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+{"text":" \nThe authors and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.\n\nCopyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors' copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com\/piracy.\nThis book is for John Varley, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Shaw, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Robert Reed, and others of the Big Object Society. On to larger things!\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nWe conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and David Hartwell gave detailed comments on the manuscript. And of course Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.\nCAST OF CHARACTERS, COMMON TERMS\n\nSUNSEEKER CREW AND TERMS\n\nCaptain Redwing\n\nCliff Kammash\u2014biologist\n\nMayra Wickramsingh\u2014pilot, with Beth team\n\nAbduss Wickramsingh\u2014engineer, with Beth team\n\nGlory\u2014the planet of destination\n\nSunSeeker\u2014the ramship\n\nBeth Marble\u2014biologist\n\nEros\u2014the first drop ship\n\nFred Ojama\u2014geologist, with Beth team\n\nAybe\u2014general engineer officer, with Cliff team\n\nHoward Blaire\u2014systems engineer, with Cliff team\n\nTerrence Gould\u2014with Cliff team\n\nIrma Michaelson\u2014plant biologist, with Cliff team\n\nTananareve Bailey\u2014with Beth team\n\nLau Pin\u2014engineer, with Beth team\n\nJampudvipa (shortened to Jam)\u2014an Indian petty officer\n\nAyaan Ali\u2014Arab woman navigator\/pilot\n\nClare Conway\u2014copilot\n\nKarl Lebanon\u2014general technology officer\n\nASTRONOMER FOLK\n\nMemor\u2014Attendant Astute Astronomer\n\nBemor\u2014Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds\n\nAsenath\u2014Chief of Wisdom\n\nIkahaja\u2014Ecosystem Savant\n\nOmanah\u2014Ecosystem Packmistress\n\nRamanuji\u2014Biology Savant\n\nKanamatha\u2014Biology Packmistress\n\nThaji\u2014Judge Savant\n\nUnajiuhanah\u2014Senior Mistress, Keeper of the Vault Library\n\nOTHER PHYLA\n\nfinger snakes\u2014Thisther, male; Phoshtha, female; Shtirk, female\n\nIce Minds\u2014cold life of great antiquity\n\nthe Adopted\u2014those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl\n\nthe Diaphanous\n\nFOLK TERMS\n\nAnalyticals\u2014artificial minds that monitor Bowl data on local scales\n\nTransLanguage\n\nLong Records\n\nLate Invaders\n\nUndermind\n\nSerf-Ones\n\nthe Builders\u2014the mix of species that built the Bowl\n\nThird Variety\u2014Astronomer variety\n\nAstronauts\u2014Astronomer variety\n\nQuicklands\n\nKahalla\nCONTENTS\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Notice\n\nDedication\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nCast of Characters, Common Terms\n\nPart I: Essential Error\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nIllustration 1\n\nPart II: Sunny Slaughterhouse\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nPart III: Status Opera\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nPart IV: Sending Superman\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nPart V: Mirror Flowers\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nPart VI: The Deep\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nPart VII: Crunchy Insects\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nPart VIII: Counterthreat\n\nChapter 24\n\nChapter 25\n\nChapter 26\n\nPart IX: On the Run\n\nChapter 27\n\nChapter 28\n\nIllustration 2\n\nIllustration 3\n\nIllustration 4\n\nChapter 29\n\nPart X: Stone Mind\n\nChapter 30\n\nChapter 31\n\nIllustration 5\n\nChapter 32\n\nPart XI: Double-Edged Sword, No Handle\n\nChapter 33\n\nIllustration 6\n\nIllustration 7\n\nIllustration 8\n\nChapter 34\n\nChapter 35\n\nPart XII: The Word of Cambronne\n\nChapter 36\n\nChapter 37\n\nChapter 38\n\nPart XIII: The Diaphanous\n\nChapter 39\n\nChapter 40\n\nChapter 41\n\nIllustration 9\n\nChapter 42\n\nChapter 43\n\nChapter 44\n\nChapter 45\n\nChapter 46\n\nChapter 47\n\nChapter 48\n\nChapter 49\n\nPart XIV: Memory's Flickering Light\n\nChapter 50\n\nChapter 51\n\nChapter 52\n\nAfterword: Big Smart Objects\n\nI. How We Built the Books\n\nII. Fun with High Tech\n\nIII. Bowl Design\n\nBooks by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven\n\nAbout the Authors\n\nCopyright\nPART I\n\nESSENTIAL ERROR\n\nIt is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential.\n\n\u2014FREEMAN DYSON\nONE\n\nMemor glimpsed the fleeing primates, a narrow view seen through the camera on one of the little mobile probes. Simian shapes cavorted and capered among the understory of the Mirror Zone, making their way to\u2014what? Apparently, to the local express station of mag-rail. Very well. She had them now, then. Memor clashed her teeth in celebration, and tossed a squirming small creature into her mouth, crunching it with relish.\n\nThese somewhat comic Late Invaders were scrambling about, anxious. They seemed dreadfully confused, too. One would have expected more of ones who had arrived via a starship, with an interstellar ram of intriguing design. But as well, they had escaped in their scampering swift way. And, alas, the other gang of them had somehow evaded Memor's attempt to kill them, when they made contact with a servant species, the Sil. So they had a certain small cleverness, true.\n\nEnough of these irritants! She would have to concentrate and act quickly to bring them to heel. \"Vector to intercept,\" Memor ordered her pilot. Their ship surged with a thrumming roar. Memor sat back and gave a brief clacking flurry of fan-signals expressing relief.\n\nMemor called up a situation graphic to see if anything had changed elsewhere. Apparently not. The Late Invader ramship was still maneuvering near the Bowl, keeping beneath the defensive weapons along the rim. From their electromagnetic emissions, clearly they monitored their two small groups of Late Invaders that were running about the Bowl. But their ship made no move to directly assist them. Good. They were wisely cautious. It would be interesting to take their ship apart, in good time, and see how the primates had engineered its adroit aspects.\n\nMemor counted herself fortunate that the seeking probe had now found this one group, running through the interstices behind the mirror section. She watched vague orange blobs that seemed to be several simians and something more, as well: tentacular shapes, just barely glimpsed. These shapes must be some variety of underspecies, wiry and quick. Snakes?\n\nThe ship vibrated under her as Memor felt a summoning signal\u2014Asenath called, her irritating chime sounding in Memor's mind. She had to take the call, since the Wisdom Chief was Memor's superior. Never a friend, regrettably. Something about Asenath kept it that way.\n\nAsenath was life-sized on the viewing wall, giving a brilliant display of multicolored feathers set in purple urgency and florid, rainbow rage. \"Memor! Have you caught the Late Invaders?\"\n\n\"Almost.\" Memor kept her own feather-display submissive, though with a fringe of fluttering orange jubilance. \"Very nearly. I can see them now. The primate named 'Beth' has a group, including the one I've trained to talk. I'm closing on them. They have somehow mustered some allies, but I am well armed.\"\n\nAsenath made a rebuke display, slow and sardonic. \"This group you let escape, yes?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, they made off while I was attending to\u2014\"\n\n\"So they are the escaped, I take it. I cannot attend to every detail, but this was a plain failure, Attendant Astute Astronomer. They eluded you.\"\n\nMemor suppressed her irritation. Asenath always used full titles to intimidate and assert superiority\u2014usually, as now, with a fan-rattle. \"Only for a short while, Wisdom Chief. I had also to contend with the other escaped primates, you may recall, Your Justness.\"\n\n\"Give up everything else and get us that primate who can talk! We need it. Don't fire on them. If they die, you die.\"\n\nMemor had to control her visible reaction. No feather-display, head motionless. \"Wisdom Chief? What has changed?\"\n\nNo answer. Asenath's feather-display flickered with a reflexive blush of fear, just before she faded.\n\nShe was hiding something... but what? Memor would have to learn, but not now. She glanced at the detection screen, ignoring her pilot. Beth's group had disappeared into a maze of machinery. There were heat traces in several spots, leading... toward the docks. Yes! Toward another escape.\n\nThere had been six of these Late Invaders when they escaped. Now the heat traces found only five, plus some slithering profiles of another species. Had one died or gone astray? These were a social species, on the diffuse hierarchy model, so it was unlikely they had simply abandoned one of their kind.\n\n\"Veest Blad,\" she said to the pilot, \"make for the docks. We'll intercept them there. Fast.\"\nTWO\n\nTananareve Bailey looked back, face lined, sweat dripping from her nose. Nobody behind her now. She was the last, almost keeping up. Her injuries had healed moderately well and she no longer limped, but gnawing fatigue had set in. She was slowing. Her breath rasped and her throat burned and she was nearly out of water.\n\nIt had been a wearing, sweaty trip through the maze she thought of as \"backstage.\" The labyrinth that formed the back of the Bowl's mirror shell was intricate and plainly never intended for anybody but workers to move through. No comforts such as passageways. Poor lighting. Twisty lanes a human could barely crawl through. This layer underpinning the Bowl was the bigger part of the whole vast structure, nearly an astronomical unit across\u2014but only a few meters thick. It was all machinery, stanchions, and cables. Control of the mirrors on the surface above demanded layers of intricate wiring and mechanical buffers. Plus, the route twisted in three dimensions.\n\nTananareve was sweating and her arms ached. She couldn't match the jumping style of her companions in 18 percent gravity without a painful clicking in her hip and ribs. Her pace was a gliding run, sometimes bounding off an obstructing wall, sometimes taking it on her butt\u2014all assisted by her hands. It demanded a kind of slithering grace she lacked.\n\nBeth, Lau Pin, Mayra, and Fred were ahead of her. She paused, clinging to a buttress shaft. She needed rest, time, but there was none of that here. For a moment she let the whole world slide away and just relaxed, as well as she could. These moments came seldom but she longed for them. She sighed and... let go....\n\nEarth came to her then... the quiet leafy air of her childhood, in evergreen forests where she hiked with her mother and father, her careless laughter sinking into the vastness of the lofty trees. Her heart was still back there in the rich loam of deep forests, fragrant and solemn in the cathedral redwoods and spruce. Even in recalling it all, she knew it had vanished on the tides of time. Her parents were dead for centuries now, surely, despite the longevity treatments. But the memories swarmed up into her as she relaxed for just a long, lingering moment.\n\nHer moment of peace drained away. She had to get back to running.\n\nIn the dim light, she could barely make out the finger snakes flickering ahead of the long-striding humans. They had an amazingly quick wriggle. Probably they'd been adapted through evolution to do repairs in the Bowl's understory. Beth had gotten fragments of their history out of the snakes, but the translation was shaky. They'd been here on the Bowl so long, their own origins were legends about a strange, mythical place where a round white sun could set to reveal black night.\n\n\"Beth,\" Tananareve sent over short-range comm, \"I'm kinda... I... need a rest.\"\n\n\"We all do,\" came the crisp reply. Beth turned up ahead and looked back at her, too far away to read an expression. \"Next break is five minutes.\"\n\n\"Here I come.\" She clamped down her jaw and took a ragged breath.\n\nTheir target was an automated cargo drone. The snakes had told of these, and now the bulkheads and struts they passed were pitched forward, suggested they were getting close. Up ahead, as she labored on, she could see it emerge, one in a line of identical flat-bellied cylinders. Tananareve could see the outline of a great oyster-colored curved hatch in its side, and\u2014was that? Yes!\u2014stars beyond a window wall. She felt elation slice through her fatigue. But now the hip injury had slowed her to a limping walk.\n\nWithout the finger snakes, this plan would have been impossible.\n\nShe limped up to the rest of them, her mouth already puckering at the imagined taste of water. The three snakes were decorated in camouflage colors, browns and mottled blacks, the patterns almost the same, but Tananareve had learned to tell them apart. They massed a bit more than any of the humans, and looked like snakes whose tails had split into four arms, each tipped with a claw. Meaty things, muscular, slick-skinned. They wore long cloth tubes as backpacks, anchored on their ridged hides.\n\nBeth's team had first seen finger snakes while escaping from the garden of their imprisonment. Tananareve surprised a nest of them and they fled down into deep jungle, carrying some cargo in a sling. The snakes were a passing oddity, apparently intelligent to a degree. Her photos of them were intriguing.\n\nNow it was clear the finger snakes must have tracked and observed their party ever since. When Fred led the humans to an alien computer facility, they were not in evidence. Fred had found a way to make the computer teach them the Bird Folk language. Among his many talents, Fred was a language speed-learner. He got the quasilinear logic and syntax down in less than a day. Once he had built a vocabulary, his learning rate increased. A few more days and he was fluent. The whole team carried sleep-learning, so they used a slip-transfer from Fred's. By then he had been somehow practicing by himself, so it was best that he got to talk to the snakes first.\n\nThey just showed up, no diplomacy or signposting. Typical snake character\u2014do, don't retreat into symbols or talk. When the finger snakes crawled through the door, somehow defeating Lau Pin's lock, Fred said hello and no more. He wasn't exactly talkative either\u2014except, as he often rejoined, when he actually had something important to say.\n\nSo after his hello, and a spurt of Snake in reply, Tananareve was able to yell at them. \"Give you honor! We are lost!\"\n\nFive snakes formed a hoop, which turned out to be a sign of \"fruitful endeavor commencing.\" Tananareve made a hand-gesture she had somehow gotten from the slip-transfer. This provoked another symbol, plus talk. Formal snake protocol moved from gestures and signs into the denser thicket of language. Luckily, the highest form of Snakespeech was a modified Bird Folk structure that stressed lean and of sinew as virtues, so their knotted phrases did convey meaning in transparent, staccato rhythms.\n\nThe finger snakes were rebels or something like it, as nearly as Tananareve could untangle from the cross-associations that slithered through Snakespeech. Curious, also. Humans were obviously new to their world, and therefore they began tracking the human band in an orderly, quiet way shaped by tradition. The snakes worked for others, but retained a fierce independence. Knowledge was their strong suit\u2014plus the ability to use tools of adroit shape and use. They went everywhere in the Bowl, they said, on engineering jobs. Especially they maintained the meters-thick layers between the lifezone and the hard hull. In a sense, they maintained the boundary that separated the uncountable living billions from the killing vacuum that waited a short distance away.\n\nThe snakes wanted to know everything they could not discover by their intricate tracking and watching. They knew the basic primate architecture, for their tapering \"arms\" used a cantilevered frame that bore a warped resemblance to the human shoulder. This, plus a million more matters, flew through their darting conversations. Snakes thought oddly. Culture, biology, singing, and food all seemed bound up in a big ball of context hard to unravel. But when something important struck them, they acted while humans were still talking.\n\nWhen it was clear that humans would die if they stayed at low gravity for too long, the finger snakes led them here: to a garage for magnetically driven space vehicles. Snake teams did the repairs here.\n\n* * *\n\nOne of the finger snakes\u2014Thisther, she thought\u2014clicked open a recessed panel in the drone, so the ceramic cowling eased down. Thisther set to work, curling head to tail so his eyes could watch his nail-tipped fingers work. The wiry body flexed like cable. Phoshtha turned away from him, on guard.\n\nTananareve was still guessing at genders, but there were behavior cues. The male always seemed to have a tool in hand, and the females were wary in new surroundings. Thisther was male; Phoshtha and Shtirk were female.\n\nPhoshtha's head dipped and curled as she turned around, seeking danger. Shtirk wasn't visible; she must be on guard. Tananareve sensed no obvious threats, barring, perhaps, a whistling just at the edge of her hearing.\n\nPhoshtha wriggled to meet her. \"Thisther knows computers-speak,\" she said. \"King of computers = persons. Will write thrust program for us quick, person-comp-adept, she is. Are you sick?\"\n\n\"Was injured,\" Tananareve said. \"Not sick. Am healing.\" Both spoke in Bird talk, its trills and rolled vowels chiming like a song.\n\n\"Is well we know.\"\n\nThe curved side of the cargo drone slid up with a high metallic whine. Green verdant wealth. The drone was filled, jammed with vegetation\u2014live plants standing forth in trays, rich hanging streamers. Lights in the curved ceiling glared like suns. Thisther continued to work, and suddenly trays were sliding out and falling. Half the trays had piled up on the deck when it stopped.\n\n\"Keep some plants. Air for us while we travel,\" Phoshtha said. She wriggled away.\n\nLau Pin jog-hopped in the light grav, springing over to help Tananareve. \"You okay? Shall I carry you?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. What's that whistling?\" It was loud and now had a low rumble to it.\n\n\"We need to get aboard,\" Lau Pin said, glancing around at the snake teams at work. \"Quick.\" He tried pulling her along by her belt, desisted when he saw her pain.\n\nTananareve walked over to a copper-hued wall, leaning against its warmth. The finger snakes chattered in their jittering bursts and oozed across the platforms with wriggling grace. She studied them amid the noise, and... let herself go.\n\nShe was back in the leafy wealth she had grown up in and, yes, knew she would never see again. She allowed her head to tilt back and felt her spine kink and lapse as it straightened and eased. Amid metal and ceramics, she thought of green. This odd construction they were moving through, a weird place bigger than planets, had its own version of green paradise... and was the only reason she had survived in it. The vast, strange canopies with their chittering airborne creatures; the stretching grasslands and zigzag trees; animals so odd, they threw her back into her basic biology\u2014they were all natural in some way, yet... not. Someone had designed their setting, if not their species.\n\nThose sprawling lands of the Bowl had been tolerable. These mechanical labyrinths below the Bowl's lifesphere were... not. She had seen quite enough, thank you, of the motorized majesty that made such a vast, rotating artifact. Rest, that was her need now. She had to descend into blissful sleep, consign to her unconscious the labors of processing so much strangeness.\n\nShe let go slowly, head lapsing back. Easing was not easy, but she let herself descend into it, for just a moment before she would get up again and stride off, full of purpose and letting no soft moments play through her... Just for a while...\n\n\"Looks like the male is finished playing with the controls,\" Lau Pin called.\n\nDimly she sensed the snakes moving by her. Thisther wriggled into the hold... then Phoshtha and Shtirk.\n\nTananareve came out of her blissful retreat slowly. Voices echoed odd and hollow around her. Lead infected her legs; they would not move without great strain. She made herself get unsteadily up onto two uncertain feet. Clouds in her mind dispelled slowly\u2014something about green wealth, forests of quiet majesty, her parents...\n\nShe made her chin snap up, eyes fluttering, back on duty... and slowly turned to survey the area. Where's Beth?\n\nClouds still grasped at her. Breathe deeply, keep it up.\n\nTananareve strode off to check around some angular buttress supports. No human about.\n\nThe snakes had crawled into the ship, fitting somehow into open spaces. Lau Pin jogged to join them. He glanced back at her, waved a hand, turned, went away....\n\nStill there were clouds. She listened intently as she tried to put one small foot in front of the other. Remarkably difficult, it was.\n\nRumbling, sharp whistling, chatter. Tananareve walked a bit unsteadily back toward the ship. Her vision was blurred, sweat trickling into her eyes and stinging.\n\nThe great curved door closed in Tananareve's face.\n\n\"Hey,\" Tananareve said. She stopped, blinked. Clouds swept away on a sudden adrenaline shock\u2014\n\n\"Wait!\"\n\nThe drone slid out of line and away, slow at first, then faster and faster.\n\n\"Dammit!\" she shouted. \"Damn\u2014\" She couldn't hear herself over a whistling roar. Hot air blasted her back.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Wait!\" Beth Marble shouted. She could feel the acceleration building. The finger snakes were wrapped around support pillars, and her crew were grabbing for tie-downs. She found handholds and footholds while thrust pulled massively at her.\n\nShe wailed, \"Tananareve!\"\n\n\"She was sick,\" Phoshtha said, recessed eyes glittering. \"Thrust would have killed her. She would have slowed us.\"\n\n\"What? You let\u2014\" Beth stopped. It was done; handle the debriefing later, in calmer moments. The snakes were useful but strange.\n\nThey were accelerating quickly and she found a wedge-shaped seat. Not ideal for humans, but manageable. There was little noise from the magnetics, but the entire length of the drone popped and ponged as stresses adjusted.\n\nLau Pin said, \"I have SunSeeker online.\"\n\n\"Send Redwing our course. Talk to him.\" Beth couldn't move; she was barely hanging on to a tie-down bar. \"Use our best previous coordinates.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'm having it compute from the present force vectors.\" Lau Pin turned up the volume so others could hear. \"Lau Pin here.\"\n\n\"Jampudvipa here, bridge petty officer. Captain Redwing's got some kind of cold, and Ayaan Ali is bridge pilot. What's your situation?\"\n\n\"We're on our way. It went pretty much as we'd planned. Hardly anything around on the way but finger snakes. We've got three with us. Uh... We lost Tananareve Bailey.\"\n\n\"Drown it,\" the officer said. \"All right. But you're en route? Hello, I see your course... yeah. Wow. You're right up against the back of the mirror shell.\"\n\n\"Jampudvipa, this drone is driven by magnets in the back of the Bowl. Most of their ships and trains operate that way, we think. It must save reaction fuel. We don't have much choice.\"\n\nSome microwave noise blurred the signal, then, \"Call me Jam. And you don't have pressure suits?\"\n\n\"No, and there's no air lock. No way to mate the ships.\"\n\nA pause. \"Well, Ayaan says she can get SunSeeker to the rendezvous in ten hours. After that... what? Stet. Stet. Lau Pin, we can maybe fit you into the bay that held Eros before we lost it. If not... mmm.\"\n\nLau Pin said, \"The finger snakes don't keep time our way. I think it's longer for us. I'll make regular checks and send them.\"\n\n\"We'll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field\u2014yeah. We'll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.\"\n\n\"Would have been Tananareve.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe drone was gone. The system's magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the sudden silence, stunned.\n\nA high hiss sounded from a nearby track. She turned to find a snake to stop the drone, call it somehow\u2014and saw no snakes at all. All three had boarded the drone. Now the shrill hiss was worse. She stepped back from the rising noise, and an alien ship came rushing toward the platform from a descending tube. It was not magnetic; it moved on jets.\n\nTananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot's cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to\u2014?\n\nThen, behind huge windows in the ship's flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped. Memor.\nTHREE\n\nRedwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.\n\nFar down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.\n\nThe Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl's hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.\n\nThe deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.\n\nHow did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains\u2014maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth's tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl's dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.\n\nBut why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?\n\nThe question wasn't just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.\n\nPing. His autosec reminded him of lunch.\n\nHe thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.\n\nHe had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal: Nosh for me, it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase, naush faramaiye, meaning \"please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,\" which seemed like bon app\u00e9tit to Redwing. Suitable. \"Naush faramaiye to you all,\" Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.\n\n\"Cap'n, I'm having trouble with the Artilect coherence,\" Jampudvipa said.\n\nRedwing still used AI as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that's what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship's current state. \"What's their problem?\"\n\n\"They want to go back into full scoop mode.\"\n\n\"In a solar system? We can't get the necessary plasma densities.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Jampudvipa shrugged. \"I think they're showing mission fatigue.\"\n\n\"Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?\"\n\n\"They resist it.\"\n\n\"Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.\"\n\nThis got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. \"Diplomacy\u2014not our strong suit,\" Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.\n\nAyaan Ali frowned. \"It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas\u2014trouble.\"\n\n\"They want what's impossible,\" Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. \"We can't go back to interstellar mode.\"\n\nClare sipped her coffee. \"They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.\"\n\n\"We're getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,\" Karl said. \"It'll tire the Artilects and we'll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.\"\n\n\"Same small-scale coil problem?\"\n\n\"Yeah. The system's pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can't get into the magneto components to adjust them.\"\n\nClare said, \"A mechanical problem, fixable\u2014but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can't do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.\"\n\n\"We can't downtime them?\" Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.\n\nRedwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.\n\nBy this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare's detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth's team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but\u2014the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or\u2014what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and... what? Too many unknowns.\n\nHe let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.\n\nAt least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth's team aboard. They'd have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.\n\nHe said mildly, \"Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?\"\n\nBlinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. \"Yes, sir. They're in collective agreement mode but\u2014yes.\"\n\nThat let him focus on the others. \"Beth's team will be aboard in a few hours. That's if we're lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up\u2014clean, shaven, bright eyed.\" Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. \"But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?\"\n\n\"I've got her photos of the vehicle they're in\u2014basically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,\" Karl said. \"But they don't have their suits. The aliens, these 'Folk,' took those at capture.\"\n\n\"So...\" Redwing let them think a moment. \"Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?\"\n\n\"Not easily.\" Karl's mouth fretted as he thought. \"We've got EVA gear, sure, but it's one-man, for repairs.\"\n\n\"How about the Bernal?\" Clare asked. \"It's for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.\"\n\n\"I don't trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,\" Karl said. \"If we try it, yes, Bernal is the best craft.\"\n\nRedwing had used the repair bots to inspect SunSeeker's hull soon after entering the Bowl system, and he privately agreed with Karl. In interstellar mode, their strong magnetic fields had kept the ship from the blizzard of neutral atoms and dust. SunSeeker was less effective dealing with erosions while it maneuvered at low thrust around the Bowl. The externals looked pitted and scarred now, and he wondered about whether the repair bots could spot flaws that could prove fatal in a personnel transfer. Or if the flexi would sustain pitting from random debris. A thousand questions nagged at him.\n\nRedwing said, \"We could try a fit with our dorsal hatch. We'd have to rig some kind of docking collar.\"\n\nThis they liked. Redwing let them toss ideas around for a while as he tried to envision exactly how that configuration might work. Ayaan Ali had little to say, but he saw a quick widening of her eyes and nodded at her, holding up a hand to draw attention.\n\n\"I... have an idea,\" she said quietly. \"But we must work quickly.\"\nFOUR\n\nBeth watched the Bowl's outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.\n\nTheir tubular craft traveled down the outside of the Bowl, hovering close on magnetically secured trap-rails. She watched enormous plains of gray steel and off-white ceramic flash by. Images jittered so fast, she could not tell what was important. A wall with crawling maggot robots, doing unknown labors. A sliding cascade of liquid metal fuming in high vacuum as it slid into jet-black chunks, then ivory cylinders, then shapely gray teardrops\u2014all to descend into intricate new works, objects meant for mysterious use. All that went by in a stretched display she processed in a few seconds\u2014an entire industrial process carried out in cold vacuum, far from the Bowl star's intrusions. It seethed with robot motion. Fumes danced, billowed, and evaporated away in lacy blue streamers.\n\nNow enormous tangled structures the size of mountains flowed by them. She could see lattice works and cup-shaped constructs but not what they did. It was difficult to keep perspective and their speed seemed to increase still, pressing her at an angle. She was sitting in a chair designed for some other being, one wider and taller. Windows on all sides showed landscapes flitting by, lit by starlight and occasional bright flares amid the odd buildings. From above her head came occasional clanking noises and whispery whistles\u2014sounds of the mag-rail.\n\n\"All this industrial infrastructure,\" Fred said quietly beside her. \"Kept out of their living zone.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" Beth said, not taking her eyes from the images flashing by in the big board window. \"We hardly saw any cities before, either.\"\n\n\"Sure, the Bowl's land area is enormous, but then you realize that their whole mechanistic civilization is clinging to the outer skin. So they have twice the area we thought.\"\n\nBeth glanced upward into the \"sky,\" where the hull's burnished metal gleamed beneath fitful lights. \"And anyone who lives here, does so wrong way up. Centrifugal gravity pushes them away from the hull, so the Bowl is always over their heads. The stars are at their feet.\" Beth laughed softly. \"An upside-down world of its own.\"\n\n\"Smart, really.\" Fred was watching, too, his eyes darting at the spacious spectacle zooming past. \"You can do your manufacturing and then throw your waste away in high vacuum.\"\n\nBeth shook herself; enough gawking. \"Look, we're in a cargo drone. We have to be ready in case we stop and get new passengers.\"\n\n\"Relax. We'll feel the deceleration, get ready.\"\n\n\"At least we should search for food dispensers. This passenger compartment is for whoever's accompanying the cargo\u2014\"\n\n\"Plants, yeah,\" Fred said distantly, still distracted by the view. \"Those finger snakes arranged to escort the plants, fit us in. Neat.\"\n\nBeth smiled. Fred had summed up days of negotiations. Their halting efforts had been beset by translation errors and mistakes. Even sharing a sort-of common language, a mix of Bird and Anglish, there were ambiguities that came from how different minds saw the universe. The snakes used wriggles and tiny movements of their outsized faces to convey meaning, and it took a while to even notice that. Words meant different things if a right-wriggle came with it, versus a left-wriggle. The snakes had similar troubles reading \"primate face gestures\" as they termed it.\n\nFred turned to her. \"You're worried about Tananareve.\"\n\n\"I... yes.\"\n\n\"You're surprised I noticed.\"\n\n\"Not really, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, I know what's in my personnel file. I'm classic Asperger's, yep. But I hope I make up for it by, well, my quirky ability to see how things work. Or that's what the file says.\"\n\nTo stall for time she asked, \"How did you see your file?\"\n\nFred was honestly surprised. She realized he did not actually know how to be dishonest, or at least without detection. \"An easy hack.\"\n\n\"Well... yes. I read everybody's file before we left SunSeeker. Standard field-prep method.\"\n\n\"So I should overlook how you fret about us, especially Tananareve.\"\n\n\"She's not really recovered, and I should've noticed she didn't get in here with us.\"\n\nFred gave her an awkward smile. \"Look, the place was confusing and we didn't have any time. She wandered off. There were the finger snakes making a racket and shooting questions at us.\" A sigh. \"Anyway, put it aside. We've got the boarding problem coming up.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Right, of course.\" So much for Asperger's patients not picking up on social signals. What had that training program said? \"Cognitive behavioral therapy can improve stress management relating to anxiety.\" Yet Fred seems calmer than the rest of us....\n\nFred pressed on. \"The snakes say we're due for a stop about where SunSeeker could rendezvous with us. But we have to come out at high speed, so they have to match us. But\u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing like pressure suits aboard,\" Lau Pin said. \"The snakes say they can't make anything like that, not in time.\"\n\nHe and Mayra had come up, carrying a bowl of what looked like gruel. Mayra scooped some out with a spoon, tasted it. \"Bland, but no harm on my bioregister. This comes out of a dispenser in the next car.\"\n\nSo they all fell to eating. Beth was hungry, so the lack of taste in the muddy mixture of carbs and sugars didn't stop her. She was thinking, anyway. Silence, except when two snakes came by and chattered in their high, fluting voices. Beth ignored them while Mayra carried on a halting conversation with the aliens. Intelligent aliens, the goal of centuries of searching, and I don't have time for them....\n\nHer hand stopped with her spoon in midair as she stared into the distance. Slowly she turned to Mayra. \"Ask them if we can disconnect this car from the track,\" she said.\n\n* * *\n\nThe big problem was hard to sense when you were blithely standing in fractional gravity and not paying attention to the sky. Here on the mag-train, that sky was filled with stars, and it took an hour or two to notice that they were moving. As she thought, Beth watched a bright star move off the window where she sat. The Bowl rotated in thirty-two hours, so the night sky seemed to move a bit slower than it did on Earth. She recalled how, in elementary school, she had been amazed that while sitting at her desk she was really whizzing around at well over a thousand kilometers an hour. The Earth's rotation did that, and its orbit moved her at thirty kilometers a second, too. Now she was sitting in a fast train car and also moving with the Bowl's rotation, hundreds of kilometers a second. Leaving the Bowl meant launching into space at that huge velocity.\n\nMayra said, \"They're scared. Why would you want to\u2014?\"\n\n\"Can they do it?\"\n\n\"Yes, at the next stop. There's a launch facility they use for traveling off the Bowl, but\u2014\"\n\n\"How do we shed the velocity?\" Fred said.\n\nBeth said, \"Carefully, I bet. If they can launch, they must fire us off against the Bowl's rotation, to bring the exit speed down to a manageable level.\"\n\n\"SunSeeker must be moving at a few tens of klicks a second,\" Fred said. \"To lose half a thousand klicks a second...\" His voice trailed off into a croak, apparently at the magnitude of it. \"... that's not the way to do it, though.\"\n\nBeth watched the landscape zoom by outside. Were they slowing?\n\nMayra said, \"They call it the Jumper.\"\n\n\"A launch facility?\" Beth asked. \"Fred, what did you mean?\"\n\n\"The obvious way to get off the Bowl is to go near the axis, where there's nearly no centrifugal grav, so not a high speed. Then leap off into vacuum.\"\n\n\"We're headed that way, but\u2014\" Beth stopped. \"Where is this Jumper?\"\n\nMayra chattered to the snakes, and then said, \"The next stop, if we take the right shunt. They say.\" She looked doubtful, as if this was all moving too fast. Which it is, Beth thought, in more ways than one.\n\nThe finger snakes rattled their \"shells,\" which seemed to work like fingernails. She had seen them use those with lightning-quick skill, to manipulate the intricate tools carried in their side pouches. Now they made a noise like castanets\u2014or, she noticed, like a rattlesnake about to strike. Each snake had four of them on their four fingers. Beth saw Mayra drawing back, her face a mask of alarm. \"What's\u2014?\"\n\n\"They sense great risk,\" Mayra said slowly, \"in taking a Jump in this hauler.\"\n\n\"Not space rated?\"\n\n\"No, a lack of 'life caring'\u2014habitat gear, I think. That noise, though... Ewww.\"\n\n\"Yeah, kinda hard to take,\" Beth said. The snakes were weaving now, standing on leathery, strong \"arms\" and straining up into the air. Their bodies seemed all ribbed muscle, eyes glittering as they glanced at each other.\n\nFred said, \"Maybe they're deciding whether the risk is worth it.\"\n\n\"Worth what?\" Mayra asked, her face still tight with alarm.\n\n\"Worth going with us,\" Fred said. \"That's what you meant, right, Beth?\"\n\n\"I figured there had to be a way to launch into raw space without going to the pole, the Knothole, to get the speed down. I guess there is.\"\n\nMayra said, \"That's what the finger snakes imply. They're working out whether to help us do that... I think.\" A wry shrug. \"Not really sure.\"\n\nBeth leaned forward, eyes still on the scenery flashing by above the perpetual night sky below. Yes, they were moving slower. Definitely. And was the grav here lighter? So they were moving toward the Knothole? \"They can handle the tech for a Jump?\"\n\n\"Yes, they say. But... they say it will be hard on us. A lot of acceleration, and\u2014\"\n\nThe snakes chattered and rattled and Mayra bowed her head, listening. \"The seats will self-contour, so we will... survive.\"\n\n\"It's that hard?\" Fred asked.\n\n\"High. We don't have suits that baffle us against sudden surges.\" Mayra shrugged. \"It is not as though we could have carried them with us, all these months.\" A slow sad smile.\n\nBeth saw she was recalling her husband, who had died when they broke out of confinement, crushed by a hideous spiderlike thing. \"What else?\"\n\n\"They say there is little time to do it. As soon as we reach the next station stop, they must gain control of the shunting system. They say they can, the attendants there\u2014mostly finger snakes\u2014are old friends. Then they must move us into a cache that will ratchet us into a 'departure slot' as they call it. Then we move into line and get dispatched by an electromagnetic system. It seizes us, in a manner independent of the precise shape of this hauler... and flings us into space, along a vector counter to the Bowl's spin.\"\n\nMayra had not spoken so much in a long while. Beth chose to take that as a positive sign. She was right about gear; they had little and would be forced to use whatever came to hand. The seats here were oddly shaped and not designed for humans. The finger snakes had couches to strap into. Not so the bare benches she was sitting on. Still less so for the latrine, which turned out to be a narrow cabin with holes in the floor, some of them small, others disturbingly large.\n\nShe signed. \"I know it may be uncomfortable. But it's the only way.\"\n\nSilence. Even the snakes had gone quiet.\n\nLau Pin said, \"We're dead if we stay down here. They'll catch us again. We escaped once; that trick won't work again.\"\n\nMayra and Fred nodded. Collective decision, great.\n\nBeth noted the snakes watching her. They had somehow deduced that she was the nominal leader of these odd primates who strode into their lives. Maybe all smart species had some hierarchy?\n\n\"Okay, we do it. Notice we're slowing down?\"\n\nFred nodded. \"Yeah, felt it.\"\n\nLau Pin said, \"We don't have much time. Got to hit the ground and move fast. The snakes will tell us what to do.\"\n\n\"Right, good,\" Beth said. She glanced at Mayra. \"And... what else?\"\n\n\"Well...\" Mayra hesitated. \"It's the finger snakes. They want to come with us.\"\nFIVE\n\nRedwing plucked a banana that grew in a weird toroid, peeled and ate it, its aroma bringing back memories of tropical nights and the lapping of waves. Cap'n's privilege.\n\nHis comm buzzed and Clare Conway said, \"We'll need you on the bridge presently.\"\n\n\"On the way.\"\n\nYet he hesitated. Something fretted at the back of his mind.\n\nRedwing had read somewhere that one of his favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said \"an unhappy childhood.\" Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that's how novels worked.\n\nHis mother had made it happy. His father was away at one war or another while he grew up, and when he was home seemed absorbed by sports and alcohol. But that didn't include playing catch with Redwing or coming to his football games. His mother had given him a birthday gift of a telescope and microscope, and a big chemistry set. He bought chemical supplies by selling gunpowder and other pyrotechnics to the local kids. So science had been in his bones from the time he could read. But there were other currents in the mix. He bought a bicycle and a better telescope with gambling cash. His mother, who was a bridge Grand Master, always played penny-ante poker with Redwing while they waited in the car for his music lessons to start. He then applied what she had taught him to the neighborhood kids. They didn't know how to count cards or compute probabilities from that. They also paid to see him blow something up or dissect some poor animal as a bio experiment. He was without principle but soon had enough principal to advance. A university career and PhD led to space, where he really wanted to go. But this far?...\n\nMaybe, considering a \"fault tree\" analysis of his life, having a father who never gave him much time, Redwing figured he was socially unhappy enough to satisfy Hemingway. But finding fault wasn't like solving a problem, was it?\n\nHe had been gaining belly weight in these long months skimming along the Bowl structure. Onboard physio analysis said cortisol was the culprit, a steroid hormone prompted by the body's \"fight or flight\" response to stress. It had bloated him, listening to the plight of his teams fleeing aliens, and damn near nothing he could do to help.\n\nHe paused outside the bridge, straightened his uniform, and went in with his shoulders straight.\n\n\"Cap'n on bridge,\" Ayaan Ali said crisply. Unnecessary, but it set the tone. Going into battle, if that's what this was, had a way of quickening the heart.\n\n\"We're skimming as close as we can to the Bowl rim,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"Having thruster problems.\"\n\nRedwing made a show of staying on his feet, taking in the screens, not pacing. \"Seems like cutting it pretty near.\"\n\nKarl Lebanon, neatly turned out with his general technology officer uniform cleaned and creases stiff, said, \"That magneto grip problem is back, big-time. Sir.\"\n\nRedwing gave him a nod. \"Hand-manage it. Stay with the scoop Artilect all the time, ride it.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It knows what's up, is running full complement.\"\n\n\"Stations,\" Redwing said quietly. Old trick: speak softly, make them stay sharp to hear.\n\nHe didn't want to call out of the cold sleep enough people to crew this any better, much less to populate some kind of a big landing expedition. Defrosting and training them would burn time and labor. Even after the reawakened came up to speed, at Glory system in some far future, the whole crew would all have to triple up on a hot hammock schedule, skimpy rations, and shower once a week. Under such stress, how could they perform? He didn't want to find out. Not yet, anyway.\n\nSunSeeker had five crew defrosted, including Captain Redwing. Beth's remaining four would make nine. If he had the chance to rescue Cliff's team, they'd be fourteen aboard. A bit crowded, but they could do it.\n\n\"Coming up, sir.\" Ayaan Ali stared intently at the screens. \"Rim looks the same, but that big cannon thing is swiveling to track us.\"\n\n\"We're in that slot?\"\n\n\"See those walls?\" Below he saw where the atmosphere screen was tied down. There was a rim zone with big constructions dotted across it, out in the vacuum. Ayaan had found a slot between two of them that kept below the cannon declination and now they were gliding through it, a few kilometers above the edge zone. Complex webs of buildings and immense, articulating machinery slid by below.\n\nThe Bowl's outer edge loomed before them, bristling with knobs and bumps the size of nations back on Earth. Looking at the rear screens, he saw the thin, smart film that held in the Bowl atmosphere shimmering in slanting sunlight, blue white. This was the closest they had coasted in to that atmosphere blanket. He hoped they wouldn't take ground fire, though the Bowl's Great Plain was a thousand kilometers away, and any projectile fire would puncture their filmy cover. But yes, Karl was probably right, just from elementary geometry.\n\nStill... \"We're low enough?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. They can't depress that snout to aim into the Bowl structure.\"\n\n\"Smart sociology. If there are wars here, at least nobody can blow a hole in their life support.\"\n\nWe keep below their firing horizon, so we're safe. Or so went the theory. So many theories had gotten blown away, ever since they sighted this huge, spinning contrivance. But if this one failed, they'd be in easy range of what looked like, Karl said, a gamma ray laser.\n\n\"Karl, what's the emission gain?\"\n\n\"They're running something that gives off a lot of microwaves. Chargers, probably. Running up capacitor banks, I'd guess.\"\n\n\"To discharge against us, through some plasma implosion, giving them the gammas?\"\n\n\"That's my estimate, sir.\"\n\n\"What do you make of our situation?\"\n\n\"I had the usual basic training in remote warfare. The find-fix-track-target-engage-assess decision tree, with Artilects providing the live data. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"No course in alien strategy and tactics?\" This got him a round of chuckles around the bridge, as he had planned. Let them get a little steam out.\n\n\"Uh\u2014no, sir. Not on the curriculum, couple centuries back.\"\n\nA quiet jab, well delivered. Redwing nodded and smiled in tribute. \"Then full speed ahead.\" In a tribute to ancient naval traditions, he added, \"Give us some steam.\"\n\n\"I don't like to flex our magnetic scoop system any more, uh, sir,\" Karl said.\n\n\"Same small-scale problem?\"\n\n\"Yeah. The system's pretty compressed. We can't get into the magneto components to adjust them. It's a mechanical problem, not just some digital e-management thing.\"\n\n\"Do your best.\" Not the time for more technospeak. Though that was all that kept them alive, of course. \"Belay any repairs until we get Beth aboard. How's the flexi gear straightening?\"\n\n\"Programmed on the printer,\" Jampudvipa said. \"Fold points and tension web seem sturdy enough to compile at pickup.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Clare?\"\n\n\"Look at the screen. The laser pods are above us now.\"\n\nWhat's the old saying? \"Come in under their radar\" means something else. This is running in under the guns of a fortress that cannot fire down into the Bowl lifezone. \"Um. Can we skim that close to the atmosphere?\"\n\nKarl pointed to the blue sheen cast off by the boundary film of the atmosphere. This close in, it spread like an ocean landscape, yet the eye saw through it to lands and seas below. These stretched away in infinite perspective, intricate layers basking in unending solar radiance, free of night. The eggshell sheen of the boundary tricked the eye into seeing it as an ocean, with lands on the floor below. There were even long rolling waves to the boundary, flexing in slow, marching rows.\n\nRedwing had to admit the design features here were clever beyond easy measure. Rather than fading off in the familiar exponential, like planets, the Bowl's air ran up and into a hard boundary. The air was thin there, hundreds of kilometers high\u2014but the multilayer smart film kept the errant wind streams and vortices at bay, spreading the energies across vast distances, smoothing them out. No molecules leaked away forever, as they had for poor Mars. The Bowl's own magnetic field gave a spiderweb defense against cosmic rays and angry storms flailing out from the persecuted star that powered all this. Its fields were like spaghetti strands wrapped around the atmosphere, layers of argument against intruding particles wanting to plow into innocent gases.\n\nRedwing said, \"What other weapons does this place have?\"\n\n\"More than we do,\" Clare said mildly.\n\n\"Look,\" Jampudvipa said with an irked twist to her mouth, \"this thing's unknowably old. Ancient! Beyond ancient. On Earth a century was a huge time for weapons to evolve. I read up on this in preoutbreak history, back when we were on one world. Amazing stuff. In the same century as the first nuke got used, we also killed each other with bayonets and one-shot rifles. So how can we think about\u2014this?\"\n\nThis outbreak of consternation made them all sit back, think.\n\nKarl said solemnly, \"The laws of physics constrain everybody\u2014even the Bowl Folk, whoever they are. Or whatever.\"\n\n\"Tech has its own evolution,\" Clare said. \"What's in those big domes at the Bowl rim?\"\n\n\"No way to know. Fly low, is all we can do,\" Redwing said. Taking my ship into uncharted waters... It was liberating to be simply honest.\n\nThey slid on a blithe arc over the quickly spinning lip of the Bowl. Sensors set on the big domes and their enormous snouts registered no change.\n\nCruising over the Bowl's lip and down the swiftly rushing hull brought quick instructive views. SunSeeker had come at the Bowl from the side and below, along the axis of revolution and through the Knothole. Now Redwing could see the detailed and intricate lattice that framed the hull's support structures, threaded by long ribbed structures that looked like enormous subways and elevators, some with spiky turrets protruding at the junctions. But here and there were sections clearly retrofitted, yellow and green splotches of newer joints and fix-up ornamentations of mysterious use.\n\nAdditions and afterthoughts, he judged. Some reminded him of accumulated grime, touch-up attempts and insertions. Like the yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece, he thought. Strip away the accretions, and beneath is the original brilliance. Interstellar archaeology.\nSIX\n\nKarl deployed the smart flexi with an electric shock. Under a kilovolt surge the velvet blue shroud billowed out\u2014so thin, he could see the gyrating hull grinding past in the distance. Starlight lit its eternal churn. A certain serenity enveloped the view, for the background was the eternal spread of stars. The approaching dot was for the moment nothing.\n\nHe had static-fixed the flexi to the Bernal's hull. Its sensors would follow inbuilt commands he could activate. Well, here goes...\n\nThe flexi popped open at the electro-command. Yet the micro sensors at the far end remained live and ready, he saw from his wrist monitor. The flexi bubble furled out as liquidly as a cape cast off a shoulder, though all this was in high vacuum, no gravity or atmosphere to command its dynamics. Such a thin fabric of layered smart carbon could be made and trained in the ship printers, but he had never tried anything this complex before. Now they had to use it to rescue Beth's team from the big train car that came swarming up at them, the dot assuming a velocity a bit too high. Problems, yes. Perhaps not fatal, entirely. Yet.\n\nKarl had not been thawed when SunSeeker shot through the Knothole, so all this gigantic architecture was new to him. He stared, momentarily lost in detail.\n\n\"Coming up on rendezvous prompt,\" Jam sent on comm. \"Bogie on vector grid.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" He eased the flexi controls, using both hands. For ease of manual operations, there were no left-handed crew on SunSeeker. Karl had made the crew cut because he was genuinely ambidextrous. In college he had made extra cash as a juggler.\n\n\"It's coming up too fast,\" Jam said urgently.\n\n\"I've got mag fields on, maybe I can push it off.\" Karl ran the mag amplitude to the max. That was a stressor in a thick-hulled freighter like the Bernal; he could hear tinny pings.\n\nHe was looking out a true port, not a screen. Living inside a starship with only screen views felt disconnected. There was something about capturing the actual starlight photons bouncing off the Bowl that made it more real. This huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together, he realized. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar. So he scanned the Bowl's wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes on his bridge board. It was only a few tens of meters thick, pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Which meant the Bowl stress-support material had to be better than SunSeeker's. What engineers they were....\n\nJam said, \"It's braking. Must have some maneuvering ability.\"\n\n\"I can see them,\" Kurt said quietly. He ran his scopes to the max. There were windows in part of the hauler and human heads peering out at him. He had to admire them. They had made it through captivity, struck out across unknown alien territory, stolen transport, liberated themselves\u2014and were coming back to the ship to report.\n\nJam said, \"Ease them in. Careful.\"\n\n\"I read their roll at near zero, yaw zero point three five, but correcting\u2014and pitch seven point five degrees.\" Kurt rattled off the numbers just to be saying something while he used hand controls to turn Bernal into a plausible alignment.\n\n\"Bearing in,\" Jam said. \"Just got confirming signal. Ha! As if anybody else were meeting us out here.\"\n\n\"Aligned. Now's the hard part.\"\n\nCenter ball was smack on, horizontal bar of the crosshatch dead center with vertical bar, and the bulky burnished train car that looked like a shoe box came to rest in the Bernal rest frame. With both hands he triggered the flexi with an electrostatic burst.\n\nThe flexi skirted across the gap like an unfolding velvet blue scarf. It unfolded and clamped on to the boxcar metal around the simple air lock. It anchored and popped him a message: PRESSURE SEAL SECURED.\n\n\"Got it.\" Kurt palmed the pressure valves, and air rushed into the flexi corridor between the ships. Of course, the craft weren't perfectly matched. But the flexi compensated, extruding further lengths of itself to accommodate the vagrant torques and thrusts as the two spacecraft wobbled and rocked in the magnetic grasp. Pressured. Secure.\n\n\"The flexi's working!\" Jam's words came compressed, excited. \"Ayaan was right. Programming them to double-seal solved the pressure problem, straightened them out.\"\n\nThe boxcar's lock popped and he saw the first head appear, looking around. Beth he recognized from her photo.\n\n\"Tag 'em through.\" It happened fast and he had to keep them aligned with the mag grapple. Kurt watched the people come out through the boxcar air lock. The flexi was so transparent, he could see them kick against the sides for momentum and glide through the channel into the Bernal. He counted them. But\u2014\n\n\"What's that with you?\"\n\n\"Snakes,\" Jam sent the audio through a direct link.\n\nIt was Beth. \"Smart snakes. They helped us.\"\n\n\"Trouble,\" Kurt said to himself.\nSEVEN\n\nIt was a rough ride, irritating for Memor. She was cramped in the rattling hot cabin, subjected to rude accelerations. Her pilot seemed to take relish in throwing them into wrenching swoops and pivots. Magnetic ships moved more smoothly, of course, but Memor had chosen a rocket vehicle: it would not have to hover so close to the outer hull of the World. Memor braced against the surge and wondered if her pilot could be among the disaffected. This might be a small way of expressing smoldering anger. Best make a note for future use?\n\nSurely not. Veest Blad was of an Adapted species, but he had been with her for years, back before Memor became female. Veest was too smart not to be loyal.\n\n\"Ah!\" And there, her prey were in sight. That limping one was Tananareve. And those ropy things the probes had seen, now wriggling into one of the cargo cars in a magnetic train, were finger snakes.\n\nTreason! They must be assisting the escaping bipeds. Finger snakes were a useful species, but their adaptation to civilization had always been chancy.\n\nThe car's side closed. The whole train lifted, eased away from the docks, and moved into star-spattered space.\n\nMemor considered. She had the acceleration to catch the train. Could she shoot out the magnetic locking plates without harming those inside? But Asenath had forbidden that\u2014and the primate Tananareve, Memor saw abruptly, was still standing on the dock.\n\nTananareve had been the language adept of this band, with many sleeps spent acquiring the Folk language. Thus, the most important, for Asenath wanted a speaking primate, for reasons unknown. But... the creature seemed ready to fall over. How far could she get before Memor claimed the rest of them and came back for her? Perhaps she would not even be needed... but wait\u2014\n\n\"Veest Blad, land near the biped. Not too near. We don't want her fried.\"\n\n\"Yes, lady.\"\n\nSo what was that about? Memor had countermanded her own decision. A moment's brief look into her Undermind told her why. The abandoned female looked to be dying, and she was the one whom Memor had inspected, had trained, had grown to know. The others\u2014perhaps they could be caught, perhaps they might all be killed by Memor's overbuilt weapons, true\u2014but they weren't needed while Tananareve was here.\n\n* * *\n\nTananareve wiped sweat away and watched the bulbous vehicle settle a good distance away, engines throbbing. Still teetering a bit, feeling woozy, she stood in the hot moist wash of rocket exhaust, waiting. Running wouldn't help her. She'd seen the tremendous creature's speed.\n\nMemor opened the great target-shaped window and rolled out. It looked painful: the rocket vehicle was cramped for her. Memor walked to Tananareve, huffed, and bent low, her eye to the woman's eyes. In her own tongue she asked, \"Where have they gone?\"\n\nTananareve groped for a lie, and it was there. Beth's team had discussed destinations, and rejected\u2014\"They've gone to join Cliff.\"\n\n\"The other fugitives? The killers?\"\n\n\"Cliff's team, yes.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nShe said, \"I don't know. The aliens knew.\"\n\n\"The limbless ones? They are Adopted, but often rebellious. We must take action against them. Tananareve, how goes your adventure?\"\n\n\"We were dying for lack of weight,\" she said. \"Lost bone and muscle. What choice did we have?\"\n\nMemor seemed to restrain herself. \"No choice now. Come. Or shall I carry you?\"\n\nTananareve took two steps, wobbled, and fell over.\n\nShe woke to a vague sensation, a hard surface with big ribs under it: Memor's hands. She flexed her fists and shook her head, trying to get her mind to work. Now they were in the ship, her face close against a wall dotted with icons for controls. Something rumbled, vibrated. Language? And now the wall took on the appearance of a distant forest of plants grown in low gravity, like the place she'd escaped from. A creature like Memor stepped into view and flexed a million multicolored feathers.\n\nNo way could Tananareve follow a conversation that was largely the flexing of feathers and silent subsonic tremors that shook her bones. Memor was holding Tananareve like a prize, and the other was snarling....\n\n* * *\n\nAsenath the Wisdom Chief was not of a mind to be placated. \"One! You have one, and it is dying!\"\n\n\"I will save it,\" Memor said. \"I will take it... her... down to the Quicklands, where spin gravity can restore her muscle and strengthen her bones. I know what she eats and I will procure it. This female is the one who understands me best. Gifted, though in many ways simple. She knows Rank One of the TransLanguage. Wisdom Chief, will you question her now?\"\n\n\"What would I ask?\" Asenath's feathers showed rage, but that was a plumage lie. Memor's undermind had caught the truth: She was in despair.\n\nMemor found that revealing. Earlier the Wisdom Chief had been trying to bring about Memor's disgrace and death. What had changed? Memor decided to wait her out.\n\nAsenath broke first. \"There comes a message from the Target Star, from our destination.\"\n\nAll Memor's feathers flared like a puffball. The human, engulfed, tried to wriggle free. Memor said, \"That is wonderful! And dangerous, yes? Can you interpret\u2014?\"\n\n\"There are visuals. Complex ones. The message seems aimed at these creatures. At your Late Invaders!\"\n\nMemor's feathers went to chaos: a riot of laughter. \"That is... endlessly interesting.\"\n\n\"You must care for your talking simian. We will try to make sense of this message. It is still flowing in. If I call, answer at once, and have the human at hand.\"\n\n* * *\n\nTananareve had caught little of that. She was nibbling at a melon slice now, slipped to her by Memor. She was enraged\u2014tight-lipped, squinting in the strange glow\u2014that she'd been caught again, but grudgingly grateful that Memor had brought provisions. The huge thing did not seem to mind carrying on conversation in front of a human, either.\n\nWhat was that about? Hard to follow. Was Glory inhabited? And had someone there sent a message? Surely not to Earth; that would be foolish, when the Bowl was straight between Earth and Glory, and so much more powerful.\n\nThe captain should be told. He and his crew would figure it out.\n\nRockets fired, accelerations gripped her\u2014and Memor's ship was in flight. Tananareve sagged into the pull. The hard clamp was too strong to allow movement. She relaxed against the floor and tried to get into savasana pose, letting her muscles ease, hoping that her dinosaur-sized captor wouldn't step on her.\nEIGHT\n\nThey couldn't all get into SunSeeker's infirmary. Beth and Fred and Captain Redwing hovered around the door, watching as Mayra and Lau Pin were led to elaborate tables. Tubes and sensors snaked out to mate with them. Jam, acting as medic now, watched, tested, then asked, \"Are you comfortable?\"\n\nMayra and Lau Pin mumbled something.\n\n\"I'm sedating you. Also, you're being recorded. Mayra Wickramsingh, I understand you lost your husband during the expedition?\"\n\n\"Expedition, my arse. We were expi... expiment... animals for testing. Big birds had us\u2014\"\n\nRedwing said, \"Come with me. You'll both be on those tables soon enough, but for now we'll give you gravity and normal food.\"\n\nBeth resisted. \"You're testing her while she talks about Abduss? He was slaughtered by one of those monstrous spider-things.\"\n\n\"We'll need to know how badly that traumatized her. The rest of you, too. How are you feeling now?\"\n\nFred said, \"Hungry.\" He lurched up the corridor toward the ship's mess, then sagged against the bulkhead. \"Feeble.\"\n\nBeth asked, \"How is Cliff? Where is he?\"\n\nRedwing allowed a vexed expression to flit across his face, then went back to the usual stern, calm mask. \"Holed up with some intelligent natives, Cliff's last message said. The Folk tried to kill them all. They were shooting down from some living blimp\u2014sounds bizarre, but what doesn't here? The locals helped Cliff's people get away. Aybe sends us stuff when he can. We have pictures of a thing that looks a lot like a dinosaur, plus some evolved apes. I sent those to you; did you get them?\"\n\nFred spoke over his shoulder. \"We got them, Cap'n. The Bowl must've stopped in Sol system at least twice. Once for the dinosaurs, once for the apes, I figure. And we found a map in that museum globe.\"\n\n\"You sent us the map,\" Redwing said, ushering them along the corridor. A pleasant aroma of warm food drew them. \"How did that strike you?\"\n\n\"Strange. Might be history, might be propaganda for the masses.\"\n\n\"There's a difference?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"It was in a big park, elaborate buildings, the works.\"\n\nFred wobbled into the mess. Beth was feeling frail, too; there were handholds everywhere, and she used them. Surely she'd been longing for foods of Earth? There had been almost no red meat in the parts of the Bowl she'd seen. Beef curry? Its tang enticed. The mess was neat, clean, like a strict diner. Already Fred had picked a five-bean salad and a cheese sandwich.\n\nRedwing dialed up a chef's salad. \"We're recording everything we can get in electromagnetics from the Bowl surface, but there's not much,\" he said.\n\nBeth asked, \"What are you doing with our allies? I mean the\u2014\"\n\n\"Snakes? They kind of give me the willies, but they seem benign. We're helping the finger snakes unload that ship you hijacked. Those plants will do more for them than for us, don't you think? Shall we house them in the garden? We'll have to work out what to give them in the way of sunlight and dirt and water. Want to watch?\" Redwing finger-danced before a sensor.\n\nThe wall wavered, and yes, on the visual wall there were finger snakes and humans moving trays out of the magnetic car. Beth saw these were new crew. Ayaan Ali, pilot; Claire Conway, copilot; and Karl Lebanon, the general technology officer. The ship's population was growing. They moved dexterously among the three snakes, struggling with the language problem.\n\nBeth muted the sound and watched while she ate. Silence as she forked in flavors she had dreamed of down on the Bowl. No talk, only the clinking of silverware. Then Fred said, \"The map in the big globe? It looked alien, but it's blue and white like an Earthlike planet.\"\n\n\"Could that have been Earth in the deep past?\"\n\n\"Yeah. A hundred million years ago?\"\n\nRedwing said, \"Ayaan says no. She pegs that clump of migrating continents to the middle Jurassic. Your picture was upside down, south pole up. Argue with her if you don't agree.\"\n\nFred shook his head. \"I can recall it, but look\u2014I sent Ayaan my photo file, so\u2014\"\n\nRedwing called up a wall display. \"There is a lot of spiky emission from that jet. Seems like message-style stuff, but we can't decipher it. Anyway, it fuzzed up your pictures and Ayaan had a tedious job getting it compiled. She compiled, processed, and flattened the image store. Piled it into a global map, stitching together your flat-on views\u2014here.\"\n\nFred read the notes. \"Of course... All those transforms have blurred out the details, sure. So now, look at South America. Just shows what looking at things upside down and only one side, will do. Now, rightside up and complete, I can see it. How could I have missed it?\"\n\nBeth said kindly, \"You didn't, not really. We were on the run, remember? And this doesn't look a lot like Earth, all the continents squeezed together. But you were right about the Bowl having some link to Earth. Tell the cap'n your ideas.\"\n\nFred glanced at Redwing, eyes wary. \"I was tired then, just thinking out loud\u2014\"\n\n\"And you were right.\" Beth opened her hands across the table. \"Spot on. Sorry I didn't pay enough attention. So, tell the cap'n.\"\n\nFred gazed off into space, speaking to nobody. \"Okay, I thought... wow, Jurassic. A hundred seventy-five million years back? That's when the dinosaurs got big. Damn. Could they have got intelligent, too? Captain, I've been thinking that intelligent dinosaurs built the Bowl and then evolved into all the varieties of Bird Folk we found here. Gene tampering, too, we saw that in some species\u2014you don't evolve extra legs by accident. They keep coming back to Sol system because it's their home.\" Fred remembered his hunger and bit into his cheese sandwich.\n\nA smile played around Redwing's lips. \"If they picked up the apes a few hundred thousand years ago, then they could have been en route to Glory for that long. They're definitely aimed at Glory, just like we were. Beth?\" Beth's mouth was full, so Redwing went on. \"All that brain sweat we spent wondering why our motors weren't putting out enough thrust? The motors are fine. We were plowing through the backwash from the Bowl's jet, picking up backflowing gases all across a thousand kilometers of our ramjet scoop, for all the last hundred years of our flight.\"\n\nBeth nodded. \"We could have gone around it. Too late now, right? We'll still be short.\"\n\n\"Short of everything. Fuel. Water. Air. Food. It gets worse the more people we thaw, but what the hell, we still can't make it unless we can get supplies from the Bowl. And we're at war.\"\n\n\"Cliff killed Bird Folk?\"\n\n\"Yeah. And they tried to repay the favor.\"\n\n* * *\n\nBeth had expected some shipboard protocols, since Redwing liked to keep discipline. But the first thing Redwing said when they got to his cramped office was, \"What was it like down there?\"\n\nAcross Beth's face emotions flickered. \"Imagine you can see land in the sky. You can tell it's far away because even the highest clouds are brighter, and you can't see stars at all. The sun blots them out. It gives you a queasy feeling at first, land hanging in the distance, no night, hard to sleep...\" She took a deep breath, wheezing a bit, her respiratory system adjusting to the ship after so long in alien air. \"The... the rest of the Bowl looks like brown land and white stretches of cloud\u2014imagine, being able to see a hurricane no bigger than your thumbnail. It's dim, because the sun's always there. The jet casts separate shadows, too. It's always slow-twisting in the sky. The clouds go far, far up\u2014their atmosphere's much higher than ours.\"\n\n\"You can't see the molecular skin they have keeping their air in?\"\n\n\"Not a chance. Clouds, stacking up as far as you can see. The trees are different, too\u2014some zigzag and send long feelers down to the ground. I never did figure out why. Maybe a low-grav effect. Anyway, there's this faint land up in the sky. You can see whole patches of land like continents just hanging there. Plus seas, but mostly you see the mirror zone. The reflectors aren't casting sunlight into your eyes\u2014\"\n\n\"They're pointed back at the star, sure.\"\n\n\"\u2014so they're gray, with brighter streaks here and there. The Knothole is up there, too, not easy to see, because it's got the jet shooting through it all the time. It narrows down and gets brighter right at the Knothole. You can watch big twisting strands moving in the jet, if you look long enough. It's always changing.\"\n\n\"And the ground, the animals\u2014\"\n\n\"Impossible to count how many differences there are. Strange things that fly\u2014the air's full of birds and flapping reptile things, too, because in low grav everything takes to the sky if there's an advantage. We got dive-bombed by birds thinking maybe our hair was something they could make off with\u2014food, I guess.\"\n\nRedwing laughed with a sad smile and she saw he was sorry he had to be stuck up here, flying a marginal ramscoop to make velocity changes against the vagrant forces around the Bowl. He didn't want to sail; he wanted to land.\n\nShe sipped some coffee and saw it was best that she not say how she had gotten a certain dreadful, electric zest while fleeing across the Bowl. Redwing asked questions and she did not want to say it was like an unending marathon. A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.\n\nTo wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was\u2014well, a consummation requiring digestion.\n\nShe could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.\nPART II\n\nSUNNY SLAUGHTERHOUSE\n\nAfter the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.\n\n\u2014ITALIAN PROVERB\nNINE\n\nCliff stood at the edge of the ruined city and tried to get his eyes to work right.\n\nThis world looked... strange. Shimmering green and blue halos hovered around the edges of every burned tree and smashed building. The jet scratched across the sky had its usual twisting helical strands around its hard, ivory-bright core... but there, too, an orange halo framed it, winking with vagrant lights.\n\nOkay... shake the head, blink. Repeat. The colored halos dimmed. He made himself breathe long and slow and deep. Acrid smoke tainted the dry air.\n\nIn the second Folk attack, he had gotten hit again. Irma had stitched the wound in his right shoulder and then... he slept. It was strange to sleep for days and nights\u2014though those words meant nothing here, where the ruddy star hung forever in the same spot in the sky. Yet he had slept long, his irked back and aching bones told him.\n\nHe had come out of it, stiff and dry and jerky. A bit foggy, he watched the Sil deal with their wounded and put out the widespread fires. He had just woken up and now, after a breakfast of odd foods and stale water, felt pretty well. The halos ebbed, faded. With Irma he stood watching the Sil work. Their lithe bodies slumped and sagged. They were naturally limber, dexterous creatures, but not now.\n\nIrma said, \"The skyfish came over this part while you and I were trying to help carry that heavy ammo the Sil use. Blasted everything.\"\n\nHe nodded, dimly recalling the fevered hours of carrying heavy cargo on rolling flatcars. Their wooden frame carriers held long cylinders of shaped shells with elementary fuses on the underside. It paid to be careful with them. Hard, dumb, sweaty work it was, while they heard hollow hammer blows rain down like a distant drumming wrath of sky gods. The concussions rolled over them and he had learned pretty quickly not to look up or back too much, because the occasional orange-hot fragment or buzzing shrapnel came that way. Once he had seen a zigzag tree burst into flame after a sizzling meteor slammed into it. He had helped throw water on it, then dirt when they had to. The burning city took all the reservoir water, and then that ran out, too.\n\nAfter they got it put out, the humans went back to hauling ammo. The Sil guns hammered hard, trying to take down the skyfish. The brown and green football blimps churned across the sky and aimed lasers, antennas, and some kind of fire weapon down on the city.\n\nHe distracted himself by thinking how the skyfish could work at all. Its elaborate fins could flare out, capturing wind like a sail, and driving the gasbag forward. He guessed the huge creature could trim on this by shifting mass inside itself, getting a torque about its center of mass to navigate. This can be somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking with its big side fan-fins spread out. It had big eyes and blister pods, maybe evolved from some balloonlike species. A bioengineered creature used to slowly patrol the air above the Bowl.\n\nHe had watched the battle and recalled how this place had been only a short while before. The Sil had their pride, of course. Their first full awake time in this large Sil city, the five visiting humans had to be led around, shown the town. They saw ancient majestic buildings of stacked stone, gleaming shiny statues to great dead savants, beautiful swooping curves and ramps and towers, then spindly ceramic bridges over moist green gardens and sprawled homes. They exhausted their reserves of oohs and ahhs. It was indeed a fine city of untold ancient origin.\n\nNot now.\n\nDuring the battle, at least five of the living skyfish had circled, covering each other against any Sil artillery. When the guns barked up at them, a shower of beams and missiles cascaded down, silencing the crews. The pain beam was terrifying. When it struck, Cliff could see the shocked fear come into the Sil faces. They turned and ran, some snatching at their skins as though they were on fire. At the sensory level, they were.\n\nThe pain gun was a microwave beam that excited Sil nerves with agonies that made them fall, writhe, scream. It deranged some, who howled and jerked and ran in chaotic bursts. Others had the sense to run steadily out of the beam, if they could. The effect was intense, immediate, and ended Sil resistance where the beams struck. The pain projectors were soundless, which made them even more horrifying. These were the standard Folk weapon to panic opponents, and they worked their silent terror well.\n\nBut humans did not feel it at all. Some difference in the neural wiring made them immune. So Cliff, Aybe, Terry, Howard, and Irma hauled ammo and tried to stay alive. The skyfish wallowed across the air above the Sil city and brought flame spouts to bear. Some forked down green rays that seared buildings and people alike. The enormous living sky creatures systematically burned along geometric paths, and whole blocks of homes and factories burst into yellow flame.\n\nThe Sil brought their archaic weaponry to bear and blew shredding blasts into the skyfish underbodies. Once Cliff heard an enormous hollow whoosh that thundered down like a bass note. He and Irma looked up and saw a skyfish belly explode. A huge yellow ball licked around the green skin and trailed up the sides.\n\n\"Hydrogen,\" Irma said brightly. \"That's their buoyancy gas.\"\n\nHoward said, \"Helium must not give them enough lift. Tricky.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, where would they get helium?\"\n\nAnother skyfish was floundering now, spewing fluids from multiple wounds, losing altitude, veering erratically. The city below it boiled with flame. The great beast slid down the sky through realms of smoke. Its crash was like a green egg crumbling in slow motion as it burned.\n\nThe destruction lumbered on amid roars and bangs and the sour stench of flame. Not long after, a nearby explosion Cliff never saw caught him. He took hot fragments in his left side and arm and went down. Then it all got fuzzy, the licking flames filmed over by a gray screen of pain.\n\nHe recalled seeing the skyfish turn and begin their ascent. They rose quickly, buoyed by the spreading fires below. Someone said the huge blimps would mend and rearm at higher altitude and might come back... and then it all went vague and he fell away into troubled sleep.\n\nSo now, getting his eyes to see this place right again, it seemed odd to have the big world go rolling along without him. Sils labored nearby and gave the humans no notice whatever. There was a gray silence to their movements, but they kept on stolidly.\n\nJust like it will keep on after you're dead, Cliff thought. The wide busy world of muscle work, weather changing, window washing, future judging, fast joyous dancing, racing heart in great passion, nose picking, fun talking, and bug swatting\u2014all that will go merrily yea merrily along. If these aliens were never aware of your presence, they won't be overwhelmed by your absence. But the same is true of the people you know, too. The world picks up the pace and moves on. Eternally.\n\nThey were standing apart from the men\u2014Terry, Aybe, Howard\u2014at the city's edge. The humans had all slept in a makeshift cave in the surrounding hills, to avoid the constant light. Here there were scraps of the lush greenery on the slopes amid the rocky landscape, with some odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. They were eating some of these, rather bland with lots of pale blue juice. Irma said, \"Quert looks worn down.\"\n\nCliff turned to see the slim alien approach, its usually light-footed stride slow and lame. Quert's voice was grainy, flat. \"Onto here I-we came to speak\"\u2014a jerky hand gesture\u2014\"and wish share help.\"\n\nQuert's Anglish was still improving, and quite a few of the other Sil had managed to share the language upload and integrator AI. Cliff still found it striking that the Astronomer Folk had widely distributed\u2014\"among the hunters,\" Quert had said\u2014a software that taught Anglish with a few immersion sleeps. He had seen the squat little machine that \"learn us\" as Quert said, but had no idea how it really worked.\n\nIrma said, \"We can labor beside you.\"\n\nQuert's large yellow eyes studied them all in turn. \"Medical we are now at. The dead rot.\"\n\n\"They be many,\" Irma said. The Sil had the most trouble with the irregular forms of to be, so they tried to use simple forms.\n\n\"I sad be for our acts.\"\n\n\"You could not know the Folk would exact such a price,\" Terry said, coming up to the group.\n\n\"Many dead. Have not known before, fire on our city.\"\n\n\"You have lost the city, too,\" Terry said.\n\n\"No. Do not hurt for the city. We build again fast.\" Quert paused for a moment, eyes distant, then said, \"The city speaks what has happened to us. Everywhere on the Bowl, the wounds, they show.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Irma said.\n\n\"When we have more to say, we rebuild, the city speaks again,\" Quert said. Irma didn't understand, then.\n\nThe Astronomer Folk had apparently hoped the varying species of this area would rally to the Folk cause, and use the Anglish to somehow ensnare Cliff and the others. For the Sil it had worked in reverse. The Sil had been festering under Folk rule for a long time, and had seized the opportunity of uniting with their small human band. Now they suffered for it repeatedly, as the Folk tried to find the humans.\n\nHow long will they bear up? Cliff wondered. We've caused them huge losses...\n\n\"How we help?\" Aybe asked.\n\nQuert stood silent as its large eyes elongated up and down, rhythmically. The yellow eyes closed and the eyelids vibrated, as if shaken from behind. These expressions had no human parallel. Cliff had thought before that this must mean surprise or puzzlement, but now the alien made a curious squatting motion, its sinewy arms knotted in front of it. With the large Sil pancake hands and thick fingers it shaped a twisting architecture in the air.\n\nThen its eyes jerked open and it stood. Cliff was cautious in inferring emotions from facial signatures in the Sil, but this case at least seemed clear. The constricted face oozed sad resolve.\n\n\"Dead are many. Have time now little.\"\n\nIrma said softly, \"You wish help with the dead?\"\n\n\"We may share violence. Share our ends also.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe finely tended Sil city was now a chaos of jagged building shells, of splintered statues to great Sils now shattered into lumpy gray shards, of cratered streets, of angular trees sheared off at their roots or burned to cinders, of vehicles sitting gnarled and toasted, and the only sounds those of stones falling from half-crumpled walls. No groans, anymore. A city of dead.\n\nA grim procession clogged the few cleared routes. Sil shuffled along with blackened faces and torn skins, mournful angular faces with eyes that saw little before them. Some of them bore wounded; others bore their dead. None spoke. None needed to.\n\nThe stench came to Cliff as they strode down from the surrounding hills. It rose as they entered the ruined precincts. Terry made masks for them all that proved essential as they labored through the endless day.\n\nThere was a code for burying the dead, something to do with recycling their substance into the Bowl's sealed ecology. Especially here, water seemed scarce and the bodies went into a kind of pit that had a flexible blue cover and drains at the bottom.\n\nCliff hated going into the buildings and avoided them. He came upon a big Sil body that had a family gathered around it. They were rolling it in a pale green sheet. They stepped back and looked at Cliff. They were short, thin, and probably could not easily carry the body. He nodded and squatted to pick up the stiff fragrant mass. He got it standing on the rigid legs, then tipped the body onto his shoulder. As he stood up, the pressure forced gas through the voice box and a ragged croak rattled out. It sent shivers down his back. For a long second he wondered if the alien was protesting. He made himself look into the contorted Sil face, gone rigid. A purple tongue stuck out between the small knobby Sil teeth. The eyes had burst and goo ran down the angular cheeks.\n\nCliff looked away, stopped breathing. He took short jolting steps and the family followed him silently, all the way to the pit. He was sweating when he edged the body gently into the opening flap. The family just stared at the green sheet as it slid in, murmured to each other, then turned and walked slowly away. No sayings over the body, no ceremony. There was something dignified in the utter lack of ritual.\n\nNone of the Sil had looked him in the eye. He wondered what that meant.\n\nThe first day was hardest. After that, a numb resignation set in. The bodies got loaded on wagons and taken to parks\u2014the only large, open areas in the city not filled with rubble. Some places the Sil got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. \"Dirt takes not all,\" Quert said. Cliff supposed that meant the soil processors were overloaded by such massive numbers.\n\nMany corpses were underground. The job became an elaborate Easter egg hunt, Irma remarked sourly. They would bust into a shelter where often Sil had taken refuge, sitting in orderly rows. The humans were just helpers beside the Sil who would gather up valuables from the Sil laps, where often the dead had held what they felt was most dear. The Sil did not attempt identification anymore. They just turned the valuables over to an escort team. Then Sil would come in with a tubular flamethrower and stand in the door and cremate those sitting rigid inside. Get the precious metals and jewelry out, Cliff supposed, and then burn everybody inside. An alien Belsen, he thought, and in the end, our fault.\n\nThe first bodies the human team had carried out, they treated with care and respect, loading them onto stretchers provided to give some semblance of funeral dignity. But after the first day of working on the piles and acres of wrecked bodies, humans and Sil alike became more casual. Bodies got stacked and carried for convenience. After that, a rank callousness descended and they used racks to group the bodies, then drag them with electrical haulers like sleds of dead.\n\nThe Sil called this entire bleak spectacle, the elegant stonework buildings smashed and seared brown and hard black, something that sounded like scleelachrhoft. But they all spoke little. In answer to questions, Quert mostly had an eye-move that meant \"yes\" or a side-nod that meant \"no.\"\n\nThen came the patient patrols through the gray stone rubble. Here a leg, there an arm. Just pickings at first, parts to bag, but then they hit a treasure vault of tragedy. A reeking hash of a hundred had assembled in a basement. Cliff stepped in and found the tiled floor was awash in a still-warm broth of rank water and viscera. When the burst water mains had erupted, Cliff deduced, some of them had tried to escape through a narrow exit in the back. Their bodies were packed in a tight passageway. The dead did not bear burns. From their stiff, bloated condition, he gathered they had died of the smoke or oxygen loss as the firestorm sucked it all away.\n\nTheir leader had made it halfway up a ramp, only to be buried halfway up to her neck in a plaster goo and stone chips. She looked delicately young, smooth of skin still, though it was swollen and had begun to pucker with brown and blue welts. He carried her out himself.\n\nHumans were bigger and stronger and came from a higher-grav world, so they got assigned the harder jobs. When they went into a typical shelter, usually an ordinary basement, it looked to Cliff like a streetcar full of Sil who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm may occur naturally in forests, but in cities becomes a conflagration attaining such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. Cliff had watched the first stages of it from a distance, as wind whirls darted among buildings like dust devils of pure yellow and burnt orange flame. Those danced among tall apartment buildings like eerie flame children having fun.\n\nCliff became used to the hovering ruddy heat that seeped through the clouds still overhead. Smells came rising from the dead and made all the work gangs speed up their work. The bodies were not alike but strangely specific. Some clutched purses, others wore jewelry, and a few who had prepared for what they thought the worst wore rucksacks full of food. Some of the Sil work teams took these, and Cliff just looked away, not knowing what to say or do or whether to care at all. A young boy Sil had a pet, a four-legged furry thing Cliff had never seen the likes of\u2014still leashed to the boy, eyes still gleaming.\n\nThey were at their work, doggedly going from apartment to apartment, when a Sil woman suddenly appeared and hurled herself at Cliff. She shouted incoherent abuse and battered at him with tight fists. Another Sil rushed over and pulled her off him. She broke down sobbing, chanting, and was led away. He stood stolidly for a long while, emotions churning.\n\nOnce some Sil work partners found a small cellar of what seemed to be a winelike drink. When Cliff passed by them a while later, carrying a Sil body, they seemed to be roaring drunk. He saw them later, too, and unlike those teams nearby were working energetically and maybe even enjoying it. So whatever they drank, it seemed a blessing.\n\nIt went on and Cliff stopped even estimating the dead. The number was beyond thousands and probably in the tens of thousands and he did not want to think about it anymore. The fiery death penalty applied to all who happened to be in the undefended city\u2014babies, old people, the zoo animals....\n\nThe teams talked less and less and the work days seemed to go on infinitely, down a dwindling pipe. A day toward the end, when they could see there were few streets left to cover, they were combing the shattered shells of the last buildings. With scarcely a whisper, a flittering craft came over and dropped filmy oval leaflets that drifted down from the sky. The curious script meant nothing to the humans, of course, but a Sil read it in broken Anglish:\n\nWe destroyed you because you harbored the Late Invaders. They will damage our fragile eternal paradise and bring disease, unease, and horror to your lot, and to all who dwell beneath the Perpetual Sun in warm mutual company. We struck at the known location of Late Invaders and those helping them to elude our capture. Destruction of other than targets of high security value was unintended and an unavoidable consequence of the fortunes of safekeeping of our eternal Bowl.\n\nThe Sil became angry when reading these notes. They hurled them to the ground, stomped on them. Then others gathered them up and marched off with piles of the filmy sheets. Cliff wondered at this and so followed. The Sil went to their collective lavatory. Since he was in need, he went in and found the propaganda stacked for use in wiping asses.\n\nHe understood all this emotionally. Gathering up body parts in bushel baskets, helping a sorrowed male Sil dig with hands and shovels where he thought his wife might be... the events blended, endlessly.\nTEN\n\nIrma said, \"You have a flat affect.\"\n\n\"Um, what's that?\" Cliff had just awakened from another long sleep. He looked out the narrow opening of the cave they called home. Beyond lay the same stark sunlit landscape of despair he had become accustomed to. He yawned. At least the halo effect in his vision had gone away. Not much else had.\n\n\"It's a failure to express feelings either verbally or nonverbally\u2014that would be, just using your usual grunts and shrugs.\"\n\nHe kept watching the view out the cave opening and shifted uneasily on the inflatable bedding the Sil had given them. It was a bit small. \"Can't say much after what we've been through.\"\n\n\"I learned this in crew training. They gave it to us because we could go through traumas if we get to Glory\u2014\"\n\n\"When we get there. This Bowl, this is an... interlude.\"\n\n\"Okay, when. There might be pretty heavy events to get through on Glory, our trainers said. So we trained to deal with shock, combat fatigue, stress disorders. Recognize the symptoms, apply a range of therapies. You've had low affect for days now.\"\n\nHe could not claim he didn't feel differently, so he said nothing. That was always easier.\n\n\"Look me in the eye.\"\n\nReluctantly, he did. Somehow it was easier to peer out at the blasted and sunny landscape... though now that he thought of that, it made no real sense. Still\u2014\n\nIrma leaned forward, took his head in both hands, and looked fiercely into his eyes, shaking his head to get him to focus on her. \"Good! Trust me, this is a problem and we both need to work on it. They told us to expect it especially when a subject\u2014\"\n\n\"Now I'm a subject?\"\n\n\"Okay, a fellow crew member. It's when people talk about issues without engaging their emotions.\"\n\n\"I'm... sorting things out.\"\n\n\"Another symptom is lack of expressive gestures, little animation in the face, not much vocal inflection.\"\n\n\"Um. Ah. So?\"\n\n\"Do you split your feelings away from events?\"\n\n\"Not... by design. I'm just trying to hold it together here.\"\n\n\"Taking pleasure in real things can help that.\"\n\n\"Um.\"\n\nPleasure. Good idea, quite distant from here...\n\nHe looked out at the ever-bright sunshine that was beginning to weigh on him. The stellar jet cut across the sky, adding its neon glow to the hammering sunlight. They had experienced some darkness here and there on this long \"expedition\" through the strange, incomprehensibly large Bowl... and in his dreams now, he longed for more darkness. He dreamed of diving into deep waters, where a murky cool leafy world wrapped itself around him. He was always sorry to wake up.\n\nHe was thinking of this when he realized she was deftly pushing his buttons. Her voice turned furry, intimate. Hands stroked, caressed. Pretty clearly she wasn't being made wanton and reckless by his fabulous magnetism.\n\nThis was therapy. Not that the fact mattered.\n\nIt became a matter of silky moments and building readiness. Then a gliding delight, sweetly enclasped, and a long exultant shudder for both of them. The artful ease lasted him into a sliding sleep....\n\nWhen he woke she took him through some softly worded moments he only later saw were exercises. Irma asked him in her soft, insistent voice to report the lurid dark nightmares he had. She walked him through those, tracing out moments like the rattling wheeze of corpses, the leaden weight of stiff bodies, the sharp acrid stench of rot... and then she asked him to watch her hand weave, left to right to left... a sway of motion that somehow called up calming spirits in him, let him lapse into a silent, quiet place where he could rest and feel and not swirl back down into those tormented whirlpools. She sighed and stayed with him while he sobbed silently, yet at least not alone. And slept again.\n\nHe woke while Irma slept and reflected on good ol' plain human sex among all this strangeness. Making love worked just fine here. He knew that aliens would have other such modes and they would be odd indeed. Earthside, male honeybee genitals exploded after sex; wasps turned cockroaches into zombie incubators; male scorpion flies produced wads of saliva to feed their mates\u2014a nuptial gift that distracted her front end while her hind end mated. He had learned a basic lesson here: Expect the unexpected.\n\nMore dozing. A lot later, it seemed, he asked vaguely, \"We should go... somewhere....\"\n\n\"The mass funeral festival of the Sil. We must go.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Get dressed.\"\n\n* * *\n\nShe had gotten him into a halfway presentable mood with the most direct possible method. Smart, with talents he could not anticipate. He had always tried to work with people who were smarter, quicker, and more naturally adept than he was, plus those who had talents he could not even anticipate. Irma was all of that. In this incredible mess of an interstellar expedition, she kept her wits.\n\nHe realized that he, on the other hand, had exceeded his limits. He had no combat experience and yet had somehow gotten through the first Folk assault with just a wound. That had nearly healed when the Folk came back with not one skyfish but six\u2014to kill so many Sil that nobody could count them. No doubt the Folk hoped to catch the humans and burn them, too, but that could not have been the reason for the hours of unrelenting flame war.\n\nThe Folk wanted discipline, and knew how to get it. Discipline meant punishment meant order meant stability meant this giant spinning contraption could go on its ancient trajectory, bound for Glory and stars beyond.\n\nLearn to think the way the Folk do, he thought. That was the only way to survive this bizarre, strange, and wonderful-but place.\n\nHe slowly got from Quert a way to deal with all the violence. After all, loss was everywhere. Everyone on SunSeeker knew when they departed Earthside that they would never see family or friends again. Cliff tried to phrase what seemed to work. You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly\u2014that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.\nELEVEN\n\nCliff listened to the deep rolling music of the Sil dirge. This was an honor, he realized\u2014to witness the public mourning of these lithe aliens, their voices soaring in a long, rolling symphony he could understand, at least emotionally. It was truly so\u2014music had fundamentals common here. Their flowing melodic line had tricky interior cadences, subthemes, and as it gathered force, these merged to become a high, howling remorse laced through with beautiful, somber notes. In the carved rock amphitheater, the Sil stood as they sang, sat when they did not, their angular heads lifted up to show faces twisted with grief.\n\nThey had lost many in the assault by the remorseless, hydrogen-fueled sky beasts. Those vast creatures had killed so many Sil almost as an afterthought, punishment for hiding humans. Apparently firing into crowds was permissible, and the Sil seemed unsurprised by these events.\n\nCliff sat and thought of that as the music wrapped around him. It immersed them all\u2014he could see this strong music had its effects on those beside him. The Sil had many subtle eye-gestures and the odd elongation of the flesh around the eyes apparently meant mourning. All because of the humans...\n\nHis small band had been on the run for a long time, and now had met the sobering fact that those Folk who ran this huge, spinning machine would kill others just to stop a few humans. But... why were they important? It puzzled him and gave the slow, solemn proceedings of public mourning a gravitas he respected.\n\nTheir song rose and fell; their long bass notes reverberating from elaborately carved walls. The Sil leader Quert stood tall and splayed arms to the sky as the large wind instruments among them\u2014not separated, as in a human orchestra\u2014joined in the deep notes, pealing forth as the longer wavelengths resonated with those reflecting from the walled basin. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it. Grief made its same choices for the Sil as among humans\u2014gliding, graceful themes, deepening as the growing amplitude plowed into more somber courses. Then, suddenly, that ended in a stunning trill the voices held for a long while, as their instruments boomed forth.\n\nThe silence. No applause. Just grief.\n\nThey all\u2014Howard, Irma, Terry, and Aybe\u2014sat respectfully until told to move, as they had learned was considered polite here. Howard was nursing a bad cut and a bum knee, Terry and Aybe had burns and bound-up wounds, but altogether the humans had minimal damage. They kept their heads down, perhaps from politeness, but Cliff lowered his eyes because he did not want to look into the eyes of the Sil more than he had to. The Sil filed out, their slanted faces seeming even longer now, no one speaking. Their instruments caught Cliff's eye. The laws of physics set design constraints for woodwinds and stringed players\u2014long tubes, resonant cavities, holes for tuning\u2014but the music that bloomed from these oddly shaped chambers and strings was both eerie and yet familiar. It had an artful use of counterpoint, moments of harmonic convergence, repeating details of melodic lines. There were side commentaries in other keys, too. Was music somehow universal?\n\nAs they emerged from the stone bowl, he looked back at the now-empty crescents where the seats each had a slight rounded depression for sitting. Once in Sicily he had seen an ancient open theater that looked much like this. But here the stones were pale conglomerate, not limestone, and far older. Yet the same design emerged.\n\nStill obeying the code of silence, they walked into the sprawling community. This part of the Sil cityscape had escaped the fire bombing. It was a vast relief to be away from the charred precincts where he and the others had worked for... he could not even recall the count. At least a week, though now it seemed a boundary between a past where he had felt in control of his world, and now... this....\n\nHe pulled his mind away from the memories. Focus. His crew training made this possible, but not easy.\n\nThe Sil chose habitats, he noticed, the way a seasoned soldier instinctively chooses cover. Here a wall gave an angled exposure to the star. Another wall stood oblique to that, to allow the jet's glow to have its say with redder luminosities, so each shadow had different colors at play. One wall gave protection from the prevailing wind, with an apartment perched to take advantage of the cooler prospect, big open windows facing away from the field of bright, fine sands that bounded the Sil town. There was a lake nearby, not deep but enough to fetch a tranquil blue from the hovering sky. Sils lounged in shadows for delicious rest, on a spongy plane, their bodies prone on the soft jade green. Sil crowds gathered there, their trilling speech low and reflective. A moist breeze blew through the crowd, and streamers of fog danced among the zigzag trees.\n\nAll eyes followed the humans. They had all agreed to affect a casual disregard of this. \"Think of it as like being a movie star,\" Irma had said.\n\nAnd it was. The Sil at least hid their sliding gaze by turning heads a bit away, but Cliff felt the pressure of their regard.\n\n\"They wonder what to make of us,\" Howard whispered.\n\nAybe said, \"We're enough like them\u2014two arms, two legs, one head. Maybe that's an optimal smart alien design? Makes us sorta simpatico. Better than the Bird Folk, anyway.\"\n\n\"And the Sil know to keep a distance, give us some room to take them in, too,\" Terry added. \"It's kinda fun. Here are real, smart aliens who aren't chasing us.\"\n\n\"Or killing us,\" Irma said sardonically. \"Beth's team wasn't so lucky.\"\n\nThis memory sobered them as they passed by a truly ancient-looking stone edifice, erect on its bare site, the huge blocks sweating with every gush of mists from the lowlands. Cliff savored the moist breath. The winds here stirred with minds of their own, sinewy and musical as they hummed through the Sil streets. The homes somehow generated music from the wind, hollow woodwind notes in lilting harmonies that seemed to spill from the shifting air.\n\nThe sky was clear, a flight of huge lenticular clouds sliding past like a parade of ivory spaceships. The sky creature had been of that size, moving with ponderous poise. Beautiful in its way, and lethal. These clouds poured rain onto distant hills, and the fragrant breeze brought the flavor to them.\n\nAs they often did, the humans watched the strange landscapes around them and tried to figure out how it all worked. Aybe and Terry maintained that there had to be tubes moving water around the Bowl, since otherwise all fluids would end up in the low-grav regions near the poles. Irma pointed out that some photos of the Bowl, taken when SunSeeker was approaching, showed just what Aybe and Terry thought\u2014huge pipes running along the outside of the Bowl. Cliff listened to all this and sorted through his photographs. He had nearly filled his comm-camera's digital storage with photos of plants and animals and had to edit out some to free up space. Already he had decided to ignore algae, bacteria, Protoctista, fungi, and much else. He kept snaps of purple-skinned animals loping on stick legs across a sandy plain. He had captured flapping, flying carpets with big yellow eyes, massive ruddy blobs moving like boulders on tracks of slime, spindly trees that walked, birds like big-eyed blue fish. A library of alien life.\n\nCliff knew he had missed a lot of creatures because they had quick and good camouflage to conceal themselves. They discovered this by stepping on what looked like limbs or lichen or dirt and turned out to be small animals that knew the arts of disguise. He sucked in the moist air and recalled that on Earth, desert plants defended against losing moisture by keeping their stomata closed in the day. They opened at night to take in carbon dioxide without evaporating too much water away. On the Bowl, though, without night, the air had to hold enough moisture to let plants respire, venting oxygen. That meant a lot of water. It explained the heavy rainstorms and thick, flavored air, the sprawling rivers they had to work around, the mists that shrouded even small depressions in the land.\n\nYet some aspects here were like an Earth that had vanished long ago. Standing nearby was an enormous version of something he had seen Earthside, embedded in coal beds: horsetails. These resembled a first draft of bamboo\u2014thick walled, segmented grass, tan and tall. The trunks popped as they swayed in the wind, eternally fighting for space and sun and soil just as did all the others. He had seen creatures that excreted through pores in their feet\u2014surely not from Earth. Their speech sounded like whistling and farting at the same time. Both used flowing gases through a pinched exit, but...\n\nQuert broke off from a murmuring crowd. Moving with efficient grace, it came up to them, its big yellow eyes heavily lidded, and said, \"Thank delivered in kind. We now speak, want.\"\n\nIts language ability came in simple stutters of words. Cliff could usually guess the content. Quert moved with rippling muscles. Like brilliant gazelles, Cliff thought. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures that worked on the Bowl's understructure. They lived in small towns, mostly, so this now-ruined city was unusual. Quert said Sil were peppered through the immense lands of the Bowl. They seldom met other Sil groups larger than the few thousand here, since distance isolated them. They received instructions from the Folk and carried out their labors. Otherwise, they governed themselves. Populations were stable, by social conventions handed down for countless generations. This was a standard Folk method, apparently. Divide and rule, Cliff thought.\n\nThrongs of Sil followed their mourning with festival. The humans stood aside as the lithe forms began to move, sway, sing. All around them spontaneous movement broke out. The warm sun and lancing jet stung their skins and they danced until a kind of glow spread on their skins. \"Maybe the exercise changes their surface circulation?\" Irma wondered as the pumping music swelled, bodies glided and kicked, and the golden richness of Sil skins seemed to give off its own moist radiance.\n\nQuert led them to a low building, its walls slanted sheets of ivory rock. Beneath their feet was blond gravel that as they entered a small room turned green, each pebble wrapped in a translucent skin of slime. Quert bent and carefully unhinged from some sculpted seats small blobs that seemed to be slugs that had adhered. They sat and the seats adjusted to their bodies with a slithery grace.\n\nThere was a long wait, but as protocol required, the alien spoke first. \"We need know goal Astronomers.\"\n\n\"They want to catch us,\" Terry said. \"Or kill us.\"\n\n\"Whichever is easier,\" Aybe added.\n\n\"Capture best for them. Folk want know what you know.\" Quert said this flatly.\n\n\"About what?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"Ship you ride, plants you carry, bodies you have, songs. Possible is.\" The swift slippery slide of Quert's words belied a calm the feline alien wore like a mantle. Plainly Quert was a leader.\n\nThe talk went on, speculating on why the Folk had fired into a Sil crowd. Yes, humans were among them, but why did that matter? Cliff watched the alien and reflected on what could come next. In his experience people centered their lives around money or status or community or service to some cause, but the Sil seemed to live learning-centered lives. Here little bits of practical knowledge were the daily currency\u2014Howard had given them a M\u00f6bius strip to amuse the children\u2014and their main vocation was to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. As one Sil had told him, it was quicker to list the jobs he didn't hold than the ones he did.\n\nThere were teams completing a pit to turn manure into electricity, plans to build a micro-hydroelectric generator in a local stream. They devised and built their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard wood of the big trees that ringed their sprawling village. The Sil seemed shaped by what Cliff saw as a frontierlike culture. Here they drilled into trees to make body lotion or designed cement hives for swarming insects, as if to foil a creature that sounded to Cliff like honey badgers. They're isolated, Cliff thought, no other Sil for great distances, or other intelligent species... out here in the bush, lost in their experiments.\n\nHis attention had wandered. Aybe had been peppering Quert with questions, and nobody understood its answers. Then the alien leaned back, yawned to show big teeth, and held up its hands. \"Not right thing, you speak for. Folk want all Adopted to obey. I-we, you\u2014\" A liquid pointing gesture. \"\u2014not made in Bowl. Danger badness comes from us, say Folk.\"\n\nThis came out as hard, clipped words, not the sliding sibilants Quert usually used. It was tricky inferring emotions from alien facial signatures, Cliff's judgment warned him, but the narrowing eyes and tensed lips made a constricted face that oozed resentment. Cliff said, \"You came before us.\"\n\nA quick blinking, which seemed to convey agreement among the Sil. \"Not Adopted over long time. We move, live, work. Folk give us things. We do their commands.\"\n\nIrma said, \"You said earlier that you move often?\"\n\nQuert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. \"Our kind rove.\"\n\n\"But you have buildings.\"\n\n\"Young must learn by doing. This I-we know. Costs to know. Must pay. No such thing as free education. And buildings, cities used to talk.\"\n\n\"Talk?\"\n\n\"Adopted can see our work from everywhere in the Bowl. We shape our cities to make messages. Small messages. Big shapes for streets, parks, buildings. When we know, they know, too. What Folk want from you.\"\n\nThe Sil had a way of leading you toward what they meant, then letting you go the rest of the way. Maddening, at times. Asking them again, or in a different way, got nowhere, banging on a door that wouldn't open.\n\nThe Sil preferred to show them. Quert took them to a site where the ground seethed with a tan, stretching substance. It came out of the Bowl when the Sil triggered it, Quert said. Then they tuned it somehow. Cliff inspected one of their handheld devices but could make nothing of the ribbed and fissured face of it. The Sil apparently took in information and gave instructions by feel, not visually. This seemed odd for ones who had so many eye-moves to express themselves. Cliff was still wondering at this when the slick tan surface began to ease upward. It became grainy as it rose, wedges emerging from the big bubble that blossomed above them. It firmed up into walls and crossbeams as windows opened like sleepy eyes along the edge. A thick cloying scent like drying cement filled the air and Cliff stepped back with the others, not able to follow the complex moves the \"constructors,\" as Quert termed them, made to shape the thing, through signals he could not fathom.\n\nAfter an hour or two, a fresh building stood two stories tall. The floors were rough and there was no clue how the inhabitants could get water or electricity, but the oval curves of its walls and sloping floors of the interior were elegantly simple. The roof sported an odd array of sculptures that imitated Sil body shapes and cups pointed at the horizon.\n\nIn the entire growth of the home, Cliff felt a tension between order, as seen in the room gridiron pattern, and a spontaneous, discontinuous rhythm to the wrinkled walls and oblong windows. It had just enough strangeness to be expressive, though he did not know what the Sil made of it. They seemed to think it played a role in reconciling them to their lost friends and shattered city.\n\nNomadic, Cliff guessed. Each generation set up shop in a new area, hunted and gathered, devised their own kind of town. A species with a wandering curiosity, alighting on interesting parts of their environment. The Bowl was big enough to accommodate that style. But buildings as messages? \"Do the Bird Folk read your building messages?\"\n\n\"Think not.\" Quert made a rustling sound in its big chest and said quietly, \"I-we lost many. Sil like you, many parts, all lost.\"\n\nThere was a sadness in the long, sliding words. The self-forming building seemed to play a role in their reconciling what had happened. Yet none cast glares or stares at the humans. He could imagine no reason why the Sil should forgive the humans for bringing all this upon them. But then he was yet again seeing them as thinking like humans, and they did not.\n\nThe talk continued for a while as Cliff listened intently, trying to judge how Quert saw the world. Having an alien who had already learned Anglish was an immense advantage, but Quert's short, punchy sentences gave only a surface view of the mind beneath.\n\n\"If I were a lizard, I'd be a belt by now,\" Irma said at one point, and for the first time they saw Quert laugh. Or something like it\u2014barks that could just as well have been a summons, but accompanied by eye-blinks and sideways jerks of the head. As Quert did this, the eyes watched the humans, and there came a moment of\u2014Cliff grasped for the right word\u2014yes, communion. A meeting of minds. This cheered him up a great deal.\n\nThen Quert said there were meetings to go to, clearly meaning to end on a high, light note. They broke up and returned to the cavelike place the Sil had given over to the humans. It was a rude warren built of rocks rolled together to form corridors and rooms. A thick tentlike sheet drawn over the top of the whole sprawl of rock made a roof. At certain places detachable patches let in sun for the rooms, and were easily pegged back in place for sleep. Utilitarian and, Cliff realized, quite portable\u2014just roll up the sheet and find another field of boulders. The Sil apparently used whole gangs to move the rocks, a communal effort.\n\nThe whole team was tired and somehow the Sil dirge had quieted them. They went to their rooms. Cliff took a side corridor to his own small cubbyhole; Irma gave him a smile he could feel in his hip pocket.\n\nCliff had never fancied himself much of a lover, but since they had been taken under the protection of the Sil, they were at it every sleep period. This was no exception. They slept awhile then, and when he woke up she was looking at him. With a lazy smile she said, \"When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.\"\n\n\"I'm more of a biology type.\"\n\n\"That, too. Y'know, you've learned how to keep this pack of people together, too. I watch you do it. You've learned how to pull their strings.\"\n\n\"Um\u2014yours, too?\"\n\n\"Not so much. Learning to pull men's strings is one of a woman's major skills, of course. I can see you do it in your own guy way.\" She softened this, though, with a grin.\n\nHe felt uneasy thinking about being manipulative, but\u2014 \"I learned on the job.\"\n\n\"You let everybody have their say, then let them do the calculation. Who's with them, who's not. Most of the time that solves the problem.\"\n\n\"Well, they think I have your vote already.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Touch\u00e9! But not because of fun in the sack.\"\n\nThey were indeed in a sack, of sorts. The open, braced hammock fiber somehow stayed flat though it hung from straps, a smart carbon sheet. He didn't like discussing how to manage their little team, though. He now trusted his intuition and was relieved not to think about it. He leaned over, kissed her. \"What do you think we should do next?\"\n\n\"If you keep caressing my leg, I'll tell you.\"\n\nCliff laughed and kept up a smooth, steady stroking of her tawny leg. He hadn't noticed he was doing it. \"I don't see how we can find Beth or stay away from the Folk, much less figure out this place.\"\n\nIrma shrugged. \"I don't either. Yet.\"\n\n\"What makes you think we can?\"\n\n\"Well, for one thing, it's us. And we have smarts.\"\n\n\"Smarter than what built this contraption?\"\n\n\"Well, there's street smarts on Earth\u2014remember that phrase? Means you can get around on your own. Maybe here we have planet smarts.\"\n\n\"Which means?\" A pretty obvious way not to give away what he thought, but people didn't seem to notice it.\n\n\"This place seems to be deeply conservative. You have to be, to keep a contrivance like this running. Hell, even at first glance, I knew it wasn't stable. If the Bowl gets closer to the star, the biosphere heats up and starts to fall toward the star. To correct that, I'd guess the locals have to fire up the jet stronger, propel the star away, and get back to the right distance for heating. Then there's the problem of what to do if I stamp my foot and the Bowl starts to wobble. It must be they have correction mechanisms in place. On a planet, inertia alone, and Newton's laws, keep you going if you do nothing. Not here.\"\n\n\"Ah, the spirit of an engineer. You didn't answer my question.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"You noticed! I'd say stay here, try to get back in touch with SunSeeker. Let Redwing figure a way to help us.\"\n\n\"He doesn't seem to have a clue. Unless you're down here, it's hard to get a grip on the quiet, odd ways this place is so different from a planet.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"It's impossibly big, but it's mostly vacant. Why?\"\n\n\"It suits the Folk mentality, must be. Lots of natural landscape\u2014okay, not natural, but it's shaped to feel natural. It's a park, really. The Sil fit in here, too.\"\n\n\"Nomad habits of mind, right. And the Bowl is a nomad, too. Wanderers living on a wandering artifact. A big, smart object.\"\n\nShe pursed her lips. \"Smart? Because it has to be managed all the time, kept from falling into its star?\"\n\n\"It moves forward in a dangerous way, just like us. Any two-legged creature has to fall forward and catch itself. Aside from birds, there aren't many Earthside animals that do that. The most common two-legged one is us.\"\n\nShe considered this. \"The Bird Folk are two-legged, in a way. Though I saw them move on all fours, too, since the forearms can help them for stability. Maybe they're concerned about not falling, because they're massive.\"\n\n\"So they have the same gut instinct\u2014move forward, even if it's tricky. I\u2014\"\n\nShouting in the distance. Irma got up and pulled on her rather tattered uniform, stuck a head out through the curtain of her chamber. \"Quert? What's\u2014?\"\n\nThe alien came into the room in the quick, sliding way the Sil made look so liquidly graceful.\n\n\"Come... they.\"\n\nCliff hauled out of the hammock, feeling his joints ache and eyes sticky. His fingers fumbled as he got dressed. Irma went with Quert. By the time he got to the entrance, they were all staring up at something humming in the sky. Not the balloon creature that had fired on them all, something smaller, faster. It skimmed low, wings purring. A slim, winged thing of feathers and a big crusty head that scanned the land below systematically. Its big glittering eyes saw the Sil settlement and turned toward them.\n\n\"Like a huge dragonfly,\" Irma whispered.\n\nQuert said, \"Scout. Smart one. High value, so Folk must\u2014\"\n\nThe thing surged as it turned toward them. Cliff said, \"Inside!\"\n\nThe nearest building was ceramic coated with crusty, bronzed metal. He ran toward it as he looked back. Howard was watching with binoculars the slim body as it canted in the air, wings furious. \"Howard!\"\n\nQuert was faster than the humans and got into the building entrance. It caught the big hinged door and swung it nearly closed as people ran under its arch. \"Howard!\" Cliff called, and then went in.\n\n\"We must be inside,\" Quert said. \"Scout smart with\u2014\"\n\nA humming in the air washed over them. Cliff saw Howard jerk and grab with frenzied fingers at his head. A startled yelp from him turned to a high, shrill scream. Howard fell and was snatching at his legs, head, chest. His jaw yawned wide with a colossal cry. His eyes bulged white.\n\nQuert slammed the heavy metal door closed and drove a latch into place, cutting off Howard's shriek like a knife.\n\nCliff stood blinking at the big door, unable to push away the sharp image of Howard frantically slapping at invisible demons.\n\nThe humans looked around at the crowds, dazed. There were many Sil already inside, providing a chorus of their sliding speech, feet shuffling, eyes shifting uneasily at this latest attack. Others, though, slumped against walls and let their heads rest back, eyes closed, as if resigned to absorbing yet one more disaster.\n\n\"They get to shelter fast,\" Irma noted. \"Seem to be riding it out, pacing themselves.\"\n\nThere were no windows in this place. Phosphors lit the narrow rooms. Cliff went through the Sil crowds, their eyes tracking him, and down a corridor, searching for a way to see out. The air hung thick and carried an odd, sour flavor.\n\nHe turned back and found Quert following him, who said, \"Hurt come through glass.\"\n\n\"You come here to get away from the Folk microwave weapon?\"\n\nQuert made the odd, waggling sign of assent. \"They Folk change to do your kind.\"\n\nIrma had followed Quert through the claustro-corridors. \"This time it hit Howard. The Folk must've found the right frequency or power levels.\"\n\n\"Folk know technologies well. Adjust fast. Always have.\"\n\n\"And sent it on that scout?\" Cliff wanted to see how Howard was doing. \"If I could get a look\u2014\"\n\n\"No window this place.\" Quert made a hand gesture that they had learned, during the long days of burying the Sil dead, meant \"rest peacefully, no cares.\"\n\nThe Sil would not let Cliff find a way to look out. One of them came down a chute and, speaking quickly in the sibilant squirts the Sil used, through Quert reported that the fast-flying scout with the big gleaming eyes had circled until it tired, fired down randomly at some Sil, then flew away.\n\nIrma said, \"It's come before?\"\n\n\"Only metal stops hurt.\" Quert looked weary, long lines running down its pale face and leathery neck. \"Keep tight.\"\n\nCliff knew that microwaves in the spectral region that plucked at the human nervous system were about three millimeters in wavelength. The Sil must be vulnerable to a different wavelength, since humans had not felt the pain gun used in earlier assaults. So the Folk must have developed something that hurt Howard a great deal, and done it within a short while. Something around a hundred gigahertz. Impressive.\n\nIrma said, \"So they must know you Sil very well\u2014\"\n\n\"The aquladatorpa knows us. It look for you.\"\n\n\"You've been living a long time with the Folk. Under them, I should say. How do you bear it?\"\n\nQuert thought awhile and Cliff let him, not interrupting. Humans had a nervous, intrusive way of interrupting each other, a social gaffe of some consequence among the Sil. Then Quert sighed and said slowly, \"You have word, 'enchant,' means our ochig. Or like it. Enchant comes from light, from sun and jet. Living essence, is enchant. Ochig comes down streaming. Plants, animals, Sil, and now human grow and learn and think from ochig. Bowl turns to keep us here so ochig can bring enchant passing through us. Sil in world, human in world, Folk more in the ochig, thick in ochig. Moving through world, ochig makes pattern. Folk see pattern. Get pattern wrong and Folk do wrong.\"\n\n\"They don't seem any better than you Sil.\"\n\n\"Not better. But in right place.\"\n\n\"They're in the right place when they slaughter you?\"\n\n\"Right will come. Ochig endures.\"\n\nThis was the longest Quert had ever talked about anything, indeed the longest speech he had ever overheard among any of the Sil. They had an air of paying attention to the passing moment. He envied that.\n\nCliff wandered aimlessly, still seeing in his mind's eye Howard slapping at himself and shrieking. He came upon Irma, who had found a little cranny and was sitting on the bare cold stone floor, sobbing. He sat beside her and took her shoulders in his hands and drew her close. Soon enough he was murmuring and clutching her, letting out emotions he did not wish to name. Just holding her helped. He kneaded the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders. She did the same for him and in the long dim time between them some comfort stole over their bodies and then deeper. He could not cry but she could, letting the soft sobs out one at a time. Time eased around them.\n\nThey spent more hours inside before the Sil unwrapped the shelter. They coiled up shiny sheets that they had triggered to cover all the door hinges. Intense electromagnetic waves with millimeter wavelengths can leak around slim edges, even those less than a millimeter wide.\n\nCliff looked out a small window and saw Howard curled up on the ground with no Sil within view. They came out a side door and surveyed the empty sky. Aybe rushed forward, unhooking the first-aid kit... and they all stopped where Howard sprawled.\n\nHoward did not resemble a man now nearly so much as a twisted, red, roasted chicken. Lips blue and bloodless, arms a blotchy purple. His eyes peered up at them as though asking what had happened.\n\nCliff stared at the face a long time. This man had been under his leadership since they left the ship, since they went through the lock at their landing, and then across long weary paths and through sudden panics. Howard had a habit of getting hurt, missing jumps and landing wrong, some scrapes and sprains, despite his physical stats. The ground truth, as their training had told them, was the final fact, and no tests or training could tell you what happened when plans met reality in a usually brutal collision. Swift came reality, and it took no prisoners. Cliff had not seen this coming and Howard had lagged a step or two behind and so was now forever gone. On his watch.\n\nQuert said quietly, \"Is quick. Hurt is where beam hits.\"\n\nThey buried Howard with the other Sil in the collective grave site. Cliff said little and they were walking back from the site when a faint hum filled the air. Heads turned. Sil nearby rustled with alarm.\n\nThe slim shape skimmed low, wings whirring in the sky. Sil began running. Their yellow eyes raced with jittery panic.\n\n\"Go time,\" Quert said. They went.\nPART III\n\nSTATUS OPERA\n\nScientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.\n\n\u2014THEODORE VON K\u00c1RM\u00c1N\nTWELVE\n\nMemor watched the primate scream. She tried to lunge out of the beam and tripped. Sprawled. Gasped. The armaments team dutifully tracked her as the poor dim creature scrambled to crawl away. She kept up the sobbing little shrieks as the weapons crew tuned their large antennas further. It went on until Memor waved an impatient fan-display and the team cut off the pain beam.\n\nThe team was pleased, their feathers fluttering with joy, though they kept discipline and said nothing. They had correctly adjusted their weaponry and hit the right resonance for nerve stimulation in the alien.\n\n\"Tananareve,\" Memor in her best learned accent, trying to address the primate by name in its own awkward tongue, \"you can survive this level of agony for, you would say, how long?\"\n\nFree of agony, the primate leaped to her feet. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, voice high. \"You torture me like a lab animal!\"\n\n\"A legitimate use,\" Memor said mildly, \"in warfare.\"\n\n\"War? We landed on your world-thing, tried to open negotiations\u2014\"\n\n\"No use to revisit the past, little one. We are on to other matters, and this experiment was useful to us.\"\n\n\"How?\" The primate sagged to her knees, than sat, wiping sweat from her forehead. \"How can slamming me with that damn fire-beam help?\"\n\n\"We need to know how to... negotiate... with those of your kind.\"\n\n\"You mean fight them.\"\n\n\"The opening struggle comes first, of course.\"\n\nTananareve's face took on an expression Memor had learned to interpret: cautious calculation. These primates managed to convey emotion through small moves of mouth, eyes, chin. They had evolved on some flat plain, apparently, without benefit of the wide range of expression that feathers conferred. Tananareve said slowly, \"I'm very glad they're still free. It means you don't know how to deal with them.\"\n\nMemor disliked the sliding logic of this creature, but knew she had to get around it. \"We need the means to bring them to order. Inflicting pain is much more... virtuous... than simply killing them, I think you will agree?\"\n\nTananareve shot back, \"Do you have anything you would die for? Your freedom to make your own way, for example?\"\n\n\"No, dying seems pointless. If you die, you cannot make use of the outcome of the act.\"\n\n\"Die to save others? Or for a belief?\"\n\n\"I certainly would not die for my beliefs. I could be wrong.\"\n\nTananareve shook her head, which seemed to be how these creatures implied rejection. \"So you experiment on me, to see what power level of your beam works best?\"\n\n\"That, and tunable frequency. How else are we to know?\"\n\nThin lips, narrowed eyes. Anger, yes; Memor was getting used to their ways. \"Don't do it again.\"\n\n\"I see no need to. You obviously felt a great terrible agony. That will suffice.\"\n\n\"I need... sleep.\"\n\n\"That I can grant.\" In truth, Memor was tired of this exercise. She did not like to inflict stinging hurt. Yet her superior, Asenath, had commanded that a fresh weapon be developed, capable of delivering sudden sharp pain. The customary such radiator, which worked well on the Sil, had failed in the first, clumsy battle. Memor did not like to think of that engagement, which had killed the skyfish she rode in. Her escape pod had lingered long enough to witness the giant, buoyant beast writhe in air, its hydrogen chambers breached by rattling shots from the ground cannon below. Then the hydrogen ignited in angry orange fireballs and the skyfish gave a long, rolling bass note of agony. The mournful cry did not end until its huge cylindrical body crumpled, crackling with flames, against a hillside. What a fiasco!\n\nNow Memor had to redeem herself. She could do so by developing and delivering quickly a pain projector, one that could damage the primates without overloading their nervous systems, and thus killing them. And now she had. Further, at the insistence of the weapons shops, Memor's stroke of insight had been to carry out earlier testing on small tree-dweller primates, gathered from the Citadel Gardens for the purpose. They seemed to have similar neurological systems and vulnerabilities, and so were the optimal path to this success.\n\nMemor swelled with pride. The trials on the Sil city had been preliminary, and it was difficult from the skyfish to discern if humans had been affected at all. But these tunings made that probable. The Sil had needed discipline, and the possibility of death-stinging the humans hiding among them was a bonus, of course.\n\n\"We will speak later,\" she told the primate. \"I have more interesting experiments in mind for us to work upon together.\"\n\nThe primate made a noise of deep tones\u2014nothing more than grunts, really\u2014perhaps some symptom of a residual pain. Memor thought it best not to notice this as she departed, her small attendants and the weapons team following dutifully.\nTHIRTEEN\n\nMemor hated when her insides wanted to be her outsides.\n\nShe did not like the testing of new weapons upon her charge, the primate. To do so made her nauseated, her acids run sour. Yet Asenath had ordered quick results quite clearly, and to preserve her position Memor had to comply. She accepted the logic, however distasteful the experience.\n\nLooked at another way, the slap of pain did not merely withhold: the slap imparted. It conveyed precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lay the genius of using, the deep humiliation it imposed. It invited the victim to accept a punishment in pursuit of a larger purpose, one that might have been worse\u2014that would in fact be worse if the use wasn't accepted. The pain-slap required that the higher goal be understood.\n\nOf course, the primates could not understand this, but in time with their Adoption that would come. If they could not be so opened, then they would have to be extinguished, well before their vagrant abilities could be a threat.\n\nMemor relaxed a bit by regarding the aged wonders nearby as she passed down corridors and through yawning archways. The teeth of time wore long on the Bowl. By its nature it must run steadily. Engineer species must fix problems without the luxury of trial and error experimenting. That meant engineer teams relied on memory, not ingenuity. Intelligence was less vital than ready response to situations that had occurred before, and so were lodged in cultural recollection. Species had their mental abilities shaped to do this. It was the Way.\n\nMemor thought on this as she watched some mutants being culled. They were small variants on the repair snakes, long ago acquired from a world with rapid tectonics. They had evolved swift, acute responses to those treacherous lands, a driver of their crafty intelligence. Memor had witnessed the underground cities this kind built, when allowed, in the underskin of the Bowl\u2014labyrinths of elegance and deft taste she had been much impressed by. Memor remained surprised that these snakes had subsections of their genome that made them resist the nirvana of the Bowl. Surely here they should be endlessly joyful, for they were free of the frightening ground-quakes, foul volcanoes, and hammering ocean waves that often dashed their hopes and their subsurface homes to oblivion?\n\nThese, however, had a touch too much of their crafty independence. They were in a nearby chamber with transparent walls, where another research team had tried to correct the mental errors in the snakes. Apparently, this corrective experiment had failed. The researchers were exterminating them by gas, and Memor paused to watch the agonies of these smart serpents, who under duress flung themselves into twisting knots. It was revolting, writhing bodies and pain-stretched mouths. At least she could not hear them, as she had Tananareve's shrieks. Gazing through the wall at this, she could not help but reflect upon the fate of the primates, should they continue to provoke.\n\nThey would face the fate of the Sil, whose rebellion had united with the renegade primates and brought down Memor's skyfish. That had made the reprisal destruction of the Sil city inevitable\u2014though it came first as an idea sprung from the slim though weighty head of Asenath, the reigning Chief of Wisdom.\n\nMemor sighed and trudged on, putting the image of the snake agonies behind her. Now she must go to Asenath and confer, though she sorely disliked and feared the Chief of Wisdom, who was known to be capricious.\n\nAn oddity of long history had placed the confinement and punishment chambers together with ancient honoring sites. They were all now encased in a great Citadel that loomed above the lush green landscapes here. She lumbered past large, luxuriant stone structures of vast age, moss clinging to the doorways of crypts polished by time. Some bore blemishes of tomb raiders, but even those harsh, jagged edges had smoothed. These chambers held ancient dead who had been allowed burial, in a far-distant time when that was possible, and before the realization that all mass and vital elements must be reprocessed. Surely that was the highest honor, to be part of life eternally, not a mere oxidized relic. The bodies inside had long returned to the air, of course, with only shriveled bones remaining as a small, unharvested calcium deposit. No doubt the grave goods\u2014ornaments and valuable family remembrance-coffers that some added to the sepulchers of that age\u2014had disappeared long ago, at the hands of vagrant intruders. The past was the easiest venue to rob, after all.\n\nThough not to fathom, came a vagrant sliver of thought. Memor stopped, shocked. Her attendants rustled, unsure what to do. With a feather rattle Memor bade them stand away. The sudden thrust of not to fathom carried guilt and fear wrapped around it. Memor felt the thought-voice and knew it had come lancing up from her Undermind. Something had festered there, and now propelled out, calling to her. She would have to deal with the unruly, understand what this shaft of emotion meant. But not now. She forced herself to resume her stroll, not letting her aides see her vexed condition. Best to rattle her feathers, sigh, casually move on.\n\nShe noted there were pointless messages for the unknowable future, here: TO BE READ UPON YOUR WAKING, from some lost age when minds stored in silica or cryo could, they hoped, work forth from their decay into some future with vaster, smarter resources. None awoke, for there was no shortage of minds in the Bowl. Nor of bodies, for the number of walking, talking minds was a matter of stability, not wealth. Minds were not the point of the Bowl, but the long-run destiny of the Folk was... and of course, of those lucky species who came onboard through countless Annuals of time, to help make the Bowl sail on, sail on, to witness and grasp the great prospect offered by the whole galaxy's own vast, strange, ponderous assets. Whoever or, indeed, whatever wrote TO BE READ UPON YOUR WAKING lived in some illusion of past times. They now drifted as fragrant dust beneath Memor's great slapping feet.\n\nShe looked around, savoring. Some mausoleums carried chiseled epitaphs noted for their charm, which may have preserved the blocky tombs' hard carbo-concentrated walls in their revered sanctity. Here one referred to\n\nI, THE FAMOUS WIT, PLONEJURE,\n\nSOOTHED PAIN WITH COMEDY AND LAUGHTER.\n\nA PERFORMER OF PARTS, SURE I OFTEN DIED...\n\nBUT NEVER QUITE LIKE THIS.\n\nAnother was more dry:\n\nDIUREAUS SAW THE OTHER FOLK BESIDE HIM,\n\nGUILTY, TRUE, AND SQUARE, AND WORSE,\n\nHUNG UP ON A HIGHER CROSS THAN SHE,\n\nDIUREAUS DIED HERE OF FURIOUS ENVY.\n\nPleasant, to think that wit was ancient. She wished that the Chief of Wisdom Asenath had a touch of wit in her genes. One more tomb inscription caught well Asenath's melancholy spirit:\n\nTHEY TOLD ME, HERADOLIS; THEY TOLD ME YOU WERE DEAD.\n\nTHEY BROUGHT ME BITTER NEWS TO HEAR, AND BITTER TEARS TO SHED.\n\nI WEPT WHEN I REMEMBERED HOW OFTEN YOU AND I\n\nHAD TIRED THE SUN WITH TALKING, AND SAW A JET-CURL CARVE THE SKY.\n\nSince this passage was carved, Memor noted, whole worlds had evolved to harbor life, and others had been scorched of life by ancient brutalities. Yet the image saw a jet-curl carve the sky endured.\n\nAh! Here was the entrance; no more time for rumination. Step proud and high\u2014\n\nMemor marched in grandly, head held high with casual grace, her attendants trailing beneath the grand arches of this Citadel of Remembrance. Herald music rumbled and sang to greet her. Pungent mists fell in tribute and out of duty she sniffed, bowed, fluttered a quick ruby tail display. Skin-caressing life fell in curling display around her, caressing her head leathers, whispering faint blessings and salacious compliments. Invitations whispered in her ears, promising succulent delights, then fluttered away. Aromas of heady prospect swarmed up her nostrils and tainted the air with ruddy promise.\n\nImpatient, she shook these off and looked around for the right portal to find Asenath. From the court rabble here dawdling came much sensory babble, greetings, aromas, electric skin-jolts, high hails, a murmur of veiled gossip\u2014all usefully ignored, for now, to show that she was above the insolent fray.\n\nHigh ramparts trimmed in grace notes of colorful mega-flowers loomed like cliffs over the noisy gathering crowd, most of them come for the extermination ceremonies. They knew the ancient rules against recording in any medium, sight or sound or scene\u2014a ritual death\u2014and so came for the immediate experience. They did carry magnifier scopes and had an anxious, eager air. Skittering voices surged with a hunger that had no proper name. All these she avoided.\n\nAdministrative high offices were disguised from those unwelcome, which meant of course the crowd schooled in mere sensation\u2014and the even greater number of the unknowing, unschooled, blunt of mind\u2014all got shielded away by pale luminances that misled the unwary, sending them down dank corridors to their elemental raw pleasures. In such holes the halt and lame of mind would find some passing delights, and forget why they came, forget for their short vexed time the whole point of the Folk. Good enough.\n\nYet the dancing sheaves of prickly glow were smart sensors, and the walls knew well whom to admit. Those embedded intelligences, ever circumspect in their ways, sent fraying brilliant amber fingers to direct Memor down somber, ancient corridors. Crusty, glistening rock winked her forward past a sensor net of embedded eyes. She drew in the soft moist airs. There were always fresh changes in the Citadel, yet the Ancient Zone captured best the colossal powers lodged here. The rough stones held much elegant and courtly wisdom of ages past, canny knowledge set in stone. Memor heaved a sigh. She belonged here.\n\nA quiet, delicious blend of dread and strangeness flowed in her Undermind; she sensed it with a tingle of relish. She forgave it the sudden lance that had jarred her, and concentrated on the immediate. That strumming presence knew that this primordial, welcoming Citadel could well be her place of execution. Should she not perform well, and fail with the primates that were fully her charge now, she would receive little mercy.\n\nYet this did not fully overcome her awe at the majesty here. Of course, her Undermind often used its trickster mode, slipping words and even phrases into her speech, in its keen, eager way. Jokes about Underminds escaping control were a staple of classic literature and current japes. She could feel its hopeful spikes of muted zeal and would have to keep it carefully controlled now. Though not to fathom, indeed.\n\nDrama entered seldom in an Astronomer's life, and for that she was grateful.\n\nAh! The correct portal. She entered into a small knot of Astronomers, to be greeted by feather-riffs in orange and emerald, then small trill songs that echoed complimentary status-signals. Heads turned. Eyes widened. Bass calls of friendship resounded. A shield, of course, for what all knew: Memor had been summoned and they were looking forward to the show. Anticipation danced in their eyes and neck-feather-flutters.\n\nShe had to wait while a Revealing ceremony concluded. It had been a passage of legendary ardor and travail. The recent male, unsteady and weak-eyed, now advanced toward the welcoming cadre, where she knelt with gravid solemnity. The new She looked around in a many-wrinkled face full of bewildered puzzlement. She blinked with surprise, her feather-fan awash in ripples of wonder and flourishes of muted purple hope. Memor recalled this stage, when the male dwindled away into memory and a new She emerged, dewy-eyed.\n\nFrom this fresh female's Revealing she would, through the difficult next Annuals, acquire the long views of a She, yet retain the robust memories of prancing, exploring thrill that had marked her vivid He era. Memor could not help joining in with her deep soprano the rising fulsome joy-song, full of deep welcoming tones, and from above, the high, tenor resonances\u2014all celebrating the conferred judgment and sympathy-from-experience that the Revealing summoned forth. This new She would in time, and with much further study of the essential astrophysics and the Vast History, join the Order of Astronomers. From this essential balance\u2014more a sure dance, truly\u2014between the He and She, wisdom could and thus would come.\n\nStriding forward, clumping with big solemn feet, Memor took note of this new Her-name: Zetasa. In time this new She could, and so might, bring a new, vital stabilizing element to their colloquy\u2014a wise method evolved by the Folk over many, many twelve-millennia in the truly ancient past. This was the essential, time-honored, and stabilizing truth. She relished it.\n\n\"Memor!\" came Asenath's solemn, deep bass voice. \"We have not greeted in longtimes, I do say.\"\n\nUntrue, but perhaps useful. \"I greet in tribute, and wish to confer on present problems,\" Memor said in long sliding tones, with a penumbral, light-yellow feather display. This drew an attendant twitter of speculation. As tradition demanded, Memor ignored the light trilling soprano chorus of conjecture.\n\n\"Which have multiplied, I gather.\"\n\n\"I captured one of the primates and am learning much from her,\" Memor said. \"As we speak, skyfish descend upon the Sil lands, to either capture the primates remaining on the Bowl, or else kill them.\"\n\n\"Ah! As Governors, we must attend to the dismay of the Bowlcrafters, who do not relish such punishments.\" Asenath made a flutter-rush of red and gold to signal concern, but Memor thought it was only a pretense. Something else was in play.\n\n\"Please lead me,\" Memor said to place the conversation in the right ranking order. Asenath had to take the lead.\n\n\"You showed us results of your neural net and brain interrogations of these primates, I recall. Eukaryotic multicellular bilaterians, they are, with unexposed Underminds\u2014fascinating, I am sure. You then estimated their capacities as well below we Folk, and perhaps somewhat above others of the Adopted. Yet they continue to elude us, and now half of them have fled the Bowl.\"\n\nThe attendant minor figures drew in their collective breath at this. To escape! was their clear, unspoken message. Memor made a half turn to block most of them from Asenath's piercing gaze. She was saying, \"Now they have returned to their plasma scoop starship. Do you still feel they can be integrated into our Way?\"\n\nMaking a ritual humble-flush, Memor said, \"Apologies most firm indeed, for my failure to retain or recapture these strange primates. I believe their curious gait\u2014a continual, controlled toppling upon those hind feet that have thick, artificial coverings\u2014must be a key clue to their ability to improvise. They can hop to new ideas far more readily than we anticipated. Their ability to form a quick bond-alliance with the Sil is an example\u2014another two-footed species, I remark, which perhaps helps explains their rebellion. The primates arrived on train transport, and immediately engaged with the Sil in a battle against our skyfish. How this came about with such speed is a puzzle. Perhaps there is a species-signal here that may explain it in part.\"\n\n\"I would think their two-legged forms were adaptive on a more aggressive and quick-fighting world.\"\n\n\"So... you would urge extermination.\"\n\nAsenath saw she had been maneuvered into a hasty conclusion, always a mistake. \"Perhaps not immediately. Their ship has interesting features of magnetic control I and others feel would be useful to examine.\"\n\n\"Ah, wise. Perhaps a consultation, then?\" Memor motioned Asenath into a speaking cloister. She took the feather-flush hint. They made it seem they were merely strolling as they spoke. Memor dropped the shimmering, electric-blue sonic cloak behind them once in the narrow confines, where luminous walls gave a warm green glow.\n\n\"I did not want to refer to our continuing trouble with the jet flare guidance,\" Memor said.\n\n\"You venture that primates could help somehow?\" Asenath's neck fringe fluttered with skepticism.\n\n\"They are inventive\u2014\"\n\n\"Surely you do not imagine that we could allow them to touch what is most sacred and vital to the Bowl!\"\n\n\"I was trying to\u2014\"\n\n\"The very idea would be transparent heresy to some of the Folk.\" A slow, studied gaze, no feather signals at all. \"Perhaps... including me.\"\n\nThere was surely danger here. Asenath's feather tones shifted from bright attentive colors of rose-purple and olive into hues tending toward pewters and subdued solemn blues. They rustled, too, with an air of menace. Betrayal by Asenath could take several avenues, all hard for Memor to counter. So\u2014admit failure, and do so quickly and first.\n\n\"I mention that possibility only because my own narrow escape\u2014when they and the Sil attacked my starfish\u2014was essential. I had learned that the primates could quickly use the chemically driven Sil weaponry. Our assault teams needed to hear that. The primates are swift, original, unpredictable. I wished to report this firsthand\u2014\"\n\n\"Your death at their hands would have carried the same message,\" Asenath said dryly.\n\nWithout hesitation at this sally, Memor said, \"I brought recordings, Wisdom Chief, to analyze\u2014\"\n\n\"Which show that these Late Invaders are erratic, impulsive, volatile, capricious\u2014yes, all qualities we Folk have suppressed, in order to preserve the Bowl of Heaven. Yet these very same Late Invaders you now propose to use, to harvest, to\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no! I think they could show us new technologies, aid us\u2014and perhaps bring word of a world we do not know, have never visited.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Of course, if they cannot be Adopted into our society, then they and their odd ship must be erased.\"\n\nAsenath gave a subtle fan-salute, undercut with a skeptical throat-wash of dubious red. \"I must say, Attendant Astute Astronomer, that you maneuver well here in chambers, though alas, not on the battlefield.\"\n\n\"I was not commanding the skyfish!\"\n\n\"I hear otherwise....\"\n\nToo late, Memor recalled giving orders to the skyfish Captain. She had been unnerved while the simple Sil artillery hammered loud and strong at the great beast's walls. There was some panic then, before the hydrogen vaults were breached. Only her own quick commands had gotten her into her pod. Her parting sally to the doomed Captain had been, Soon we shall have no further disputes. I will have my pod now. The Captain had of course not appreciated the ironic tone. Memor had not looked back as she quickly departed. The Captain had gone to his proper reward.\n\nMemor had been a bare short distance from the lumbering gray-skinned beast when a Sil shot struck a girder-bone and ricocheted into a hydrogen vault, then through the outer wall. Surely that had been a lucky shot, which Memor witnessed at a distressingly close distance. The hard slam of the exploding hydrogen had very nearly thrown her fleeing pod into a fatal yaw and tumble. She had shuddered as the skyfish bellowed a long, hoarse cry, realizing its imminent death.\n\nMemor sensed she had been silent too long, reflecting on the sudden memory welling up. Her Undermind had not processed those harrowing moments then. But now was not the time to dally over the past. \"I made a few suggestions to the Captain, all in the heat of the moment.\"\n\n\"It became even more heated as you escaped,\" Asenath said with brittle brevity, eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Had I not, you would know little of the engagement.\"\n\n\"You are aware that you are already in disfavor?\"\n\n\"I know that my efforts have not been widely recognized. These primates are difficult to reason with, for their mental structures suffer primitive modes we have not dealt with for a great while.\"\n\n\"At least you recaptured one of those who escaped in the original party. Yet the others now divide into two groups: those ones we have never captured, somewhere among the Sil, and as well a party of four, who escaped the Bowl entirely, and now return to their ship. This last is most infuriating. Their ship somehow glides just below the firing field of view of our gamma ray lasers on the Rim.\"\n\n\"Yes, most regrettable.\" Memor made an apologetic display of amber and blue gray, rippling her feathers to convey remorse. \"I did note that our defenses are deliberately unable to be aimed downward at our Bowl, and this decision was made by Elders long ago, after the Maxer Rebellion.\"\n\n\"Your history is correct. Alas, the Maxer Movement is not completely extinguished, and I fear this flaw in our defenses can be laid at their door.\"\n\n\"I did not know!\" Memor did not have to pretend; this was indeed bad news, a defense flaw coming at the worst time, with Late Invaders at large.\n\n\"It is not your matter, Memor. Concentrate upon the Late Invaders.\"\n\n\"You mean, capture and kill?\" That would be easiest, and would get Memor out of the spotlight. Though she would regret their loss, for they were intriguing in their odd mysteries.\n\n\"No! I felt that way before, but there are now new issues. To understand, and keep these discussions secure, we must visit the Vaults.\"\n\nMemor felt a tremor of unease ripple up from her Undermind. Grave matters came to those who had to consult the Vaults. \"But why?\"\n\n\"That you must ask Unajiuhanah, Keeper of the Vault Library.\"\n\nThe idea itself was puzzling, and filled Memor with dread.\nFOURTEEN\n\nAbout Unajiuhanah there was a timeworn joke, that she loved to sing the ancient songs at public events, even at funerals. Asked if she had performed at a recent high burial, Unajiuhanah answered no, and the riposte was, \"Then it was a merciful death indeed.\"\n\n\"Compliments to you, Asenath,\" Unajiuhanah began with a ritual rippling feather salute in gray and violet. This achieved the feat of representing the Great Seal of the Vaults in an actual fluttering picture, a striking image on Unajiuhanah's high fan display. Memor could even see a jittering vague white patch that stood for the formal writing of ancient times, indecipherable now but signifying the weight of vast history. It shimmered like a mute reminder of the long purpose of the Bowl and thus of the Vault.\n\nAsenath introduced Memor, which proved unnecessary as Unajiuhanah brushed aside a summary of Memor's life details and turned to address her directly.\n\n\"Memor, I will entertain your notions because I knew your great ancestors and feel I owe them some indulgence. Indeed, I live because a certain fine SheFolk many generations ago stood and fought against an insurrection that very nearly toppled all order in this Vault. That ForeFolk stands before me now, represented by a minute genetic fraction\u2014in you, Memor.\"\n\n\"I am most grateful,\" Memor said with a simple mild flourish of ruby, embarrassed neck-fringe.\n\n\"Now I have a surprise of sorts for you, to bring you into our deliberations. Here is your other self.\"\n\nUnajiuhanah paused, her voice rising to call, \"Bemor, come forth.\"\n\n\"Be More\" Memor heard, the very name plunging her backwards into her young days\u2014while her eyes fixed on the big, somewhat ungainly senior male that was... she saw, breathing hard... herself. At least, genetically. Bemor! Lost brother! They had been separated long before Memor went through the Revealing. Now with \"Bemor\" she heard again the joke between the two of them. It had been funny then while young but had turned sour many twelve-cubed Annuals ago... Be More. More than Memor. Be smarter, swifter, know more, exert power, fathom more deeply, stand taller, command power. Be More.\n\n\"Brother!\" Memor called, for Bemor had not suffered the Revealing's agonies and transformations\u2014all done in their youth, by high design. Be more... be male.\n\n\"I thought this meeting should best come as a surprise, or else one or the other or even both of you would surely dodge it.\" Unajiuhanah gave a mirthful display, fluttering ruby breast-feathers discreetly. Clearly she was enjoying this.\n\n\"Your great turbine of a mind reports you well,\" Bemor said as overture. \"I've sensed your reports. Quite complex and deep.\"\n\n\"Sensed?\" Memor realized her own whole-mind scans, carried out routinely to monitor performance, were not private. Usually they were, but of course not in matters of high security.\n\n\"They are also quite entertaining,\" Bemor said. \"You remember well, and your Undermind is a source of insight. The facts you confronted alone are high drama. I could scarcely imagine such odd aliens as these Late Invaders. What zest!\"\n\n\"You mean, how did I let them escape?\"\n\n\"No, I mean they have a crafty nature we could use.\"\n\nMemor was sure Your great turbine of a mind was an ironic salute, but best not to draw Unajiuhanah's attention to it. \"If we can Adopt them, perhaps\u2014\"\n\n\"I think not. Too unstable, as species go. They can be better used to carry out our larger cruising agenda.\"\n\nThis was new, beyond the time-honored precepts of the Astronomers, and indeed, of all other castes. Larger cruising agenda? Memor should be shocked, she knew, but had no time for that now. \"I acted to constrain their actions, under Asenath's direction.\"\n\nBemor waved this aside with a cluster-flourish in green and sea blue. \"Those orders now vanish. There is new wisdom, falling upon us from the stars.\"\n\nMemor contented herself with a fan-feather gesture and let Asenath carry the conversation. She was still staggering mentally from the sudden meeting of her near-self: the path not taken, if somehow she could have stayed a male. Bemor had a quick, brusque way of saying things that swept away the niceties of diplomacy and polite evasion. Quite male. Best to change direction.\n\n\"I was discussing how I was forced to carry forward the reconnaissance of the Sil, who had sheltered the primates. They proved better at bringing down our skyfish with their simple chemical cannon, admittedly. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Fled, as you should.\" Bemore spoke kindly, shuffling his large feet in a faint echo-dance of welcome\u2014to soften what was to come? \"The primate ingenuity combined nonlinearly with that of the Sil, who were always an irksome and crafty kind.\"\n\n\"Destabilizing,\" Asenath added, \"still.\" But then she backed away, as if to let the twins negotiate their own newfound equilibrium. So did Unajiuhanah, with a muted bow. Memor saw this meeting was arranged to divulge information, in a way slanted to make best use of the perpetual jockeying for position in the Astronomer hierarchy\u2014and of course, in the status of the Vaulted, who tended the most ancient records, integrating them with the emerging new.\n\nSo, take the momentum away from them. \"What new wisdom intrudes?\" Memor chose to use an ancient saying, said to come from the Builders, though across the sum of Bowl eras, no one truly knew.\n\n\"We fathom more of the gravitational waves, and their true origin,\" Bemor said.\n\n\"As I recall, they come from Glory, or from some source well beyond,\" Memor said, for this had been the received wisdom from before she was born.\n\n\"Not so,\" Bemor said. \"Not beyond. The source is in the immediate Glorian system.\"\n\n\"There is no plausibility, as some argued, that the gravitational waves came from a chance coincidence in the sky? From some cosmological source far away?\"\n\n\"Not even close. I see your early education has been a waste of time.\"\n\nMemor knew this gibe, a lancing shot at her earlier ranking in the rigorous status queue of the elect, pre-Astronomer examinations. Quadlineal calculus had always eluded her somehow, and Bemor had never let her forget it.... She now had to get back some position in this conversation playing out before their elders.\n\n\"But surely there cannot be heavy masses moving near a planetary system. That would render unstable the orbits of any planet nearby\u2014\"\n\n\"No, that must now be considered untrue. Facts say otherwise. We have heard from our Web trading partners.\"\n\n\"What can they\u2014?\"\n\nBemor beamed, yet kept to his clear, factual mask. \"You may recall some long Annuals ago we asked them to erect gravitational wave antennas to concentrate upon Glory. They have so done, and with felicitous trading strategies, we have secured their data.\"\n\nVery well, play for time. And think. \"I did not know that. Expensive, I suppose?\"\n\nBemor was enough similar that Memor could easily read the quick, darting expressions in feather-flutter\u2014quill rattle, spines flexing so hues slid from steel blue to indigo sheen\u2014that bespoke anticipation of an opportunity to make a veiled boast.\n\nAsenath raised some pink neck-rustle as a deft, ironic signal. Memor realized this was what some intimates of the court termed Status Opera, the only true game when the social structure must remain static, for the sake of Bowl stability. Maneuver for position, yes, but carefully, deftly, for the system must always endure, above all.\n\nBemor was in his element, and so took his fulsome time. \"I engaged three other Galactic Web partners, one of whom knew nothing of gravitational waves whatever, and how to detect them. As expected, those who did know had technologies smaller and less sensitive than ours.\"\n\nBemor delivered this in a flat, factual way, almost offhand, and with a subtle wing-shrug\u2014a good precursor to a revelation. Memor appreciated the method, as it was hers as well. They were twins, after all.... Though Bemor seemed to do it with more verve, as if knowing their audience would approve verve.\n\n\"I had to trade valuable arts and science to induce their cooperation,\" Bemor said. \"We barter and gain, delayed for many Annuals, of course. I employed a rich trading language to describe our wants, and used the artificial, intelligent agents we had installed in those societies long in the past.\"\n\nMemor was at a disadvantage here, since she had learned little of such distant diplomacies. She did know that the Ancients had seen value in establishing agents, transferred as sealed minds in code, to distant worlds. Interstellar commerce over huge distances made sense only if exchange of knowledge\u2014arts, science, engineering, the equivalent of patents\u2014could be traded for some return value. Such a market occurred, mediated among artificial intelligences run solely inside mutually agreed upon containment: the Mind Province established among alien societies. Elaborate protocols ensured that no artificial intelligences could run outside the Mind Province. They were safe there, too, to run their code without corruption. This protected Bowl secrets from the alien locals, and in turn, the local infosphere from the agent.\n\n\"I chose truly distant worlds for two reasons,\" Bemor said. \"They had to be displaced from our trajectory, so that we could gain triangulation on Glory. I then\u2014\"\n\n\"You transmitted double-encrypted?\" Asenath demanded. \"You are sure the gravitational wave signatures were unwrapped in secrecy by our sequestered agent?\"\n\n\"I received the coded instant return notice, yes. I got it back many Annuals before the official trading partner even acknowledged receipt.\"\n\n\"Meaning? That they pondered it long before even notifying us?\"\n\nBemor was not disturbed by these thrusts; he seemed bemused. \"Caution is admirable, do you not think so? The first reply came from an insectoid civilization, apparently hungry for further astronomical knowledge. They trade such wares eagerly and built the needed detectors with speed.\"\n\n\"How distant are they?\"\n\n\"Over a twelve-squared light-Annuals, at a high angle with respect to our trajectory. The second reply came from a similar distance and a different, large angle. We paid them with techno-lore, methods our prior history implied would interest them. These were duly lodged in the host species' banking system. Credits not spent locally may be transmitted, securely encrypted, between solar systems, of course. Then came a third reply, also willing.\"\n\nBemor made to condense around them a shimmering shell display of the realm around the Bowl. The three agreeable trader stars shone bright yellow, all at considerable angles away. One lay very nearly parallel to the Bowl, along the trajectory axis they followed, ending in Glory. The simulation showed message flags denoting ongoing info-commerce transporting among all three, as well as their links to the Bowl.\n\n\"So they set to work, these trade partners\u2014\"\n\n\"Ran their gravitational wave detectors. Learned our skills. And nailed firm the site of the waves. It is in our destination system\u2014Glory.\"\n\nMemor said slowly, \"Agents do amass more and more knowledge about their host species. They report back. Do these worlds have any opinion about the cause of the waves?\"\n\nBemor looked pleased, with a body-flutter of magenta flush. To Memor this was a giveaway: a salute, really, as if to say, I recognize!\u2014you can leap ahead, see what's coming. \"They could not resist diagnosing the long wavelengths and their resonances. And... there are messages within.\"\n\nAsenath gasped and could not resist: \"Saying what?\"\n\nBemor's elation collapsed, his neck wattles compressing to thin red layers. \"We do not know. These, too, are apparently deeply encrypted.\"\n\nMemor felt a tremor of awe, that emotion mingling fear and wonder, so seldom sensed in a calm, regular life. It swept her like a tidal slap. \"Sending coded messages, by oscillating huge masses to make waves of gravity itself?\u2014in organized ways? That is...\" She was about to say, impossible\u2014but caution ruled. \"... improbable, in the extreme.\"\n\nAsenath added wryly, \"We are approaching something strange and perhaps quite dangerous. Glory seems innocuous, but they send gravitational messages\u2014somehow. The escaped primates are headed that way, too\u2014or were, until they decided to land upon the Bowl of Heaven. They seem\u2014\" She preened with an oddly insulting fan-gesture, ominous and foreboding. \"\u2014ambitious.\"\n\nMemor decided not to rise to the bait. \"They are able and may be of use.\"\n\nUnajiuhanah came in then with a gentle, sad wing-shrug. \"I enjoy your sparring, but there are larger issues, you twins.\" A nod to Asenath, to proceed. \"Our larger cruising agenda, recall?\"\n\nAsenath said, \"The Glorians, as we term them, have sent an electromagnetic signal.\"\n\n\"Directed at us?\" Unajiuhanah prompted.\n\n\"I... suppose.\" Asenath looked puzzled.\n\n\"There is no distinction in spatial coordinates between the Bowl and the primate star rammer,\" Bemor said. \"That may explain the content.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" Memor asked, impatient with this parrying.\n\n\"Cartoons,\" Unajiuhanah said. \"Such as primitive cultures employ. They might as well be painted on cave walls, but for the fact that they move. Showing violence, often physically improbable.\"\n\nSilence. \"I would truly like to know some way to discover if these abject signals are insulting, from a culture that has devolved so deeply that it thinks these are useful, or even amusing.\"\n\nBemor said, \"Beings who can hurl huge masses to make messages would not be so. All our knowledge of cultural evolution, gathered in your archives, Unajiuhanah, says so.\"\n\n\"I would so believe,\" Unajiuhanah said simply.\n\n\"Or else...\" Memor hesitated. \"We are mistaken in our assumptions.\"\n\n\"Whatever can you mean?\" Asenath said with a nasty rebuke-rustle.\n\n\"Suppose they are not sent to intersect us, or the star rammer.\" Memor envisioned the line of sight\u2014Glory, the Bowl, and upon it the alien ship, orbiting above... and beyond, at an unknown distance, farther from Glory... \"The Glorians may be transmitting to hail and instruct, and so to warn... the primate home world.\"\n\n\"But then\u2014\" Bemor hesitated. Fevered rattles came from his wing, a note of harried distress at what he glimpsed.\n\nImagination helps, Memor realized. The insight had come from her Undermind, direct and unsaid until now.... She felt a rumble of discontent from deep within her\u2014of knowledge pent up, unexpressed, and so vagrant and wild. Fear surged in her, but she suppressed it, focused on the moment. She had been in a duel with Bemor here, and now there was a sally she could use, at last, an advantage coming from within, uninspected, yet sure, she felt, sure.\n\nMemor said, not without some pleasure, \"They are afraid not of us, but of the humans.\"\nPART IV\n\nSENDING SUPERMAN\n\nNothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. The only thing we ever learn from is failure. Success only confirms our superstitions.\n\n\u2014KENNETH BOULDING\nFIFTEEN\n\nIt was possible to exercise at Earth gravity on SunSeeker, just by jogging six-minute kilometers in the direction the deck was rotating. Beth sweated but didn't make that speed, running on the spongy turf and sucking down the chilly ship air that always seemed to taste faintly of oil. An hour into her slogging, choppy run she felt better in the odd way that returning to good gravs did\u2014a sensation of solidity, of the body's chugging machinery settling back into its groove. If she ran fast in the same direction the deck rotated, she increased her speed of rotation, and so increased her weight. She reversed for her hard-pounding finish. Going fast against the rotation, she nearly floated like some sticky angel on air, her bare feet barely skimming the soft fabric. She sped around the outer habitat circumference in her shorts and sopping T-shirt and lurched into the showers, gasping and happy.\n\nThe shower next to her went on. She leaned around the corner and saw a finger snake wriggling in the spray.\n\n\"Phoshtha?\"\n\n\"Hello, Beth. This device is delight.\" The thin, sliding voice somehow fit the dancing eyes.\n\n\"Yes, but do not use it too often. We can't recycle the water very fast.\" Beth stepped back in and turned the shower on, a giggle tickling her lips. The finger snakes had no sense of privacy.\n\nShe got herself in order, feeling much better. Exercise calmed, made her world brighter. Ready for Redwing. Maybe.\n\nTen minutes later she rapped on his door. He was wedged behind his desk, leaving her more room in the narrow captain's cabin. His wall display showed the slowly passing infinities of Bowl landscapes\u2014at the moment, low mountain ranges in a low-grav region, with cottony cloud masses stacked above them. She had seen such clouds from below while swinging through the spindly trees on vines of thin, flexing strength. The clouds were nearly as tall as Earth's entire atmosphere, and from the ground looked like an ivory cliff that tapered away to a speck.\n\n\"Hope you're feeling better,\" Redwing, rising\u2014unusual for him, indeed\u2014to shake her hand. \"Admirable performance down there. I'd like to get some background from you, away from the others.\"\n\n\"I think if we met as a group and\u2014\"\n\n\"A unit commander always reports first.\" Redwing's crusty face wrinkled into a grin, but she knew beneath the wry, leathery look he was absolutely serious.\n\n\"Oh.\" Back in the navy we are, yessiree.\n\n\"Before we get to specifics, bring you up to speed, I want to know what it was like down there.\"\n\nShe was prepared for this, because the shipboard crew all asked the same thing. They had spent months eating canned food and breathing desiccated air, gazing down at a whole vast thing gliding by, like having a terrific top view and no way out of your cramped apartment.\n\nStill, she struggled to put the experience into words. Wonder, terror, hunger, spurts of fear, aching weariness fringed with a lacing anxiety that every time you closed your sticky eyes and fell into sweaty sleep, you could wake to find yourself about to die... \"A tailored wilderness. For days you forget you're not on an alien planet but on the skin of a furiously rotating machine. The star is always there and after a while, even after you've learned to sleep in shade and heat, you hate it. Darkness\u2014I can't tell you what a luxury it is to turn out the light. There's weather, for sure, lightning that seems to be sheeting yellow all around you, and the jet\u2014like a golden snake twisting across the sky. Always on the run, looking to see if something's coming up on your tail to eat you, going for days without a bath, running without water even, feeling your steps get lighter because you've lost weight without even noticing it, hunger being sometimes the only thing you can think about\u2014\"\n\nShe made herself stop. With the crew she had been able to hold back but here, with Redwing, she couldn't... and realized that something in the smile, his head nodding as she spoke on and on, the eyes dancing with interest, had made it happen. How did he do that? Maybe it was something you had to learn, from commanding ships all over the solar system.\n\n\"I know some of that,\" he said, face now open and eyes far away. \"You don't get to pick the nightmare that wakes you up at four A.M.\u2014it comes looking for you, again and again.\"\n\nThis was a startling moment, taking her unaware. He was a man in a hard place to be, and she read in his gentle downturned smile a rueful regret that he could not possibly, as captain, go down there.\n\nShe made herself sit up straight, regain some composure. Keep your smile in the upright and locked position. \"My mom used to say, a truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.\"\n\nHe laughed, a hearty, full-throated roar in the metal echo chamber of his cabin. \"Good one! Damn true, this whole thing is a detour.\"\n\nThis last sentence came out of nowhere, with baritone notes of regret. He sat back and took a moment to see the mountain range far below slide away on the wall, a huge glimmering eggshell blue sea lapping against the mountains' slate gray slopes along a narrow beach.\n\nHe knows how to pace this conversation, let it breathe.\n\nHe swiveled back to gaze at her with deep blue, penetrating eyes. \"Tell me about... the food.\"\n\nShe held her breath for a long moment, comparing the bland, warm forgettable dishes she had wolfed down in ship's mess, realizing that while she ate eagerly it left no trace of memory. \"I... there was something we could shoot out of the trees, when we were desperate. A fat primate thing, in the low-grav region. Stringy meat, yellow fat, looked like a big roasted monkey, but when you'd gone two days without anything but a kind of thick-leaved grass, it was... heavenly.\"\n\n\"Taste human?\"\n\n\"How the hell would I know?\" Then she saw he was grinning, and laughed. \"Not that I would've cared.\"\n\n\"You could digest it?\"\n\n\"Surprisingly, yes. Of course, we had all the biotech compatibility injections and a handful of pills. I had all of us start taking them as soon as the aliens\u2014they call themselves the Folk, just like primitives on Earth\u2014gave us food. We held out on our own rations for a while, then I had us cook the live game they gave us\u2014\"\n\n\"Live?\"\n\n\"Yes. They were smart enough to let us prepare it our way, which they watched closely. We dispatched them with our lasers. Simmered some, with some herbs tossed in, it stayed down pretty well. But once, when we were hiding near somebody\u2014something\u2014searching for us in the tall tree region, we ate fish, raw. In fact, I had to be still and not give us away, afraid to get out my knife or laser, so I ate it while it was... alive.\"\n\n\"Not for long, I bet. Sashimi still moving.\"\n\n\"Unpleasant... for me and for the fish.\"\n\n\"You all lost weight.\"\n\n\"Even after eating yummy dried worms, very ripe, like sticky Jell-O. Live antlike things, as big as dogs in the low-grav zone. Crunchy embryos in the shell, tasted good but I felt horrid after it, dunno why. A fried scorpion-like thing, two tails. The head was bitter but I ate it anyway.\" She paused; it came back so easily.... \"Trying to forget that one. Bizarre, memorable.\"\n\nRedwing smiled fondly. \"Hey, I ate haggis once in Edinburgh. So... uh, thanks.\"\n\nShe blinked. Thanks for what? Then she saw; the yucky food made him yearn to go down there a little less. And he had gotten her to unload some, too, get some of it behind her. A ship's captain is always about moving on.\n\n\"So I wondered\u2014what kind of weaponry can they have down there? Gray goo bombs? Nerve flatteners? Old-style shaped charge with spinning flechettes?\"\n\n\"I didn't really see weapons.\"\n\n\"Um. Cliff did\u2014I'll get to that in a moment.\"\n\nCliff! The crew had been evasive about him and his team, but they did say the \"Cliff team\" seemed healthy and still free\u2014quite a tribute, they said, considering. She had thought to shooting back, Considering how we got snapped up right away?\u2014but didn't.\n\n\"Point is, what can we expect from them?\"\n\n\"I think they want to control this, keep us around\u2014preferably, in a nice, spacious prison like the low-grav one we were stuck in\u2014while they figure out who we are, and if they can use us.\"\n\n\"Use us? For what?\n\n\"Maybe make their big whirling machine work better? New tech?\u2014though it's hard to believe we could tell them anything. They built this\u2014\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Well, they run it, anyway. It must be really old. Maybe somebody else built it? The big one who interrogated us, Memor, was evasive on that.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Hiding something they don't want outsiders to know?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's a puzzle. Or maybe a really ancient mystery. I wonder if even the Folk don't know where the Bowl really comes from. They do know the terrain, though. There are life-forms that dazzle any biologist, some I couldn't figure out at all. Cliff must be in heaven\u2014he likes taxonomy. I filled up my digital photo files keeping track of the plants and weird animals. Some are bizarre, and others are kind of like Earthside, but changed. Larger, for one thing.\"\n\n\"Because the grav is less, point eight?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That, yes. Could also be the island effect.\"\n\n\"Which is?...\"\n\n\"We see it Earthside. Small islands have smaller animals. The last mammoths lived on Siberian islands, the smallest of their kind because the resource base is less.\"\n\n\"So... continents here are sure bigger. Some are larger than Earth. So are oceans\u2014seas, I guess we should call them, they're shallow. I've studied them in close-up scan while you were down there.\" Redwing brightened. Here was something he knew and Beth didn't. He flashed pictures on the wall and she realized he had cooked up a slide show. He went through it eagerly, describing how and where he had found the images. He and Karl had worked up a Bowl version of longitude and latitude. Numbers marked each slide.\n\n\"So much open territory! Forests as big as North America, not a town anywhere. But cities the size of countries back home\u2014hell, bigger than our continents. I'd sure as hell like to know who made it, and how.\"\n\nBeth nodded. It had been an impressive show. \"The Folk may have built it, or know who did. They're unlike anything I've ever seen\u2014think of elephant-sized, two feet and a heavy tail, big eyes and mouths\u2014and feathers they flutter around all the time, like it's some kind of coded fan dance.\"\n\nHe grunted and frowned, which she took as encouragement. She knew she had to write a report, but telling it helped shape the story. Enthusiasm began to steal into her voice. \"They examined Tananareve for long times in a big machine that seemed, she said, to read everything in her body. Plus her mind, somehow. She could feel tingling all over her, sensations like quiet little sparks, she said. There were plenty of other smart aliens around, most with handlike things that Earth never evolved\u2014a sort of wriggly tentacle that split out into feelers, like you might see on an octopus that could make tools. They worked for the honcho\u2014the big Folk creature in charge, named Memor. Terrifying thing, when it loomed over you, huffing hot smelly air in your face. Memor was in charge, all right. Once I saw it\u2014her, whatever\u2014eat something that was still alive, a kind of crunchy armadillo the size of a pony. It bellowed as she chewed it up. Disgusting! But sights like that were just getting started\u2014\"\n\nRedwing gave her a concerned look. \"Um, if you could...\"\n\n\"Sorry, once I get started\u2014okay. It'll be in my report.\"\n\n\"Everything you recall. Anything could be vital; we just don't know enough.\"\n\nBeth nodded. It had all come rushing out, the pent-up emotions and thoughts of months on the ground, every day tense and wearing.... She took a deep breath. \"Anyway. This Memor seemed to read Tananareve and ask questions about how her mind worked, what she thought of, how it felt to think\u2014odd stuff.\"\n\nRedwing pursed his lips and looked down at the vast clouds coasting by far below. His wall screen amped the image to the max, so they both watched huge purple cloud-anvils towering over a seemingly endless sea. There were sand bars the size of the Rockies lounging in the sea's green shallows, like tan punctuation marks. Vegetation dotted them, and one dot she judged to be the size of Texas.\n\nShe had learned to let him have his silences, as he let her experience settle in with all the rest of what he knew. Beth sucked in the dry ship air and tried to recall the cloying thick, aromatic atmosphere they had wondered about, alien air they called it because of the syrupy way it filled your lungs with a heavy, cloying sweetness unlike any flower she had ever known. The smell was still on some of her carry-gear. Up here, in dry antiseptic rooms, she sniffed it and liked the aroma and body. Breathing it in, she felt something like nostalgia.\n\nRedwing nodded as if making a decision. \"You can review Cliff's messages\u2014some text, some voice. Short, to the point. Don't be alarmed by them. He had not much time to report in. Reception is bad, we should have sent you down with more robust comm.\"\n\n\"Our good comm gear was in the landers.\"\n\n\"Of course. That's how the Folk found out our operating frequencies, broadband patterns, encryption. For the landers and for the hand comms, too, damn it. So he and you could get through only a short while, then the Folk autoscreens went up and it was all fuzz.\"\n\n\"Look, Cap'n, we had no way of knowing\u2014\"\n\n\"I should've been more cautious.\" He shook his head abruptly, face pinched. \"I used the landing protocols we rehearsed Earthside\u2014simple stuff for an uninhabited planet. No defensive measures. I went by rote, when I should have been wary of anything like this\u2014an impossible machine churning through space, managing its own star to\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off, she saw, knowing he shouldn't vent his inner doubts to officers or crew. Yet it helped him, she was sure, and he needed it. A man like Redwing had spent his life wanting authority, getting some, then some more, all the time finding out how to make it work, how to move up a ladder everybody wanted to climb. Nobody had a captaincy forced on them. Nobody told them it meant keeping yourself to yourself for long years and decades and, for starships, the rest of your life.\n\nHe swiveled his chair away from the constant landscape sliding by and looked at her with an expression made rigid by force of will. \"Cliff described a mass slaughter. He was hurt\u2014not too bad, but he took days to even be able to call in. Wounds, fever, the cruds.\"\n\n\"We had the cruds a lot of the time,\" she said to be saying something, keep him from lapsing into a monologue again. This captain needs help. But then we all do.\n\n\"I got reports just this watch. From Cliff, pretty noisy. The Folk killed a whole damn city. Some kind of living blimp\u2014he sent two pictures, hard to believe even then. And Howard... died.\"\n\n\"Oh no. He was\u2014\"\n\n\"Always thought he was a little too inquisitive, couldn't move fast\u2014I down-wrote him in an operations report during crew training, but Command ignored me. He didn't come into a shelter fast enough, Cliff said. Got burned with a weapon tuned to our nervous system. Heats up the skin some, overloads the neurological system\u2014fries it, really. Pain like he'd never felt before, Cliff said.\"\n\nIt was Beth's turn to look away. \"We had it easy.\"\n\n\"But these 'ally aliens' as Cliff calls them, the Sil\u2014they had scavenged around in the blimp thing. Got some Folk comm gear they'd never seen before. Those Sil are smart. They got it running, broke the encryption barriers on the Folk message center, pried out all sorts of stuff they can use\u2014and something bigger than that. Lots bigger, that we can use. The Folk had a message, just came in recently, the tags said\u2014\" Redwing leaned across the desk, laced his hands together on it, spoke directly at her. \"\u2014from Glory.\"\n\nBeth had been in sympathetic mode, trying not to think about Cliff's wounds, Howard being fried, and all the rest\u2014but this made her snap out of it. \"Earthside never picked up a peep from Glory. No leakage, no ordinary surface EM traffic\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. This is plainly different, directed at Earth.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Here.\" He thumped his desk, and the wall turned from sliding perspectives of a tan grassland swept by waves the size of continents\u2014and became... a cartoon.\n\nLine drawings, vibrant color. Purple background. Traceries of yellow on the edges, twisting like snakes. A strange red-skinned asymmetric being with what looked like three arms stood alone, facing the viewer. It began a rhythmic move, arms rotating in their sockets in big, broad sweeps\u2014except the third, which somehow lashed up and down, then made a wide circular arc with a sharp snap at the end. Athletics? Beth thought. Or some diplomatic pose? Ritual? Kabuki theater among the stars?\n\nThe thing wore tight blue green sheath-clothes that showed muscles everywhere, bulging and pulsing. The covering seemed sprayed on, showing a big cluster of tubular\u2014genitalia? If so, male\u2014not between the legs but above them, where a human's belly button would be. They, too, bulged as she watched.\n\nThe skintight covering ran all over the body, including the wide gripping feet. But the arms and its head were exposed; the head was triangular and oddly ribbed. Two large black eyes. No discernible nose, but three big holes in the middle of the face, echoing the face's triangle, with big hairy black coronas around each hole like a weird round mustache. A large mouth with two rows of evenly spaced gray teeth.\n\nFor a moment the viewpoint closed in on the head, which looked like an Egyptian pyramid upside down\u2014ferocious, with mouth twisting, thin lips rippling with intricate fine muscles around the gray teeth, which kept clashing together. The front three teeth in both rows were pointed\u2014evil-looking things\u2014and the mouth had puffed-out lips to accommodate them.\n\n\"So far, just an introductory picture, looks like,\" Redwing said. \"No sound. But then we get action.\"\n\nBeth was still blinking in pure astonishment. Her father had centuries ago called this a whatthehell moment.... She had met uncountable aliens, fled from some, killed some, eaten many\u2014but this...\n\nThe viewing angle expanded, and walking in from the right was a... human. Beth gasped.\n\nThe man wore a blue skintight suit with a red cape, big head, black hair\u2014clearly a man, yes. Muscled, striding forward proudly\u2014and the alien third arm struck out, caught the human in the face. A nasty slap. The man staggered back. The alien made a half turn and thrashed the man, slamming him away and then grabbing him by his right shoulder, twisting him into full view. There was a large red S on the man's deep blue chest.\n\n\"Superman!\" Beth did not know whether to laugh or just gape. She did both.\n\nThe alien leaped, twisting in air, kicking Superman in the gut. He went down hard on the rocky ground. The graphics were good\u2014Beth could see Superman's shock, surprise, pain. Dust puffed up where he fell. Vigorously the alien leaped high, paused while it made more mouth-gestures directly toward the viewer\u2014and came down hard on top of Superman with obvious relish, slamming down with both big feet. Superman's mouth opened in shock and surprise, eyes bulging, showing white. The alien fanned its two arms, whipped the third one that seemed slim and sharp\u2014and brought it down on Superman's head. The lash brought blood streaming from Superman's left ear and\u2014incredibly, splashed big red gobbets on an imaginary window between the scene and the viewer. The blood ran down in rivulets while the alien raised all three arms into the air, head back.\n\nThe effect made Beth rock back, as if the blood had flown in her face. She gasped.\n\nPrancing, whip arm twirling, the alien proceeded to dance on Superman. It sent more kicks to the head and gut as the opportunity arose. The alien looked full at the viewer as it pranced, eyes even bigger. Its image swelled to fill the screen, and the eyes glowered at the viewer.\n\nStop.\n\nA long silence.\n\n\"Pretty clear message, I'd say,\" Redwing clasped hands across his belt and leaned back in his flex chair.\n\nBeth could not take her eyes from the alien head, its threatening expression frozen. \"They eavesdropped on something, TV I guess, or...\"\n\n\"And chose to send a message a child could understand: Stay away.\"\nSIXTEEN\n\nCliff had handed him a problem from hell. How to stop the Folk from killing a lot more of an alien species, to intervene with big things Redwing had never seen, minds unknown... or else do nothing. \"Nothing\" looked like the right answer, but he didn't have to like it.\n\nHe had the shipmind call up readings on this from the ancients available on the ship's database of all human cultures. These long-dead voices had never confronted any remotely similar problem, but came as close as humans could: Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Churchill, Lao Tzu, Kant, Aristotle, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King, Singh. Interesting, thick reading\u2014but it made him think about his life in perspective. Maybe he could use that if he survived this whole huge thing. But for now, alas... No help there.\n\nThe best solution was to get Cliff's team out of that place. Then the Folk would stop trying to capture or kill them. Bargaining could begin.\n\nThe brief comm burst Cliff had managed to get through to SunSeeker, fighting through the electromagnetic haze-screen the Folk had put up, gave the cartoon files and some optical spectral data that fit Glory exactly. No question where it came from.\n\nIt couldn't be a coincidence. The Glorians were sending the Bowl a threat. But it used imagery of Superman, of all things\u2014an antique \"superhero\" (he had to look the term up) from the expansionist phase of the Anglo-Saxon era. Technically, of course, that era was not over. It had merged with the larger economic unification of Earthside. English was the obvious unifying language\u2014larger, richer, with simple introductory grammar. Irregular verbs galore, of course, but by the time the interplanetary phase of economic expansion was well under way, there was no competition. Mandarin, Cantonese\u2014they came from a productive society, as did Hindi\u2014but nobody could write them well, and they didn't work simply with digital culture anyway. Plus the Chinese culture didn't have the flexibility of the Anglo structure. The other Asian cultures did a bit better, but English was as set into the world culture as the qwerty keyboard. History ruled.\n\nSo a comic book figure like Superman, his Pedia base said, fit with the modern social structure, too. Other archetypes like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein had clear roles, but fit uncomfortably with the world culture. The other superheroes of the twencen were modeled on men like animals\u2014bats, spiders, apes. Superman, tellingly, was an alien. Yet he fit into human society seamlessly.\n\nSuperman's key assumption was that his disguise was just to put on glasses and business clothes and be an everyman. Then nobody, even Lois Lane\u2014a character that reminded Redwing of his ex-wife\u2014could spot him. Every man a Superman. What could be more obvious? Do your job, toe the line, the daily grind\u2014but all the time you are free to imagine yourself leaping over buildings, flying through the air, flattening the baddies. Maybe even getting a date with Lois.\n\nRedwing shook his head. Cultures could best be understood in the rearview mirror. Superman might work among the multitudes of Earthside, but such guiding archetypes were not what you needed in deep space. The interplanetary culture spawned Smoke, Ellipso, Whitethighs, and others. Such larger-than-life figures helped cultures understand themselves, turn their lives into stories.\n\nSo... Here among the worlds and stars, this was a frontier. Earthside hadn't had one in centuries.\n\nBut the aliens spoke in that antique visual language. They must have used big antennas to pick up all sorts of popular media, broadcast over hundreds of years. Then, apparently, they finally saw the Bowl headed toward them. So they sent a brush-off message, using the cartoons that swerved around language and slammed home the point. Aliens stomping on Superman, beating him up, kicks to his head and gut, the finishing glower straight into the viewer's face\u2014classic, in its way. Any chimpanzee would get that right away. Even a smart one with a starship.\n\nThere were intelligent, technological Glorians who knew something about images with power\u2014and they didn't want the Bowl to appear in their skies.\n\nWell, who would? It had immense mass and its own star in tow. It couldn't approach a planetary system without scrambling up planetary orbits. Coming to call meant the bull comes into your china shop and is in no hurry to leave.\n\nA warning was understandable. Threats, comic book or not, might work.\n\nBut... no curiosity? No desire to embrace the strange, the alien, the obviously huge technology the Bowl implied? What kind of aliens were these Glorians, anyway?\n\nBeth had said shakily, \"I need to think about this,\" and departed.\n\nA sharp rap startled Redwing. He glanced at his desk, which pulsed with a reminder color.\n\nKarl had knocked smartly on the door, right on time. Redwing got up and met him, shaking hands as he did sometimes with crew to show this conversation was more than ordinary. After all, the close quarters and endless waiting led, in classic fashion, to rumors, imaginary problems, and endless speculation.\n\n\"I carried forward those points you brought up,\" Karl began.\n\n\"You're done integrating the new crew?\"\n\n\"Nearly. They're slow, dazed. Some sleep pods didn't work just right, it seems.\"\n\n\"Anything serious medically?\"\n\n\"No, just slow recovery rates.\" Karl looked tired.\n\nRedwing knew that rumor-mongering went double for the newbies. Some of the freshly revived had the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people absorbing and not able to react. It was a surprise, yes. Not Glory on the viewscreens, but an immense, whirling landscape. Redwing had decided to let them get into the work cycle, then get to know them, see what teams he could shape from them. Dealing with the Bowl to get what Redwing wanted was going to be a complex game.\n\nThey needed supplies of volatiles and fusion fuel catalysts, just to depart and head for Glory. That was only the beginning, though.\n\nBest to get things back on firm ground. He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desk. \"You and I need to have a clear understanding of how the dynamics of this Bowl and star system work. It may be the only leverage we have over the Folk.\"\n\n\"They've been running this place for a very long time,\" Karl said. \"I doubt it has any vulnerabilities.\"\n\n\"Start with that jet. You'd think they'd have reached cruising speed and been able to shut off the plasma jet by now, but never mind that\u2014\"\n\n\"They can't!\"\n\nRedwing looked skeptical. He liked playing this role, letting crew \"educate him\" and tumble out their ideas. While a lower-rank officer dealing with the myriad specialists a ship needed, he had learned that you could get to the point much faster this way. These were tech types first and crew members a distant second. \"Ummm... Maybe they can't.\"\n\nKarl rose to the bait. \"Look, a grad student can show that the Bowl isn't statically stable. I know, I checked with a shipmind nonlinear analysis, and I'm just an engineer.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"The Bowl's not in orbit around the star. Turn off the jet, the star draws it in by gravity. It hits the star.\"\n\n\"So the jet has to stay on.\"\n\n\"This whole thing is dynamically stable, not static\u2014same as we are when we walk. We take a step, fall forward, catch ourselves\u2014only way to get anywhere.\"\n\n\"So what makes the whole star-and-Bowl scheme work?\" Redwing had a hunch, but he liked to check it against somebody who really knew. It helped the intuition. Karl was just the type he needed.\n\n\"The jet comes off that glaring hot spot. The Bowl reflects a lot of the star's own sunlight on that spot, making the corona far hotter than you ever see on the surface of a star. Somehow\u2014here's the real magic trick\u2014the star's own magnetic field gets wound up in that spot. Notice the star's spinning\u2014so it generates magnetic fields deep in its core, a dynamo. That leaks out, forms the whole region dominated by the fields\u2014the magnetosphere\u2014and that hot spot draws field lines in, wraps them around the jet as it forms. Then the field takes off with the incredibly hot plasma, trapping that pressure in a wraparound like rubber bands\u2014and it all escapes the star. The magnetic field lines wrap around the plasma like tight invisible fingers, squeeze it, make it spurt out. The jet carries forward, slim as you like, straight for the Knothole\u2014and passes through. The jet thrust makes the whole damned thing move forward, star and Bowl and all.\"\n\n\"So?\" Redwing knew he could appear incisive by just asking the obvious next question, interrupting the headlong spinning out of a whole complex story.\n\nIt worked. Karl blinked, seemed to come out of his techno-daze. \"So... the magnetic fields hit the Bowl's fields\u2014\"\n\n\"What fields?\"\n\n\"The Bowl's a huge conductor, spinning fast, with electrical currents running in it. It makes its own magnetic fields. I checked the lander data from when the teams went down. Strong fields, even at the top of that deep atmosphere. Keeps cosmic rays away, sure, but its real reason is\u2014\"\n\nKarl blinked again and sensed he was going into lecture mode. Redwing just nodded. Keep 'em anxious but focused, his old cycle-ship commander had said. They never really notice you're leading them.\n\nKarl slowed. \"The Bowl mag fields, they catch the fields from the jet. I've got plenty of mag-depth photos of this. The Bowl shapes the jet and binds to it, both. That links the Bowl to the star. Of course, gravity's making the Bowl want to fall toward the star\u2014after all, it's not in orbit or anything, just spinning around. But it can't fall into the star\u2014there's a sort of dance between them. The star's running away, thanks to the steady push it gets from the jet. So the Bowl is chasing it. To make the ride less bumpy, the system has those nice magnetic fields, acting like rubber bands you can't break. See, magnetic fields always form closed loops.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Even Redwing knew this, but it was best to throw the occasional bone.\n\n\"Old Doc Maxwell. It's the law.\"\n\n\"So\u2014\"\n\nKarl jumped right in, as Redwing had known he would. \"The fields massage the Bowl, cushion minor excursions, smooth out the ride.\"\n\n\"So the Folk can't turn it off. Ever.\"\n\n\"Do that, the Bowl crashes. I estimate it'll take about a year to fall into the star. I'd love to see it\u2014gotta be spectacular.\"\n\n\"But it can't happen. Because of the jet. So\u2014how do we screw around with it?\"\n\nKarl blinked yet again, twice. \"But... why...\"\n\n\"We have people down there. Must be billions of smart aliens on the Bowl, too. We have to make a deal to get our people back. To get on to Glory.\"\n\nKarl looked at the Bowl view sliding by on the wall\u2014forestland now, dotted with twinkling small seas, whitecaps outlining some where a strong wind blew down from somber gray mountains. \"They've been safe for millions of years. Longer.\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But to make something like this\u2014you have to have some large-scale ambition in mind.\"\n\nRedwing looked skeptical. \"Touring the galaxy?\"\n\n\"While you get a permanent suntan, yes.\" Karl grinned. \"And never get cold.\"\n\nRedwing nodded. \"Never get cold\u2014maybe a motive? Not just a small thing like going interstellar, but never leaving your home?\"\n\nKarl thought awhile and Redwing let him. When Karl spoke, it was a whisper. \"Taking a whole culture, a world, so many species... on a ride that could last forever. Not just colonizing some planet. An eternal voyage. That's got to be it.\"\n\nRedwing shrugged. \"Over millions of years, your own species has got to change\u2014maybe go extinct.\"\n\n\"The whole thing will go unstable if you don't have somebody to do the tweaks, keep watch, fix accidents.\"\n\n\"For sure. Then there's cultural change. But you can't let the society decide the whole Bowl experiment is a bad idea. Then you die!\"\n\nKarl hadn't thought this way. Engineers don't, he mused, and then recalled that his three degrees were in electrical, mechanical, and astroengineering. Okay, usually. \"Look, Karl. A few hundred years ago, we called people savages because they pierced their ears, ballooned their lips, wore trinkets in their nose, cut their hair so it looked wild or had no hair at all. They did weird stuff, had strange noisy dances and rites, and tattooed their bodies. Then, when I was growing up, everybody called that stuff hip and fashionable.\"\n\n\"Uh, so?\"\n\nThe lands below were back to mountains and seas\u2014beautiful expanses, larger than the whole Earth\u2013Moon system. Redwing never tired of it all.... \"We can take cultural change, even stuff that comes back from our ancestors and looks odd. But we're expanding, moving out into the stars.\"\n\n\"Well, sure.\"\n\n\"And so are the Folk. I guess they can take tattoos. It's fashion, which means it's over by the time people like us even hear about it. But I doubt they can take big new religions or political mobs that want to, say, take over piloting this contraption. They can't allow that.\"\n\nKarl got it. He nodded eagerly. \"And we thought we knew what conservative meant.\"\n\n\"They can't risk the wrong kind of change. And that's exactly what we new-kid-on-the-block humans represent.\"\nPART V\n\nMIRROR FLOWERS\n\nA man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.\n\n\u2014MARK TWAIN\nSEVENTEEN\n\nCliff and his party followed Quert at an easy, loping pace. The lower gravity made long strides easy, but the humans could not match the ease of the Sil's fluid grace. There was no ground transport except the Sil city subway, but that had been damaged, too. Quert said it was intermittent and unreliable, \"Smoke go in there. And... some say... be worse things.\"\n\nThey made their way beyond the ruined Sil city and broke into open woodlands. It was a relief to suck in soft, moist air and just move, escape. No one looked back.\n\nThey paused on a short hill and Cliff could not resist a last perspective on the blasted landscape. Its once-proud ramparts and arches, its residential precincts, its lofty spires of what might have been elegant churches\u2014all burned or hammered down to rubble. The Folk had no mercy. Yet he could see rising from rubble the tan buildings they had watched self-forming with a quiet, eternal energy. Seen at a distance, the fresh shoots of new life moved like stop-motion videos, eager plants rising to begin anew a city that surely, in the immense history of the Bowl, had been rebuilt myriad times. Cliff sighed and clasped Irma to his side. \"It's coming back. Slow but steady.\"\n\n\"This place was made to replace itself. A technology that counts on having to regenerate. I wonder what it runs on.\"\n\n\"Solar energy, reprocessed waste\u2014did you see that molecular printer Quert used to make us your new carry-pack?\"\n\nShe nodded and shrugged the new pack, easing the straps. \"Great, some kind of light composite stuff. Made a molecule at a time, Quert said. It's built exactly like the old busted one. Minus the broken frame, from when I fell down.\"\n\nCliff shrugged. \"If you hadn't been down, that flame beam would've burned you.\"\n\n\"Yeah, lucky break.\" She puffed her overhanging hair back from her eyes, a classic gesture of bemused frustration. \"Dumb luck. Poor old Howard ran out of luck.\"\n\n\"Damn shame. He was always getting hurt, breaking something, even getting lost to go pee.\"\n\n\"Some people are like that. Crew selection was by Fleet merits, y'know\u2014not backpack experience. R\u00e9sum\u00e9s don't account for plain old bad luck that keeps coming back.\"\n\n\"Sure 'nuff\u2014a big mistake. Next starship I'm on, I'll remember that.\"\n\nShe laughed and punched him in the arm, which drew sidelong glances from Terry and Aybe. Even Quert noticed. Well, let 'em, Cliff thought. Not like it's been a lot of fun lately.\n\nThen they pressed on, turning their backs on the burgeoning city that would live again.\n\nQuert led the way, with other Sil flanking them. They all carried weapons, long slim tube launchers. Their faces were grim, focused, and they did not seem to tire.\n\nRelentless sunlight streamed down through the symphonic play of ivory clouds. Tall and cottony, they were so vast that parts of them were laced through with blue tinges of moist anvils. Clouds as anthologies: the anvils hanging in the soft mist of larger puffballs, lightning sheeting across denser, purple knots, all of it like separate cities of the sky, tapering away into the far heights. Here and there clots condensed out, their understories fading into rainfalls\u2014sheets of pale blue falling great distances, then absorbed back into the air before ever striking the Bowl.\n\nCliff said to Irma and Aybe, \"Relax into tourist mode,\" and they all chuckled, not because it was funny but because everyone needed an excuse to smile. They came into a flash of green, almost pornographically abundant in the smoky, almost rotting aroma of turned black earth, rains sweating down from passing squalls, air thickened with rich purpose. A vehicle purred past and from its big tailpipe a lush pale blue cloud gushed. Irma drew in a breath of it and said, \"You can almost smell dinosaurs in that. It smells like a fossil fuel.\"\n\nAybe sniffed. \"Probably ethanol, but it sure smells rich.\"\n\nNone of them had actually ever smelled the exhaust of a true oil burner, on an Earthside that was scrupulous about emissions. Only jet airplanes using turbines rated fossil fuel use, back when SunSeeker left the solar system. Cliff wondered if by now Earthside biotech had engineered anything like the skyfish here, living beasts that could float and fight.\n\nHe doubted it. What biological substrate could they start with to develop such bizarre forms? That made him consider how the Folk had ever engineered their skyfish. From some airborne floaters, found on some planet where thick air and light gravity made that an optimal path? Big, slow, made invulnerable by its size, like elephants or whales or a brontosaurus? This place is like a museum of other life-forms, he thought, but one that keeps evolving. Maybe that was part of the point of building the Bowl itself? An ongoing, moving experiment with more room than a million planets?\n\nThey entered a broad plain of short grass, and there was a trampled, much-traveled track stretching into the hazy distance. Straight up in the air, though, momentary openings between the towering clouds gave a dim vision of the Bowl hanging in a pale eggshell blue sky. Cliff watched the watery vision of huge lands shimmer, a vision from all the way across this solar system. Only it's not any solar system we ever envisioned, he thought. More like a huge contraption made of a system's parts. Back on SunSeeker before they came down, Fred the engineer type had estimated the Bowl's mass, and got more than Jupiter, more probably than there was in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Somebody had scavenged an entire expanse of space, maybe all the worlds that circled Wickramsingh's Star, to make this thing.\n\nAlong the trampled path, occasional Sil held out strings of fish, stringy rootlike vegetables, a gauzy plant like a haze of wire. He realized these were for sale, but of course, the humans had nothing like Sil cash. Passing these hawkers, making poor imitations of the Sil no no no eye-gestures, they went by. Here and there a Sil stepped forward, lowered its head, and held goods up, waving them toward the humans\u2014an offering. This struck Irma as an eye-widening surprise. Cliff knew enough to take some food, with eye-moves of thanks, and then wondered how to cook the food that began accumulating. All this occurred silently, for the Sil seemed to relish a gentle, still presence. It was usually hard to get them to talk at all, and when they did, they were terse.\n\nAcross the plain came small, darting vehicles sheathed in shiny silver metal. Some moved toward the humans, though most went their own way. A knot of about a dozen Sil cars eased up in the purring machines and shut them down. With proper greetings they got out to address Quert. They had a conversation taking at least twenty minutes.\n\nThat was long enough for the humans to sit near the cars and find out which of the gift foods they could eat raw. \"Hand meal\" the Sil called this. Sil talked while they ate. When Irma asked about that, Quert had consulted an electronic aid he sometimes used to translate, and said, \"Sportive verse.\" This apparently meant creating poetry, a ritual perhaps parallel to humans drinking alcohol and singing together.\n\nThey were hungry. There was a pleasant nutty spiral fruit that left a peppery taste. They ate it all and had moved on to a nearly rhomboid-shaped bittersweet fruit. Quert and three other Sil came over to the humans, doing the head-moves and eye-signals that always came before an important discussion. Cliff reflected on how much they had learned about Sil culture by simply watching their social cadences. Humans talked all the time, Quert had noted with genuine wonder, as though that were uncommon on the Bowl.\n\nQuert said, \"They gift movers to us.\"\n\n\"We are gift happy,\" Irma said, smiling and nodding. She was better at ferreting out the meanings of the clipped Sil sentences and echoing their manner. She kept track of the myriad eye- and head-gestures and tried to imitate them, though not always with much success. There had been some amusing errors, such as when she had inadvertently asked Quert if sex was part of their diet, or where the beds were to be, and then walked into the rather primitive male toilets. She could not then tell male from female Sil and had to be told, with furious elbow signals.\n\nThe small, squat vehicles were actually simple to drive. They used hands and feet, just as Earthside cars did, and ran on an auto-gear system with adjustable constraints, mostly apparently magnetic. Indeed, its propulsion seemed magnetic, but it never rose more than a meter above the broad plain. Everything here, even the homes, seemed powered by electromagnetic induction, through the Bowl's substructure. There were solar collectors everywhere, befitting a land where the sun always shone, and the self-shaping buildings were driven that way, too. Cliff could tell by the occasional tingling of electrical discharge that ran over his skin when he stood near the walls, as they surged up and formed elegant cusps and arches.\n\nQuert showed Cliff how to drive the magcar, seeming to insist it was a guest's privilege. That let him take the little thing out onto the broad plain, Quert in the copilot seat, and Irma and Aybe in the rather cramped rear seats. Their backpacks and gear went in racks on the roof, secured by a curious self-wrapping lattice that figured out its own way to secure the arrangement, tripped by a tiny tapping from Quert.\n\nThey headed on toward distant mountains, cloud-shrouded and mysterious. Quert then went into comm mode, using the inbuilt dash system to get in touch with other Sil, using a system Quert said the Folk could not intercept. Quert apparently had embedded acoustic receivers, for it peered ahead intently and subvocalized, face giving nothing away. Irma sat in the back, and the others were in another car, following close on the right side. Cliff took the odd magcar up to its highest speed as other car traffic thinned out. They were moving away from the Sil concentrations, but Cliff had no idea of their destination.\n\nHe did not notice nearby cars or anyone following until abruptly one drew up alongside them. It deftly came in and blocked them from the other human car. The two Sil inside did not look at him, but they matched exactly his velocity. Then the magcar started coming in closer. He thought nothing of it until they were only a car-length away. He slowed. They slowed. He sped up. So did they. Another magcar came in from his left, moving fast. Its driver also didn't even seem to notice the three cars moving now together. They all peered straight ahead. Maybe they're a guard party? he wondered.\n\nCloser, closer... Cliff had time to say, \"Quert\u2014Quert?\" interrupting the alien's concentration, its eyes slowly coming fully open, as if it had been in a trance. \"I think something's\u2014\"\n\nA third car came over fast from the left, slightly ahead. It slewed hard and set itself up exactly in front of their car.\n\nIrma said, \"Are these\u2014?\"\n\nThe lead car slowed, its big tail signal sliding in ruby red pulses across the back. Cliff had to step on the mag brakes, and the car hummed loudly. He tried to maneuver to the left, then right, but there was no room now, and then the car ahead braked harder.\n\nCliff slammed on the brakes. The three that had boxed him in hit theirs a few seconds later. The brake howl was a high skkkrrreeeee, all of them losing speed as fast as they could. The cars were identical, so they hardly separated at all as the howling deceleration threw Cliff forward. They all wore odd net belts that stopped Cliff from being heaved onto the windshield. His few seconds' lead in decelerating meant he was now about ten meters behind them all as they slid to a stop, throwing gray dust and the humming loud and shrill.\n\nIrma was saying something and Quert, too, but Cliff focused on the six Sil who jumped out of the magcars. They called short crisp orders to each other and reached into their workbelts. Going for weapons, Cliff thought. Not guards.\n\nThe Sil ran around their cars and formed an orderly bunch, intent on Cliff's car, shouting now. Quert gave its gravel growl and took off its web-belt. Irma gave an alarmed cry.\n\nThe only weapon we have, we're inside.\n\nCliff saw what he must do. He slammed on the acceleration and shot forward. The car shook as he hit the Sil. Impact scattered them across the blunt shiny hood. Bodies struck their windshield and rolled up it, tumbling over the roof\u2014dull thumps\u2014and Cliff kept his foot on the accelerator until just before they hit the forward car.\n\nThey slammed in hard and the magnetic bumper pushed them back, lessening the impact. Their magcar's hood crumpled. Alarms blared an odd hooting call in Cliff's ears. Quert cried out in surprise and Irma went silent.\n\n\"Okay?\" Cliff said, surprised at how mildly he said it. \"Irma? Quert?\"\n\n\"O-okay,\" Irma said. Coughed, gasped. Aybe said, \"What the\u2014?\"\n\nQuert caught Cliff's eye and gave the assent signal. Its mouth sagged open.\n\nHe had scooped up all the Sil. Some had rolled off to the side and others over the cabin. They had all absorbed the full hard impact of the car, giving off sharp, surprised cries. He watched where they had hit the plain. None bounced back up.\n\nThey wanted to grab us, maybe kill us. No negotiation. Went for their weapons.\n\nSome of them had gotten their odd little guns free and lay stretched out, guns in hand but arms not moving.\n\nCliff backed out, turning to his left so the car glided over the bodies on that side. They crunched beneath the magcar. He got ten meters behind the bodies and shifted. He moved forward very deliberately and ran over the ones sprawled on the right. Moving fast, he slewed to ride over the two in front. Each body nudged the car up, no more, but that brought the full pressure of the magcar down on them.\n\nHe knew the bumps meant smashed bones, organs, spurting gouts of fluids lost into the soil. Agony, screams, the light fading behind terrified eyes.\n\nNone of them moved as Cliff then backed all the way out and drove around the whole mess. No point in checking to see if anyone survived.\n\nIrma said, \"The other car's gotten free, too. Looks like they have a Sil driving.\"\n\n\"My mate,\" Quert said quietly. \"She fine. Drive hard.\" Cliff glanced at the alien, who seemed as quiet and calm as ever.\n\nTerry was in the other car and waved at them, holding thumbs-up. \"They must've done something similar,\" Aybe said quietly. \"Wasn't watching...\"\n\nCliff amped the acceleration and had them up to max speed by the time the cars and bodies were just a dot in his side rearview screen. He was surprised that he did not need to think much at all about what had happened. The three-car team had tried to grab those he cared about and were willing to use force to do it. That meant they had crossed a line.\n\nCliff had spent endless days stacking and processing bodies, and now knew he was not the same man. He had done what he had to and had not taken any time to think it through. Before he came down to the Bowl, he had been another sort of man entirely. This place had taught him a lot, and most of it he could not say but perhaps comprehended it better that way. It was in his nervous system now, experience digested and made part of himself.\n\nMaybe that was what Quert had. Indeed, maybe the Sil had it without having to learn. In the silence of the magcar he felt himself relax. The mountains ahead loomed large now beneath their mantle of anvil clouds, bellies ripe with purple richness, ready to rain as they climbed the slopes. Already he looked forward to that. He would get out of the car and let the falling big drops hammer him with their wealth and feel each moment for what it was, for the joy of it entire.\n\n\"Those wanted capture,\" Quert said.\n\n\"I figured that,\" Irma said. \"Killing us is easier.\"\n\n\"Our chances would be not good in their tender care,\" Cliff said.\n\n\"Give us to the Folk, show loyalty.\" Quert made a head-shrug.\n\n\"So... you killed them,\" Irma said.\n\nCliff nodded. \"Probably so.\"\n\nIrma let that ride and then said, \"They would have gotten in their cars and come after us.\"\n\nCliff thought that was obvious and kept his attention on their rearviews and the mountains ahead. No visible pursuit. He reminded himself that attack could easily come from above. A skyfish could be hovering a kilometer up and\u2014he glanced out the window\u2014not obvious until it was too late. Worrying isn't thinking, he thought, using a saying he had honed in the long, unending days of pursuit when they were first on the run across the Bowl. Perpetual alert could degenerate into a floating anxiety that robbed the mind of concentration, sent it skittering into pointless knots. Not returning to the same damn subject was a learned skill, he saw.\n\n\"Where do we go now?\" he said directly to Quert.\n\n\"Into cold.\"\nEIGHTEEN\n\nThey went under the mountains, not up them.\n\nBefore entering the underground maze, Cliff looked down through a short pass at the lands beyond the lofty mountains. Beyond lay the first mirror zone he had ever seen. Big hexagonal patterns gave some sparkling side-scatter of sunlight. They filled a valley and dotted the hills above. Lush vegetation filled the spaces between, but clearly most of the sunlight reflected back at the star. This was how the Bowl fueled the jet that boiled up from the hot arc light inferno at the center of the stellar disk. Expanses of mirrors, incomprehensible in scale, focused on the central fury. Somehow, the SunSeeker engineers said, magnetic fields got drawn into the perpetual hellhole. These fed outward with the jet as it escaped the focal point. The brilliant plasma billowed out at its base, and then the magnetic fields gripping it in rubbery embrace disciplined the flow, narrowing it. By the time the luminous jet reached the Bowl's Knothole, it passed through easily without brushing the heavily armored walls.\n\nAs he watched the enormous sheets of reflecting metal in the distance, Cliff mused that this was how the star provided its own thrust, from sunlight that first bounced off the hexagonal mirrors, returned to its parent source, and propelled the jet. Riding on light, he thought, and held his phone up to the star itself, letting the device consider it. In a moment, the back panel said\n\nK2 STAR. SIMILAR TO EPSILON ERIDANI (K2 V). INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE BETWEEN RED M-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS AND YELLOW G-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS.\n\nYet he recalled the watch officer who revived him had said it was an F star. It had turned out later that the spectrograph was saturated by the hot spot glare, and got its signatures wrong. Classic field error.\n\nAnd indeed the star seen through the phone's polarizer was a troubled disk, speckled by dark blots that circled the base where the jet blossomed. The whole star rotated around the jet base, which meant the builders had started their mammoth final touch there, perching the Bowl as a cup high above the original star's pole. Fascinating to consider\u2014\n\n\"Come!\" Cliff noticed Quert glance back at him with irritation, eyes jouncing in the Sil way. He rushed to catch up with the others.\n\nTheir party neared the underground labyrinth and found they were not alone. There were zigzag trees in dense blue green forests near the entrance. Sil moved under the canopy, bands trotting with deft speed. They kept to well-defined bunches, entering the weaving corridors under the stony flanks. The corridor's external locks yawned. Even in the rock hallways, yellow orange plants hung, emitting light to guide the constant line of Sils and humans. The Sil barely glanced at the humans. Quert and mate moved together in the swift shuffle Sil used, like loping in light gravity, as easy as swimming in air. All in silence.\n\nCliff saw as they fled that many Sils had small, betraying injuries. Parts missing\u2014splayed knobby fingers with one gone, just a blank space of gnarled red skin. A conical Sil ear half sheared away. Marvelous purple-irised eyes clouded by some past collision with life. Mottled skin; scars adorning slim legs, feet, inflamed two-step joints that served as elbows in their arms; faces sporting red scars that wrapped around as though some enemy had used a curved blade. Cliff felt oddly embarrassed at the humans' smooth clear skins, unmarked by a life of labor and hardship, or battle and disaster. Without even thinking about it, the humans paraded around with skins and sturdy limbs that spoke of city comforts, the easy life away from fear and pain, a softness not earned.\n\nThe unseen Sil damage was perhaps more lasting.\n\nHe watched Irma as they sped down internal corridors of the Bowl, following Quert and its team along the gradual downward slope. She was changed, subdued and reflective. Her eyes peered ahead but were focused on some internal scene. He recognized the symptoms because he had known them, back there amid the wholesale slaughter of the Sil. She had announced his own blunted responses to him, using her jargon\u2014diminished affect, emotional isolation, a thousand-meter stare, a general emotional numbness, stress disorder.\n\nNow it visited her. Maybe Howard's death had done it, tipped her over the edge. Or the fast way Cliff had crushed the Sil who wanted to grab them.\n\nHe thought of this as they kept their steady pace, moving away from the big thick doors of what seemed to be the occasional air lock. Since he and Irma started having sex\u2014neither of them called it lovemaking, and in a fundamental way, it wasn't\u2014they had drawn closer. The other team members had seen that, and aside from a few wry references, nobody said much about it, or seemed to let it irk them. They were a field team, not a social circle. Howard's death had made that clear enough.\n\nHe watched Irma's concentrated expression, ever alert to what lay ahead, but clearly introspective. He cared about her now and had to understand what she was going through. They had lost Howard in a way nobody saw coming, and for Cliff there were no afterthoughts, because he knew he could have done nothing different. In the sudden deadly moments, everyone was truly on their own.\n\nMaybe Irma didn't see that yet. Something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against some hammering event that changed how she saw the world. If she had stayed Earthside, she might have gone into late old age before it happened. The ones with no give, the ones with the carefully guarded, clear-skinned little porcelain selves, shatter in the end. Some chips and splinters get lost, so that when mended, little fracture lines show. Nobody gets through life immune to the hard collisions. The blackness always follows a step or two behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. That tap, when it comes, shakes you and hastens your step. When the indifferent world breaks your illusions, that shattering takes something out of your own inner cosmos. Something dies within. Irma will never fit together quite so well again. Neither will I, of course.\n\nThey came through another of the bulky air locks, and when the intermediate chamber closed, Cliff saw that their escort Sil were the only ones left with the four humans. The fleeing Sil had gone elsewhere.\n\nAt the other side, the cool, clammy corridor sloped steeper still, and now they passed into a different kind of passageway. The flooring became transparent and then the walls. The orange glow of luminous plants dimmed because there were few of them on the ceiling. Through the floor he could see nothing but black and then abruptly, as they passed a ribbed steel seam\u2014stars. Wheeling slowly across their view through walls and floor, red and blue and yellow.\n\n\"Ah!\" Aybe said. Irma sighed. Quert made the gesture of approval and eye-bulge.\n\n\"We're on the outside of the Bowl,\" Cliff said needlessly, hearing the joy in his voice at the same moment he noticed the air before him fog with his breath.\n\nThe wheeling sky lit a twilight world.\n\nThey all stood and took it in. The whispering drone of the airflow masked any sounds that might come from the outside world. They stood on a pathway looking up at the Bowl skin, visible in starlight through cylindrical walls transparent in all directions. Their passage stretched into the distance, below a flat plane above them that even looked cold, a land showing silver ice and black ribbed lines that marched away like longitudes and latitudes.\n\n\"Ice and iron,\" Irma said.\n\nBetween the black support struts was a rumpled terrain of dirty ice. The stars moved in lazy arcs above. A few craters pocked the ice, broken by strands of black rock and\u2014\n\nGlimmers on the plain. Cliff turned and looked behind them, where the long shadows of a quick dawn stretched. And sharp diamonds sparkled white and hard.\n\n\"Reading 152 K in starlight from that surface,\" Aybe said, peering at his all-purpose detector\/phone\/computer.\n\n\"Nearly as cold as the Oort cloud,\" Terry said. \"But why is there a tube to take people\u2014well, Sil\u2014up above the Bowl skin?\"\n\nQuert said nothing.\n\nIrma pointed to bright points of light winking on and, after a few seconds, off. \"It's always dark here, just starlight. Maybe that's mica reflecting from rock?\"\n\n\"Too bright,\" Terry said.\n\nA flash came from nearby. They turned and looked at a pinnacle that forked up from the silvery plain below. \"A... flower,\" Terry whispered.\n\nFronds spread up from a gnarled base, which itself sat firmly on the icy crust. Light green leaves speared up, tilted toward them. \"A paraboloid plant,\" Aybe said.\n\nThe thing was at least five meters long and curved upward to shape a graceful cup made of glossy, polished segments. The plant turned steadily as they watched, and as the direct focus of it swept over them, the reflected beam was like a blue-tinged spotlight.\n\nIrma looked over her shoulder and said, \"It's tracking that big blue star.\"\n\nThe plant turned steadily away and Aybe said, \"Look down at the focus point.\" Where the glassy frond skins narrowed down, they became translucent, tight, and stretched. The starlight collected all along the parabolic curve, about a meter on a side.\n\nCliff close-upped it in his binocs and made out an intricate tan-colored pattern of lacy veins. \"Chloroplasts working in this cold? Impossible.\"\n\n\"It's not so cold at the focus, I bet. That's the point of concentrating starlight,\" Irma said. She gestured at the horizon, which seemed sharp even though it must have been thousands of kilometers away. \"A whole damn biosphere in vacuum.\"\n\n\"Running on just starshine?\" Terry asked. \"Not much energy there.\"\n\n\"So this plant evolved to work like an antenna,\" Aybe said. \"They live here, hanging upside down on the outer edge of the Bowl.\"\n\n\"Where did a star flower evolve?\" Irma asked wistfully. They saw now the thick dark stalk that supported and held the flower, swiveling it as the Bowl's fast rotation swept stars across the sky. \"To track starlight and digest it.\"\n\nAybe snorted. \"Life evolving in vacuum?\"\n\nCliff noticed that Quert was letting them work through this.\n\n\"Doing its chemistry by... starlight?\" Disbelief made Aybe grimace. \"How's that happen?\"\n\n\"Folk bring,\" Quert said.\n\n\"From were?\" Terry asked. \"Why?\"\n\nQuert paused and struggled with the language problem, eyes jittery and trying to convey nuances, Cliff thought, that were simply beyond human capacities. \"Light life we term them. Here when we came. Learned to get out... live from ice... find star.\"\n\nIrma said, \"Maybe they started in a warm core of an asteroid? Or iceteriod? Got to the surface and used sunlight? Far out from its star, maybe no star at all nearby. Survived. Made leaves to be sunlight concentrators. So then parabola flowers just evolved, out in the dark.\"\n\n\"Long time,\" Quert said.\n\nIrma shrugged. \"Maybe a long way from a star, too. So the Bowl comes by, grabs some? But... why?\"\n\nCliff watched across the flat plain and, yes, glimmers came from everywhere as\u2014he glanced back\u2014stars rose and the light-seeking flowers tracked them. Or one of them. The slow steady sway of the focusing plants swept the sky, selected the brightest, fixed on it. The big flowers locked on a bright blue-white star. Light vampires, Cliff thought.\n\nHe judged the humans and Sil stood perhaps a kilometer or two above the Bowl's outer shell, looking down at a wonderland of deep cold night. Yet it lived. He watched a forest of strange, attentive life-forms that tracked across the moving sky, clinging to the outer skin of this whirling top. All this cold empire\u2014stretching far away, perhaps around the entire Bowl\u2014worked on, as it moved through starfields and brought heat to kindle their own chemistry. An entire vast ecology lurked here. SunSeeker had flown by it and seen none of this, Cliff recalled. The whole Bowl was so striking, nobody registered details. They had taken the huge ribbed outer structures to be the mechanical substructure it seemed. Nobody noticed icefields or plants; they were on too small a scale.\n\nHe close-upped some of the points of light and saw shiny emerald sheets moving all together, following the brightest star visible. They never saw the star that drove the Bowl, of course, only the eternal spinning night. There were translucent football cores at their central focus. In a nearby parabolic flower, he could make out how the filmy football frothed with activity at the focus\u2014bubbles streaming, glinting flashes tracing out veins of flowing fluids. Momentary Earthly levels of warmth and chemistry, from hard bright dots that crept across a cold black sky. Flowers rooted in ice, hanging under the centrifugal grav. Driven by evolution that didn't mind operating without an atmosphere, in deep cold and somber dark. Always, everywhere, evolution never slept.\n\nIrma said as they moved along the transparent tube corridor, \"Y'know, we've found piezophiles that thrive under extreme ocean pressure, and halophiles grow in high salt concentrations. This isn't all that much stranger.\"\n\nAybe said, \"I wonder if they cover the whole outer surface. They could be the most common form of life in the Bowl.\"\n\nTerry pointed. \"Maybe even more than we thought.\"\n\nThey gaped. Terry said, \"Like a... cobweb. Stretching up.\" The thing hung on several stringy tendons that sprouted from an icefield in the distance. Their eyes had adjusted so even in starlight they could make out five sturdy arms of interlaced strands. It climbed away from the Bowl and into the inky sky, and all across it were more of the flowers, their heads slowly turning to track the brightest blue-white point of light above. It narrowed as it extended and cross struts met branches to frame the huge array of emerald flowers. These were larger than the ones on the ground. The colossal tree tapered as it reached out.\n\n\"A cold ecology,\" Terry said. \"The flip side of the Bowl's constant sunlight. A steady night.\"\n\nIrma asked Quert, \"Why do the Folk need this?\"\n\n\"Soft fur, sharp claws. Same animal.\"\n\nThis seemed enigmatic to Cliff, so he said, \"They get something from it\u2014what?\"\n\n\"Their past.\" Quert's slim face struggled for the right translation. In the dim starlight, the alien face showed its seams, its lines drawn by tragedy. He reached for his mate, a willowy Sil who seldom uttered a word, but whose eyes slid and danced expressively. She clasped Quert to her, they embraced, and there was much eye movement between them. Apparently such signals were more intimate and effective among Sil\u2014and certainly so, compared to the talky humans.\n\nCliff had learned to look away at such moments; Sil had a different code for privacy and display, and apparently did not mind expressing emotional intimacy in view of others. Cliff was not used to it, and wondered if he ever would be. Quert turned from its mate and nodded toward the cold fields of paraboloid flowers. \"Soft fur of Folk.\"\n\nQuert turned back to the humans and visibly made itself stand firmly, looking at them all. Speaking slowly, to let its inboard translation training give it the human words, Quert said, \"The plants are always here. Stars power them. They store. Always Bowl skin is cold. This be\u2014\" Quert gave a sweeping gesture, eye-moves, and said in a whispery tone, \"sacred memory.\"\n\nIrma said, \"You mean their... data store?\"\n\n\"History,\" Quert said. \"Big history. Sil want to read it. You can help?\"\nPART VI\n\nTHE DEEP\n\nThe Mind, that Ocean where each kind\n\nDoes streight its own resemblance find;\n\nYet it creates, transcending these,\n\nFar other Worlds, and other Seas.\n\n\u2014ANDREW MARVELL\nNINETEEN\n\nAs soon as Memor sat down, she noted that the Late Invader Tananareve was carefully watching the bulk of Contriver Bemor settle into place. Bulging eyes, lips tight-pressed and white, body tensed as if ready to flee\u2014Tananareve showed the classic primate fear signals.\n\nFair enough; being the smallest creature in the ample cavern, more slight even than Serf-Ones, must draw up primordial dreads of being trampled. Memor tossed Tananareve some glossy sweatfruit to ease her trembling. She took it, bit, considered the taste. Gave a small smile. No sign of gratitude, however.\n\nIntelligence generally emerged on worlds only after earlier forms exploited the advantages of being large, slow, and stupid. Size was a ready defense inspiring no selection pressure toward more complex neuro systems and forward-seeing capability. Indeed, Memor had learned about such creatures as Tananareve in her study immersions. They were among the class that built models of their external world, all the better to predict where food might lie, or what predators would do, and still later, what others of their kind would think of them. Somewhere along that axis of change their internal models learned that other creatures also had models running behind their anxious eyes. Thus emerged advanced societies.\n\n\"We merely wish to question you about aspects of your species,\" Memor said as a preliminary.\n\n\"That last session\u2014where you 'slapped' me with that pain gun? Was that asking questions?\"\n\n\"You understand, we were developing\u2014quite successfully, I must remark\u2014a tool to use in making contact with the others of your kind.\"\n\n\"They're still alive?\" The primate seemed to honestly doubt.\n\n\"Of course. They are taking their pleasure with travel about our vast lands.\"\n\n\"You haven't caught them, have you?\"\n\nOne of Tananareve's least attractive qualities, as a medium-level intelligence, was her way of leaping ahead in a discussion.\n\n\"We have not exerted sufficient effort to capture them, if that is what you mean. They did elude us at the very moment we took custody of you Late Visitors. We decided to let them remain at large, as experience of our wonders is the best lesson we can give.\"\n\n\"Do you understand our word 'smug'?\"\n\n\"I do. Our reading of your entire dictionary\u2014both active that you use, and passive that you merely recognize\u2014shows you have levels of nuance.\"\n\nMemor had meant this as a compliment, but Tananareve gave a dry little cackle that meant derision.\n\n\"I think you should consider our relative status before invoking your 'smug' word.\"\n\n\"Ummm. Smug is as smug does.\"\n\nThis elliptical remark brought a dismissive rumble from Bemor. Memor's twin, though still held at the male First Life, let his words sprawl forward, languid, as if he wished the small audience to savor them. \"We desire your counsel, little smart monkey. Your fellows have done harm to several castes, from Serf Prime to even a few at the lower rungs of the Folk. All this\u2014\" Abruptly Bemor belched out a bass snarl. \"\u2014because they would not submit to diplomatic engagements.\"\n\nTananareve laughed again. \"Loud bluster is still just bluster.\"\n\nMemor admired how Bemor did not allow emotion to flare further in his speech. This was evidence of an Undermind fully and well integrated, unlike the turmoil Memor felt bubbling up from her own. His voice and feather display suddenly smoothed, becoming a cool refrain. \"I wish you all now to focus upon our slow, steady response to the Glorian crisis. This goal we have long sought, for it is the plentiful world long observed but never understood\u2014and so we pursue it.\"\n\n\"Because we seek the origin of the gravitational messages,\" Asenath interjected. \"And now, the electromagnetic sendings from Glory are so simple, we can at least decipher those. Yet they do not speak to us.\"\n\nBemor allowed this interruption, though only marginally within conversation protocols, and gave a feather-rush of agreement. \"Indeed. As we approach, suddenly these Late Invaders appear in our skies. So arrive the primates in their adroitly engineered magnetic funnel fusion rammer\u2014and we receive a message from our destination. The simple drawings carried in electromagnetic codings are of the primates, not of the Bowl. These two events are not coincidences. They come so very close together in the great abyss of galactic time.\" Bemor reclined in his chute, easing his bulk. \"The Glorians convey a strange warning message. As Memor noted, they warn away these smart monkeys, but not we of the Bowl. So we must act. The vectors of our circumstance demand so.\"\n\nMemor turned to Tananareve. \"Your expedition knew none of this?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Tananareve said, eyeing them both warily. \"Your\u2014what do you call it?\u2014Bowl, that was enough.\"\n\nMemor began, \"Their story is that they did not suspect our presence or trajectory. As well, their ship lacked supplies\u2014\"\n\n\"I know all that.\" Bemor gave a feather-fan shrug. \"And their star ramship rode a prow of ionization that absorbed the microwave emissions we saw, so they could not have received them in flight. Their own communications are simple digital amplitude-modulated laser beams\u2014and those are directed back toward their star, not ahead.\"\n\nHe waved an arm-fan at Tananareve. \"You have said your ship did not receive messages from your home world for a long time, then did. Why?\"\n\n\"Political instability, we think. We did send reports, but apparently our people went through a phase of no interest in the interstellar expeditions.\" She sat stiffly, Memor noted, as though reluctant to admit this.\n\nBemor looked skeptical, his eyes turned upward derisively\u2014though Memor knew Tananareve could not interpret this. \"Why this lack of concern?\"\n\nBemor saw this primate was unable to follow their discourse, and so waxed prolific in his remarks. Memor cocked a scarlet at him in ironic interest, for this was unusual for him. Bemor said, \"We have only a few long-flight expeditions, such as this one. Most are from stars we pass nearby, who see us in their night sky. Those mount an expedition, those who have interplanetary abilities. In that sense, we inspire progress among slumbering civilizations, simply by appearing to them in passing. Those that have arrived had great trouble living in the biospheres they found. Microbial mismatches, food-production difficulties, and some unknown health problems.\"\n\n\"But we did receive a message about the time we discovered your... Bowl.\"\n\nTananareve was still edgy, and yielded this information only, Memor saw, because she feared Bemor. Something about an inherent caution with males? Bemor's rank musk was a bit overpowering. Or had the earlier pain gun incident made this primate more willing to cooperate? If so, it had been a good move.\n\n\"Ah. The primates did not expect to receive signals from Glory, suggesting that this is their first attempt to reach that star. So\u2014\" Bemor turned to Tananareve and whispered in her tongue. \"\u2014I hope you are telling true?\"\n\nShe returned his gaze. \"Right, we're the first expedition. Your Bowl... We knew none of this.\"\n\n\"You had no plan when you invaded our paradise?\"\n\nTananareve snorted. \"The team I was in, Beth Marble's team\u2014until we escaped, we had as much control over what happened as a kitten does in a clothes dryer. Cliff's team is showing you what we can do, I hear.\"\n\nBemor gave a bemused eye-flutter with his delicate purple fringe. \"I saw in your vessel a high level of ingenuity, more than expected of First Stage intelligences.\"\n\n\"Which is...?\n\n\"Curiosity, as you display in that admirably simple phrase. Artifice in magnetic engineering, particularly the ingenious flux conservation mechanism in your scoop. We have studied it, following the fluorescence of decaying ions, and so mapped your magnetic artifice. Your configuration can navigate on the skimpy ion density gathered from our star. Admirable!\"\n\nTananareve blinked, unsure how to respond. Memor began, \"I, too, am surprised that you manage to\u2014\"\n\n\"Moving on,\" Bemor said, turning away from Tananareve and Memor alike, \"I believe you, Asenath, have questions for the primate?\"\n\nAsenath fluttered forward\u2014glad of some attention, finally, Memor guessed. She questioned Tananareve, with Memor supervising occasionally, and learned nothing new. Bemor became bored. They were still close enough in manner\u2014since, after all, they shared the same genetics\u2014for Memor to know that Bemor was remaining politely present, but in fact was importing signals from elsewhere in the Citadel. Perhaps from superiors?\n\n\"This Late Invader is most useful for studies of the structure of her mind,\" Memor said, trying to introduce what was for her the most original Late Invader trait, their submerged and unreachable unconscious.\n\nBut Asenath went on, her agenda becoming apparent. \"The message from Glory is aimed at primates. The Glorians think primates are running the Bowl!\"\n\nCackles, hoots, coughs, and murmurs. General hilarity, even among the assistants, who normally suppressed any show. \"Good!\" Asenath said. \"Let them keep that misapprehension. Make the true rulers, ourselves, unpredictable.\"\n\n\"We surely are that,\" Bemor said sardonically. Yet something in his tone conveyed ironic skepticism.\n\nAsenath made a submission-display flutter, but it was unconvincing. \"Ideal setting for an entire suite of deception-maneuvers, yes. We will need cooperation of the primates to bring this off.\"\n\nBemor turned to the primate and said in its tongue, \"You follow this?\"\n\nMemor was surprised that Bemor articulated the alien fricative consonants quite well, directing breath with his tongue over the sharp edge of the teeth and into the capture hollows of his cheeks. It gave Bemor a solemn, echoing way of pronouncing the rather simple constructions the primates could manage. Memor had taken several sleep-times to master that, and her words still came out reedy and thin. Worse, the primate understood Bemor immediately, saying, \"I don't know your language.\"\n\nSo Bemor gave a guarded version of their conversation, keeping it minimal, giving away nothing, omitting of course anything the primate could use. Artfully done, Memor had to admit.\n\nTananareve's first comment was a question. \"What about the light-speed problem?\"\n\nBemor said, \"We think long. Perhaps few of us will live to arrive near Glory.\"\n\n\"So you want to reply to their signal? Deceive them?\"\n\nMemor felt the primate showed insufficient respect for their company, but Asenath chose that moment to recover some role in the conversation. \"My team is putting together a response for Glory. No great hurry, but there may be a time limit.\"\n\nTananareve shot back, \"What if the Glorians send out an exploring expedition of their own?\"\n\n\"We can surely see it well in advance and defend properly,\" Asenath said with a fan-flutter in ivory that said, Such is obvious.\n\n\"You know about the gravity waves, right?\"\n\nBemor said, \"You imply, we should be wary of what weapons might they have?\"\n\nTananareve stood, stretched, plucked some sweatfruit from an ample bowl. A show of indifference? Perhaps this was all the primate could do, since it could not give feather displays or more subtle signals. With a mouth partly full of the fruit\u2014a grave social error for the Folk\u2014she said, \"Well, I sure would be.\"\n\n\"I believe,\" Asenath said, \"and Contriver Bemor may amend this, that the Lambda Spear can be revived?\"\n\nBemor made a ring-show of blue and green, meaning \"yes,\" for he knew the primate could not grasp this.\n\n\"What's that?\" Tananareve said.\n\n\"It is a truly terrible device, able to alter the fundamental constants of a small region of space-time, upon command,\" Memor put in.\n\nHer eyes widened. \"You use this... how?\"\n\n\"With great care, obviously,\" Bemor said. \"We can project such an effect only over long distances, so to avoid being in the realm affected. It is appropriate for defense on a system-wide scale.\"\n\n\"It comes to us,\" Memor added, \"from the Time of Terror.\"\n\n\"I'd love to hear the story,\" Tananareve said.\n\n\"I can show you a worked example of how we avoid such dark times, soon enough,\" Asenath said with a mild feather-rustle. \"I have an appointment at a Justice Rendering. Duty summons.\"\nTWENTY\n\nCliff and the others were glad to get back into the warmer precincts of the Bowl underground. They rested in a large view space that gave them warmth, yet through a broad portal gave a closer view of the \"vacuum flowers,\" as Irma termed them. They ate the food they carried, and the Sil leading them brought water from a small delivery system lodged in the hard rock walls. The Bowl's outer hull was intricately woven through with passages, rooms, narrow little living quarters, and shops for what looked like repairs. As well, they passed by warrens that seemed to be where the finger snakes lived and worked. In some of the shops, snakes wearing harnesses labored at rack arrays, doing metal and electronics work. They were intense little creatures of glistening, gunmetal blue skin, beady eyes focused at close range on implements usually smaller than a finger\u2014a human finger, not the bigger boneless ones the snakes used.\n\n\"Y'know,\" Aybe said, \"it's kind of reassuring that in this incredible place, they're making flanges and hex joints, pressure sleeves and shafts with ball joints.\"\n\n\"Engineering,\" Terry said, \"is a universal.\"\n\nSome of the snake teams were working now on a large, intricate wall. They worked with a fevered energy, clacking and hissing to each other and slithering adroitly over copper arrays. This wall lay behind where the humans watched the dim landscape of the hull. Hull ice was thick here, and vacuum flowers lapped against the transparent portal. Cliff touched the window and had to snatch his hand away at a sudden sharp pain. He feared it was so cold, his fingers would freeze to it. Quert had said there were multiple vacuum layers in these transparent walls, but the cutting cold came through.\n\n\"That's it,\" Aybe said, \"these corridors are below the mirror zone. We're at the edge of a big mirror area, too. This whole section of the Bowl must be chilly.\"\n\nIt seemed so. So the land beyond was extremely cold, dotted with rock that formed roofs over areas of gray ice steeped in dark. Following Quert's advice, Irma played her laser beam, set on dispersed mode, into those dark spaces. In this flashlight mode, they were surprised to see odd, ivory-colored things moving with agonizing slowness.\n\nAybe asked what these were. \"On our way here we saw bizarre life-forms feeding on ice, but those\u2014\"\n\nIrma said, \"Those slow creatures with mandibles and eyestalks, yes\u2014like lobsters, but living in high vacuum and low temperatures.\"\n\nTerry eyed the moving gray things. \"These shapes are amorphous. More like moving fluids.\"\n\n\"Ice life,\" Quert said. \"Kin to ice minds.\"\n\nIrma said, \"So, ah... You brought us here to...\"\n\nQuert let the silence lengthen, then said, \"Sil want speak.\"\n\n\"To...?\"\n\n\"Ice minds.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"Ice minds speak to you.\" Quert made eye-moves that might imply hope or expectation; it was still hard to tell.\n\n\"Won't they speak to you?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"Not speak Adopted.\"\n\nIrma said, \"You mean, species brought onboard the Bowl? Why not?\"\n\n\"Ice minds old. Want only new.\"\n\n\"Y'know, those blobs in the shadows are moving, together. Toward us,\" Aybe said.\n\n\"Watchers,\" Quert said. \"Allied with ice minds.\"\n\nCliff said, \"So you were ignored before\u2014,\" and saw that now the vacuum flowers were opening and turning. \"Why... why are those doing\u2014?\"\n\nQuert gestured at the vacuum flowers that abandoned their slow sweep of the sky, dutifully tracking nearby stars for their starlight. They rotated on their pivot roots toward this transparent wall.\n\nThe company fell silent as the flowers began to open fully, from their tight paraboloid shapes that focused sunlight on their inner chemistry. Slowly they nosed toward the wall where humans and Sil watched. As they did so, they blossomed into broad white expanses, each several meters across.\n\n\"They're really large,\" Irma said. \"Still hard to imagine, plants that can live in vacuum, and bring in starlight from over a large area. To feed... Quert, did you mean these flowers provide energy for the whole biosphere living out there, on the hull?\n\nQuert simply gave eye-signals, apparently a \"yes.\" Then the Sil said, \"Commanded by cold minds,\" and would say no more.\n\nThe thin glow of the jet brimmed above the horizon here, and some flowers seemed focused permanently on that. It seemed an unlikely source of much energy, for the plasma was recombining and emitting soft tones in blue and red. On the other hand, that was steady though weak and some flowers had perhaps evolved to harvest even such dim energies.\n\nThey were all transfixed as the radiators spread open and completed their pivot toward the humans. There was silence broken only by the faint sound of air circulating, as the field of flowers\u2014Cliff swung his head around to count over a hundred within view\u2014then began to pulse with a gray glow. Behind the flower field the stars still wheeled, cutting arcs in the black. The humans stood mutely watching, their heads tilted up to see the spreading flowers, who in turn clung to the rotating hull. The gray glow built slowly, the whole flower display assuming a shape like a giant circle flecked with light, staring at them. Cliff felt a chill wash over his skin that was not from the temperature. This is truly alien....\n\nA pattern began to emerge. In the dim light their eyes had adjusted, and so the brighter flower circles made blotchy spots while the darker flowers accented a contrast... and the entire array began to form a speckled image....\n\nA picture came into view. Irma gasped. \"It's Beth's face\u2014again!\"\n\nThe picture was crude because there were fewer pixels to be had from the flowers, but still Cliff found it unsettling. He gazed at the cartoon of Beth Marble while others talked on. Finally he said, \"Reasonably close, too. Whoever commands these vacuum flowers knows the method they used with the mirror zones. They're using this to get our attention.\"\n\nQuert gave a rustle of agreement. \"Ice minds.\"\n\n\"At least her lips aren't moving,\" Terry said. \"That gave me the creeps.\"\n\n\"So... no message,\" Aybe said. \"Just a calling card.\"\n\nQuert looked around and pointed to the wall behind them. The snake team was still working, this time with some armatures like waldoes. They had somehow extruded a flat tank from the wall, and snakelike machine arms were completing it. This was not repair but construction. They worked by coaxing features from a substrate that simmered with flashes of orange light. The whole working team was laboring with new members. A big lizardlike thing of crusted hide had four tentacles, each of which alone was larger than a finger snake, fissioning into more small ones that snakes did not have. Cliff watched one use fingernails, too, that deformed into helical screwdrivers, snub pliers, a small hammer. It was trimming away and adjusting features freshly drawn from the wall. Cliff glanced back at the Beth portrait, still frozen in a smile. When he turned, the work team was slithering away across the wall, as the central oval they left brimmed with orange glows.\n\nLetters and then words seemed to drift to the surface of the wall, as if bubbling up from deep ocean water.\n\n\"It's Anglish,\" Terry said. \"How do they know?\"\n\n\"Ice minds,\" Quert said. Across the Sil's face\u2014and across those of the other Sil with them, who had been quiet all along\u2014the skin stretched and warped, framing the eyes. Did this mean joy? Fear? Impossible to tell. But there were no other signs of concern in the body, which remained still.\n\nThe script ran slowly.\n\nWe have ranged the Deep and kept history near.\n\nWe are not of you carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.\n\nWe ride here to preserve the greatness you have found now.\n\nLong ago we shaped this traveling structure, when the warm folk came to us from deep within the whirlpools that girdled our suns. The warm folk gave us tools to build large. Some of us stayed among the comets, but we here have clung to the Bowl. We live through eons of time, and so have seen the many thousands of faces intelligence can assume. We dealt with them in turn. We are the Bowl memory.\n\nIrma said, \"This looks like a prepared lecture.\"\n\nAybe nodded. \"Must be. They've used it before. I guess if there are thousands of years between passes nearby other stars, you work up an all-purpose greeting.\"\n\nTerry smiled. \"Boilerplate, huh? This doesn't look like a greeting, though. More of an announcement, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Intended to awe, yep,\" Cliff said.\n\n\"As if this place didn't impress us enough? Their Anglish is good,\" Irma said. \"They must have access to the Folk's experience. But are we missing a point? These\u2014Ice Minds\u2014claim they built the Bowl.\"\n\n\"Shaped it. Designed it, maybe,\" Terry corrected her. \"After intelligent warm life found them. After they ranged through the solar system and then the planets of this other little companion sun, after they worked their way into... would you say a mutual Oort cloud? And found these forests of supercold life. And the Ice Minds used them for engineering.\"\n\n\"Or they could be bragging,\" Cliff said. Nobody laughed.\n\nThey watched as the words faded and a long series of still pictures followed. Each came in at an easy pace, as though there were all the time in the world to show images of planets\u2014crisp and dry, cloudy and cool, cratered yet with shimmering blue atmospheres\u2014and stars, sometimes in crowded clusters, at times seen close-up and going nova in bright, virulent streamers, or in tight orbits around unseen companions that might be neutron stars or black holes. Wonders the Bowl had seen while driven forward by its jet. Portraits of the early Bowl years, Cliff gathered\u2014the jet flaring and trembling in tangled knots of ruby and sharp yellow as the vast cup got under way.\n\nFor these ones that Quert termed Ice Minds there was indeed all the time in the world. The screen visions streamed on and the humans sat with backs against the rough walls to watch them. Strange landscapes loomed.\n\n\"They call us warmlife,\" Quert added as the screen showed an iceworld. Against a black sky odd lumps moved, in a lake lit by a smoldering red light. There were dune fields, ponds, channels. The lake sat in a convoluted region of hills cut by valleys and chasms.\n\nAybe said, \"I'd say that looks kind of like Titan, Saturn's moon.\"\n\n\"There was small life there,\" Irma said. \"Microbial, some pond scum, nothing more.\"\n\n\"There're moving forms on that screen,\" Terry said. For this view the screen showed sequential shots. The lumps seemed like knots of fluid, assisted by sticks that crossed through the globular bodies. Blobs that somehow used tools like rods? These coherent colloids moved across bleak fluid that might be hydrocarbons like ethane. On the beach the lumps moved ashore with viscous grace, pulling themselves forward with extruded feelers that managed the sticks. \"They're clustering around that domed thing that looks like a termite mound,\" Irma said. \"Even blobs can build.\"\n\n\"Those forms we saw in the shadows out there\u2014\" Terry gestured to the ice plains beyond. \"\u2014might have some connection to these. Except these are on a planet.\"\n\n\"Life adapts,\" Irma said. \"A big leap, from a Titan-like cold around a hundred degrees Kelvin, with high atmospheric pressure, to those vacuum flowers and the rest of it, all holding on to the outside hull.\"\n\n\"A big jump,\" Terry said. \"But there must have been incremental steps, and they had billions of years to do it.\"\n\nBy this time the image had faded, replaced by a view of a dense jungle. This one, though, had spiral trees, whipped by high winds against a purple sky of shredded clouds. The stilled storm had a big beast in the foreground, something like a dirty brown groundhog, its head tucked in against the wind.\n\nThe show went on and then on some more. After a while even exotic alien landscapes became repetitious: blue green mountain ranges scoured by deep gray rivers, placid oceans brimming with green scum, arid tan desert worlds ground down under heavy brooding brown atmospheres\u2014\n\n\"All planets,\" Terry said. \"They're not showing us comets. Not showing us themselves.\"\n\n\u2014iceworlds aplenty beneath starry skies, grasslands with four-footed herds roaming as volcanoes belched red streamers in the distance, oceans with huge beasts wallowing in enormous crashing waves, places hard to identify in the swirling pink mists. Life adapts, indeed.\n\nAfter a while, the slide show was over and more Anglish words appeared.\n\nYou warmlife now learn to journey from star to star.\n\nWe have seen your kind before.\n\nYou expand outward at great cost to you, for fleeting quicklife reasons.\n\nMost warmlife comes in small ships, as do you.\n\nThe dream of this Bowl enticed us with its capacity. Its slow progress fits our minds, our style. Over eons we have seen little need to change its design.\n\nThrough voyages we gain passengers warm and cold. This is only part of us. Other ice minds live elsewhere in the Bowl's shadow.\n\nWe deeplife are one in fluidity.\n\nWe address you now because this is an unusual time. This Bowl approaches a fresh world. As do you.\n\nWe have no reason to intervene in warmlife affairs. We act when the Bowl faces threats to its stability and endurance.\n\nYou will help us.\n\n\"We will?\" Aybe said.\n\n\"They're probably listening in some way, y'know,\" Cliff said sternly.\n\nAybe blinked and said loudly, \"Ah, yes, we will. If we know how.\"\n\nIrma stood and gazed out at the dim icelands where the vacuum flowers still held Beth's image. She fanned her laser and said, \"Those blobs, they're moving, all right.\"\n\n\"Maybe these Cold Minds keep those forms around because they're related by mutual evolution?\" Terry asked. \"Hard to know. If these Cold Minds are as old as they say, there's not much that can be new to them.\"\n\nCliff said, \"And even less that's interesting.\"\n\nLiquid life-forms? he thought. Trying to think on huge time scales was hard. Maybe warmlife is just a buzzing, frantic irritant to them. And there is something in their manner, dealing with us warmlife, that suggests immense distance. These things had probably evolved in the outer fringes of solar systems. They could travel on comets, maybe, bouncing from star to star. So maybe they freely roamed the galaxy while the most advanced warmlife consisted of single-celled pond scum.\n\nNone of this was reassuring.\n\n\"What did you have in mind?\" Irma addressed the screen.\nTWENTY-ONE\n\nMemor watched Tananareve carefully as their party entered the chamber for the Justice Rendering. The primate studied the walls and ornamental traces with a quick and ready eye, as though cataloging all she saw. Quite natural for an explorer, who expected to report back to her superiors. That might well not happen, but no need to give the primate a hint of that.\n\nThey sat in high rows above the steeply inclined vault. Above them hovered ancient tapestries of gold and ivory, while the funnel at the vault's floor was an ominous jet black. Bemor sat higher than Asenath, Memor, and the primate, as fitted his rank. He spoke with the Highers, even the Ice Minds. Memor knew\u2014and envied, of course. Though Bemor was her twin genetically, but for those genes that expressed sex, he had been reared to deal with long-term thinking and abstractions at a level Memor had not. Perhaps that explained, Memor thought, the tenor of irritation that crept into his sentences when discussions flagged or failed to reach a sharp point of usefulness. Male traits indeed, she recalled.\n\nA clarion call sounded deep and long in the vault. It comprised some high trills, playing against long strumming bass notes that Memor knew were resonant with the body size of Folk, and so would be felt rather than heard. Such musics instilled an uneasy impression of immensity and whole-body involvement, a tool persuasive yet hard to recognize. It instilled an apprehensive awe.\n\nTananareve watched and listened, saying nothing. Her eyes darted with quick intelligence. Only her tight pale lips told of some inner tension.\n\nResonant chords came from the music walls. At a signal, a team of brawny Folk strode from the witnesses gathered on the lower level. With prods, these forced each of the Maxer Cult members forward... closer to the edge... their legs slipping in the slime... then at the teetering brink... as a deep voice extolled their violations of the Great Pact. At a second hooting call, the Folk thrust the Maxers into the pit. Some flailed in resistance. Others turned with resigned shrugs and jumped. Cries, shouts, shrieks.\n\n\"This is a most useful spectacle,\" Asenath said mildly. \"Well done, too.\"\n\nThe music rose to a triumphant chorus, high notes rejoicing. Barely audible beneath the sound was a chanting\u2014\n\n\"Live in this moment. Give in this moment.\"\n\n\"Ritual reprocessing is too good for those who undermine stability,\" Asenath said, spitting out the words. \"They endanger us all.\"\n\n\"So may we,\" Memor said, and at once regretted it.\n\nAsenath shot back, \"Not if we exterminate the humans as we have these!\"\n\nThey had apparently forgotten that the primate sat among them, Memor saw. Tananareve's head jerked up for a moment; then she bowed it... which meant, Memor knew, that the primate had learned some of their speech. Had understood Asenath's remark. These creatures were smarter than she knew.\n\nThere was a long silence after the ceremony, hanging in the heavy air.\n\nBemor said softly, \"We Folk must conquer our own festering anxieties, as well. These reprocessings are necessary for stability and for life itself. We Folk in our own wide variety, along with the multitudes of Adopted, should accept the hard, simple fact that we ourselves and all we encounter are transitory, ephemeral, beings of the moment. We matter little. We should embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world, knowing it will cease for us, inevitably. We are not the Ice Minds. Such is the Order of Life.\"\n\nMemor added her agreeing fan-display to that of Asenath and other Folk within range of Bemor's deep bass voice. For her it was a satisfying moment. Bemor could make these matters far more resonant and inspiring than she; just another sign of his ability range. When they were both young, cared for by their long dead Principal Mother, he had early on shown his ability to handle higher-level abstractions and find the nugget of wisdom in passing moments. She admired him.\n\nBut Asenath would not let it be. She said, \"These primates do not see such wisdom. They are an expansionist species, such as has been seldom seen in the Bowl for great ages. Their ship has maneuvered below range of our defense gamma ray lasers. Their parties afoot elude us. It is time to marshal efforts to eliminate them.\" A pause and vigorous fan-rattle. \"Obviously.\"\n\nBemor gave an agreeable rainbow flourish with mingled eye-frets, but then said soberly, \"There have been, down through the vast generations, uncounted acts to restore stability. All these carried a penumbra of drownings, starvation, sad sickness, massacre, looting, ethnic scourges, laser conflagrations, air-cutting slaughters, assisted group suicides, expulsions into vacuum\u2014the list trudges on.\"\n\n\"You seem saddened by this,\" Memor said\u2014a bit presumptively, but after all, she was his identical.\n\nBemor yielded on this with an embarrassed flutter. \"I recall when young\u2014you were spared this, my twin\u2014assisting the more militant among us. We walked on corpses, sat on wrecked bodies to rest, stacked them as they stiffened to provide us a momentary table to eat upon. The delay in recycling them into the Great Soil meant they had to be assembled and even defended, against predators both feral and intelligent. But it had to be done.\"\n\nMemor said kindly, in mellow tones, \"Brother, I do not follow\u2014\"\n\n\"The Bowl grows errant beliefs like mutant species. There were obscure faiths and ethical theories that held the body was some kind of holy vessel, whose owners had not yet departed. Or else such spirits would require the body, even though rendered into dust, to be made animate again. So they resisted return to the Great Soil, a true sin.\"\n\nHe looked around at nearby Folk, who regarded him with varying displays of doubt. \"You flutter your fan-feathers with disbelief, yes\u2014but I have seen this in historical records, and even in person. Sad sights I regret witnessing now.\" Bemor sagged a bit as if borne down by history, his feathery jaws swaying. \"Alas, my memory is long and I cannot erase those laid down with such feeling.\"\n\nCrowds come to witness now shuffled out of the Vault. Other Folk dispersed until it was Asenath, Bemor, and Memor, plus of course the primate.\n\nAsenath said, \"Your report is due, Memor. Your hunt for the bandit crew still loose among the Sil continues?\"\n\nMemor duly reported finding the Late Invaders among the Sil. With a quick air display of images, she told of the attack upon the Sil city, the vast destruction.\n\n\"Approved by upper echelons?\" Asenath asked severely.\n\n\"I ushered it through,\" Bemor said mildly, eyeing Asenath but making no feather-display at all. Lack of fan-signal was a subtle sign of coolness, but Asenath missed this and rushed ahead, eager with a point to make.\n\n\"And they are dead?\"\n\nMemor suppressed her usual feather-rainbow to convey irked response and said, \"No. I had surveillance auto-eyes study the Sil buildings. While they are rebuilding themselves, they involuntarily shape new messages in their forms. This is not a language but a gesture-speak. The influence of building style plainly shows a vagrant presence among the Sil, and I deduce that the humans survived the assault.\"\n\nAsenath pressed forward with full fan-clatter. \"So. You failed.\"\n\n\"I did not command the skyfish. Those who did not achieve their goals were demoted. But recently one fast-fly craft caught this.\" Memor flicked an image into the air surrounding them. A down view showed a primate running between recently shaped buildings. A pain beam rippled over it, and the figure crumpled. The beam stayed on and the writhing thing kicked and thrashed and then lay still.\n\n\"A single kill?\" Asenath said with downcast tones.\n\n\"We now know we can hurt them at will over distance. My primate here\"\u2014a gesture at Tananareve\u2014\"was our test subject. But I found also that the Sil have secured access to my own surveillance.\"\n\nBemor said, \"So the Sil are watching you, too?\"\n\n\"I withdrew immediately, of course. In that interval the primates made their way toward a nearby mirror zone.\"\n\nAsenath brushed this aside, pressing on. \"Memor, we have not heard your report on this primate of yours. I take it she has been well fed and often exercised?\"\n\nMemor puzzled at Asenath's apparently friendly tone, suspecting something. \"Of course. I brought her here to higher gravities, for her health. Her species was clearly not made for lightness\u2014indeed, their bone and joint structures suggest a world of heavier gravitation than even the Great Plain.\"\n\nBemor asked, \"You have read her mind structures enough? Your reports mentioned this odd character, inability to see her own Undermind.\"\n\n\"Yes, obviously an early evolutionary step. Imagine building a large, coherent society of individuals who could not know their own impulses, their inner thoughts! Touring her mind was instructive. I got most of what I need.\"\n\nAsenath fluttered with appreciation. \"I shall depend upon your ability to monitor this primate. We will need her cooperation to convey our response to their ship's attempts at contact.\"\n\nMemor hid her surprise. \"Now?\"\n\nAsenath said sternly, \"We must deceive the Glorians about who commands the Bowl. Your primates can do this for us, if properly handled.\"\nPART VII\n\nCRUNCHY INSECTS\n\nIt is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.\n\n\u2014JOHN STEINBECK\nTWENTY-TWO\n\n\"These snakes are incredible,\" Beth said to Karl. It was pleasant to have time to relax and just watch without feeling endlessly responsible. She had gotten used to that on the Bowl.\n\n\"If you'd asked me before I saw them, I'd have said more like improbable.\" Karl could not take his eyes from the screen. \"Hard to see how evolution worked out skills like this.\"\n\nThey were watching some aft zone electronic repairs carried out in the narrow spaces near the magnetic drive modules. The snakes wriggled into spaces that would have taken her and Kurt hours to unsheath, disconnect, monitor, diagnose, and fix.\n\nKarl called to them, \"Go left at the condenser bank. They're cylindrical drums with oil valves on the upper side, colored yellow. Then spin open the double diode\u2014they're the blue plates.\"\n\nThe Maintenance Artilect took this from Karl's mike and translated it into the sliding vowels and clipped sharp notes that made up the finger snake language. On the screen they both watched the snakes make the right moves. They each had a tool harness that they plucked small instruments from. With these they deftly inserted, turned, levered, and adjusted their way through one task after another, with speeds almost impossible to follow. The interior cameras were tiny light pipes and gave barely enough definition to make this work. All the while, the ship hummed on and occasional thumps and surges hampered the work. SunSeeker's magscoop was operating close to its shutdown threshold already, and repairs while operating were the bane of all ships\u2014but it had to be done.\n\nBeth was out of her depth here\u2014hell, I'm a field biologist!\u2014but regs said nobody worked alone on ship maintenance, ever. Flight deck officers were full up, conning SunSeeker as close in to the Bowl's atmosphere levels as they could, while still grabbing enough plasma from the star as they could. Just maintaining flight trajectories while watching for bogies was burning up all their attention.\n\nBeyond tending to the hydroponics, certifying the air content, and helping turn algae into edible insects and porridge, Beth had nothing more to do. She helped a little with the preliminary \"fault tree\" analysis of this maintenance run, but that meant mostly giving instructions to the Artilect, which plainly knew far more than she did about what she was supposed to be doing. So she used a wise saying she'd learned from Cliff: Never pass up a chance to shut up.\n\nWhich was harder to do than she had thought. \"Uh, can I help?\" she asked for maybe the eighteenth time.\n\n\"No, I got it.\" Kurt never took his eyes from the screens, and his headphones whispered constantly with updates from the Artilect. \"Going well.\"\n\nMan of few words, bless him. At least Karl didn't ask her over and over about living on the Bowl, like the rest of the watch crew.\n\nThe snakes wriggled some more, did scrub procedures on some parts, and with surprising speed got a discharge capacitor line back up to specs\u2014part of the booster system that allowed them to amp their magscoop when needed. \"Okay,\" Kurt said, \"come on back out. You guys need a break.\"\n\nThe snakes dutifully turned and started on their tortured way back out of the engine labyrinths. \"Amazing what they can do,\" Kurt said, nodding his head. \"Makes me wonder how we got by without them.\"\n\n\"Barely,\" Beth said.\n\n\"You're bio, how did smart snakes ever evolve? They sure didn't Earthside.\"\n\n\"Something about their home world, one of them said. It had plate tectonics gone wild, crazy surface weather, storms that would take the paint off metal. So smart life stayed underground.\"\n\n\"How about earthquakes? Volcanoes?\"\n\n\"Their world had 'bands of furious turmoil,' they said\u2014their language has considerable poetic power. Their landmasses butt against each other, kind of like Earth, with its baseball seam wrapping around the globe. Stay away from those, and life underground is somewhat easier, they learned. Where are you from?\"\n\n\"Gross Deutschland. You?\"\n\n\"Everyplace, mostly away from California\u2014after the Collapse, we had plenty of migrants from there.\"\n\n\"Okay, snakes got smart, but mein Gott they are wonders at handling mechanics.\"\n\nBeth grinned. \"Look, we don't even know why we're relatively hairless, compared with the other apes. Why we walk on two legs and can outrun anything over distance. Why we're so damn good at mathematics, at music\u2014you name it. So understanding where an alien species came from is hopeless.\"\n\nThe finger snakes came wriggling out of the narrow cap passage into the drive's innards. Ordinarily she and Kurt would've used smart cables to get in there, running them with a control panel. To her astonishment, the snakes broke into a high, wailing song\u2014chip chip, duooo, rang rang, chip, duoo duoo. Not entirely unpleasant, either. At least it did not last long. Then they formed a \"wriggle dance\" as Redwing called it, arcing over each other and forming intricate curves that included bobbing in and out of the circle, rolling over and doubling up to make O's, then back into the throng\u2014still singing, though less shrill. They finally ended up standing halfway erect on their muscular tails, their fingers wriggling at the dumbstruck humans in comradeship\u2014or so whispered the Artilect in Karl's ear.\n\nThen, with good-bye hails, they went off to eat in the algae pits, where a repast cooked up by Beth earlier awaited.\n\nKarl said, \"They're so coordinated. As if it was completely natural for them.\"\n\n\"You mean instead of how humans do it\u2014drill, train, discipline, drill some more?\"\n\n\"Pretty much. The snakes\u2014look at them, off to their home in the biospace. All together, chattering... Some species are better at collaboration than we are. How come?\"\n\n\"We're pretty new at it. About two hundred fifty thousand years ago Earthside, group hunting became more successful than individual hunting. That started the logic of shared profits and risks. Penalties kept alpha males from dominating. There emerged a kind of inverted eugenics: elimination of the strong, if they abuse power. And the cooperators won out.\"\n\n\"Wow, you know this stuff. It'll be fun seeing you work out all the aliens on the Bowl.\"\n\nBeth opened her mouth to say something modest but... he'd brought up what she'd already missed. Back onboard, but dreaming at nights of the Bowl. \"Uh, yes. Look, it's time for that self-cook in the mess,\" she said.\n\n* * *\n\nFred was talking while he pounded a wad of bread dough. Physical work opened him as well as anyone could, so Beth tried to pay attention. \"I kept wondering, y'know. The Bowl map shows Earth as of the Jurassic period, when all of the biggest dinosaurs emerged. Y'know, apatosaurs and so forth. I think I finally have the sequence right.\"\n\nBeth nodded while she did her own kitchen work. He slammed the dough down and punched it for punctuation. \"A variety of intelligent dinosaurs emerged first. Oof! They must have been carnivores. They invented herding. Uh! For millions of years they must have been breeding meat animals for size. Ahh!\"\n\nHe looked around and realized that nobody was listening except Beth. \"You mean all those theories about dino evolution are wrong?\" This was interesting to her but apparently not to the others. The crowded kitchen buzzed with low conversation as they worked on aspects of dinner. Fred's jaw closed with a snap. She knew the pattern\u2014if people didn't listen, he didn't talk.\n\nKarl handed Beth a handful of roasted crickets that reeked of garlic. \"Try these. Crunchy.\" He had pitched in with the cooking before she even got to the ship's mess.\n\n\"Yum,\" she said. Next came a basket of aromatic wax worms ready to cook. She tossed aside black ones: that meant necrosis. \"They go bad fast; hell, I harvested them two hours ago,\" she apologized. \"The rest are pupating\u2014just right.\" Deftly she peeled back their cocoons and tossed them into the electric wok.\n\nCaptain Redwing came in and watched, standing straight and tall, smacking his lips slightly. \"Wax moth larvae, a gourmet favorite.\" The crew laughed, because he always pretended to like the food in the mess, no matter how implausible that was. Or else he ate alone in his cabin. After their last culinary disaster, a motley mashed-up dish everyone disliked and called Stew in Hell, he went on dry rations alone.\n\nKarl turned and swept brown roasted crickets up, salted them\u2014salt was easy to extract from the recycler\u2014and with head tilted back, trickled them into his mouth. \"How come when you have less to eat, it tastes better?\"\n\n\"Less is more,\" Redwing said. Everyone around him raised eyebrows. \"Look, we're in a tough spot, carrying forward maneuvers nobody trained for\u2014\" He nodded at Karl, Beth, Ayaan Ali. \"\u2014and exploring a big thing nobody even imagined. We've got to do with less until we see our way out of this.\"\n\nEveryone nodded. Redwing finished with, \"So on to Glory\u2014and let's eat.\"\n\nThe moth larvae weren't all done. The crew watched the chubby white larvae sway and wriggle in delirious fits as the heat took them. Insect protein was simple to raise on algae and, if well cooked, had a zest that the rest of the menu lacked. Fresh from a skillet, they had a kind of fried fritter some called \"pond scum patties\" to go with them. The ship couldn't afford the room or resources to raise muscle and sinew. Some crew came from the North American Republic and weren't used to insect food, or else from experience regarded it as beneath their standards. A few weeks' exposure to the stored rations usually fixed that. Some things, like the trays of gray longworms, few could bear to look at. Those Beth thought it best to grind into a paste for a fake pancake.\n\nBeth spread the larvae into a frying pan, where they fell into a fragrant, fatty goo Ayaan Ali had made. They squirmed as they sizzled and then went still. She stirred them, thinking Amazing what you'll eat when you have to... and then recalled things she had gratefully ingested when she had to on the Bowl. Sometimes, admittedly, while deliberately not looking at them...\n\nA zesty aroma rose from the crusty larvae and as soon as she set them out, crew descended on them.\n\nRedwing had saved a morsel for this moment, and now trotted out from his personal stock a bowl of\u2014\"Honey!\"\n\nThat made the dish work. Everyone dug in. \"As insect vomit goes,\" Karl said, \"not at all bad.\"\n\nAyaan Ali asked Karl, \"Done with that flight analysis?\"\n\nKarl barely slowed his eating to say, \"Realigned the simulation, yes. Fitted it to isotope data from the scoop over the last century.\"\n\nBeth asked, \"Meaning?\"\n\nAyaan Ali said, \"We're still trying to understand why the scoop underperformed. It might help us fly it now in this low-plasma-density regime.\"\n\nRedwing said casually, \"How's the detector mote net working?\"\n\nBeth knew this was one way Redwing liked to turn social occasions into a loose staff report meeting. Certainly his approach made hearing tech stuff flung about a tad more appetizing.\n\nAyaan Ali gave herself an extra helping of sauce\u2014much needed, since to Beth the woman seemed rail thin and low energy\u2014and crunched up some more insect delicacies before saying softly to the others, \"Karl and I deployed, on the captain's direction, the diagnostic fliers we'd planned to use when we came into the Glory system. They would give us a good three-D map of the mag fields and solar wind when we came in.\"\n\nRedwing said, \"So I decided we could send them out on a short leash. They can tell us details about the plasma turbulence, density ridges, things that we can't get a good reading on inside SunSeeker's mag cocoon.\"\n\nThis, too, was a Redwing method\u2014let the crew know there was logic behind his orders, but do so ex post facto. Playing along, Beth asked, \"Short leash?\"\n\nKarl said, \"I'm pretty sure we can reel them back in. They're marvels, really, size of a coin but able to propel themselves by using tiny electric fields that let them sail on magnetic energy, to sense plasma and measure waves, and report back in gigahertz band. We've got them spread over a big fraction of an astronomical unit, sniffing out ion masses and densities, picking up plasma waves, the whole lot.\"\n\nBeth was impressed with SunSeeker's abilities and kept quiet while the others kicked around their lingo. They loved their gadgets the way ordinary people cherish their pets. The thousands of \"smart coins\" sending back data were working well. That they could be fetched back, told to return home for reuse\u2014amazing stuff. Plus they had useful results right now.\n\nAyaan Ali waved one of her augmented fingers, and a 3-D vision snapped into view, sharp and clear above their table. Hanging in air, it showed schematics of the Bowl in green, with SunSeeker a tiny orange dot swimming above it. The ship had to stay below the rim of the Bowl to avoid the defensive weapons there. But it also had to skate above the upper membrane that held in the Bowl's atmosphere. That left a narrow disk of vacuum for SunSeeker to navigate, riding the plasma winds that came direct from the star. But more important, they got plasma spurts from the traceries and streamers that purled off the yellow-colored jet. The churning jet was big in the 3-D view, a slowly twisting nest of luminous threads that drove forward. As the crew watched the display, it shifted smoothly, since the Bridge Artilect tracked human eye movements to display what interested people. They witnessed the jet narrowing further as it flowed out, then piercing the Bowl cleanly at the back, through the Knothole and out into interstellar space.\n\nDeftly Ayaan Ali pointed to the safety zone disk where SunSeeker flew and the 3-D dutifully expanded until they could see bright blue dots swimming in a grid formation all across the huge expanse. They were sprinkled over a distance of about an astronomical unit and when Ayaan Ali waved her hand, they answered with momentary violet flares, a ripple slowly expanding away from the ship's position.\n\n\"They report in steadily, each staying a good distance from the others. We get plasma signatures in ample arrays. The coins feed on the plasma itself and change momentum by electrodynamic steering.\" She could not restrain herself, beaming. \"Beautiful!\"\n\nKarl nodded. \"And they got good news, in a way. Remember, before we sighted the Bowl, our scoop underperforming? Turned out it was eating a lot more helium and molecular hydrogen than ordinary interstellar space has. Some of it got ionized by our bow shock and then sucked into the main feeder.\"\n\n\"Ah, but it doesn't fuse\u2014got it,\" Fred said. This was the first time he had spoken during the entire meal, and everyone looked at him. \"Hard to tell from inside the ship that it wasn't getting the right food.\"\n\nBeth didn't see, but wasn't afraid to ask, \"So?\"\n\n\"Those useless ions slowed us down, just pointless extra mass\u2014and not fuel.\" Fred dipped his head, as if apologizing. \"Sorry if I get too technical. My obsessions don't translate well.\"\n\nEveryone around the table laughed, including Redwing's rolling bark. \"Don't put down your assets, Fred,\" Redwing said. \"Even that dinosaur idea.\"\n\nBeth appreciated Redwing's methods but wanted to move this along, so she asked, \"So our drive's okay? We're managing to keep it flying in interplanetary conditions, after all\u2014which it was never designed to do.\"\n\n\"That's what the smart coins tell us. We're actually getting more plasma than we would if we were in near-Earth space,\" Karl said. \"The jet snarls up some, so we get a bit more blowoff plasma from it.\"\n\n\"That star isn't behaving like a main-sequence one, either,\" Redwing said. \"I had the Astro Artilect look into it. It says we got the spectral class wrong at first because of the hot spot\u2014it swamped some spectral lines. But as well, the whole jet formation active zone makes the star act funny.\"\n\nAyaan Ali asked, \"You mean those big solar arches we keep seeing? Big billowing loops. They dance around the hot spot, and every week or two they blow up in huge, nasty flares.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Karl said. \"Those help build the jet, somehow\u2014I really don't see how to build so stable a pillar of plasma from the storm at its feet. Those storms give the jet its power and blow off other plasma, too. The jet's base storms also spatter out a big, highly ionized solar wind\u2014which helps us scoop up more fusion fuel, too.\"\n\nBeth nodded, feeling more than a bit out of it. \"Pleasant to have some good news for once.\"\n\nRedwing said quietly, \"So the smart coins tell us we have some room to maneuver. Good indeed.\"\n\nSmiles all round. Fred nodded enthusiastically.\n\nA new flight deck officer Beth didn't know well, one of the recent revivals, came into the mess. \"Captain, we're getting a tightbeam laser signal from the Bowl. Did a translation in digital format. It's in Anglish. Visual's cutting in and out. But we can tell who it is\u2014it's Tananareve.\"\nTWENTY-THREE\n\nAs he sat waiting for the signal to stabilize, Redwing recalled the hammering noise that worked through the ship's plates in the trial run, as acoustics bled from the ramscoop magnetic fields into the marrow of their bones. At the departure reception, a president of one of the major ship builders said lightly of the din, \"To me, it's the sound of the cash register.\" It had been a major achievement not to deck him right there.\n\nAnd even better later, when the medical teams were putting him under, to reflect that when he next opened his eyes, the ship builder would be dust.\n\nNow the background rattles and pops and long rolling strums were second nature. He listened all the same, as a captain should. Now he heard a crackling and a carrier hum. Then \"\u2014hope this gets through.\"\n\nTo Redwing, Tananareve's smoke-and-whiskey voice said she had been through a lot, but the timbre of it spoke of her resolution. The screen was blank, but audio came with little pips and murmurs in the background, perhaps static, perhaps the background noise of some alien place.\n\n\"How goes it?\" he said.\n\nAfter a delay of only five or six seconds, her shaky voice answered carefully, \"It goes.\"\n\nThen she coughed. \"They... they here want me to talk to you about cooperating on a message. You've seen the feed from Glory, right?\"\n\nHe saw a bottom-screen crawl line from the bridge comm system say they had picked up the full feed. The screen flickered, and then suddenly an image of Tananareve snapped into full color view. Against a black rock background, she looked haggard and pale but her eyes flashed with flinty energy. Nothing more in view. Her clothes were the field-issue pants, shirt, and jacket she had gone down in, looking beat up and patched. She also wore an odd gray shawl around neck and shoulders. There was dirt on the left side of her jaw and scratches along the neck. Overall she looked worn down.\n\n\"Yes, we have. Very odd,\" Redwing said. Best to be guarded. He knew her captors were listening and wished one would step into view. He hungered for a feel of what these aliens were like.\n\n\"The Folk, these aliens call themselves, they want to work, to, uh, collaborate with us\u2014with you, Captain\u2014on making a message. Something to send to Glory.\" Her eyebrows rose on you, and Redwing wondered what that meant.\n\nSomething in her voice had roughened, maybe from being in the field so long. It was Anglish with the corners knocked off. She laughed suddenly. \"The civilization at Glory, they seem to think we're running the Bowl. My, um, mentors, they want to leave it that way. Keep themselves in the shadows, at least until they know something about Glory. But they need our help for that.\"\n\n\"Outstanding. What do they want to say to the Glory Hounds?\"\n\n\"Captain, they're still fighting about that. They'll have to talk to us first.\"\n\n\"That's it? What about Cliff's team?\"\n\nHe could see conflict flicker in her face. So could Beth and Karl, sitting behind him, judging from the way they stirred in their seats. They were in Redwing's cabin because he wanted to keep this first transmission from the aliens, after months of silence, from the rest of the crew. It was always a bad idea to let crew see policy being made, especially if it was on the fly, as this might have to be. \"I... don't know anything... about that.\"\n\nHer hesitations told more than the words. She was probably trying not to let the Folk know how much she knew. Then, to confirm his hunch, she very carefully gave him a wink with her left eye. Left: something wrong. A common code in visual reporting, all across the Fleet. Right meant things were right but more was to be said.\n\n\"So why don't they let Cliff's team go? And you?\"\n\nHesitation, a side glance at whatever was directing her. \"They need me as translator....\"\n\n\"And Cliff's team?\"\n\n\"And as for Cliff, they don't know where he is.\" A right-eye wink this time. What could that mean? That the Folk knew something but not enough to use?\n\n\"So if we work with them on a Glory message, what do we get?\" It was time, he judged, to put something on the table. Let them go first.\n\n\"You are all welcome down here. There is plenty for us.\" She said this straight, no inflection, staring straight at the camera as if this were a rehearsed line.\n\n\"Thanks, but mostly we want supplies for the ship. And information.\"\n\n\"I believe they want to help with ship repairs.\" Again the straight stare, no eye movement.\n\n\"We don't need repair. We figured out that we'd been fighting their jet backwash for a century. Once we're full up on ship stores, we'll be on our way.\"\n\nFor the first time, she showed a darting, skeptical squint of the eyes. \"That isn't what they have in mind.\"\n\n\"Tell them we will exchange delegates, perhaps. We can't house more than one or two\u2014\"\n\n\"They want you, Captain, for negotiations in person.\"\n\n\"Not until they release you and Cliff's people. They've been in the field a long time, need medical and some R and R. You, too, Tananareve.\"\n\n\"I believe they have something more... lasting... in mind.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"They mentioned a generation or two. Enough time. They say, for species to get to know each other.\"\n\n\"I'm a ship officer with orders to carry out. I'm conveying colonists to Glory and cannot change mission.\"\n\nHesitation, side look, pursed lips. \"I... gather they like to sort of collect species, to live here, to work with them.\"\n\n\"I can't spare people. Colonizing a whole planet takes teams, and they're barely big enough as it is. Cut our numbers and then downstream both halves\u2014those we left with you, and those we took\u2014would get inbred.\"\n\nA pause, her eyes dancing, looking off to the side. \"They... they say they find us very interesting.\" The flat way she said it told him that she was also not saying a lot, and he would have to guess it. But what?\n\nThere came a sudden voice, swift chippering sounds underlaid by deep notes, as if someone was speaking in two tones at once. Redwing thought it was the first truly alien thing in this transmission\u2014speech built like a symphony, with several elements rendering part of the message in different sliding tones, sometimes highs and lows scampering over each other. Some notes rang hollow, others full. Yet all this was also oddly resonant, as if the play of words\u2014if the screeches, grunts, trills, and mutters were that at all\u2014made a larger work of greater scale.\n\nHe really wanted to see who made that voice. The six-second delay was driving him nuts.\n\nShe considered for a moment, looking off camera, and then said slowly, \"They welcome us with... total hospitality. We can live here. They will assign a huge territory to us and help us set up a civilization comparable to\u2014\" She paused. \"\u2014well, what we had Earthside.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Redwing said, keeping his face blank.\n\n\"And... from what I've seen, there are rules to keep this whole big habitat working. They impose... order. They're very, uh, firm about that. Make a mistake here, and you could endanger the whole place.\"\n\n\"Like any spaceship,\" Redwing said. \"Open a hatch the wrong way, and you die. Maybe everybody in crew dies.\"\n\nShe nodded and her eyes slid briefly to her left, then back. \"I think so. They do say we should know for the long run that there are generous upper limits on population. We could have territory bigger than Earth itself. Really, we could choose what part of this whole huge thing we wanted. I'd guess we'd probably want to be on the Great Plain, where it's point eight gravs and pretty calm, I gather.\"\n\n\"You make it sound pretty fine,\" Redwing said in a flat voice, no inflection at all.\n\nHer tongue darted out, and she looked uncertain. \"It is, in its way.\"\n\n\"We all have to come down? Leave the ship in some orbit?\"\n\nShe paused. Redwing now sensed a presence near her, the target of her glances. Somehow from the small sounds of muffled movement, shuffles, and long slow breaths, he felt something nearby. The source of that strange voice, yes. Maybe more of them, several aliens watching, listening, no doubt knowing through their technology what he meant as soon as he said it. And what else would they get from this conversation?\n\n\"I... suppose so. They do want to study SunSeeker, they say. There are some aspects of the magnetic throat and drive they might be able to use. One of the Folk\u2014a big one who seems in command, though it's hard to tell, really\u2014says the techniques we use may have been known a long time ago, and lost. So they're interested.\"\n\n\"Lost? How old is this Bowl?\"\n\n\"They won't say.\" She frowned. \"Maybe they don't know.\"\n\nBeth and the others kept quiet as Redwing's face furrowed with thought.\n\n\"And if we don't like to stay long? And give over a lot of our people?\"\n\n\"They say this aspect of our interactions is not negotiable. They must acquire some of us.\"\n\n\"No deal,\" Redwing said sharply.\n\n\"Then... there will be... suffering, they say.\"\n\n\"We've come to threats pretty quick, haven't we?\" Redwing said with lifted eyebrows.\n\nShe gave him a quick nod. Then the screen went blank.\n\nThey sat in Redwing's cabin a long time, watching to see if the signal came back on. It didn't.\nPART VIII\n\nCOUNTERTHREAT\n\nThe possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.\n\n\u2014ANA\u00cfS NIN\nTWENTY-FOUR\n\n\"They seem as recalcitrant as you implied,\" Asenath said, leaning toward Memor and fluttering irked yellows about her neck. Her harsh warm breath rippled Memor's ruff feathers, an unpleasant sensation.\n\nBemor added, \"More so.\"\n\nThey were ensconced in a shadowy side chamber after the transmission to the alien ship. The dark rock walls were of truly ancient times, furrowed with past attempts at adornment\u2014panoramas that once depicted vast sagas of civilizations, long vanished. These had nearly worn away, leaving the striations and sparkles of the original grit-soil substance from which the Bowl was first built. The air of great, chilly expanses of time clung to them.\n\nTananareve, the last remaining Late Invader prisoner, was bending, flexing, pulling her foot to her forehead, sitting up and lying down over and over with a weight on her straightened hind limbs. The motion was distracting. They were flexible creatures, indeed. Memor told herself that the primate was doing it for her health and tried to ignore it.\n\nAsenath restlessly gave an agree-flutter. \"I do not enjoy negotiating with those who can see so little of their true position.\"\n\nMemor gave a fan-salute of agreement but said, \"They are new to all this. No doubt they wish to take their best possible outcome as a beginning position.\"\n\nBemor gave no feather-signals at all, but let his voice range down into low registers. \"They are not negotiating from strength.\"\n\n\"I think they imagine they are,\" Memor said.\n\n\"I could not diagnose that from their speech,\" Bemor said with a casual, superior sniff.\n\nMemor still felt uncomfortable around Bemor, and tried to tell herself that his dismissive murmurs and small feather-displays were not meant to offend her. Perhaps they were mannerisms he had evolved to deal with staff and lower workers? Stiffening her resolve with this thought, she allowed herself some of what the Folk termed \"lubrications\" on what she had learned, using images of the primate cast on a shimmering wall projection. \"I have studied their 'tells,' their limited visible methods of adding meaning beyond their words. They communicate, process, and fully feel emotions by mimicking the facial expressions of others nearby. So I studied the subtle shifts in their Captain's eyes, mouth, even the slight expansions and contractions of his nostrils. Apparently they have no ability to signal with their ears.\"\n\n\"Ah, their Captain is male? Unusual.\" Bemor looked skeptical.\n\n\"Bemor, there have been other Invaders who had male hierarchy leadership, yes?\" Memor felt this appeal to his greater range of knowledge would mollify her brother. And give a nod to the very idea of male leadership, too\u2014though he knew well that his prominence at high levels was a planned aberration in Folk social structures.\n\n\"Of course, though we managed them throughout their Adoption to cleanse them of that destabilizing structure. They are now all proper matriarchies.\"\n\n\"But not the Sil,\" Asenath said.\n\n\"They are young, not fully formed,\" Bemor countered.\n\nAsenath gestured outside the Citadel, toward where the primate was hanging from a tree limb, her legs raised to form a V. She remained in that position as the moments passed, but her eyes were on her captors. Distracting. \"And that one\u2014you watched her during the talk with Captain Redwing? She gave some facials.\"\n\n\"Of course. Tananareve is under therapy: well fed, often exercised. This local gravity is closer to her home world, too. A fairly simple creature, she is. And she used no unusual signals, as I could see.\" The Late Invader was still watching her, but surely Tananareve could not follow the swift, layered Folk speech. Simple commands, yes, but nothing sophisticated. She might overhear a word or two, but never the feather-nuances.\n\n\"The eyes,\" Bemor said. \"What does a slow wink mean to them?\"\n\n\"Puzzlement, I believe,\" Memor said.\n\n\"Nothing more?\"\n\n\"Uh, I believe not.\"\n\n\"She used a long slow wink when questioned by that male Captain about the whereabouts of their other party.\"\n\n\"I noticed, but how much can a single small gesture convey?\"\n\n\"Could it be a sexual signal?\"\n\nThey all found this amusing, since sex among the Folk involved ritual feather-displays lasting through several mealtimes, classic dancing and cadences, song-trills of expectation and mutual agreed definition, then the ultimate mounting, all with urging songs and the completing union\u2014not a matter to be taken lightly or often.\n\nMemor was pleased that this remark drew amusement; she was known for her humor. \"They are storytelling creatures, transferring useful knowledge from short-term into long-term memory, with assigned significance, all by telling a narrative to themselves.\"\n\nAsenath said, \"They constantly update this?\"\n\n\"Without complete fidelity to the original, yes. Remembering a narrative alters it.\"\n\nBemor said mildly, \"So they know their inner selves as fictional characters, written by themselves? Then rewritten?\"\n\nAfter more agreeable and incredulous laughter, and then a timely arrival of small tasty animals served on sticks by the attendants, Asenath said, \"I fear that adds to their lack of realism. We should remind them of it.\"\n\nBemor looked skeptical, with purple rushes at his neck. \"That would be...?\"\n\n\"Memor, fetch forth your primate.\"\n\nWhen Tananareve came hesitantly through the arch, the contrast of her spindly, pale skin and dull-toned clothes with the three large full-feathered Folk was striking. Her feet slapped the bare cold stones in her frayed boots and her breath wheezed as she got used to the moist, salty scents of life within a Citadel. She was only a bit larger than the attendants who sat dutifully near Asenath, Bemor, and Memor, their faces always tilted upward hopefully in the ivory light, watching to see what their superiors might need.\n\n\"How do you think, little one?\" Bemor addressed the primate with his rumbling voice.\n\nMemor was shocked. Somehow in a mere few sleep-times, Bemor had mastered the Late Invader tongue, solely from Memor's reports and recordings. His pronunciation was accurate, too, strong on the clunky primate vowels. She felt a wash of cold anxiety and not a little fear. My brother truly is quicker, sharper. Can it be because he links so much with the Ice Minds?\n\n\"Clearly,\" Tananareve said. \"Quietly.\"\n\nBemor gave an amused rustle that no doubt the primate did not fathom. \"Quite well put,\" he said in Anglish. \"Do you think your Captain will cooperate with us?\"\n\n\"If you let go of our people, he will.\"\n\n\"We will compromise on that. We might very well let many of you go on to Glory.\"\n\n\"Nope, we all go.\"\n\n\"That is unreasonable.\"\n\nBemor turned to Memor and in Folk said, \"This is normal?\"\n\n\"They sail before the thousand breezes that blow through their opaque unconscious Underminds,\" Memor said. She noted the primate was looking at them, but did not worry that this creature could fathom their speech. After all, Folk had layered grammars and conditional tenses the primates totally lacked.\n\nBemor huffed skeptically. In formal Folkspeak he said, \"Very pretty. What do we do?\"\n\n\"They do learn by experience,\" Asenath said. \"Memor herself says so. They are in a wholly strange place and may relapse into patterns from their past, fearing to face their future here.\"\n\n\"To face their fate,\" Bemor said.\n\nAsenath said, \"In them there is an undercurrent of strong neurological response to social life. In their neural patterns I read connecting elements, plainly honed by long natural selection. They evolved as hunter-gatherers within a socioeconomy where sharing and justice were critical to long-term survival. Yet these fail when extended to larger groups\u2014a major problem of theirs, even now. Judging from the encased memories I read, even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.\"\n\nBemor said formally, \"Our long voyages have revealed much poignant wisdom. I have often viewed from the hull observatories, the vibrant stars glaring in their perpetual dark. That star swarm marks not so much a mystery but a morgue, brimming with once glorious and now dead civilizations. This I learned from the Ice Minds.\"\n\nMemor rustled at this. Here at last Bemor played his strong card, the slow intelligences of great antiquity. They dozed through the Bowl's long voyages, else they might try too many experiments. In this way they were a reserve of long-term wisdom, not of mere passing expertise. They had been present at the Bowl's construction, even participating in its design, or so legend had it. How such cold creatures could know mechanics was an ancient puzzle.\n\nBemor used the rolling cadences of formal speech to stress his different status. Infuriating, but she could do nothing overt about it. And she was his sister twin, too. Asenath would falsely assume they worked together. Perhaps, Memor saw, she could use that in her own favor.\n\n\"You believe they wish to play a role in this Glory matter already?\" Asenath asked intently.\n\nBemor fan-marked yellow agreement tones. \"They must. The Glorians have technologies we need to ascend to a higher level of communications, with minds that have ignored us until now. The Ice Minds also surely wonder if these primates could ever fit in on the Bowl. They have implied such.\"\n\nAsenath said, \"The primates will have to.\"\n\nBemor said with casual superiority, \"If they are able. We live among the long history of spaces and species. We encourage local groupings and discourage long travels across the Bowl. These adventurers may not fit in well. They seem obsessed with pushing beyond their horizons.\"\n\nAsenath said, \"Most of our Adopted give their names as 'the people'\u2014whom they of course assume to be blessed. Others are, well, not so blessed. Each likes to see itself as central and important even among the vast tracts of the Bowl. Many live within a history of faces\u2014bosses and chiefs, matrons and managers on high. As they adapt, these Adopted, to the majesty that is the Bowl, their history becomes simple. It is about who wore their own species' crown and then who wore it next.\"\n\nBemor fluttered agreeably. \"Of course, as planned long ago. The Adopted do not any longer reflect upon great matters, beneath our eternal sun, untroubled by the universe around them. They dwell in comfort, without the horrors of unsteady sunlight, of seasons and slantwise sun. The Ice Minds see nothing but the entire universe, all around them. They are of the constant dark.\"\n\nMemor thought this a bit much, attaching Ice Mind majesty to his own agenda. But she said nothing. She thought, though, upon her own past roles in this. Species grew in number until the Folk had to shepherd them to their equilibrium value. Belligerence and slaughter ran their bloody course. Borders brought a fretwork of scars, a long scrawl of history made legible on ground. With borders of sand or forest or water, Astronomer Folk shaped place to match species. Boundaries defined. When warring muddles arose, they examined yet again why territory caused them. Often this came from inept borders drawn by yawning bureaucrats far in the past.\n\nSo Memor and others thrust themselves into the ground truth of locales, letting time brew wisdom from raw rubs and strife. Such lands were often the equivalent of cluttered attics, stuffed by history with soiled rags, dented cans, and old, oily wood: a single spark could ignite them. Such running sores where species war raged unchecked, the Folk could only cleanse with great diebacks. Quite commonly, the packing fraction of religious passions in too little space was the deep cause, and had to be corrected. Folk molded the Adopted so none sprawled in an unending tide. Conversations and genetics shaped better and longer than mountains and monsoons could. Tribal beliefs in a tyrannical God figure running an imaginary, celestial dictatorship were often easier to manage. They understood hierarchy.\n\nSuch was the aged truth the Folk learned either from the Cold Minds or from hard experience. Memor had climbed up with a chilly indifference to necessity, and so now had merited the honor of dealing with the Late Invaders. I hope I can capture the renegades and win approval, Memor thought, suppressing her Undermind's qualms. Or else there will come... execution. She felt a shudder from her Undermind\u2014something she could not see, a secret of great implication... it slipped away.\n\nHer reverie done, Memor snapped back to attention. Asenath ventured, \"So... we should not consider these primates good Adoption candidates?\"\n\nBemor gestured at the primate, who narrowed her eyes and looked intently at him. \"No, I believe they can be broken to the rule of reason, in time. But their Adoption should not be assumed to be an important value to us. We need them to help negotiate with the Glory system, true. But we can then cast them aside like a sucked carcass, if we wish, at little loss.\"\n\n\"What habitat would suit these creatures, then?\" Asenath asked.\n\nMemor said, \"I have plumbed the mind of this primate, Tananareve. I gather they want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean. They prefer to live in those environments in which their species evolved over millions of years. Instinctively, they gravitate toward parklands and transitional forest, looking out safely over a distance toward reliable sources of food and water. They can flee predators from land to water, or back, or to forest, where their kind once lived in trees.\"\n\n\"What a primitive mode!\" Asenath seemed repulsed.\n\n\"Is this opinion, that the primates are mostly useful for dealing with Glory, the sole wisdom the Ice Minds wish to convey to us at this point?\" Memor asked, turning to Bemor.\n\n\"I think that is quite enough indeed,\" Bemor said\u2014rather haughtily, Memor thought. \"But...\" Bemor moved uneasily, feathers rustling. \"The Ice Minds do not always reveal their thinking. They seem unusually interested in these primates. Still, they wish us to secure the help of these Late Invaders.\"\n\nAsenath rushed to send an assent-flutter toward Bemor and turned a subtle angle toward him, and so away from Memor. \"So, Contriver, I propose that we give the primate ship a reminder of their true position.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Bemor said with a skeptical eye-cant. \"How?\"\n\n\"They are inspecting the magnetic configurations around their ship, probably to better guide their own craft. But it could be they will use it to disturb our magnetic mechanics, as well. Their technique is to spread a wide array of sensors.\"\n\n\"Adeptly so?\" Bemor said.\n\n\"These are craftily done, hundreds of disks the size of my toenail. I suggest we wipe our skies free of them.\"\n\n\"Destroy them?\" Memor asked.\n\n\"It will serve as a calling card,\" Aseneth said with a smirk-flutter.\n\n\"I'm sure it will,\" Bemor said, sending an assent corona of yellow and blue. He leaned forward eagerly. \"We will at least learn something from their response.\"\n\n\"I shall see it is done,\" Asenath said happily. \"I believe these Late Invaders will be put in their proper place, and soon realize it.\"\n\nMemor wondered if she had been outmaneuvered here. Caution would have been her policy, but Bemor seemed bemused by the idea of overt action. \"I hope you enjoy it as well, Asenath,\" Memor said with what she hoped was just the right tone of sardonic agreement. It was always difficult to get these things right.\nTWENTY-FIVE\n\nBlessed night, Cliff thought. The soothing qualities of pure deep darkness washed over them all. After months of relentless sun, they had all they wished of sweet shadow. It fell like a club upon their minds, sucking them into sleep.\n\nHe swam up to blurred consciousness after another long sleep, wrapped in a fuzzy warm blanket the Sil had found for them all. His team lay around like sacks of sand, feasting on the festival of dark that released their need, after so long in the field, for rest.\n\nHe was still groggy. Something had sent a twinge, awakened him. He got up, pulled on pants and boots, and left their little room carved from brown rock. His boots were getting worn down and he wondered how he could get something serviceable. As usual, the right answer was, ask the Sil.\n\nSmall soft sounds were coming from where they viewed the Ice Minds messages. He came in carefully, watching the two Sil speaking in their curious way. There was more eye and head movement than there was talk. And as usual, the most active one was Quert\u2014who noticed Cliff and beckoned him over with an eye-shrug.\n\n\"Ask for wisdom of past,\" Quert said. \"This got now.\"\n\nOn the screen were phrases that might have been answers to Sil questions.\n\nOver long times there is no lack of energy or materials, only of imagination.\n\nNot having resources makes species resourceful.\n\nAnger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.\n\n\"Thanks for having them do this in Anglish.\"\n\n\"Did not ask. They spoke first to us. Now to you.\"\n\n\"What is this all about?\"\n\n\"Want to deal with Folk. You can help. Ice Minds care not for us. Care for you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"New Invaders know new things.\"\n\n\"So they brush you off with 'Anger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.' And you are supposed to forget how the Folk killed so many of you?\"\n\nQuert gave only a tightening around the eyes, and his words were in a cool whisper. \"Ice Minds say we are unquiet in soul.\"\n\n\"You're handling those deaths better than I have done with my friend Howard.\"\n\n\"There is more worry to come.\"\n\nQuert beckoned him toward the large portal that gave a view of the sprawling icefields. To the side the stars wheeled and on the dim icy outer crust of the Bowl the vacuum flowers slowly tracked the brightest stars in the moving sky. This was for Cliff still a magical vision. He watched it with Quert, who after a moment made a simple hand gesture and the portal flickered. The view jerked and though the stars still swept across the jet-black sky, now there was a bright object moving counter to the Bowl's rotation, skating across the blackness. When it was nearly overhead, a sudden beam flashed into view and Cliff realized the craft was using a spotlight. A powerful green laser beam fanned out to a ten-meter circle, sweeping. The beam flared briefly as it shone directly into the portal and then moved on. The bright point of the surveying ship tracked on, away and over the horizon. The stars wheeled on.\n\n\"That was a recording?\"\n\nAn assent-rachet of Quert's eyes. \"They not see your kind. Saw us.\"\n\n\"Some Sil? If they were looking for us, then we're safe\u2014\"\n\n\"Folk say Sil not come here.\"\n\n\"I thought\u2014\" He stopped, realizing that he had not thought at all whether the Sil were trespassing here. Apparently they were. Once the thought occurred, it seemed reasonable. You don't want riffraff intruding into the provinces of beings who dwell in deep cold. Their mere body heat could cause damage.\n\n\"No one is to come talk to the Ice Minds?\"\n\n\"Not allowed by Folk.\"\n\n\"So they'll come after you?\"\n\n\"Soon. We move.\"\n\nCliff realized he had thought of this cool dark refuge in rock as a resting place. They were all tired of moving across strange landscapes. But now they would lose that, too.\n\n\"Where to?\"\n\n\"Warm and hot.\"\nTWENTY-SIX\n\nRedwing woke from a blurred dream of swimming in a warm ocean, lazily drifting... to a melodious call from the bridge. He hated buzzers in his cabin, and so the strains of Beethoven's Fifth drew him up with their four hammering notes. If he didn't answer within ten seconds, it would double in volume. He got to it in nine. \"Um, yeah.\"\n\n\"Captain, the smart coins aren't reporting in,\" Ayaan Ali said in a tight, clipped voice. In task rotation, this was her week on the skeleton watch. It was 4:07 ship time.\n\n\"How many?\" He was still groggy.\n\n\"All of them. Their hail marks just winked out. I had them up on the big board along with full stereo visuals in optical. Their hails started disappearing at angle two eighty-seven, and a wave of them swept across the real space coordinate representation. It took, let's see, one hundred forty-nine seconds to sweep over all of them. I can't get a response hail from a single one.\"\n\n\"Sounds like an in-system malf.\"\n\n\"I checked that. The Insys Artilect says nothing wrong.\"\n\n\"You called on the other two?\"\n\n\"I brought them up into partial mode to save time. With just their diagnostic subset running, I got them to review whole-system stats for the last hour. They say there's nothing wrong.\"\n\n\"The full Artilect is right, then.\" His mind scrambled over the problem, got nothing. \"Run it again. And direct for an all-spectrum search. Plus look at all the particle count indexes. Everything we've got.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Shall I call\u2014?\"\n\n\"Right, Karl. And Fred.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"I'll be there pronto.\"\n\nHe made it in under two minutes. His onboard coverall slipped on easily\u2014he had been losing weight lately, working the weights and doing pace running\u2014and he used Velcro shoes. Ayaan Ali's brow was creased with lines he had never seen before. Worry, not fatigue.\n\n\"Nothing unusual in the all-spectrum,\" she said, voice high and tight. \"Particle fluxes normal. The magnetosonic and ion cyclotron spectrum is as usual, pretty much. But the Alfv\u00e9n wave spectrum power is up nearly an order of magnitude.\"\n\nThe Insys Artilect visualized this spectrum, cast over the schematic of their near-space environment. It presented as a green front of waves rolling over the zone of the smart coins, silencing each as it swamped them. With an on-screen slider bar, Ayaan Ali moved this map backwards and forward in time. \"I wonder how these magnetic waves could turn off our coins.\"\n\n\"Tumbling them, I would think,\" Karl said. He had come in quietly with Fred just behind. \"Alfv\u00e9n waves can nonlinearly decay into waves short enough to be of the same size as the coins. That tumbles them and can kill their navigation.\"\n\n\"And maybe turn them off, too,\" Fred added.\n\nKarl pointed to the wave sequences. \"They spread out from the jet, notice. An example of what my language has a single word for\u2014Vernichtungswille: the desire to annihilate.\"\n\n\"So this is the Folk reply to our first negotiation?\" Ayaan Ali asked.\n\n\"Looks like,\" Fred said. \"Say, what's that?\" The back-time display ran into earlier hours, and Fred reached over to freeze it, march it forward. As he did, a blue wave rushed across the entire display space. He backtracked it, shifting out to larger frames. \"Look, it traces back to the jet. What's blue mean?\"\n\n\"High-energy ions.\" Ayaan Ali thumbed the resolution until they could make out a snarl in the jet itself. It was a knot of magnetic stresses that tightened, fed by smaller curls of magnetic flux that rushed outward along the jet.\n\n\"Look,\" Fred said. \"Kinks came purling along the jet, moving fast. They converged in that knot, and\u2014here comes the blue.\"\n\nKarl nodded. \"From that we get the Alfv\u00e9n waves. Very neat, really. They can control the magnetic fields in their jet, focus them.\"\n\n\"To kill our coins.\" Redwing looked around at them. \"To show us what they can do.\"\n\nA silence as they looked at him, as if to say, What do we do?\n\n\"Officers of the bridge, I want you to fly a small satellite over the rim of the Bowl. We haven't got any recon of the outside of this thing, and Ayaan Ali reports that we got a stray signal from Cliff's team just hours ago. It was text only, said they were under the mirror zone. If we can put a relay sat within range of them, on the outside, maybe we can make a stable link.\"\n\nFred looked at Redwing for a long moment. \"You want to risk a satellite?\"\n\n\"I think we need to know how far these Folk will go,\" Redwing said. He kept his tone mild and his face blank.\n\n\"As for further measures, I have a brief from Karl\"\u2014giving him a nod\u2014\"and we will meet in the mess at eight hundred hours to discuss it.\" A pause to let this sink in. Time to go public, he figured. \"Dismissed.\"\n\n* * *\n\nHe started the meeting with news. Ayaan Ali delivered it, standing beside an image that flickered onto their wall screen. All exec crew were arrayed around the biggest table on the starship, coffees smartly set in front of them, uniforms fresh pressed from the steamer presser, everybody aware that this was not just another damn crew meet.\n\nGrimly she said, \"We launched our satellite toward the nearest Bowl rim. It is a microsat with ion drive, so it accelerated fast. I took it over a mountain range that neighbors the rim edge. See the picture sequence.\"\n\nA set of stills ran, in time jumps that made the craggy mountains below zoom past. Their peaks were in permanent snow despite the constant sunlight. Redwing supposed this meant that the atmosphere was thin there and the outer skin, which they now knew was quite cold, was only a short distance away. The chill of space kept water frozen out.\n\nNow the scene stuttered forward to show the Bowl rim approaching. The sat probe scanned forward, aft, both sides. At the far left edge, the atmospheric film shimmered, keeping air confined. On the left a small bright light appeared.\n\n\"I stop it here,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"Note the near-UV burst on this view. It appeared within a microsecond frame, apparently a precursor.\"\n\n\"To...?\" Karl wondered.\n\n\"This. Next frame.\" Ayaan Ali pointed to a bigger white blotch at the same location to the sat probe's left. Her smile had a sardonic curve. \"And that is it.\"\n\nKarl asked, \"What happened? Where's the next frame?\"\n\nAyaan Ali gave them a cold smile. \"There are no more. It stopped transmitting. Here is an X-ray image of that region. I had it running all during the fly-out, just in case.\"\n\nThey could make out the dim X-ray images of mountains and Bowl rim. Apparently this came from minor particle impacts of the solar wind. At the very edge of the rim was a hard bright dot. \"That's our probe dying. From spectra and side-scatter analysis, I believe the killing pulse, which we saw the UV precursor of, was a gamma ray beam.\"\n\n\"From where?\" Redwing knew the answer, but he liked to let Ayaan Ali keep the stage.\n\n\"That big cannonlike thing farther along the Bowl rim, sir.\"\n\n\"It's an X-ray laser?\"\n\nAyaan Ali shook her head. \"This image comes from secondary emissions. I can tell by looking at the spectrum. Also, I had a gamma ray detector taking a broader picture. It gave this.\"\n\nAnother bright dot. This time there was no background at all, just a point in a black field. \"The power in this image is five orders of magnitude higher than the X-ray fluence.\"\n\nHe said flatly. \"So we were right. It's a gamma ray laser.\"\n\nRedwing looked at Beth. Ever since she returned, he had asked her to attend tech meetings, reasoning that she might have insights called forth by new events. \"As far as I know, we never found a way to go that high in photon energy. Did you see any signs the Folk had tech like that?\"\n\nNow Beth shook her head. \"Weapons weren't really around us. Or maybe we didn't even recognize them as weapons. They didn't need them, I guess. We were trapped.\"\n\nAyaan Ali said, \"Weapons of this class would be very dangerous on a rotating shell world. Blow a hole in the ground and you're dead.\"\n\nKarl said, \"There was an Earthside program to develop high-frequency lasers long ago\u2014I mean even before we left\u2014and it never got lasing to gamma energies. At those tiny wavelengths, a laser could focus to very small areas, so you wouldn't need very much power to blow something to pieces.\"\n\nFred said, \"This is bad news. Now we can't fly a probe over the rim. They can kill any sensors we send out. We're bottled up.\"\n\n\"No doubt they expect us to come back to them and ask for a negotiation,\" Ayaan Ali said.\n\n\"Which we won't do,\" Redwing said. Nobody said anything. Time to change direction. Sometimes that jarred loose a fresh insight. He leaned forward, fingers knitted together. \"Beth, do you think that the Folk would ever let us go forward to Glory?\"\n\nBeth sighed and looked at the screen, where the explosion of their probe was frozen in time. \"They have a very hierarchical society. The big one who interrogated us, Memor, acted as if she owned the world. It's hard to think they'll let us go and reach Glory first.\"\n\nAyaan Ali said, \"Which we certainly could do, since we won't be facing their jet backwash.\"\n\nRedwing remembered a lecture on alien biospheres during flight training in which someone said, \"Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.\" Yet here he was trying to figure out the negotiating strategy of an alien mind, immersed in a civilization uncountably old. He let them toss ideas around for a while to get them used to their situation. Sending the probe out to get destroyed had given the right edge to this, he decided. And it had laid to rest any notion that the Folk were bluffing.\n\n\"So...\" He let the pause grow; they were so quiet, he could hear the whisper of the air circulation. \"Let's send a reply.\"\n\nKarl got up to speak and flicked on the wall display. It showed the jet in an extreme view\u2014magnetic field lines in ruby, the tubes of bright plasma they contained glowing orange, the Bowl itself sketched in nearby as abstract lines. \"We can fire a shot across their bow. The jet is pretty narrow as it approaches the Knothole. Notice the helical mag fields that funnel and contain the plasma. Very neat.\"\n\nBeth said, \"So the idea is...?\"\n\n\"Fly into it. Disturb the jet. Let it flicker around in the Knothole.\"\n\nThey just gaped at Karl. He had a chance to check their teeth and noted that Beth had an incisor with some ragged damage and stains. Beth let out a breath. \"I flew us up the jet, remember? Remember? It was like taking a sailing ship through a hurricane. Do that again?\"\n\nFor a long moment Redwing watched the naked fear play across her face. He recalled the long hours of strain and sweat as the ship popped and creaked, the racking uncertainty Beth had showed as she stayed with it through surges and awful wrenching turns. All the crew had worked to the limits of their endurance. That had been their only real choice. Through it all he showed no uncertainty. That was his job. And in the end he did not regret it.\n\nBut this was not a necessity. They could coast here and play for time. But they could not leave. And they were eating their provisions while Cliff's team was in constant danger.\n\nHe said slowly, \"I think we need to show them that we are not going along with their agenda. That we will not be docile members of their big club.\"\n\nA long silence. Their faces tightened and mouths compressed to thin white lines: startled fright, worry, puzzlement. Karl then said, \"I wasn't thawed when you danced through the Knothole, Beth, but I checked this out with Fred. The physics is fairly straightforward. It won't last long, maybe ten hours.\"\n\nRedwing could see they were too stunned to take it in.\n\n\"We'll leave the technical aspects for later. There will be three crew rated to pilot on the bridge at all times. In fact, all crew present. Warn the finger snakes to anchor themselves.\"\n\nKarl said formally, \"I want you all to know I have done calculations and simulations. There is a broad parameter range of what we might face. The Navigation Artilects have been working full bore to study trajectories, the back-reaction of the jet plasma flow on our mag throat. It compresses our prow fields and alters our uptake\u2014but that's mostly good news, because we get more thrust from the plasma. There'll be plenty of ions to fuel our fusion burn. I think\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, technical aspects come later.\" Redwing smiled and tried to look confident. \"Thanks, Karl.\"\n\nBeth looked him straight in the eye. \"We don't understand the Folk worth a damn, sir.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\"\n\n\"I have no idea how they'll respond.\" Beth looked worried, and her eyes jerked around the table, looking for support.\n\n\"They understand negotiation, that's clear from our conversation through Tananareve. They've killed our coins and now our probe. Let's show them we know tit for tat, too.\"\n\nThey looked hard at him. Ayaan Ali still had her slightly wide-eyed, shocked gaze. Fred wore his usual expectant fixed stare. Karl was trying to look confident. Beth's face was pale and strained, eyes fixed on him.\n\nHe stood. \"I want you all to know we'll reply to the Folk. But while doing so, we'll navigate toward the jet and make preparations.\"\n\nThey left quietly. None of them looked back at him except Beth. She waited until the others were gone and closed the door. \"I have to admit it feels good to be doing something. I didn't like being in their prison. Even when we got out, it was into a bigger prison.\"\n\nRedwing blinked. \"One the size of a whole damn solar system?\"\n\nShe laughed, gave him the high sign, and left.\nPART IX\n\nON THE RUN\n\nSome folks are wise and some are otherwise.\n\n\u2014TOBIAS SMOLLETT\nTWENTY-SEVEN\n\nCliff was tired of traveling. The immense distances of the Bowl took a steady toll that could not be erased by dozing in uncomfortable seats designed for another species, or indifferent food gotten from dispensers along the way, or headphones that tuned out the drones and rattles of endless long transport. The Bowl was built on the scale of solar systems, but humans were built to smaller perspectives.\n\nQuert and the other Sils had brought Cliff's team through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, moving away from the hull where the Ice Minds dwelled. Then a mag-train. More tunnels. Occasional glimpses of odd landscapes seen through huge quartz sheets that glided by as they took barely curved speed ramps at planetary velocities.\n\nHe had felt the surges and high speeds, but after a while they did not register as distinct events, just a long symphony of lurches. At times he felt he knew where they were in an astronomical sense\u2014alignments of star and jet and horizon, glimpsed through flickering windows. But those got confused as soon as he looked again, hours later, after being pummeled and spun.\n\nNow they ventured out, on foot, into a terrain that reminded him of California deserts\u2014low scrub brush, gullied tan terrain, hazy sky, occasional zigzag trees. Those seemed to grow everywhere on the Bowl. Gravity was different here, a lot less. He felt a slight tilt to his weight, too. They were closer to the Knothole, had to be.\n\nCurious blocky buildings visible through some dust haze in the distance, maybe ten kilometers away, a tapered tower at its center. Cliff drew in hot dry air with a crisp, nose-tingling flavor and basked in the raw sunlight. It was good to be still and on your feet in sunlight. Always sunlight.\n\nQuert beckoned the others out of the well-disguised hatch that led into the hull system. For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. Then a train. The Bowl's constant daylight threw off their sleep cycles. He'd measured this, and found that the team had shifted to a thirty-hour waking cycle. The welcome dark of the night-side hull had helped fix that. But they were worn down.\n\n\"Think we're okay here?\" Irma asked Quert.\n\n\"Need go farther,\" Quert said, looking around. \"Not safe here.\" The other Sil shifted uneasily and looked at the zigzag trees.\n\n\"What's the danger? At least it's warm.\" Irma had not liked the cold and had hugged one or the other of the men in the night, seeking warmth. Nobody thought anything of it; they were all in a pile most of the time, dead to the world.\n\n\"The Kahalla. In shape they are more like you than we. An old kind of Adopted. Loyal to Folk.\"\n\nIrma frowned. \"So what do we do?\"\n\n\"Find...\" Quert paused, as if translating from his language. \"Tadfish. You would say. Maybe.\"\n\n\"There's shelter over there.\" Terry pointed at the low hills to their left. He seemed more alert and energetic now, Cliff noted.\n\n\"We go past that,\" Quert said, but the other Sil around him rustled with unease. This was the first sign Cliff had seen that they all could understand Anglish. Plainly they were worried, their legs shifting and heads jerking around as if looking for threats.\n\n\"So let's do this fast,\" Aybe said. He, too, looked refreshed. They all had skins worn from constant sun but not deeply tanned. There wasn't a lot of UV in this star's spectrum.\n\nThey set off at a long lope made graceful by the lower gravity. Cliff got into his stride easily, enjoying the sensation of hanging a second or two longer at the apex while his legs stretched out. As much as he had liked the dark of the hull labyrinth, the sunlit open was more his style.\n\n\"Kahalla!\" one of the Sil cried. Quert stopped and turned and so did they all. Some fast shapes flitted through a distant stand of zigzags and heavy brush.\n\nAt first Cliff thought these were four-legged creatures, but as one of them sped across a gap in the rust-colored brush, he saw they had two legs. Their gait leaned forward and hinged oddly. Big angular heads.\n\n\"Here Kahalla live,\" Quert said.\n\n\"What should we do? Deal with them?\"\n\n\"Do not know.\" Quert and the other Sil looked carefully at the Kahalla. There were many of them.\n\nThey all began to run again. Quert waved them away from the zigzag trees where the moving figures were and toward the buildings several kilometers away across a dusty plain. It seemed to Cliff they were needlessly exposed there but then Quert, who was in the lead, took them behind a rise and into a slight gully that was enough to shield them from direct fire. Dust from their running stung his nose. They were all running flat out. His team had their lasers and Quert their own weaponry, but they were vastly outnumbered. Until now he had not thought much about how lightly armed Bowl natives were. That seemed to imply little overt conflict despite the vast and horrible damage the Folk had dealt out to the Sil. There was an odd Zen-like grace to them in the face of horror.\n\nAs if sensing that something was up, big birds flapped suddenly from the surrounding brush and zigzags. They swarmed and turned together and made off with loud keening squawks. In the lower grav, the big wings could use the slight wind to escape. Obviously to these odd four-winged birds, the running figures meant trouble.\n\nThe dust swarmed up into his nostrils and stung. The acrid nip also snapped him into focus. He looked up at the big birds stroking themselves up into the air and he recalled his sense of relish when he saw his first Baltimore oriole. They were nearly extinct then. The Great Crash had passed but many birds were teetering on the edge, and the sight of the deep flaming orange against the rest of its black plumage thrilled him. He knew the Baltimore oriole's name came from some ancient coat of arms royalty, but that mattered nothing compared with the small fragile beauty of it. These alien birds sweeping and cawing above had none of that, yet they still stirred him. So why had this structure, vast in size and time, kept so much rich wildlife when Earth had not? Humanity had overrun itself in vast sullen cities long ago. Its soiled vapors ruled the sky, still, despite earnest geoengineering.\n\nThat question swarmed up, awakened by this wealth of life flapping around him. Stinging sweat trickled into his eyes and he was glad of it.\n\nHe remembered the bleak gray landscapes he had seen across the American West following the Great Dry. The denuded skeleton forests of the High Sierras, where fires consumed the last needles of the demolished pine forests and layered the Owens Valley with black shrouds for weeks. The dead dry prospects of deserted suburban streets lined by abandoned cars already stripped of their paint by the hissing sands borne on constant hot winds.\n\nHis legs burned with fatigue. Cliff shook his head to throw the sweat aside. He checked that his team was staying together, and panted, and felt the ache slicing in his lungs, and ran on.\n\nSometimes he could abstract himself out of the moment with thoughts, memories, dreams, anything. Anything but the terrible fear that once again they were the prey. His team. Being run down again. His responsibility.\n\nSo... how did this enormous artifact preserve such diversity of life? It was like some goddamned Central Park in Old Manhattan, before the rising seas washed all that away. A natural place that life sought refuge in, yet it was an artifact, a managed simulacrum of the natural world. A jewel in a concrete setting.\n\nBut this place was not a dead park. It lived and maintained itself and went on. He had to concede that to the Folk who ran this place. They had evaded the excess that had nearly ruined Earth.\n\nHe ran on. The others panted and strained around him. The Sil took their long strides with easy grace and were always ahead. The humans labored in sweat and stink and gathering sour fatigue as the building complex loomed.\n\nIn the zigzag trees around them, Cliff felt the presence of the running humanoids though he could not see them. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before. Here amid a fantastic construction they were reduced to\u2014\n\nThen he saw it. The Bowl, a huge facsimile of a real planet, kept itself running and stable by being larger than worlds could be. Giving life enough room to find its own way.\n\nBut how did they stop the myriad intelligent species here from expanding beyond their province? A puzzle.\n\nAnd now there was no more time for idle thought. The distant buildings were close. And his legs were made of lead.\n\nQuick is the word and sharp's the action. Where had he heard that?\n\nThey came upon the towering great gray slabs through an outer maze of silvery metal sculptures. These depicted heavyset humanoids in various poses, mostly in combat with assorted knives, shields, lances, and the like. The nude bodies were squat and sturdy, big muscled chunks above short legs and fat feet. Their ribs seemed to wrap around the whole body and their arms turned both ways, double-jointed and elbowed. Some statues were of standing figures and in the air around these gleamed some unintelligible script that flashed brighter as Cliff looked at them. A smart system that registered his gaze and amped the label? They reached a large bladelike tower that seemed solid, standing at the center of a hexagonal open spot. Flagstones of intricate angular designs led toward this tower and up its flanks in elongated perspectives. There was a solemn air to the place as its design soared up the flat tower face, ornamented with bumps and knobs that tapered away into the sky.\n\nThey paused to drink water and Cliff stood looking at the big stonework. Slowly, about fifty meters up, an eye opened.\n\nHe knew it was an eye though it was of the same burnished tan as the rest of the tower. It had a green center like an iris. Slowly the entire oval, several meters across, turned downward to look at them. One eye.\n\n\"What...\" Cliff could not take his eyes off the single enormous pupil at the thing's center. It seemed to be looking straight at him. A pupil in rock? An eye with lens and retinas?\n\n\"Stone mind,\" Quert said simply. Then he turned quickly and peered into the distance.\n\nCliff looked to his left and saw several of the stumpy humanoids flitting among the sculptures. There were a lot of them, moving with surprising speed. They huffed and squatted and made ready. Their brown clothes seemed to have endless pockets and they fished among those to bring out things, affixing them to the long tubes.\n\n\"Chem guns,\" Aybe said. \"In all this high tech, the old stuff still makes sense.\"\n\n\"Or maybe they haven't been allowed any more advanced tech?\" Terry wondered.\n\n\"We saw a humanoid like this, remember?\" Irma said. \"It opened a door leading down into some entrance, back there on an open plain. When it saw us, it just walked away.\"\n\nAybe said, \"Yeah, maybe we should've looked into that entrance. We were getting pretty ragged, maybe it would've been good shelter.\"\n\nCliff knew this was a way of calling up an unspoken grudge. He had argued to push on and they had. \"That means these humanoids are maybe maintenance workers,\" he said mildly. \"They're working for the Folk, keeping the Bowl fit.\"\n\nThey broke off talk as the creatures moved. Without a word the entire party of Sil and humans turned and watched the humanoids go to each flank, surrounding them. Nobody spoke.\n\n\"Kahalla,\" Quert said. \"They hold us for Folk. Send message.\"\n\nTerry whispered, \"How can we get away?\"\n\nBefore Quert could speak, a long droning note washed over the area. It seemed to come from everywhere and was more like a sensation in Cliff's body than a sound. The tone shifted and a long rolling vowel played out, aaahhhhmmmm.\n\nQuert said, \"Sit. Listen. The stone mind wakes.\"\n\nCliff sized up their situation. There were at least a few hundred of the humanoids around them. They didn't look friendly. Many wore jackets and carried long tubes that looked like some sort of launch weapon. They were swarthy and their heads never turned away from watching the humans near the tower. They bristled with suppressed energy. Cliff wondered how he knew this and saw it was something about reading body postures. Maybe that was a universal, across species? Or else the whole primate suite of abilities converged\u2014driven by the urgent need to communicate, no matter what world your abilities came from\u2014on myriad subtle signs that told stories from a mere glance.\n\nIrma said quietly, \"They're dangerous. We can't fight them. Are we waiting for this song to end or what?\"\n\n\"They hear the long voice,\" Quert said.\n\nAybe said, \"So? How long does this last?\"\n\n\"The rock being speaks of its many deaths,\" Quert said, its head dipping low and eye darting up and down, a gesture Cliff did not know.\n\nTones now shifted higher, into shrees, kinnnes, awiiihs, and oooeeeiiinneees. The pressing power in it seemed to hammer the air around them. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance, his body arch and flex and stretch in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them.\n\n\"It's... it's playing us,\" he managed to get out. \"This sound...\"\n\n\"It tells of its great death,\" Quert said. \"Takes far time.\"\n\nThe Sil had formed a crescent facing outward against the solemn threatening silence of the humanoids. Together with Quert, the Sil flexed their arms, turning their inner elbows up to the sun. Cliff saw slender black fibers extend in the pits of their elbows. Their tips gleamed in the hard sunlight. He had never been able to tell males from females in the Sil, but it did not matter. They all had done some physiological magic and made these black lances poke out of their inner elbows. One of them abruptly jerked an arm down and the lance arced fast and sure out in a long parabola. The elegance of it struck Cliff as it watched it skewer a small wood emblem atop a hunkering stone sculpture of a big-chested humanoid. It hit the dry dark wood exactly in its center, and the black arrow flapped with energy not yet dissipated. As sure a challenge as he could imagine.\n\nThe humanoids did not respond. Their feet shuffled, their heads waggled a bit, but no sounds came. The big notes had fallen silent, and Cliff thought the song or whatever it was had come to an end. Dead silence. The Sil glowered at the humanoids and flexed their black arrows. He wondered how that had evolved. Gene tampering? An onboard defense, obviously. You didn't have to carry anything, and the black rods with their gleaming pointed tips waited for the downward yank of the arm. Their hands could be free, so they could have other weapons there, too. But... the Sil held no other weapons in their hands. No pistols or guns of any sort. Unlike the humanoids, who now sent forth barking calls, high and shrill.\n\nA taunt? A rebuke? It was impossible to tell. The calls stopped and Cliff felt himself tensing, pulse fast and hard. The two bands of aliens glared at each other in what seemed another universal signal\u2014narrowed eyes. Grunts and hisses and heavy panting. Feet stirred in the dust. Arms and chests bunched and flexed. A fevered bristly aroma came drifting on the still air, the heat of bodies exuding aromas that, he supposed, carried signals evolved long ago on planets far from this stark scene. Time stood crisp and still. Eyes darted and judged.\n\nBut then came long drawing notes from the stone tower. Echoing tones of kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrrafff...\n\nHe panted and watched the aliens move into position around them. Shuffling in the dust. Huffing with energy.\n\n\"We haven't got a chance, do we?\" he said in a casual way.\n\nIrma said wryly, \"Looks like.\"\n\nBoonnnug wrappppennnu faaaaliiiooong...\n\nThe humanoids lifted their heads. Their shuffling ceased. As the long solemn notes washed over them, they slowly buckled. Sat. Folded their armaments and their arms, down and low.\n\nThe long, loud notes rolled on. Cliff did not know this speech. Neither did the Sil, he gathered. But the humanoids did and they wilted before the slow steady sway of the music that poured over them. The words became a soothing song that washed over the entire stonework, itself laid out some vast time long ago, an era beyond knowing.\n\nThe warmth lulled Cliff as well. \"Take a break,\" he said to the others. \"Sit. Wait them out.\"\n\nHe felt the flowing wall of sound as it called, yoouuiunggg kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg.... He felt his knees go weak.\n\nQuert was having none of this. It said, \"Let them sit. You do not.\"\n\n\"Huh? Why?\" Cliff straightened up.\n\n\"The slow song will reach them. Resist it.\"\n\n\"Resist? I don't\u2014\"\n\nQuert gave him an eye-goggle he could not read.\n\n\"Let it go,\" Irma said. \"There's more going on here than we know.\"\n\nTerry and Aybe agreed, heads nodding, eyes drifting, going drowsy and vague. Greee habbbiiitaaa loohgeree...\n\nStrange fat pauses drifted by in the warm air. Hums and echoes. Like corpses on an ocean, Cliff thought, and jerked awake. What an odd repellent metaphor of the vaguely meaningful. His unconscious was seeping through as he got drowsy. Or was it something the words called forth? The low booming voice called... biiitha ablorgh quartehor biiilannaa...\n\nTo keep himself awake and not weaken and sit down, Cliff asked Quert, \"This is a sculpture? With a recording? Why is it so important?\"\n\nQuert looked at him with an expression Cliff had learned to read as puzzlement. \"It is alive. It awakes to speak.\"\n\nCliff glanced up at the huge eye, which was still staring down at them. Gradually Quert's indirect way of saying things unfurled the story of this place. What Cliff saw as a sculpture was actually a living thing. Alien to the Bowl, rugged and slow, it had come long ago from a world that died. \"It lives to tell. It awakes when audience approaches.\"\n\nIrma said, \"This is a smart rock?\"\n\nQuert said, \"Sunlight powered. From world very hot.\"\n\n\"It can't move, right?\" Aybe asked. \"How'd it get here?\"\n\nQuert found all this unremarkable. \"Bowl passing by. Explored that hot world. These Kahalla asked the Bowl to take one of them to keep themselves. To speak for them.\"\n\nTerry asked, \"To carry their culture?\"\n\nQuert turned to them and made a gesture they now knew meant \"stay steady\" among the Sil. \"It sings. The Kahalla decide to send one of them. Their sun swelled. They would soon melt.\"\n\nTerry said, \"I thought those humanoids\u2014\" He gestured at the ring surrounding them. \"\u2014were the Kahalla.\"\n\n\"They take name of living stone.\" Quert seemed to find this completely natural.\n\n\"We triggered the monument? The Kahalla stone?\" Aybe asked, his eyes wandering over the landscape.\n\nCliff understood; it was so ordinary in a dry fashion, but there were plenty of ways to get everything wrong here. Stones and primitives, all beneath a luminous sky, elements of ancient human history and still so easy to see as simple, a tailoring of Earth history. It was nothing like that. The strange kept trying not to be strange.\n\nQuert's eyes meant \"yes.\" \"I-us took here. Knew song was only way.\" The alien's eyes told more than its words, but then words were tight little symbol lines. They could easily deceive the mind.\n\nOnly way? To not get caught? Cliff studied the stern stonework that soared over a hundred meters above them. A single creature, something he would have bet plenty could never evolve: smart rock. On a hot dry world, there must have been some sort of competition. Among rocks? He could not grasp how they contended. Against weathering? To gain mass and so defend themselves against abrasive winds and tides? How could information flow in a stone? How could it gain intelligence, to control its fate?\n\nThis went beyond biology into geology\u2014and yet evolution had to explain such a thing. He recalled how dumbfounded he had been when he first saw the Bowl from SunSeeker. This made him feel the same way.\n\nIt was harder to remain standing, but Quert insisted. The resonant voice boomed on and the Sil listened intently. Long droning notes rode the hot dry air.\n\n\"Each time, different information,\" Quert said.\n\nLong song pealing on. In the next hour, Quert gave Cliff, in halting detail, some of the Kahalla's slow evolution. Planets that condensed out early near their stars necessarily must seethe and surge. Liquid metals and decaying radioactives spit energy into crystalline lattices. Order came from oblique condensations. The essentials geological were much like essentials biological: Life began from metabolism wedded with reproduction.\n\nThe first sentient Kahallans used their world's temperature and metallic difference between the core and the upper mantle as their thermodynamic driver. Along slithering seams of flowing lava, moving with aching slowness, they learned to track the shifting heat patterns. Predicting these was even better. Among the metal ions in their crystalline rhomboids, variations made their own order. Slow, slow and strange, reproduction of patterns followed. Some worked and so persisted. When shifting crystalline lattices held the basic data of early sentience, evolution's hammer could find its anvil\u2014much like bits encoded in silicon by humans' computing chips, fresh intelligences arose without benefit of the bio world.\n\nSize conferred advantages in energy harvesting, so the Kahalla grew ever larger, over working agonies of billions of years. They learned to communicate through acoustic waves amid the strata. Social evolution drove the geological, just as they had driven the biological.\n\nTime stretched on. There was plenty of it.\n\nAs their world's core cooled, the Kahalla migrated from near the core and toward the surface, for their planet was slowly spiraling toward its sun, its barren rocky surface cracking with the warming\u2014a new source of nourishment. Geological energy was like the biological\u2014diffuse, persistent. Driven by gradients, not logic. Yet it sifted through patterns and choices.\n\nAges passed. Finally the early Kahalla extruded themselves onto the plains festering with swarming heat, simmering beneath a glowering orange sky that was mostly now the skin of their star. Bio life had never arisen here, but now persistently the Kahalla colonized the stark black fields graced by rivers of smoldering lava. Great strange sagas of conquest and failure played out across smoldering landscapes. Songs worthy of immortality sang across blistered lands and blighted great monuments.\n\nCivilizations faded as tidal forces forced the planet nearer its star, ever nearer beneath a flowering culture\u2014and soon the Kahalla saw their fatal trap.\n\nWith their gravid slow slides of silicate, they could not migrate away from the surface fast enough to evade the heat. It lanced down from a star that swept the Kahalla with furious particle storms and bristling plasma. They retreated. Not fast enough. And ahead, their silicate minds knew, lay a great brutal force. They would soon enough reach the limit where tidal stretching could wrench and wrest apart their entire world.\n\nTheir society, ponderous and unimaginative, began to disintegrate. Their muted culture was largely a society of songs\u2014purling out through the stacked geological layers, soaring operas of driven love and inevitable death. Like all life in its long run, it strove to understand itself and so perhaps its universe.\n\nYet some had fashioned instruments to survey their lands, their swarming sultry skies\u2014and caught a glimmer of the Bowl in a momentarily clear sky. The Bowl had ventured in without fear of disrupting life-bearing worlds, for there were none\u2014it thought. It coasted clear and sure in a long hyperbolic orbit. The Bowl was a sudden beckoning promise to those slow and solid and doomed.\n\nSomehow the Kahalla sent a signal to the Bowl. It was of long wavelength and thus carried low meaning, A slow song. Yet over time their signal persisted, and was heard.\n\nAn expedition of robots answered\u2014the spawn of a crafter species that stubbornly managed the near-Bowl transport and mass harvesting. Much conversation came and went and came again. It became with gravid grace a slow sliding talk across barriers of time and mind and much else.\n\nYet still. These robots retrieved the essence of the Kahalla intelligence\u2014slabs of silicate, laced with evolved strands of impurities, all serving as a computational matrix.\n\nSo the robots brought the Kahalla mind to the Bowl in crystalline crucibles. It was a great act of graceful tribute, ordered by the least likely magistrates of all\u2014the Ice Minds. So did the very cold save the very hot from utter extinction.\n\n\"And this is the only one?\" Cliff asked Quert. The droning long chant was still pealing on. And on. Bass thuds and hollow tones spoke wruuunggg laddduuutt eeeillooonnnggghh.\n\n\"It alone stands for all the Kahalla now.\"\n\nCliff could sense the majesty of it as he watched the great vibrating rock, framed against cottony clouds that rushed across the sky. \"How does it live?\"\n\n\"The sun lights those\"\u2014an eye-shrug toward the hills\u2014\"and tech condenses the heat, feeds the Kahalla crystals.\"\n\n\"So it's like an enormous, living museum exhibit,\" Irma said.\n\n\"Bowl preserves. Without, life-forms die.\"\n\n\"All life-forms?\" she asked.\n\n\"Must be.\"\n\nCliff turned to watch the humanoids who had taken the name of this mournful singing stone and saw that the Kahalla's long hours of chant had done its work. The humanoids lay sprawled in deep slumber.\n\n\"Song goes to their souls,\" Quert said.\n\n\"You knew it would?\" Aybe whispered.\n\n\"Heard it did. Only chance.\" Quert turned and gave them a comical eye-shrug. Then Quert bowed and gestured to them all. \"Silent go.\"\n\nThe long aaahhhhmmmm loohgeree oojahhaaa habbbiiitaaa pealed on. It was great and strange and still impossible to fathom.\n\nThey left quietly. They were tired, but the long notes drove them forward. Somehow the place now smelled ancient and timeworn without question. The very scented air told them this without instruction.\n\nCliff and Irma and Aybe and Terry\u2014they were all that was left now, and they had to move. The constant sun slanted pale yellow through high sheets as they trundled on with the Sil forming a crescent escort around them. He saw rainbow clouds hovering in the vapor over their laboring heads. Their crescents spoke bold colors shimmering through the sky's firm radiance.\n\nHis team was shambling on now, sweaty and confused, truly tired in the way he had learned to recognize. Heads sagged, feet dragged, words slurred. The alien song droning on from far behind them would never end, he saw, down through however many corridors of ruin and turbulence that song needed. They were beautiful stretched songs telling of sad histories that no one would ever quite know. There would be scholars of it somehow in the long run, but they would carve off only a sheet of it and not know it entire. Cliff looked back once as they neared a stand of zigzag trees, a whole sweeping forest waving in the moment's breeze, and saw that the round eye was still watching them.\n\nIt never blinked. They went on.\nTWENTY-EIGHT\n\nCaptain Redwing started crisp and sharp, fresh from coffee, with the same questions he always used when taking staff through the planning stages of a new, untried operation. Standard questions, but always able to surprise.\n\nThey had walked through Karl's simulations and Ayaan Ali's trajectory analysis. The Specialty Artilects had put their own stamp upon the general plan, though as always they did not make judgments beyond a probability analysis. Their deep problem, Redwing thought, was that they were so much like human reason with far better data\u2014and yet so forever uncertain.\n\nThe worst way of reviewing options was to let people make speeches. Questions shook them up, made them come forth.\n\nHe looked at the entire assembled crew around the main deck table. \"First question: What could we be missing?\"\n\nKarl Lebanon answered. \"Their defenses.\"\n\nFred Ojama said, \"Ayaan Ali and I did a depth scan for those. Nothing obvious, like the gamma ray laser.\"\n\nBeth Marble set her mouth at a skeptical slant. \"They could launch craft against you from anywhere.\"\n\nPetty Officer Jam scowled. \"I've seen curiously few flights above their atmosphere envelope. They don't seem to launch into space often.\"\n\nClare Conway said, \"Speaking as copilot, the obvious way to launch is to just pop a craft out on the hull side. It's moving at hundreds of klicks a second right away, so you zoom around the rim. Come at us from that angle.\"\n\nAyaan Ali nodded. She was wearing a metallic blue scarf over her hair and resisting the urge to toy with it, Redwing noticed. This crew was good at suppressing tension and not allowing it to change the group mood. That had been a high selection criterion. She spoke slowly. \"We would have time to deal with that. I am able to turn the ship quickly now. We've learned how to use the magnetic torque technique to gain angular momentum from the fields above their atmosphere. And we may be difficult to spot, since we will be in the jet.\"\n\nKarl nodded. Redwing saw they had now mentally stacked up the unknowns, which was a good moment to hit them with more. \"Second big question: How will this not work?\"\n\nSilence. Beth said quietly, \"If they have something to prevent tipping the jet awry. Something we can't guess at now.\"\n\n\"They've surprised us plenty before,\" Ayaan Ali added.\n\nKarl added, \"Right. They've had lots of time to think about this.\"\n\nClare said, \"What maybe won't work? Me. I may overestimate my ability to pilot through the jet. Beth, how bad was it?\"\n\n\"An endurance test, mostly. I was driving straight up the bore, staying near the middle. Had to stay on the helm every second of the way. The big problem was keeping SunSeeker stable in the plasma turbulence. The jet is far denser than anything this ship and its magscoop were designed for. I had to max everything we had.\"\n\nRedwing wanted to add, And we nearly overheated, too, but he said instead, \"Sounds hard. But we're thinking of a fast flight through, yes?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Beth said, looking at Redwing, who nodded. \"Put it this way\u2014staying alive on the Bowl was hard, too, but lots more fun.\"\n\nTheir faces had grown more somber already. Most of them hadn't been revived when SunSeeker flew up the jet and through the Knothole, but they had heard about the long hours of a creaking, groaning ship, and the dizzy swirls when they yawed and nearly tumbled. Their eyes turned introspective. He decided to loosen them up.\n\n\"Y'know, way back when I was in nav school, I asked an instructor, 'Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?' At first the woman didn't want to answer. But I nagged her and finally she said, 'It saves them time.'\"\n\nWhen their laughter died down\u2014he could read their tensions by that measure, too\u2014he said, \"Point is, I'm a bug about details. Made me pretty damn obnoxious in nav school and ever since.\" He gave them a smile. \"I learned that in nav and tactics and all the rest. Space doesn't forgive anybody. So we have to simulate all the troubles we can see coming.\"\n\nKarl said, \"And then?\"\n\n\"I'll throw some unknowns you hadn't thought of into the simulation, the training pod, all the rest. I want you to expect the unexpected.\"\n\nThey nodded and for half an hour they tossed around possible unknowns. Then he said, \"Question three: Will you please shoot as many holes as possible into my thinking on this?\"\n\nThis led to more scattershot thinking, more debate. The jet was the big problem, and there were many ways to look at it. Redwing waved his hand in a programmed way, and the bridge wall lit up with a photo of the Bowl made when they were on the approach from the side. This was when Redwing and the small watch crew, plus Cliff and Beth, were just trying to grasp the concept of the Bowl. That now seemed so long ago, but it was less than a year.\n\nSome of them must not have seen it before, because it brought gasps.\n\n\"I'd forgotten how beautiful it is,\" Beth said.\n\nClare said wistfully, \"Some of us have only seen it up close. We missed a lot.\"\n\nFred pointed. \"Notice how it flares out from its star, then narrows down a lot. That's the magnetic stresses working. Wish I knew how they do it.\"\n\nKarl said, \"I've fished around in the thousands of images SunSeeker's Omni-survey Artilect made on our approach. That's when we got far enough ahead, while we were making our long turn to rendezvous. By the way\"\u2014a nod to Beth\u2014\"that was brilliant navigation. Hitting a moving target on an interstellar scale.\"\n\n\"This was all-spectra?\" Fred asked.\n\n\"Exactly. Here is a view of the other side of their star. Away from the jet. It's in spectral lines specified to bring out the magnetic structures visible in their solar corona.\"\n\nAyaan Ali said, \"Star acne,\" one of her rare jokes. She even blushed when everyone laughed.\n\nBeth said hesitantly, \"Those are all... magnetic storms?\"\n\n\"Not storms, though on our sun, they would eventually blow open and make storms. Those loop structures are anchored in the star's plasma. Think of the magnetic fields as rubber bands. The plasma holds them down, and when they get free they stretch away from their feet. They're stable, at least for a while. Lots of magnetic field energy in those things. They move, just like the ones on our sun. But in the long run they move toward the edge we see and migrate. Over to the other side.\"\n\nBefore Karl could go on, Fred said, \"To the jet.\"\n\nKarl chuckled. \"I should know somebody'd steal my thunder. Fred's good at that.\"\n\n\"So the other side of their star, which we can't see\u2014\"\n\n\"Is a magnetic farm, sort of?\" Clare said skeptically.\n\nKarl chuckled again. \"You guys are too fast. Yep, Clare, that's where the star builds big magnetic loops and swirls. Then they drift over to our side of the star. They gang up around the foot of the jet. Then they merge\u2014don't ask me how. That feeds magnetic energy into the jet\u2014builds it, I guess.\" He shrugged. \"I don't have a clue about how this gets done.\"\n\nAll but Karl had blank, big-eyed stares. Redwing watched them digest the scale of the whole thing for a long moment. Star engineering, he thought. Somehow we missed that in school....\n\n\"There's a real problem here,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"These Folk aliens you talked to, Captain\u2014did they seem like beings who could command a star?\"\n\nRedwing pursed his lips. He liked to let things speak for themselves, and so had not kept the recording of his talk with Tananareve away from the crew. The more heads working these problems, the better. They had intuitions about the Folk, too, and now was the right time to let them come out. So he just nodded to Beth with raised eyebrows.\n\nBeth said, \"You've all seen my pictures of the one who interrogated us, Memor. Plus all the assistants\u2014so much smaller, they seem like another species entirely. Probably they are, but they work together in what looked to us like a steep hierarchy. Impressive, that Memor\u2014especially in bulk. But a creature that could manage a star?\" She arched a skeptical eyebrow and let her mouth turn down in a comic show of doubt.\n\nThis brought smiles all round the table. \"My point exactly,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"How would anything our size\u2014hell, any size\u2014made out of ordinary matter, control solar magnetic loops?\"\n\n\"Good point,\" Fred said. \"There's something else going on.\"\n\n\"But what?\" Redwing said.\n\nNo answers. They were all thinking, and he saw it was time to get back to work. He flicked another image on the view wall. \"Here's a later view as we came around in advance of their star.\"\n\nThis brought more quiet ooohs and aahhhs.\n\n\"Here's where we see the point about those magnetic loops,\" Karl said. Fred was already nodding. \"See how the jet seems to curl around? Those are\u2014\"\n\n\"Magnetic helices,\" Fred cut in. \"The corkscrew threads are brighter, because the field strength is stronger there, and so is the plasma density. Classic stuff. Way back a century or two ago, we saw all that in the big jets that come out of disks around black holes. Astronomers know plenty about these.\"\n\n\"Uh, thanks.\"\n\nRedwing could tell Karl was getting irked with Fred's butting in. But Karl was holding himself back with admirable restraint. And Fred's point was well taken. Redwing said mildly, \"So to get the idea for this, whoever built it had only to look into the night sky. At other galaxies, same as we did back in the\u2014what, twenty-first century?\"\n\nKurt nodded. \"As Fred said, yes. My point is, the jet gets all that magnetic field strength from the loop structures. So those magnetic fields migrate around to the jet base and get sucked up into it somehow.\"\n\nFred said, \"Ah! Then those fields do the crucial job of confining the jet, straightening it out into the lance that spears through the Knothole.\"\n\n\"Right. Because the star spins, its magnetic field gets twisted and wrinkled, kind of like a ballerina's skirt. That gets swept into the base of the jet, hangs up in it. The intense pressures at the base throw the jet out. It swells at first. Then the magnetic fields sort themselves out. Because field lines have to eat their tail\u2014they can't break\u2014they weave themselves. We've known a long while that you can twist a magnetic field so it crosses itself\u2014but then it just springs back as two loops, almost like reproduction. So the field self-organizes in the flow and takes the jet through the Knothole.\" Karl finished with a flourish, getting the picture of the Bowl to make the threads in the jet fluoresce like neon signs.\n\nBeth caught on to this. \"I get it\u2014hell, I experienced it. Waves of hard turbulence, coming at us at speeds SunSeeker was never designed for.\"\n\nKarl smiled, happy to see his theory confirmed by raw experience. \"You came in on the jet at first in the exhaust, right? Backwash. That's where the folds of the skirt bunch up\u2014\"\n\nKarl went on with some more technical stuff, but Redwing didn't listen. He watched them all to see how they took it in. Teams had to feel they had some understanding of what they were about to get into. If you were lucky, you even got a dividend, a fresh idea or two.\n\n\"It's self-organizing,\" Ayaan Ali said, gazing at the intricate luminous lines that laced through the jet. \"That's why it all works.\"\n\nPlainly this surprised everyone. Ayaan Ali's crew slot was navigator\/pilot, not astrophysics.\n\nShe paid no attention to their puzzled expressions and went on, \"Our fusion drive is the same. It confines plasma long enough to fuse it for energy, heats the incoming plasma that way. Then we blow it out the back. It's a hot plasma shaped by magnetic fields all along the way. That jet that makes the Bowl work\u2014it's just like our exhaust jet.\"\n\nA few jaws dropped. Redwing had always enjoyed moments like this. Get a smart crew together and let them Ping-Pong ideas back and forth. Add new information. Stir. Turn up the heat a notch. Simmer. Amazing, how often good fresh notions came out.\n\nA rustle of astonishment. \"Good point,\" Karl said. \"The same basic idea in our ship and... theirs.\"\n\n\"Their shipstar,\" Redwing said.\n\nThe melody of the conversation had shifted. The immensity of what they faced simmered below everything they said, and their faces showed this. Tight mouths, chins stiff, eyes dancing or else narrowed. Time to get them back into focus.\n\n\"Even if it's technically sound,\" Redwing said, leaning forward with hands clamped together on the table. \"There's the big question\u2014is this maneuver understandable enough for the ship Artilects to operate, to troubleshoot, and to extend what they've learned?\"\n\nBeth said, \"Our flight in, up the jet\u2014the Nav Artilect group certainly learned from that.\"\n\nAyaan Ali's face became veiled, remembering. \"You're right. When I came on duty, I was amazed at how much they could do. Remember when we had trouble with the scoop getting enough mass to fuse it in our core chamber? They adjusted the field structure before I could even grasp what was wrong. They'd never done that in our field trials out in the Oort cloud.\"\n\nThe talk got technical. They all ran with it. The deep silent secret of SunSeeker was the collaboration between mere mortal humans and the crystal Artilects who knew much that the vagrant human mind could not hold in ready use. The Artilects managed innumerable details at a speed and accuracy far beyond the blunt comprehension of their fragile cargo. They were integrated artificial minds, merged into a collective intellect. A society of minds, furiously engaged. Redwing always thought of them as crew who rarely talked back. They kept track of innumerable daily problems and never complained. The Insys Artilect, especially; he spoke with it several times every watch. On the other hand, they never had really original ideas.\n\nClare said sternly, \"Their attention reservoirs can take only so much\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's leave that to experience,\" Redwing cut in. \"Officer Conway,\" with a nod to Clare, \"consult the Artilects themselves. Give them your simulations; ask them to appraise their own capabilities. Regard them as crew members who couldn't make it to this meeting, if you will.\" And since the interior systems no doubt can hear us in their acoustic monitors, they actually are here. Not that the Insys Artilect would ever bring it up; strategy was not its province. But he suppressed that thought, for now.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" she said, and sipped her coffee. Always the caffeinated, he recalled\u2014she used it to drive herself harder. Several others around the table did the same, an amusing social echo.\n\n\"Then we are resolved on this course?\" Redwing said with a light and conversational air.\n\nOnly Beth failed to get the message. Probably, he thought, because she had been down on the Bowl so long and had forgotten shipboard's unspoken signals. She said, \"I don't know if we've resolved anything, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"We're going to give the Folk a nudge,\" Redwing said. \"Their reply was quite clear\u2014they killed our coin array. They don't want us knowing the local conditions well, to navigate by. If we were Earthside, that would be an act of war.\"\n\nBeth wouldn't stand down. \"A 'nudge'? Despite all these problems? Unknowns? Risks?\"\n\nHe leaned forward, extending his clasped hands. \"There are always problems. My orders are to get us to Glory and see if we can colonize it. Extracting us from this strange... place... this shipstar... I see as my duty. To do so, I must impress on these aliens that we will not join the\u2014what was their term? The one Beth reported?\"\n\nRedwing looked down the table at Beth, whose open O of a mouth told him she had not expected this. Maybe the ground truth of the Bowl had told her something he did not know? \"Beth?\"\n\n\"The... the Adopted.\"\n\n\"Right. We're not a damn bunch of orphans from Earth. We're not going to get Adopted.\"\n\nBeth said, \"In their eyes...,\" and stopped.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"We've been gone from Earth so long, all our relatives dead, who knows what has happened...\" She looked forlorn for a moment, grasping for words, head down. \"We might as well be orphans.\"\n\nHe had not expected this. What had the Bowl done to her? \"We're officers of a ship, Science Officer Beth Marble. Humanity's farthest excursion. We have a goal and we shall reach it. This Bowl interlude, however amazing, will be useful, but we shall go on. Is that understood?\"\n\nLong silence. Karl started to say something, his lips half-forming a word, but thought better of it. Fred was quite obviously biting his tongue, eyes studying the table as if it were a brilliant new discovery. Their faces closed up into pale masks with eyes looking everywhere but not at Beth or at him. Very well. \"This was an exploratory discussion, folks. I appreciate a free airing of views, as always.\"\n\nFred said, \"Outcome pretty obvious. When we came in.\"\n\nRedwing let nothing show in his face. \"I'm sorry, Officer Ojama? Your special area is geology, as I recall. And ship systems. You said...?\"\n\n\"It was pretty obvious you had decided to fly into the jet. You wanted to get us used to it.\" Only after saying this did Fred's eyes jerk away from the table's smooth obsidian finish and dart a look at Redwing.\n\nRedwing did not let his feelings show, much less his surprise at Fred's suddenly becoming a talker on something other than tech details. Always remember that these people are damned smart. And odd. Not predictable. \"Quite so. It's useful to hear how hard this is going to be. Also to know the purpose.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" Beth was still softly defiant. Her eyes glowed.\n\n\"Getting to Glory. Those are our mission orders. We're carrying humanity to the stars. Beginning a process that ensures our species immortality.\" They had all heard these terms, but maybe they needed to be reminded.\n\n\"We haven't discussed other options,\" Fred said, his eyes still holding firm on Redwing.\n\n\"I haven't heard any proposed,\" Redwing said, deliberately settling his cheek on his right palm, as if settling in to listen.\n\n\"We could\u2014should\u2014continue our conversation with the Folk. Edge them toward our point of view.\" Beth said this stiffly, eyes on Redwing. \"They have Tananareve and Cliff's team, yes. But we have so many sleeping souls with us\u2014\"\n\n\"We have given them days already,\" Clare Conway said. \"And they attacked our coins. In a few more days, what else might they do?\"\n\nRedwing was happy with this support and decided to let them talk awhile, let the idea sink in.\n\nFred said, \"Think about us as orphans. This thing, the Bowl, is so old\u2014they must be used to expeditions from some nearby star coming out to look. So whatever alien species arrived, they were on a one-way trip. Just like us. That's the Folk history. So they think of us the same way.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Karl said. \"They think the Bowl is so wonderful, of course smart species want to come and see it. Tourists who came and stayed.\"\n\nFred grinned, a rare event. \"Not like us, passersby.\"\n\nRedwing did not like the way this was going. He kept his tone measured and precise. \"In the end, a ship is not a democracy. It's a ship and there's only one captain. I'm it. I have to decide.\" This came out of him as a formula, but he had to say it.\n\n\"The Bowl teaches us a lot, Captain.\" Beth spoke quietly, slowly, but firm and steady. \"We should study it awhile before we just go on. Before we leave it behind. There's so much to learn!\"\n\n\"They could be just waiting us out,\" Clare said. \"They know our general flight plan. It demands that we have only a few crew up and consuming food while we're on full-bore flight. Here, we're in a solar system, of sorts. We're catching their solar wind, what there is of it, and barely maintaining good sailing conditions. They know us. We don't know them.\"\n\nFred said, \"They must have seen our magscoop flexing, struggling, trying out new patterns.\" He nodded to Clare. \"And we kept running, but barely.\"\n\n\"It's pretty obvious, now that I think about it, from their point of view,\" Karl said. \"They know this system intimately\u2014hell, we don't even know how they manage to run it!\"\n\n\"So it's likely they want to wait us out. Run low on supplies.\" Clare looked around at the whole table. \"Gives them more time to hunt down Cliff's team, too.\"\n\nRedwing was glad to get some support without saying a word. \"Y'know,\" he said casually, \"Magellan lost most of his crew when he sailed around the world.\"\n\n\"Magellan didn't make it home either,\" Fred said. \"And we have over a thousand souls sleeping aboard who count on us.\"\n\nWell, that backfired. \"They're always in my calculations, Fred,\" he said as warmly as he could.\n\n\"I still think\u2014,\" Beth began.\n\n\"That's not a crew officer issue,\" Redwing said firmly. \"Not at all.\"\n\nSilence as it sank in. To his surprise, Karl said with a deliberate mild voice, \"We do not know what we face.\"\n\nRedwing felt the tension rising in the room. At least the Artilects don't argue.... \"The human race has never known what it faced. We came out of Africa not knowing that deserts and glaciers lay ahead. Same here. If we have no respect from these Folk, we will be captives. Humanity will become zoo animals.\"\n\nThis shocked them. Their eyes widened, blinked, mouths opened and closed with a snap. Maybe they'll remember their obligations. Where they came from.\n\nThey all looked at him long and hard. But Beth looked away\u2014and in that moment he knew that he had them.\nTWENTY-NINE\n\nTananareve was a useful test subject. Memor enjoyed experimenting with the primate.\n\nMemor listened to the rumble of the fast train and ignored Bemor, who was working on his portable communicator. The primate was irked, eyes narrowed, after she heard some of Memor's remarks about the difficulty of negotiating with their Captain. Tananareve did not know she carried embedded sensors that reported regularly to Memor's diagnostic systems. When she got angry, her heart rate, arterial tension, and testosterone production increased. Quite interestingly, her stress hormones decreased.\n\nMemor turned out of the line of sight and flourished a flat display of the primate response.\n\n\"Bemor, note this, please.\"\n\nBemor idly cast a distracted glance. Memor sent the data set to him and he glanced at the curves on his comm. \"How odd, that anger relieves stress in these primates.\"\n\nHe sniffed. \"With bad social effects, I would wager.\"\n\n\"Why? It must have evolved in the wild\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly. They feel the stress-lowering as a kind of pleasure. So to relieve anxieties, they fight. This is not good for a peaceful society. It may explain why they are out here, far from home, exploring.\"\n\nMemor paused. She differed with her brother over this area, which was, after all, her own realm of research. But... \"You could be right. It seems an unlikely feature in a species we would make docile.\"\n\n\"I note her left brain hemisphere becomes more stimulated as well. This may confer some aggressive abilities.\"\n\nMemor let this ride. The strumming metallic rhythms of the fast train were comforting, considering that they were moving with truly astronomical speeds down magnetically pulsing tubes, over elegant curve trajectories, arcing across and within the Bowl's long slopes. They had voyaged now for several slumbers. The fast tubes were cramped, and their outer metal skins at times heated to smarting temperatures through inductive losses. Tight, unamusing quarters even for Folk. Uninspired edibles, with little live game at all. Memor passed the last wriggling forkfish to Bemor; it flapped weakly and gave a soft cry of despair. He took it with relish and crunched happily, snapping the bones. The heady, acid flavor of the forkfish filled the cabin. Tananareve made a clenched face and covered her mouth and nose with a cloth.\n\nAll this travel to rendezvous with the proximate locus the autoprobes had found\u2014among the icefields of the hull, in ready range of the Ice Minds\u2014for the vagrant primates.\n\nThe renegade primates had tripped detectors among the renegade Sil first. Now this. Memor's attempts to keep a distant trace on the primates was well enough, Bemor thought, but \"Given to excess,\" he had remarked, \"when not well policed.\"\n\nSeveral ready examples had happened a short while ago.\n\nFirst came the incident in which Sil hirelings had patrolled the precincts outside the recently bombed Sil city. There were minor traces of the primates in the area, but the bombardment had eliminated most of the sites where identification would have been simple. Instead there were vague sightings and some detector probables. Bemor had disliked Memor's delegation of patrolling to a band of Sil unloyal to the central Sil hierarchy. They attempted a poorly thought-through maneuver to block the primates' movements across a plain. The Sil accompanying the Late Invaders managed to kill and badly injure several of their blockers. There was one report that a car of Late Invaders had taken part in the action. Since Memor knew this same party had killed a local party in a magcar before, and taken part in an insurrection from which Memor herself narrowly escaped, this latest incident was no surprise.\n\nThe second incident was more troubling. The same Sil and Late Invaders party had been glimpsed by a routine patrol skirting the hull territories. Only one clear identification, but enough. Yet by the time automatic patrols had arrived, the party was gone.\n\nNow a third report, in a region housing old intelligences. The portal near the Kahalla shrine had triggered an abnormality alert. This signal came to the attention of resident monitors for the Zone. Since Memor had a tag on such genetic identifiers, she heard of this just a short while ago, when already in the long magnetic train tube network with Bemor.\n\n\"They move in crafty fashion,\" Bemor had observed. \"Doubtless this is not a signature of Late Invader cleverness. They do not know our territories. They must be guided by the Sil.\"\n\nMemor sent a fan-array in a flutter of subtle, doubting yellows. \"I doubt the Sil have such abilities either. We have contained them in their urge to expand for a great long time now. Many generations have passed since Sil could roam in exploring parties.\"\n\nBemor considered this. \"They are also a rambunctious species, still. Some longlives ago, they sought access to the strictly nonsentient Zones.\"\n\n\"I do recall.\" Memor quickly accessed her Undermind, and the memory unfolded for her quick review. \"Outright demands for territory, claiming that their species had spread quickly over their homeworld due to a mixed genetic and social imperative.\"\n\n\"Quite. Note that seems, from your own work, to be a signature heritage of your Late Invaders.\"\n\nThe implications of this struck Memor only now. But her Undermind quickly sent a link that showed she had been mulling over these Late Invader\u2013Sil resonances. But only vaguely. Bemor, on the other hand, had seen it immediately.\n\nMemor turned to Tananareve. \"Your origins are how far back in your own measure?\"\n\nThe primate took her time. Her eyes swept from Memor to her brother as she kept her mouth stiff. Then, \"Several hundred thousand orbitals.\"\n\nBemor had not ingested Memor's concept-map of her studies of the Late Invaders, for he said, \"She must not know the correct sum.\"\n\n\"No, this fits with her supporting frame-referencing knowledge. I read it directly from her long-term memory.\"\n\n\"Unreliable. We do not know the topology of her Undermind.\"\n\n\"We will. But more important, I asked her. She gave a detailed history of their species traumas. Detailed and odd, but plausible. They were several times forced into small surviving parties, due to climate shifts. At one point they were barely above levels to avoid inbreeding in a cold place near an ocean. This built in a desire to expand\u2014almost an assumption, I would say, that the lands far beyond the hills they saw could be better.\"\n\nBemor huffed and shifted his bulk uneasily. In close quarters, his musk flavored the air and rankled her nose. She sniffed as a rebuke. \"It is rare to proceed up through the stages of mental layering you describe. I cannot believe it would occur in so few orbitals of an ordinary star.\"\n\n\"As I recall, the Sil also evolved high intelligence and tool use in a short while.\" Memor fished up the details and sent them to Bemor.\n\nA long moment of brooding inspection, a rumbling in his chest, wheeze of slowly expelled breath. \"So they did. This explains their intuitive alliance with the Late Invaders.\"\n\nMemor said, \"We have new data that the Sil have been privy to our general messages about the Late Invaders. They may have sensed this as their opportunity.\"\n\nBemor turned to Tananareve. \"You know of the Sil?\" he asked in something resembling Anglish.\n\n\"Only what you have said of them,\" she said.\n\n\"They are with the other escaped Late Invaders.\"\n\n\"We were not invaders at all!\" This animated the primate. \"We came as peaceful explorers.\"\n\nHe rumbled with mirth at this, but a quick startled expression on Tananareve's face showed she thought it an aggressive sound. \"Your peacefulness is surely moot, is it not? You of course we retained, but some others of you escaped.\"\n\n\"We do not like being unfree.\"\n\n\"And we\u2014who of course did not fear any warlike abilities such as your kind might have\u2014do not savor intrusion. We avoid having new influences introduced into our Bowl without adequate wise supervision.\" Bemor said this slowly, as if speaking to a child, or to some of the slower Adopteds.\n\n\"I think by now all of 'our kind' would like to just get away from this place. We have another destination.\"\n\n\"As well we know,\" Memor said, flashing a humor her fan-signal to Bemor. \"But that is also why we cannot allow you to arrive there first.\"\n\nA nod. \"That's how I figured it.\"\n\n\"Can you also give an opinion of why your companions are allied with the Sil?\"\n\nTananareve smiled. \"They need help.\"\n\n\"And why together a band of these is moving through the Bowl, using fast transport and undersurface methods?\" Bemor huffed, drawing nearer the primate\u2014who then shrank back, nose wrinkling.\n\n\"They're on the run. Been running so long, maybe it's a habit.\"\n\nMemor suspected this was a gibe but said nothing. Bemor persisted, his sour and salty male odor rising in their compartment. \"Nothing more?\"\n\nShe looked up at them both with a level, assessing gaze. \"How about curiosity?\"\n\n\"That is not a plausible motive,\" Memor said, but saw that Bemor gave off flurry-fan-signals of disagreement.\n\n\"I fear it is,\" Bemor said. \"We try not to allow such facets of a species' character to rule their behavior.\"\n\nTananareve smiled again. \"That's what becoming Adopted means?\n\n\"In part,\" Bemor conceded.\n\n\"Then you will savor our destination,\" Memor said. \"It will show you creatures you have never seen and quite probably cannot imagine.\" No point in not using a touch of anticipation, was there? Some species appreciated that.\n\nThe primate said, \"Try me.\"\nPART X\n\nSTONE MIND\n\nIt's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.\n\n\u2014MARK TWAIN\nTHIRTY\n\nCliff watched the sleeting, tarnished-silver rain slam down from an angry, growling purple cloud. This was like a more ferocious form of the cool autumnal storms he had waited out while hiking in the high Sierra Nevada, with crackling platinum lightning electrifying half the sky's dark pewter. Crack and boom, all louder and larger than in the Sierra, maybe because it came from an atmosphere deeper and more driven, sprawling across scales far larger than planets. This violence was casually enormous, with clouds stacked like purple sandwiches up the silvered sky until they faded in the haze. The stench of wet wood mingled with a zesty tang of ozone, sharp in his nose and sinuses. He tasted iron in the drops that splashed on his outstretched tongue, and salt in the rough leaves they'd just eaten, plus a citrus burn in the vegetables they'd managed to scrounge from some trees nearby, before the hammering rainstorm arrived. Tastes of the alien lands.\n\n\"Rain near done,\" Quert said. \"Need go. Soon.\"\n\nCliff could scarcely believe this prediction. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Folk find us.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"They know much. Even stones\u2014\" A gesture to distant sharp peaks, emerging from cottony clouds as the storm ebbed. \"\u2014speak to them. Always know.\" A grave nod of Quert's bare head said much.\n\nCliff nodded. Rain pattered down and smoke stained the air and it was hard to think. Quert made sense. The whole Bowl was deeply wired in some way. Its lands were vast but not stupid; there had to be a smart network that wove all this together. Still, most of the Bowl had to run on its own. No one or no thing could manage so huge a space unless the default options were stable, ordinary, and would work without incessant managing. Still...\n\nNo security from prying eyes would last for long. Their only advantage was that the Bowl was, while well integrated, still so vast. Even light took a while to cross it\u2014up to twelve minutes, from the edge of the rim to the other edge. The delays sending text or faint voices across it, to Redwing on SunSeeker, were irritating. Especially when you could lose contact at any second.\n\nThe sky roiled with restless smoldering energy. Sudden gusts of howling wind drove the cold hard rain into their rock shelter. The pewter sky slid endlessly across them. But Quert had made them stop here in a long shaped-stone space, angular and ancient seeming, cut back into a hillside. They got in just before the slamming storm descended. Then after hours of huddling, the sky calmed. By the time they ate some of their food, heating it with burning twigs, a black slate wedge had slid overhead and the first hard drops spattered down.\n\nNow it suddenly ended. Cliff turned to the others and said, \"Pack up, gang.\"\n\nSil and humans, they all grunted a bit with the effort of getting moving and splashed water on their fire. Cliff could still taste the sweet meat they had roasted there. It had made him wish for a robust California zinfandel, though perhaps those didn't even exist anymore now. Maybe there wasn't a place called California anymore back Earthside, he mused.\n\nThe succulent aromatic filets came from a big fat meaty doglike creature that had rushed at them hours before. When it came fast out of some big-leafed rustling bushes, they first noticed the curved yellow horns it carried on a broad, bony head. Then the bared teeth. It snarled and leaped, with an expression Cliff thought looked as greedy as a weasel in a henhouse. Most of them froze, for it was a true surprise\u2014not even Quert and the Sils had seen it coming. But Aybe had caught it in midair with a laser shot that drilled through its surprisingly large brain cage and the thing fell limp and sprawling at their feet. It died with a shudder and a long, gut-deep gasp.\n\nThey ate the dark rich meat eagerly. It had a strong muscular frame that gutted easily. The Sil cracked its bones and sucked out the marrow. Cliff considered doing it\u2014fat hunger!\u2014but the rank, oily smell put him off. So he offered his bone around.\n\n\"Sure,\" Aybe said, taking it. He sliced a line in it with his serrated blade and snapped the bone open over his knee. \"Yum.\"\n\nIrma and Terry shook their heads, no. \"Ugh,\" Terry said. \"I grew up on a low-fat diet. That was gospel for a half century, before we had nano blood policing.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Irma added, wrinkling her nose. \"Our generation hated that fat smell.\"\n\n\"I like it plenty,\" Aybe said. \"Must be\u2014hey, what generation are you?\"\n\nTerry, Cliff, and Irma looked at each other. \"We're in our seventies,\" Irma said.\n\n\"Gee, I'm forty-four,\" Aybe said.\n\n\"Just a kid,\" Terry said. \"Surprised you made the grade. The rumor around Fleet was, nobody has enough experience before they're in their fifties.\"\n\nAybe smirked. \"You old guys always say that.\"\n\nIrma chuckled. \"The first forty years are for sex and reproduction. You used yours amassing a lot of tech abilities?\"\n\n\"Sure did.\" Aybe shrugged. \"I wanted more than anything to get on a starship. Reproduction is overrated.\"\n\nThey all laughed. \"Women routinely stored eggs and you guys are never quite out of business,\" Irma said. \"Childbirth's just easier below sixty.\"\n\n\"How old do you think Redwing is?\" Terry asked, finishing a slab of meat he had traded with Aybe in return for another bone.\n\n\"Gotta be a hundred,\" Terry said.\n\n\"Older, I'd say. Went through the tail end of the Age of Appetite, he told me once. Pretty nasty time.\"\n\n\"He's a pretty nasty guy,\" Aybe said, and then sucked loudly on a long bone until they could hear him drawing air all the way through it, a hollow slurp.\n\n\"Look,\" Cliff said mildly, \"plenty of people live to well over a hundred and fifty now. Redwing's not what I'd call old.\"\n\n\"By 'now' you mean 'when we were Earthside,' right?\" Terry said. \"God knows how old people live there now.\"\n\nThat made everyone think of the abyss of time separating them from everyone they knew, Cliff saw. He let that ride for a while. Quert nodded to him, seeming to understand. Then it was time to move on.\n\nThey hiked away from their latest rough stone shelter into a clearing sky. There were local horizons here, but now the stray clouds skated over those near horizons and the sweet blue air above cleared further. Cliff had not seen before this sharp, sure atmosphere that he knew was deeper than anything on Earth. Yet now few clouds intruded into a shimmering sharp air. The piercing point star of the Bowl's governing sky still hung above them, of course. But he and his team had moved along the slope of the Bowl for many days at high speeds, one way or the other, and now the star\u2014Cliff had named it Wickramsingh's Star, he recalled\u2014shone not at the absolute center of this sky, but at a slight angle. Its jet seemed now to plunge more deeply toward them. Its streamers turned with elegant grace, pale orange filaments laced across the gauzy firmament. He watched its slow swirls as they slogged across a broad hill. The humans hung back from the Sil advance point men\u2014though some of their Sil party, he had finally realized, were women. He still could not tell their sexes apart with assurance. The Sil didn't seem to have strong binary distinctions between sexes in looks, dress, or behavior. Their occasional puzzled glances at Irma might come from that. Maybe, Cliff realized, humans were just more sexually restless than these Sil.\n\nShapes darted around in the forest. Cliff had seen that with constant sunlight, creatures had to be on guard all the time. Prey had eyes that looked broadly, like rabbits' bulging eyes, or insects' compound eyes\u2014all designed to see at wide angles. Predators, as on Earth, had good depth of field, with eyes looking mostly forward, and wide-spaced for maximal 3-D perception.\n\nIrma walked beside him, shouldering her pack where it wore on her, and said brightly, \"Ever think, how come we're seeing so many bipeds?\"\n\nCliff tried to remember that he actually was a biologist. \"Um. Hadn't thought. But look, as I recall from lectures, anyway, Earthside bipedalism was really nothing more than an oddball vertebrate artifact.\"\n\nShe adjusted her hat against the sunlight. \"Those back there, the Kahalla, they couldn't pass for us, not even in a dim room. Humanoids, though, for sure. Same basic design. But they're from a tide-locked world, not like Earth at all. Odd.\"\n\nHe kept watching the forest slipping by as they marched on. But theory was fun, too. He bit off a bit of a sweet root they'd pried up from the ground, under Quert's instruction, and said, \"Convergent evolution, must be. Those Kahalla prob'ly had four-limbed ancestors, just like us. Back Earthside, the arthropods always had limbs to spare, but not poor old mammals like us. We're bipeds because we started with four limbs, and developed climbing skills, then tool use. That left two limbs for walking, so that pressure forced us to stand up.\"\n\nIrma took some of the sweet root, ate through all the rest of it, and smiled. She, too, endlessly scanned the passing trees and vines, and searched the skies. You learned to stay alert after so long in the field. \"Yeah, Earthside, bipeds are really rare. Except for birds, who've got 'em because they invest so much in wings. For invertebrates, the closest thing to that vertical posture is something like a praying mantis.\"\n\nCliff thought on that as he slapped a fat bug that wanted to use his hair for a nest. \"A mantis has four legs.\"\n\nIrma's voice always went up in pitch when she had an idea. \"You're skipping my point. We saw one biped far back, right? Big lumbering thing that ignored us, dunno why. Then the Sil. Now these Kahalla. All had heads with faces, two forward-looking eyes and jaws and a nose.\"\n\nCliff saw her point. \"Not a necessary arrangement, right. Just look at arthropod faces. Scary, because they're just close enough to ours to look threatening, horrible.\"\n\n\"Those Kahalla though, had pointy faces, eyes more on the side.\"\n\n\"That's a prey signature. I remember from high school, 'Eyes front, likes to hunt; eyes on side, likes to hide.' Seems to be a universal.\"\n\n\"Plus they had fur,\" Irma said. \"We don't, because we overheated when we ran long distances\u2014so we lost the fur.\"\n\nCliff nodded, recalling how lumbering those Kahalla figures had been. Bulky, ponderous, more like bears than people. And not a word had been spoken between them and the humans and Sil. Just glowers and postures, like the signals animals give. \"Um, okay. So the Kahalla aren't runners. Or talkers.\"\n\nIrma said, voice rising more, \"The Bowl is telling us that smart aliens converge to a humanoid form.\"\n\nCliff thought on that, never ceasing his scan of the forest around them. Or could be, somebody designed them....\n\nQuert was ahead of them and now turned. \"Not the Folk. Not like, your word, humanoid. We say, Sil Shape. Same thing.\"\n\n\"Um, yeah,\" Irma said. \"I wonder why?\"\n\n\"Come from self design, for Folk,\" Quert said. \"Ancient.\"\n\n\"So they have\u2014what?\u2014two arms and four legs?\" Cliff asked.\n\n\"Some do. Many others, two legs. Still all Folk.\"\n\nIrma asked, \"The Folk, do they really run things here?\"\n\nQuert gave a downward eye-gesture, which Cliff now knew expressed polite doubt. \"Ice Minds, they above Folk.\"\n\n\"How's that work?\" Cliff pressed.\n\n\"That changes now. Since you came. We Sil work for Ice Minds too, now.\" Quert brandished his small communicator, a pyramidal solid that could deform into a flat screen. Cliff had yet to figure out how that worked.\n\nIrma said, \"What do you do for them?\"\n\n\"Brought you to them.\"\n\n\"That's it?\" Irma asked. \"Why us?\"\n\n\"You disturb. Folk call you 'Late Invader' because you new. Ice Minds want to see you. Know you. So we bring.\"\n\n\"We're just a small ship, passing by,\" Irma said.\n\n\"Something about Glory, I hear from Ice Minds. They want to know what you are, going to Glory.\" Quert gave a head-shrug. \"Not sure what Glory be.\"\n\n\"It's a star right ahead of you,\" Cliff said. \"We can't see it\u2014your star's too bright.\"\n\n\"Star ahead?\" Quert's face went blank, which meant the alien was thinking, giving nothing away.\n\nIrma said, \"It's a star a lot like yours, still so far away that it's only a dot. Its planet has a biosphere with oxygen and nitrogen and the usual. We want to go there, live there.\"\n\nQuert kept the blank look, but the eyes jittered up, down, around. The alien was undergoing an entire conceptual shift.\n\nSuddenly Cliff saw it. The Sil had been ushered into the view from the Bowl hull\u2014the deep dark abyss of glinting stars\u2014only lately. The Ice Minds had beckoned to them somehow, sent signals, and propelled forward the events Cliff's team had then intersected. So Quert and the others had never seen the stars at all, until they brought Cliff's team through the underground labyrinth and to where they could see the sliding panorama of the galaxy in full.\n\nThe Sil had been like people trapped in a cave, never shown the sky. Their world, the world of all who lived on the Bowl, was an endless warm paradise in steady daylight. Their sun and jet obliterated perspective. The ordinary denizens never saw the stars, or the great plane of the galaxy hanging in a black firmament, dark and strange and sprinkled with twinkling jewel stars.\n\nThat revelation had come to the Sil when they were restless and angry. The Folk had suppressed them for ageless times, but now they knew where they were, who they were. All that had exploded into their world only lately. Cliff's team had confirmed new truths, and so had made many tragedies come to pass\u2014the battle with the skyfish, the bombing and firestorms of the Sil cities, so much else.\n\nCliff started to say some of this to Quert. The alien still had the stiff fixed face, giving nothing away while it thought. But then movements caught their attention.\n\nThe point Sil stopped, gestured, and muttered something in a low whisper. Head and arm gestures: something ahead, spread out.\n\nThey all followed their standard tactic, moving off to both sides and seeking cover, then moving carefully forward. The humans had learned this in training, fire-and-maneuver. Each member of the Sil and human team moved only when others could cover with fire from lasers, arm-arrows.\n\nAhead, a faint repeating clatter came through the trees and vines.\n\nBeyond, the land cleared. Cautiously they worked their way to a vantage point on a small hill. A strip of neatly arranged, emerald green agricultural fields stretched into the distance to their left and right. Simple farm machinery worked in them, making whack-whack-whack noises. Directly ahead, the forest resumed several kilometers away. The crop was yellow and purple shoots that seemed to spray out like arrows from a thick brown trunk. These were three or four meters tall, Cliff judged, like trees with spokes flying out. The spokes were fat and had wide, fanlike flowers along their lengths. The air carried a fine mist of\u2014what? Pollen?\n\n\"We can cross that at a run,\" Aybe said.\n\nQuert pointed to figures working in the field. They had trucks and a robot harvester that worked away, chopping off the shoots and dropping them into the trucks. The machinery worked with a regular whump whump whump. A breeze brought a heady sweet scent like orange blossoms with a cutting undertang. Everything moved with a slow rhythm, and the scene reminded Cliff of a monotonous summer he had spent on a farm in California's Central Valley. He close-upped them and said, \"They're the same kind we left behind, those humanoids mesmerized by that ancient rock life. Kahalla.\"\n\n\"These special Kahalla evolve for farm work,\" Quert said. \"They stay here always on farm. Birthing and dying, all done here.\"\n\nIrma asked, \"They live in a village all their lives?\"\n\n\"Content. In balance.\" Quert conferred with the other Sil in quick, scattershot bursts of unintelligible talk. They all looked wary to Cliff, as nearly as he could judge. The Sil had complex suites of expressions that darted across their faces, mostly coded in their eye-moves and the light-browed ridgelines above. Quert turned to the humans. \"This Aybe right. Run fast across. See there?\"\n\nNearly directly across from them was a complex of low buildings the tan color of dried mud. \"Their hatchery. Few Kahalla there most times. We cross, the Kahalla not see.\"\n\nCliff tried to take this in. A special form of Kahalla just for the grunt labor of farming? Had the Folk specially bred for that? And... hatchery?\n\nThey moved through the cover of a long winding grove of zigzag trees. He and Irma thought the zigzag strategy was to get more sunlight under a constant sun, which meant more exposed foliage turned to the direction of the star, a reddish dot fixed firmly in the sky. The jet's filmy light they ignored. Bristly branches and coiling vines sprawled along the thick zigzag trunks to harvest the constant sunlight. That made them useful cover, because the branches were thin at the top and thicker at the tree base. Easy to slip among and elude any watching eyes.\n\nWarily they stopped within easy view of the tannin brick buildings. As a Californian, Cliff seldom saw ceramic slabs stacked to great heights; his instinct said they were earthquake vulnerable. But there were no quakes here at all. He saw through binocs furry figures moving with lumbering, swaying bodies on two legs, moving slowly among the brick walls. He pointed to them.\n\n\"Friends not,\" Quert said with narrowed eyes and edgy eye-clicks.\n\n\"These Kahalla will turn us over to the Folk?\" Terry asked.\n\nQuert said, \"Must,\" and gave a downturned eye-move.\n\nThe other Sil shuffled and eye-clicked in what seemed agreement, their feet shuffling, impatient. They seemed to feel there was no time to waste in pondering this problem. No point in trying to go around the long farming strip that faded away into the light tan color of the distance, which came from simple dust haze. No telling how long this farm was. An odd way to cultivate; why not in squared-off plots so you minimized the travel distance?\n\n\"No time to think much,\" Aybe said. \"Ready to run?\"\n\nThey set off at a good pace. The Sil got out in front right away with their long graceful strides, taking long slow deep breaths as their feet came down. They seemed to have evolved for running. Humans had, too, but not this well. Cliff wondered if their home world, with somewhat lower gravity, had better shaped them for this part of the Bowl. Again he wondered, as sweat collected in his eyebrows and trickled down, stinging his eyes, what the Sil's agenda was. Getting out from under the Folk, yes. But those big birds ran this place, and a few puny humans surely could not make much difference. A puzzle. But without the Sil, they'd have been nabbed by the Folk long ago. He let it pass.\n\nThey made a good fast run across the fields, running close to the curious trees. The Kahalla were upwind of their crossing route, too, so that might be an advantage. Cliff was surprised at how easily he ran. He was in better physical condition now from so long on the run, and the local grav seemed lower here, too. But Quert's head turned, surveying the whole area, as did all the Sil. They were worried.\n\nThe rough rectangular buildings Quert called a hatchery loomed up, two stories high and no windows. They entered the complex, panting and sweaty, and made their way down the main corridor between the buildings. There were no Kahalla around at all. A few zigzag trees lined this main street of the place, their wood worn and gray. The Sil went down side passages, doing reconn, and in a few moments came running back fast. They shouted a word in Sil language and formed a defensive arc facing two passageways. Automatically the humans gathered in behind them, drawing weapons, looking anxiously around.\n\nOnly when a Sil launched one of its arm-arrows did they look up.\n\nThings like meter-wide spiders came over the lip of the roof. They were white and clacked as they moved, surging down the wall on flexing black palps. Their legs were bristly and black; big angry red eyes glared at the sides of a squashed face.\n\nThe first Sil arm-arrow lanced through one that was halfway over the edge of the roof. It scrabbled at the wall and fell with a smack at their feet. The Sil who had nailed it stepped forward, shot at another of the attackers, hit it at dead center of its circular body\u2014then bent and plucked the arrow out, inserting it quickly back in the air sheath.\n\nThe Sil were shooting at the things now, and the humans used their lasers. But there were plenty of the things, and they kept coming.\n\nThey move more like crabs than like spiders, Cliff thought as the Sil fell back. He aimed at one of the things and hit it, but it just kept climbing down the wall toward them. His shot had gone through it near its edge, but that was not enough, apparently.\n\nThey made small, shrill chippering sounds. They moved sideways with quick sure moves.\n\nNow Cliff recalled a relayed message from Beth when they had broken out of their captivity. \"Spidows,\" he said.\n\nIrma got the reference. \"Those were huge, they said. These aren't.\"\n\n\"Local adaptation,\" Aybe said. \"Our lasers blow through them but don't kill, most of the time.\"\n\nFive of the things took on a Sil. They crawled up its legs and bit deep with claws. The Sil howled. It batted at them and lurched away. That unnerved the other Sil as rivers of the midget spidows rushed down from other roofs and through the lanes nearby. Their high, shrill cries became a shriek. The humans huddled behind a thin line of Sils who were running out of their arm-arrows.\n\nQuert was driving arm-arrows into the spidows but then shouted in Sil and then in Anglish, \"Back through!\"\n\nCliff turned and saw a Sil had found, down a side corridor, a big frame door that opened. They all turned and rushed there. The spidows' shrill cries rose as they came after the running Sil and humans. Several Sil tore branches off the zigzag trees along the way, snapping them off. They got through the doorway and into a big high room. The door slammed. Sil secured it.\n\nIllumination streamed down from a ceiling that simmered with ivory light. The place reeked of some sullen odor. It was damp and warm here, and the humans looked at each other, eyes wide, still surprised by the sudden ferocity of the spidow attack. The Sil muttered to each other. They were all standing under the heat beating down from above, panting in moist air flavored with an odd stinging taste.\n\n\"Were... were those spiders?\" Aybe asked.\n\n\"More like crabs,\" Cliff said.\n\n\"They have a shell and move with a sideways crawl, lots of legs,\" Irma said.\n\n\"If there weren't so many, we could just tromp on them,\" Terry said.\n\n\"But there are!\" Aybe was scared and covered it with anger.\n\nThe Sil stirred and murmured and Quert listened to them intently. The humans talked but no ideas emerged. The high keening cries of the spidows came through the walls. They all knew they were trapped, and the shock of it was sinking in, Cliff saw.\n\n\"Let's see what there is here. What this place is,\" Cliff said. It was good to get them focused on something beyond their fears. They murmured, shuffled, and started to look around.\n\nAround them stood cylindrical towers with big fat orange spheres arrayed in a matrix. There were some kind of ceramic tubes laced through the crude baked brick frame, and those felt warm to the touch.\n\n\"What are these things? A whole room full,\" Irma said.\n\nQuert said, \"Kahalla eggs. Hatch here,\" and took two other Sil to prowl the room. Cliff followed down the line of Kahalla egg cylinder holders. The warm damp air was cloying. Heads jerked toward a scraping noise. They all saw a white carapace of a spidow scuttling away. It left behind a ripped-open Kahalla egg that dripped brown fluids on the red clay floor. The spidow had been eating it. A Sil stabbed it with a shaft of wood it had yanked off a zigzag tree outside. The spidow writhed, worked its claws against the shaft, and died with a faint squealing gasp.\n\nThey found another a few moments later. Some had gotten in here, Cliff supposed, and were eating Kahalla eggs. \"Food source,\" Irma said.\n\nSeveral of the big orange spheres were already spattered over the ceramic floor, their insides gone. Cliff followed, still dazed by the speed of events. He shook his head, rattled. As the Sil searched the aisles of egg-holding cylinders Cliff kept up, feeling pretty useless, and then asked Quert, \"The Kahalla look kind of like us\u2014two legs, same body shape. But they lay eggs?\"\n\n\"Kahalla way,\" Quert said. Its eyes were wary, searching the whole room. \"Stack their eggs here. Let hatch. Safe so they can work their fields.\"\n\n\"Uh, but the spidows\u2014that's what we call them\u2014they come and eat?\"\n\nAn eye-click of agreement. \"Been so, long time. We call those things upanafiki. Pests, are.\"\n\n\"They're smart enough to get into these hatcheries.\"\n\nQuert sniffed and gave soft barking sounds with a head-jerk, which seemed to be the Sil equivalent of laughter. All the Sil joined in. Some alien inside joke, Cliff suspected. Or was Sil humor a category outside human comprehension? Quert stopped the quiet barking laugh and said, \"Kahalla not smart.\"\n\n\"Egg layers...\" Cliff tried to get his head around all this.\n\nIrma said, \"Earthside we have monotremes, mammal egg-layers. They're very old, Triassic maybe.\"\n\nCliff shook his head. \"Forget about parallels to Earth. So: smart egg-layers who are humanoid tool-users. What the hell, with evolution on the Bowl, all bets are off.\"\n\nQuert said, \"Upanafiki many. Kahalla crave land. Upanafiki keep Kahalla numbers down. Kahalla and upanafiki\u2014\" Quert thrust its bony hands together. \"Always. Fight. Dance.\"\n\nAybe said, \"Where did these Kahalla come from? What world?\"\n\nQuert said, \"Kahalla means in your tongue One Face Folk.\"\n\nTerry got it. \"So they come from a planet tidally locked to its star? On their side it was always sunny. They had an adaptation advantage when they arrived at the Bowl, over people like us who need night. Makes sense.\"\n\nQuert gave an eye-click of agreement. \"Spread widely. They are conservative. Folk use them. Not good allies for us.\"\n\nCliff frowned. Evolutionary theory in the middle of a fight...\n\n\"Come see this,\" Irma called. She was at the other end of the room. They followed her up some crudely fashioned stairs of gray clay ceramic. The dusty second floor was like the first but Irma pointed to a hole in its ceiling. \"Looks like they dug down through.\"\n\nCliff crouched, jumped, and caught the edge of the hole. Some of it crumbled away, but he held on and pulled his head through the meter-wide opening. This might be risky, but he was curious\u2014and hanging there, he saw the roof now deserted. A nearby piece of wood caught his eye. He held on with one hand and shuffled a slim shaft nearby into the hole, letting it drop. Then he followed it, landing neatly. Low grav had its uses.\n\nIrma picked up the slender piece of wood. \"It has a tip like flint. Those small spidows\u2014they're tool-users.\"\n\n\"Keep Kahalla stable,\" Quert said, glancing upward. \"They outside on ground. We go this way.\"\n\nCliff and Irma looked askance at the alien. Quert went to the stairwell and shouted orders in the slippery Sil speech. Terry and Aybe came up with them. \"Those spidows,\" Terry said, \"they're chipping at the door with something.\"\n\nIrma needed help, but in surprisingly short order their entire team, humans and Sil alike, made the leap to the ceiling hole. Those already on the roof grabbed their hands and hauled them out, onto the flat roof. It was made of tan triangular bricks. Now Cliff could see Quert's plan. The hatchery buildings were close together, and the Sil could leap from one roof to the next. So could the humans. The Sil were remarkably calm; they had met this foe before. They started leaping across. Cliff looked down as he took a running jump across. The spidows were clustered around the door to the building they had just left. Several of them held bigger wood shafts, also with blackened hard tips that seemed to have been turned on a fire.\n\nIrma came next. She landed with one foot halfway onto the next roof lip. Cliff grabbed her and tugged her in. Terry and Aybe followed. By that time, most of the Sil were across to the next building, looking unhurried but quick.\n\nThey all ran and leaped, ran and leaped, and soon were at the far end of the hatchery buildings. There the Sil slung a thin wire around nearby trees, throwing it with a kind of boomerang hook that wrapped around a tree trunk. Then a Sil attached the wire to its backpack solar panel source, made some adjustments, hit a command switch\u2014and the wire expanded, puffing up into a thick rope that hands could grab. Cliff blinked; a useful trick he had never seen.\n\nThey descended on that rope, belaying a bit to break their sliding descent. Cliff and Irma leaned over the side of the building to glimpse the spidows while others took the rope down. Spidows were still working on the door, chipping with crude spikes. But then some Kahalla came in from a side corridor, shouting. The spidows turned, and a battle began.\n\nThe spidow's bristly palps moved in a jerky blur. The Kahalla had simple hoes or similar farm tools. They struck down hard on the spidows and pinned them. But there were a lot, and some Kahalla got overwhelmed.\n\nThis was nature red in tooth and claw in a way he'd never seen. There were over a hundred spidows and maybe a dozen Kahalla\u2014a melee. As they watched, Irma said, \"A fight over reproduction? Nasty.\"\n\nQuert had come over to them and looked down, unsurprised. \"Folk set rules. Keep Kahalla from farming more and more. Use upanafiki to keep not many Kahalla eggs to hatch. These upanafiki pests for us. Their war with Kahalla never end.\"\n\n\"The Folk don't stop this?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"Folk want this.\" Quert paused, searching for the right Anglish words. \"Equilibrium. Stasis.\"\n\nAs Cliff watched five spidows swarm fast over a struggling Kahalla humanoid, he thought, Nightmare spiders on a caffeine high. The Kahalla toppled and vanished beneath the swarming spidows. He recalled a remark heard long ago, Flattery isn't the highest compliment\u2014parasitism is.\n\n\"Damn!\" Irma's shrill shout jerked him out of his thoughts.\n\nHe saw several spidows, their legs grappling for purchase over the lip of the roof, twenty meters away. They had come up the wall. They made a sharp hissing, their legs clicking with darting moves.\n\nHe and Irma had been distracted and now with Quert were the only ones left on the roof. Quert was already ahead of them and took the rope with an easy grace. Down Quert slid, shouting back \"Come fast!\" Irma went next, and Cliff turned to take a laser shot at the mass of spidows surging across the tan brick roof. The bolts punched holes easily enough, but the spidows did not stop. A bolt to the center did work, and one of the things flopped down. But now they were five meters away. Cliff leaned down and plucked the securing anchor of the rope. No time to slide down it now. He couldn't be sure the spidows couldn't use it. The black rope was firmly fixed in the trees thirty meters away, so he just grabbed it and ran off the edge of the roof. He dropped, then swung.\n\nHis breath rasped and he ignored a snap in his shoulder. He tumbled on the descent and tried to pull himself up the rope as it carried him toward the trees. His swing brought him boot-forward, so when he hit the branches of a zigzag tree the leaves lashed him. One limb caught him smack in the face. He hit another, and a sharp pain lanced into his ribs. He gasped and slid down the rope, a nearly vertical drop now. The zigzag tree trunk smacked his thigh, but he managed to get his boots under him. He sprawled when he hit.\n\nAs he was rolling away, his ribs sent him a lance of pain and his vision blurred for a moment. He lay there gasping and hands grabbed him. They heaved him up and Terry shouted, \"Gotta run!\" So he did. Not very well.\n\nThe spidows were running through the trees already, lots of them. Their chippering calls were loud now. But the spidows were small and if humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.\n\nFor a while, though, until they no longer saw the spidows behind them, it was more like limping for him. He was worn out.\nTHIRTY-ONE\n\nRedwing watched the Bowl landscape slide by below, distracting himself for a moment of relaxation with the splendid view. Getting back to work, he switched to interior ship views. In the garden, on screens left and right, two finger snakes were slithering through plants, picking here, planting seeds there, while the third\u2014the male, Thisther, darker and a bit bigger than the others\u2014was playing with two pigs, all three having hissing and oinking fun. A laugh bubbled in Redwing's throat\u2014and still the big first question was there. What could I be missing?\n\nBeth was due in a moment and he let the Bowl feed play on his display wall. He took out a tattered, yellowing paper. As part of his several-kilogram weight allowance it was nothing, but in his memories it was everything. His father had written it to him when in the Huntsville hospital from which he would not return. When he was ten, it had meant a great deal and now it meant more.\n\nLIVE FULLY. TAKE RISKS. THINK CAREFULLY BUT ACT, TOO. SPEAK UP. KEEP MIND OPEN AND HEART WARM. DON'T JUST PASS THE TIME. LIVE LIVE LIVE!\u2014FOR SOMEDAY YOU WILL NOT.\n\nHe recalled the man at his best: sawdust sprinkled in black hair, deftly pushing a Douglas fir two-by-four through the buzzing blade of a circular saw, then trimming it and taking a quick measure of the work by holding it against the studs, nodding in the damp fragrant sawdust air, plucking a nail from where he stored it in his front teeth, fetching a ball-peen hammer from its loop on his belt, two quick whaps and a finishing tap, a bright grin, then on to the next.\n\nHe stared at the paper scrap and then put it away, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was centuries old but still true.\n\nBeth tapped on his door. He stood to slide the door aside and nodded with a greeting. They got right to it.\n\nShe sat across from him in his narrow cabin and he made a show of finishing a log entry. It was not entirely show. He had to keep on top of how SunSeeker sailed on the vagrant winds of plasma and magnetic fields. Plus preparations for the jet interception. And an anxious, overworked crew.\n\nBut Beth was the hardest. She had been down there for long months and managed to get back aboard, a striking feat. She had prestige with the rest of the crew. She regaled them with stories of aliens and exploits and weird doings down on the Bowl. She'd taken casualties and escaped from a prison. Figured out the alien landscape and made her team get across it. And fly back home in an alien craft. So he had promoted her two grades in the science officer ladder. When she got to Glory\u2014and we will do that, by damn!\u2014she would command the first landing. Still, her tight face promised trouble.\n\n\"We're in an existential position here, sir,\" she began.\n\n\"Right. We don't have enough supplies to get to Glory. Our logistics were marginal when we sighted the Bowl. Now it's hopeless. We've burned food and essentials hovering over this enormous thing. Plus time.\"\n\nBeth said with deliberation, \"I mean, if we commit an overt hostile act, that sure does change the game.\"\n\nHe nodded. Always concede the rhetorical stuff. \"We have to start a clock running. Otherwise they'll wait us out.\"\n\n\"But their jet is the key to their Bowl. Damaging it is a mortal threat.\"\n\n\"Sure it is. We don't mean to shove a dagger in. We want to show that we can.\"\n\nBeth twisted her mouth into a wry grimace. \"A pinprick, then?\"\n\n\"That's all.\"\n\n\"These are aliens, Cap'n. Their civilization is older than anything we know. Hell, maybe than we can know. This maneuver, this provocation, is a huge gamble.\"\n\n\"That it is.\" He sat back and folded his hands on his desk. \"One we've got to take.\"\n\n\"Look, we don't know how that damn jet operates. How the Folk run it. How unstable it is.\"\n\n\"Right. Isn't that how science works?\" Redwing grinned. \"If you don't understand, do an experiment.\"\n\nBeth shook her head. \"Plus we don't understand the Glory message, or how the Folk really feel about it. I just... I worry.\"\n\n\"So do I.\" What could I be missing?\n\n\"There are risks to every choice. Maybe the right question is, do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?\"\n\nShe sighed and got up. She was a bit wobbly. He wondered if she was truly fit for service as their backup pilot. On impulse, he got up and gave her a firm warm hug. With a sigh, too.\n\n* * *\n\nKarl showed him the external views of SunSeeker, freshly gathered by their small auto-cam bots that had flown around the entire ship. \"She's centuries old now, but holding up,\" he said with a hint of pride. Karl was a bit stiff and formal, but he could not conceal his feelings completely.\n\nThe ship's sleek after section hid behind the torus of the life zone. The shuttle cradles along the central boom were yawning yellow and orange cups for craft docking and vacuum maintenance bots. Micrometeorites had pitted the hull, and radiation burns splashed black filigrees along the flanks. The entire sleek design focused on the demands of starflight. Now their planetary-scale orbits made it hard to get adequate plasma into the magnetic funnel, and the ship barely ran. Fitful spasms sometimes passed through her, the coughs and sputters of a system hovering on the brink of shutting down entirely. The fusion fires in her belly ran soft, then hard, then not at all\u2014until Karl and the crew could get them burning full and furious again. It reminded him of a fine ship built for the high seas, rotting beside a wharf.\n\nRedwing nodded. \"Fair enough. The mag systems, they can handle the jet?\"\n\nAyaan Ali said, with a tired and exasperated sigh, \"Our upgrades are basically fine-tuning. They seem to work. I'm pretty sure, from records and Artilect memories of Beth's flight up the jet, that we can deal with the turbulence levels.\"\n\n\"And if we can't?\" Redwing persisted.\n\nKarl said, \"The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.\"\n\nAyaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. \"The jet's mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They're two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.\"\n\nRedwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. \"How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?\"\n\n\"We'll tumble,\" Ayaan Ali said.\n\n\"And we can recover,\" Karl said evenly.\n\nThey had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt\u2014a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.\n\nAyaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge. SunSeeker had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their \"experiment\" with flying a small package over the rim\u2014and watching it disappear in a furious instant\u2014proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage SunSeeker now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl's air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.\n\nAyaan Ali's 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere's partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gather there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes\u2014the \"bottom\" of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.\n\n\"Those partitions are a wonder,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it's hundreds of kilometers on a side!\"\n\nRedwing nodded, thinking again, What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can't see, can't yet imagine.\n\nYet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth's team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself. Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still... They're not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?\n\nAyaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, \"So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we've just circled it, mostly.\"\n\nKarl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then\u2014as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point\u2014beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that SunSeeker had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth's return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem\u2014flying into the jet's thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.\n\n\"I've calculated how to tip in near the top\u2014that's our sign convention, right? Top is as high as we dare get, just below the deflection ability of the gamma ray lasers. We turn and plunge down, toward the Knothole. We sway back and forth across the jet while we drive down. Thrust hard in a helix winding path.\"\n\nHe had painted a red line in her simulation, standing for SunSeeker's calculated path. Its helix widened as it got nearer the Knothole and the magnetic field lines\u2014blue swirls embedded in the yellow and orange showing plasma\u2014bulged outward in response. \"See? We make the jet sway a little. A kink in the flow.\"\n\nRedwing thought he followed this, but decided to play dumb. \"Which are?\"\n\n\"I'm sure you went through the basic plasma-instabilities material, Cap'n. It was in your briefing run-up.\"\n\nThe right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. He let it simmer a bit. \"Karl, you will always answer a direct technical question and skip your idea of what I know. Assume I know nothing.\"\n\n\"Sorry, um, Cap'n. Of course. Certainly. I meant that...\" His voice trailed off, uncertain of anything.\n\nRedwing bailed him out. \"Like a fire hose?\"\n\n\"Right! Fast water going through a fire hose, if it swerves a little, the centrifugal force of it forces the hose even more to the side. It corkscrews, makes a kink.\"\n\n\"So it will lash the side of the Knothole? You're sure?\"\n\nKarl paused, nodded. \"More of a brush, I'd say.\"\n\nRedwing nodded. Ayaan Ali said, \"I have some good news. We got a short signal from Cliff's team\u2014from Aybe.\"\n\nRedwing brightened. \"Where are they? What\u2014?\"\n\n\"Here. They passed under the edge of the mirror zone and got out onto the hull. Found ice there. Then they had to take off. They got led to a place where there were something like, well, talking stones.\"\n\nRedwing leaned forward. \"And those said...?\"\n\nA shrug. \"We got cut off. See down there? They were in lands between that zone of hexagonal mirrors. The icelands, with some life in them, those are on the outer hull under the mirrors, which keep it cold. Then Cliff's team and those Sil got to the drylands between the mirrors and this huge ocean.\"\n\nRedwing stared at the view. Even when Ayaan Ali brought up a max resolution image, there was nothing to show more than occasional towns and roads. Again it struck him how much of this place was endless forests and seas and ranges of tan hills. Very few large cities and plenty of room for wildlife. Why? Hard to evaluate a thing as big as this Bowl. Earth alone had plenty of habitats that a few thousand years back were places where the crown of creation would be a tasty breakfast.\n\nKarl asked, \"Those are\u2014what, hurricanes on that ocean?\"\n\n\"Seems so.\" Ayaan Ali pointed to a few. \"The big winds have lots more room to play out, too. Huge storms. Cyclones the size of planets.\"\n\nRedwing stood to end the meeting. \"We'll hit the jet in a few days, right? Keep doing your simulations and drills. Get some rest, too,\" with a nod to Ayaan Ali.\n\nNow that the die was cast, he needed some alone time. SunSeeker's steady rumble always told you that you were in a big metal tube, only meters away from other people. And meters away from both a furious fusion burn and, not far from that, high vacuum. First he quietly made his way through the biozones, sniffing and savoring air that came fresh from the oxy-making plants, and avoiding the finger snakes in their happy labors. They were fun, but he was not in a fun mood.\n\nGecko slippers let him walk the far reaches of the ship, out of the centri-grav torus. They were like weak glue on your soles, following the sticky patches on the walls. The zero-grav plants were matted tangles of beans and peas, with carrots that grew like twisted orange baseballs and green bananas that made weird toroids. A finger snake tunnel ran underneath. The snakes weren't showing.\n\nHe went on into the hibernation modules, where what he thought of as the biostasis crew lay. Just sleeping, sort of, though hard to wake up. His footsteps rang as he walked the aluminum web corridor beside the solemn gray capsules. He didn't want to call out of cold sleep enough people to crew a big landing expedition, not for the Bowl anyway. In the defrosting and training they would all have to triple up on a hot hammock, and shower once a week. As it was now, even the small present crew\u2014nine plus Redwing plus three finger snakes\u2014got two showers a week and didn't like it.\n\nNow that they were headed for a battle, of sorts, he realized how far from its expected role this expedition had come. This was not a craft built for war and neither were the crew. They had been carefully tuned for exploration and centuries of confinement. They were living in a constantly running machine where opening a hatch without proper precautions could kill you dead in seconds flat.\n\nWith that happy thought, he turned back. You're worrying, not thinking. He could use some time with the finger snakes.\n\n* * *\n\nRich garden smells slapped him in the face. He looked around him, seeing miniature sheep and full-sized pigs and chickens, clucking and grunting\u2014and no finger snakes. Their tunnel was big enough, he could peer into it... but he went to the screens. If they weren't in the tunnel, he'd still find them easily enough.\n\nNow, what had the finger snakes left on-screen? They'd been watching the Bowl slide past, even as he had. No, they hadn't: this view was following a cityscape as it rolled below SunSeeker. If Redwing understood rightly, that was a Sil city, newly rebuilt after an attack from the Folk. It looked quite strange. Streets and peaks like hieroglyphs, or wispy Arab writing.\n\nHe jumped when a flat head poked his elbow. \"This they did hide,\" said\u2014Shtirk? Marked near the tail with a bent black hourglass. \"Hide no more. A great shame.\"\n\n\"Wait. Is this writing? So big?\"\n\nIts voice had a sliding, flat tone, faint. \"Can see such writing from everywhere on the Bowl. This says the Bird Folk stamped their own world flat. A mistake in steering ended their bloodline. This was in a message... a message from the stars. Captain, yes please, how does a star send a message?\"\n\nRedwing dithered for a moment about how much to reveal; but he wanted to know what Shtirk knew. \"You know what a star is? It's like your sun, that sun, but much farther away. Stars have worlds, not Bowls but spinning balls. We have a message from one of those, from Glory. We haven't been able to read it all, and it's still coming in.\"\n\n\"The Sil read,\" Shtirk said. \"Your bandits learn find the message from you, the Sil from them, then the Sil read. Now they tell us. Thisther goes to tell you all in command deck. Is it true? Bird Folk did smash their own world?\"\n\nRedwing laughed. \"And they think they're the Lords of Creation! Yeah, I believe it. I'll put it to the others, and we'll look through the message from Glory. But I believe it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nFred Ojama and a giant snake were hard at work at the control screens when Redwing found them. Thisther's head and the fingernails on its tiny quick tail were close up against the controls, typing. Fred was saying, \"Yup, yup, yup...\"\n\n\"Fred?\"\n\n\"Sir.\" Fred didn't turn. \"If you'll look past me... see the starscape? And the blue dot? The dot is the Bowl. The stars move, too. I've run this twice already. The Bowl left Sol system in Jurassic times, then tootled around to several other stars\u2014not moving as fast as it does now. Then they came back between the Cretaceous and Tertiary. If the times hold, then the mass of the Bowl ruined some comet orbits that second time, and that was it.\"\n\n\"It?\"\n\n\"The timeline checks. They caused the Dinosaur Killer impact.\"\n\nThisther said, \"Great shame. They hid this for lifetimes of worlds.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Redwing said.\n\nThisther said in his quiet way, \"But no more. All will know. They killed their own genetic line. Sil will tell all.\"\nTHIRTY-TWO\n\nTananareve realized she should agree with the big, ponderous beast that was Memor. She had come to think of the alien as a kind of smart elephant, with a sense of humor equally heavy. \"Yes, that was a clever saying,\" Tananareve made herself say.\n\n\"I am happy you have discovered the nuances of our nature,\" Memor said. Apparently sarcasm is unknown here, never mind irony, Tananareve thought. She knew Memor thought what she'd said was amusing, from the way her body shook, but it went right by human ears.\n\n\"The wonder of all this is what impresses me most,\" Tananareve said to move on to better things. Memor and Bemor were huge and strange, but they liked her to play the awed-primate role. The hard case was Asenath, who mostly ignored Tananareve except for the occasional glower. Plus deliberately aimed stale exhaled breaths and well-timed, acid farts.\n\nThey stood among a crowd of hundreds of squat, humanoid creatures who formed neat, obedient circles around the Folk party. She watched these, the first human-shaped aliens she had seen, trying to understand the blank expressions on their hairy faces, to figure out what was going on. Beyond the crowd was a tall pinnacle with a single round thing in it that she had just now realized was an eye or camera, watching all this.\n\nAsenath was holding forth to the rapt assembly in a booming voice that had made Tananareve flinch when she first heard it. Study of the Folk conversations had given her some hints of meaning, but the long phrases Asenath used seemed more like chanting. Tananareve asked Memor, \"Is this some kind of ritual?\"\n\n\"Quite observant of you. She is reassuring the Kahalla that the Sil and humans who escaped their capture will be taken in hand soon. No damage shall follow from this Kahalla failure.\"\n\n\"What's that about their... children?\"\n\n\"Nothing important. The Kahalla are losing many eggs to the appetites of scavengers. They seek us to somehow ward off their predators.\"\n\n\"Will you?\"\n\n\"We do not intervene in natural matters. Nature runs itself well.\"\n\n\"You told me earlier that you Folk ran Nature.\"\n\nMemor gave a fan-flutter of amber and blue, which seemed to mean pleasant amusement. \"And so we do. At a remove, of course. Long ago the Folk set up this dynamic equilibrium, a predator\u2013prey oscillation that will not go too far.\"\n\n\"So these... Kahalla?... won't get wiped out?\"\n\n\"No, they are sufficiently intelligent and wary to deal with their predators\u2014a nasty little vermin species. Both predator and prey have a low mental level and can adapt to changes in the other species, as they occur over long times. Evolution is thus contained. Populations do not sprawl out, consuming natural lands. There are several such interlacing balances in this zone.\"\n\nTananareve pondered this as Asenath's long bellow went on.\n\nThen a new droning cry came\u2014shree, kinnne, warrickk, awiiiha...\n\nMemor said, \"Ah, they have awakened the memory box.\"\n\nAsenath paused, then went on, trying to boom over these new deep tones with their extended cadences. Tananareve saw that the laboring sounds came from the tower with the eye. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"A form of consciousness prison. From a hotworld it came and we are its stewards. Or rather these Kahalla are its attendants.\"\n\n\"A... rock mind?\"\n\n\"We have several strewn about the Bowl. They are slow but sure and alert us to long-term trends that otherwise might elude our quick eyes. You are, for example, a somewhat old-fashioned individual intelligence, organic. This is an inorganic one, and the Kahalla are a sort of hybrid mind who attend the stone lattice mind. They are nothing like the vast collective intelligences\u2014but never mind, we have had enough of this slow-thought place. And our escape approaches.\"\n\nawrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrraff kinnne yuuf...\n\nTananareve had not noticed the huge wall of scaly flesh settling down from the sky, beyond the talking tower. Across its rough brown skin silvery fins fanned as the bulk waltzed lazily into place. It spread slender tentacles grasping for ground. They played across the land. Kahalla ran to secure these to boulders, looking in perspective like ants bringing down a sea fish. The tentacles wrapped around catch points and pulled the great thing snug to ground.\n\nAsenath finished and the Kahalla bowed deeply, on their knees with a low, sonorous moan that grew in volume until it washed over Tananareve. Asenath returned the bow, gave a vibrant trill salute and a four-color fan-flurry of farewell. Memor scooped up Tananareve and made short work of the journey to the immense thing\u2014a bag inflated to fly, she guessed. But alive.\n\nBy now she knew that Memor enjoyed the open land, and spoke, too, of \"the serene voyaging our living craft affords.\" They entered by a flap that opened like a mouth. A huge tongue unfurled and Memor walked up it, carrying the primate on her shoulder. It felt to Tananareve unpleasantly like being eaten. Memor said in her booming Anglish, \"The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent is a luxury and settles the mind, a necessary aid in air travel. Chaos may come to rage all about us, but we shall be mild.\"\n\nTananareve sucked in a lingering taste. Like flowers, though with an oily undertaste. Bemor, too, sighed, though he said, \"We must make haste,\" and bellowed an order to small scampering things that had come to greet them.\n\nThey were in a wet cavern. This \"skyfish\" as Memor called it was like a cave of moist membranes lit by phosphorescent swirls embedded behind translucent tissues. They reminded Tananareve of illuminated art back Earthside.\n\nA deep bass note rang, ending in a whoosh that made it seem like an immense sigh. Grav momentarily rose, and Tananareve knew they had lifted off. Ruddy wall membranes fluttered. Warm air eased by them as they entered a large bowl-shaped area. Sunshine lanced through membranes so clear, Tananareve thought at first they were open to the air. But the sweet breeze swept first one way, then reversed, and she realized that it was the breathing of this great beast. The tower that had seemed so tall outside now dwindled away and the skyfish turned, so the sweep of a plain came into view. Clouds stacked like fat blue plates loomed on the shimmering distance. She could see the long arc of Bowl curving up into a pale sky; she was looking across a distance the size of planetary orbits. The eggshell blue of seas dominated the somewhat washed-out greens and browns of landmasses, and made pale the sheet grays of mirror zones. Across that flapped big-winged angular birds with long snouts and crests atop their bony heads.\n\nMemor met the captain of this gasbag being. The whole idea of a captain was odd until Tananareve realized they were like people riding a larger animal, as she had ridden horses. Memor spoke quickly, with booming comments from Bemor, all too fast for her to fathom.\n\nThe captain listened for a while, big eyes watery and anxious. This creature was somewhat like some of the Folk\u2014a big thing, four-legged and solemn and slow, mouth wide and salmon-pink and lipless. Bursts of words rattled from the mouth. Its narrow nostrils were veined pink, with fleshy flaps beneath. Large round black eyes watched them, yellow irises flashing in the slanting sunlight. From the top of the captain's head sprouted a vibrant blue crest, serrated and trimmed with yellow fat, reminding Tananareve of a cock's comb.\n\nThe captain took them on a walk through the ramparts, view balconies, and residential segments of the great living volume. A narrow hissing hydrogen arc heated its eating levels and lit the translucent furniture in blue light, where workers of four and six and even eight legs labored to bring forth live dishes for Folk delight. Pressed, Tananareve cracked a carapace and slurped out the warm white flesh of some sea creature. The next dish was a kicking big insect basted in creamy sauce. Memor said something about how keeping it alive through the cooking added savor to the proteins, but Tananareve decided that it was best to know less about Folk gustatory tastes. She tried to break the thick legs with her hands and snap off the tasty eyestalks. Crunchy but with a peppery flavor that stung her lips and sent a scent like stale meat into her sinuses. A green pudding turned out to be a slime mold that thrust probes out into her mouth as she tried to chew it. The flavor wasn't nearly worth it.\n\nStill, it was useful food. Folk ate meats and veggies she found mostly dull or repulsive, with little in between. She sat in the steady warm breeze of the skyfish's sweet internal breath\u2014were they essentially sitting in its trachea?\u2014and listened as Memor rattled on to other Folk sitting nearby about matters political and somehow always urgent. Or so her limited translation abilities told her. Finally Memor turned and said to her\u2014whom she described to the other Folk as \"the small Invader primate\"\u2014\"You must surely admire our craft. We took the early forms of this creature from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world, long ago. Their ancestors found our deep atmosphere a similar paradise, to cruise on soft moist winds, and mate in their battering fashion, and wallow in our air, to turn falling water into their life fluid, hydrogen.\"\n\n\"I doubt the primate can follow your description,\" Asenath said, coming into view.\n\nTananareve warily backed away from the lumbering thing. She could smell the malice oozing from Asenath. \"Still, she could be of some use in capturing the renegades of her kind, whom we shall soon intersect.\"\n\nAsenath ushered them all over to the broad window in the skyfish's side. Elaborate orange-colored fins flexed near the back of the beast. They flared out, capturing winds like a sail, driving the bag forward. Tananareve felt a lurch and a dull thump. She had the sense of rumbling movement under her feet and in the living walls. Memor explained that the bag was \"trimming\" in flight by shifting weight inside itself. Asenath said, \"Our admirable skyfish can torque about its center of mass, and thus navigate.\" Tananareve watched the flexible yet controlled fan-fins spread out, at least a hundred meters long. Its gravid majesty seemed somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking above the lush forest below.\n\nAsenath said, \"We are precisely on course to intersect the renegades. They are sailing on this same gathering wind.\"\n\nTananareve watched the opalescent walls shimmer with hot perspiration. Memor remarked that these were \"anxiety dewdrops,\" brought out by the laboring muscles of the great fish. The shimmering moist jewels hung like gaudy chandeliers, lit by the blue glow of hydrogen flares and phosphorescent yellow bands that ran across the high ceiling. One of the drops, bigger than Tananareve's head, fell from high up and spattered at her feet with cutting acid odor.\n\nBemor shifted his bulk and remarked, \"The new signal from Glory is coded in a different manner. We are having difficulties decoding it, except for a few images.\"\n\nMemor shifted into Folkspeech. \"Best not to let the primate know. Show what images you have.\"\n\nTananareve felt her pulse speed up but kept her face blank and made a show of turning to gaze out at the view. A huge bird was flapping by below, eyeing the skyfish. Casually she stepped away to the spot where, leaning forward, she could see reflected in the transparent window the projection Bemor was showing Memor. It was an animated series of images. A man in a white robe advanced into view and something leaped at him. It was an alien with ruddy skin and three arms. It jumped at the man, and huge feet kicked him to the ground. The alien wore tight blue clothes that showed muscles bulging as the view drew closer. The alien head was like a pyramid with sharp chin and bones like ribs under tight, ruddy skin. Two large black eyes glinted at the man, who was getting up, his smiling face mild and his long blond hair flowing. He was holding forward an object\u2014a wooden cross\u2014to the alien. Tananareve saw suddenly that the man was Jesus. The alien leaped on the man, hammering him with feet and two fists. Its third arm was bony and sharp, with nasty nails tapering to points. The alien slammed this into the head of Jesus, shattering the skull into pieces. Blood flew into the air and Jesus collapsed. His body lay still. The black alien eyes looked straight out from the screen Bemor held and thick lips pulsed, swelling and narrowing in what must have been some kind of victory gesture.\n\nThe sudden raw images startled her. A surge of anger tightened her throat. She made herself keep still and watched the bird flap out of view on its four wings.\n\n\"Ah,\" Memor said, \"similar to the earlier one. But look\u2014we are intersecting the tadfish, as we had hoped to. Now we can deal with these primates, brought together.\"\n\nTananareve saw swimming in the filmy air below them a gossamer tube shape. Fins stroked all along the barrel body as it rose from the forest below. Somehow, she realized, the Folk had found Cliff's team, and now had them cornered.\nPART XI\n\nDOUBLE-EDGED SWORD, NO HANDLE\n\nIt is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It is because we dare not venture that they are difficult.\n\n\u2014SENECA\nTHIRTY-THREE\n\n\"What's that?\" Irma pointed.\n\nHanging among cottony clouds, near to the woody horizon, was a thing that struck him as a silvery, flapping blimp. Coming toward them.\n\n\"What's that?\" Cliff echoed to Quert\u2014who scowled.\n\n\"Escape,\" Quert said. \"So you say?\"\n\n\"From what?\"\n\n\"Folk know where we are. Track us.\"\n\n\"They can?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Irma said. \"They must have sensors embedded in the original frame that holds the Bowl together. Any smart building does. The trick would be managing such a torrent of data.\"\n\nQuert gave an assenting eye-click and fell silent. The Sil took their orders from Quert and studiously let Quert alone speak for them. Cliff wondered about this but did not want to bring up or question an arrangement that was at least keeping his small party out of the hands of the Folk.\n\nWhen the spidows gave up the chase, the tired party of Sil and humans had moved on awhile, crossed a stream that Quert said spidows could not, and then stopped without a word. Cliff could feel the adrenaline collapse; he had gotten used to it after so many scares and flights. He wondered how the Sil managed crises. The same play of hormones?\n\nSome cold food with water from the convenient spring made them all feel better. Cliff had little storage left in the electronics he had carried all this time. He had chronicled all the places he had been and enjoyed looking back over the images. One from a good while back he liked, a clear day when the great sweep of the Bowl and its jet was sharp and clear. Too often the deep atmosphere blocked long views with enormous stacks of cloud. He had caught some of the team in the foreground, slogging along near a zigzag tree.\n\n\"You're keeping notes?\" Irma asked. \"I filled my data storage a long time ago.\"\n\nCliff shrugged. \"I'm either lazy or just plain picky. After the first week, when I was taking shots of every flower, tree, animal, insect, bird\u2014well, harder to be a scientist when you're on the run.\"\n\n\"One thing you're not is lazy.\" She looked at his small working screen. \"Notes for each shot, even.\"\n\n\"I do them at our rest stops, like this.\"\n\nBut there was no real resting, as the Sil made clear.\n\nQuert eyed the humans. \"We not go under now. Best not.\"\n\n\"Into the tunnels?\" Aybe asked. \"The trains? They'll catch us there?\"\n\nSlow steady eye-shifts. \"Soon. Yes. Best not go in tunnels.\"\n\n\"I kind of liked those fast tunnels,\" Aybe said.\n\n\"Folk hold them now.\"\n\n\"So... what do we do?\" Terry persisted.\n\n\"See there.\" Quert's slim arm pointed. The small silvery thing hung in the distance above a dense forest ridgeline. It moved slowly and the sun reflected winking spots of yellow and blue from it. \"Tadfish.\" The Sil around him shuffled uneasily but as usual said nothing.\n\n\"We're getting away in that?\" Irma frowned doubtfully.\n\n\"Best way,\" Quert said, and they moved forward steadily. \"Hide in sky.\"\n\nCliff wondered at the Sil social conventions, and their psychology. They were all in mortal danger but the Sil showed little jittery nervousness. Quert ruled absolutely. In contrast, he had to deal with ongoing questions and doubt from Aybe, Terry, and Irma. Only the need to move on, endlessly on, kept him in shaky control.\n\nThe tadfish was coming this way and as they entered the nearby forest of vine-rich trees and brush, Cliff could see it had a deft grace to its movement, though he could not see how it did so. Tendrils of vines yearned for the sun, though some turned at another angle, apparently partial to the jet's rosy rays\u2014specialization at work. The woods had a thick cloying stink, but were so thick overhead that the tadfish crew could not possibly see them below. Animals scampered away in their path, but there were plenty more concealed. From endless movement, Cliff had picked up ways to sense the life around them. Some animals here were superb at hiding, skinnying up into dense trees, or burrowing in hidden pits like trapdoor spiders. Others just flew away on quick stubby wings, fluttering fast enough to discourage pursuit.\n\nAybe and Irma walked with him, and Sils were both point and rear guards. The Sil somehow kept themselves in good order, Cliff saw, while the humans in their worn cargo pants with big flap pockets were drab and saggy. The Sil had patched those up for the bedraggled humans, back in the all-too-brief rest period following the battle with the skyfish. All that now seemed a long time ago. More wear had made their clothes ragged and rough. In contrast, the Sil had loose-fitting, lightweight tan and dusty white jumpsuits that never looked the worse for wear. They could be cleaned by just dipping them in water and connecting them to the Sil onboard and solar-powered back-batteries. Apparently some electrical method rejected ions the cloth disliked and knitted up broken fibers. The humans marveled at this.\n\nCliff let himself relax for a moment and enjoy the one sure thing he knew here\u2014life: wild flocks of strange things wheeling and crying high overhead; guttural lowings and crisp cacklings from the forest around them; a smelly cloying carpet underfoot, springy, more like moss than grass, starred with bright stalks like flowers; zigzag trees silvery and ripe with flapping life, big coppery-winged things that shrieked and dived at humans when they could. Somehow the big things knew not to go after the Sil, who used their arm-arrows to slice them from the sky. Cliff hit a few with his laser and so did the others and they sank to the ground after that, going for cover.\n\nThey managed to get some sleep. Cliff woke up several times, slapping and swearing at bugs that got into his clothes. Terry kept warily watching the trees and shrubs. The spidow encounter and the bird attack had made them jumpy. There were a lot of ropy vines, and gibbering small things rushed among them, sometimes hurling down oblong red fruit as if to drive the intruders away. A Sil caught one fruit and bit into it, made a twisted face, and tossed it aside. Cliff saw a long vine move on its own and pointed. \"A snake. Adapted to trees, probably disguises itself as a vine.\"\n\nQuert heard and nodded. \"We call sky pirates.\"\n\nIrma chuckled. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Intelligent. In a way.\"\n\n\"Really? What do they do with intelligence?\"\n\n\"Save food for hard times.\"\n\nShe stared up at the muscular, glistening snake that hung ten meters above their heads and seemed at least that long. It curled itself and leveraged onto another branch of a tall, spindly tree. Above it were cocoons of pale gray suspended among bare branches. \"Like those?\"\n\nQuert gave an assenting eye-click. \"Call them\u2014\" He paused, searching for the right Anglish term. \"\u2014mummies. Smart snakes store so many. Sometimes mummies we use for fertilizer.\"\n\nAybe gaped at this and as they moved on, he said, \"Mummies for... I don't get it.\"\n\n\"Closed ecology, see?\" Irma shrugged. \"They have to keep everything moving.\"\n\n\"So does the Earth,\" Aybe said. \"At least, until we started industrializing space. Then we did metal smelting and manufacture in vacuum, where we could throw the wastes into the solar wind, and clean up the planet a bit.\"\n\n\"But this ground ecology is just a few tens of meters deep,\" Cliff said. \"Has no plate tectonics. Can't hide carbon from its air. Can't bring fresh elements up from far below, vomit it out from volcanoes.\"\n\nIrma finished, \"So you do that artificially. Plus you save resources. You might not get any more for a while. Or ever again.\"\n\nHe nodded at this elementary wisdom that could always bear repeating, especially on the Bowl. They were still trying to figure out the greater scheme here, as a long-term investment. A negotiation might come up ahead, and Redwing would need to know something about those on the other side of the table.\n\nThat suited Cliff for now: seeing the Bowl as a puzzle. He had always been a problem-solver, a man who reflexively reacted to the unknown by breaking it into understandable pieces. Then Cliff would carefully solve each small puzzle, confident that the sum of such micro-problems would finally resolve the larger confusions. Irma thought the same way, one reason he liked her so much. On this endless trek through strange lands, they had grown to need each other. Every day was unnerving and wonderful at the same time, and for the same reasons. His whole team had gone into cold biostasis\u2014always a risk\u2014so they could reach an alien planet they knew very little about. Now they were immersed in that, multiplied by orders of magnitude. And they knew even less about this huge strange thing, the Bowl. It was daunting and thrilling, every day\u2014in a place where there were not really days at all.\n\nNow that they had a clear destination, the team of Sil and humans moved on with renewed energy. As they mounted a low hill, they saw the tadfish was closer. \"It lands there,\" Quert said, gesturing toward the next hill.\n\nThe slowly drifting football-shaped creature was maneuvering under tendrils of rain. Cliff remembered the one that had ravaged the Sil city and looked at its blister pods, wondering if the skyfish carried weapons there.\n\n\"Virga,\" Aybe said. \"That's the name for when water evaporates away before hitting the ground. See? It's falling from clumps of altocumulus clouds up there.\" Among towering, steepled clouds rain fell, to be absorbed by lower, dryer layers.\n\n\"Tadfish drinking,\" Quert said. \"Hurry.\"\n\nThey came up on the strange creature through a cluster of zigzag trees thickly wreathed in green vines. The silvery tadfish settled down in a clearing near some ceramic buildings. Quert picked up the pace. Cliff watched the complex sheen of skin as it flexed and stroked its translucent fins. Some attendants clustered at its base as it settled down. Quert was taking them in a flanking approach through the zigzag and vine maze. The ground crew was Kahalla in bright, creamy clothes. They took a small party of passengers off, and Cliff could not see who or what they were as they went into the dun-colored buildings. The Sil did not slow down.\n\nWith the humans struggling in the rear, the whole band sprinted from the last of the zigzags into the open pale dirt field and quickly across to the tadfish. They approached its face as its big green oval eyes peered down at them.\n\nSeveral Sil peeled off and took up positions between the tadfish and the buildings. Cliff came out of the trees and saw some of the Kahalla ground crew turn back. They started running toward the tadfish, and the Sil moved to block them. A Kahalla drew a weapon and one Sil flexed his arm. The Kahalla went down instantly. The other Kahalla backed off and the Sil advanced.\n\nQuert said, \"They stay. Tadfish small. Not carry all of us.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nThe tadfish mouth was still open. Quert ducked and ran directly into the mouth. This looked to Cliff like a very bad idea. He slowed as they approached the ruby red lip of the mouth and saw the floor of the mouth was a hardened cartilage, lime green and ribbed. He tromped in, boots rapping on the cartilage. A musky smell seemed to wrap around his face. He edged down a narrow passage to the left, dimly lit by amber phosphors in the fleshy walls. The walls pulsed with heat and he emerged into a long room devoted to the view out a transparent wall in the tadfish side. The humans were there but no Sil. As he crossed the room, he felt a surge and the tadfish took off, angling over the zigzags. It turned to bask in the wind and accelerated. Everyone caught their balance, bracing against the softly resistant, fleshy walls. Below he saw Kahalla figures running vainly toward some tow lines that had held the tadfish in place. They retracted, and a Kahalla raised a tube weapon toward the humans looking down. It sighted\u2014then lowered the weapon and shook its arms in frustration.\n\nIrma said, \"The Sil stole this thing.\"\n\nThey all laughed a bit in appreciation, relieved, and Quert came into the room. In its staccato manner, it confirmed that the Sil had kept track of when the tadfish would set down on its regular route and had rushed to get there just in time to seize the tadfish when the flight crews changed shift. \"Good timing,\" Terry said, and Quert gave a hand-pass that meant assent.\n\nCliff did not remark that the Sil had not bothered to tell the humans what was up. Quert didn't like debating policy; indeed, the Sil did not share the human appetite for endless talk and at times made fun of it.\n\n\"So now we'll 'hide in the sky' as you said.\" Aybe scowled. \"From what?\"\n\n\"Folk trace us. Saw at Ice Minds. Kahalla alert them.\"\n\nThey were rising fast above the spreading plain. The atmosphere became supersaturated, the air suddenly full of mist. Cliff looked out along the axis of his shadow and there it was forming, a huge round luminous rainbow. The circular rainbow popped into the halo air. It formed near the top of a mountain, aslant from the constant star hanging at his back. He could see five separate colors; the red was intense. Slowly the mist dissolved and the spectral promise faded away. Yet it moved him with its beauty and its quick demise.\n\nThe tadfish walls popped and creaked. Irma said, \"What's that?\" They rose faster. The fins outside beat in synchronous rhythm, and they heard a heavy thudding through the walls. \"Is that its heart?\"\n\nAybe looked out the transparent wall. \"Maybe the body is expanding. It must be making more hydrogen from water, filling itself out.\"\n\nCliff put his head against the oddly warm transparent window and only then noticed a separate transparent bulge farther along the curving skin. It promised a better viewing angle. But the wall nearby had no opening. He saw no way to reach that bulge but ran his hands along the wall and felt a crease in the warm flesh. He pried at it, and with a rasping purr a sheet came free along a seam. A pressure seal, apparently. He peeled it back and saw a narrow footway lit by blue phosphors. A few steps took him to the transparent blister. From here he could see farther around the curve of the great flying balloon, and the stately ranks of flapping translucent fins.\n\nThe view now was majestic and vast. The deep Bowl atmosphere fell off slowly with height, so a living balloon with a fishlike shape could rise a long way before the slackening pressure outside made it bulge. He looked down through many kilometers at the clouds flowing over the low mountains that only a short while ago, while they were running, had loomed in the distance. Refracted glows of the jet and star danced and coiled in deep clouds. Except for the slow thump of the tadfish heart, he felt as though he were hanging in air, seeing the Bowl as did the great birds he had seen far up the towering sky.\n\nHe turned to rejoin the others and saw to his side another pressure seal. He felt it for a seam. Then Irma came into the cramped blister. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Look, we're just passengers, can't do anything but wait. Let's see how this thing works. Might be useful up ahead.\"\n\nIrma twisted her mouth in a skeptical curve. \"I could use a rest.\"\n\n\"The more we know, the better.\"\n\nIrma leaned against the warm wall and gazed out on the spectacular view. \"Um, maybe. Me, I've got strangeness overload. Every day there's more to digest. And on the run, too.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"We're in the belly of a beast already. Let's not get digested.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"These passages are claustrophobic. Let's leave Aybe and Terry back there\u2014Quert's brought some gloppy food for them and they're wolfing it down. Tastes like a chicken-flavored milk shake. Hard bits in it, too, tasted like bitter snails. I can wait.\"\n\nThey went through the narrow tunnels along the tadfish's streamlined form. It had a torpedo shape, and the occasional viewing blister was flanked by big slabs of sinewy brown muscle. These flexed as it propelled forward and Cliff sniffed; their close, moist air took on a sweaty, salty tinge.\n\n\"Fishoids, torpedo-shaped predators,\" Irma said when they looked out a blister and saw a swarm of long tubular birds flocking below. They swerved and scooped in the air, catching something that vented from the tadfish. \"Feeding on waste?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"One species' waste is another's food,\" Cliff said.\n\nAround the long curve of the tadfish body came big gliding shapes in convoy, more like manta rays than like birds. They were flying in a V formation and had slick, matted gray skins. Diving and banking in concert through the thick air, big eyes intent on the feeding tubular birds. Their shapes, Cliff saw, reflected the demands of curvature, flow, and tension as they lazily slid down the air. Meaty triangular wings led back to rudderlike fins and a long spike at the tail. Cliff pointed. \"The killing instrument.\" A pair of eyes protruded in knobs at either side of their wedgelike heads, above the long slit mouth. Another pair of bigger, yellow eyes sat close together and peered forward. The flying tubes moved with stately grace through the glassy air. Fleshy, oarlike appendages flanked the heads, as the manta snapped up the smaller tubular birds. Through the window, Cliff and Irma could hear cries and shrieks as the pillage cut through the flock.\n\nIt was a strange sight and over in a moment. The mantas dove under the tadfish, while a few survivors scattered in frantic haste. Irma put an arm around Cliff's waist and he felt a rush of contentment. In all this strangeness, the small comforts mattered most. They stood that way awhile, until warm air drew their attention to an inward-leading passage. He was trying to analyze all they were seeing, but the dimly lit passage drew them onward. Squishing sounds came from ahead. They worked along a throbbing wall and came upon a translucent interior layer, where they could see dark bones working in a sheath. Low murmurs and hums came through the transparent wall, and they could see gray fluids running down the bulky flesh everywhere. Lubricants?\n\n\"This is its internal skeleton?\" Cliff wondered. The sliding parallel bones worked through thick green collars, coiling like a flexible spring. But their attention focused on two moving stick-figure creatures that seemingly tended this living machinery. They were about a meter tall, with six limbs that moved quickly, clambering everywhere, adjusting the mechanical supports of the bony spine. These creatures used their flexing limbs as either arms or legs, depending on where they scampered over the big moving apparatus. Irma pointed\u2014they had long, two-petaled tails that folded to protect sexual organs that occasionally came into view as they worked. They seemed like slender, pink skeletons, with brains carried in a bump between the pair of limbs at the top of the spinal cord. Three eyes worked on stalks, making an equilateral triangle around a broad red slit of a mouth.\n\n\"They can see us,\" Irma said, \"but they're ignoring us.\"\n\n\"Not so peculiar, really. Think what it's like to work on a public conveyance,\" Cliff said. \"They've seen plenty odder than we are.\"\n\nThey moved along the transparent wall and saw two thick, muscular creatures wearing what seemed to be equipment belts. They were working on a panel pulled open, revealing some complex piping throbbing with amber liquids. They moved with deft small fingers, using tools too small to make out. \"Those look like the ones we saw before,\" Irma said. \"Remember? We were\u2014\"\n\n\"Screwing, yes. And one of them fell on us.\"\n\n\"Turns out they're smart tool-users. I wonder what they thought of us.\"\n\n\"These are ignoring us, same as before. We're pretty ordinary, I guess.\"\n\n\"Here, sophisticated means, I guess, not impressed to run into just another funny alien.\"\n\nCliff chuckled. \"Puts us in our place, doesn't it?\"\n\nAs they neared the tail, there were sudden orange flares jetting from tubes below the viewing blisters. \"Must be fueled by hydrocarbons,\" Cliff said, \"brewed into burnable fuels.\"\n\n\"We're moving fast,\" Irma said as a surge rippled through the body around them. The floor also rolled a bit, like a ship. \"The burn helps.\"\n\n\"Quert said they're artificially bred forms of an original balloon-birdlike species,\" Cliff said. \"So their energy source got engineered, too.\"\n\n\"We'd better get back,\" Irma said. They were moving quickly now, diving out over a sheet of green water that seemed a continent wide, beneath the waving fields of grass. Dotting this grass sea were bumps shaped like tadpoles, with a crust of trees ornamenting them. The thick end pointed upstream, while the water swept debris past and then dropped it in the eddy behind the hummock. This made the tadpole tail grow, building slim islands where animals lived among the dense amber and green trees. All this simmered beneath the reddish light of the star and orange filigrees cast by the slowly churning helices in the jet. As they descended, gaining speed, packs of large fishlike life became clear. They breached the shallow sea in great leaps, hanging in air, then crashing down in great sprays of white.\n\nIrma said, \"Those look a lot like dolphins.\"\n\n\"The basic fish shape, as you say.\" Cliff pointed at the width of the moving school. \"Thousands of them. What a great way to see Bowl life.\"\n\nIrma said, \"I always thought, we believe dolphins are not as smart as we because they never built cars or refrigerators or New York or had wars. All they do is spend every day swimming in warm oceans, chasing and eating fish, mating and having fun. The dolphins think they are smarter than us, for the very same reasons.\"\n\nAgain, Cliff chuckled. \"I always thought, on a statistical argument about time scales, that if we ran across intelligent aliens at Glory, they'd be overwhelmingly likely to be far more intelligent than us.\"\n\nIrma nodded. \"And therefore wouldn't care at all about us\u2014if they even noticed us.\"\n\n\"Me, too. But we've been able to stay out of the hands of the Folk for a long time now. On their own turf!\"\n\n\"Could be the aliens who built this place were super-minds, but their descendants have gotten stupid.\"\n\n\"So both the skeptics about smart aliens were wrong, and so were the optimists?\" Cliff liked the idea. \"Wonder what that means\u2014\"\n\nShe and Cliff were so caught up in the sight, they only noticed the huge thing hanging above when it blotted out the star.\n\nThe skyfish was firing hydrogen jets behind it and slewing swiftly through the filmy air. Headed toward them. Some strange angular birds were flocking out of the skyfish. They were lean and had long jaws with\u2014 \"Are those teeth?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"Looks like. Not friendly, no.\"\nTHIRTY-FOUR\n\nThey had been running hot and hard now for many hours, and it was starting to show in his crew.\n\nRedwing sat on the bridge because if he paced for hours, as he already had, everybody got edgy. Fair enough; he sat and twitched, mostly by moving his feet, in their gecko shoes, where nobody could see. He had used up his weekly shower ration in two days of this.\n\nThey had entered the jet days ago, not that there was any clear sign of it. The mag field values started to climb a day ago and the plasma density followed it. Only by amping certain spectral lines of yellow and green could the wall screens show the filmy curtains of sliding ion flow in the jet. Those weren't plasma, really\u2014the light came from ions, as electrons found them at last and cascaded down the energy levels to emit a photon. The light showed where plasma eased into little deaths.\n\nNow Ayaan Ali had taken over as lead pilot and Clare Conway sat in the copilot deck chair. Beth Marble had gone to get some sleep. They all watched the blue and green lines work on the large screens, mapping pressures and flux changes at the perimeter of their magscoop fields.\n\n\"How's the scoop impedance looking?\" Redwing asked.\n\n\"Down to three meg-ohms, sir.\" From her sideways glance, he knew Ayaan Ali understood that he could have read it from the screens, but that they needed to have some talk on the bridge, just to diffuse tensions.\n\nA rumble and a rolling shock came rippling through the ship. \"Ride's interesting,\" Redwing said mildly.\n\nAyaan Ali smiled and nodded, eyes never leaving the screens, hands on the e-helm at all times. \"We took a shock front from forty-two degrees starboard, seventeen degrees south. Plasma still rising.\"\n\n\"This fits the model Karl worked up?\"\n\n\"Um, sort of.\" A skeptical arching of eyebrows.\n\nRedwing picked up something more in her body language. Karl and Ayaan Ali always kept a wary distance in crew meetings and were crisply correct around him... which led him to wonder if something was going on between them. They were in a dangerous place, and tensions needed release. He decided to put it away for later, if ever. The mission was the point here. \"Okay. Nobody expects models to work well here. I don't, anyway. Let's see the aft scoop and plume.\" Redwing always felt a bit jumpy about anything sneaking up behind them, though with the Artilects on constant duty, that was extremely unlikely.\n\nThe rumbling aft faded. Eerie popping noises came through the support beams and hollow creakings sounded. A sour stench of something scorched\u2014probably just overheating in a forward tank. The display space before them showed flurries of plasma, highlighted in violet, slamming into the scoop.\n\n\"Those knots again,\" Ayaan Ali said.\n\n\"Let's see long-range radar,\" Redwing said.\n\nThey studied the yawning space around the jet, looking from multiple dishes. \"Nothing near us, nothing in near space, nothing farther out,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"I've always wondered why we saw so few spacecraft. You'd think they would be sending ships out to monitor the whole system.\"\n\nRedwing nodded. \"This system has no planets, or asteroids, no comets coming in. Nothing bigger than a school bus. But there were some small craft, remember? They came over the Bowl rim, flew along the top of their atmosphere manifolds, ducked into a hole in the upper atmosphere layer.\"\n\n\"But very few, very little craft.\" Clare shrugged. \"And we know the gravitational instabilities that the Bowl risks all the time. If they get too close to the star, they have to fire up the jet and push the stellar mass away, while they grab the rising jet flux and let it push them back. Reverse if they start falling behind. Then there's the spinning Bowl, same instabilities as a spinning top. But I guess they can run this whole wacky system without many spacecraft.\"\n\nKarl came onto the bridge, back from checking inductance coils along the ship. He had heard Ayaan Ali. \"It's all maintained with magnetic fields and jet pressure,\" he said. \"Plus the reflected sunlight, to heat the hot spot. Tricky stuff.\"\n\n\"Those inductance coils getting worked hard?\" Redwing asked.\n\n\"Running high, but within margin.\" Karl got into his chair and belted up, casting a side look at Redwing, as if to say, Why don't you sit?\n\nRedwing never explained that he liked to move through the ship when it was having trouble. He could tell more with his feet and ears than the screens could say.\n\nThey had taken three days to cross the jet with the fusion chambers running at full bore, driving them to nearly two hundred kilometers per second. That was far higher than an orbital velocity, though still far under the ship's coasting specs. SunSeeker now was turning in the helix Karl had calculated, cutting in an arc near the jet's boundary, its magscoop facing the star at a steep angle and swallowing its heated plasma. They had faced such a headwind coming in and survived. But now the navigation was tougher. This time they had to remain lower than the Bowl's rim, or else come within the firing field of the gamma ray lasers there.\n\n\"How do we know this is the optimal path?\" Redwing asked Karl.\n\n\"Calculations\u2014\"\n\n\"I mean from what we've learned these last few days.\"\n\n\"It's working.\" Karl's lean face tightened, ending in his skewed, tight mouth above a pointed chin where he had begun to grow a goatee. \"We're brushing the mag pressures outward. Our sideways thrust drives the magnetic kink mode, feeding off the jet's own forward momentum. We're stimulating the flow patterns at the right wavelength to make the jet slew.\"\n\n\"We'll see sideways jet movement before it shoots through the Knothole?\"\n\n\"It should.\" Karl's gaze was steady, intent. He had a lot riding on this.\n\n\"Let's look aft. Have we got better directionals this time?\" Redwing asked Ayaan Ali.\n\n\"Somewhat,\" she said. \"I rotated some aft antennas to get a look, the sideband controllers, too.\"\n\nShe changed the color view, and Redwing watched brilliant yellow knots twist around the prow of their magscoop like neon tropical storms. \"These curlers push us sideways a lot.\"\n\nA rumble ran down the axis and Redwing hung on to Ayaan Ali's deck chair. Clare showed the acoustic monitors display in red lines on a side screen. The strains worked all down the ship axis.\n\n\"We're getting side shear,\" Redwing said mildly. He took care not to give direct piloting instructions; no backseat driving.\n\n\"I'll fire a small side jet, let some plasma vent from the side of the magscoop, rotate on the other axis, and take our aft around some.\"\n\nHer hands traced a command in the space before her. A faint rumbling began, then a surge. The ship slid sideways and Redwing hung on to a deck chair. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been his strong point. His stomach lurched.\n\nShe worked on getting the aft view aligned. SunSeeker's core was no mere pod sitting atop the big fuel tank that held the fusion catalysis ions. Gouts of those ions had to merge with the incoming plasma, fresh from the magscoop. In turn, the mated streams fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way along the axis, no matter how ornate the subsections got, hanging on the main axis, because the water reserves tank shielded the biozone and crew up front, far from the fusion reactor, and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.\n\nRedwing knew every rivet and corner of the ship and liked to prowl through all its sections. The whole stack was in zero gee, except the thick rotating toroid at the top, which the crew seldom left. A hundred and sixteen meters in diameter, looking like a dirty, scarred angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were two meters thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with its point forward, bristling with viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds. Yet they had big wall displays at high resolution and smart optics to tell them far more than a window ever could.\n\nAyaan Ali's work brought the multiple camera views into alignment with some jitter. They were looking back at the Bowl and she had to tease the jet out of all the brighter oceans and lands slowly turning in the background, a complicated problem.\n\n\"Let's get a clear look-down of the jet,\" Redwing said.\n\nTo see and diagnose the plume, they had a rearview polished aluminum mirror floating out forty meters to the side. They didn't dare risk a survey bot in the roiling plasma streams that skirted around the magscoop, with occasional dense plasma fingers jutting in.\n\nThe image tuned through different spectral lines, picking out regions where densities were high and glows twisted. On the screen, a blue-white flare tapered away for a thousand kilometers before fraying into streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out an actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern. He was used to seeing it against the black of space, but now all around their jet was a view of the Bowl. The gray-white mirror zones glinted with occasional sparkles from the innumerable mirrors that reflected light back on the star.\n\nSeen slightly to the side of the jet, the Knothole was a patch of dark beneath the filmy yellow and orange filigrees of the jet. Redwing supposed that at the right angle, the whole jet looked like a filmy exclamation point, with Wickramsingh's Star as the searing bright dot.\n\nKarl said, \"See that bulge to the left? That's the kink working toward the Knothole.\"\n\nAyaan Ali nodded. \"Wow. To think we can kick this thing around!\"\n\n\"Trick is, we're using the jet's energy to do the work.\" Karl smiled, a thin pale line. \"It's snaking like a fire hose held in by magnetic fields.\"\n\nAyaan Ali frowned. \"When it hits the Knothole, how close to the edge does it get?\"\n\n\"Not too close, I think.\"\n\n\"You think?\"\n\n\"The calculations and simulations I've run, they say so.\"\n\n\"Hope they're right,\" Ayaan Ali said softly.\n\nThey continued on the calculated trajectory as the ship sang with the torque. The helix gave them a side acceleration of about a tenth of a grav, so Redwing kept pacing the deck on a slight slant, inspecting the screens in the operating bays.\n\nHe also watched how everyone was holding up. His crew had been refined so they fit together like carefully crafted puzzles, each skill set reinforcing another's. That meant excluding even personal habits, like \"mineralarians,\" a faction who insisted that eating animals or even plants, which both cling to life, was a moral failing. Instead, they choked down an awful mix of sugars, amino and fatty acids, minerals and vitamins, all made from rocks, air, and water. That could never work while pioneering a planet, so the mineralarians got cut from the candidate list immediately. Same for genetic fashions. Homo evolutis were automatically excluded from the expedition as too untested, though of course no one ever said so in public. That would be speciesism, a sin when SunSeeker was being built, and in Redwing's opinion, one of the ugliest words ever devised.\n\nBut with all the years of screening, there were still wild cards in his deck. Smart people always had a trick or two you never saw until pressure brought it out. Managing people was not remotely like ordering from a menu.\n\nAs he watched an internal status board Fred was manning, Redwing felt a hard jar run down the axis. Ayaan Ali quickly corrected for a slew to their port side. The fusion chamber's low rumble rose. It sounded, Redwing thought, a lot like the lower notes on an organ playing in a cathedral.\n\n\"Exhaust flow is pulsing,\" she said. \"External pressure is rising behind us.\"\n\n\"Funny.\" Redwing watched the screens intently. \"Makes no sense.\"\n\n\"We're getting back pressure.\" Her hands flew over the command board. A long, wrenching wave ran through the ship. Redwing sat at last in a deck chair\u2014just in time, as a rumbling sound built in the walls and surges of acceleration shook the ship.\n\nThe aft picture worsened. They saw from two angles looking aft that the plume was bunching up, as if rippling around some unseen obstacle. The logjam thickened as they watched. Rolling waves came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.\n\n\"Getting a lot of strange jitter,\" Beth said. She was in uniform, crisply turned out.\n\nRedwing looked around. \"It's your sleep time.\"\n\n\"Who could sleep through this? Captain, it's building up.\"\n\n\"You're to take the chief pilot's chair in three hours\u2014\"\n\n\"Aft ram pressure is inverting profile,\" Ayaan Ali said crisply. \"Never happens, this. Not even in simulations.\"\n\n\"I can feel it,\" Beth said. \"This much vibration, the whole config must be\u2014\"\n\n\"Too much plasma jamming back into the throat.\" Ayaan Ali gestured to the screen profiling the engine, its blue magnetic hourglass-shaped throat. Its pinch-and-release flaring geometry was made of fields, so could adjust at the speed of light to the furious ion pressures that rushed down it, fresh from their fusion burn. But it could only take so much variation before snarling, choking\u2014and blowing a hole in the entire field geometry. That would direct hot plasma on the ship wall itself, a cutting blowtorch.\n\nAs they watched, the orange flow in its blue field-line cage curled and snarled. \"It's under pressures from outside the ship,\" Ayaan Ali said, voice tight and high.\n\n\"If it gets close to critical pressures, shut down,\" Redwing said. He was surprised his own voice sounded calm.\n\nBeth said, \"But we'll\u2014\"\n\n\"Go to reserve power if we have to,\" Clare said.\n\n\"That won't last long,\" Karl said. \"And this external pressure on our magscoop could crumple it.\"\n\nA long, low note rang through the ship\u2014a full system warning. No one had heard that sound since training. The drive had not been off since they left Earthside.\n\n\"I'm going to spin us,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"Outrace the pressure.\"\n\nShe ran the helm hard over and the magscoop responded, canting its mouth. Next she flared the magnetic nozzle at the very aft end of the ship, clearing it of knotted plasma. That took two seconds. Then she flexed the field back down and ran the fusion chamber to its max. Redwing could follow this, but her speed and agility were what made her a standout. They were all hanging on as the entire ship spun about its radial axis. Redwing closed his eyes and let the swirl go away from him, listening to the ship. The pops and groans recalled the drastic maneuvers they'd run SunSeeker through, during the years-long Oort cloud trials. He trusted his ears more than the screen displays of magnetic stresses.\n\nThe rumbles ebbed away. When the spin slowed, he opened his eyes again. The screens showed milder conditions around the ship. \"I broke us out of that magnetic pinch,\" Ayaan Ali said. \"We got caught in a sausage instability. Had to flex our scoop pretty hard.\"\n\nRedwing recalled that meant the radial squeezing the jet sometimes displayed. Karl had said the jet narrowing looked like some sort of sausage mode, which took it through the Knothole and made it flare out once it was well beyond. But they weren't that close to the Knothole. That was the point\u2014the kink instability took a while to develop while the jet was arrowing in toward the Bowl.\n\nRedwing thought it strange that the pinch effect had been so strong. He asked Karl if the magnetic pressures on their magnetic nozzle could be so strong, but before Karl could answer he felt a prickly sensation play fretfully across his skin. Everyone looked around, sensing it also.\n\nAbruptly a yellow arc cut through the air above the deck. It crackled and snaked as it moved, but turned aside whenever it met a metal barrier. They all bailed out of their couches. Redwing lay flat on the deck as the snapping, curling discharge twisted in the air above him. The crackling thing snarled around itself. Sparks hissed into the air. Yellow coils flexed, spitting light. The discharge arched and twisted and abruptly split, shaped into an extended cup shape that spun.\n\n\"It's shaping the... the Bowl,\" Beth said.\n\nThe yellow arc made a bad cartoon, snapping and writhing, never holding true for long.\n\nRedwing felt his heart thump. \"Something is out there. Making trouble for us.\"\n\nBeth said, \"Something we can't see.\"\n\nRedwing recalled that in their discussions he had asked, What could I be missing? Well, here it was.\n\nBeth had once said that flying into the jet could give them an edge, all right\u2014but there were huge unknowns. Unknown unknowns were like a double-edged sword, she had said, with no handle. You didn't know which way the edge would cut.\nTHIRTY-FIVE\n\nAsenath made a show of her entrance. She gave the assembled crew and servants a traditional bronze-golden chest display, then unfurled side arrow lances, ending in brilliant purple fan crescents. Her cycle-shaped tail laces coiled out with a snap, their flourish attracting attention first to tail, then with a flurry, to breast. Even the sub-Folk knew this strategy, though without nuance or passion. Crowds of them in the big bay of the skyfish clustered and tittered as Asenath presented. Memor watched with glazed eyes, Bemor at her side and the primate crouched nearby.\n\nThe grand bang and rattle caught many eyes, so she followed with a sharp pop. Yellow patch flares then ignited their tips, flavoring the already fragrant air. Quills rattled at incessant pace, rolls and frissons, japes and jars. All this was a part of the eternal status-flurry that kept order across the great stretches of the Bowl.\n\n\"What's all this for?\" the primate said.\n\nThe impudence of this question, coming at the climax of Asenath's display, angered both Memor and, she could see, Bemor. The primate was about to become very useful, so Memor decided to discipline her in full view of all. As she turned, Bemor clasped her shoulder in a restraining grasp. \"Do not. It will disturb this creature more than you know.\"\n\n\"I have spent more time with her than\u2014\"\n\n\"Than I have, yes. But indulge me this once.\"\n\nMemor explained to the primate that such social rituals shored up the hierarchy needed to manage the entire Bowl society. Whenever the Folk visited a local venue of use, such as this skyfish, they reminded all of how the vast world worked, by showing ancient rituals. \"Making the past come into their present, and so reside for their futures.\"\n\n\"It's just a dance with feathers, incense, songs, and whatever drug is floating in this air,\" Tananareve Bailey said. \"I can sense it creeping in through my pores.\"\n\n\"I will be most surprised if it affects your chemistry. It is tuned for these Kahalla and their minions, plus adjacent evolved subspecies.\"\n\nTananareve coughed. \"Stinks, too.\"\n\nMemor rankled at this but said, \"The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival, operating on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully, but the unit of survival is different at each of the six time ranges. On intervals of what you would term years, or orbital periods, the unit surviving is the individual. On a time scale of decades of orbitals, the unit is the family. On a scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation\u2014such as this district of the Kahalla. On a time range of millennia, the unit is the culture. The Kahalla culture is widespread. So they may lend that gracious stability to vagrant districts. On a time scale of tens or more of millennia, the surviving unit is the species. Some cultures do survive that long, and we encourage that. On the range of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our Bowl.\" Memor made a signifying fan-rattle to conclude and for punctuation gave a sweet aroma-belch from her neck.\n\nBemor added, \"That is the scale we now confront with you Late Invaders.\"\n\n\"Huh? We're just stopping by.\"\n\nBemor huffed in amusement. \"Not so. You are important at this juncture as we approach Glory.\"\n\n\"Who says?\"\n\n\"The Ice Minds,\" Memor injected, though she knew the primate did not know the term, much less the substance.\n\nAsenath finished and resumed command of this skyfish with quick, darting orders. Squads rushed off to prepare for battle, a rolling bass note summoned crew to stations, and an electric intensity shot through the air\u2014a zippy ion augmentation to stimulate. A wall flushed from its solemn gray to a stunning view of the region the skyfish commanded.\n\nNeedles of spiral rock forked up, moss-covered and home to many flapping species. The skyfish had recently fed there, from server species that brought arrays of food to be easily ingested as the skyfish moored on the peaks. These erections stood beside bays and lagoons, where waves reflecting the jet and star winked up at them. Here and there in the complex landscape, white snakes curved, highways like lines drawn on a lush green paper.\n\nTo the side, fluttering fast, was a silvery mote. Their target, just as the Kahalla had said.\n\n\"What's the battle?\" Tananareve asked, watching the many minions scurry around.\n\n\"We expect little fighting,\" Memor said. \"We are to capture the rest of you.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" Tananareve said. \"They've been on the run here a long time. And they bite.\"\n\nMemor found this amusing and sent a subtle fan-display of this to Bemor. \"As if we had cause to fear them!\" she said in Folk.\n\n\"Yes, perhaps this primate has a sense of humor,\" Bemor said, distracted, his big eyes looking into the distance.\n\nSuddenly Memor felt a tremor from her Undermind. It was a cool trickle of apprehension, not of actual fear, yet its icy fingers crept into her thinking. She paused a moment to do her inward-turning, letting the Undermind gradually open. She found a swamp. Fresh, gaudy notions and worries laced through fetid dark pools of ancient fears, all beneath a sullen sky. Trepidations wrapped around a locus, like tendrils of gray fog settling on a hill. The darting slips of anxiety seemed to orbit that hill. What was in it? Under it? She did not recall ever seeing this rising bulge before. Yet she knew it was not new, but old. She knew the bodies of congested uneasiness might be thrust down for a while, into the recesses of the Undermind. But this was a large bolus of somber dark emotions, and it drove fresh fears into her conscious layers.\n\nYet she had no time for this now. Action drew near. \"Asenath, how might we assist?\"\n\n\"Keep your Late Invader close. We will need her to interpret nuance and the other Invaders' nonverbal signaling.\"\n\nBemor seemed uneasy. Memor gave him a flurry of feathers that bespoke concern, but he shook it off with a rustle. She saw from his distant gaze that he was tapped into his comm and studying information.\n\nHe breathed quicker, a low rumble of thought. Memor respected Bemor's ability to go beyond the Bowl's constant data flood, mediated through its incessantly collecting local Analyticals. Those artificial minds monitored Bowl data on local scales, then sent it upward through an ascending pyramid of minds both wholly artificial and natural\u2014though, of course, all minds had been bred and engineered for optimal performance, far long ago. Then the smoothed product of much mastication came to such as Bemor, to make sense nuanced of mind-numbingly complex situations. Digested data could help compensate for Folk overconfidence in their own intuitions, thus reducing the distortion of perception by desire. Natural minds were unable to deal with avalanches of data and mathematics, but were excellent at social cognition. Bemor could draw from his deep knowledge of history and the higher intellects. He was good at mirroring others' emotional states, such as detecting uncooperative behavior, and at assigning value to things through emotion. Was he dealing with new ideas from the Ice Minds now? Something in his posture told Memor that he was deeply concerned about some matter far distant from their pursuit of these Late Invaders.\n\nAbruptly Bemor broke off and spat at Asenath, \"We need those Late Invaders captured immediately. No delay! But handle them carefully. Loss of even one of their lives could endanger us all.\"\n\nAsenath knew enough to take this command without question. She turned and ordered a nearby Kahalla, \"Do not chance a glancing shot.\"\n\n\"But we planned\u2014,\" the Kahalla began.\n\n\"Ignore all that came before. A shot to compel them might do damage to the tadfish. Especially if you miss by even a fraction.\"\n\n\"Madam, we have already dispatched the sharpwings,\" the Kahalla said, going into a bowing posture of apology.\n\n\"I did not so order!\"\n\n\"It was explicit in your attack plan, timed to occur as we first sighted the tadfish.\"\n\nMemor could see that Asenath had no ready reply to this, so she turned away with a rebuking ruffle-display of red with scarlet fringes.\n\nThey all moved close to the observation wall. The tadfish drew nearer and now a school of angular birds came forking in toward the silvery shape. They were big in wing and head. Memor knew these sharpwings as pack birds who could harry and bring down far larger prey.\n\nBemor was alarmed enough to be distracted from his comm. \"Stop them. Now.\"\n\nAsenath obeyed. Memor knew that here, nearer to the Knothole, craft such as tadfish had a natural utility. Great circulating cells of warm air cycled across the zones and life used these free rides. Skyfish were a transport business in the long voyages and tadfish had been bred from them, long ago, to traverse the shorter routes. In its constant restless way, evolution had spawned species of sharpwings to prey on tadfish. Most often they swarmed the prey, as Memor now watched them do.\n\nAsenath shouted, \"I said to turn them back!\" to the Kahalla who backed away from her, head bent deep in contrition.\n\n\"They do not respond,\" the Kahalla whispered. \"They are hirelings, and hard to deflect once engaged in their ancient battle rites.\"\n\n\"So they make for the meaty passengers,\" Memor said dryly.\n\n\"Their spirits are up,\" the Kahalla said. \"Difficult to countermand.\"\n\nNow the sharpwings circled the tadfish. The great fish fired its hydrogen jets at them. Great plumes of ignited gas forked out and burned sharpwings black in an instant. Bodies tumbled away but more sharpwings came arrowing in. Their long jaws with razor teeth sliced at the working fins to disable navigation. The orange tongues licked more sharpwings.\n\nThey were drawing nearer, and Asenath ordered external ears to pick up the battle sounds. Memor could make out the anguish cries of those being burned. Sharpwing song-calls also laced the air, vibrant and shrill. Beneath that came the deep bass roll of the tadfish's agony. It echoed across the diminishing distance.\n\nNow sharpwings dove along the tadfish flanks, going for the gut. Their spiked wings ripped along and into the scaly flesh. It was, Memor reflected, as though the attackers were writing on the lustrous flesh their own messages, in long lines that soon brimmed red. These species had evolved to a stable predator\u2013prey balancing, now governed by their betters\u2014but only when their passions could be blunted.\n\n\"Bring your lancing shots to bear,\" Asenath ordered.\n\n\"Please note, we cannot be so accurate at this range,\" the Kahalla said. \"I fear\u2014\"\n\n\"Do it.\" Asenath was stern. \"Otherwise they will bring down the tadfish and devour its passengers.\"\n\nThe Kahalla did not attempt to argue. It turned and gave orders. Over the amplified booming, shrieks, and cries, Memor could scarcely hear the sharp psssstt! of the pellet guns. These hit the sharpwings with shattering blows. Next came the rattling laser batteries, picking off the great birds with quick stabs of green brilliance. All these weapons had to hit the sharpwings as they banked away from the tadfish, to avoid wounding it, so those sharpwings already close in on the attack escaped for a while. Orange jets from the tadfish belly licked at flights of the sharpwings. Squawks and screeches rose in an anguished crescendo. The thuds of pellets firing slowed as targets became scarce. A rain of blackened and shattered bodies tumbled, turning slowly in the long descent toward the green forests and glinting lakes below.\n\nThe remaining few sharpwings broke off the attack and flapped away, sending mournful long songs forth. \"Very good,\" Asenath said.\n\n\"Let us escort the tadfish down, then,\" Memor said. \"We can land and take possession.\"\n\nAsenath conferred with the Kahalla, then turned to address Bemor, ignoring Memor. \"We can swallow such a small tadfish. No need to land. We can continue to higher altitudes and catch the fast winds toward the upper Mirror Zone.\"\n\nBemor sent approval-displays, but his eyes did not move from his comm plate. \"Good. Do so. We need the other Late Invaders.\"\n\nMemor felt shunted aside. She had been pursuing these vagrant primates for a great while, and now Bemor\u2014and even worse, Asenath\u2014would get credit for their apprehension. But at least it was done. \"Why are they so useful? I am happy to have them in hand, of course, but\u2014\"\n\nBemor gave a low, bass growl. \"The Ice Minds command it. Events proceed elsewhere. A crisis threatens. We must get the primates.\"\n\n\"We have this one here\u2014\" A gesture at Tananareve.\n\n\"We may need more. The Ice Minds want to use them to converse in an immersion mode.\"\n\nMemor stirred with misgivings. Her Undermind was fevered and demanded to be heard, but there was no time now. \"Immersion? That can be destructive.\"\n\nTananareve seemed to be following this, but wisely said nothing.\n\n\"That is why we need several pathways. The connection may be too much for them, and we will need replacements.\"\n\nMemor said softly, feeling a tremor from her Undermind, \"What crisis?\"\n\n\"It goes badly in the jet.\"\nPART XII\n\nTHE WORD OF CAMBRONNE\n\nIt was at Waterloo that General Cambronne, when called on to surrender, was supposed to have said, \"The Old Guard dies but never surrenders!\" What Cambronne actually said was, \"Merde!\" which the French, when they do not wish to pronounce it, still refer to as, \"the word of Cambronne.\" It corresponds to our four-letter word for manure. All the difference between the noble and the earthy accounts of war is contained in the variance between these two quotations.\n\n\u2014ERNEST HEMINGWAY, MEN AT WAR\nTHIRTY-SIX\n\nThe first sight of the Folk commanding the big skyfish was daunting. Cliff had seen these Folk aliens when his team came through the lock, in what seemed a very long time ago. Later he had heard fragments about the Folk from the scattered SunSeeker transmissions.\n\nBut now these before him seemed different\u2014larger, with big heads on a leathery stalk neck. Their feathers made the body shape hard to make out. The Folk back at the air lock had feathers, but not nearly so large, colorful, and vibrant. As Cliff's team and Quert's Sil entered, the three big Folk rattled their displays, forking out neck arrays that flashed quick variations in magenta, rose, and ivory. Their lower bodies flourished downy wreaths of brown and contrasting violet.\n\n\"They're... giant peacocks,\" Irma whispered.\n\nCliff nodded. Back Earthside, peacocks used their outrageously large feathers to woo females. But these rustling, constantly shifting feather-shows had far more signaling capacity. Beneath the layers, he could glimpse ropy pelvic muscles. Loose-jointed shoulders gave intricate control to the feathers. \"More like, those flaunt unspoken messages, I'd guess.\"\n\nQuert gestured and said, \"Quill feather gives mood. Tail fan on neck cups sound to ears. Fan-signals are many. Rattle and flap for more signal. Color choice gives messages, too.\"\n\nAybe said, \"Structural coloration, I'd say. Microfibers, fine enough to interfere with the incoming light, reflect back the color the creature wants.\"\n\nCliff watched the beautiful iridescent blue green or green-colored plumage shimmer and change with viewing angle. \"Reflections from fibers, could be.\"\n\nThey all stood bunched together, humans and Sil, as the Folk came slowly into the big room, passing nearby with a gliding walk before settling on a place. The big things loomed over them and rattled out a long, ordered set of clattering sounds. \"What's that sound say?\" Terry whispered.\n\n\"Greet to visitor. But visitors inferior and should say so.\"\n\n\"Say so?\" Irma whispered. \"How?\"\n\nQuert gave the other Sil quick sliding words, a question. They all responded with a few other short, soft words. Quert's face took on a wrinkled, wry cast. \"Sil not say, you not either.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Aybe said, and the others nodded. No tribute, no submission.\n\nCliff regarded the Folk's unmistakable piercing eyes, big though now slitted and slanted beneath heavy, crusted eyelids. Their pupils were big and black, set in bright yellow irises. There was something going on behind those eyes. Cliff had an impression of a brooding intelligence measuring the small band of humans and Sil. The tall, feathered Folk held the gaze of humans and Sil as they settled back on their huge legs and tails and gestured, murmuring to each other while still peering down at the humans. Cliff felt a prickly, primitive sensation, an awareness of a special danger. His nostrils flared and he automatically spread his stance, fists on his hips, facing the three aliens fore square.\n\nThe three Folk settled into the high room bounded by pink, fleshy walls. Attendants flanked the three, and others scurried off to unknown tasks. There were small forms with six legs and plumed heads, carrying burdens and arranging the flesh-pink walls with quick energy. Constant motion surrounded the Folk, who went slowly, almost gliding. It was like watching an eerie parade with three big, frightening floats.\n\n\"Irma! Cliff!\" Suddenly Tananareve Bailey appeared from behind one of the Folk. She ran toward them.\n\nMeeting any friend in this bizarre place was wonderful. They all embraced Tananareve as she rushed into their arms. To Cliff, she was as lean and steely as a piece of gym equipment; you saw the skull beneath the skin. Irma said, laughing, \"At last! Some woman company.\" And they all laughed long and hard. Giddy jokes, ample smiles.\n\nA long loud sentence from the largest of the Folk broke them out of their happy chatter. They looked up into big yellow eyes.\n\n\"They said they needed you,\" Tananareve translated, \"but I never know if they're telling me true.\"\n\n\"This skyfish just swallowed our tadfish,\" Irma said. \"I thought we were goners.\"\n\n\"Better than a fight,\" Terry said. \"But... we're captured.\"\n\nThe enormity of this last hurried and harried hour came to Cliff. He had kept his team free for so long now, barely escaping in one scrape after another... only to fail so quickly, swallowed, a slap in the face with cold water. He opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. The others were still happy just to have Tananareve, but the implications were stunning.\n\n\"Maybe they want to negotiate,\" Cliff said, not really believing it.\n\nTananareve said, \"They got orders from someone to grab you, pronto. They've been tracking you ever since you saw something called the Ice Minds. It took this long to catch up with you. They're big and can't crawl through the Bowl understructure. They kept complaining about having to take the other transports that can handle their size.\"\n\n\"What's up?\" Aybe asked.\n\n\"They're under pressure. I don't know why.\" Tananareve stood near the Folk and introduced Asenath, Memor, and Bemor. It took a while to explain that Memor and Bemor had nearly the same genetics, were something like fraternal twins of different sexes, but that Bemor was somehow enhanced and held a higher-status position. \"He can speak to the Ice Minds. Whereas Asenath\"\u2014a nod to the tall, densely feathered creature, sharp-eyed and rustling with impatience\u2014\"is a Wisdom Chief.\" A shrug. \"As near as I can tell, that's kind of like an operations officer.\"\n\nThere followed some back and forth translating as Memor insisted on a full introduction using her complete title, Attendant Astute Astronomer. Bemor then managed to get his \"Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds\" into the discussion. Tananareve whispered, \"Slip those titles into your remarks now and then; they like that.\"\n\nCliff watched the huge aliens as the light of the jet and star, at these higher altitudes, poured down on the fleshy floor like glistening yellow-white oil. Asenath thundered, \"We have you indeed, at last. The first issue is our need of you, to prepare a message for those whom you term the 'Glorians'\u2014to continue the artifice.\"\n\nThe others looked to Cliff. He faced the big skull Asenath lowered, as if to listen more closely. Cliff suspected this was just intimidation\u2014and decided to ignore it, the only strategy that might work. \"Artifice?\"\n\n\"Glorians believe you primates are the rulers and pilots of our Bowl,\" Asenath thundered. \"They confuse our mutual trajectories as meaning that the Bowl comes from your world.\"\n\n\"Weird. So?\" It seemed to Cliff better to play dumb for a while. There was too much going on to make sense of this. He needed time to talk to Tananareve and get his bearings. These Folk had talked to Redwing, using Tananareve, but what were the nuances of that?\n\nAsenath gave a purple and rose display and her head descended still closer. Her Anglish was clipped and brusque, perhaps because she had only recently imbibed the language, or because she meant it that way. \"Of course we converge on Glory. Over time scales of many thousands of orbitals, similar goals emerge. The only puzzle to us is why you, with your simple though ingenious and craftily made ship, desire to attain the status the Glorian technologies imply.\"\n\nCliff shrugged, glanced at Tananareve\u2014who shrugged. \"Imply?\"\n\n\"The gravitational signals. Surely this lures you.\"\n\n\"Not really. We're bound for Glory because it's a biosphere a lot like our own. The right oxygen levels, water vapor, a hydrogen cycle with oceans. Plus no signs of technology. No signatures of odd elements in its air. No electromagnetic emissions. No signals at all. Kind of like our world thousands of years\u2014I guess you call them orbitals\u2014ago.\" Cliff spread his hands, hoping this was a signal of admitting the obvious.\n\nAsenath gave a rustling flurry of feather displays, crimson and violet. \"Your ship has received the Glorian signals, yet you do not know?\"\n\n\"Know what?\"\n\n\"The Glorians, as you term them, are of the August.\"\n\n\"Meaning...?\"\n\n\"They do not deign, over many megaorbitals, to answer our electromagnetic signals. No matter of what frequencies. The Aloof and August.\"\n\n\"The same might be said of any rock.\"\n\n\"The advanced societies of this galaxy deliver their August messages only by means that young societies, such as yours, cannot detect.\" Asenath gave a rattling side-display in eggshell blue. \"Most important, signals of great information density, to which young worlds cannot reply.\"\n\n\"We picked up the gravity waves, around the time our ship left Earthside,\" Cliff said. \"There didn't seem to be a signal, just noise.\"\n\n\"So young societies would think,\" Bemor said from beside Asenath. \"We do\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly something made the three Folk pause, Bemor with his mouth partly open. Silence. Their yellow eyes were distant.\n\nQuert appeared at Cliff's side and whispered, \"They hear other voices.\"\n\n\"They've done this before, getting signals somehow,\" Tananareve said. \"Let's use the time. What's our strategy here?\"\n\n\"These Folk have something in mind, using us somehow, I'll bet,\" Aybe said. \"Wish I knew what they're hearing right now.\"\n\nQuert said, \"They now listen to what we Sil brought forth. Told to. We showed old truth.\"\n\n\"How?\" Tananareve asked.\n\n\"Folk control electromagnetic pathways in Bowl. So Sil make signs buildings.\" The swift slippery slide of Quert's words belied the content.\n\nCliff said, \"Those deforming houses we saw you building?\" He recalled how the Sil had deftly rebuilt their ruined city. He had seen a growing arch inching out into a parabolic curve, the scaffolding of tan walls rising from what seemed to be a sticky, plastic dirt. Wrinkled bulks had surged up as oblong windows popped into shape from a crude substrate, all driven by electrical panels. The Sil were working their entire city into fresh structures like spun glass, growing them into artful loops and bridges and elegant spires.\n\n\"You make signals with your cities?\" Irma asked. \"How?\"\n\n\"City, all can see all across Bowl. Others know to look to us. To get message.\" Quert had now a calm the feline alien wore like a cloak.\n\n\"What was the message?\"\n\nQuert looked at them all slowly, as if unburdening at last. He wagged his head and said, \"Bowl pass by your sun. Go too close. Shower down mass. Damage world biosphere.\"\n\nIrma said, \"What? When?\"\n\n\"Long ago. Folk call it Great Shame.\"\n\nTerry said, \"You got this how?\"\n\nQuert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. \"Your ship told you. You told us.\"\n\n\"What?\" Terry turned to Cliff. \"You got this from Redwing?\"\n\n\"Yup. I tried it out on Quert. I didn't believe it, really.\"\n\n\"You didn't tell us!\" Aybe said.\n\n\"Saw no need to.\" Cliff's face stiffened. \"I still don't know if it's true.\"\n\n\"We got more from... others,\" Quert said. \"Come.\"\n\nQuert led them to a small room that puckered into the ribbed, pink slabs that formed the great hall. Cliff looked back. The Folk were still rigid, eyes focused on infinity, taking in some transmission from... where? Their bodies were clenched, feet grasping at the floor. He turned and went into a narrow chamber where a bright screen fluoresced into pale blue light. \"We have map sent. History.\"\n\nIt was a 3-D starscape. Across it scratched a ruby line. \"Bowl went there. Time go backward.\"\n\nA dot started at the Bowl, shown as a small cup embracing a red star. The ruby line stretched as it moved backwards, away, into the reaches of stars. Cliff and the others muttered to each other, watching the constellations slip by as time ran in reverse, accelerating. The line looped near many dots that were stars\u2014yellow, red, some bright blue\u2014and went on, faster, until the perspective became confusing. It wound along the Orion arm of the slowly churning galaxy. They could see the stars moving now in their gyres. The ruby line ventured out toward the Perseus arm, which was festering with light, then looped near some to pick off glimmering sites apparently of interest. The Bowl's method, Cliff could see, was to dive into the distant, shallow slope of the grav well of a star, slowing somehow, and skate by. A close-up view near a yellow dot showed bright sparks departing the Bowl, to descend deeper into the gravity potential well of the destination star. These soon returned, apparently bearing whatever they found on the circling worlds down in the grav well. This happened several times as they watched.\n\nThen the Bowl cruised through what Cliff recognized as the Local Fluff inside the Local Bubble, terms he recalled from some distant lecture for the spaces around Sol. Then the Bowl surged a bit, building speed, bound for the next target brimming ahead.\n\nCliff and the Sil had to interpret in this way the backward-running line, for what they saw was the reverse. Then the Bowl-star pair descended on a yellow star.\n\nThey watched the entire encounter and talked about it, piecing the story together in backward fashion. After the encounter, the Bowl came soaring out of a system racked and ruined. Comets flared in the yellow star glow, and it was clear why. The Bowl had swept through the prickly small motes of light that swarmed far from the star. It had left a roiling path through those tiny lights, giving them small nudges, and so some had plunged inward. Only one was needed.\n\nOne. It slid down the slow slope of gravity and arced on its long hyperbola toward a pale blue dot. And hit.\n\n\"They brushed along in our Oort cloud,\" Aybe said. \"That's it. They, they tipped that rock into\u2014\"\n\n\"An accident. Killed the dinosaurs,\" Terry said, \"who were descendants of their own kind. Can't check the time axis on this thing\u2014what the hell would the units be anyway?\u2014but there's a reason it shows this way. Somebody's making a point. The Bird Folk were clumsy, careless.\"\n\n\"Yeah...\" Irma stared at the screen. \"Who?\"\n\nCliff said nothing, just tried to take it all in. He felt Quert's presence strongly as a kind of intense energy, as though this were the crucial moment in some plan the alien had. Yet there was no overt sign of it he could detect.\n\nHe said, \"Terry, I think the Glorians' point is, 'See, we know all about you.'\"\n\nQuert seemed unperturbed, his face calm. The other Sil had not come into this room, but they clustered at the entrance, watching silently. \"Folk go to other stars after yours. But yours special for other reason.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\" Irma asked.\n\n\"They come from your sun.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Irma's mouth gave a skeptical twist. \"The Folk?\"\n\n\"See.\" Quert moved his hand near the screen and the ruby line seemed to accelerate, slipping smoothly from star to star in the Orion Arm. The speed now barely showed a slowing as the Bowl dived near a star, sent expeditions down, then moved on. Cliff lost count of how many the Bowl visited. Then the trajectory took a long swooping arc, still sampling stars and worlds. The curve turned back along the sprinkle of slowly moving stars.\n\n\"These are the even earlier eras for the Bowl?\" Irma said. \"Must be a really long time ago.\"\n\n\"Notice how the Bowl is going now from one star to the next, pausing near each one,\" Aybe said. \"That fits\u2014they were exploring for the first time. Sizing up what solar systems around other stars are like.\"\n\n\"Then we're headed back to\u2014look, there's the Local Bubble,\" Terry said. In an overlay, a thin ivory blob approached probably an image of the low-density shell that surrounded Sol. \"But... Sol's not there.\"\n\n\"Stars move,\" Irma said. \"See, the Bowl is moving on past that, not stopping.\"\n\nAybe said, \"It's slowing down a lot, seems to be approaching this yellow star\u2014hey, is that us?\"\n\nThey watched, stunned, as the Bowl and its reddish star slowed more and more, edging up to the yellow star.\n\n\"Can't be, see?\" Terry pointed. \"The Bowl's going into orbit, making\u2014\"\n\nThe image froze.\n\nIrma whispered, \"The Bowl came from... a binary.\"\n\n\"They built it around a binary star,\" Cliff said, \"and one of those stars was Sol.\"\n\n\"Didn't we hear a little from Redwing about Beth's team, pretty far back?\" Terry said. \"They went to some kind of museum and saw a show about how the Bowl got built.\"\n\nAybe said, \"After all, they had to start with a smaller star than Sol. They grabbed big masses from the swarm around that star, and\u2014who knows?\u2014maybe some of Sol's Oort cloud.\"\n\nIrma snorted. \"Are you saying they came from Earth?\"\n\nAybe shrugged. \"Looks like it. I mean, Mars had an early warm era, so maybe\u2014\"\n\n\"That was in the first billion years or so after Sol formed,\" Terry said. \"The end of this Bowl voyage show we just saw, it can't be that far back. Makes no sense! You'd have to get an intelligent species up to full industrial ability in just a billion years.\"\n\n\"Okay, then whoever built the Bowl had to come from Earth,\" Irma said, hands on hips. \"I'm discounting smart creatures from the Jovian moons or Venus or someplace.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Aybe said. \"So, Earth. These Folk out there, you're saying they had to come from some time\u2014\"\n\n\"We're all thinking the same thing? They were dinosaurs,\" Cliff said. \"The feathers make it hard to see, though. Asenath looks more like a monster Easter chick than a Tyrannosaurus rex.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Aybe said. \"Remember when we were on the run, when we hid under a bridge? We saw\u2014\"\n\n\"Right,\" Terry burst in. \"Big plant-eater reptile. We ran away, pretty damn scared.\"\n\n\"So...\" Cliff's training as a biologist was taking a beating. \"That thing comes from maybe the Jurassic, one hundred and forty-five million years ago. Maybe the Bowl builders took along the current flora and fauna?\"\n\n\"Because they came from then?\" Irma scoffed. \"We would've seen their ruins. A whole industrial civilization, and we missed it? This whole idea is impossible!\"\n\n\"Maybe it was very short-lived, lasted say about ten thousand years,\" Terry said. \"Just a tiny sliver of the geological record.\"\n\nAybe said, \"Consider what alien explorers might discover if they arrived on Earth one hundred million years from now. Their scientists would find evidence of vast tectonic movements, ice ages, and the movement of oceans, a geological history sprinkled with life. Maybe an occasional catastrophic collapse.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Terry talked right over Aybe. \"They might also find, in a single layer of rock, signs of cities and the creatures who built them. But that layer had been crushed, subducted, oxidized. Hell, tens of thousands of years\u2014that'll be smashed flat, only a centimeter thick when it comes out from the subduction. In dozens of million years, there's nothing.\"\n\nCliff was warming to the idea. \"Easy to miss, especially if you aren't looking for it.\"\n\n\"Explains why the Folk are interested in us,\" Irma said. \"We're relatives!\"\n\nCliff saw Quert give the eye-moves of disagreement. \"Not so?\"\n\n\"Folk want to know of ship you ride. Plants you carry. Bodies you have, songs, lore.\"\n\n\"Then they don't know where we're from?\" Aybe demanded.\n\n\"They know. Do not care.\" Quert looked uneasy, a change from the pensive calm of only minutes before. Cliff wondered if the alien and other Sil knew all the implications of this backward history of the Bowl. Had they recognized the home star as Sol?\n\nA loud, rolling boom came from the large area outside. At first Cliff thought it was an explosion, but then it took on other notes and held, lingering with a mournful long strumming cadence. Like someone crying, he thought. Or some thing.\n\n\"It's the Folk,\" Aybe said. Quert gave an agreeing eye-click. \"They... something's wrong.\"\nTHIRTY-SEVEN\n\nRedwing stepped into the garden and inhaled through his nose. Good moist green smells. Take a moment, just a breather. The animals\u2014\n\nThe animals had been tied down, netted, and they were not happy. He hadn't ordered that. He should have, of course, the way SunSeeker was lurching about. Had the finger snakes done that?\n\nThe finger snakes. Redwing tended to forget that they were part of what he was trying to save. Were they in their tunnel? No, he could see all three of them wrapped around three thick-bole apple trees.\n\nA smartbot prowled the rows of plants, testing soil and injecting fluids where needed. Just growing plants hydroponically wasn't enough. Humans needed micronutrients, vitamins, minerals\u2014but so did the plants and animals they ate. So all organisms in the looping food chains had to provide the right micronutrients needed by others, without them getting locked up in insoluble forms or running out. Selenium had gone missing a century back, he had learned from the log. Only with sophisticated biochem types woken up for the task did they get the food chain running right again.\n\nRedwing savored the leafy comfort lacing the air and staggered as SunSeeker surged. Redwing caught himself on a stanchion. The snakes didn't seem to notice. Phoshtha and Shtirk were watching a screen, a view of lands showing murkily through the jet, while they worked on small things with their darting, intricate hands. Thisther was watching the captain.\n\nRedwing asked, \"Thisther, did you secure the pigs and sheep and such?\"\n\n\"Yes. Was well done?\" A thin, reedy command of Anglish.\n\n\"Yes, thank you. Are you comfortable?\"\n\n\"Better. What a ride!\"\n\nRedwing left the garden feeling better. Now what? There was nothing like cramped quarters to concentrate the mind. So he went to his cabin as the deck creaked and rolled with the jet storms that whipped by it. He watched the Bowl view crawl past on his wall and did a few standing exercises, adjusted against the tilt local grav had, due to the helix SunSeeker was following. He had learned to disappear within himself, walling out a ship's routine humming and stale smells and dead air, to create a still, silent space where he could live, rest, think. In the continual noise of the ship he had learned to hear well, picking telltale murmurs out of SunSeeker's constant vibrations.\n\nA call buzzed in his ear. \"Cap'n, got something to see on the bridge. The jet's really snaking now. Flares like sausages running down it, too.\"\n\nHe started back, still listening to the pops and creaks of his ship. With his crew he also knew how to listen carefully, or to deliberately not hear. An essential skill, taking only a lifetime of daily practice to master.\n\nBeth's voice had been strained, and she had just replaced Ayaan Ali in the lead pilot's chair, with Clare Conway in the second chair. They all looked pale, their eyes never leaving the wall screens and operations boards. SunSeeker's long helix within the jet had worn them all down, and now the pace was picking up. He hadn't been resting well, and neither had the others. Coffee could only do so much.\n\nAs he entered the bridge, he noted that everyone had coffee ready at the elbow. Should he tell them to switch to decaf? No, too much meddling.\n\nKarl said as Redwing came onto the bridge, \"It's whipping around in the Knothole, just as the simulation said.\"\n\nOn the biggest screen, the jet was now lit up in yellow. They were looking straight down it and could see the flexed jet now bulging very close to the Knothole edge. \"See, the Knothole has big mag fields to stop it.\"\n\n\"Are we driving the jet just enough to give them a scare?\" Redwing leaned over the panel and switched to a flank camera view. \"And what's that secondary bump?\"\n\nKarl studied it. Redwing noted that Beth was working a different telescoping camera, focused far away from the jet, on the mirror zone. Karl said, \"That's a nonlinear effect\u2014a backflow.\"\n\n\"You mean there's a shock wave working back toward us?\" Redwing watched the small sideways oscillation evolve, working around the rim of the jet. \"It's from the big kink?\"\n\nSunSeeker could run for weeks in the jet without climbing into view of the gamma ray lasers on the Bowl rim. They were already fairly deep in the Bowl and getting a closer view of the zones near the Knothole, where centrifugal gravity was less. The mirror zone, a vast annulus, was behind their forward-looking views, and ahead loomed the forested regions just in from the Knothole. Beth had been kept somewhere in all that.\n\n\"Looks like the kink went nonlinear and launched this shock back at us,\" Karl said. \"I don't understand\u2014\"\n\n\"Here's a better view,\" Beth said. \"I asked the Bridge Artilect to find any part of the mirror zone that could give us an angled reflection, and it found this.\"\n\nShe smiled, and Redwing saw she was enjoying this. She always seized fresh opportunity with relish, one of her best qualities. The wobbly, somewhat blurred image gave them a view from far away to the side. He watched the kink bulge warping as it met the higher mag fields at the Knothole rim, and a countershock race away up the jet. That played among the boundary mag fields of the jet, pushing out farther to the side\u2014\n\n\"It's going to hit the atmospheric membrane in the closest-in zone,\" Beth said. \"Moving at high speed\u2014over a hundred klicks a second in sideways motion.\"\n\n\"This wasn't in the simulation, as I recall.\" Redwing let his statement hang there, without a tone of sarcasm. Flat facts spoke for themselves.\n\nKarl nodded, said nothing. Beth watched the fast-moving side shock as it plowed toward the atmosphere's envelope, a layer sketched in by a graphic; it wasn't truly visible in these narrow line widths. \"Is there enough mass in that to do damage?\"\n\n\"Plenty,\" Karl said, \"and the magnetic energy density, too, can hammer the envelope.\" He looked worried and said no more.\n\n\"What about the structure itself?\" Redwing said. He knew this huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship's axial core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar.\n\nKarl said in a distant tone, almost automatically, \"I scanned the Bowl wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes. Had the Artilects do a spectral study. It was only a few tens of meters thick, mostly carbon composite looks like, at least on the outside. That's pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Calculated the stress.\"\n\n\"Which means...?\" Redwing persisted.\n\n\"The Bowl stress-support material has to be better than SunSeeker's. Maybe lots better.\"\n\n\"Should we alter our planned trajectory?\" Beth asked, eyes moving among the screens.\n\n\"Not yet.\" He was thinking fast but getting nothing. So many factors at play... \"That display we got before, the lightning here on the bridge, it must be some kind of message.\"\n\n\"I noticed something here before,\" Karl said. \"Look.\" He thumped his command pad and brought up a recorded scene on a side screen. \"See that?\"\n\nThe vector locator was focused on the zone nearest the Knothole. They could see the massive mag field coils at the rim, then the boundary of the atmospheric envelope, shiny in orange, reflected jet light. There were verdant forests sprawling away from the bulky Knothole structures.\n\n\"That's the same sort of area we were in,\" Beth said. \"Low gravs, huge tall trees, big spider things. And I saw some of that orange light shimmering up high, from far off, bounced off the upper boundary layer, I guess. Jet light.\"\n\nPartway into the large band of forest was a burnt brown and black slash among the lush greens, now mostly faded. Something had left a fresher black burn on the metal and ceramic portion near the Knothole, where the jet passed through.\n\nKarl said slowly, \"So instability was a major problem here. It's damaged the Bowl before.\"\n\n\"But shouldn't forest have covered over damage pretty quickly?\" Beth asked.\n\n\"Maybe it was damage to the understructure,\" Karl said. \"It broke systems that deliver water and nutrients. Not repaired yet.\"\n\n\"That means they're neglecting upkeep,\" Redwing said. \"The usual first sign of a system sliding downhill.\"\n\n\"So why don't they have defenses against the occasional jet malf?\" Beth asked.\n\nA long silence. They recalled the crackling image of the Bowl dancing in air above the bridge, sent by some mysterious agency. Karl had explained it in terms of some inductive electromagnetic fields, playing along the outside of the ceramic walls nearby. Redwing was skeptical of that mechanism but certain that the event had been a crude attempt at getting their attention. Then nothing more happened. \"A trial run, maybe,\" Karl had said. Redwing decided to keep to their planned helical trajectory.\n\nClare Conway said, rising from the copilot chair, \"Cap'n, I see three small ships coming up behind us. They popped into view of long-range microwave radar minutes ago.\"\n\nRedwing flicked the radar display on the biggest screen. \"Where'd they come from?\"\n\n\"From the Knothole rim, looks like,\" Clare said.\n\nKarl said, \"Maybe this answers Beth's question. They're sending out something to attack us.\"\n\n\"What's their ETA on current trajectory?\" Redwing asked, keeping his voice calm.\n\n\"Two hours, approx,\" Clare said.\n\n\"Get me an image.\" Redwing considered what they could do. SunSeeker had no substantial defenses against projectile or high-intensity laser weapons. He had learned a simple rule back in the brief, enormously destructive Asteroid War: that any mass hitting at three kilometers per second delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT. And SunSeeker was moving well above 100 km\/sec now. Add to that any incoming kinetic energy of an attacker. Square it. Any interesting space drive was a weapon of mass destruction, even to itself.\n\nThat was why the ship had auto-laser batteries run by the Artilects, designed for interstellar travel. They could hammer a rock the size of your fist or smaller into ionized atoms in a microsecond. But above that mass level, not much. They might deflect it a bit, which could be useful. That's all. Throw a living room couch at SunSeeker at these speeds and they would suffer a hull breach.\n\n\"They're small, can maneuver faster than we can,\" Clare said. \"Accelerating at three gravs, too.\"\n\n\"So maybe robotic,\" Redwing said. This was not looking good. \"How do they navigate in the jet? Can we tell?\"\n\n\"Looks like magscoops, same as us. Smaller, of course.\"\n\nClare brought up the same telescope Beth had used and sought out the small moving dots. \"Less than a hundred meters across,\" she said. \"Cylindrical, with an ionized propulsion signature.\"\n\nRedwing said, \"Maybe they didn't take us seriously before. Slow reflexes.\"\n\n\"No,\" Karl said flatly. \"We're missing something here.\"\n\nThe ship strummed with long rolling waves and sharp pops and snaps. No one spoke, and Redwing listened to his ship while all around him his crew worked to find out more about the roiling jet that streamed by, into the magscoop and their fusion chambers. The shipboard Artilects were working as well, but seldom spoke or called attention to themselves. They were built and trained for their talents to sustain, not for imagination and quick responses to the wholly new.\n\nInto the long uncomfortable silence Beth said quietly, watching the screens, \"That shock wave pushing out the jet in the Knothole\u2014it's hit the membrane. At high velocity.\"\n\nThey all turned and saw it on max amplification. Beth had used the overlay yellow and orange to signify plasma and lag fields, and strands of these showed the jet striking the boundary of the Bowl biosphere. Filmy gases escaped into space, pearly strands they saw in the visible. Redwing knew what this meant. The plasma's high-energy particles, encased in the sheath of magnetic fields, would deliver prickly energies. This would fry away the long-chain organic molecules that made the gossamer boundaries. Those separated the Bowl's many compartments, holding the great vaults of air above the living zones. So it would all go to smash and scatteration in a blizzard of unleashed furies.\n\nHe tried to imagine what that meant to those living there. Then he made himself stop.\n\nA booming roll came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.\n\n\"Plasma densities nearby are rising. Our exhaust is getting blocked again,\" Beth said.\n\n\"This is how it started before,\" Karl said. \"To break down air, the voltage is\u2014\"\n\n\"Megavolts,\" Clare snapped. \"Got it. If that happens, stay flat. Stick your head up, it'll draw current, fry you.\"\n\n\"You think they\u2014it\u2014is trying to kill us?\" Beth said. \"This could be communication.\"\n\n\"Strange way to do it,\" Redwing said.\n\n\"Retaliation for thrashing the jet, I'd think,\" Fred said. He had come onto the board so quietly no one noticed him.\n\n\"I'm getting rising inductive effects close to our skin,\" Beth said. \"Must be Alfv\u00e9n waves rippling in on the scoop fields. Higher electric fields\u2014\"\n\nRedwing felt his hair stand on end. He hit the deck.\n\nSparks snapped. Everyone flopped onto the deck and lay flat. A bright yellow-white line scratched across the air. More lines sputtered. They arched and twisted. Some split, and yellow green strands shaped a tight shape\u2014\n\n\"Human form!\" Fred said from the deck. \"They're making our image. They know what we are.\"\n\nThe shape wobbled and throbbed in the fevered air. Carved in shifting, crackling yellow lines, it was like a bad cartoon. Stretched legs, arms flapping, wobbly head, hands first spread then balled into fists, the whole body flailing. Then it was gone in a sizzle and a flicker.\n\nBeth said, \"Can they see us?\"\n\n\"Who's 'they' anyway?\" Clare said. Her face was flushed, lips compressed. \"They're trying to jam our fusion burn, get us to stop, I suppose. So they're sending us an echo, an image of us to\u2014make some kind of communication?\"\n\nThe shape popped up again. Outlined in crackling yellow and orange, the figure wriggled and sputtered.\n\n\"Let me try...\" Clare raised a hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, twisting and shuddering, losing definition in the legs, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image to Clare's right. Air snapped around the dancing yellow image. The hand flexed, worked, wriggled itself into... fingers. A thumb grew, extended, turned red, and contracted. Now the crackling image filled itself in, a skin spreading yellow-bright and warped and seething. The body grew a head, and it struggled to make a mouth and eyes of pale ivory. The electrical fog flickered, as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.\n\nClare slowly flexed her fingers. The fingers twitched, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron glow. The body hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all the defining bright yellow lines focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.\n\n\"Let's try to signal\u2014,\" Redwing began.\n\nThe arc snapped off with a pop. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.\n\nClare sobbed softly. Fred jumped up and turned in all directions, but could see nothing to do. The only sound was the rumbling fusion engines.\n\n\"Let's get back to stations,\" Redwing said.\n\nClare laughed with a high, nervous edge. She got up and resumed the copilot chair. Everyone got back into bridge position, unsteady and pensive.\n\nFred said, \"The low-frequency spectrum has changed.\"\n\n\"Which means?\" Redwing asked.\n\n\"It's got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier\u2014\" His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. \"Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.\"\n\n\"Someone sending? Now?\" Beth said. \"Maybe they want to talk?\"\n\n\"This is really low-frequency stuff,\" Fred said. \"The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfv\u00e9n waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we'd get a coherent message on those!\" Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.\n\nKarl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred's chair. He said, \"That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency\u2014look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they're at least as large as a wavelength, so... that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!\"\n\nRedwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. \"Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?\"\n\nThe answer came quickly: no.\n\n\"How can we decode it?\" Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred's Fourier display.\n\nFred said, \"I can look for correlates, but\u2014hell!\u2014we're starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is\u2014\"\n\nThis time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped\u2014and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.\n\nHer red coverall sparked at the belt. Tiny fires forked from her fingers as she struck the deck. Her hair seethed with smoke. She shuddered, twitched\u2014was still.\n\nRedwing did not move, but he noticed the tension had left the air. A seared silence came as acrid air stung the nostrils.\n\nIn the silence he could hear a last long sigh ease out of Clare, whistling between broken teeth.\n\nBeth sobbed as they gingerly gathered around the singed body. Redwing wondered what he could do in the short time before the cylindrical alien ships arrived, climbing up the jet toward them.\nTHIRTY-EIGHT\n\nMemor was roaring out of control. The two other Folk restrained her as she twisted and clawed at them. Their howls and wails blended together, even to Tananareve Bailey's ears as she ran toward the enormous, thrashing things.\n\nHer Folk attendants had scattered, not knowing what to do. They were backed against the walls, stunned into silence by Memor's deep growls. Tananareve could tell they were too afraid to leave and too afraid to do anything. She saw that a figure among them lurked under a cowl, a humanoid with a gray metallic head, carrying three ruby red eyes that peered out from the cowl's shadows. A cyborg, she guessed\u2014mind downloaded into a metal body. Such things had begun to manifest Earthside in the era when they had departed, so perhaps it was natural that an alien form of embodied Artilects should have manifested here in a Bowl that was millions of years old. The cyborg had a crystal silicon carbide assembly, four arms, and sturdy legs. She had seen no artificial bodies in the Bowl but now here was one, an attendant to the Folk, cowering like the rest, against the pink living wall.\n\nTananareve glanced at all those pressed against the walls and now could tell they were all far too afraid, too devoted to the entire Bowl system, ever to see any other future. A stasis state where nothing changed.\n\nThen there came a move, from the Folk.\n\nBemor acted. He held his genetic sister in a firm embrace while Asenath did something at the back of Memor's head. Her great shape stopped writhing and shuddering and then slowly eased, her arms going slack. Memor's eyes were distant, her face blank, breath long and heavy, a whuff whuff Tananareve had not heard before. Her big, nimble four-fingered hands twitched but did nothing.\n\nBemor turned from Memor, chuffing and labored, his face troubled. Blinking, he saw the humans and Sil. \"We now know what you Sil have been spreading.\" His voice came from the barrel chest, low and threatening.\n\nQuert stepped forward, mild and calm, seeming utterly unafraid. Tananareve had met the alien Sil only moments before and was still trying to understand them. They were humanoid and walked with a fluid grace, their tan clothing adjusting itself to their movements. Quert said, \"Glorian message came to human ship, the SunSeeker.\"\n\nBemor huffed, stamped around, clearly calling on outside Artilects, and thinking on what they said, and finally himself said, \"I am, yes, aware that our forward stations, orbiting from ahead of us, did not register the Glorian signals well and bring them to the proper level of attention. A bureaucratic error, alas. These stations have had no true news for many kilo-orbitals. They suffer from a sclerotic inability to adapt, to remain fresh.\"\n\nQuert said softly, \"We know so. Sire.\"\n\nBemor ignored this status salute. \"These humans managed to get the Glorian mischief to you, the vagrant and difficult Sil.\"\n\n\"It was important, surely you can see so, Sire. We spread such message through city-speak.\" Quert spoke mildly but with eyes steady. \"Then came more. Diagram of Bowl's path. Much long history, strange tales the Glorians know.\"\n\nBemor said, \"Annoying! You had no need to be familiar with such.\"\n\nQuert did not blink. \"Sil think opposite.\"\n\nThen they got into a hot discussion Tananareve could not follow, so she stepped back a few paces, into the comforting circle of humans. She had not realized, living so long among aliens whose social signals were strange and hard to register, what a simple warmth came from her own kind. After so long, it felt like a profound blessing. As the Folk chatter waxed on around them\u2014Bemor booming, Quert's small voice in sliding syllables\u2014she considered her fellow humans. This was so strange in itself that the mere phrase fellow humans said it all as she thought of it. She had competed for, and then signed on to SunSeeker, all for one solid purpose\u2014to go to a distant star and begin a new civilization. Straight out, true enough\u2014a species imperative, some had said, and so she had supposed. She did feel that, then. She had stored her eggs and planned to find a man who deserved them, and to do what she could, in some distant land among the stars, to bring humanity to a greater destiny.\n\nYet... now these fellow humans in their nervous chatting selves looked... strange to her. Their rambling, whispered words, their ill-concealed yet clearly frightened eyeball-jittering glances... all these seemed both familiar and yet edged in strangeness.\n\nCliff, for example, looked worn down. Skinny. Standard uniform but patched here and there, knees and elbows replaced, and tattered beyond easy recognition. Rough-cut beard, hair chopped into blunt wedges, a true wild man from many wearing days. Yet his eyes were watchful and quick, listening to his team and also sizing up the alien discussion going on a few paces away. He seemed somehow telescoped down a long range, so she could see him in a perspective she had never known. As a member of his species, he talked less than others and never stopped studying his surroundings. Watching him was to her now refreshment, consolation, peace.\n\nBest to leave that for later, though. You met the alien on your own terms and what you took away might be unexpected. She had to use whatever perspective worked.\n\nSo Tananareve turned to Irma, smiled, and did the ritual girl thing, and got the whole story in a few minutes.\n\nThe Glorians had sent their own history of the Bowl's long trajectory, plus some cartoon threats to stay away from Glory. Apparently they had been surveying all their galactic neighborhood for a great long time, while keeping electromagnetic silence. But now that the Bowl was steadily approaching, they resorted to a simple microwave signal train. And it told a truly ancient tale.\n\nAn event the Folk called the Great Shame was marked in the Bowl's path. The Sil wrote it in their architectural messages. Their new city rapidly rebuilt after the Bird Folk smashed it. The new Sil array of parks, plazas, streets, and structures held an agreed code. This conveyed a message other societies ringed around the great expanses of the Bowl could see and use. Now everyone knew of the Great Shame.\n\nTananareve asked, \"And why's that important?\"\n\n\"Because the Folk destroyed their own home world,\" Cliff said. \"As we saw. Earth. It looks like they blundered into the Oort cloud, and their gravitational impulse nudged the Dinosaur Killer comet, sixty-five million years ago.\"\n\n\"So life changed directions,\" Tananareve said, eyes distant. \"Doomed the dinosaurs, but made us possible.\"\n\n\"Must be more,\" Irma said. \"Must be.\"\n\nMemor thrashed and called in long strident shrieks. She raised her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound. Bemor sheltered his sister twin through this and gathered himself, a big hulking presence, and said to them all, \"The Sil did not truly know what they were doing. This is the Great Shame, yes. Now that it is known, the task of us all is to make clear that it came from an earlier species, and so does not imply that the Folk are responsible.\"\n\nTananareve's eyes flared, eyebrows arched. \"Huh? C'mon\u2014this 'does not imply that the Folk are responsible'\u2014but you caused it! And why's Memor so distressed?\"\n\nBemor shuddered a bit and in low bass tones said, \"She is in conversation with her... Undermind. The Great Shame was merely a phrase to her. Now she has discovered that her Undermind concealed its meaning, to preserve her balance.\"\n\n\"I thought you Folk could view all your unconscious,\" Tananareve said.\n\n\"Not always.\" Bemor hesitated, then with a rustle of feathers that she now knew meant he had made a decision, went on. \"The proto-Folk of that ancient era, who committed the Great Shame, were unwise. They returned to their home system, flush with triumphant contacts with scores of nearby worlds. The dynamics of their parent system were well known to them, but wrong. Their data was gathered when the second sun\u2014our star, now\u2014was still in place. And perhaps they ventured too deeply into the large cloud of iceteroids.\"\n\nTananareve was digesting this when Cliff frowned and said, \"The Bowl has one great commandment\u2014stability is all. Right? Having this Great Shame is a contradiction you don't want to face\u2014is that what's making that one\"\u2014a nod to Memor\u2014\"so crazy?\"\n\nAn awkward silence. Then Asenath said, \"We Folk differ from those who built the Bowl. Those could not view their Underminds. The vagrant forces that arise in Underminds can be managed, if the sunshine of the Overmind shines upon them.\"\n\nTananareve said, \"You think of your unconscious as like, say, bacteria? Sanitize it, problem solved?\"\n\nBemor and Asenath looked at each other and exchanged fast, complex fan-signals with clacking and rustling. Bemor had Memor in a restraining hold and the big creature was slowly becoming less restive.\n\n\"Not knowing your desires renders them more potent,\" Bemor said. \"They then emerge in strange ways, at unexpected moments. Your greatest drives lie concealed from your fore-minds. So the running agents and subsystems of your immediate, thinking persona can be invaded, without knowing it, by your Underminds. Quite primitive.\"\n\n\"Which defeats control, right?\" Cliff said.\n\n\"And so stability,\" Tananareve added.\n\nAsenath said, \"You mean, Late Invaders, that notions simply appear in your Overminds?\"\n\n\"You mean do we have ideas?\" Tananareve considered. \"Sure.\"\n\n\"But you have no clue where the ideas came from,\" Asenath said.\n\nBemor added, \"Worse, they cannot go find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds is barred to them.\"\n\n\"Astounding!\" Asenath said. \"Yet... it works in a way. They did get here on their own starship.\"\n\n\"There are many subtle aspects,\" Bemor began, and then paused. \"We must keep to task.\" He turned and gestured. Attendants rolled forward a large machine.\n\n\"I don't like the look of that,\" Tananareve said. \"Is this the same machine you put me in before? That Memor used to study my mind?\"\n\n\"No,\" Bemor said. \"This enables you to communicate with other minds, specifically those who need you to serve as an intermediary.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Tananareve turned to Irma and Cliff. \"I hated that suffocating box with its foul smell. And the feeling\u2014like snakes swarming over my skull. Then fingers in my head. I'd think something, then it slipped away, as if something was... running greasy hands over it.\"\n\n\"We require you to enter this device,\" Asenath said. She turned to Bemor and said in Folk\u2014but not so fast that Tananareve could not translate it\u2014\"Do we need the others? They are trouble.\"\n\nBemor rattled suppressing signals with his hind feathers. Not now.\n\nCliff and Irma had caught none of this. She said, \"Look, I can't square that Great Shame history of yours. You came back from star-voyaging to see the old place, Earth. So why haven't we found Folk artifacts on other planets in the solar system?\"\n\n\"There were stages. There was the era, after the Great Shame, that earlier Folk forms called the Dusting. It was a rain of small fragments into the solar system. An aftereffect of the Shame, in ways known to orbital specialists, arising from multiple iceteroid collisions far out from Sol. A sad era. Mere high-velocity dust destroyed much space-based technology. It etched whole cities out of existence on worlds not protected by atmospheres.\n\n\"But enough of this!\" Bemor said. \"Into this device you go now, Late Invader. We are ordered to send you thus, for reasons opaque to me. The Ice Minds would have it so. Welcome to this\"\u2014a broad sweeping gesture with a final feathered flourish\u2014\"a singular machine which we term a Reader.\"\n\nShe had no choice. The assistants looked nasty and they moved swiftly, closing in on her. She turned and embraced the people near her. \"Damn, we've just reunited and, and\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll still be here when you come out.\"\n\nThe others gave murmuring reassurances. She turned to follow the assistant, some nervous little form of robot, and suddenly a loud thunderclap hammered through the room. The fleshy walls of the skyfish rippled with it, and the floor lurched beneath her. She staggered, caught herself on Irma's shoulder, stayed standing. \"Damn!\"\n\n\"A shock wave,\" Cliff said. He turned to the Folk. \"From what?\"\n\nBemor looked out the transparent wall. \"Disaster.\"\nPART XIII\n\nTHE DIAPHANOUS\n\nIt appears that the radical element responsible for the continuing thread of cosmic unrest is the magnetic field. What, then, is a magnetic field... that, like a biological form, is able to reproduce itself and carry on an active life in the general outflow of starlight, and from there alter the behavior of stars and galaxies?\n\n\u2014EUGENE PARKER,  \nCOSMICAL MAGNETIC FIELDS\nTHIRTY-NINE\n\nKarl said, \"It's a standing kink.\"\n\nBeth looked at the screen showing the jet, its plasma and magnetic densities highlighted in color. \"This is a snap of it?\"\n\n\"No, it's real-time. The sideways movement of the jet in the Knothole region is hung up, lashing against the mag bumpers meant to keep it away.\" A side excursion had forked over against one of the life zones, penetrating the atmospheric envelope of a pie-shaped wedge.\n\n\"How in hell did that happen?\" Redwing asked from over Beth's shoulder.\n\nKarl grimaced. \"We've been driving our fusion burn pretty hard, trying to get some distance from the fliers that are coming up at us in the jet\u2014\"\n\n\"And failing,\" Redwing added.\n\n\"\u2014so that added our plume to the plasma already forcing the kink instability. Nonlinear mechanics at work. The kink has gotten into some mode where it snags against the mag defenses and just stays there.\" Karl shrugged, as if to say, Don't blame me, it's nonlinear.\n\n\"So it's getting worse down there,\" Beth said. Her eyes were always on the shifting screens as they powered away from their pursuers. In the howling maelstrom of the jet, there were always vagrant pressures, sudden snarling knots of turbulence, shifts in SunSeeker's magscoop configuration. Now SunSeeker had Mayra Wickramsingh and Ayaan Ali as backup navigator\/pilot, since Clare Conway had died in an instant's sudden lightning flash through the excited air above the bridge deck.\n\nThat had been only an hour ago, but the sharp terror of it was already fading in memory. There was too much to do now, to think of what had happened. Beth had helped carry away the charred corpse, holding Clare by the arms, seeing the face that was swollen and already darkening. Only hours ago, she had seen that mouth smiling, laughing.\n\nBeth heard her own voice rattling out, \"Those flitters, as you call 'em, Cap'n, are coming up fast.\" Her eyes studied the slim, quick shapes, just barely defined in size by their microwave radars. They had spread into a triangle, centered on SunSeeker's wake.\n\nRedwing stood in the middle of the bridge and said to everyone, \"We're plainly about to go into battle. Those flitters are fast. We can't outrun them. So we've got to engage them with a ship not designed to do battle at all.\"\n\nSilence. Jampudvipa usually said little, but now she said quietly, \"Is there any advantage in leaving the jet?\"\n\nBeth knew Redwing should answer that, but she seethed with anger now and could not stop herself. \"I don't want to maneuver against craft that fast, with our only fuel the star's solar wind. Or what's left of it\u2014the jet gets over ninety percent of the plasma that leaves the star. I can't fly hard with no mass coming through the scoop.\"\n\nKarl Lebanon asked, head bowed, \"What do the flitters fly on?\"\n\n\"Not plasma, right?\" Redwing turned to Beth.\n\n\"Their plume shows fusion burners, but they're running on boron-proton. They carry their fuel and reaction mass.\"\n\n\"They're flying upstream, which costs them in momentum,\" Karl said. \"For us, it's gain. We get more charged mass down the magscoop gullet. So\u2014\"\n\n\"What do we do when we get to gunplay?\" Redwing asked. \"We got no guns aboard, Dr. Lebanon.\"\n\nBeth said, \"You've got the big gun, Cap'n\u2014the torch.\"\n\nRedwing nodded somberly. \"You think it can make that much difference?\"\n\nKarl said, \"Whatever's flying the flitters, Artilects or aliens, it has to be vulnerable to the jet. They have magnetic screens for sure. They must've been engineered to take care of problems in the jet.\"\n\nBeth turned her back on Karl, irritated that he had jumped in when Redwing clearly addressed his question to her. \"So\u2014if we push them harder, give 'em some twist, maybe we can keep them at a distance, dodge them. Not like there's not room to play out here in the jet.\"\n\nRedwing scowled, his face more lined than she had ever seen. \"It's ten light-seconds across. Room to dodge, but\u2014can we keep them far enough away?\"\n\n\"Depends on what their weaponry is.\" Karl wore a dispassionate expression, staring into space. \"Nuclear, sure, we can see hardware coming and hit it with our scoop-policing lasers. But if they have gamma ray lasers, like those big domes on the Bowl rim, we're done.\"\n\nBeth sat back and watched the flitters edge up from behind. She bit her lip, adjusted for a vortex plasma knot, felt it surge them to starboard, and said, even and controlled, \"Cap'n, we don't have much choice.\"\n\nRedwing was silent, pacing, frowning. More silence. And suddenly Beth found herself on her feet, speaking in a flat, hard voice. \"You ordered us into the jet, you wanted to press the Folk, Clare got killed right here, and you now have no idea what to do?\"\n\nRedwing spun on his heel. \"I have over a thousand souls aboard who signed on to go to Glory. I took an oath to deliver them. I didn't agree to turn them over to aliens riding along in a big contraption.\"\n\n\"I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Point is, your job is to not think beyond your rank!\"\n\n\"We all just saw Clare killed by something we don't understand, that's got us all terrified, and you\u2014\"\n\n\"Quiet!\" Jam said, rising to her height on the deck, her dark face severe. \"The captain commands. We do not question, especially under combat conditions.\"\n\nBeth stared at Jam, whom she recalled was a mere petty officer. But... she had to admit, Jam was right. \"I...\" Beth's throat filled, choking off her words. \"Clare...\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Redwing said, addressing all the bridge crew. \"We're all jumpy. Forget this happened. We are committed and we shall engage.\" He turned to Beth. \"But you're lead pilot. You are carrying this ship into a battle we cannot master without you. Do it.\"\n\nSo she did.\nFORTY\n\nWe have need of your skills with your own kind, the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.\n\n\"I am certainly willing,\" Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.\n\nWe desire you to be quiet of soul.\n\n\"I don't know what that means.\"\n\nWe can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.\n\n\"Uh, who are you?\"\n\nThe Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.\n\n\"You know us? From Cliff's team, I suppose?\"\n\nThose who stand now outside this reading realm.\n\n\"Reading? You're inside my mind somehow.\"\n\nFrom the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor's excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.\n\nShe didn't like the sound of this. \"To do what?\"\n\nTo prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.\n\nTananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. \"Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?\"\n\nThere flashed before her images that somehow blended with knowing at the same instant\u2014vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.\n\nA rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars... and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.\n\n\"You're the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?\"\n\nAnd you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.\n\n\"And you live here?\" Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.\n\nThe Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet\u2014and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware\u2014humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin\u2014until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl's rotation, focused up at the passing stars... while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might\u2014she knew, without thinking about it\u2014be dwellings, of a sort.\n\n\"Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it's kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.\"\n\nWe exploit the heat engine of leaked warmth from the Bowl's sunswept side to our realm, so we bask in beautiful cold-dark while harvesting waste energy from below. Our minds organize as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids.\n\nThe view skated across huge curved fields of icy hummocks and hills, with sliding strange rivers of ivory glowing beneath the dim stars. There came to her a creeping sensation of a vast crowd on this stretching plain, a landscape of minds that lived by flowing into each other, and somehow teasing out meaning, thought... more.\n\n\"Why do you care about us? We\u2014\"\n\nWarmlife, you are. In our primordial form, we traded knowledge collected over vast eras, useful for chemicals, coldworld facilities, or astronomy. We were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons, and having dealt with the many faces intelligence can assume. Our cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force.\n\nTananareve was startled by the linguistic sophistication of their speech, resounding in her head exactly like real sounds, in a flat accent\u2014no, wait, they were speaking to her with her accent. Even more impressive. Not many could ape her honey-toned Mississippi vowels.\n\n\"Against all that, why bother with me?\" Maybe not a smart question, but she was wondering, and here were the minds that seemed to rule this place.\n\nTo us little is new. Even less is interesting. We have watched great clouds of dust and simple molecules as they were pruned away, collapsing into suns, and so left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for our kind to negotiate, and for the ion churn of plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. We are as near to eternal as warmlife can imagine. But you are quite the opposite. You are swift and new.\n\nInto her mind came an image of their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles, all gracefully flowing, a sliding ivory cryogenic liquid. Something like an upturned cat-o'-nine-tails whip appearance.\n\nWe stand at an immense distance from such as you, yet at times arouse when the Bowl, our transport, is under threat. As it is now\u2014from you.\n\n\"Look, I don't know what Redwing is doing\u2014\"\n\nYet you are also vital to the Bowl's survival when we arrive at the target star, one you term Glory. So you are both friend and foe.\n\n\"Why me? I\u2014\"\n\nMemor integrated your neural levels to enough detail that we can access them. So we choose you to speak for us to your nominal leader, the Redwing, and to the Diaphanous.\n\n\"I don't know what's going on!\"\n\nOur long views are essential to the Bowl's longevity. At this moment some 123,675 of us are engaged in this collective conversation with you. The number shifted even while the Ice Minds spoke.\n\nWe are individually slow, but together we can think far quicker than you. We are eternal and you are like the flickerings of a candle flame\u2014that which combusts dies, as must all warmlife. When we evolved, the most advanced warmlife creatures on hotlife worlds were single-celled pond scum.\n\n\"Why are you on the Bowl at all, then?\" She was getting irked with all this bragging. But trapped in a smelly box, probed by who-knows-what kinds of technologies, it seemed best not to be obnoxious. And she would hate to meet whatever these things needed help with. If these Ice Minds just wanted her to talk to Redwing, fine. But somehow she knew it couldn't just be that.\n\nWe bring a wisdom of long memory. We alone speak with and for the Diaphanous. We wish to explore and to meet the Superiors who seem to be at Glory.\n\nThen she felt a surge, as though the entire machine containing her was moving. It lurched a bit and she poked an elbow against a soft wall. Hoarse calls came from outside. What now?\nFORTY-ONE\n\nCliff looked down at what the Folk called their mooring mountain. They said it held a shelter for this skyfish, but it was far beneath them, barely visible through stacked gray cumulus clouds.\n\nThe ship crew had leaped into action after the big long boom pressed through the skyfish. They had all rushed to the big transparent wall, mouths gaping, not heeding the shouted orders of Bemor. The male Folk stamped his feet in an accelerating rhythm, big hard thuds. That snapped the crew out of their funk and they followed his barking orders.\n\nThe humans and Sil did not know what was going on, so they moved to the wall, now deserted, to look out. Cliff saw far overhead an upside-down tornado. In profile, it looked like a funnel. Within it, huge clouds churned in an ever-tightening upward spiral, turning somber purple as moisture condensed within them. The lower levels of the air were clear, so Cliff knew he was seeing far up into the atmosphere. The conical cloud was fat and white at the bottom and tapered upward into a narrow purple-dark neck. Even at this great distance, Cliff could see flashes of blue and orange lightning between immense clouds. Across the sky, other high decks of stratocumulus were edging toward the inverted hurricane. He was looking at a puncture in the high envelope.\n\n\"They're trying to ground the skyfish in this storm,\" Irma said.\n\nThe skyfish dove deeper and shuddered with the racking winds. Irma and the others watched the high vortex churn as if it could change, but Cliff knew with a wry sinking feeling that it could only worsen. A huge deep atmosphere would take a long time to empty out into space, but the pressure drop would drive weather hard. He wondered if the Folk could patch a big rip in the high shimmering envelope from the way Bemor was lumbering around and barking at the crew, he doubted it. He looked down and saw they were headed for the nearest clear ground they could find within quick reach, the mooring mountain.\n\nAybe pointed. \"The crew\u2014they're taking that machine away, with Tananareve in it. Damn! We get her back, and then right away she's goddamn gone.\"\n\n\"We're all gone, really,\" Terry said. \"No chance of getting out of this living blimp that I can see.\"\n\nIrma was talking to Quert and reported back. \"That's a kind of Folk redoubt we're approaching. They can shelter there.\"\n\nQuert came over. \"Wind hard. Anchor skyfish, it hard.\"\n\nAs if to demonstrate, the skyfish lurched and they all fell to the deck. Cliff tucked in and rolled, coming up to look out the transparent wall just in time to see a brilliant yellow lightning strike descend from a high cloud. Unlike on Earth, this one snaked down, shooting side bolts as it kept going. The distance was so much, Cliff could see the entire brilliant streamer, the vibrant, bristling conducting path for electrons seeking the ground. Like a lazy snake, it slid sideways in a long twist. Then it hit the mountain below and snapped off, just vanished in an instant. The thunderclap shook the entire skyfish, and Terry, who had already gotten back up, came crashing down again.\n\nSomething rumbled in the pink walls nearby. The skyfish went into a steep descent. \"It fears,\" Quert said.\n\n\"Me, too,\" Irma added. Everybody stayed down, hugging the deck that reeked with some slimy fluid. The skyfish tilted and turned violently. More lightning scratched across a lead sky.\n\nThe skyfish hit like a fat balloon. It squashed and flexed, the walls of their big chamber collapsing down, then wheezing with the effort to rebound. The walls thumped with the slow, massive heartbeat of the skyfish. Cliff heard bones snap and the soft rip of tissues deep in the walls. Blood ran across the deck.\n\n\"Let us go fast, my friends,\" Quert said. They fled.\n\nAs Cliff followed the Sil down fleshy corridors that reeked of fluids he did not want to think about, sloshing boot-deep through it, he recalled something his army uncle had said once. Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.\nFORTY-TWO\n\nWith her fellows, Memor watched a high view of their Zone, sent from a craft dispatched to survey.\n\nSomething had hit the great sea at the center of the Zone, not far from where their skyfish labored. An enormous tsunami rushed across the dappled gray surface. The sea was shallow, so the wave was already at great height and as they watched, it broke, white foam curling forward. This towering monster broke across the land. Forests and towns disappeared.\n\nThe skyfish rolled to port and then back, with an alarming twist running down the great beast's spine as well. Their compartment twisted as the skyfish fought to right itself. In this very low gravity zone, the air density fell off slowly and there was less acceleration to gain from venting hydrogen. The floor tilted as they accelerated downward at a steep angle. Memor staggered, then abruptly sat. The capsule where Tananareve was in immersion with someone\u2014could it be Bemor was right, and she spoke now with the Ice Minds? Surely that was impossible. The mismatch of mind states was surely too much for that. Memor herself had encountered difficulties with the primate. The Ice Minds were scarcely reachable without considerable training, such as Bemor had endured.\n\nThe deck heaved sickeningly, but Memor forced herself to her feet. Bemor was gone on a task he said came from the Ice Minds, and Asenath lay whimpering in a slung rack. It was one of the water-clasping type, so she now floated in a sleeve, only her head visible. Her eyes wandered, and Memor judged Asenath would be paying no attention to Memor. Good.\n\nEach step she took came freighted with fear. The deck rolled with flesh waves. The body around them groaned and sloshed. The hydrogen exhaust was roaring and she felt its dull tone through her legs. Memor had made herself put away the terrifying\u2014and, she now realized, quite embarrassing\u2014storm within her. Suppressed truths had overwhelmed her. She realized that her Undermind had sheltered much of the Bowl's long history from her and she had never suspected. The Undermind somehow knew she could not bear facts that clashed with her deepest beliefs in the role, status, and glory of the Folk.\n\nThen, in shocking moments that she never wanted to relive, all the tensions and layered lies of her entire lifetime came welling up. Spewing as from a volcano, it burst through her.\n\nNow she made herself put all that aside. She sealed layers over her Undermind. She confronted a problem demanding all her ability now. Put a foot forward. Brace against the rumbling, twisted flooring. Take another step. Each demanded labor and focus, and it seemed to take a long while to reach the external panel of the capsule.\n\nThe harness fit her head, and the connections self-aligned. She sank into the inner discourse, but only as an observer. She could affect nothing inside.\n\nShe felt Tananareve's mind as a skittering, quick bright thing. Few images, but thoughts of the Ice Minds played through the strata of the primate mind. They seemed to fragment and go into separate channels, streams fracturing as they flowed.\n\nMemor struggled to make sense of the hot-eyed fervor of these flows. Revelation dawned along axes of the primate Undermind. New data flowed into Memor and she could flick back and forth between her own mental understory and the primate's. These laced with the shadowy strangeness of linear minds. Hereditary neural equipment governed these divided minds\u2014straight down the middle, a clear cleft. Such was common in the Bowl's explored region of the galaxy.\n\nShe saw Tananareve's mind taking in the Ice Minds' conversation and hammering that on the twin forges of reason and intuition, with great speed. So the Ice Minds wished to enlist her! Astounding, but perhaps it was only to speak to that Captain Redwing. Still, Bemor was the proper pathway for such diplomacy.\n\nThe deck lurched. Memor barely kept her purchase. Shouts and cries echoed.\n\nThe conversations and images seemed to condense in Memor's mind like a vapor forming a shape. The precise words shifted and changed as the translations moved restlessly. Memor had to cling to nuance, not precision. Something about Redwing the Captain and the jet, yes, and how much humans could help in dealing with the Glorians. A need to intervene between Redwing and\u2014\n\nA hard jerk knocked her over. Memor struggled up to her feet and grasped for the harness, which had come unfastened. She just got it positioned when another twisting roll came through the ship and Asenath collided with her. \"We are down!\" she cried. \"Get out!\"\n\n\"But the primate\u2014\"\n\n\"Bemor is in charge, and he says we should go out and seek the central shelter. Come!\" Asenath turned and fled.\n\nMemor hesitated. She wanted to know what the Ice Minds said. She started to settle in, restarting the harness configuration, when a voice bellowed at her, \"Go! I will care for this.\"\n\nShe turned, and joy flooded through her at the sight of Bemor. The ship trembled, and a great wheezing came rattling down through the corridor outside. She hurried away.\n\nWithin a few moments, Memor lost her footing in the dim light outside. She curled up and slammed to ground. Screams, shouts, crashes. The mountain's firm rock snapped and cracked, heaved and buckled. The path to the shelter now had a great pit crossing it. Sound came from everywhere, and the ground seemed to be grinding against itself, sending gray dust plumes shooting up.\n\nA black curtain boiled across the sky. Within its churn, flashes snapped like eyes in a great beast. Ozone stung the howling breeze. With it came rain.\n\nNot rain\u2014mud. Pellets of it, hard and dry on their skins, soft at their centers. They splatted down, rapping Memor's skull. \"From some body of water,\" she said wonderingly, \"thrown up by something hitting\u2014\"\n\nShe extended her long tongue and tasted the warm rain, like water from a bath, and\u2014salt. The great sea was pelting even this high fortress mountain. Memor folded her feathers close and tight, a raincoat of sorts.\n\nA pool of ink poured across the sky, layers of cloud sliding over each other as if liquid. The reassuring steady day had now turned to a dim night, one filled with sky fireworks far brighter now than the star and jet. Her view flashed in blue-white light and then vanished into the murk. \"Bemor!\" No answer. She got up and walked on legs like pillows through strobes of lightning.\n\nThe flashes showed ahead a new problem\u2014a crevasse yawned. It was a split in the crowning rock slab itself, showing fresh sharp edges. She could barely glimpse the far side in the lightning flashes. Far away. Even in this low gravity, nothing could leap it, certainly none of the bulky Folk. It blocked their way to the station.\n\nMemor looked around in anxious despair. Various staff and crew milled at the edge of this gap, looking desperate. She sniffed their acrid fears. Asenath was nowhere among them. Another blue-white flash allowed her to survey the gathering jam all along the broken path, jostling and shouting strident calls.\n\nMemor saw a new problem. Where were the Sil? And the primates?\nFORTY-THREE\n\nRedwing paced the bridge and watched the approaching shapes, flitting close now among the roiling turbulent knots. Moments ticked by, and the bridge was silent. Beth was ready to focus their exhaust as much as the tunable scoop mag fields allowed. And now there was something new and strange as well.\n\nTheir hull resounded with a strange strumming symphony. The long notes were just at the edge of hearing but clear and distinct. Haunting low notes came like the beating of a giant heart, or of grand booming waves crashing with slow majesty upon a crystal beach, ceramic resonating instrument. Redwing felt the notes with his whole body, recalling a time when as a boy he stood in a cathedral and heard Bach on a massive pipe organ. The pipes sent resounding wavelengths longer than the human body. He did not so much hear notes as feel them as his body vibrated in sympathy. A feeling like being shaken by something invisible conveyed grandeur in a way beyond words.\n\nBeth said, \"Whatever's outside\u2014and I can't see a thing on these screens, just plasma and magnetic signatures\u2014is trying to say something.\"\n\nKarl said, \"Their last attempt killed Clare.\"\n\n\"Yes, a horrible way to die. I... I wonder how whatever is outside makes sounds?\" Beth said. \"Oh\u2014Cap'n, there's a dense plasma knot headed for us.\"\n\n\"Focus it in on the prow fields,\" Redwing said. \"Can we snag it and narrow the exhaust, then aim at the first of those fliers?\"\n\n\"I... think... so.\" Beth and the entire bridge crew were concentrated on their work, belted in tight, eyes following screens, hands hitting key commands. \"The workaround on that digital algorithm block is coming up, running right. The Artilects are all over this problem, but they don't like it.\"\n\n\"They don't have to,\" Redwing said.\n\nThe strange deep notes running through the ship's hull ceased. \"They're leaving us alone, maybe,\" Beth muttered.\n\nThe roiling knot of hot ions clamped within a nest of rubbery magnetic fields came slamming at them at over seven hundred kilometers a second. \"Added to our speed, the impact will be well over a thousand kilometers a second,\" Karl said. \"Is the magscoop cinched in?\"\n\n\"As much as we can,\" Beth said, voice high and lips tight.\n\nThey watched the large blob come straight at them. It was far bigger than SunSeeker's scoop, and they felt the surge, their heads snug against their chair braces. The ship groaned.\n\nTheir internal diagnostics tracked the flow of dense plasma through the magnetic funnel out front, through the tapered neck that flushed it into the reaction chambers. There lived the steadily maintained, self-shaping field geometries that further compressed the plasma, added catalysts, and\u2014the screens showed the pulsing glow in coiled doughnuts of prickly yellow\u2014burned with fusion fire. This got expelled at the max temperature, into an opening throat that sent this starfire into the classic magnetic nozzle facing aft.\n\nBut not exactly dead aft. Beth's fingers flew over the complex command web. The fields slanted slightly, clamping down on the flow, shunting it sideways. The bridge surged again under this momentum change. The Ship Stability Artilect kept them from tumbling with extruded counterfields. Virulent plasma jetted out in a starboard cant. Beth altered the fusion geometry's exit profile to include more shaping magnetic fields in the exhaust. The emerging bolt of hot plasma was like a finger scratching across the wave behind them.\n\n\"With a little bit of windage...,\" Beth mused, intent on the screens.\n\nA flier lay dead at the center of the bolt. When the exhaust struck it, the image wobbled, refracted by the complex play of forces, then sharpened. Fragments swirled where the flier had been.\n\n\"Got it,\" Beth said quietly.\n\n\"Brilliant,\" Redwing said. \"The others\u2014\"\n\n\"The second one is taking an evasive trajectory,\" Karl said. \"Moving away laterally.\"\n\nBeth angled their exhaust and caught it before the flier could get away. Nobody cheered.\n\n\"The third is dropping back,\" Karl said.\n\n\"We can't fly much farther up the jet,\" Redwing said. \"They know that. We'll reverse, make our turn.\"\n\n\"And that third one will be waiting for us,\" Beth finished for him. \"And it'll be ahead of us.\"\nFORTY-FOUR\n\nTananareve was grateful the walls of her confinement were soft but firm. Whatever was carrying her along did not trouble to make the trip pleasant. Jerks and jostles made it hard to keep focused on the sliding, cool voice of the Ice Minds in her mind, overlayered with their images of the lands where they lived.\n\nStarlight cast stretched pale fingers across the plain of rock and ice, where vacuum flowers dutifully pointed their parabolic eyes at the slow sweep of target suns. Around the base of the light-harvesters flowed the pearly fluids that were the commingled selves of the Ice Minds. How these blended thought and became coherent, she could not imagine.\n\nThe moment hastens. We decided to revive ourselves wholly, to deal with this pressing problem.\n\n\"What problem?\"\n\nYour species. The Folk believed they could deal with you as a young and largely incompetent species, but we came to see this is not so.\n\nShe thought of saying, Gee, thanks! but sarcasm might not translate in dealing with aliens. \"Look, we have been imprisoned or chased ever since we got here.\"\n\nThe Folk are our\u2014 A pause. \u2014our police. They also maintain at equilibrium. We are not at equilibrium now. They have failed to understand your kind. Now disruption proceeds.\n\n\"What? Why? How?\"\n\nYour ship has disturbed our jet. The Folk have ordered attacks on your ship. This is against our wishes. We cannot well communicate with your kind in your ship, as some of the Folk have prevented that. We wish you to speak directly to your ship through channels we shall soon open.\n\n\"That's a lot to take in. SunSeeker is in your jet? Wow.\"\n\nInto her mind came an image of a small dark mote plowing upstream against a torrent of coiling plasma. The view backed away and she could see the jet slide sideways as it approached the Knothole. It surged over the Knothole restraining fields and into several life zones. Atmosphere belched out. Some thin girders holding the atmosphere zones apart fractured and fell. She was startled.\n\nYour mind we can approach. The Folk Attendant Astute Astronomer Memor made deep soundings of your neural labyrinths. These we use now. We wish you to speak with your own kind and then to serve to reassure the Diaphanous.\n\nAnother alien? \"Who are\u2014?\"\n\nInto her mind came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies and turning in fat toroids, all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. Somehow she knew these were larger than continents and fuzzy at their edges, where flow was more important than barriers. Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions\u2014all testified to the recombining energy of the fields.\n\n\"These... live in the jet?\" She could not imagine this, but lack of imagination had ceased to be a good argument here.\n\nThey evolved in the magnetic structures that dot the skin of stars. These could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information in those fields led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness.\n\n\"But they don't have bodies. How can they\u2014?\" Her grasp faltered.\n\nYou and we do not witness the chaotic tumble of great plasma clouds between the stars. We all see nothing hanging between the hard points of incandescent light, and so falsely assume that space is somehow nothing. But evolution works there against the constant forces of dissolution.\n\nTananareve knew a bit of general life theory. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably, to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct some awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of... well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals. But in plasma and magnetic fields?\n\nThe Diaphanous migrated on solar storms into the greater voids where we evolved. When the building of the Bowl began, it became essential to include them, as managers of the jet and of the star itself. Only by shaping the magnetic fields of star and jet can we move the Bowl, with constant attention to momentum and stability. Who else to govern magnetic machinery than magnetic beings?\n\nThe Ice Minds sounded so reasonable, their conclusions seemed obvious. Before her inner eye played scenes of magnetic arches rising from stars, twisting and kinking to cut off and therefore give birth to new self-stabilized beings. She could sense, not merely see, waves lashing among the complex magnetic nets that surged in her mind\u2014speech of a sort, maybe. Now the view in her mind shifted to the jet and the plight of SunSeeker, pursued by small ships of destructive intent.\n\n\"You want to\u2014what? Broker a deal? After hounding us across\u2014\"\n\nThe Folk have failed us. Their defenses of the jet are ancient and many failed. Your ship did not even notice these, we are certain. The loosened jet now lashes across Life Zones and wreaks much ill. Yet those who bear down upon that ship now may well have to resort to a weapon we have vowed never to use. It could bring far more evil.\n\nThat, at least, was a familiar concept. Calamity stacking up. \"Okay, what do I do?\"\n\nLet us override the Folk pathways. We shall connect you to your Captain Redwing.\n\nA ripple ran through her mind, a floating airy sensation that somehow mixed with colors flashing in what she felt as her eyes. Yet at the same time, she knew her eyes were open in the complete blackness of the cramped machine. Her eyes saw black, but her mind saw shifting bands of orange and purple, and on top of that\u2014bursting yellow foam ran over an eggshell blue plain. Speckled green things moved on it in staccato rhythm. Twisting lines meshed there and wove into triangles where frantic energy pulsed. A shrill grating sound came with flashes of crimson.\n\nThen she saw Redwing. His image wobbled and she wondered how they could put that into her mind. \"What are you?\" His voice echoed as though he were in a chamber.\n\n\"Captain, this is Tananareve. I'm in some device that, well, wants to speak with you. They are\u2014let's skip that, okay? The Bowl has a lot stranger aliens than we thought.\"\n\n\"How do I know you're really Tananareve at all?\"\n\nThis question hadn't occurred to her. \"Recall that party we had before we went down to land? Feels like a long time ago.\"\n\n\"Yes, I suppose I do.\" He was standing on the bridge, and she could see Beth and others in the background, all looking at what had to be a\u2014what? She tried to remember the bridge but failed. Maybe a camera? How did these aliens tap into internal ship systems?\n\nInto her head came the Ice Minds' sliding, calm voice. We have dealt with what you term your Artilects. They are most agreeable.\n\n\"You brought out a bottle of champagne, remember? You said it was for our first landfall at Glory, but what the hell, this was a landfall and so here it was.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Redwing's face broadened into a grin. \"It really is you. No video, but\u2014welcome aboard, sort of.\"\n\n\"Captain, I'm conveying messages from, well, some aliens we didn't know were here. They want you to stop fooling with the jet.\"\n\nThat comes later. For now tell your commander that they are in grave danger.\n\nShe said that, but Redwing's face turned away to look at a screen she could partially see. On it some flecks moved against a yellow weave of lines that she knew represented magnetic field contours.\n\n\"You mean these guys coming up on us?\"\n\nYour ship has permission to destroy them. But a weapon aboard one of them can erase your ship.\n\n\"Captain, try to kill them right away. They have something\u2014\" She paused, not knowing what to say.\n\nIt is the Lambda Gun, and will disrupt space-time near them.\n\n\"It's some sort of ultimate weapon,\" she said.\n\nRedwing looked tired. He nodded. \"Okay, stay on the line. We'll try that\u2014\"\n\nThe connection broke. His image dwindled and she was in darkness. Somebody was still carrying her around, and she felt a sudden drop. Thump. She heard distant shouts in a language she did not know and felt all at once very tired.\nFORTY-FIVE\n\nCliff crouched with the others and watched the big blimp skyfish wallow on the mountaintop. Scampering crews had secured the huge thing at both ends and now were lashing the sides down with big cables. A heavy rain ate most of the light from the skyfish itself, dim glows of ivory that got drowned in the brilliant lightning flashes. Hammering raindrops scattered even the crashes of lightning into a blurred white murk.\n\n\"Where'd the Folk go?\" Irma shouted against the wind.\n\n\"Into that big entrance!\" Aybe pointed. \"They had that thing they put Tananareve into with them.\"\n\nTerry said, \"Remember what threw us around, back in the skyfish? To make a shock like that, and blow sheets of rock off this mountain\u2014that takes a lot of quake energy. But there aren't quakes here\u2014no plate tectonics.\"\n\nAybe swept rain from his eyes and jutted his chin out. \"Look, the Bowl has a light, elastic underpinning, with not much simple mass loading. So an impact, from something thrown down here, that has a lot of energy. Real quick it moves through the support structure. It came here, to this big slab of rock, a whole mountain\u2014and knocked the bejeezus out of it.\"\n\n\"Just as we landed. What luck.\" Irma huddled down. Cliff read her body language: the rain was warm, at least. It smacked down hard.\n\nTerry sniffed and said, \"I'd like to get out of this damned rain.\"\n\nAs if on cue, white specks began smacking down on the flat rock plain around them. \"Hail!\" Aybe said.\n\nA dirty white ball the size of his fist hit Cliff in the side. He thought he felt a rib crack. The weather here was bigger and harder than he could deal with. Plus the darkness of the storm kept making him feel like sleeping.\n\n\"Let's get inside, out of this storm,\" Cliff said. \"Not the skyfish\u2014who knows what'll happen in there?\"\n\nTo his surprise, the others just nodded. They looked tired, and that made them compliant. He turned to Quert. \"How can we get into their station?\"\n\nQuert had been dealing with his Sil, who were doing what they usually did at a delay\u2014resting. They were squatting and eating something they had gotten on the skyfish. The more anxious humans just milled around. \"Let us lead,\" Quert said.\n\nThe Sil set off at an angle to the crack that had formed in the slab rock. In the confusion of abandoning the skyfish, they had all managed to slip away from the Folk and their many, panicked attendants. The darkness from huge black clouds that slid endlessly across their sky had sent the crew into jittery, nervous states, their legs jerking as they moved, eyes cast fearfully skyward. They had never known night, and this vast storm could not be common here.\n\nThe crack finally ended several hundred meters away from the skyfish. The Sil simply walked around the end of it with complete confidence, and headed back toward a raised bump near the larger mound of the Folk station. As they all cautiously approached, the lightning came less often. Cliff looked back in the darkness and saw the skyfish dimly lit from inside, like some enormous orange Halloween lantern on its side. There was no one in the tube passageway that led downward. \"Why?\" Cliff asked Quert.\n\n\"All fear,\" Quert said. \"Folk, others, all hide inside.\"\n\nAnd so it was. They padded carefully down corridors and across large rooms bristling with gear whose function Cliff could not even guess. It seemed to be working, there were some small lights on the faces, but no clue as to what they did.\n\n\"Folk not know how to work when big change comes,\" Quert said laconically. He relayed this to the Sil and they all made the yawning, hacking sound of Sil laughter.\n\nThey came into a large room that looked down on an even larger area. Quietly they crept up to the edge of a parapet and saw below a milling crowd. The attendants and servants, a throng including alien shapes Cliff had never seen before, and robotic ones as well, held back toward the walls. At the center were the three large Folk and the machine holding Tananareve. The far walls were large oval screens showing views of the Knothole region. One smaller screen was a view from far above, where a long tear in the atmospheric envelope had drawn clouds streaming in, moisture condensing and lightning forking along the flanks of immense purple storms.\n\n\"That's the top of the typhoon we're under,\" Terry said. \"Judging the scale, I'd say those cloud banks are the size of Earthside continents\u2014and look at that lightning flash! You can see it coiling around. As big as the Mississippi, easy.\"\n\n\"Look,\" Irma said, pointing at the shifting view as it tilted toward the Knothole. \"There's the jet\u2014and my God!\u2014SunSeeker.\"\n\nThe screens showed swift small motes dodging and banking in the center of the luminous swirling plasma jet. A quick close-up of their own starship showed it plowing through knots of turbulence and making a tight helix, aiming its pencil exhaust in a tight hot luminous finger at the\u2014\n\n\"Damn, they hit it!\" Aybe said, eyes jumping. \"Blew that flier to pieces.\"\n\n\"Damn right!\" Terry said, pumping his fist.\n\nThey didn't know what was going on, but excitement rippled through humans and Sil alike as they watched something like a dogfight going on. Cliff watched the ballet of ships moving at many hundreds of kilometers a second, seen on scales that had to be zoomed six or seven orders of magnitudes. Nothing but machines could handle this, and even they seemed strained from the sudden turns and swerves they saw.\n\nThe crowd below gazed upward at the screens, and the Folk were at the center, managing machines. The odd curved box that held Tananareve was with them. He wondered what they were making of this confusing mess. He grasped Irma and held her close. They kissed, not caring if anyone saw. Then the guards arrived.\nFORTY-SIX\n\nThey were drenched and cold, Folk and Serfs alike, but the hour demanded attention. Memor slumped down to rest, sitting back a bit on her haunches.\n\nTheir flight from the poor agonized and wounded skyfish had been rowdy, noisy, swept by rain beneath inky clouds flashing with electrical anger. Their ragged party had slipped and stumbled their way across great slabs of rock, with Memor trying to keep order in their flight. A team from the station had come out to erect, with swift competence, a bridge over the jagged chasm that had split open. The station's deputy commander said a flying hard-carbon flange had fallen on the mountain, apparently freed of its support structure high up in the envelope's stanchions, and plunged deep into the mountain's firm mass. The shock wave had rocked the skyfish sideways and blown several of its compartments, spilling crew onto the rock. That knife-sharp girder had also split a crevasse at the worst possible moment, spraying fragments into the skyfish and killing some local staff. The great skyfish bellowed and writhed against the crews attempting to moor it, killing several. Its flailing fins were sharp and deadly.\n\nConsidering this, it was a wonder anything worked.\n\nMemor sagged with exhaustion. She watched Asenath stand proudly at the prow of the command center in their mountain shelter, in full authority. She listened to the panicked signals from the fliers, displayed on screens and sounding shrill even in this large command room. The fliers were guided by robot minds, high level and capable of what seemed like emotions. The voices were brittle, sharp, edged with urgency. The swift ships tumbled and gyred, blown about by the ramscoop thrust. That made evasive navigation and aiming nearly impossible.\n\n\"We could use the Lambda Gun, as you said before, Wisdom Chief,\" a small lieutenant said softly. \"One of the fliers bears only the gun. It is bulky and makes maneuver difficult in the jet. That flier hangs back, away from the pencil exhaust the primates are using against us.\"\n\n\"Under whose orders was this done?\" Memor said.\n\n\"Mine,\" Asenath said firmly.\n\n\"Have the Ice Minds agreed? They have\u2014\"\n\n\"Bemor is not here, so we cannot readily consult with the Ice Minds. He is off managing their discourse, if that is the proper word, with your talking primate. So I shall have to assume command.\"\n\nMemor felt compelled to say, \"Separated command? This is not proper use of the hierarchy\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, but then, this is a clear emergency. Communications are fragmented and time ticks on. I order the Lambda Gun unfolded.\"\n\nMemor felt a sudden spike of fear. \"That, that will take time\u2014\"\n\n\"Get to it,\" Asenath ordered the lieutenant. Various officers, gathered around the two Folk in a crescent, rustled with unease. Nobody moved. The silence stretched.\n\nMemor said, \"You had the Lambda Gun prepared before, didn't you?\"\n\nAsenath gave an irritated fan-rebuke to her underlings. \"Now!\" They scurried off to their many tasks.\n\nAlmost casually, in a way that told Memor this had been long planned, Asenath turned and gave a gray green feather rush of haughty disregard. \"I felt it necessary. Events now prove me correct.\"\n\nMemor felt icy fatigue run through her but summoned up reserves, rustled her feathers, and turned inward. She had heard of the Lambda Gun long ago as a historical curiosity, and now had to call up its history to have any hope of dealing with Asenath. Her Undermind held this lore, and was sore abused. She felt this as she unveiled portions, stripping back layers of youthful memory, gazing inward past the trauma suffered after the revelation of the Great Shame. She felt it now in its full ghastly panorama\u2014the images of a long cometary tail, pointing directly at Earth in the final moments, like an accusatory finger, and the spreading circle of destruction that annihilated the ancient civilization of smart, warm-blooded reptiles. Their majesty lay not in vast edifices, culminating in the Bowl. Instead, they were heirs to the fraction of that great species which relished their natural planet and did not want to take part in the Bowl, or its technical prowess, or the alliance with strange minds in the cometary halo. They had kept Earth green and fertile, restricting their own numbers so the natural luxuriant world was not paved over with artifice. In a way, Memor recalled, the Bowl became a tribute to their deep instincts. Its huge expanses enabled many species to live intelligently in Zones dominated by leafy wealth, though built upon a substrate of spinning metal and carbon fiber intricacies. A natural world built upon a machine...\n\nShe had become lost in her introspection, a common liability of voyages into the Undermind's shadowy labyrinths. Memor revived an old image of the Lambda Gun, a fearsome projector of gray spherical bulk, tapering into a belligerent snout. It could project a disturbance in the vacuum energy of space-time, throwing this knot of chaos out in a beam. Suitably tuned, it would cause, when it struck solid matter, a catastrophic expansion of a small volume of space. The inflation field increased the cosmological constant in a very restricted region for a brief snap of time. Whatever contained this howling monstrosity, reborn from the first instant of this universe, would be ripped into particles far smaller than nuclei.\n\nMemor recoiled from this appalling vision. With a hasty withdrawal salute, she slammed her Undermind shut. \"This is grisly! This is a planet buster, capable of delivering enormous energies\u2014\"\n\n\"So well I do know,\" Asenath replied. \"I have studied this ancient device and its history. The true Ancients invented it as a last resort against balky species. Some hurled relativistic masses at the Bowl to drive it away. The Lambda Gun put a quick end to their mischief.\"\n\n\"Surely we have shields that would be useful\u2014\"\n\n\"Not against a vagrant craft with powerful magnetic scoops. We enjoyed great magnetic craftsmanship in Ancient ages, but our Bowl does not muster such intensities. Nor do the Diaphanous have ready responses. Meanwhile, the jet stands in a nonlinear kink mode and deals us terrible destruction.\"\n\nAsenath said this with a reasonable air and somber fan-display. Memor knew she could not deflect Asenath in an area where her expertise and rank prevailed. She gave it one last try. \"The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous are in charge of jet dynamics!\"\n\n\"And they have failed. Prepare to fire,\" Asenath said to a lieutenant, and turned her back on Memor.\nFORTY-SEVEN\n\nBeth felt the hairs on her neck rise, prickly and trembling as the electrical charge built again. But this time she was getting irked and instead of flattening herself yet again on the deck, she hit a hard thruster in the magscoop. Fields vented plasma and the ship lurched. The others were hitting the deck but Beth discharged a brace of capacitors in the magscoop's leading magnetic fields. This gave a powerful burst of electrons at the far end of the scoop, moving at the speed of light. Instantly her neck hairs stopped tingling.\n\n\"Cap'n, looks like I've found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,\" she said with a deliberately casual air.\n\nRedwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. \"Brilliant!\"\n\n\"And she nailed that flier flat on, too,\" Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. \"There's only one flier left, and it's hanging back pretty far.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. \"But we're near the top of our mission profile, right?\"\n\nBeth checked. \"Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.\"\n\n\"That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,\" Karl said. \"We'll have a reduced exhaust.\"\n\n\"So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,\" Redwing said. \"Let's try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?\"\n\nRedwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.\n\n\"Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.\" Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon\u2014well, it added up fast.\n\nThe ship rumbled as she took it on a slow tipping angle. She was concentrating so didn't notice the beeping of the comm.\n\nKarl picked it up for her. His body went rigid and he glanced at his shocked face. \"It's... Tananareve, Cap'n. For you.\"\n\nHe grabbed it. \"Redwing here. How in\u2014?\" Redwing's face showed nothing as he listened. Then his mouth slowly opened and he stared into space. \"How did\u2014?\" More silence. \"So they'll let us go?\"\n\nBeth suddenly realized that this was a negotiation that could end all this madness. She kept SunSeeker in a tight helical turn, with a wary eye on the flier below, now approaching. Something told her that she should make some quick dodgy movements to make them a less predictable target. While hanging on Redwing's every word, of course.\n\n\"Okay, details later. Right.\" Redwing's entire body was tense now, on his feet, spine ramrod straight. He gripped his chair so hard, she saw his hand turn pale. \"What?\" The silence seemed long and unbearable, but she noticed the seconds on her situation screen were going by slowly. \"Roger. More later.\"\n\nRedwing turned to her and said, \"That flier behind us, take all the evasion you can. They're trying to shut down a weapon that's in armed and aiming mode right now.\"\n\nShe slammed the helm over hard and teased the fusion burn to its max. Then she released the bolus of searing plasma and wrenched the helm again, putting them into a flat spin, then a dive. Pops and creaks came echoing down the bridge from the connecting corridors. Karl's tablet escaped from the ridged worktable and smacked into the bulkhead.\n\nRedwing said, \"There's an electromagnetic precursor maybe two seconds before discharge. Look for that. Say again, Tananareve\u2014\"\n\nKarl flicked their EM antennas into one overlay, frequencies color-coded. Beth could see the flier as a dark point among hills and valleys of Technicolor richness. \"It's buried in all this plasma emission,\" Karl said.\n\n\"Integrate the whole spectral emission,\" Beth said. \"I don't know what frequency it will come out in, but if we\u2014\"\n\n\"Got it.\" A smooth topological surface appeared now in auburn colors, brown for valleys and nearly yellow at the peaks. The sky flexed like an ocean rolling with colliding wave fronts.\n\nShe fought the helm around again and let their speed drop a bit. This let her fill reserve chambers with incoming plasma and build to the max density they could carry. The jet wind was coming in at velocities over a thousand kilometers a second, and she could vary the inflow rate simply by moving the magscoop to angle it more fully into the stream. SunSeeker was working far from its optimal performance peak, which had been designed to run steady and smooth on interstellar plasma, orders of magnitude below the sleeting hail of knotty ionized matter rushing at them. Now she used, without thinking about it, the skills she had won from their flight up the jet when they arrived here. Through long hours she had fought violent currents, swimming upstream against conditions SunSeeker had never seen.\n\nNow she just let her instincts rule. Her hands and eyes moved restlessly, shaping plasma and bunching it. When she saw the holding chambers were full, she began to trickle more into the fusion chambers. The boost took them up jetward and to starboard as she waited for something strange to come at them.\n\nIt wasn't subtle. The maroon tones around the flier profile suddenly blossomed with a hard bright yellow peak. She fed the stored plasma into the chambers and goosed the drive. The helm slammed over, and she had time to shout \"Incoming!\"\n\nThe bridge shuddered and then wrinkled. She looked down the deck line and saw the bulwark ripple and flex. Pops and groans rose. Karl dove for the deck. She felt a tight pressure run through her like a slow, sinuous wave. Her stomach lurched. A deep bass tone rolled along the ship axis and\u2014\n\n\u2014it was gone. The bridge snapped back into straight lines and firm walls. The hail of small stressed sounds fell away.\n\n\"They missed us,\" Karl said.\n\nRedwing nodded. \"But what missed us? The deck got rubbery\u2014\"\n\n\"A space-time wrinkle, maybe,\" Karl said. \"I dunno how in hell anybody could make one, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me concentrate,\" Beth said. \"They could shoot at us again.\"\n\nShe dodged and swerved and dove and soared and plunged, and time stretched the way space had moments before. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the feeds that told her what the flier was doing. It cut her off on a side curve and flared more exhaust to draw closer. She countered with her own moves. All this she did with hands incessantly moving as her eyes looked for another of the hard bright yellow peaks. But it didn't come.\n\nThe comm beeped. Redwing answered. \"Oh. Good. What? Say again. Good. Great. You're sure. Okay. Terms come later, sure. Soon, yes.\"\n\nHe hung up and turned to Beth. She allowed her eyes to stray to him and she was shocked at how old he looked.\n\n\"They're standing down. No more pulses like that. Something called the Lambda Gun.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth to say something, and the comm beeped again.\n\nRedwing answered. \"What? Look at the star?\"\n\n\"Got it,\" Karl said. He and Fred, who had come onto the bridge, peered at the big screen.\n\nGeysers. The curve of the red star worked with furious energies. Flares and huge arches broke into space. Currents swept across the troubled crescent. Beth saw there was a dent in the perfect circle. Something had chewed it.\n\nKarl said, \"Look at these vectors.\" He had told the Kinematic Artilect to project an acceptance cone on the thing that had missed them. He had set the basic width to be a few times the jittering pattern Beth had followed to evade whatever the flier threw at them. Within the error bars, the cone snipped a bit off the star.\n\nRedwing frowned. \"Tananareve says the Folk call it a Lambda Gun. It does something with space-time, so if it just projected on\u2014\" He stopped. Facts trump words.\n\nThey watched the star adjust gravity against its internal pressures. Huge fissures opened and closed like snapping mouths. Fountains of restless plasma worked up in slender, vibrant yellow tendrils before curving and dying. The star flooded simmering masses into the gap, and waves spread from that. Fluids shaped by strong magnetic fields moved in complex eddies. Storms peeled off this and spread, tornadoes the size of planets.\n\nBeth let out a long slow breath, trying to get herself back into somewhat normal condition. She was tired and worn and completely confused. Coffee no longer helped. She needed a bath, too.\n\nShe stood, wobbling a little. \"Tananareve said more, Cap'n. I could tell. What?\"\n\n\"We've got a deal. They'll resupply us.\"\n\nGasps. Redwing shrugged and smiled, bobbing his head when the entire bridge burst into applause. \"Uh, yes. There's more. They want some of us, maybe enough to avoid inbreeding, to stay on the Bowl. The ones who actually run this place aren't those Folk at all. Those are like the local police on the beat, or middle managers in a bureaucracy. This thing is so old, something needs to live long enough to run it.\"\n\n\"Some aliens we didn't see down there?\" Beth asked, her vision bleary, bones aching now. \"Some kind of\u2014\"\n\nRedwing shrugged, as though he should have known all along. \"Ice Minds move slowly because they're cold. They keep the memories and experience, Tananareve said. They work with something called the Diaphanous, who manage the jet and the star.\"\n\n\"Plasma stuff?\" Karl said. \"Those were what made those sounds, that created those discharge arcs, that\u2014\"\n\n\"Killed Clare,\" Beth said. \"Trying to stop us from kinking the jet.\"\n\n\"The cold works with the hot, then,\" Karl said. \"The Folk are just local managers.\"\n\n\"They sure don't think so. They imagine they're the whole show,\" Beth said. \"Funny, really.\"\n\n\"So why did the Ice Minds, or whatever, let us live at all?\" Fred said. He had been silent the whole time but now seemed happy, smiling, eyes dancing.\n\n\"They need help with Glory,\" Redwing said. \"We can get there first, going full blast. We can reconnoiter. And talk to the Glorians, who think we humans are running the Bowl. They got our radio and TV, and since they were along the same line of sight, thought the Bowl was ours.\"\n\nBeth frowned. \"We have to?\"\n\n\"Part of the deal.\" Redwing smiled. \"Tananareve said it's pretty much take it or leave it.\"\n\nKarl laughed. \"No question, I'd say. We take it.\"\n\n\"They do want us to straighten out that standing kink. It's rubbing against the Knothole and it's gonna stay that way. But if we fly through it the right way, maybe we can bust it loose.\"\n\nKarl said dryly, \"There are better ways to put that, more precise. But I think with the fluences we have, and Beth as pilot, we can.\"\n\nBeth laughed, a bit dry. \"Beth the perfect pilot thinks she needs sleep. Lots of it. Then more coffee.\"\n\nRedwing smiled and finally sat down in his deck chair, more relaxed than she had seen him in a long while. He looked at the walls showing their situation and said, \"If we run down the jet, fix the Knothole plasma stall, then out\u2014well, we can loop around and come back into simple orbit.\"\n\nBeth scowled. \"Back into the cold sleep vaults?\"\n\n\"Some stay here,\" Redwing said. \"The Ice Minds want some new species to give the Bowl some stability. The Folk couldn't handle us, so they're out of the policing business. We get that.\"\n\nBeth nodded, knowing her piloting days were very nearly over.\nFORTY-EIGHT\n\nTananareve was tired when the incessant images and thoughts finally started to taper away. The Ice Minds had much to convey in their cool, gliding manner, but it was all so big and strange, she could not really think what to say. Mostly she just digested. Which was exhausting in itself. But one thing did puzzle her, and she asked about it.\n\n\"Why was your jet open to attack? I mean, it and the star and the Bowl\u2014it's an unstable system, has to be adjusted all the time or it falls apart. Anybody wants to do you harm, the jet is an open target, the heart of the system.\"\n\nSome confusion and delay. Soft pictures floated into her mind. The jet's filmy twisting strands working out from the star. Sometimes it snarled a bit, but the plasma clots called the Diaphanous adjusted that. They made the jet smooth out and glide tight and sure through the Knothole. All was well. Nominally.\n\n\"What's the idea of letting it be so vulnerable? I mean, we just came alongside you and slipped in, rode up the jet. We could've damaged it then, even by accident. But other kinds, other aliens, they might want to bring you down.\"\n\nSome did.\n\n\"What was your strategy then?\" She was tired, but what she learned could be useful. Redwing would want to know every damn detail.\n\nImagine a simple army's task, under imminent attack. They must find the part of their landscape best suited to strengthen their position when fighting in open battle. The answer is to fight on the edge of a sharp cliff. This gives their soldiers just two choices\u2014to fight or retreat, and in retreating to go over the cliff and die. Their enemy has different options\u2014to fight or flee. That option to flee makes the enemy's attack less likely to persevere. Placing yourself in peril makes you appear fearless. It gives your opponent cause to consider breaking off the battle.\n\nShe found this strange. \"So you put your backs to the wall and that's a defense?\"\n\nWe prefer to dissuade. We regret that the Folk, or rather one of them, used our final defense. Our Lambda Gun is immensely powerful. Luckily it was ineptly used. We have stopped its use and will punish those who erred so grievously.\n\nTananareve said nothing. She felt a rising, apprehensive note strike through her mind, and realized it was coming from the Ice Minds. They said, The Diaphanous now speak to those who caused this deep error. You should hear as well. A somber, rolling voice came then, not so much spoken as unfurled.\n\nWho is this that wrecks our province without knowledge?\n\nDo you know the sliding laws of blithe fluids?\n\nWere you here when the great curve of the Bowl shaped true?\n\nCan you raise your voice to the clouds of stars?\n\nDo fields unseen report to you?\n\nCan your bodies shape the fires of thrusting suns?\n\nHave you ever given orders to the passing stars or shown the dawn its place?\n\nCan you seize the Bowl by the edges to shake the wicked out of it?\n\nHave you journeyed to the springs of fusion or walked in the recesses of the brittle night?\n\nHave you entered the storehouses of the Ice Minds and found there tales of your long past?\n\nCan you father events in times beyond all seeing?\n\nYour answer to all these cannot justify your brute hands upon machines of black wonder.\n\nNor shall you ever chance to be so able again, for you shall be no more.\n\nThe space and time you sought to dissolve shall reckon without you hence.\n\nTananareve knew somehow this came from the invisible ones who dwelled in the jet. She did not understand any of this. She just sighed and put such troubles away as she gratefully slipped into sleep.\nFORTY-NINE\n\nMemor watched the great floods sweep across lands that had held towns and forests and would now be swamps. Great constructions from far antiquity were undermined and slumped. Under great magnification, from this satellite view, she studied the rooftops of homes and city centers. There were no survivors awaiting rescue. A few boats bobbed here and there, but not many.\n\n\"It is a tragedy, indeed,\" Bemor said. He looked tired, surely from the work of keeping the Ice Minds in touch with the primates, funneled through the mind of the poor Tananareve. \"But we are demanded at the leaving ceremony. Come.\"\n\n\"Who demands this? I do not wish to witness such.\"\n\n\"The Ice Minds command. Their attitude has changed substantially. I do not sense their goodwill toward us any longer.\"\n\nMemor bristled and gave quick fan-signals of rebuke and mild anger. \"The crisis faded away, yes? And we surely played a role.\"\n\n\"Of a kind.\" Bemor gave a feathered signature of drab purple resignation, and wheezed a bit. \"Come. And bring your primates. The Ice Minds wish them to see this.\"\n\n\"They have rested and eaten,\" Memor said. \"Perhaps they will profit from witnessing.\"\n\nThey entered the Citadel of the Dishonored to see Asenath's end. She would be churned into the great matrix of dead plants and animals, so the dishonored could enhance topsoil. Memor and Bemor plodded into the high, arched atrium, where subtly hidden machinery murmured, managing the bacterial content, acidity, and trace elements of the slowly roiling mud-fluid below the Pit. First the Pit, then the Garden: the fate of all.\n\n\"I disliked Asenath,\" Memor whispered. \"But she did have talent.\"\n\nBemor said, \"Insults are best not remembered. She was sure of herself and had no thought of consequence.\"\n\nStill, Memor needed to consult her Undermind to help her get through this. Calling the extinction of one she had worked with \"a just recycling\" did little good.\n\nThe primates followed, and the Sil. Bemor remarked, \"They show few signs of the early stages of Adoption. Perhaps we'd best be rid of them.\"\n\n\"I believe the Ice Minds will not allow any executions or harm to them,\" Memor said. \"Or the Sil, though we could build a case against them.\"\n\nBemor flashed vigorous objection. \"The Ice Minds were behind the Sil actions. They wished the humans brought to them, without our knowing such intent.\"\n\n\"Ah, so the Sil are invulnerable, as are the primates. I dislike profoundly having our command of these creatures revoked for the sake of a passing problem\u2014\"\n\n\"It is not passing. Asenath's Lambda Gun pulse passed along the jet for a considerable distance. It intersected portions of several of the Diaphanous. One was killed, the others injured. These could self-repair, with help of others who could lend portions of their own anatomy. To damage the Diaphanous is to endanger the jet and thus the Bowl.\" Bemor's grave voice boomed. \"An example must be made.\"\n\nMemor saw Asenath being led to the Pit and recalled when she herself had faced the prospect of oblivion. Asenath had been disappointed at Memor's being spared, and had allowed a pitch of reluctance into her later comments. Now Asenath faced the yawning black Pit at the center of the Vault. The sentence was read and Asenath gave no reply, or any mournful yips and drones. Her feathers were a muted gray and hung lifeless. Her fate spread before her in the green slime before the final descent. Deep long chords sounded.\n\nVarious religious figures were there, clad in ancient Folk grandcloth. They urged Asenath to convert to their faiths, here in her last moments. Memor recalled that through its history the Bowl had passed by worlds where creatures shaped like ribbons or pancakes held sway. These the ancients had termed Philosophers, for they had little tool-using ability. Such fauna were deeply social and spun great theories of their world, verging into the theological. To Memor philosophy was like a blind being searching a dark room for an unknown, black beast. When philosophy verged into theology, it was like that same predicament, but the black beast did not even exist, yet the search went on. Asenath waved the religious Folk away, giving a fan-flutter of rejection.\n\nAsenath declined a final statement; then her feather-crown altered to deep gray. She raised her head and said, \"We die containing a richness of lovers, and characters we have climbed into, as if trees. I have marked these on my body for my death. Then I go into the Great Soil.\"\n\nMemor wondered at this. No one would see such inscriptions. Perhaps it was a declaration Asenath hoped would somehow make its way into Folk-lore?\n\nHead held high, with a resigned shrug, she simply stepped off the edge and slid down into the disposal hole. She had never looked at the crowd of witnesses.\n\nMemor could smell a fear among the primates; she had nearly forgotten them. She reassured them that this was to educate them in the ways of the Bowl and the Great Soil to which all must return.\n\nA primate vomited at the sight and smell of the execution, spattering vile acid. Memor saw it was Tananareve, who she recalled had learned some of Folk speech. These creatures were smarter than she had supposed, as recent events revealed.\n\nThere was a long silence after the ceremony. Bemor said to the primates, \"We have strict justice for all here.\"\n\nTananareve said, \"It looks like you're ruled by those Ice Minds. They can order executions?\"\n\nBemor said, \"The Bowl would fail if there were not an authority who could override the passing opinions of individuals. Or of species. Your own ship has a Captain.\"\n\n\"I never thought it would be a pleasure to see Redwing again,\" Tananareve said. \"But life is full of surprises.\"\n\nThey all\u2014Cliff, Irma, Terry, Aybe\u2014laughed hard and long at this. Memor saw that this eruption came from great internal pressures, now released.\n\n\"We shall have to be careful with these primates,\" Bemor whispered in Folk speech. \"They are few and we are merely many trillions.\"\n\nHe and Memor laughed with deep, rolling tones of relieving tensions. In not too long a time, they would remember Bemor's joke with little humor.\nPART XIV\n\nMEMORY'S FLICKERING LIGHT\n\nThe natural world does not optimize, it merely exists.\n\n\u2014KEN CALDEIRA\nFIFTY\n\nBeth yawned and stretched and looked at the big foaming breakers curling onto a beach, splashing with a churning roar out to the edge of her wall. Relaxing lapping ocean sounds were a pleasant wake-up call. She had surfed there once a century or so ago and very nearly drowned. Her wrenched back had taken a while to stop complaining.\n\nNow her muscles ached and spoke to her of her many hours in the lead pilot's chair on the flight deck. They hadn't enjoyed it, and neither had she. More fun to get worked over in a wave, she thought fuzzily. I wonder if there are surf-worthy waves somewhere on the Bowl? Maybe when a hurricane's running somewhere, safely far away...\n\nShe got up and trooped down to the head and spent three days' allotment of water on a hot shower. It helped ease her back muscles, and she could think again, too. About how to deal with Redwing and Cliff and all the open doors she was about to slam shut.\n\nShe slumped through the mess in her bathrobe, ignoring Fred, who was reading his tablet anyway, and scored a big coffee hit in her extra-size cup. Then back in bed and the wall now running a restful English village, with enough background sounds of breeze and birds to let her forget the ghastly silence aboard SunSeeker.\n\nIt wasn't easy for SunSeeker's chief pilot to ignore the quiet. SunSeeker was at rest, motors down, shields down. Only a pattern in the Bowl's magnetic fields protected her from a flood of interstellar radiation. And an alien magnetic pattern, the Diaphanous, was shaping that.\n\nThe silence was eerie, after she had spent so long under its background working rumble. Now came a massive, heavy thump. A tanker, she thought. Tankers and cargo craft were a cloud around SunSeeker, and there were thumps and scraping as one or another mated to the ship and masses moved through air locks. Some robots dispatched by the Folk clumped and clanked across the hull on magnetic graspers.\n\nShe took a sip and shut out the fevered world.\n\nE-mail first, to get up to speed after ten hours in the sack. She plunged in. The very first was a slab of homework from Tananareve. She had craftily recorded nearly all her interactions with the Ice Minds, at least those rendered in speech within the machine they had her trapped in. She had asked them to use audio rather than somehow making a voice resound in her mind. In the middle of the transcript, captured on her phone and patched up by a shipboard Artilect, was a nugget.\n\nYou must realize that Glory is not a true planet but rather a shell world. Many different species of intelligent Glorians live on concentric spheres, with considerable atmosphere spaces between them. Many pillars support this system, and powerful energy sources provide light and heat. Entirely different life-forms inhabit the differing spheres. The innermost shells support life without oxygen. These kinds come from deep within ordinary worlds, creatures of darkness and great heat. Some species have made their spheres into imitations of whatever their best-loved environments are. At the very top is a re-creation of a primitive oxygen world, flush with forests and seas. This outer shell your astronomers have studied. You conclude that Glory is a succulent target for a colony. That upper layer is deceiving, perhaps deliberately so\u2014we do not know. Certainly Glory is not a simple prospect for your kind.\n\nThe Glorians who constructed this shell paradise of theirs also communicate on scales of the galaxy itself. They do not use simple electromagnetics, as you do. There are many worlds, many of them ruled by machine intelligences, who use electromagnetics over stellar scales. Emitting in these ways reveals an emergent society capable of beginner technologies. Most keep silent, their radiated power low, fearing unknown perils. We often found such silent planets. We were drawn to worlds we knew by distant examination were life-bearing, yet electromagnetically quiet.\n\nThe Glorians disdain such societies. They wish to speak, over many long eras, with greater minds\u2014those who can blare forth using gravitational waves. Those waves are far harder to detect and stupendously more difficult to emit in coherent fashion, to carry messages. Here again, to radiate at all is a show of power.\n\nThese signals you primates have detected but cannot translate. That is unsurprising. So thus have many minds discovered, over many millions of your years. Some of these who hear but cannot understand gravitational waves, the Bowl encountered long ago. The gravitational message landscape is an intricate puzzle few solve.\n\nWe Ice Minds have unraveled the Glorian waves, with the help of the Diaphanous. It was a lengthy labor. They are strange, intriguing, and imply much more than they say. We now wish to know the Glorian Masters ourselves, to join in their company. That is why the Bowl now feels itself ready to approach. Before, we did not dare.\n\nFor you primates to dare is surely folly.\n\nBeth took a deep breath and watched people from another century\u2014when she grew up, of course\u2014walk down the streets of the English village, the sea breeze sighing, birds all atwitter. So the Ice Minds were making their case for some of SunSeeker's passengers to stay. Fair enough. The problem was going to be Redwing.\n\nNext came data and text from Tananareve and ship Artilects, dissecting the events with the Diaphanous.\n\nKarl and the Theory Artilect had worked out some ideas about what the hell the Diaphanous beings who had killed Clare could be. Self-organizing magnetic fields, smart bellies full of plasma, harvesting energy from the jet? And bigger than planets? Well, the jet was a puzzle, and managing it seemed beyond the Folk. She and the others had ignored that problem, now pretty obvious once you thought of it. Who mustered solar storms to the jet base? Who got the mag fields aligned so the jet was under steady control?\n\nSomething big. Beth tried to envision what would radiate waves kilometers long. That could induce enormous electric fields inside SunSeeker, and sound waves, too. To such creatures, humans might be as inconsequential as the lice that pestered the skin of a blue whale.\n\nWithout the Diaphanous, the whole Bowl system was impossible. Want someone to manage a star? Take the children born in stellar magnetic arches, evolved there. Hire the locals.\n\nEnough. She left off the reading to get ready for her appointment with Redwing. Time to don the battle uniform, gal.\nFIFTY-ONE\n\nThe worst part about the free-bounding exercise he did in zero grav was the sweat. Sweat didn't run. Redwing clung to a stanchion and mopped some from his eyes, but it was hard to get it all. Some covered his eyes in lenses. Blinking only made his image of the big craft bay wobble. Then his belt rang, reminding him of his appointments with Karl and then Beth.\n\nKarl was waiting. Redwing hated showing up late for a crew appointment, but he had needed the exercise to clear his mind. As they went into his cabin, he saw his wall was running their real-time view. He was glad to see they had rounded the Bowl lip and so could see the Knothole region again. Radiation remained near zero as the Diaphanous sun dwellers' mag shield followed their orbit. Redwing could not imagine magnetic stresses that could grasp and guide a starship of a thousand tons, but he was getting used to the apparently impossible.\n\nKarl grinned. \"It's been a hell of ride. The way Beth drove us down into the cinch point of the Knothole, and then stood us here, blasting plasma out the back and pushing the standing kink over toward center, into a straight line\u2014wow. Just, wow.\"\n\nRedwing nodded. \"The finger snakes loved it, too. They're bright, seemed to know a lot about how the jet works. I've seen piloting but never like that. We owe her one.\"\n\n\"Maybe more than one,\" Karl said, but Redwing let it pass.\n\nKarl studied the hurricanes visible on long-range scopes. They were beyond spectacular, when you adjusted for scale. In the fractured zones near the knothole, the seas were giving up their moisture to the lowered atmospheric pressure. An enormous hurricane fed on the air pressure drop, a quickening drift toward the ruptured atmospheric envelope.\n\n\"Maybe we need a new term,\" Karl said. He stood and pointed on the wall. \"See, those eddies form in the big churning spiral, then spin off into hurricanes. It's a fractal fluid turbulence.\" He increased screen resolution. \"So those too fling out smaller hurricanes, and so on down to some scale more like Earth's puny varieties.\"\n\n\"So more and more of them dance out their fury on the life below,\" Redwing said, musing.\n\n\"They'll take a while to patch the tears.\" Karl turned away, shaking his head. \"We really went too far.\"\n\nThere was business to do, but he asked instead, \"A celebration seems in order\u2014the old eat, drink, and be merry. Plus we're all tired. Let's let the Artilects take over, say two hours from now, and muster the crew.\"\n\nKarl nodded, distracted. Redwing reflected that at tonight's party, the entr\u00e9e steak would not be meat, the wine would be water plus a grape extract and alcohol, and the water was fashioned from their collective piss. After all the deaths, maybe being merry was the hard part.\n\n\"Cap'n, this blizzard of info we're getting from Tananareve and the Folk\u2014it's hard to digest. We're getting their point of view, and I try to cock it around to our line of sight.\"\n\n\"They're old, we're young. To be expected.\"\n\nKarl gave a wry smile. \"Some of these messages, I sort of feel that they should have a space for 'fill in name, address, and solar system'\u2014it's hard to grasp their assumptions.\"\n\n\"And so, hard to know how to negotiate with them?\"\n\n\"Damn right. Look, the Bowl is on a journey that takes it all over a chunk of the available galaxy. They should've settled most of the local arm by now. But these Bird Folk, they're deeply conservative. They don't seem to leave colonies.\"\n\nRedwing pursed his lips, sat back, and watched the super-hurricane grinding on. He tried not to think about what was happening below them. His work...\n\n\"Um. They say that's because the Bowl is perfect, suited for the smart dinosaurs that built it. Warm, stable, predictable weather. They don't want to leave it. So?\"\n\n\"Then who's doing the exploring? The Folk don't want to advertise this, but it's pretty clear. They tried colonies and failed. After millions of years in this nice, steady place\u2014heaven, right?\u2014they don't work out well on planets.\"\n\n\"But they say they keep track of every star they've visited. That's how they knew what was going on, the Great Shame, all that.\"\n\nKarl leaned forward with a thin smile. \"It's the Ice Minds. They think slow, they live slow, but there's still room for boredom. They've left some of themselves in the local Oort clouds, all over this galactic arm. Plus Earth's. They like it, there's no weather there. Stable, gives them lots of data, propagates the species, too.\"\n\n\"And the Folk?\"\n\n\"They're the caretakers. They pick up some new species every million years or so, but mostly they just lord it over all the other species on the Bowl\u2014the Adopted, they call them.\"\n\n\"And we're the new kids on the block?\"\n\n\"Wait'll you see this.\" Karl clicked his tablet and flashed a picture on the opposite wall. A view of two spheres orbiting each other, black and white. A simulation, too clean to be real.\n\n\"The Ice Minds think the Glorians have a binary-charged black hole system, Tananareve says. It looks like this, they say. Since the black holes are basically very large charged particles, you could control their orbits with very large electromagnetic containment fields. That avoids collision of the black holes. But then they swerve them a little, so the near misses generate intense gravitational waves. That's the Glorians' communication link with other big-time civilizations in the galaxy.\"\n\n\"And the Ice Minds want in on the conversation?\" This was getting stranger than he liked.\n\n\"Social climbers, yes. They want to meet the adults, looks like.\"\n\nRedwing frowned. \"But they can't have black holes around the Bowl. Too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but\u2014these black holes are small, maybe a few meters across.\"\n\n\"That small? It's still massive.\"\n\n\"Right, around a hundred times more massive than Earth. Oh, and\u2014the Glorians made the holes, too.\"\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"The Ice Minds want to find out how.\"\n\n\"And we're headed there....\" Redwing wanted to think this through, but a polite knock told him it was time for Beth.\n\nKarl said, \"I was talking to Fred just now and he made an interesting point. Remember when we all were approaching the Bowl? Flabbergasted, sure. But now, Fred says to him it's been like a twisted encounter with the eventual human future.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense.\"\n\n\"In a tilted way\u2014in Fred's style of thinking, anyway\u2014SunSeeker left an Earth already pretty well worked over by the human hand. Remember? Sunlight reflected by sulfur dioxide particles shimmering in its stratosphere, so at the right angle we could see it from space. Clouds of seawater mist billowing up from those small sail ships, to shield oceans from sunlight. Big carbon collector towers, stretching out across continents. Farm waste rounded up and consigned to the deep ocean, where it'll keep for a thousand years. Throwing fine-ground chalk into those oceans every year, remember that?\u2014in masses equal to the white cliffs of Dover.\"\n\nRedwing nodded, recalling the furiously working fretwork of corrections. \"Right, to offset the acid from absorbed CO2. I was in deep space for decades, running hot nukes. Made no difference to us.\"\n\n\"Me, too, mostly. Somebody else's problem, and we had plenty of our own, running closed biospheres.\" Karl gave a wry shrug.\n\n\"That was pretty much taking on an infinite career, endlessly shaping habitat. So I see Fred's point\u2014why didn't he come with you to lay it out?\"\n\nKarl gave Redwing a skeptical arched eyebrow. \"You don't know he's scared of you?\"\n\n\"He does seem a bit quiet.\"\n\n\"He's not when you're absent. His point is, someone or some thing faced those same problems long ago. They built the Bowl to be a better place. Got tired of planets, probably. Wanted to venture into the night sky, but in no hurry. So they took a big fraction of the species with them. Left behind the stay-at-homes.\"\n\nRedwing liked this. \"You and Fred are saying they wanted managed landscapes that seemed natural. All nice and dinosaur-friendly warm, under a constant reddish sun. Plus its amigo, the jolly jet.\"\n\nKarl chuckled. \"God knows what Earth looks like now, centuries into running its biosphere.\"\n\n\"Is this a way of saying you and Fred want to stay on the Bowl?\"\n\n\"Not at all!\"\n\n\"Um. So what do I do with this new input?\" He disliked asking advice from crew, but at least they were alone. \"How does it affect going to Glory?\"\n\n\"I thought you should hear what the crew thinks. Time's up, I know.\" Karl stood and saluted. \"I want to go see the show at Glory, sir. Sail on.\" He left.\n\nWhen Beth came in, he could see her jaw set at a determined angle. She had looked that way through the long hard hours straightening the standing knot. When it was done, she had barely made it to her quarters.\n\n\"Captain, I formally request transfer to the colony on the Bowl.\"\n\n\"Colony?\" Things were moving too damn fast.\n\n\"The Folk\u2014okay, they're just speaking for the Ice Minds now\u2014they say Cliff's team all want to stay. I want to join them.\"\n\n\"Look, I can't have crew leaving. We need a sharp pilot\u2014\"\n\n\"Warm one up. I'm a biologist first, just a backup pilot, really.\"\n\n\"You're our best! The way you flew us\u2014\"\n\n\"Then it's payback time, Captain. You made the deal with the Folk, right?\"\n\n\"Not the Folk, no. The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous, actually, seems like.\"\n\n\"You have to leave some of us on the Bowl, then. So leave enough to reproduce without inbreeding.\"\n\n\"The genetic stores\u2014\"\n\n\"Need enough founding population to reduce risk, even with the genetic augmentations from the database. That's at least a hundred people, no, several hundred. Defrost them while we're resupplying.\"\n\n\"You want a\u2014\"\n\n\"Colony. That's what we were sent for.\"\n\nRedwing told himself to stay steady, calm, but his heart thumped harder. \"I'll have to do that anyway, Beth. The finger snakes want to ride with us. Just the three, a male and two females; they don't seem to have an inbreeding problem. But fifty Sil have already been picked. There are other species who might want to board. The Artilects say they can rework the freezer capsules, but some of our passengers will have to stay awake longer than optimal.\"\n\n\"You've got room for a bigger live crew, don't you? You're launching fully provisioned, yes? We're already near relativistic speed.\"\n\n\"Faster than that. We'll fly up the Jet and get a boost from rounding the sun. Sure you want to miss that?\"\n\n\"I'm sure. I'm the one who wants to stay, Captain. Cliff is going along with that.\"\n\nRedwing sighed. \"Then there's no room for Bird Folk, of course, except as fertilized eggs and an artificial womb\u2014but they want that, and it's a big volume.\"\n\nBeth's mouth twisted. \"After all they did to us?\"\n\n\"It's part of our deal. Those Folk don't run the Bowl, they're more like the cop on the beat\u2014\"\n\n\"Corrupt cops. They kill other species to keep some equilibrium of theirs running. It's a murderous regime. They chased us, imprisoned us\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll be carrying them because we could hardly carry Ice Minds. Though we will have a Diaphanous\u2014more on that later, when it's worked out.\"\n\n\"But your charge Earthside wasn't to pick up aliens and carry them\u2014\"\n\n\"You have to adjust your initial launch orders to the situation. Beth, I'll have to download nearly half our passengers, and how do I pick them? It isn't as if I could thaw them and let them choose. They get no more vote than the unborn.\"\n\nBeth said, \"Pick mated couples. Pick the ones who wanted to colonize rather than explore. We were tested for attitudes.\"\n\n\"We were all picked for adaptability. Even so...\"\n\nShe leaned forward, smiling. He sat back, a little mouth twitch telling her he found that a bit strange. \"Look at our larger aim\u2014to get humanity out into the galaxy. Play the big game. This way we have two colonies.\"\n\n\"Glory's a bigger game,\" he said. She hadn't heard Karl go on about the black hole radiator theory, but no doubt she would in the mess, later, when the reconstituted booze started flowing.\n\n\"Glory's not our kind of game, I'd guess. Not yet.\" She shrugged ruefully. \"It's maybe a league up from what we can handle. The Bowl was tough enough.\"\n\nRedwing knew enough to wait. Her voice became soft, almost sympathetic. \"But we'll get there. The Bowl will get our first human colony to Glory. Long after I'm dead, sure\u2014and I'm hoping to reach two hundred. Hell, more! But we humans, we'll get there. And be waiting to meet up with you.\"\n\nRedwing frowned. \"I have orders.\"\n\n\"And crew. You'll have nearly a thousand left in cold sleep. Plus, y'know, not all our people on the ground down there want to stay. Tananareve doesn't! She's had enough of the Folk, thank you.\"\n\n\"Okay, I heard that. You want to reunite with Cliff, too. So you'll join this Bowl colony you want.\"\n\n\"Right. But not because of Cliff, especially. He's important to me, sure, but\u2014oh, that's right. You probably know from the field reports\u2014somebody must've blabbed, though it's obvious\u2014 He's been screwing Irma.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not prepared to reveal\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't have to. Put people under dire threat for many months, and the prospect of death makes them set about being sure there's going to be a replacement. Plus it feels good when the world threatens you. Hey, I'm a biologist.\"\n\n\"I know. And Irma's coming with us. So is her husband. You don't\u2014?\"\n\n\"I don't mind. Irma, Cliff\u2014that was a 'field event,' as we used to call it. Whatever works in a pinch, I say. And... isn't that party you talked about earlier about to start?\"\n\nA big sunny smile. And she gave him, unmistakably, a wink.\nFIFTY-TWO\n\nHe got back to his cabin only a bit squiffed. Odd term, squiffed. He had inherited it from his grandfather, who had never given a definition. It was pretty clear, though. Pleasantly inebriated but in control. As a captain should be.\n\nRedwing also recalled a parting remark from his commanding officer, just before he took the shuttle out to SunSeeker for his last transfer. Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery. You had to give them room.\n\nThere was plenty more to being a captain than bulldog stubbornness. Beth was good at giving him a different angle on events. It had been fun seeing her play with the finger snakes tonight. Who knew that they liked alcohol, too? There had been a lot of laughter, the pure long gasps that meant pressures were easing somewhere deep inside.\n\nBeth was good, quite so. But she hadn't seen that the Ice Minds wanted Tananareve to go forward to Glory on SunSeeker, as part of their exploratory advance party. Tananareve would be able to report back to the Folk\u2014or maybe directly to the Ice Minds?\u2014in an intuitive way. Better than the rest of the rude invader primates, since now they knew how her mind worked.\n\nHe still hadn't told Beth all of it.\n\nThe ship would run up the jet, gulping plasma, boosting hard, and as it flew past the sun, SunSeeker would gain one more passenger. A Diaphanous would ride the motor. The Diaphanous thought that was a fresh opportunity, helping shape the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. They'd never tried such a lark before. And maybe they wanted to meet up with the Diaphanous species on yet another star? Redwing suspected he would never truly know their motives.\n\nSunSeeker's Artilects had already been brought up to speed on that. Would a magnetic pattern obey a ship's captain?\n\nThat problem could wait. He shrugged off his uniform and decided to shower in the morning. He brushed his teeth and dropped the plastic glass as he tried to dump the waste rinse water into the tiny bowl his cabin alone had. Was he losing his ability to process alcohol? Well, so be it. After all, he was somewhere in his eighties.\n\nHe stared into the Bowl. They had called this huge artifact Wokworld when they first found it, but names were just pigeonholes. The feeling he had gotten, at first glance, seeing the vast spinning machine at a distance, was of some parasite grasping a star, sucking life from it. And charging forward, too, using that raw energy to move, forever restless, onward into the great night.\n\nBeth had been a quick, sharp slap in the face today. She had made him see the bigger view of what they were here for. He owed her for that. And he would miss her, he just now realized.\n\nShould he just stay here, dock SunSeeker somehow, and join the happy guys down on the Bowl? No. He had a clear duty and he would carry it out, even if all those who had ordered him were dead.\n\nThe biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one, he had heard somewhere in his Fleet training. Somehow in this evening, with Beth's help, he had made a lot of them.\n\nOn his wall he called up the real-time view of the landscape passing below them. They were headed for a good place to rendezvous with the lander they had sent down. The Folk would put Tananareve on board\u2014and Aybe, who had just changed his mind; tech types often did. The Folk would send up supplies, and it shouldn't take long to mate their comm gear with SunSeeker's, so they could stay in close touch with the Bowl, and get going again. Bound for Glory.\n\nYes\u2014squiffed he was. Indeed, sir. Onward.\n\nThis Bowl was not so strange, after all. Maybe it meant that really advanced societies overshot their agenda, gliding for a while in the enameled perfection of their way of life, following habits deep-grained and evolved long before. So they correct and modify and engineer and correct again. Build big and think big and think again. The Bowl was the first big strange idea humanity had really met\u2014terrifying and intriguing. And among many yet to come. Of that he was sure. Terrors can be mirrors, too.\n\nDetails. The tortured landscapes below passed before his eyes like an unending scroll. He thought of how the decisions that seem momentous in the moment, or even over a lifetime, were flickering instants in the life of the Bowl. These matters were too small to be observed by the Ice Minds, just single passing lives.\n\nThe Bowl had made them look back across a gulf of not mere centuries or millennia, but on the grand scale of evolution itself. Maybe that was the true deep purpose of coming out here among the stars. To see times that glowed and shimmered in memory's flickering light.\n\nHe had a thought. Was there more than one Bowl, coasting around the galaxy? Maybe such things were a technological niche that others thought of and inhabited\u2014very-long-view things, hard to quite grasp for humans. Maybe if alien species had the right precursor society\u2014that of those smart dinosaurs, who loved warmth and sun and stillness\u2014then their love of a forever summer would make them build such contraptions. If so, the blunt hammer of evolution gave another strategy to gain the stars, one different from smart, talky primates.\n\nWhatever waited at Glory, in its stacked levels, there was a biosphere on top, a place to love beneath a star that had a sunset every day. Beings who lived in layers would be strange indeed, and humanity would have to adapt. Redwing smiled. If the Bowl had taught him anything, it was about human versatility. He would be alert when he reached Glory after a long sleep, and he liked his odds.\n\nIt couldn't be stupid to voyage out in small vessels, to distant worlds where beauty and happiness would get redefined again and again. Even if Earth became a distant and perhaps wistful memory\u2014as all his crew and himself would inevitably be, for sure\u2014the expansion of human horizons was an ultimate good. Whatever built the Bowl had believed that, too. There was something comforting in that thought alone.\n\nTime for bed.\nAFTERWORD\n\nBIG SMART OBJECTS\n\nI. HOW WE BUILT THE BOOKS\n\nGregory Benford's take\u2014\n\nIn science fiction, a Big Dumb Object is any immense mysterious object that generates an intense sense of wonder just by being there. \"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz\" by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a non-SF example. They don't have to be inert constructs, so perhaps the \"dumb\" aspect also expresses the sensation of being struck dumb by the scale of them.\n\nLarry said to me at a party, \"Big dumb objects are so much easier. Collapsed civilizations are so much easier. Yeah, let's bring them up to speed.\"\n\nSo we wrote Bowl of Heaven, deciding that we needed two volumes to do justice to a Big Smart Object. The Bowl has to be controlled, because it's not neutrally stable. His Ringworld is a Big Dumb Object since it's passively stable, as we are when we stand still. (Or the ringworld would be except for nudges that can make it fall into the sun. Those are fairly easy to catch in time. Larry put active stabilizers into the second Ringworld novel.)\n\nA Smart Object is statically unstable but dynamically stable, as we are when we walk. We fall forward on one leg, then catch ourselves with the other. That takes a lot of fast signal processing and coordination. (We're the only large animal without a tail that's mastered this. Two legs are dangerous without a big brain or a stabilizing tail.) There've been several Big Dumb Objects in SF, but as far as I know, no smart ones. Our Big Smart Object is larger than Ringworld and is going somewhere, using an entire star as its engine.\n\nOur Bowl is a shell more than a hundred million miles across, held to a star by gravity and some electrodynamic forces. The star produces a long jet of hot gas, which is magnetically confined so well, it spears through a hole at the crown of the cup-shaped shell. This jet propels the entire system forward\u2014literally, a star turned into the engine of a \"ship\" that is the shell, the Bowl. On the shell's inner face, a sprawling civilization dwells. The novel's structure doesn't resemble Larry's Ringworld much, because the big problem is dealing with the natives.\n\nThe virtues of any Big Object, whether dumb or smart, are energy and space. The collected solar energy is immense, and the living space lies beyond comprehension except in numerical terms. While we were planning this, my friend Freeman Dyson remarked, \"I like to use a figure of demerit for habitats, namely the ratio R of total mass to the supply of available energy. The bigger R is, the poorer the habitat. If we calculate R for the Earth, using total incident sunlight as the available energy, the result is about twelve thousand tons per watt. If we calculate R for a cometary object with optical concentrators, traveling anywhere in the galaxy where a zero magnitude star is visible, the result is one hundred tons per watt. A cometary object, almost anywhere in the galaxy, is 120 times better than planet Earth as a home for life. The basic problem with planets is that they have too little area and too much mass. Life needs area, not only to collect incident energy but also to dispose of waste heat. In the long run, life will spread to the places where mass can be used most efficiently, far away from planets, to comet clouds or to dust clouds not too far from a friendly star. If the friendly star happens to be our Sun, we have a chance to detect any wandering life-form that may have settled here.\"\n\nThis insight helped me think through the Bowl, which has an R of about 10\u221210! The local centrifugal gravity avoids entirely the piling up of mass to get a grip on objects, and just uses rotary mechanics. So of course, that shifts the engineering problem to the Bowl's structural demands.\n\nBig human-built objects, whether pyramids, cathedrals, or skyscrapers, can always be criticized as criminal wastes of a civilization's resources, particularly when they seem tacky or tasteless. But not if they extend living spaces and semi-natural habitat. This idea goes back to Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker:\n\nNot only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy.\n\nOur smart Bowl craft is also going somewhere, not just sitting around, waiting for visitors like Ringworld\u2014and its tenders live aboard.\n\nWe started with the obvious: Where are they going, and why?\n\nAnswering that question generated the entire frame of the two novels. That's the fun of smart objects\u2014they don't just awe, they also intrigue.\n\nMy grandfather used to say, as we headed out into the Gulf of Mexico on a shrimping run, A boat is just looking for a place to sink.\n\nSo heading out to design a new, shiny Big Smart Object, I said, An artificial world is just looking for a seam to pop.\n\nYou're living just meters away from a high vacuum that's moving fast, because of the Bowl's spin (to supply centrifugal gravity). That makes it easy to launch ships, since they have the rotational velocity with respect to the Bowl or Ringworld... but that also means high seam-popping stresses have to be compensated. Living creatures on the sunny side will want to tinker, try new things....\n\n\"Y'know, Fred, I think I can fix this plumbing problem with just a drill-through right here. Uh\u2014oops!\"\n\nThe vacuum can suck you right through. Suddenly you're moving off on a tangent at a thousand kilometers a second\u2014far larger than the 50 km\/sec needed to escape the star. This makes exploring passing nearby stars on flyby missions easy.\n\nBut that easy exit is a hazard, indeed. To live on a Big Smart Object, you'd better be pretty smart yourself.\n\nLarry Niven's take\u2014\n\n\"The Enormous Big Thing\" was my friend David Gerrold's description of a plotline that flowered after the publication of Ringworld. Stories like Orbitsville, Ring, Newton's Wake, John Varley's Titan trilogy and Rendezvous with Rama depend on the sense of wonder evoked by huge, ambitious endeavors. Ringworld wasn't the first; there had been stories that built, and destroyed, whole universes. These objects often become icons of larger issues implying unknowable reaches and perspectives. Their governing question is usually, \"Who built this thing? And why?\" They had fallen out of favor.\n\nI wasn't the first to notice that a fallen civilization is easier to describe than a working one. Your characters can sort through the artifacts without hindrance until they've built a picture of the whole vast structure. Conan the Barbarian, and countless barbarians to follow, found fallen civilizations everywhere. I took this route quite deliberately with Ringworld. I was young and untrained, and I knew it.\n\nA fully working civilization, doomed if they ever lose their grasp on their tools, is quite another thing. I wouldn't have tried it alone. Jerry Pournelle and I have described working civilizations several times, in Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, and The Burning City.\n\nWith Greg Benford, I was willing to take a whack at a Dyson-level civilization. Greg shaped the Bowl in its first design. It had a gaudy simplicity that grabbed me from the start. It was easy to work with: essentially a Ringworld with a lid, and a star for a motor. We got Don Davis involved in working some dynamite paintings.\n\nGreg kept seeing implications. The Bowl's history grew more and more elaborate. Ultimately I knew we'd need at least two volumes to cover everything we'd need to show. That gave us time and room.\n\nII. FUN WITH HIGH TECH\n\nWarning: some plot spoilers lurk here.\n\nOur first book, Bowl of Heaven, set up reader expectations and introduced the Folk who ran the place\u2014or thought so. That let us wrap up storylines in the sequel, Shipstar, in part by undermining the expectations built up in Bowl of Heaven. We chose to write all this in two volumes because it took time to figure out. The longer time also let us process what many readers thought of Bowl of Heaven, its problems and processes.\n\nMuch of this comes from the intricacies of how the Bowl came to be built. Plus its origins.\n\nWe supposed the founders made its understory frame with something like scrith\u2014a Ringworld term, grayish translucent material with strength on the order of the nuclear binding energy, stuff from the same level of physics as held Ringworld from flying apart. This stuff is the only outright physical miracle needed to make Ringworld or the Bowl work mechanically. Rendering Ringworld stable is a simple problem\u2014just counteract small sidewise nudges. Making the Bowl work in dynamic terms is far harder; the big problem is the jet and its magnetic fields. This was Benford's department, since he published many research papers in The Astrophysical Journal and the like on jets from the accretion disks around black holes, some of which are far bigger than galaxies. But who manages the jet? And how, since it's larger than worlds? This is how you get plot moves from the underlying physics.\n\nOne way to think of the strength needed to hold the Bowl together is by envisioning what would hold up a tower a hundred thousand kilometers high on Earth. The tallest building we now have is the 829.8 m (2,722 ft) tall, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. So for Ringworld or for the Bowl, we're imagining a scrith-like substance 100,000 times stronger than the best steel and carbon composites can do now. Even under static conditions, though, buildings have a tendency to buckle under varying stresses. Really bad weather can blow over very strong buildings. So this is mega-engineering by master engineers indeed. Neutron stars can cope with such stresses, we know, and smart aliens or even ordinary humans might do well, too. So: let engineers at Caltech (where Larry was an undergraduate) or Georgia Tech (where Benford nearly went) or MIT (where Benford did a sabbatical) take a crack at it, then wait a century or two\u2014who knows what they might invent? This is a premise and still better, a promise\u2014the essence of modern science fiction.\n\nOur own inner solar system contains enough usable material for a classic Dyson sphere. The planets and vast cold swarms of ice and rock, like our Kuiper belt and Oort clouds\u2014all that, orbiting around another star, can plausibly give enough mass to build the Bowl. For alien minds, this could be a beckoning temptation. Put it together from freely orbiting substructures, stick it into bigger masses, use molecular glues. Then stabilize such sheet masses into plates that can get nudged inward. This lets the Builders lock them together into a shell\u2014for example, from spherical triangles. The work of generations, even for beings with very long life spans. We humans have done such, as seen in Chartres cathedral, the Great Wall, and much else.\n\nStill: Who did this? Maybe the Bowl was first made for just living beneath constant sunshine. So at first the Builders may have basked in the glow of their smaller sun, developing and colonizing the Bowl with ambitions to have a huge surface area with room for immense natural expanses. But then the Bowl natives began dreaming of colonizing the galaxy. They hit on the jet idea, and already had the Knothole as an exit for it. Building the Mirror Zone took a while, but then the jet allowed them to voyage. It didn't work as well as they thought, and demanded control, which they did by using large magnetic fields.\n\nThe system had virtues for space flight, too. Once in space, you're in free fall; the Bowl mass is fairly large, but you exit on the outer hull at high velocity, so the faint attraction of the Bowl is no issue. Anyone can scoot around the solar system, and it's cleared of all large masses. (The Bowl atmosphere serves to burn any meteorites that punch through the monolayer.)\n\nThe key idea is that a big fraction of the Bowl is mirrored, directing reflected sunlight onto a small spot on the star, the foot of the jet line. From this spot the enhanced sunlight excites a standing \"flare\" that makes a jet. This jet drives the star forward, pulling the Bowl with it through gravitation.\n\nThe jet passes through a Knothole at the \"bottom\" of the Bowl, out into space, as exhaust. Magnetic fields, entrained on the star surface, wrap around the outgoing jet plasma and confine it, so it does not flare out and paint the interior face of the Bowl\u2014where a whole living ecology thrives, immensely larger than Earth's area. So it's a huge moving object, the largest we could envision, since we wanted to write a novel about something beyond Niven's Ringworld.\n\nFor plausible stellar parameters, the jet can drive the system roughly a light-year in a few centuries. Slow but inexorable, with steering a delicate problem, the Bowl glides through the interstellar reaches. The star acts as a shield, stopping random iceteroids that may lie in the Bowl's path. There is friction from the interstellar plasma and dust density acting against the huge solar magnetosphere of the star, essentially a sphere 100 astronomical units in radius.\n\nSo the jet can be managed to adjust acceleration, if needed. If the jet becomes unstable, the most plausible destructive mode is the kink\u2014a snarling knot in the flow that moves outward. This could lash sideways and hammer the zones near the Knothole with virulent plasma, a dense solar wind. The first mode of defense, if the jet seems to be developing a kink, would be to turn the mirrors aside, not illuminating the jet foot. But that might not be enough to prevent a destructive kink. This has happened in the past, we decided, and lives in Bowl legend.\n\nThe reflecting zone of mirrors is defined by an inner angle, \u0398, and the outer angle, \u03a9. Reflecting sunlight back onto the star, focused to a point, then generates a jet which blows off. This carries most of what would be the star's solar wind, trapped in magnetic fields and heading straight along the system axis. The incoming reflected sunlight also heats the star, which struggles to find an equilibrium. The net opening angle, \u03a9 minus \u0398, then defines how much the star heats up. We set \u03a9 = 30 degrees, and \u0398 = 5 degrees, so the mirrors subtend that 25-degree band in the Bowl. The Bowl rim can be 45 degrees, or larger.\n\nThe K2 star is now running in a warmer regime, heated by the mirrors, thus making its spectrum nearer that of Sol. This explains how the star can have a spectral class somewhat different from that predicted by its mass. It looks oddly colored, more yellow than its mass would indicate.\n\nFor that matter, that little sun used to be a little bigger. It's been blowing off a jet for many millions of years. Still, it should last a long time. The Bowl could circle the galaxy itself several times.\n\nIII. BOWL DESIGN\n\nAs the book says, the Bowl star is\n\nK2 STAR. SIMILAR TO EPSILON ERIDANI (K2 V). INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE BETWEEN RED M-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS AND YELLOW G-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS.\n\nSo its light is reddish and a tad less bright than Sol. There is a broad, cylindrical segment of the Bowl at its outer edge, the Great Plain. This is huge, roughly the scale of Ringworld, with centrifugal gravity Earth normal times 0.8, so humans can walk easily there. Beyond that is the bowl curve, a hemisphere that arcs inward toward the Knothole. On the hemisphere, the Wok, the centrifugal gravity varies with latitude, and is not perpendicular to the local ground. To make a level walking surface, the Bowl has to have many platforms that are parallel to the jet axis, so gravity points straight down.\n\nThe local apparent centrifugal gravity has two vector components:\n\nA: Centrifugal gravity that is perpendicular to the local level surface on the bowl, vs angle \u03a8 (in radians). Here \u03a8 is measured away from the polar bowl axis\u2014that is, the jet axis. The curve peaks at 90 degrees, where the Great Plain has a local g of 1 in this plot. (It's 0.8 of Earth's.)\n\nB: Below shows the magnitude of centrifugal gravity that is parallel to the local level surface on the bowl, vs angle \u03a8\u2014thus, it's the felt force pushing away from the pole where the Knothole lies, along the local level.\n\nSo the pushing-away force is largest at the mid-latitudes, then falls away because the total force is small at the poles. This component also vanishes on the Great Plain.\n\nLocal Gravity versus Angle from the Jet Axis\n\nThe Builders designed it this way so that some of the lands are hard to walk upon in the direction of the Knothole. This discourages others from simply traveling to the Knothole by a slog across the entire Bowl; it takes a lot of work, working against a slanted local \"gravity\"\u2014especially near the Mirror Zones, which are in the mid-latitudes. Remember also that you must pump fluids around, since local forces drive rivers to flow and either they return through clouds and rain, or you must pump them when the weather doesn't perform well. There's a tendency for fluids to wind up in the lower gravity regions, too.\n\nWe did other such calculations, and many such didn't get into the final book. But they lurked in our minds. This may be an example of Ernest Hemingway's dictum that the more you know about a story's background, the more you can then leave out, and the detail will still make the story stronger because of the confident way you write it.\n\nThis odd centrifugal gravity also presents the Builders with a big stress problem. Holding together this whirling, forward-driving system demands nuclear-force levels of strength.\n\nThe atmosphere is quite deep, more than two hundred kilometers. This soaks up solar wind and cosmic rays. Also, the pressure is higher than Earth normal by about 50 percent, depending on location in the Bowl. It is also a reservoir to absorb the occasional big, unintended hit to the ecology. Compress Earth's entire atmosphere down to the density of water, and it would only be thirty feet deep. Everything we're dumping into our air goes into just thirty feet of water. The Bowl has much more, over a hundred yards deep in equivalent water. Too much carbon dioxide? It gets more diluted.\n\nSideways \"Gravity\" versus Angle from the Jet Axis\n\nThis deeper atmosphere explains why in low-grav areas, surprisingly large things can fly\u2014big aliens and even humans. We humans Earthside enjoy a partial pressure of 0.21 bars of oxygen, and we can do quite nicely in a two-bar atmosphere of almost pure oxygen (but be careful about fire). The Bowl has a bit less than we like: 0.18 bar, but the higher pressure compensates. This depresses fire risk, someone figures out later.\n\nStarting out, we wrote a background history of where the Builders came from, which we didn't insert into the novel. It lays out a version of that distant history that isn't necessarily what we ended up implying and partially describing:\n\nLong before 65 million years ago, there were dinosaurs who maintained internal temperatures through feathers, in a largely warmer world. But they ventured out with rockets into a solar system chilly and hostile. Still, they needed metals and did not want to destroy their biosphere with the pollutants from smelting, fast energy use, excess carbon dioxide, and the like. So the Bird Folk split into two factions:\n\n\u2022 the Gobacks who wanted to return to simple habits compatible with the world they once knew, using only minimal technology, and\n\n\u2022 the Forwards, who wanted to re-create around the Minor Star (which became the Bowl's) a fresh paradise that fulfilled the warm, comfortable paradise the Folk had once known. That could send the Forwards out into the galaxy that beckoned, full of living worlds ripe for the spread of the evolving Folk and all they stood for.\n\nSome of the Forwards were impatient to see what worlds lay millennia away. Many had themselves put in stasis to await a planetary rendezvous. Some faiths arose, hoping to commune somehow with the Godminds whose SETI signals told of great feats of engineering... but these turned out to be funeral pyre signals, of greatness departed long before. By that time, Earth was far behind the Bowl and shrouded in nostalgic legend.\n\nSo came the Separation, with the warmth-loving Forwards leaving and the Gobacks remaining on Earth. There they returned to the free life available in the ancestral lands. They kept their numbers low and gradually came to dislike the technologies they had inherited from the Forwards and the earlier civilizations. They reverted to a quiet, calm, agricultural culture. And they prospered, until a bright, flaring tail appeared in their skies....\n\nAfter all, by then, the dinosaurs didn't have a space program.\n\n\u2014April 2013\nBOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD AND LARRY NIVEN\n\nBowl of Heaven\n\nTOR BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD\n\nJupiter Project\n\nThe Stars in Shroud\n\nShiva Descending\n\nArtifact\n\nIn Alien Flesh\n\nFar Futures\n\nBeyond Human\n\nTOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN\n\nN-Space\n\nDestiny's Road\n\nRainbow Mars\n\nScatterbrain\n\nRingworld's Children\n\nThe Draco Tavern\n\nStars and Gods\n\nPlaygrounds of the Mind\nABOUT THE AUTHORS\n\nGREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Irvine. He is a winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, and the Nebula Award for his classic novel Timescape. Visit him at www.gregorybenford.com.\n\nLARRY NIVEN is the author of the Ringworld series and many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf's Children, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California. Visit him at www.larryniven.net.\nThis is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.\n\nSHIPSTAR\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nCover photograph of Galaxy 4499 by NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (STSCI\/ESA), and The Hubble Heritage (STSCI\/AURA)\u2014ESA\/Hubble Collaboration\n\nA Tor Book\n\nPublished by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC\n\n175 Fifth Avenue\n\nNew York, NY 10010\n\nwww.tor-forge.com\n\nTor\u00ae is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.\n\nThe Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.\n\nISBN 978-0-7653-2870-0 (hardcover)\n\nISBN 978-1-4299-4968-2 (e-book)\n\ne-ISBN 9781429949682\n\nFirst Edition: April 2014\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nFor Florence Freeman, with love\n\nContents\n\nOne: Princess Frida and the Mourning Curtain\n\nTwo: King Alberto's Bad Decision\n\nThree: The Secret\n\nFour: A Dance and a Doughnut\n\nFive: King Alberto's Second Bad Decision\n\nSix: Delilah and the Dormidon\n\nSeven: A Coronation\n\nEight: Peacocks and Paw Prints\n\nOne\n\nPrincess Frida and the Mourning Curtain\n\nNot far from where you're sitting right now, there exists a country called Kalia. It's a beautiful place, well worth visiting if you have the time. The capital is an ancient city named Lago Puera, and sailors and visitors usually enter through its port. They are greeted by the sight of the palace domes, sparkling in the sun, painted like the Kalian sea, whose waves foam silver, whose depths shade the eye with unending blues. The shore shimmers gold, the land opens like an emerald quilt, and the Kalian mountains rise up as giants to greet the sky.\n\nYou'd think that for the princesses in this story, who were born in Kalia, who grew up in that palace, who were destined to survey the waters of the Kalian sea, this would be a happy place to live.\n\nIn fact, it was the opposite.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThere were twelve of them, and the eldest was called Frida. Frida was very clever, and she had many ambitions, but most persistent was her desire to fly a plane.\n\nThen came Polina, and she could read the stars.\n\nNext was Lorna, the kindest, and thus the wisest, of them all.\n\nAfter her was Ariosta, a talented painter, who cut off all her hair without permission when she was ten. (She had the same style ten years on: it still suited her.)\n\nChessa came next, a girl who sang to break your heart in twenty pieces, then put it back together with a jazzy aria.\n\nThen came Bellina, who'd taught herself five languages.\n\nVita was the seventh daughter, a happy spirit, whose laugh was like a tonic. She was the luckiest, and the quickest at jokes.\n\nMariella came next, and she loved to do sums, numbers dancing in her mind like obedient bears.\n\nThen there was Delilah, who had such green fingers that even the stubbornest plant grew at her touch.\n\nNext was Flora, always reading a book, a newspaper or the side of a biscuit box.\n\nAfter her came Emelia, who wanted to be a vet.\n\nAnd the youngest was Agnes, the most watchful of the sisters. She was going to be a writer when she grew up.\n\nAnd their parents?\n\nWell. This was the problem, as parents often are.\n\nQueen Laurelia was their mother, dead before this story starts, but in her end is this beginning. Laurelia had been a woman of many words and the driver of a racing car \u2013 open top, leather seats, a craving for speed and a fatal crash that was the bitterest unfairness her daughters ever tasted.\n\nWhen they were very little, the princesses had never understood why it made their mother so happy to speed off down the road, goggles on, hair flying, metal gleaming, the engine roaring to a buzz and then to silence as she disappeared over the hill. Sometimes, at night, after Laurelia had died, Agnes thought she could feel the vibration of her mother's engine revving in her ribcage. Then she woke up and realised it was Emelia's snores. Agnes discovered that both the imagined and the real worlds could be equally comforting, and that sometimes it was very hard to tell the difference.\n\nNever mind jewels and diadems, the words they'd heard from Laurelia were the princesses' inheritance: her songs down the corridors, her bedtime stories of other worlds. Her words roosted like birds in the girls' imaginations. In the days, weeks and months after Laurelia's death, they took flight from her daughters' mouths and became their own.\n\nTheir father was called Alberto, and Alberto was king of Kalia. In the scheme of the story, this is a fact both important and irrelevant, like most things are, depending on the time of day you're looking at them. It was Alberto being king that made his daughters princesses. Now, between you and me, I don't think any of them liked being princesses very much. It might _seem_ fun to wear a jewelled crown and have people do everything for you \u2013 but it quickly becomes tiresome, to the point that boiling an egg for yourself feels like a holiday.\n\nAfter Queen Laurelia's death, King Alberto became the sort of person who ate a whole cake without offering anyone else a slice, and who punished his girls for things that weren't their fault at all. The girls weren't alone in this: the world is full of children picking up their parents' crumbs. Alberto and Laurelia had no sons, and I think this was part of the problem, because after Laurelia died, Alberto didn't know what to do with _one_ daughter, let alone twelve of them. Laurelia had been the one watching them, nurturing their imaginations, their educations.\n\nAnd now she was gone.\n\nGrowing up, Alberto had never learned a thing about girls; as a prince, all his friends were boys, and then as king, all his advisers were men. Girls in Kalia, whether they were princesses or not, had never been considered very important. Most important were the subjects of horse riding, hawking, killing small animals, sitting on thrones and gathering taxes. When she was alive, Queen Laurelia had done her best to encourage her daughters to look forward to their adulthood, but it's hard when you're just one queen racing your motor against a long line of history trying to squash you down. No one had done such a thing for her when _she_ was a little girl \u2013 they hadn't even thought it necessary to teach her how to read.\n\nEvery girl in Kalia was the same, and the people in charge of them clumped their individual hopes and dreams together like one big ball of moss. It didn't matter how well a girl could play the trumpet, or grow a sunflower, or write a poem, or solve a quadratic equation. _None_ of that mattered. The best a girl could hope for was a marriage where the money was good and her husband didn't hog all of life's fun. A girl might as well have been a sunflower or a trumpet herself for all that her feelings were taken into consideration.\n\nIn the first week of mourning after Queen Laurelia's death, King Alberto dispensed with the girls' music lessons. He couldn't bear the sound of Chessa singing, he said, because she sounded too much like her mother. Chessa didn't open her mouth for days, not even to speak.\n\nThen, in the second week of mourning, their mathematics tutor was dismissed, because princesses didn't need numbers. Mariella took to lying on her bed, tapping out times tables on her forearm.\n\nBy the third week of mourning, their botany classes were taken away from them. No longer were they allowed to take trips to the majestic Kalian mountains to collect plant samples for the palace laboratory. It wasn't just Delilah who had loved the clear air \u2013 all the girls enjoyed the mountains, where birds of extraordinary plumage called to each other from high trees, and the wildest flowers flourished.\n\nBack at the palace, life was a tomb. The bright walls that Queen Laurelia had decorated were now shrouded in black velvet. No electric light was allowed, only candles were permitted \u2013 and their flames barely lit the corners of the huge, dark rooms.\n\nThe maids and cooks and butlers scurried along the walls, their shadows long and looming, heads down towards carpets that gathered dust because no one could see to clean them.\n\nThe sun, the gorgeous spanning sea beyond the windows, the sky such a blue, were shut out. Only melancholy was allowed to illuminate the girls' days.\n\nThe telephones \u2013 so recently installed, and such a thrill to Laurelia that she could speak to her sisters, who had married kings in other lands \u2013 were disconnected. The girls ached for that cheery metallic ring, which had always excited them, to know which far-off aunt was calling by the touch of her finger.\n\nNow all was silence.\n\nIn the fourth week of mourning for the queen, King Alberto took away:\n\nAriosta's painting supplies\n\nAll the girls' novels, poetry, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, comics and newspapers\n\nMariella's chemistry set\n\nEmelia's guide to looking after sick tigers\n\nAgnes's typewriter\n\nPolina's telescope\n\nDelilah's key to the greenhouse (the plants were left untended and began to die)...\n\nAnd their mother's gramophone and all her jazz records.\n\nFrida, who I told you was the cleverest, hid her aeroplane manuals in her knicker drawer. But regardless of this personal ingenuity, the girls were more miserable than they had ever been in their lives.\n\nThe king explained to the girls that they were now no longer allowed to go beyond the palace walls.\n\n'But why?' asked Frida, surrounded as usual by the others. 'You can't keep us locked in.'\n\n'I'm king and I can,' Alberto said. He sighed, scratching the top of his balding head through the circle of his crown. 'I'm doing it because I love you,' he went on. 'I couldn't bear it if anything happened to you. It's so dangerous outside the palace walls.'\n\n'It's dangerous inside them too,' Frida muttered, as their father hurried off. He almost ran away from them, as if each of his daughters carried within her the spark of his dead wife, and their faces might pin him to the floor with grief.\n\nBy now, not even their eyes felt like the princesses' own, not even their hands and feet. Their hearts were gloomy; the palace guards watched them everywhere. Everything they saw and touched belonged to their father.\n\nA yearning for their mother spread through the princesses' bodies like mould. It grew and grew, inside and over them, a creeping, seeping crust of pain swallowing them up \u2013 and the only things that might have kept them breathing, might have pushed back the mould a little bit, might have reminded them that they were still alive, and deserved a chance to _enjoy_ this fact, Alberto had taken away. The girls felt as dead as their mother.\n\nFrida's sorrow over this turned to confusion, and finally to clarity and anger. She understood what that motor car had meant to Laurelia \u2013 it wasn't the car itself so much as what it had given her: a sense of movement, of direction. 'You see, my darlings,' Frida said to her younger sisters, 'it made her feel _free_. And I'll tell you something else. The time for muttering is done.'\n\nFrida was true to her word, as she always was.\n\nOne fateful afternoon, after the princesses had endured yet another morning cooped up like twelve chickens with no promise of an egg, she stormed the corridors looking for their father. Polina and Lorna ran after her, trying to keep up. The other nine sisters scattered behind, a confusion of sad butterflies.\n\nKing Alberto was in the throne room as usual, the curtains closed. His advisers were standing in the shadows, unsure of what to do with their increasingly difficult monarch.\n\n'Your Majesty,' said Frida, coming towards him. 'This isn't fair, and you know it. You cannot tell us how to grieve.'\n\n'Please go away,' he said. 'I can't bear to look at you.'\n\n'Father,' Frida persisted. 'We know you're sad, but we're sad too. Why take away our lessons, our music, our books and our paints? They make us feel as if Mother is still here.'\n\n'Your mother is not here!' the king cried. 'She's gone! Dead, by her own stupidity \u2013 and mine, for ever allowing her to drive that blasted racing car in the first place!'\n\n'She loved that racing car,' said Frida.\n\n'Well, it didn't love her back,' the king replied, screwing his face up like a horrible turnip. 'I'm having it crushed.'\n\n'You can't!'\n\n'Frida,' said Alberto, 'I'm the king. I can do what I want.'\n\nFrida pretended she hadn't heard. 'Let me fix it with the help of the palace mechanic,' she said.\n\n'You'll do no such thing!' King Alberto snapped, losing his patience. 'No man will marry a girl who fixes cars!'\n\n'What does Mother's motor car have to do with getting married?' asked Frida.\n\n(Frida, you may have noticed, never gave up.)\n\nKing Alberto's round cheeks turned tomato red, and he looked at his other eleven daughters, who had gathered behind Frida as she faced their father.\n\n'Every one of you is a stick of dynamite!' he bellowed. 'You'll explode me, and this kingdom \u2013 BOOM! Your mother was ridiculous about you, and now no one will touch you. Girls aren't supposed to do even a tiny _bit_ of what you got up to. And look at what happened to her. Dead. _Dead!_ I won't have it, I won't!' He slammed his hand on the arm of his throne, and his crown knocked slightly sideways.\n\n'We're not sticks of dynamite,' said Frida. 'We're simply excellent girls.'\n\nKing Alberto ignored her, throwing his hands up in the air. 'Oh, why, why, _why_ were we not blessed with a boy? Just one boy, one incy-wincy little boy, just one! That's all I ever asked for! I'm getting old, I feel a hundred \u2013 I look _two_ hundred \u2013 and still no heir!'\n\n'But you have twelve heirs,' Frida said.\n\nAlberto was used to these conversations with Frida. They'd been having them since she could talk, and he too would rarely give up. (In fact, I think that sometimes he rather enjoyed them.) 'I have twelve girls,' he said. 'And what use are you? No woman can inherit my kingdom.'\n\n'Says who?' said Frida.\n\nAlberto jumped from the throne as if his eldest daughter had slapped him in the face with a Kalian trout, and a large one at that. 'It's the law!' he cried.\n\n'Your Majesty,' said Frida patiently. ' _You_ are the law.'\n\nHis advisers shuffled on their feet like a group of perturbed pigeons. King Alberto was silent as he sat back into his throne, stroking his chin. For an agonising, ecstatic moment, he actually seemed to be considering Frida's point. Agnes felt her heart lift, and the energy between her sisters' bodies shifted with hopeful anticipation. _Good old Frida_ , she thought. _Quick as ever._\n\nBut then their father stared down at them in horror, as if he was looking at his dead wife's image, a woman's lost face reflected in twelve young mirrors of fear. 'None of you has the faintest idea what it takes to run a kingdom,' he said.\n\nFrida fell on her knees towards him, her arms open wide. 'Because no one has ever taught us! But we'd learn. And have we not lived with your advisers our whole lives? I could lead a kingdom, I know I could. And if I couldn't, Polina could, and then there's \u2013'\n\nAlberto snorted. ' _Polina?_ Polina, who spends her life with one eye glued to a telescope?'\n\n'But, Father,' said Polina. 'There is so much in the sky we've yet to learn \u2013'\n\n'No,' interrupted Alberto, pointing at the floor. 'Down _here_ is what matters, not twinkling stars.' He readjusted his crown.\n\n'Father,' said Frida, jumping to her feet and pacing back and forth in front of the throne. 'I want you to imagine something for me. Can you do that?' She looked at her father with a doubtful expression, as if it was unlikely he had any imagination left. 'Imagine not being able to do anything, except _sit_.'\n\n'Sounds good to me.'\n\n'Except sit, and think about getting married. That's it, nothing else. Married to a man who doesn't even _exist_ yet. And you can't even sit at a window with a view, because they're all covered over with black cloth.'\n\n'It'll do you good to calm down,' he said. 'Respect your mother's memory.'\n\n'We will respect her by carrying on as we did when she was alive.'\n\n'Your Majesty,' Agnes piped up, encouraged by her sister's fire, 'imagine... imagine that our hearts are lions, needing to jump and play, and feed and drink, and grow.'\n\nFrida laughed with joy. 'Oh yes, Agnes!' she said. 'Our hearts are lions!'\n\n'Your hearts are _what_?' spluttered Alberto. 'You're not lions! You and your ridiculous ideas, Agnes. Grow up.'\n\nHe turned from his youngest daughter back to his eldest. 'Frida. Be an example to the others, _please_. Think of your marriages, and accept that no girl, no woman, could ever be smart enough for my job.'\n\nFrida narrowed her eyes. 'You wish me to be an example to the others?' she said.\n\nAlberto folded his arms and stared at his defiant daughter. 'Frida, it's my dearest wish.'\n\n'Very well, Your Majesty,' she said.\n\nThe king sighed with relief; but everyone else in the room knew Princess Frida better. There was a beat. The room was silent, waiting to see what she would do next.\n\nFrida walked, head held high, towards the curtain covering one of the windows.\n\nWhen they realised what she was about to do, the advisers cried in unison for her to stop.\n\nBut Frida did not stop.\n\nWith one sharp heave, she pulled the curtain back, and a golden vengeance poured into the room.\n\n'Insolence!' screamed the king, and in that moment it was hard to tell whether he was blinded by the light of the sun or his daughter.\n\nFrida was moving like a spirit, curtain to curtain, pulling down the black drapes, advisers and maids cringing with their eyes closed, the dust swirling like gold motes around the throne as velvet and taffeta tumbled to the floor. Ariosta rushed to help her, and Bellina followed, then Chessa and Delilah and Mariella, then Polina and Emelia, then Flora and Vita, and finally Lorna and Agnes, twelve princessly pairs of hands making portal after portal of sunshine to flood the room.\n\nNo one could stop them,\n\nno one dared go near them,\n\nand thus their father's throne was nothing,\n\na chair bleached white by the light of grief.\n\nTwo\n\nKing Alberto's Bad Decision\n\nI don't think it's exactly right to say Frida _regretted_ her performance in the throne room \u2013 for who could ever regret a slice of sunshine? \u2013 but the consequences for her and her eleven sisters were dire. As I've mentioned: it was a fateful afternoon.\n\nTrue, Alberto didn't crush Laurelia's racing car to pieces, despite his threats. He had it renovated and sealed up inside the palace garage, where it started to gather dust, and a family of mice took up residence in the passenger seat.\n\nBut just when the girls thought life couldn't get any worse, it got worse.\n\nThree days after the curtain incident, King Alberto, flanked by his advisers, summoned his daughters to a room in the palace they'd never seen before.\n\n'You'll be perfectly safe in here,' he said.\n\nBy now, the girls had barely enough energy to lift their heads and peer in, but when they did, they stared in horror at their new surroundings.\n\nIt was a room with no windows.\n\nIt contained twelve beds, in two facing rows of six. Off to the side was one small bathroom. On the far wall, hanging between the ends of the rows of beds, was a truly enormous portrait of Queen Laurelia in her motor-racing gear, as if to remind the girls what might happen if they ever tried to go faster than was appropriate.\n\n'Good _lord_ ,' said Ariosta, staring up at the painting. The other girls could barely look at it.\n\n'You can't do this to us,' said Frida, turning to her father and the advisers, several of whom were looking puffed up and pleased with themselves. 'We used to play in Lago Puera and the mountains beyond. We used to make chemistry experiments in the royal laboratory. We used to play music in our own little band! Now this is what you do to us?'\n\n'It's for your own good,' replied the king. His expression was horribly blank, which was worse than him being angry.\n\n'No,' said Frida. 'We were destined to survey the waters of the Kalian sea. Everyone told us that. You always said it yourself.'\n\n'I did. But in happier days.'\n\n'We deserve happier days again. Instead, you would put us in a cell, where we cannot even hear the waves? You would shrink our lives to this small room, and a frozen picture of our mother's face \u2013'\n\n'Frida, stop!' said Alberto. 'One of these days you will go too far.'\n\n'No,' she replied. 'I fear I won't go far enough.' She took up Agnes's hand, which had begun to tremble.\n\n'You can't be serious about this, Father,' said Polina, attempting reason, wishing to thaw the air of hostility.\n\n'I'm most serious,' he replied. 'One hour a day out in the palace grounds to stretch your legs.'\n\nFrida still hadn't given up. She turned to the king's advisers. 'Gentlemen. Surely, for the good of Kalia, we should have our telescopes and typewriters back. Surely, instead of worrying about whether your princesses are going to explode, you should be concerning yourselves with your harvests, and your relations with the borderlands?' There was a slight panic in her voice now, and it scared the other princesses. They huddled behind her, hugging one another tight.\n\nThe advisers looked away, but Frida was right. (Frida was often right when it came to matters of state, although no one ever listened to her.) The kingdom of Kalia was falling apart, but Alberto was more obsessed with keeping his daughters locked safely away than doing his kingly duty.\n\nNone of the advisers wanted to lose his job, so they said nothing. Frida turned up her chin in disgust. 'Cowards,' she said. One of them, at least \u2013 her father's youngest adviser, a whippety-thin man called Clarence \u2013 looked shamefaced.\n\n'You've all gone mad,' said Ariosta.\n\n'Not mad, just sensible,' said the king. He brandished a heavy iron key at Frida. 'Inside,' he said. ' _Now_. And please,' he pleaded, 'just go to sleep.'\n\nThe advisers ushered them in, and each princess found a bed. They heard the key turn in the lock, a horrid grating sound that plunged their hearts into their feet.\n\nThere was no natural light, no privacy, no place for them to hide away with their thoughts. All Agnes wanted to hear was Emelia's little snores, to remind her that once they'd had a mother who loved a motor's engine. But instead the room hummed with the nervous energy of twelve young minds, crawling up the walls with no way out.\n\nThat day, the princesses learned that the line between mad and sensible is a very fine line indeed.\n\n\u22c7\n\nIt went on like this for weeks. The girls were kept in the room, allowed one hour a day for a walk, and their mother's painted face greeted them on their return. The maids brought their meals to the door, and the girls ate on their beds. King Alberto had ordered that they should be given a plain diet of porridge and toast, morning and night, with the occasional satsuma, but the girls barely noticed what was passing their lips.\n\nThey slept very badly. Frida said it felt as if they were getting older as their mother stayed young. And, of course, the painting's expression did indeed stay the same, friendly but distant, Queen Laurelia's mouth slightly open on a word they would never hear. 'Oh, if only she would walk out of the frame and take us to the mountain!' Frida cried, tossing the skin of yet another satsuma to the floor.\n\nIt was such a sad sight, these wilting girls, that I can hardly bear to type it. But I've since learned that sadness comes and goes, and typewriters win out.\n\nYou see, the king could control the paths his daughters trod; he could take away their pleasures and their views and lock them up. He could make sure that the princesses didn't have anything in that room except their toothbrushes and tiaras, pyjamas and dressing gowns. But king or no king, there was one thing they possessed that he could never own: their imaginations.\n\nHave _you_ ever tried getting into someone else's imagination? It's practically impossible. Our inability to do so has caused headache and heartache since time began. Even your own imagination can be a slippery thing \u2013 you can't see it, you can't hold it, but you can certainly _feel_ it. It can fill your day with sunshine or with storm. It will conjure worlds from nowhere and make them real. It will open doors you didn't even know existed; it will show you secrets that are yours alone. And the strange thing about imagination is that it can fly absolutely anywhere, even when your body stays in one place. I've seen it happen.\n\nImagination was the greatest weapon those girls had.\n\nAnd one night, sitting up in their beds, telling stories as they always did, the princesses did indeed discover a secret.\n\nIt was the most perfect, timely secret, like moonlight on a pillow in a windowless room. It changed their lives forever.\n\nAnd what was the secret?\n\nOh, go on then. Seeing as it's you.\n\nThree\n\nThe Secret\n\nThat night \u2013 that particular night when everything changed \u2013 it was Frida's turn to tell a story. The others had climbed out of their own beds and were gathered on hers \u2013 quite a squeeze, as you might imagine. They always liked it when it was Frida's turn because, as the eldest, she had the most memories of Queen Laurelia. But sometimes Frida told stories that were only half a memory, and the other half was made up \u2013 'because really,' she would say, 'who can tell the difference?'\n\nThe lamps were lit as usual \u2013 twelve glowing orbs around the room. The princesses felt as if they were living in a jewel box, their hair and silk pyjamas golden in the light.\n\nFrida was just about to start her story, when she lifted her lamp towards the portrait of their mother. 'Has someone moved the painting?' she asked. 'It's crooked.'\n\nThe other princesses looked over at the painting. It was true: Queen Laurelia was looking back at her daughters at a slight angle.\n\n'I haven't touched it,' said Flora.\n\n'She never said you did, dearest,' said Delilah.\n\n'Maybe Vita knocked it by mistake,' said Chessa. 'You can't swing a cat in here.'\n\n'Tell us a story, Frida. _Please_ ,' said Lorna, sensing that everyone was a bit crotchety.\n\nBut Frida had slipped off the bed and was standing close to her mother's painting. 'I'll tell you a story in a minute,' she said. 'But don't you think her eyes are inviting us in?'\n\n'Inviting us in where?' asked Polina.\n\nFrida touched the edge of the frame in an attempt to straighten it, and her hand froze. ' _No_ ,' she said. 'That's _impossible_.'\n\n'What? What is it, Frida?' whispered Agnes as her skin turned to goosebumps, her hairs on end.\n\nFrida turned to her sisters, her face pale. 'Can you come and help me lift the painting off?' she said. The sisters rushed over and did as they were asked, staggering with the weight of their mother's portrait. All twelve of them shuffled between the beds with the frame, propping Queen Laurelia to one side.\n\nFrida held up her lamp to the wall. 'By all the stars of Kalia,' she breathed. 'I wondered, but I hardly dared hope.'\n\nIn the flickering light of her lamp, the others could see what Frida had thought was impossible, but which, in fact, was true.\n\n'Is that... a _door_?' whispered Emelia.\n\nEmelia was quite right. It was a thin outline of a door, a panel embedded in the wall. Frida reached out. Her hand could touch it, feel it! It was _real_.\n\n'How did we never notice this before?' she asked her sisters, but none of them could answer.\n\nThe door was made of the same material as the wall, and there was no handle. Frida pushed the panel, and under her touch it swung back easily. The other girls joined her and stood around the threshold. All they could see was pitch black, as if they were standing on the edge of a deep pit. Cold air hit their cheeks and knocked the breath out of them. In the silence, from somewhere deep and far away, Agnes thought she could hear music, the sweet jazzy waft of a clarinet. A strange smell she'd never tasted before rose up: heady, heavy, a little smoky, like a raspberry dipped in black amber. A tinkling of bells, the lap of a wave. It was most unsettling.\n\nAnd most exciting.\n\nFor a moment, no one said anything. It felt as if they were teetering between an old life and a new.\n\n'Where does this lead?' asked Mariella.\n\n'Good question. Who knows? But I'm going to find out,' replied Frida.\n\n'I'm coming with you,' said Vita.\n\n'Me too,' said Ariosta.\n\n'We'll _all_ go,' said Frida. 'No one should be left behind.'\n\n'But it could be dangerous,' Bellina cried, leaping to Frida's side and hanging on her sleeve. 'It might be a trap.'\n\n'A trap?' said Frida, laughing. 'I think we've been trapped long enough, don't you?'\n\n'I don't want something bad to happen. What would Father say \u2013?'\n\n'He's not going to say anything, my sweet, because we're not going to tell him,' said Frida. 'And, Bellina, _think_. What could be worse than being holed up here for another night?'\n\nBellina bit her lip.\n\n'Darling Bell,' said Lorna. 'What Frida's saying is true. And if I have to spend one more evening in this tiny room with nothing to do except count sheep and polish my tiara, I might go mad.'\n\n'I'm surprised I'm not mad already,' said Emelia. 'We have to go.'\n\n'Well said, both of you,' said Frida. 'This door is exactly what we need. Hurry!' she went on, shooing her sisters. 'Dressing gowns and shoes. Fetch your lamps. Voices down. Father's guards may be on the other side of the walls, wherever it is we're going.'\n\nThe princesses found their lamps, put on their shoes and followed their eldest sister to the edge of the strange door.\n\nFrida held her lamp over the threshold, and the light opened up the darkness like a dancer cast from orange flame, jumping and jutting, finding its way. The others waited with bated breath for her to tell them what she could see.\n\n'A staircase!' she whispered. 'Oh, it goes down and down and down! I can't imagine how many steps there are. It's so _dark_.'\n\nNevertheless, one by one, the princesses began to follow her down,\n\nand down,\n\nand down,\n\nand down,\n\ntheir lamps held high,\n\ntheir soles echoing\n\nand echoing\n\non the stone steps.\n\nThe staircase did not appear to have been used for years. Cobwebs clung to their faces and stuck to their hair. There was a new smell of mould and damp, and the air was still horribly cold.\n\n'Do you think Mother went down this staircase?' asked Mariella. 'Did she ever mention one to you, Frida?'\n\nFrida was silent for a moment. 'Do you know, Mari, I think she might have. But only when I was tiny.'\n\n'I don't like it,' Polina whispered over Frida's shoulder. 'We're going underground. What if there are spiders?'\n\n'The stars will be waiting for you when we come back, Pol. And as for spiders, they'll be more frightened of you. Keep walking,' Frida whispered back. 'I'm sure this is something important.'\n\nAfter about fifteen minutes, the girls, made dizzy from the continual spiralling downwards and the fluff of cobweb in their eyes, finally reached a flat level. They held up their lamps again. They could see nothing beyond them but darkness. All they could hear was their own blood beating in their bodies, and their breath on the cool air.\n\n'That was five hundred and three steps,' whispered Mariella. 'I counted.'\n\n'I think we're deep beneath the palace,' said Flora. She held her lamp higher. 'And look \u2013 there's the mouth of the sea!'\n\nBut it was not the mouth of the sea. Beyond was a lagoon \u2013 a wide, deep, dark underground pool \u2013 lit around its edges and in the crannies of its rocks by tiny lights that blinked from the darkness like stars.\n\nWhen Polina looked at it, she wondered why she'd ever been worried. It felt as if they'd travelled upwards into a firmament of celestial wonder, not deep beneath the surface of their father's land. It was a breathtaking vision.\n\nAgnes ran to the lagoon's edge.\n\n'Don't touch it!' said Flora, for she had read many stories of tempting and beautiful sights that would only lead a princess to her doom.\n\n'I'm not going to touch it,' said Agnes. 'I'm just trying to work out how we're going to cross it.'\n\nThe others joined her, and stared at the water. It was as deep as a dream from which you might never wake. They shivered; for all its beauty, they felt that perhaps they shouldn't hang around. And then came the noise of the music again, that sweet melodious sound of a single clarinet, from somewhere across the lagoon, and it felt to the girls as if it was calling them to join it.\n\n'Maybe we should swim across?' said Ariosta, beginning to roll up her pyjama legs. 'It's been ages since I had a dip.'\n\n'I \u2013 Ari \u2013 really?' said Bellina.\n\n'Let her,' said Frida. 'Ariosta's the best swimmer out of all of us, and sometimes a dolphin just has to swim.'\n\n'But what if there's something in the water?' whispered Flora.\n\n'There's always something in the water,' said Ariosta, grinning, and she sat by the side of the lagoon and plunged in one leg and then the other. The girls held their breath, but nothing bad happened to their sister. Ariosta splashed her legs around, the drops illuminated by the twinkling lights. 'Oooh! It's _freezing_!' she said, which made them laugh for the first time since their mother died.\n\nEmboldened by her intrepid sister, Bellina dipped her hand into the water. 'It feels like Mother's shirts,' she said. 'So satiny!'\n\n'Don't drink it,' warned Lorna. 'It's bad enough that one of us is swimming in it.'\n\n'I don't want to drink it, I just want to swim in it. I'll be back,' said Ariosta.\n\n'It'll be all right, Lorn,' said Frida. 'Trust me.'\n\n'Oh, Ari,' said Delilah proudly. 'You really are a fantastic fish.' They waited in silence, holding their lamps up as high as they could to illuminate Ariosta's swim. The minutes ticked.\n\n'I've found something!' Ariosta called, and her sisters breathed a sigh of relief.\n\n'What is it?' Polina shouted back. 'Ari, be careful!'\n\n'Hold on \u2013 it's so dark,' Ariosta replied. And then \u2013 'Oh! I've found... some boats!'\n\nThe sisters cheered and clapped as Ariosta swam back and forth six times, bringing six boats to their side of the lagoon, six boats that turned out to fit two princesses apiece. When Ariosta was finished and had pulled herself out of the water, her sisters hugged her so tightly, and covered her with so many of their dressing gowns until her teeth stopped chattering, that she looked happier than she had in over a year.\n\nTwo by two, the girls lowered themselves into the bobbing vessels and set off across the water. Chessa splashed her oars into the dark, her eyes on the bank ahead. She hummed a quiet tune, gently testing the acoustics of the rocks above.\n\nThe others, who loved to hear her sing, and who had missed it terribly since King Alberto had stopped their music lessons, kept their own oars as quiet as they could, hoping they might hear again the glorious sound of their childhood.\n\nThey were in luck. After what had felt to them a lifetime, Chessa took a deep breath, closed her eyes, opened her mouth and began to sing:\n\n' _The girls rowed on a dark lagoon_\n\n_In the cave's imaginary night._\n\n_They didn't know why_\n\n_But still in the sky \u2013_\n\n_There burned a beautiful light!_ '\n\nChessa's voice reverberated across the water and round the rocks in a magical echo. 'Oh, Chess,' Frida called from the boat she was sharing with Agnes. 'You always pop my heart like a champagne cork.' The others laughed at the truth of Frida's words, for Chessa's singing did fizz their blood like the finest bubbles. Then far off came the clarinet again, as if it was replying to the power of Chessa's voice, waiting impatiently for her to give it more music.\n\n'Mother used to sing that to me at bath time,' said Chessa after she stopped, now dipping her fingers in the lagoon.\n\n'Well, Mother was right,' said Flora. ' _Look!_ '\n\nThe girls turned towards the bank. It was as if the words of Chessa's song had conjured the sight before them. Where minutes before all had been darkness, now, through a crack in the rock beyond, narrow enough for one princess at a time, there was indeed a light.\n\nThis light sparkled more than any knife or fork the girls had used at their parents' banquets. This light seemed to burn brighter than the moon, as its shining rays beckoned them in. This light was extraordinary.\n\n'What _is_ it?' said Emelia, as the girls jumped out of the boats and tied them to various rocks lining the new side of the lagoon.\n\n'We won't know until we go a little closer,' said Agnes. 'Frida, wise to pursue?'\n\nAll the sisters turned to Frida. Frida looked first at the moored boats, secondly at Agnes's hopeful little face, and then towards the lagoon, darker than a thought that never ends.\n\n'It would be a shame,' she said, 'given how enterprising Ariosta has been with getting us over the water, and how observant Chessa has been about this light, _not_ to carry on. To do anything else feels wrong. Agnes, you shall lead the way.'\n\nAgnes's small body puffed up with pride and pleasure at such responsibility, and the older sisters hid their affectionate smiles at their little walking popcorn. With Agnes at the fore, princess after princess slipped through the crack in the rock. Once they were all safely through, they abandoned their lamps and approached the glowing magnificence.\n\nAny fear they might have been holding in their hearts was forgotten. The light made their cheeks pale, their eyes shining coins, their hair a moving field of silver wheat. As they kept on, the princesses soon realised they were walking through the most beautiful forest. They trod a delicate path lined by tall and slender birch trees, each leaf on the branches a glorious, shimmering pocket of light. Silver birds sang to each other, glimpsed through the foliage like falling stars.\n\n'I can't believe it,' whispered Polina. 'I'm sure I dreamed of such a place when I was a little girl!'\n\n'Me too,' said Frida, turning up her face in wonder.\n\n'Me three,' breathed Lorna.\n\nThe eldest three sisters agreed that the silver forest, for all its surprise, also had the air of familiarity \u2013 as if, once upon a time, someone had told them about it, as if it had always been there, waiting for them to return. Frida scrunched up her face, trying to remember where, how, _why_ this place felt like a second home. But it was no use \u2013 and Frida knew when it was best to accept a mystery and not pull its wings off, like a brute might to a butterfly.\n\nAfter a while, the birches started to thin out, and the calls of the silver birds fell silent. The light that had cloaked them faded away, and everything went dark. Polina looked up, in case there were any stars she could use to guide their way \u2013 but she couldn't see a thing. The girls stopped walking and formed a circle, holding hands, palm against damp palm as they looked outwards on the endless night.\n\n'I wish we still had our lamps,' whispered Bellina.\n\n'What do we do now?' asked Delilah.\n\n'We could retrace our steps,' Mariella suggested.\n\n'We don't know where those steps _are_ , it's so dark,' replied Vita.\n\nIt was true. They'd lost their bearings. They were surrounded by a nothingness, a looming absence of landscape and dimension, depth and time. A strange feeling of uncertainty crept up the backs of their legs and spines, into their stomachs, their throats, their eyes. It was as if the silver forest, the lagoon, the staircase \u2013 even the palace upstairs \u2013 had never existed.\n\nWithout warning, Emelia broke the circle and dropped down on to all fours. 'Shh!' she said. 'Can you hear that?'\n\n'Hear what?' said Flora.\n\n' _That_ ,' replied Emelia. 'Where are you?' she called. 'I can hear you!'\n\n'Who is she talking to? Has she gone mad?' said Vita.\n\nBut then the other sisters began to hear it too, a faint sound of dried leaves swishing, a thrum of movement on the air.\n\n'Maybe it's one of Father's advisers, come to punish us,' said Ariosta. The girls huddled closer together against this new fear.\n\n'Never,' said Frida. 'They're not brave enough to come down here.'\n\nEmelia carried on crawling around in the dark, and called gently, 'Don't be scared, I'll help you.'\n\nAs she said this, a small fox crawled into view.\n\nNow, you probably know what a fox looks like.\n\nPerhaps you picture a proud red coat, neat and springy black legs, intelligent eyes the colour of an orange stone?\n\nWell, this fox didn't look like that. _This_ fox had green eyes and fur like tarnished gold, a weak star fallen in the girls' circle. He was dragging one of his back legs. It was broken, and little whimpers were coming from his damaged body. Suddenly, the girls forgot their own worry, and turned instead to this beautiful, suffering creature, so fantastical he could have climbed out of a treasure chest.\n\nEmelia got to her feet and went over to Mariella. Without warning, she dug deep in her sister's dressing gown pocket. 'Aha!' she said, pulling out Mariella's favourite wooden ruler. 'I _knew_ you still had it. Perfect for a splint.'\n\n'Hold on \u2013'\n\nBut Emelia was down again, facing the fox. She put out a hand, and he turned his muzzle, sniffing the scent of her welcome on the air. He approached her \u2013 slowly, timidly \u2013 his emerald eyes fixed on her in the hope that she would remove his pain.\n\n'But that's my best ruler!' said Mariella.\n\n'We'll make sure you have a new one, sweetheart,' Frida replied. 'By the looks of it, right now that little creature needs it more than you.'\n\nEmelia whipped off her dressing gown cord and fashioned it into a bandage against the fox's leg. The fox didn't flinch under her ministrations. He kept quite still, as if he trusted her. The other eleven girls admired their sister, her deftness, her confidence, her gentle handling of such a frightened being.\n\nEmelia finished securing the fox's bad leg into a splint.\n\n'I'm sure it's glowing brighter,' said Agnes, and it did seem as if the fox had absorbed Emelia's expertise. His golden fur was shining; his body beamed like a living lantern. Nudging Emelia's hand as if to say _thank you_ , he trotted out of the circle, three good legs padding on the ground, his healing leg treading lighter. The girls followed the fox's glow, happy that Emelia's skill had led them from that place of doubt.\n\nAs they followed the fox, the princesses noticed that the air had warmed, its texture thicker. A forest of oaks began to appear, trees with bark so shining the sisters were dazzled by their light. Delilah patted one of the trunks. 'These must be made of gold!' she said. When the others touched it too, it certainly felt to them like something precious.\n\nThe forest where the fox had led them became a glowing goblet. In the canopy that beamed above, every leaf on every tree turned honey, amber, topaz, ruby. It was as if the world was on fire, and they were standing in the centre of their father's crown. Delighted, they spun round and round until the forest was nothing but a bright blur.\n\nBut by the time they steadied themselves, the little fox had vanished.\n\n'We must keep walking,' said Frida. 'This adventure isn't over yet.' She looked round at her sisters. Their eyes were bright; they were chatting amongst themselves. 'We have to keep going.'\n\n'Can't we just stay here?' said Flora. 'It's so beautiful.'\n\n'We could. But I think something even more special is waiting for us at the end,' said Frida.\n\nAnd as she uttered these words, just as the forest of silver had done, the forest of gold began to disappear. The darkness grew around them once more. But this time the princesses were not frightened. They knew now that the dark was simply the beginning of new things. The dark was necessary. The dark might bring you a golden fox. The dark could be kind to twelve girls simply looking for their next path.\n\nAnd soon enough, they could hear the tinkling of bells, the same they had heard standing in their bedroom at the top of the staircase.\n\nAs they kept on through the dark, following this sound, a forest of diamonds appeared, diamonds hanging everywhere in heavy vines of brilliance, a splendour that outshone even the forests of silver and gold. Nature itself was a jewel. Beholding this sight, the girls felt themselves to be as powerful as the glittering stones draping every inch of the underground world they had discovered.\n\nDelilah approached the shining vines, her eyes wide in wonder. 'It can't be!' she whispered. She stood before the sinewy, silvery ropes, not daring to touch them.\n\n'What is it, Delly?' Chessa asked.\n\n'It's a dormidon plant,' said Delilah. 'The diamonds are growing on its vines.'\n\n'My goodness!' said Bellina.\n\n'I'd read that they existed,' Delilah went on, the excitement growing in her voice, 'but no one's ever seen one in the flesh. It's such a powerful plant, and that's why diamonds choose to grow on it.'\n\n'How beautiful it is!' said Agnes.\n\nAs the other girls ran over to join Delilah and Agnes, to take in the twisting, twinkling, intoxicating strings of stones, they realised the source of those tinkling bells: it was the diamonds themselves, moving against each other on the vines.\n\n'The seeds live inside the vine,' Delilah said. She turned to her eldest sister. 'Do you... do you think I could take some back with me, Frida? Just to see if I could grow one in the palace gardens, if Father ever lets me?'\n\nFrida put her hands on her hips and stood back to survey the thick, swaying curtain of dormidon vines. From somewhere very near came the sound of that clarinet, except now there was something else \u2013 a beating drum \u2013 and was that a trumpet, so fast and lively and exciting? The other sisters looked at each other: they could hear it too.\n\n'I promise you, Delilah,' Frida said, 'that one day you will return to those gardens. So you'd better take some dormidon with you, for when the moment comes.'\n\nDelilah stepped in amongst the vines and gently tugged one. It came away in her hands like a girl's cut plait. She tucked it into her dressing gown pocket and began to wander further in.\n\n'Let me help you, Delly,' said Frida, reaching towards the cool plant, feeling the icy touch of the diamonds as they tumbled from the vine on to the forest floor. 'You're going to need a bit more.'\n\n'How can you possibly know that?' asked Mariella.\n\nFrida shrugged. 'Just a feeling. Sometimes a feeling can be as true as fact.'\n\nMariella laughed at this, but she helped her sisters with the vines regardless. Bellina joined in too, and then all the princesses, and as several hands touched the swaying ropes, something astonishing happened.\n\nWith a _whoosh_ , a whole sheet of vines and diamonds fell to the forest floor, revealing the most incredible sight any of the princesses had ever seen.\n\nNone of them could speak. They simply stood there in their dressing gowns. All they could do was stare at the scene beyond them, as the dormidon vines snaked silverly around their feet.\n\nAnd what did they see? It's not easy to describe. But seeing as you've come this far with me, I will most definitely try.\n\nIt was a gigantic tree, probably the biggest tree they'd ever seen, and bigger even than that. At the front of this gigantic tree, the twists of its own roots \u2013 the thickest, strongest, highest roots imaginable \u2013 made an arch wide enough, and tall enough, for a three-storey house to fit beneath with room to spare.\n\n'I can see lights in there!' said Agnes.\n\n'And can you hear that wonderful music?' said Chessa.\n\nThey looked closer: under that soaring arch of roots, deep into its heart, a hollowed entrance hall spanned out in shining tiles of black and white. Around the hall, lights of every colour bobbed like fireflies, whilst above, hanging in the ceiling, clear chandeliers glittered like illuminated raindrops.\n\nIt felt wonderful to be near. In a funny way, it was just as they imagined it would be, even though they didn't know they were coming and they'd never seen it before. It felt like, in this place, the girls might have nothing to worry about, nothing to fear.\n\n'Wise to pursue?' Agnes whispered to her eldest sister.\n\n'Wise to pursue,' replied Frida, and Agnes was sure that Frida had quickly wiped away a tear.\n\nFour\n\nA Dance and a Doughnut\n\nThe girls moved as if in a living dream. Never in their lives had they desired something as much as they desired to enter that tree.\n\nBut _just_ as they had walked under the soaring tree roots and were about to set foot on that black and white floor, they heard a voice.\n\nA blustering, slightly squeaky, indignant voice.\n\n'Do you have the right to come in here?' asked the voice. 'Oh, goodness me. There's _twelve_ of you?'\n\nThey looked down. To their surprise, a peacock had appeared before them, his tail feathers spread. He wore a red velvet waistcoat that could not meet across the plump brilliance of his turquoise chest. His wings clutched a huge leather book, gold letters across it spelling out the words: _Necessary Guests_. The feathers on the crown of his head quivered in a way that was strangely familiar to the twelve sisters.\n\n'I beg your pardon?' said Lorna, who could not abide rudeness.\n\n'You can't just _walk_ in here, you know,' said the peacock. 'You have to _be expected_.'\n\n'Saleem,' said another voice. 'Please calm down.'\n\nFrom across the black and white floor came a lioness. Her voice was very different: smooth and deep, a little smoky, warm as a rug on a cold winter night. She was big, and the girls shrank away a little in fear. Her fur shone under the multicoloured lights, changing rainbow shades as she strode towards them. Her paws were huge, the size of dinner plates, and her eyes burned with an intelligence that intimidated the girls.\n\nThe lioness sat up straight before them. 'Page thirty-five, Saleem,' she said patiently.\n\nSaleem riffled through the pages of his book, even as his own feathers ruffled with indignation. 'Ah!' he squeaked. 'The _princesses_. I see. Yes, yes.' He cleared his throat. 'Item: found door to staircase, and descended despite spiders. Item: sourced boats and crossed lagoon. Item: walked the three forests, and endured doubt. Item: befriended, tended and mended the fox. Item: identified the dormidon amongst the diamonds. Item: discovered the tree palace.'\n\nThe lioness examined her claws. 'Brave, resourceful, clever and kind. And terribly imaginative. Just how I like princesses to be.' She grinned, retracting the claws. The girls still felt a little unsure. The lioness extended her front right paw. 'I wasn't sure you were ever going to find us,' she said. 'But I'm glad you did.'\n\nFrida was the first to shake the lioness's paw. 'Perhaps you've been expecting us,' she said. 'I believe we have a reservation.'\n\nLioness and princess eyed each other, and each seemed satisfied by what they could see. 'You have indeed,' replied the lioness. She swished her majestic tail. 'Welcome to the tree palace.'\n\n'The what?' said Agnes, forgetting her manners in a moment of curiosity.\n\n'The tree palace. You're a little late, but Saleem and I appreciate that sometimes one's delays are not one's fault,' the lioness went on. 'Moreover, of course, certain guests never know they're coming to the tree palace until they find it.'\n\n'Very true,' said Saleem. 'I call it the reverse search.' He peered at the girls. 'Often happens with the likes of you. Down here, you don't find what you're looking for, but you will find what you need.'\n\nOne by one, the other girls lined up to shake the lioness's paw. And a strange thing happened when human palm met feline pad: each of the princesses felt a touch of power. It was as if they had drunk a mug of hot chocolate and it was coursing through their bodies, with a little kick of chilli at the end. It felt, quite frankly, _marvellous_.\n\n'We could hear music,' said Chessa.\n\n'Ah, _that's_ how you did it. Of course!' said the lioness. 'Well, I expected you girls to have excellent taste. I do love jazz.' She swept a paw back to welcome the girls in.\n\n'My goodness,' said Emelia. 'Can you smell the food?'\n\nThe princesses were starving; they hadn't eaten a morsel since the cook's thin porridge many hours ago. And indeed, on the air, there was a mixture of the most delicious cooking aromas the girls had ever smelt.\n\n'I can smell lamb chops,' said Lorna.\n\n'Juicy ones!' said Vita.\n\n'Sprigged with rosemary,' said Flora.\n\n' _Look_ ,' said Polina, and she pointed to a trestle table at the back of the dance floor.\n\nOn this trestle table there were indeed lamb chops, and next to these the princesses could also see doughnut pyramids \u2013 and next to _these_ , glistening pavlovas and roast chickens. Oh, how they wanted to touch the tiny caraway seed rolls and curls of the creamiest butter! There were peppercorn biscuits piled high like a pastry chef's counting house. Fountains of elderflower champagne, fizzing and frothing into the finest glasses they'd ever seen. They wanted to dip their fingers in the tureens of bubbling chocolate sauce and the ice creams to pour it on, flavours of cinnamon, satsuma, vanilla and coconut all mingling in the air. They wanted it all.\n\nRound the edges of the dance floor, small circular tables had been arranged, with tasselled, pristine tablecloths. And in the near distance, a band of musicians was playing jazz \u2013 the jazz they'd been hearing so far away, for so long \u2013 now here, before them, sweet and clear, free and joyous! The girls felt a happiness they had never dared hope could be theirs again.\n\nThe lioness gazed at their pyjamas and dressing gowns. 'I _adore_ your evening attire. A little louche, yes, but inimitably stylish.'\n\n'Hold on,' said Mariella. 'Are they... bears?'\n\n'Oh yes,' replied the lioness. 'Dancing bears.'\n\nTwo bears were shimmying in sequin skirts whilst a leopard played the clarinet. A tiger was playing the piano, a monkey was on the sax, a tabby cat was on the trumpet, an ostrich in a red beret was shaking her tail feathers, and three tortoises were working together, one on top of the other, to strum the double bass. The music they were making was perfect to the girls' ears: lively, happy and quick. It was dizzying to watch them.\n\n'I'm _starving_ ,' said Ariosta, her eye on the teetering trestle table.\n\n'Then you shall eat,' said the lioness. 'You've done so well to get here, it's the least we can do.' She grinned indulgently. 'We're a bit off the beaten track, so take your table and the waiters will be with you.'\n\nThe girls did as she said, and the lioness clicked her claws. A toucan flew over, depositing a perfect jam doughnut on Ariosta's plate. In fact, all the waiters were toucans, flying from girl to girl with menus in their beaks.\n\n'Try that doughnut for starters,' said the lioness. 'Then take your fill.'\n\nAriosta took a bite, and rolled her eyes in amazement. ' _Unf_. This is the best jam doughnut I've ever tasted.'\n\nThe girls ordered from the toucan waiters, who obligingly flew hither and thither, fetching lamb chops and chicken legs, squishy cheeses and hot buttered toast, sausage and mash, glasses of champagne, strawberries dipped in chocolate, and cups of smoky black tea that seemed to contain within it all the spices of the world.\n\n'How do you like the place so far?' the lioness asked Frida.\n\nFrida sat back in her chair, holding a glass of elderflower champagne as she surveyed the inside of the tree palace: the dance floor, the glittering chandelier, her sisters' delighted, happy faces at the food and music surrounding them. 'It's funny,' she said, 'but it's just like the forests of silver, gold and diamonds.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'I mean that this tree palace seems to have been waiting for us particularly.'\n\nThe lioness nodded. 'Tree palaces are a bit like that.'\n\n'It feels like home,' said Frida.\n\nThe lioness shook her large head, her whiskers glinting in the lights. 'Oh, no. The tree palace isn't your home. You mustn't think it is.'\n\n'But it's so much nicer than what we've got upstairs!'\n\n'Well. It does belong to you, Frida, but it isn't your home. There's a difference. You mustn't forget that.' She pinned Frida with a thoughtful look. 'You girls can't stay here, you know.'\n\n'But why ever not? We were in the book of necessary guests!'\n\nThe lioness smiled. 'Exactly, Frida. You're _guests_. And good guests always leave in the end \u2013 however much we might want them to stay. But you must never forget your way here. Palaces like this won't survive without guests like you.'\n\nThe lioness was almost talking in riddles. Frida tried to understand, but before she could find out anything more, Saleem had strutted over to the table. 'Do take your fill, my ladies,' he said. 'But leave some time for dancing. Princess Frida, will you do me the honour?'\n\n'Dancing?' said Frida. She felt inexplicably sad after her conversation with the lioness. 'Oh, I don't dance. I can't.'\n\nSaleem readjusted his waistcoat. 'You can't dance? Don't believe it for a minute.'\n\n'None of us has ever really danced before.'\n\n' _Ever?_ '\n\n'Oh, well, there were the courtly dances we were taught as little girls: a step here, a heel there.' Frida looked over to the dance floor. 'But shimmying and stomping like those bears? Never.'\n\nSaleem extended his wing, and it flashed iridescent in the light. 'So brave to come here, but she won't dance! Fear not, Princess Frida! I will take the utmost care of you. Michel the monkey is playing a solo on the saxophone and it is not something I care to miss.'\n\n'Oh, go on, Frida,' said Polina. 'You need to let your hair down. You've looked after us so well. Go and have some fun.'\n\n'She's right!' said the others. 'Please, Frida. Please dance with Saleem!'\n\nOnly for her sisters did she accept Saleem's invitation, but it was a dance that stayed inside her feet for the rest of Frida's life.\n\nAs soon as the peacock and the princess took to the floor, it was clear that Saleem was an excellent dancer \u2013 wings neat, toes tidy, feathers adding the flair.\n\nBut it wasn't that.\n\nIt was the freedom Frida had talked of but never known for herself, until now, until the endless music and movement, round in circles, hand in wing \u2013 sometimes on her own, her feet moving and stamping, arms in the air, body jumping and swirling, whirling and twirling, in and out of the multicoloured lights. She felt as if her feet were flying on Saleem's wings, as if every soul on that dance floor with her \u2013 her eleven sisters, the lioness too, even a couple of the toucan waiters \u2013 had truly understood what it meant to be alive. And Frida said to herself, _What more could I ask from life than a monkey playing the sax, a stomach full of doughnuts, my sisters close and a dance floor made for us inside the roots of a gigantic tree?_\n\nBut in that moment, the lioness came up and whispered hot breath into Frida's ear: 'Even necessary guests must leave, my dear \u2013 and nothing in this palace comes for free.'\n\nFive\n\nKing Alberto's Second Bad Decision\n\nIt was the best time the sisters had ever known. Every night, their father would lock them in with his heavy iron key, and after the palace had fallen quiet, they would take it in turns to push open the secret door behind their mother's portrait,\n\nand down they would go,\n\nall five hundred and three steps of the dark staircase,\n\nacross the lagoon,\n\nthrough the three beauteous forests,\n\nuntil finally they reached their tree palace, where the lioness would greet them at the arch, Saleem would show them to their regular table, and the toucan waiters would attend to their every happiness.\n\nWhatever the girls had dreamed of eating, that exact dish was always on the menu. Baked beans on toast, spaghetti with clams, fresh fish fingers in buttery buns? No matter what they'd been dreaming about on the way there, the lioness's kitchen was ready. She would sit with them, and they would talk to her about their dreams for the future, or they would tell silly jokes, and she would tell them stories about princesses locked in rooms. And then the girls would dance in rapture to the jazz music until they could barely feel their feet, and their shoes were worn through.\n\nAnd every morning in the upstairs palace, King Alberto would unlock their bedroom door to find his twelve lovely daughters fast asleep in their rows of beds. All the king had ever wanted was for his girls to go to sleep, because he believed that only in their dreams could they be safe. (That, and they were easier to manage than when they were awake.) As he watched them snoring, he was delighted that they were finally so obedient.\n\nThe girls hated their daytime hours doing nothing. But although the king and his advisers continued to deny them any tasks or pleasures, the existence of their tree palace made everything bearable. The sisters knew that, come the night, they would have a chance once more to feel free.\n\nThey would whisper about new dance steps, what tiara might look best with their pyjamas. Ariosta looked forward to a swim in the lagoon. Delilah had discovered that the forests contained other plants for her to examine. Emelia always kept her eyes peeled for the little golden fox, but I am sad to say she never saw him again. Instead, she busied herself making sure the jazz musicians had sleek fur and clean claws, in order to play their instruments to the best of their abilities. Chessa, who had been promised an invitation by the lioness to sing onstage with the band, would practise in her mind which numbers she was going to perform.\n\nIn short, the girls started to feel alive. They were in possession of the most brilliant secret, and they hid it so very well that neither King Alberto nor any of his advisers had the faintest clue.\n\n'It feels like _home_!' Bellina declared happily one breaking dawn, all of them sinking gratefully (but not particularly gracefully) into their beds after a night of dancing.\n\nBut Frida was worried. She'd never been able to put out of her mind what the lioness had told her on their first visit. The lioness had said that the tree palace _belonged_ to the princesses, but they could never call it home. Was that because someone was going to steal it from them? Why was she so insistent on reminding Frida that they must leave the tree palace, when it seemed expressly designed for them? And if nothing in the tree palace came for free, what was the price they were going to have to pay for spending so much time there?\n\nShe almost felt anger at the lioness \u2013 for showing them such a wonderful place and making them feel as if it was theirs, only to suggest they couldn't stay. They'd explained to her how miserable their life upstairs had become! It wasn't as if the lioness was unaware of their horrid situation.\n\nFrida sighed to herself. Her mother's death had taught her well that the world doesn't always skip along to your wishes. But then again, wisdom didn't always make this fact any easier to accept.\n\nSo one night, after coming back up the staircase at dawn, closing the secret door quietly, adjusting her mother's portrait and making sure every princess was accounted for, Frida said they should make a pact. 'We must swear to each other that we will protect this tree palace,' she said, kicking off her worn-out shoes and rubbing the balls of her feet.\n\n'But why? We're not going to tell anyone,' said Ariosta, snuggling under her duvet.\n\n'Of course we're not. But that might not stop Father's advisers \u2013 or Father himself \u2013 from asking questions.'\n\n'Father's none the wiser,' said Flora. 'We've been doing this for weeks!'\n\nFrida frowned like a military general. 'True, but we cannot be complacent. What would we do if we could never dance in the tree palace again? If we were trapped in this bedroom without even the promise of the music down below to cheer us up?'\n\n'Imagine never seeing the lioness again!' said Delilah.\n\n'Or Saleem,' said Mariella.\n\n'Ugh,' said Vita, burying her face in her pillow. 'I couldn't bear it.'\n\n'Exactly,' said Frida. 'We must plan. We found the tree palace together, and if anything happens we will defend it together. Whatever it takes, we'll do it. Agreed?' She put her hand out.\n\n'Agreed,' said the eleven others, without hesitation, piling their hands on top of Frida's.\n\nBut as it happened, there was just one tiny detail the girls hadn't thought through. Not even clever Frida.\n\nIt caught them out, as you might say, royally.\n\n\u22c7\n\nOne morning, King Alberto opened their bedroom door as usual. And, as usual, his daughters' twelve pairs of shoes were lined up neatly against the wall. Except this time (why this time? Who knows \u2013 kings are unreliable characters) he bent down and lifted one shoe in order to admire the craftsmanship.\n\nThe king was in for a shock.\n\nHe stood there in the soft morning light, shaking his grey head as his girls slumbered away. 'These are not the shoes of a princess,' he said to himself. 'They're completely ruined!'\n\nAnd he was right. The sole of this particular shoe \u2013 belonging, in this case, to Polina \u2013 was utterly destroyed. The king reached down and picked up another shoe, then another and another \u2013 until he'd turned all twenty-four shoes upside down.\n\nAll of them had more holes than a fine Swiss cheese.\n\nHe tiptoed away and ordered the royal shoemaker to make the girls some better ones.\n\n'But I never stop making shoes for your daughters, Your Majesty,' said the shoemaker.\n\n'I beg your pardon?' said King Alberto.\n\nThe shoemaker gestured mournfully towards his dwindling leather supplies. 'I've made more pairs of shoes for them than my wife makes me hot dinners.'\n\n'What on earth is going on?' King Alberto asked himself, for the shoemaker was a talented man and had been making sturdy footwear since the king was a boy.\n\nThe next morning, the king opened the girls' bedroom door and discovered that the shoes he'd ordered for his daughters but one day previously were again worn through.\n\nHe sent for even more shoes. And yet again, the morning after their delivery, whilst his daughters slept unawares, he found that every shoe was ruined.\n\nKing Alberto hated not knowing answers generally, but this particular mystery enraged him. You'd think a king had bigger fish to fry, but no! He summoned each daughter, one by one, and asked them to explain the reason behind the unending pairs of holey shoes. The girls were frightened, but Frida had prepared them for disaster. Remembering the pact they had made to each other, the princesses held their nerve.\n\n'The guard dogs bite them,' said Frida.\n\n'I walk a great deal,' said Polina.\n\n'I stood on a nail,' said Lorna.\n\n'The shoemaker's no good,' said Ariosta.\n\n'My feet get hot, so I let the air in,' said Chessa.\n\n'I find mice in them,' said Bellina. 'We need to get a palace cat.'\n\n'It's my fault,' laughed Vita. 'I scuff my feet all day.'\n\n'I have no idea,' said Mariella, with a shrug.\n\n'I ripped them on a tree root in the garden,' said Delilah.\n\n'I held them too long over a candle when I was warming them up,' said Flora.\n\n'They're my favourite pair, so I've worn them through,' said Emelia.\n\n'Maybe they're supposed to have holes?' said Agnes, staring at the floor.\n\nKing Alberto was sure they weren't telling the truth. He felt it in his royal gut. His daughters had such innocent faces, but it was too bizarre that they were going through so many pairs of shoes at such a rapid rate! The shoemaker, who had made thousands of pairs of shoes and whose fingers were worn to the bone, begged for early retirement. The king dismissed him, and raged that his daughters were out of control.\n\n'They're just shoes, Your Majesty!' his advisers pleaded with him, knowing that there were much more important things to be worrying about, like gathering the harvests, and the uprisings in the west of the kingdom.\n\nThe king couldn't agree. They weren't just shoes. They were his _daughters'_ shoes, and they had holes in them when they shouldn't. It felt like his girls were going somewhere beyond his reach, and he didn't like it.\n\nOne morning, he summoned Frida to his throne.\n\nFrida came, feeling a nervousness in her stomach which she tried to push away. As usual, the black drapes were up, but Frida could just make out the dust gathering in small grey balls around the legs of her father's ornate throne. _Really, someone should do a spring clean in here_ , she thought.\n\nHer father's advisers were huddled in the corner like a group of worried penguins, the candlelight throwing their shadows into grotesque shapes. She sighed, thinking about the beautiful multicoloured lights of the tree palace, the fluttering wings of the toucan waiters, how pleased the lioness always was to see the princesses and how they danced and danced with Saleem \u2013\n\n'So, my girl,' the king said, interrupting her daydream. 'Are you going to tell me your secret?'\n\nFrida flicked her eyes towards the king. Something in her father's voice chilled her. The memories of the previous night's dancing melted like ice under a flame.\n\n'My secret?' she echoed.\n\n'Come on, Frida. You're slyer than a fox. You're the eldest. You're the ringleader. You should be setting an example. I've asked you why your shoes are worn out and not one of you has told me the truth. Why are your sisters all so disobedient?'\n\nFrida thought about her younger sisters. They were so much happier since the discovery of the tree palace: it made their life in this upstairs mausoleum tolerable. She thought of the pact she'd asked them to make. In a way, her father was right. She _was_ responsible. She had been the one to find the door behind the painting, after all. She had been the first to shake the lioness's paw. She had been the one who encouraged her sisters to lie. 'Father,' she replied, 'They are not disobedient. They are loyal and true.'\n\n'True to what?' asked her father. 'To _whom_?'\n\nFrida remained silent.\n\n'You are the most disobedient of all,' he said. 'Just like your mother.'\n\nFrida closed her eyes. 'I beg you, Father, attend to your kingship.'\n\n'Outrageous cheek! I will know your secret,' Alberto raged, 'and you will tell me or face the consequence!'\n\nFrida took a deep breath. _The consequence_. She knew silence was no longer an option, that she must speak and suffer. 'Father,' she said quietly, 'it is not your secret to know.'\n\nAt this, the king leapt out of his throne, the hair on the top of his head quivering. The advisers rushed forward, worried that he might trip on his robes. 'Get out!' he screamed at his daughter. 'But don't think this is the end. I'll get the truth out of you if it's the last thing I do!'\n\nFor the first time in her life, Frida was truly frightened. Suddenly, the lioness's voice filled her ears: _Nothing in this palace comes for free_.\n\nShe looked at her father's advisers, who did nothing to help her, and she stumbled away, running through the gloom of the corridors to find her sisters. _You think I'm slyer than a fox?_ she thought, her mind racing. She remembered the golden fox that Emelia had saved, down in the darkness. _Well, Father_ , she thought. _And you too, lioness._ You haven't seen anything yet.\n\nBy the time Frida returned to the bedroom, she had composed herself.\n\n'What did he say?' asked Vita, looking nervous.\n\n'Nothing he hasn't said already,' said Frida, smiling. 'Don't worry. We'll go down to the tree palace tonight and have a marvellous time. Although \u2013 listen, my darlings. Look after the soles of your shoes. Less dancing, if possible.'\n\nShe was met with a chorus of protest.\n\n'I know, I know. But we need to be even cleverer than we already are.'\n\nFrida never wanted to be the one to tell her sisters to dance less. But what could she do? Their father was so suspicious, so dangerous! His face in anger these days was redder than a lobster. She feared that their time in the tree palace was running out, but she wasn't going to let her sisters worry too. She racked her brains to think of some way to put King Alberto off the scent, whilst ensuring her sisters could still go to the tree palace. Yet all the time, the lioness's words went round in her head: _Even necessary guests must leave_.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThat night, as they rowed across the lagoon, Frida draped her fingers in the dark water. She felt its cool quality, how its very touch cleansed her father's anger and strengthened her resolve. They walked through the forest of silver, with Frida bringing up the rear. Making sure none of the others saw her, Frida quietly picked up a shining fallen leaf and slipped it into the pocket of her dressing gown. When they reached the forest of gold, Frida did the same again, scooping up a glowing twig, adding it to the silver leaf. And in the forest of diamonds, ensuring that she was the last to leave, she plucked one of the precious stones and dropped it in her pocket. It rested with the silver leaf and gold tree limb, cold and hard through the fabric of her gown.\n\nNone of the other girls noticed a thing.\n\nThat night in the tree palace, the lioness decided the time had come for Chessa to step up to the stage and take her moment.\n\n'Chessa,' she announced, 'you are our starriest singer, on this starriest night!'\n\nThe other girls clapped and cheered, delighted that the lioness was finally going to hear their sister's magical voice. Chessa, who had been waiting for this for weeks, bounded up, standing before the microphone as if it was the most comfortable place in the world.\n\nEven the shimmying bears in their sequin skirts \u2013 even the toucan waiters \u2013 stopped what they were doing to listen. A hush fell, and Chessa began to sing. Into the silence, her beautiful, entrancing voice rose up, spreading through the roots of the tree. It wove like invisible smoke into the ear, filling their hearts, bringing tears to eyes and smiles to whiskers.\n\nOh, it was an evening none of them would ever forget. Chessa started with a song called 'Laurelia, My Love', a sad number which nevertheless had some strains of happiness to be heard in its major shifts, but her next number was a jumpy, jivey, madcap extravaganza with Michel the monkey on the saxophone that had everyone whooping out of their chairs on to the dance floor.\n\nVita even taught the bears how to pirouette three times in a row without falling over. And every time Chessa thought her set was finished, trying to step away from the microphone in order to slug back a glass of elderflower fizz and reunite with her sisters, the leopard with his clarinet and the tabby cat on her trumpet would shout, 'Come back and sing another!' \u2013 and the ostrich threw her feathers at Chessa's feet in adoration.\n\nThe lioness, who had noticed Frida looking a little sad despite all this fun, sat down next to her.\n\n'Have you been thinking about what I said, Princess Frida?' she asked in her low, warm voice. 'Have you been thinking how to say goodbye?'\n\n'I never stop thinking about it,' said Frida a little coldly. She felt the remnants she had taken from the three forests lodged inside the pocket of her dressing gown.\n\n'You're angry with me,' said the lioness.\n\nFrida didn't dare admit it, but she could not help but speak a little of her mind. 'But it's so _lovely_ down here, you see?' she said. 'My sisters are happy. Look at them dancing!'\n\nThe lioness twisted her whiskers together and let them spring apart again. 'Tree palace or no tree palace, you and your sisters have a capacity to be happy wherever you are, which is a very fortunate thing indeed.'\n\n'Our father \u2013' Frida began.\n\n'From what you've told me about your father,' said the lioness, 'he does not sound like a bad man. But he is a lost one. Parents can be tricky creatures.' She smiled at Frida. 'Or so I've heard.'\n\n'Here is the only place we can feel happy,' said Frida, feeling stubborn.\n\nThe lioness turned away from the chaos on the dance floor and placed a dinner-plate paw on Frida's heart. 'No, Frida, that's not true,' she said. 'Look closer.'\n\n'He wants to know what we're doing every night to make our shoes so worn out. He keeps summoning me, talking about _the consequence_. I'm scared what he'll do if he finds out \u2013'\n\n' _Frida_.' The lioness pressed a little harder with her paw, and Frida felt suffused with such serene power, such warmth and contentment, such a sense of coming home.\n\n'I promise you, I understand,' the lioness said. 'But listen to me. Frida, trust yourself. You know exactly what you have to do.'\n\n\u22c7\n\nThe next morning, King Alberto summoned his eldest daughter yet again.\n\nHe looked crazed. His hair was even more stuck out through the top of his crown, and he was waving a pair of Frida's shoes on his hands. 'Do these look like the shoes of a princess?' he shouted.\n\nFrida had felt completely calm since her conversation with the lioness at the end of the previous evening. Her whispered words made circles in her head: _Frida, trust yourself_.\n\n'They look like the shoes of a woman with places to go,' she said to her father.\n\n'Argh!' King Alberto hurled the shoes across the room, where they struck the side of an adviser's head with a leathery slap. 'You have _nowhere_ to go,' her father cried. 'And I made it so in order to protect you!'\n\n'You have let us rot inside this palace,' she replied. 'You've been so scared that we will die, as your queen has died, that you've tried to stop us living. You're mad with grief and blind to your madness. It has been outrageous and unfair.'\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. 'Then tell me your secret, and maybe I'll give you some freedom.'\n\nShe looked him in the eye. 'I fear your idea of freedom is not the same as mine.'\n\n'Frida, as your king, I demand the secret.'\n\nShe took a deep breath. 'Then, as your subject, I deny you.'\n\n'Then you give me no choice,' her father roared.\n\nFrida knew that _the consequence_ was coming.\n\n'Frida, I banish you!'\n\nShe bowed her head. The air sang with a strange electricity. _I banish you_. Her father's words washed over her, they drenched her skin with pain, but they did not unsteady her. She did not move, she did not speak. _Banished_ : the word like a magic spell! Out of the corner of her eye, Frida could see the advisers, frozen in fear. From far off, she was certain she heard a lion's cry.\n\n'Sire,' said one of the advisers, stepping out of the shadows, clutching the hurled shoes. He cleared his throat. It was Clarence, the youngest of Alberto's staff, a pair of shrewd eyes in that whippety-thin face. Despite his youth, Clarence looked exhausted, as if dealing with Alberto over the past weeks had done him in.\n\n'Princess Frida is \u2013 um, a great _asset_ to Kalia, Your Majesty. Are you quite sure that this is a \u2013 er, a sensible thing to do?'\n\n'Be quiet!' screamed Alberto. 'Only weaklings change their minds! Frida, did you hear me? You're _banished_!'\n\nStill Frida did not speak. The king stopped, catching his breath. 'And hear this too,' he went on, clambering out of his throne and pacing up and down. 'Whosoever can solve the riddle of your sisters' shoes shall inherit my kingdom, and choose any remaining girl for a wife.'\n\n'Sire!' cried Clarence.\n\nBut King Alberto was past listening to counsel. He pointed to the circle of gold resting on his hair. 'And I shall place this crown on their head myself.'\n\nAgain, Frida said nothing, her eyes fixed on the balls of dust around her father's throne. The king's own eyes widened as he circled round her. 'Oh, you've nothing to say now, Frida? Thought not \u2013 it's a miracle \u2013 Frida has nothing to say! This is my royal decree,' he spat. 'And once done, it cannot be undone. Didn't you say I was the law?'\n\nAt this, Frida looked up. She could feel the chill of the silver forest running through her veins and how the heat of the gold forest was turning the inside of her head to flames. She looked at her father, and her eyes flashed as hard as a pair of diamonds. Clarence shrank from her, and King Alberto looked frightened.\n\n'See how he would give away a daughter so thoughtlessly?' she said. Her voice was strong and clear. 'Never mind the kingdom. Of _course_ it's not sensible, Clarence. But when has my father ever done anything sensible?' She drew herself up. 'Father, you can banish me, but to marry one of my sisters to a man she does not love \u2013 that is beyond cruelty.'\n\n'My word is final!' said King Alberto.\n\nFrida looked at him with a thoughtful expression she had borrowed from the lioness. 'I see that you will never change the way you treat your daughters. It pains me. Perhaps you will live to regret it. But even after this, for as long as you call me daughter, I will never tell you the secret of our shoes.'\n\nAlberto climbed back up into his throne and thumped his fist on the arm. 'Then I shall never call you daughter again!'\n\nFrida took her shoes from Clarence's thin and trembling hands. 'Then so it shall be,' she said, and walked from the throne room without another word.\n\n\u22c7\n\nFrida's sisters were enjoying their hour in the palace grounds, still unaware of her predicament. She took a pouch of Kalian coins from the royal mint, and packed the meagre contents of her drawers into a suitcase as quickly as she could. She added the silver leaf, glittering with light, the gold branch that glowed like the sun, and the single diamond, hard and cold in her palm, plucked from her last visit to the underground world.\n\nWhen her sisters came back, they found a pale-faced Frida sitting on the edge of her bed, in a plain brown dress and the sort of coat that no one would ever suppose belonged to a princess.\n\n'Where on earth did you find that coat?' asked Delilah.\n\n'And why do you have a suitcase?' asked Mariella.\n\n'It's Father, isn't it?' Agnes said.\n\n'It's always Father,' said Ariosta.\n\nFrida smiled sadly. 'He's realised that there's another reason why our shoes are wearing out so quickly, and he wants to know what it is, of course. He wants to know about Saleem and the lioness, and the toucan waiters. He wants to know it all. But I won't tell him any of it. So here's the thing, my loves. He's banished me.'\n\nA cry came up from the others, a sound of rage and sadness.\n\n' _Banished?_ ' said Bellina, falling to the floor, wrapping her arms round Frida's knees. 'No, no, you can't leave us, you _can't_.'\n\n'You'll be perfectly fine without me,' said Frida.\n\n'We won't,' said Polina.\n\n'Where will you go?' said Lorna.\n\n'How are you going to _survive_?' asked Flora.\n\n'I was born to do more than survive. And so were you.' Frida rummaged in her coat pocket and pulled out a key. 'And guess what I've got.'\n\n' _No_. It can't be,' said Vita. 'You naughty thing!'\n\n'The key to Mother's motor car.' Frida grinned. 'If Father thinks I'm walking out of here, or riding a _horse_ , he's in for a surprise.'\n\n'I think you're lucky,' said Emelia. 'You get to leave. You get true freedom, whilst the rest of us stay here.'\n\nThe others were quiet at this, and Frida looked sombre. She thought about the terrible decree her father was going to make, how he would give one of his daughters away, and his kingdom too, to whichever man \u2013 it didn't even matter who he was! \u2013 as long as he was first to uncover the secret. Emelia was right in that respect, Frida thought. By being banished from Kalia, a random marriage against her will was one fate she was definitely going to avoid. King Alberto was indeed a law unto himself; look at the way he treated even clever Clarence. Her sisters were going to have to be strong.\n\nFrida stood up. 'I'm lucky in some ways, Emmy,' she said. 'But you'll still have the tree palace. It will be there for as long as you need it. More importantly, you still have each other. And anyway, I've a suspicion that freedom is a bit of a slippery fish.' She placed her hand on each of their hearts, one after the other, just as the lioness had done to her. 'I swear to you, as I love each and every one of you, I _will_ come back.'\n\nShe scooped her suitcase off the bed. 'I don't know where I'm going, but I promise that I will work out how to free us all. In the meantime, you must never stop going down to the tree palace. Do you promise? You have to keep going, otherwise... well, otherwise it might just disappear.'\n\n'Disappear? How?' asked Chessa.\n\n'If a tree palace doesn't have its necessary guests, it might get forgotten. If you want to keep something alive, you have to turn up.'\n\n'We will,' said Agnes. 'We promise.'\n\n'There are going to be difficult times ahead,' said Frida. 'So cry if you feel like crying. Never hold in tears, it's pointless. Then dry your eyes, look around you, think \u2013 think a bit _more_ \u2013 then act. It's time to stand on your own twenty-two feet, my loves, whether your shoes have holes in them or not. And if you can cross lagoons and heal foxes and find tree palaces, then you're halfway there already.'\n\nShe hugged each of her sisters tightly. 'Will you tell the lioness that I understand now, and that I said goodbye?'\n\nBefore the princesses could ask Frida what she meant, she had gripped her suitcase handle and walked out of the bedroom with her head held high. She took a left, then a right towards the staircase that led to the palace garages.\n\nThe royal mechanic, who'd heard about the banishment and assumed she was there under her father's orders, opened the garage door for her. Frida revved her mother's engine so loudly that the mice that had been happily nesting in the passenger seat, for several generations by now, squeaked in terror, jumped out en masse and dived inside an empty petrol can.\n\nHer sisters, who, as you will recall, had no window in their room, couldn't even watch her go.\n\nFrida drove along the coastal road out of Lago Puera, the salt wind billowing her loose hair, the sun on her back, both palaces diminishing with every revolution of Laurelia's wheels. Who knew that standing up to her father would give her the freedom she'd so desired? That part had been easy in the end, but it didn't make it any easier to leave.\n\nThe truth was, Frida's feelings were complicated.\n\nLook at this sunshine \u2013 this should have been a glorious moment, something she'd longed for, for years! But how could she be happy knowing her sisters were at the mercy of their father's ridiculous decree?\n\nFrida sighed, set her eyes on the road and knew that she would never dance in the tree palace again. The lioness had known this day would come well before Frida had. But the tree palace had not completely disappeared. It was inside Frida now, a paw print pressure, a hot coal memory stoking her fire. And her sisters would still go dancing. They must; it was all they had. They would think of something to protect their secret, and so would she.\n\nA few more turns of the wheels, and the motor car dipped over the brow of a hill.\n\nFrida honked her horn at the last of the Kalian seagulls,\n\nand with that, the eldest princess crossed the city border,\n\nand was gone.\n\nSix\n\nDelilah and the Dormidon\n\nMeanwhile, back at the palace, King Alberto printed his ridiculous decree one thousand times. It looked like this:\n\nROYAL DECREE\n\nATTENTION, SUBJECTS:\n\nBE THE MAN WHO SOLVES THE SECRET OF THE SHOES!\n\nINHERIT THE KINGDOM OF KALIA AND MARRY A PRINCESS\n\n(I'VE GOT ELEVEN: YOU CAN CHOOSE)\n\nInterested candidates: please register at the main palace door by Tuesday morning\n\nBy order of HRH King Alberto of the Kingly Kingdom of Kalia\n\nSigned: Alberto Rex\n\nOne thousand decrees were glued fast to shop windows and caf\u00e9 doors, and further afield, on farmers' gates. The kingdom and its princesses were up for grabs, and King Alberto wanted everyone to know. Some of the decrees came unstuck, and I like to think of them being blown by the sea winds far beyond the city, along the coast road, up over the hills and on to the mountain passes. I also like to think that one found its way into Frida's hands. One can only imagine her feelings on seeing her father's stupidity, proved in print.\n\nBy Tuesday, a long line of applicants appeared outside the palace door. Men of all ages and abilities came to try their luck in solving the mystery of the princesses' shoes. They arrived from every corner of the kingdom, far beyond the city of Lago Puera, from the borderlands, from the mountains, from the sand dune towns. Some women came too, but to their intense annoyance, the palace guards told them to leave.\n\nThe men formed an orderly queue, flexing their muscles at each other and boasting about which girl they'd pick out of the remaining eleven. They set up tents, and market traders came to sell them lunch, and street entertainers came to take their money. None of these men had much idea what was actually going to be asked of them once they were inside the palace walls. They just knew it was something about shoes, so it was going to be easy.\n\nClarence, the whippety-thin adviser, slipped behind one of the black drapes over the throne room window and watched the circus gather. He thought King Alberto had lost his mind. Princess Frida had been right \u2013 what sort of method was this to find the future king of Kalia? Alberto had ordered that a camp bed be set up outside the girls' room for a man to sleep on. Rightly anticipating a high level of interest, he'd decreed that each man would be allowed one night only to solve the mystery.\n\nClarence put his face in his hands and hoped for a miracle.\n\nThe eleven remaining sisters, who had been allowed into the throne room as these events unfolded, watched miserably from another window. Bellina threw a walnut and snickered as it bounced off a man's head.\n\n'I don't care if these men are princes or paupers; I don't want any of them,' said Ariosta.\n\n'This is _awful_ ,' said Lorna. 'I feel sick. I miss Frida so much.'\n\n'Frida said she'd come back and save us, and I believe her,' said Agnes.\n\nBut the other girls could not share their youngest sister's hope. Vita's usually happy face was pale. 'Well, she isn't here now, and we're going to have to be very, very clever,' she said.\n\n'You're right. All sorts of idiots are going to try to uncover our secret,' said Delilah. 'We have to make sure none of them succeeds, but we are _not_ going to throw walnuts.' She gave Bellina a stern look.\n\n'Frida was banished for refusing to reveal our secret,' Chessa whispered. 'She sacrificed her happiness for ours. So we must never stop \u2013' here, she mouthed the word \u2013 ' _dancing_.'\n\n'That would make Frida's banishment twice as bad,' agreed Ariosta. 'The tree palace is all we have now. I wonder where she is. Will she write to us, do you think?'\n\nMariella was sobbing quietly. 'I don't want to get married,' she said.\n\n'I certainly don't want to marry anyone so intent on spoiling our fun,' said Polina, looking out of the window at the line of preening men.\n\n'Exactly \u2013 someone who's going to peer through the keyhole and creep behind us, watching everything we do,' said Agnes with a shudder. 'Anyway, I'm too young to be married. Surely if I'm ever picked, Father will say no?'\n\nLorna bit her lip. 'I don't know, Aggie. That is why we have to be careful.'\n\n'But, girls,' said Flora. 'Whichever man comes to sit outside our door, he'll know we're not in there. We can't block up the keyhole, because he'll get suspicious. What are we going to _do_?'\n\nThe princesses looked forlornly at one another, as outside the line of men grew and grew. Their situation felt impossible. It seemed inevitable that one of them \u2013 someday soon \u2013 would be taken as a reluctant bride, and the rest of them forbidden to dance ever again.\n\nSuddenly, Delilah's eyes widened in excitement. 'Oh, boy. I've got it,' she said. 'Why didn't I think of this before? Bedroom. Now, before the first man gets in.'\n\nAs princessly as they could, the eleven girls walked back to their room. They could almost see the excitement fizzing around Delilah's head.\n\nOnce they were all inside, and the bedroom door closed, Delilah rushed over to her dressing gown. From down below, they could hear the palace door being opened, and the sound of tramping feet as the men lined up to be registered to sleep outside the princesses' room.\n\n'It's got to be here somewhere,' Delilah said, throwing leaves and soil and even a woodlouse across her bed. 'Aha!' She brandished her treasure at her sisters. It didn't look very promising: a limp, dried vine of brownish colour, dangling from her hands like a worm.\n\n'That's supposed to help us?' said Bellina, tears welling in her eyes.\n\n'Yes, it is,' said Delilah proudly. 'Don't you remember the first time we went to the tree palace?' Her sisters looked at her blankly. 'The _dormidon_!' she whispered. 'All right,' she said, hoiking herself up on to her bed and looking round at her sisters. 'I know it doesn't look like much. But we haven't much time, and we need to discuss this. Tell me what you know about the dormidon plant.'\n\nNo one said anything. Delilah sighed. Voices could be heard coming up the corridor.\n\n'Delilah, _hurry_ ,' said Agnes.\n\n'Girls, we _are_ going to go dancing,' Delilah said. She held the vine up. 'And this is how: If you drop a dormidon vine in hot water and drain off the liquid, it will make you a tasteless sleeping draught so powerful that just one drop of it in a goblet of wine or cup of tea is enough to knock a grown man out for twelve hours.' Her voice dropped to a whisper. 'But you have to be very, very careful with the dormidon, because too much of it will kill someone. Only experienced botanists should handle such a powerful little plant.'\n\n'An experienced botanist like you, say?' said Agnes, grinning.\n\nDelilah grinned back. 'You know exactly where this is going, don't you, Aggie. I've got enough in this bedroom for a hundred men.'\n\n'But what if you make a mistake and knock them out... forever?' said Emelia.\n\n'Well, it's their own damned fault for coming here to ruin our lives in the first place,' said Ariosta. 'Spying on us, trying to marry us without our permission.'\n\n'I'd put three dormidons in their drink if I could,' said Vita.\n\nLorna put up her hands. 'All right, all right. We don't want dead men on our hands. We just want them to leave us alone.'\n\n'Wise to pursue?' Delilah asked her sisters.\n\n'Wise to pursue,' they whispered back.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThe first man to be admitted was \u2013 how can I put this tactfully? \u2013 a buffoon. He didn't walk into the palace, he _swaggered_. He practically _rolled_ in, as if grabbing the kingdom for himself and picking a daughter \u2013 or grabbing a daughter and picking the kingdom \u2013 was as easy as brushing his teeth.\n\nI forget his name. It doesn't matter.\n\nIt was Agnes, the most innocent-looking, the sweetest, the most childlike, who smiled and handed him a goodnight cup of milky hot chocolate as he sat on the edge of the camp bed. The man took it greedily, not even bothering to say thank you before he swigged it down. The girls were locked in their room immediately after.\n\nSettling in for a night of vigilance, he was asleep in five minutes.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThat night in the tree palace, every one of the princesses danced that little bit longer, taking extra pleasure in every whirl and jig they made, in case it was the last time they might ever be allowed. Agnes told the lioness that Frida wanted her to know that she understood, and passed on her message of goodbye. The youngest princess was surprised by the look of pride in the lioness's eyes, where Agnes thought there might at least have been sadness.\n\nThe next morning, Delilah's plan had worked.\n\nThe first man was late to his meeting with the king and had no evidence to present him as to the girls' activity. He could barely string a sentence together and was booted out of the first floor window, and \u2013 if I recall correctly, from Emelia's account of it \u2013 he landed slap bang in a pile of horse manure.\n\nThe second man was given a goblet of delicious Kalian wine to drink. Again, Agnes, the saintly darling little angel that she was, was given the job of handing over the drink. He sloshed it down, and through their door the girls could hear his teeth clanking against the soft gold of the cup, followed by loud snoring. They moved aside their mother's portrait and vanished in silence.\n\nThat night down in the tree palace, they told Saleem and the lioness the news. Delilah was made guest of honour, and the toucans brought her a special doughnut filled with wild blueberry jam, with a diamond on top.\n\n\u22c7\n\n'It's all right,' said King Alberto to himself, after the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth man entered the palace, full of confidence, only to be dismissed as unsuccessful, unable to recall a jot of what he might have seen or heard. 'There are enough men out there. One of them will crack it, I'm sure.'\n\nBy the failure of the eightieth man, King Alberto was nearly bursting with fury.\n\nOver the next four months, the line outside the palace shrank as, one by one, the men attempted to uncover the secret of the shoes and, one by one, they failed. Their tents were packed up, the smell of street food evaporated, and the entertainers left to find bigger audiences in other kingdoms. Inside the palace, King Alberto bounced up and down on his throne until his backside split a cushion. 'Does every man in Kalia have a radish for a brain?' he ranted, spluttering on the feathers.\n\nHis advisers, particularly Clarence, were delighted that Alberto's scheme was failing, but the girls didn't know how much longer they could get away with drugging a man with dormidon every night. Delilah's supply of the plant was running perilously low. The last time they'd gone to the forest of diamonds, they realised they'd plucked all the ripe plants, and the saplings were still growing.\n\nBut whilst they still had the last of the dormidon to help them, the eleven sisters descended the five hundred and three steps of the staircase, crossed the lagoon in their boats, walked through the three sparkling forests, and danced in their tree palace until their shoes had lost their soles. Saleem and the lioness were always happy to see them, but they always asked them if they had news of Frida, and the sisters always had to say no. The telephone lines were still disconnected, and they hadn't even received a letter.\n\nAnd were they happy?\n\nWell, that's a good question. Their happiness these days was of a strange kind. They were outsmarting those who wanted to ruin their fun, but it was a happiness that lasted in the whirl of a dance and died within a breath. It was _tiring_ having to attend to these men every day. And it wasn't just that. Going to bed in the early hours of morning, they felt as if an anchor of sadness was plunging through them, pinning them to their mattresses. The dancing had stopped being enough. They dearly missed their sister. They wanted her stories, her strength. They wanted to stand on their twenty-four feet together, not their twenty-two.\n\nEventually, the last man turned his back on the palace, thwarted in his attempt to unmask the princesses' secret. The king was exhausted, regretting deeply that he'd ever agreed to such a ridiculous scheme. He blamed his advisers for suggesting it, and they duly apologised.\n\nFor the girls, never had a victory tasted so bittersweet. A bit like pre-boiled dormidon, in fact.\n\nThe palace was quiet. None of the girls felt like dancing. Not even a tiny jig.\n\nAnd then, just like that, everything in Kalia changed forever.\n\nSeven\n\nA Coronation\n\nIt was Vita who heard it first: a faint buzzing in the sky. It was coming, she suspected, from across the sea.\n\nIt was their hour of recreation, and the eleven girls were in the palace garden, wandering aimlessly amongst the palms and hothouse flowers, whose bright pinks no longer cheered them. The high walls that surrounded them cut most of the sunshine at this time of day, and the garden had no view.\n\nBut Vita heard it, all the same. She looked up, and saw only the bright rectangle of cloudless blue above her. Yet the buzzing was getting louder. 'Ariosta,' she said to her sister, 'give me a leg-up against that wall.'\n\n'I beg your pardon?'\n\n' _Listen_. Can't you hear that?'\n\n'It's just an angry bee.'\n\n'Don't be ridiculous. No bee is ever that angry. I want to see!'\n\nIn the end, it took Emelia standing on Flora, standing on Delilah, standing on Mariella, standing on Vita, standing on Bellina, standing on Chessa, standing on Ariosta, standing on Lorna, standing on Polina \u2013 with Agnes, who was the smallest, at the top on Emelia's shoulders \u2013 even to be able to _peer_ over the top of the wall, taking a few precious seconds before the guards came back and all of them tumbled to the ground.\n\n'What is it?' hissed Polina. 'Please hurry up \u2013 my shoulders are killing me!'\n\n'Oh my, oh _my_ ,' said Agnes. 'It's an aeroplane.'\n\n'Is that all? I think I'd rather it was an angry bee.'\n\n'No you wouldn't, Pol \u2013 this one's about to land on the beach!'\n\nAgnes scaled down her sisters' arms and legs, and ran out of the garden to find a better view. The others followed, the plane's engines reverberating deep in their bodies. No one stopped them, because by now everyone had heard that a plane was trying to land on the royal beach, and the palace was in uproar, maids running hither and thither, advisers reaching for their robes, the guards trying to find their weapons. Nothing this exciting had happened in Kalia for _ages_.\n\nFrom a high balcony, the princesses looked down and saw a small biplane circling above the turquoise surf. Whoever was flying it was an expert pilot, making circles and ovals, dipping down and soaring up into the sky. It was as if the pilot wanted to make sure that everyone in Lago Puera had seen this display, and the eleven princesses in particular, seeing as this was happening directly outside the palace. Eventually, it was time for the plane to land properly, and the girls watched its tail scud away before it turned round and came down upon the vast, empty stretch of royal sand that ribboned round the palace. The pilot landed effortlessly with a single bump, and cut the engines.\n\nThe sisters watched with an exquisite mixture of excitement and dread as the palace guards rushed towards the aircraft, their revolvers at the ready. A group of advisers, led by Clarence, hurried after them. The cockpit window opened, and a tall, slender young man pushed his arms up, then his body, then his legs, before jumping down easily on to the sand. He was wearing a pilot's jumpsuit, a flying jacket, a white scarf, a leather cap and a pair of goggles, but even with these covering his face, the princesses could see he was handsome.\n\nThey strained their ears to hear the conversation taking place on the beach. The pilot had pushed his goggles up on to his forehead and was now shading his eyes against the punishing sun as he admired the sea. 'What a beautiful beach,' he said. 'Is this the kingdom of Kalia?'\n\n'It might be,' said Clarence. 'Why do you want to know?'\n\nThe pilot fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper, which fluttered in the breeze. He steadied himself against the wing. 'I'm here to see the king,' he said. 'King Alberto, I believe?'\n\n'Oh, _no_ ,' said Polina. 'He's holding one of Father's decrees!'\n\nBellina groaned. 'I thought we'd seen the last of those silly men.'\n\n'But he's so handsome,' said Chessa. 'And he's got a _plane_.'\n\n'I don't care if he's handsome! I don't care if he's got twenty planes! We still have to make him drink the dormidon!' said Ariosta, crossing her arms. 'Turning up here with one of those dratted pieces of paper \u2013'\n\n'Of course, sweetest,' said Polina, but she also found it rather hard to draw her eyes from the youth, who was by now walking in the centre of the guards, striding up the beach, leaving nimble boot prints in the sand.\n\n'Imagine dancing with _him_ ,' breathed Agnes. 'Oof, I bet he's an excellent dancer.'\n\n\u22c7\n\nThe sisters hid behind a curtain and listened as the pilot spoke with their father.\n\n'And where are you from?' King Alberto asked him.\n\n'From across the sea,' the pilot replied. Now that they were closer to him, the girls could hear his voice properly. It was low and calm, and ever so slightly musical.\n\n'You've got a nice, um... aeroplane,' said King Alberto. He sounded very un-king-like. (He'd given up hope, you understand \u2013 and it's not often you see someone so fine-looking, so confident, someone who looks so perfectly like your future heir.) Alberto felt as if he was looking at one of his heroes from the fairytales he'd read as a little boy. And a pilot, no less. How modern, how daring, to live up in the air!\n\n'Thank you,' said the youth, smiling. 'In my kingdom, we guard our vehicles well \u2013 for battle, mainly.'\n\n'Been in any battles, have you?'\n\n'Of sorts. My people fight a particular type of war.'\n\n'Excellent. And d'you hunt?'\n\n'I have chased illusions, Your Majesty.'\n\nKing Alberto nodded, pretending that he'd understood. He'd never met such an impressive fellow. 'Of course,' he replied. 'And I assume you're here to see if you can uncover the secret of my daughters' shoes?'\n\nThe youth handed over the crumpled decree. 'I am.'\n\n'It'll take a miracle. My daughters have cleared this town of men.'\n\n'Well, miracles happen. And is it still true, sire, that you will crown me if I am successful?'\n\nThe king spread his hands. 'But of course! A king never goes back on his word. Moreover, it's time for my retirement. And you would do perfectly, a good strapping lad like you. You're not... a prince, by any chance?'\n\nThe man bowed. 'A royal since birth, Your Majesty.'\n\nThe king clapped with joy. 'Oh, marvellous, marvellous!' he cried. Clarence craned his neck with new interest towards the young man. King Alberto patted the pilot on the back and went off humming, thinking about the hobbies he would take up once he was no longer king.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThat night, Delilah prepared the last of the dormidon in the girls' little bathroom. And, as usual, Agnes was the one to offer it to the young pilot, this time in a glass of sweet mint tea. The pilot was sitting upright on the camp bed, his back against the wall. He looked thoughtful, and a little sad, his gaze cast towards the floor as he turned the glass of tea round and round in his hands. He wouldn't look at her, but Agnes was used to this by now \u2013 so few of the men who'd come to find their secret had bothered to acknowledge her. But this one hadn't looked at any of the princesses as they'd filed past him; instead, he'd kept his chin down, half his face tucked in his scarf, deep in thought, eyes averted.\n\nAgnes stood in front of him. 'It's very good tea,' she said. 'You should drink it.'\n\n'Thank you,' he mumbled into the scarf.\n\n'Well, go on then. Drink it up.'\n\n'You seem very keen for me to drink this tea, Princess Agnes,' he said, looking into the glass. Fragrant steam rose off the top of the liquid.\n\n'I \u2013' said Agnes.\n\n'Do you like it here, Agnes?' the pilot asked.\n\n'I... used to.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because we used to do experiments, and play music, and explore. Of course, we still have the \u2013' Agnes stopped herself just in time. She'd found it strangely easy to talk to this pilot, but if any of her sisters heard her nearly reveal the tree palace, they'd be furious.\n\n'You still have the secret,' the pilot said, attempting to finish her sentence. 'You've guarded it well. From what I've heard, I'm about the thousandth person to try to uncover it.' He laughed, and Agnes couldn't help grinning.\n\n'Maybe,' she said.\n\n'And do you like being a princess?' the pilot asked.\n\n'Bits of it.'\n\n'What bits?'\n\nAgnes shifted from foot to foot. None of the other men had ever asked her any questions, and she wasn't used to it. 'I like being with my sisters,' she said. 'But you want to take one of us away.'\n\n'Well, I would hope one day you'd leave this palace of your own will. There's a big world out there, Princess Agnes,' the pilot said. 'I've seen a bit of it. It wouldn't be so bad to go and take a look, you know.'\n\nAgnes was confused by this, and grateful that without another word, the young pilot put the glass to his lips and drank down the whole of the dormidon.\n\nIn a few minutes, the girls heard his light breathing. As they listened to the gentle slumber of the pilot on the other side of the door, they felt strangely peaceful. And after Agnes told them what the pilot had said to her, for the first time in ages, the princesses truly wanted to dance.\n\n\u22c7\n\nThe next morning, they agreed that although it was a relief the dormidon had worked, it was a shame the young man would be on his way. They went down to the throne room to watch him be dismissed. He was dressed in his pilot's outfit and goggles, and was holding a small sack at his side. Agnes noticed that his hands were trembling a little.\n\n'So, my boy,' King Alberto said. 'Are you going to tell me the secret?'\n\nAt these words, the young man seemed to hesitate, but then resolved himself. 'Yes, Your Majesty,' he said. 'I am.'\n\nThe girls gasped. They all turned to Delilah. The dormidon had _worked_ , hadn't it? Agnes said she'd watched him drink the whole thing! And they'd heard him snoring on the other side of the door! What on earth was going on? Delilah looked more boiled than the dormidon vine she'd prepared the night before.\n\nKing Alberto could hardly believe his ears. He leaned forward. 'You _are_? Go on then. Spill the magic beans!'\n\n'Your girls go dancing every night,' the young man said.\n\n' _What?_ '\n\nAgnes let out a cry, but the pilot carried on. 'They open a secret door that lies behind the portrait of your wife in their bedroom.'\n\nAlberto's eyes boggled. 'My wife's _portrait_?'\n\n'Indeed, sir. One might say that Queen Laurelia leads the way. They go down five hundred and three steps, through the gloom and the cobwebs, towards a wide lagoon. Your daughter Ariosta swims into the deep water to find six little boats that the girls row over to the other side. They walk through three forests that they found themselves: the first is a forest of silver, which your daughter Chessa discovered. The second is made of gold, which Emelia found when she helped a wounded fox, and the last is made of diamonds. In the forest of diamonds, you'll find the dormidon vine, which your botanist daughter, Delilah, has been using to drug all the suitors who have competed for your kingdom.'\n\nKing Alberto looked towards his daughters in astonishment. 'Ariosta?' he said dumbly. 'I didn't even know you could swim. Chessa? Delilah, have you been... drugging a potential _king_?'\n\nThe girls stared with hatred at the pilot, but the pilot wasn't finished. 'At the end of the forests, Your Majesty, they enter a tree palace.'\n\nAt these words, several of the princesses fell to their knees.\n\n'A _what_?' said King Alberto.\n\nOne of the older advisers, a man called Bernard, began to move forward. 'Sire,' he whispered in the king's ear, 'this is preposterous. Shall we remove the young man now?'\n\n'Your Majesty,' said Clarence, looking with great interest at the pilot. 'May I suggest it wiser to let him speak?'\n\nThe pilot carried on before the king could decide. 'The tree palace is a dance floor in the roots of a tree, where your daughters dance and dine and sing with a lioness and a peacock and all kinds of other animals. They dance to their hearts' content. Their happiness is unlike any I've ever seen. And if I could bottle that happiness up, Your Majesty, I reckon I could fly my plane on it.'\n\n'This is absurd,' said Bernard.\n\n'But is it true?' asked the king.\n\n'As true as I stand before you now. At the end of the evening, they return back the way they came. They fall into bed, and they leave their shoes in a neat row, worn to pieces. And that, Your Majesty, is the sum total of the secret you have been craving, all this time.'\n\nIn the silence that followed, the princesses looked at each other in deep sorrow. The advisers would find the secret door. Their lives would be over. Their father would seal up the staircase, and after this, they would never be allowed out of their bedroom, even for an hour. And who was the pilot going to pick for a wife? Nobody liked him now. Lorna began to weep.\n\nThe king looked stunned. 'A forest made of silver?' he said. 'A forest made of gold?'\n\n'He imagined it,' said Bernard.\n\nThe pilot laughed. 'Maybe I did. But it's real.'\n\n'Do you take His Majesty for a fool?' said Bernard. 'There is no such thing as a tree palace, or dancing with a lioness. A lioness would eat you.'\n\nThe pilot bowed. 'Forgive me, but this particular lioness would not. Although,' he added, looking Bernard up and down, 'she might have a go at you.'\n\n'Pilot,' said Clarence. 'Do you have any proof of these forests? Then at least the matter can be settled.'\n\nThe pilot bent down and opened the sack, and to the girls' horror he pulled out a single silver leaf, unmistakably from the forest. He pointed it at the king, and it shimmered in his hand like a small shield. King Alberto shrank back into the seat of his throne, a little frightened. The pilot put the silver leaf on the floor and pulled out a branch, made of gold. It glittered in the daylight, and he held it up to the king as if it were a ceremonial mace. The king swallowed nervously. And finally, the pilot rummaged in the sack and pulled out a large diamond. He handed it to Alberto, and it winked in his palm like an accusing eye.\n\n'My goodness,' breathed Alberto. 'I've never seen precious metals like it. Girls, do you deny this? Answer me!'\n\nPolina rose from the floor. Something in her looked broken. 'Oh, Father,' she said. 'We only liked a little dancing!'\n\n'Please, please, Father,' said Vita. ' _Please_ don't lock us up again!'\n\nThe king lurched to his feet. 'So it's true! Your insolence, your disobedience, your downright _outrageous_ rebellion makes me sad to call you my daughters! Every night, going down to a dark lagoon, strange forests, talking lionesses \u2013 after all I did to try to keep you safe!'\n\nThe princesses looked at the pilot, their faces portraits of pure distress. 'I understand it was precious to you, ladies,' said the pilot. 'Believe me. But the kingdom of Kalia needs a new ruler, so I really had no choice.'\n\n'How could you?' said Flora. 'We thought you were _nice_!'\n\nKing Alberto turned to the pilot. ' _Finally!_ ' he cried. 'I've found someone worthy to inherit my kingdom! So clever, so brave, so ingenious! Come here, boy. You are a true prince and you shall have your reward. Clarence, see to it that the coronation takes place tomorrow. A small affair. No fuss.'\n\nThe advisers looked at each other. Half of them, including Clarence, seemed to say, _Why not?_ Alberto had always been an impossible king to manage one way or another, and this young man had excellent potential. The other half, led by Bernard, did not look convinced. In fact, they looked very unhappy indeed, and stared at the boy with hostility.\n\n'Are you sure you wish to crown me, sire?' asked the youth.\n\n'I've never been surer of anything in my life!' replied the king. 'And which one of these girls do you want for a wife?'\n\nThe pilot faltered, turning to the eleven girls, who scowled at him in unison. Agnes thought she saw a look of dismay pass across his face, which he quickly tried to hide.\n\n'I'm not sure I'll ever know how to pick,' he said.\n\nAlberto beamed. 'Crown first, bride later?' he asked the pilot.\n\n'That couldn't be more perfect,' came the young man's reply.\n\n\u22c7\n\nClarence was an efficient organiser. The coronation was prepared for the next day, in the throne room. King Alberto even ordered the black drapes to be removed and the dust balls to be swept away from the legs of his throne. The maids had done a fabulous job in cleaning the place, and the crystal chandelier sparkled in the glorious light.\n\nThere was just one small problem.\n\nUnbeknownst to the pilot, or King Alberto and the eleven girls, Bernard, the most suspicious of the king's advisers, decided to check whether the pilot's story was true: namely that, behind Laurelia's portrait, he would find a door that led down five hundred and three steps to a wide lagoon, three forests and a tree palace. Once the princesses were in the throne room downstairs, Bernard snuck into the girls' cell and wrenched the portrait of Queen Laurelia from off the wall.\n\nThere was no sign of a door.\n\nBernard looked and looked. He tapped the wall; he ran his hands over its stone \u2013 but he couldn't find a thing.\n\nAll he could see was a solid wall.\n\nIt was a trick! To think the future of Kalia was to be handed over like this to a complete stranger, and a liar at that! About what else had the pilot deceived them? 'Never trust a man who arrives by plane,' Bernard muttered to himself as he scurried furiously out of the girls' bedroom and through the palace to tell King Alberto, before it was too late.\n\nThe eleven princesses were, by now, seated on gold chairs to the left of the throne, with the advisers in favour of the pilot's coronation standing behind them. Alberto was sitting in the throne, a seat in which he had sat for years, and which he was soon to vacate. The king had even woken up his old herald, who hadn't played his trumpet since the passing of Queen Laurelia. He stood at Alberto's side, his trumpet waiting. There was an atmosphere of intense expectation.\n\nWhen the pilot entered the throne room, hush descended. Alberto stood up and removed the crown from his own head.\n\nFrom far off, somewhere in the palace, came the sound of hurried footsteps.\n\nThe pilot approached the throne. As he knelt before Alberto, the girls could hardly breathe. The herald blew on his trumpet: a triumphant, trilling fanfare with suitably royal pomp.\n\nThe hurried footsteps were getting louder, reverberating along the corridor.\n\nAlberto lifted the crown high. 'With this, I name you King of Kalia,' he said to the pilot, and the old man encircled the young man's head with the heft of the crown.\n\n'Stop!' cried a voice, and Bernard burst into the throne room. Everyone turned to him. 'There isn't any door!'\n\nBut Bernard was seconds too late. Kalia had a new king. Clarence breathed an audible sigh, his thin face flushed with relief.\n\nAgnes turned to the windows. The sea wind was blowing freshly through, the curtains danced in joy, and the sunlight in the room had become, yes, _brighter_. She blinked. Was that \u2013 was that \u2013 a _toucan_ that just flew by? When she looked again, it was gone.\n\nThe adviser Bernard clung to the curtains, severely out of breath.\n\n'And once done, it cannot be undone,' said the pilot, rising to his feet and surveying the room. He looked very calm, and he smiled at the girls. For all their sorrow, they had to admit to themselves that the crown suited him very well; it shone as brightly on his pilot's cap as the circle of oaks in the forest of gold.\n\n'Sire, sire,' panted Bernard, letting go of the curtain and staggering towards Alberto. 'This is all a terrible mistake. There's been a trick. There isn't any door! I've looked! There isn't any tree palace. It's nonsense. This boy was lying to you. You've handed your crown to a liar!'\n\nAlberto blinked and shook his head. 'A liar?'\n\n'There _is_ a tree palace,' said the new king. 'I've been there, several times.'\n\nThe princesses stared at each other in confusion. _Several_ times? But this pilot had only been with them for one night.\n\n'I want to go there myself,' announced Alberto. 'If it _isn't_ there, I'll take my crown back.'\n\n'Ah. It isn't possible to enter the tree palace simply because you want to,' said the new king.\n\n'You see! You see!' said Bernard. 'Because it isn't there!'\n\n'Not at all,' said the new king. 'You have to be a necessary guest, that's all.'\n\nAgnes looked with curiosity at the pilot. Had he been a necessary guest too? 'It _is_ there,' she said, forgetting in her anger at Bernard that she was supposed to keep the tree palace secret. 'You just have to know where to look.'\n\n'Yes,' said Polina, drawing close to Agnes's side. 'You saw the gold branch, Father. The silver leaf, the diamond.'\n\nAlberto looked from daughter to daughter in confusion. 'I did,' he said. 'It's true.'\n\nBernard scoffed. 'He could have got those shining trinkets from any old market on his way here.'\n\nAlberto looked panicked. 'That's true too.'\n\n'Sire,' soothed Clarence. 'Think of your retirement plans.'\n\nAs if to settle the argument, the new king reached into his pockets to show a worn-out pair of shoes, with holes in their soles. 'If I have deceived you, sire,' he said to Alberto, 'it is over one thing only.' He held the shoes out towards the old king. 'Perhaps you will remember these?'\n\nAlberto peered at the bashed-up shoes, and turned pale. He started huffing and puffing. When Agnes saw the shoes for herself, and realised how the new king might have that particular pair in his possession, she gasped.\n\nThe new king dropped the worn-out shoes on the throne room floor.\n\nHe lifted off his crown, his pilot's cap and goggles, never once taking his eyes off Alberto. With a twist of his fingers, long locks of billowing hair fell to his shoulders, tumbling from their bindings \u2013 and Frida stood before them.\n\nFrida, their brand new king.\n\n'I suppose you'd better call me queen of Kalia, actually,' Frida said to the stunned gathering, as she twirled her pilot's goggles on her index finger, placing the crown back on her head with her free hand.\n\nBernard took one look at her and fainted to the floor.\n\n'I knew it!' cried Agnes.\n\nAlberto staggered away. 'Frida?' he uttered. 'But \u2013'\n\n'I knew you'd come back,' said Agnes. Lorna fell to her knees in tears, and the other sisters laughed and whooped around the room.\n\n'Queen Frida! Queen Frida!' Vita chanted.\n\n'I promised, didn't I?' said Frida \u2013 expert pilot, new queen of Kalia \u2013 as she opened her arm s. Her sisters ran towards her, each of them hugging her tight, sobbing into her shoulders, kissing her face, patting her flying jacket and trying on her goggles.\n\n'Where have you been?' Agnes said. 'How have you \u2013'\n\n'Didn't I say, Aggie? It's a big world out there,' said Frida, smiling. 'I'll tell you about it later.'\n\n'This is impossible,' said Alberto, stamping his foot. 'No daughter of mine knows how to fly a plane!'\n\n'Oh, Father. This one does. It took me a few weeks, but I managed it.'\n\n'Frida, give me back my crown!'\n\n'I'm afraid I won't be doing that, Father,' said Frida firmly. 'And as you once pointed out to me: with this crown, I am the law.'\n\n'But \u2013'\n\n'And Clarence is right. Thank you, Clarence. What about all those hobbies you wanted to take up in retirement?'\n\n'But \u2013!'\n\n'You may keep the diamond as a token of my appreciation.'\n\nAlberto stared at his daughter the queen. The princesses watched with fascination as their father seemed to wrestle with him self without actually moving. His mouth bobbed open and closed like a confused fish. His eyes boggled. He looked like a man having a tug of war with his own soul. And then he laughed \u2013 yes, Alberto, the man who had not laughed for months and months, began to shake, big belly hoots, wheezing squeals of what they dared to hope was joy. 'Oh my, oh my!' he said.\n\n'Are you quite well, sire?' said Clarence.\n\nThe old man stared at the adviser. 'Quite well!' he said. 'I think I may never have been better!' He opened his palm and looked at the diamond resting in the centre, glinting and winking at him like a promise of a future he'd never dared admit. Then, to their astonishment, he ran from the room, tripping over the figure of Bernard, who was still lying in shock on the floor.\n\nNo one could stop the old king; he couldn't get out of there fast enough. They could hear the patter of his footsteps down the corridor, interspersed with occasional hoots and whoops, noises he hadn't made since he was a boy.\n\n'Queen Frida,' said Clarence, his thin face alight with pleasure as he emerged from the cluster of astonished staff. He knelt. 'A great leader stands before us,' he said. 'It shall be an honour to serve you.'\n\nThe other advisers looked at each other, wondering whether to follow Clarence's lead.\n\n'A queen?' whispered one. 'This is a bit... new.'\n\n'How glad I am I didn't call the new monarch a liar. Poor, stupid Bernard!' whispered another.\n\n'But she isn't really new, is she?' said yet another. 'Queen Frida is still the same brave, clever, thoughtful person she's always been.'\n\n'Indeed. And who knows Kalia better? No one.'\n\nThey all fell to their knees before her.\n\n'Thank you, Clarence. Thank you, gentlemen,' said Frida. 'But, please, get up. And stop whispering. We've got so much to do.'\n\nEight\n\nPeacocks and Paw Prints\n\nKalia was a very different place after Frida became queen. Bernard and a few others who weren't in agreement with a queen being in charge, particularly one so talented, were dismissed. Frida, aided by Clarence, filled her palace with people from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. She became an excellent leader, and a great favourite am ongst the Kalian citizens: fair, thoughtful, open-minded and patient, not without a little bit of spark to get her through the difficult times. She can still be seen occasionally, flying in her biplane over the city of Lago Puera, dipping and soaring over the famous Kalian sea.\n\nAbout a month into her reign, she built a dance floor in the palace. It has black and white tiles on the floor, and multicoloured lights which bob like fireflies, and every Friday all the people of Kalia are invited to come and dance. The food's pretty good too.\n\nAlberto eventually recovered from his fit of giggles. He'd realised two things: firstly, that his daughter had been cleverer than him all along, and secondly, that his time as king was indeed over, and he could have some fun. Laughter seemed the best solution to these two realisations, and he packed his own suitcase and went off for a year or two of sightseeing. He took the diamond.\n\nThat was several years ago, in fact, and the princesses are still wondering if he'll ever come back. They each secretly, bafflingly, miss him. That's parents for you. The lioness was right: Alberto wasn't bad. No one's entirely bad, but they do get a little lost. And perhaps \u2013 just like his eldest daughter \u2013 in leaving, Alberto has found him self. He sends postcards from every country that he visits, and the palace fridge is covered with his missives.\n\nPolina was appointed palace astronomer, and Delilah is head gardener; she still keeps a strong supply of dorm idon, just in case, and advises the citizens on their herbs and vegetables. Bellina is chief of foreign affairs, and since her appointment Kalia's wars with neighbouring kingdom shave ended. Emelia is a vet, and oversees the health of Kalia's livestock. Ariosta is a famous artist who shows her paintings around the world. Mariella keeps the kingdom's budget in order, and Chessa gives singing recitals and occasionally tours. When she's home in Lago Puera, the palace doors are open every afternoon for musicians to come and play. Lorna has established several schools for the people of the city, where lessons are available for all Kalian boys and girls. Vita runs a theatre on the beach, and every summer the famous Kalian festival lasts for weeks on end. If you time your trip well, you can see some excellent plays. Flora is the palace librarian, and people flock from miles around to come and find a cosy nook, where they while away the hours with her excellent choice of books.\n\nAnd Agnes? The one with the typewriter, who wanted to tell stories?\n\nLet's just say I managed it.\n\nAs for the tree palace, you may well be wondering whether it really existed. People often do. The old king's adviser Bernard claimed it didn't, but that was only because he couldn't find it.\n\nThe truth is, we were so tired the night after Frida's coronation that we completely forgot to check if the door was still there. And with Frida crowned queen, and so many things for us to do, we never looked for that particular door again. We got older, became women of the world, our energies directed to the lives we had made. Yes, often, we thought about the tree palace, about Saleem and the lioness, and the toucan waiters, and the fun of dancing. But we were so busy upstairs that I must confess our thoughts about it lessened as the years went on. I think it is also true to say that none of us particularly wanted to revisit that windowless room, where we'd been so unfairly cooped up for months on end.\n\nThat is, until yesterday, when a strange thing happened, and I had to write all this down.\n\nYesterday morning, a huge box was delivered to the palace door. I enquired as to who had delivered it, but the guard on duty had seen nobody. Neither was there any message. Except \u2013 next to the box, a feather had been laid, belonging to a peacock. And by its side, marked in the earth, was a paw print the size of a dinner plate. Gingerly, I opened the box. Inside was a pyramid of jam doughnuts.\n\nI stood there, looking at the doughnuts \u2013 suddenly so familiar! \u2013 and my heart was thumping hard. I rem embered the way Frida whirled and twirled under the multicoloured lights, the way Ariosta swam across the lagoon, the way Emelia saved that little fox. It felt so long ago, and yet it could have been last week. Was someone watching me? I turned around, scanning the horizon \u2013 the Kalian sea, the shore, the green hills \u2013 but there was no one to be seen.\n\nThat afternoon, I took the box to Frida, who had just finished a meeting in the throne room with Clarence. The other princesses were all out of the city on various missions. Queen Frida's eyes lit up when she saw the doughnuts, and I told her how they'd appeared earlier in the day with no explanation, but for a peacock feather and a paw print.\n\nFrida reached into the box and lifted one out. It was newly baked, and the sugar that dusted it glittered like tiny diamonds. 'You don't think... ?' She trailed off.\n\nI looked at her. 'That's exactly what I think,' I said.\n\nShe hesitated. 'Do you know, Agnes, there are times when I might be brushing my teeth, or about to hold a meeting, or writing a letter \u2013 and I swear, I swear, I can hear a lioness's roar.'\n\n'Me too!'\n\n'Oh, thank goodness. I thought I might be mad.'\n\n'It feels very far off, but strangely, I can feel it deep within me.'\n\nMy sister the queen looked at me. Time had barely aged her, and she still wore exquisite shoes. 'That's exactly how it is for me too,' she said. 'And I've been thinking about it, Aggie. I've no doubt that the tree palace is still there, that Saleem and the lioness and the toucan waiters and the jazz band are waiting for their next necessary guests. For although some things exist in places out of reach, that doesn't mean they cannot be.'\n\n(My sister really is a wise queen.)\n\n'I always thought I'd never be able to go back. But shall we... shall we go and look tonight?' she went on, nibbling the doughnut. 'Shall we go to that poky room and look behind Mother's portrait?'\n\nI thought of Bernard the old adviser, pushing aside the portrait of Queen Laurelia and finding nothing but a solid wall. I thought of the twelve of us when we were younger, finding the cold staircase and descending the five hundred and three steps to a world that gave us so much happiness. I was frightened to think of what we might find, but then I remembered the box of glittering doughnuts.\n\nI must have been silent a long while, for Frida looked at me with concern. 'Wise to pursue?' she asked me.\n\nI smiled. 'Wise to pursue,' I replied, and we agreed on a time when the rest of the palace would be fast asleep.\n\nAnd as I look at my clock, I see the hour has come. It's very dark and quiet outside in Kalia at this time of night; thanks to Bellina's international efforts, a peace has reigned for years. Frida's footsteps are coming up the corridor, and I see the golden glow of her lantern pooling. I can feel the old thrum of excitement in my heart. We'll walk the corridors of her palace together, my sister and I, hand in hand, the lioness's cry an echo in our ears. We'll find that old room and approach that portrait of our mother. We'll push it aside. And we will see.\n\nBLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS\n\nBloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\n50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP, UK\n\nThis electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nBLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nFirst published in Great Britain in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nText copyright \u00a9 Peebo & Pilgrim Ltd, 2018\n\nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 Angela Barrett, 2018\n\nJessie Burton and Angela Barrett have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author and lllustrator of this work\n\nAll rights reserved  \nYou may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library\n\nISBN: 978-1-4088-8691-5 (HB)   \nISBN: 978-1-4088-8690-8 (eBook)\n\nTo find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletter.\n\n#\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Dedication\n  4. Contents\n  5. One: Princess Frida and the Mourning Curtain\n  6. Two: King Alberto's Bad Decision\n  7. Three: The Secret\n  8. Four: A Dance and a Doughnut\n  9. Five: King Alberto's Second Bad Decision\n  10. Six: Delilah and the Dormidon\n  11. Seven: A Coronation\n  12. Eight: Peacocks and Paw Prints\n  13. eCopyright\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nPRAISE FOR\n\nGEMINI CELL\n\n\"The best novel [Cole's] written so far . . . A military fantasy that combines intense personal anguish with elements of actual horror.\"\n\n\u2014Tor.com\n\n\"Myke Cole's novels are like crack: they're highly addictive, and this one is no exception.\"\n\n\u2014BuzzFeed\n\n\"Intense and explosive\u2014Cole tells a hell of a story.\"\n\n\u2014Mark Lawrence, international bestselling author of _The Liar's Key_\n\n\"The story is a powerful one . . . it takes some oft-maligned tropes of military adventure fiction and shows us how those things are supposed to be done.\"\n\n\u2014Howard Tayler, award-winning creator of the webcomic _Schlock Mercenary_\n\n\"Think Vince Flynn plus a whole lot of magic mixed in and baked in hellfire, and you've got the gist of how awesome Myke Cole's new series is shaping up to be.\"\n\n\u2014Michael Patrick Hicks, author of _Convergence_\n\n\"Cole's books are an intriguing mix of fantasy and military fiction . . . [ _Gemini Cell_ ] is outstanding.\"\n\n\u2014SFcrowsnest\n\n\"With each book, Myke Cole levels up, and _Gemini Cell_ is no exception. This is Cole's best work to date . . . A fast-moving, page-turning story that you'll read late into the night.\"\n\n\u2014Fantasy-Faction\n\n\"Myke Cole is a fantastic author who gets better with every book he writes.\"\n\n\u2014Whatchamacallit Reviews\n\n\"This is some really good, exciting military\/urban fantasy. Cole's style is fast-paced, immensely enjoyable, and delivers on both action and character in equal measure.\"\n\n\u2014SFRevu\n\nPRAISE FOR THE SHADOW OPS NOVELS\n\n\"It's not _just_ military . . . It's just a great book.\"\n\n\u2014Patrick Rothfuss, #1 _New York Times_ bestselling author of _The Slow Regard of Silent Things_\n\n\"Hands down, the best military fantasy I've ever read.\"\n\n\u2014Ann Aguirre, _New York Times_ bestselling author of _Breakout_\n\n\"Fast-paced and thrilling from start to finish . . . military fantasy like you've never seen it before.\"\n\n\u2014Peter V. Brett, international bestselling author of _The Skull Throne_\n\n\"Excellent, action-packed novels that combine elements of contemporary magic and superhero fiction with the type of atmosphere genre readers usually only get in military SF.\"\n\n\u2014Tor.com\n\n\"Arguably one of the definitive military fantasy novels.\"\n\n\u2014The Founding Fields\n\n\"[Cole] proves that an action blockbuster can have heart and emotional depth, while never skimping on the fireworks and explosions.\"\n\n\u2014Fantasy-Faction\n\n\"Myke Cole is an absolute gift to urban fantasy and military fantasy subgenres.\"\n\n\u2014Fantasy Book Critic\n\n# Ace Books by Myke Cole\n\nSHADOW OPS: CONTROL POINT\n\nSHADOW OPS: FORTRESS FRONTIER\n\nSHADOW OPS: BREACH ZONE\n\nGEMINI CELL\n\nJAVELIN RAIN\n\n** **\n\n**An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC**\n\n**375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014**\n\nJAVELIN RAIN\n\nAn Ace Book \/ published by arrangement with the author\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 by Myke Cole.\n\nPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.\n\nACE\u00ae is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nThe \"A\" design is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nFor more information, visit penguin.com.\n\neBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63676-3\n\nPUBLISHING HISTORY\n\nAce mass-market edition \/ April 2016\n\nCover illustration by Larry Rostant.\n\nCover design by Diana Kolsky.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nVersion_1\nFor Peat and Pete,   \nmy brother and my brother\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nWriting novel acknowledgments is always a fraught exercise. So many people other than the author are involved in making a successful book that it is inevitable you'll miss someone. Any omissions are my own, and I hope those slighted will accept my apology.\n\nI want to single out for praise my tireless teams at Ace\/Roc and Headline, and my agents at JABberwocky and Zeno. Thanks also to my audio publishers at Recorded Books and W. F. Howes, and extra-special thanks to GraphicAudio, whose gorgeous full-scale radio dramas have brought my books to life in a way I never imagined possible. Thanks also to Larry Rostant, who similarly evokes my world through imagery. I see my world because of you, and I am incredibly grateful.\n\nThanks are due to my beta readers, and in particular to Mallory O'Meara, who weathered the storms of my moods as she applied the same critical lens with which she brings incredible films to life. This book would not be worth reading if not for her.\n\nThanks also to my two tribes: the nerds and the military\/police, both separate and intersecting, simultaneously teaching me to fight and giving me something to fight for.\n\nAnd Peat, once more lighting the way and covering my six. Not a day goes by that I don't remember how very much I owe you.\n\n# CONTENTS\n\n_Praise for Myke Cole_\n\n_Ace Books by Myke Cole_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n_Epigraph_\n\n_Author's Note_\n\nCHAPTER I: THE PLAN IS SOUTH\n\nCHAPTER II: HUNTING THE DEAD\n\nCHAPTER III: CALIFORNIA SUNSHINE\n\nCHAPTER IV: BRIEFING\n\nCHAPTER V: TOUCHING DOWN\n\nCHAPTER VI: MAMA DADOU\n\nCHAPTER VII: PATCHING UP\n\nCHAPTER VIII: WHAT IT'S LIKE\n\nCHAPTER IX: HONESTLY, OFFICER\n\nCHAPTER X: COLLATERAL DAMAGE\n\nCHAPTER XI: TOGETHER\n\nCHAPTER XII: PURE GOLD\n\nCHAPTER XIII: PROGRAM REVIEW\n\nCHAPTER XIV: ON TO THE LIVING\n\nCHAPTER XV: ALL THE DEAD CAN DO IS PROTECT\n\nCHAPTER XVI: DOESN'T ANYONE KNOCK ANYMORE?\n\nCHAPTER XVII: THE PLAN IS WEST\n\nCHAPTER XVIII: PUSHED TOO FAR\n\nCHAPTER XIX: THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE\n\nCHAPTER XX: WHY DID YOU GO?\n\nCHAPTER XXI: LAST RESORT\n\nCHAPTER XXII: NEW MANAGEMENT\n\nCHAPTER XXIII: RETURN\n\nCHAPTER XXIV: THE FLIGHT IN\n\nCHAPTER XXV: COMBINED\n\nCHAPTER XXVI: SO OTHERS MIGHT LIVE\n\nEPILOGUE: COASTLINE\n\n_Glossary of Military Acronyms and Slang_\nThe term \"Javelin\" denotes the seizure, theft, or loss of a national security asset with strategic impact. The term is followed by an explanatory code word indicating the severity of the incident and the nature of the response. Code word \"Dry\" indicates executive authorization of a diplomatic or clandestine response, with no action required from major commands. Code word \"Drizzle\" indicates a combined response involving assets from the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.\n\nCode word \"Rain\" indicates a crisis of existential proportions representing a direct and pressing threat to the continued security of the nation. Javelin Rain incidents authorize any and all means necessary to bring the matter to a resolution as quickly and completely as possible.\n\n\u2014CHAIRMAN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF MANUAL 3250.03B  \nJOINT REPORTING STRUCTURE EVENT AND INCIDENT REPORTING\n\nThe fear of death follows from the fear of life.\n\n\u2014MARK TWAIN\n\n# AUTHOR'S NOTE\n\nA glossary of military acronyms and slang can be found in the back of this book.\n\n# CHAPTER I\n\nTHE PLAN IS SOUTH\n\nJames Schweitzer's bare foot came down on a splintered root that punctured his sole, digging an inch-deep furrow in the gray flesh. His senses registered the cut, assessed the damage, dismissed it.\n\nHe felt no pain. The furrow in his flesh didn't bleed.\n\nSchweitzer knew he should be horrified by what he had become. What little clothing remained on him was shredded, filthy, and stinking. The body beneath was a landscape of puckered purple-white scars, dotted with darker gray rents, wounds that would never heal, revealing the yellowed articulation of the bone beneath. His face was a dark horror, a parody of his features stretched over a skull that was mostly metal.\n\nHis eyes were gone. In their place burned twin silver orbs, thimbles full of metal-colored fire.\n\nHe was a Hollywood zombie. No, movie zombies shambled. Schweitzer picked his way through the forest as nimble as a cat, his body instinctively low, hands up and bone claws extended, ready for the fight that might find him at any moment.\n\nHis wife came behind him, their son slung across her chest. Schweitzer had tried to carry him, but Patrick wouldn't have it. Sarah Schweitzer knew her husband despite what death had made of him, years of love bound up in the magic that linked their souls, but Patrick was just a boy. Maybe, one day, he would develop the arcane sympathy that connected Schweitzer and his wife, but he hadn't yet, and he squalled and fought whenever Schweitzer came near.\n\n_Keep them alive._ The words were a mantra, repeating in his mind. Over and over again, _Keep them alive._ His magically augmented hearing picked up the steady beating of Sarah's and Patrick's hearts, the rhythm keeping him from panic, reminding him that he hadn't lost them. Or had he? He listened to Sarah's panting breaths as she struggled to keep up. She was alive.\n\nHe wasn't. His embrace was cold, his skin hard from the glycerol they'd used to keep his veins inflated and resistant to wear. Even if they shook off the Gemini Cell, found a way to escape them forever, he couldn't stand at her side at art shows, laugh with her at parties, take her out to dinner. No matter how much he loved her, he couldn't be a husband to her anymore.\n\nHe glanced back over his shoulder, and his spiritual stomach seized as he realized how far behind him she was. Sarah was young and fit, but the monsters pursuing them were immortal, needing neither rest nor food. She stumbled, wheezed. Schweitzer forced himself to slow, to wait for her. The need to run was almost overwhelming; the dead muscles in his legs twitched with the desire to move on.\n\nFor the hundredth time since they'd fled together, he considered telling her to leave him, to take Patrick and find some place to lie low, to start over. He dismissed the idea as soon as it arose. He was the Gemini Cell's primary target, but they would never suffer someone knowing as much as Sarah did. As for Patrick, they'd either kill him or take him as their own, and Schweitzer wasn't going to let either of those things happen. The Gemini Cell had all the resources of a special operations regiment and intelligence service combined, but that paled in comparison to their Gold Operators, feral monsters, all as immortal and superpowered as Schweitzer himself.\n\nNo, Sarah and Patrick were safest with him. Only Schweitzer was strong enough to protect them. Grief for all he had lost ripped through him yet again, and yet again he quashed it. Grief was an emotion for the living. As was anger, or regret, or joy. He couldn't afford those luxuries now. He could take one thing from his former life: his oath as a Navy SEAL. _So others might live._\n\nHe'd died trying to protect Sarah and Patrick. He'd been fortunate enough to get a second crack at it, and by God, he'd take it.\n\n_So others might live._\n\nHe turned his focus to the woods around him, leaping over a fallen log, landing on a stone barely larger than his foot and balancing there. The magic that animated his corpse gave him heightened senses. He could see for miles in different spectrums. He could sniff out a rose petal buried in a garbage heap. Now, he dialed his hearing out, straining to catch the sounds of dirt-bike engines or helicopter rotors, anything that might indicate that the Cell's agents were closing in.\n\nNothing. His boosted senses brought him only the sounds of beetles foraging in the dead leaves beneath them, the wind rushing in the canopy over their heads. The only smells were leaf mold and wildflowers and fresh water a long way off. No trace of humanity.\n\nThey were deep in nearly two million acres of forest spanning three states. Years of running counterinsurgency ops in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan had taught Schweitzer firsthand how hard it was to locate a single man on the run, even one with a family. All the drone cameras and ground teams backed by largest defense budget in the world couldn't make the haystack any smaller, the needles any bigger. He nodded and pressed on.\n\n\"Jim!\" Sarah sounded winded and a lot farther behind him than he'd realized. He stopped, whirled.\n\nShe was bent at the waist, hands on her hips, breathing in labored gasps. Her pink hair was clotted with leaves and mud, her T-shirt ripped and filthy. Patrick flailed in his makeshift sling, all cried out but still struggling.\n\n\"Wait . . .\" she panted. \"Jesus . . . fucking . . . Christ . . . just wait . . . one . . . minute.\"\n\nHe had pushed her too hard, too fast. He had forgotten mortal limitations. It was a reminder of the chasm that separated them, and it tore his heart anew. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Patrick and I aren't like you.\" She straightened, spat a long streamer of mucus-flecked saliva, and suppressed a coughing fit. \"We can't keep going like this.\"\n\nHer skin was pale and waxy, her eyes fever bright. He was hurting her, as his frequent absences had in life, all the missed art shows, her long nights at home alone caring for Patrick while he was away on ops. And now she was condemned to run like an animal, hounded by the undead, all because of him.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said again, hoping that his tone conveyed just how much. \"I'll slow down.\"\n\nBut he didn't want to slow down. The Gemini Cell wouldn't rest until it had them. He turned to go.\n\nSarah didn't move. \"Where are we going?\"\n\nSchweitzer realized that he didn't know. Since they'd won the battle at Drew's farm and fled into the forest, his only thought had been an animal litany of _get away get away get away_. He cursed himself. That was feral thinking, better suited to jinn like Ninip, the monster who'd shared his own corpse. At last, he'd figured out how to exorcise the jinn and take full control of his body, but he wondered if Ninip hadn't corrupted him, warped him with its predator lust.\n\n\"Away,\" Schweitzer said. \"We have to put miles between us and our last known position. They'll be launching from that old man's house.\" Drew and Martha, kindly old retirees who had taken Sarah in, and paid the ultimate price for it. More deaths laid at Schweitzer's door.\n\n\"Away?\" Sarah asked. \"That's the plan? We have to do better than that.\"\n\nShe was right, of course, but the feral side of him, the jinn side, as he was coming to think of it, snarled. She was slowing them down. \"We can't stop,\" he said.\n\n\"Your goal here is to protect Patrick and I, and you're not going to succeed at that if we both drop dead of exhaustion. We need to rest.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I . . .\"\n\n\"No, Jim. We are in this together. If you want to help me, that's fine. I accept your help, but I won't accept a leash. We need to come up with a plan.\"\n\nOne advantage to death was that Schweitzer had no trouble keeping his emotion off his face. He swallowed his anger and frustration, doubly intense because he knew she was right.\n\n\"Fine,\" he said, keeping his voice neutral. \"The plan is that we keep moving as fast as we can, but slow enough that you and Patrick can keep up.\"\n\n\"That's not a plan.\"\n\n\"Sarah, they're coming.\"\n\n\"How are they coming? On foot? By helicopter? On horseback? How many of them? More monsters or people this time?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, because the truth was that he didn't know. Death had given him superhuman physical capabilities, but it hadn't sharpened his mind. She was smarter than he was. Always had been. It was one of the many reasons he loved her.\n\nSarah sighed. \"Didn't you say they were the government?\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded.\n\n\"The government controls the entire country, Jim,\" she went on. \"That means that while we're getting away from them in one direction, we're heading toward them in another. This is _their_ country. If they're as powerful as you say they are, they'll be able to tap police in any town we come to. There isn't anywhere to run and we can't stay in the woods forever.\"\n\n\"Then we get out of the country. We slip across the border into Mexico, or make our way to Florida and stow away on a ship bound for Cuba or Haiti.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"I ran operations against drug cartels and human smuggling networks for years. I still know some of the players. I know how they operate. Let's get down there and then I can figure out a way to get us across the border.\"\n\n\"We need more specifics, Jim. How are we going to get across the border? I know you're trying to protect us, but we need a real plan.\"\n\n\"At least my plan comes with a direction. The plan is south. If you've got a better one, I'm all ears. For now, all we can do is keep moving. This forest is enormous, and that'll buy us some time at least.\"\n\n\"We can't keep moving unless we have somewhere to move.\"\n\n\"All right, then where do we move, Sarah? What place is safe for us now?\"\n\n\"No place, Jim. That's my whole point. We can't hide from this threat forever.\"\n\nSchweitzer swallowed his frustration, the need to keep going like an itch in his soul. \"Then what do you propose we do?\"\n\nSarah swallowed. Schweitzer could tell she was choking back tears. \"What do you do with a threat you can't escape?\"\n\nThe itch vanished. Schweitzer narrowed his eyes. \"You stop it.\"\n\n\"You stop it,\" Sarah repeated. \"We have to go on offense.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I spent months in that facility. I saw the guns, the people, the Gold Operators. We can't go up against that.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Sarah said. \" _We_ can't.\"\n\nSchweitzer's dead stomach clenched. \"What the hell are you talking about?\"\n\nSarah was silent for a long time. When she finally spoke, the defeat in her voice made him cringe. \"Jim, you're dead. Patrick and I are alive.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" Schweitzer snarled, knowing exactly what she meant, knowing that she was right. He could feel the grief down the magical link between them, the desperation, but it didn't change the sinking feeling in his own soul. _She wants me to go._\n\n\"You know what it means,\" she said. \"It means that Patrick and I hunker down somewhere, and you find a way to make all this stop. You found me even though hell itself stood between us. You'll find me again.\"\n\n\"You saw what those things can do. You expect me to go up against an army of them by myself?\"\n\n\"I saw you take on four of them and win.\" Three. Sarah had destroyed one, but Schweitzer didn't correct her.\n\n\"There are more than four! And that doesn't even count the living enemy.\"\n\n\"I don't know what else to do, Jim. I don't know how else we can stop this. Please . . . I . . . I love you, but you're dead, Jim. Patrick is alive. Protecting him has to be our first priority.\"\n\nPatrick began to squall, pulling at his mother's shirt. Schweitzer searched his own mind desperately for a retort, for a way to make her stay with him, but the grief and anger clouded everything. \"You're safest with me.\"\n\n\"You can't honestly believe that. The Cell wants _you_ , Jim. If I go on TV, people can roll their eyes at a widow gone mad with grief, but nobody who sees you can deny what you are. Wherever you are, they will come. It's the government. They don't give up. They don't run out of money. You have to stop this threat.\"\n\n\"I won't leave you.\"\n\n\"Damn it, Jim,\" she shouted, tears glistening in her eyes. \"You think this is easy for me? What about Patrick? Are you going to drop him off at school? Are you going to help him with his math homework? Do you expect him to spend the rest of his life running?\"\n\nThe grief funneling down the link between them triggered his own. His dead body still possessed the phantom limbs of life: he felt the shade of a tightening throat, the pricking of phantom tears at the corners of his eyes. His voice came out as a strangled cry. \"Sarah, please. I fought so hard to get back to you. I can't lose you again.\"\n\nShe put her head in one hand, hugged Patrick tightly with the other, and wept.\n\n\"You're dead, Jim. We can't make love, we can't be together. You can't raise Patrick. We'll only slow you down. We're already slowing you down.\"\n\n\"I can keep you both safe.\"\n\n\"Jim, please. Please don't make this harder. If you push me, I'll just stay, and that's no life for either of us. Just . . . just . . . go and find a way to make them stop. Patrick and I are only human. We can't fight them. You can.\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"I love you too. When this is over, you'll find me again, and we can . . . figure something out.\"\n\nWith that shred of a promise, thin as tissue, Schweitzer's SEAL side took control. _She's right. If you want to keep her, keep Patrick safe, you have to find a way to shut the Cell down._ \"Chang.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"We can trust Steve Chang. He has the training. He has steel. He can keep you safe while I finish this. I wouldn't ask him to turn his coat, and I don't know that he ever would, but he loves you and Patrick as much as I do. He'll protect you.\"\n\n\"Jim,\" Sarah sobbed anew. The feelings along the link between them were tangled now, a riot of terror and love and grief and rage.\n\n\"What? What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Steve's dead.\"\n\nSchweitzer's mouth hadn't had saliva since the day he died, but he felt it had gone dry just the same. More phantom limbs, shades of the life he'd once had. \"No.\"\n\nSarah was too overcome with weeping to answer. She only nodded.\n\n\"Did you see a body?\"\n\n\"I don't need to.\"\n\n\"Then how do you know?\"\n\n\"I _know_ , Jim. The same way I knew that you were alive. I could feel it.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Schweitzer could hear the anger in his voice, the desperation, couldn't stop either. \"Sarah, are you _sure_?\"\n\nShe wept again, nodded. \"Completely.\"\n\nSchweitzer was too crushed by his own loss to focus on the tangle of emotions coming down the link from her. Steve Chang, his best friend, his teammate, gone. He struggled for a long moment before he found his voice again.\n\n\"How did he die?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I just know that he did.\" Sarah's emotions became pinched, frightened. \"He came around a lot at first, when we thought you were dead, but then he just disappeared. Chief Ahmad said he'd been deployed.\"\n\n\"And then you just felt it? He was gone?\" Fear came flooding along the link from her. Schweitzer smelled the slightest hint of adrenaline in her bloodstream.\n\nShe nodded. \"He's gone, Jim. That's all I can tell you.\" _No, that's bullshit. There's more. Something between her and Steve._\n\n\"Sarah, there's something wrong here. What aren't you telling me?\"\n\nShe only shook her head and wept. \"I just . . . I just know he's gone, Jim. Please, just leave it at that.\"\n\nAnd now Schweitzer's grief came on him like a wave, so strong that his legs shook. He grit his spiritual teeth and pushed it down, swallowed it. The questions rioted, the urge to interrogate her so strong that he suppressed a growl. There was something wrong with the way she was feeling, something more complex than the simple grief of someone mourning a passed friend.\n\nEnough. Steve would have wanted him to be strong. He'd shown Sarah and Patrick enough of his underbelly for one day. When she was ready to tell him what she was thinking, she would. \"He was our best option.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Sarah said, mastering her tears, drawing strength from Jim, as she had when he was alive.\n\n\"There are no good options here, Sarah. We can't go to a family member, no matter how far removed. Family's the first thing a targeter diagrams out. Close friends will be next.\"\n\nHe would have trusted his brother, Peter, to protect Patrick. Peter the golden boy, the model SEAL Schweitzer had aspired to be. _Proud of you, bro._ But Peter was dead, his body shredded in the wreckage of the downed helo in Afghanistan. He'd died when Schweitzer was still alive, before he'd known that death wasn't the end. He supposed Peter twisted in the soul storm now, or maybe there was somewhere else beyond it. It didn't matter. There was no way to know, and knowing wouldn't help him now anyway.\n\nSarah swallowed, nodded. \"I'll think of something, but we're not going another step until we rest. That's not negotiable. You want to go on, you go ahead. Patrick and I are getting a few hours sleep.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I don't know that we have a few hours.\"\n\n\"Well, we damn well have to. We can't keep going. I can't see straight, Jim.\" She sat down where she was, not bothering to inspect the ground beneath her. She flopped over on her back, cradling Patrick against her chest. Her voice was already sluggish as fatigue wrenched her down into drowsiness. \"And we could use something to eat.\"\n\n\"Sarah, let me carry you. I can tote you and Patrick without breaking a sweat.\"\n\nShe shook her head faintly. \"We need to sleep, and Patrick is going to freak if you come near him. Can you get us some food?\" And then she was snoring softly, her breath lightly wheezing, thick in a way that troubled him.\n\n\"Sarah,\" he said. She didn't respond. He knelt at her side, reached out to touch her, thought better of it. Patrick's face was turned away from him, his cheek nestled against his mother's chest. Schweitzer could tell from his breathing that he had collapsed into sleep the moment he had stopped bouncing in the sling.\n\nSarah was right, they needed sleep, and they needed food. Schweitzer sat back, pushed his hearing out to its very limit. A hawk circled miles out, crying out warning to any who would seek to approach its hunting grounds. An aircraft droned miles overhead, likely a passenger airliner, moving steadily away from them. There were still no sounds of pursuit. He dialed his hearing in closer, pausing at intervals to assure himself that all he heard were the sounds of the natural world around him. When he finally heard the snuffling of a deer drinking at a stream less than a mile away, he made his decision.\n\n\"I'll give you a few hours,\" he whispered to his wife. He bent to kiss Patrick's head, pulled back. Better not to risk waking him. \"I love you,\" he whispered, then stood, turned, and took off running.\n\nThe wind was out of the south, blowing a steady two knots, bringing the sharp odor of the deer's hide to him, and more importantly, carrying his own scent away. He shifted his balance up into his midsection, slowing just enough to make his footfalls light. He brushed over the leaves, barely making a sound, the forest falling away to either side as the stream grew louder. At last, he saw an elbow of the water shining silver in the failing light, broken into glowing filaments by sharp rocks and jagged twigs. He heard the deer now, nosing in the water. It was breathing in deep pants, far apart. Gulping. It was thirsty then, winded from the climb to the stream.\n\nSchweitzer advanced at a crouch, letting his senses dial in on the deer's breathing, concerned that the focus on the animal took so much of his concentration that it left him vulnerable to attack from another direction. He examined the branches above him, looking for a way to get off the ground and make a safer approach.\n\n_No time. Every second you're away from Sarah and Patrick puts them in danger. Get it done._\n\nSchweitzer gave free rein to his jinn side, letting his magical reflexes take over. His crouch turned into a loping crawl, wickedly fast, shoulders pumping as he knuckled over the uneven terrain, bone spines beginning to protrude from his head and back. This was the form Ninip had favored, an appearance in better keeping with its nature. When he'd shared the body with Ninip, taking this form had clouded Schweitzer's mind, submerging it in a sea of predatory lust. But now the jinn was gone, and the form was just one of many tools at Schweitzer's disposal, like his training. He put on speed, heedless of noise now, crashing through the underbrush. He heard the deer stop drinking, the creaking of its neck as it raised its head, muscles tensing as it prepared to spring away.\n\nSchweitzer exploded from a patch of stunted trees, slamming into the animal before its eyes had so much as a chance to widen, locking his limbs around its thick body and sending it tumbling. The deer was strong, thrashing against him, the back of its skull hammering his face. It might as well have been a kitten compared to Schweitzer's magical strength. He locked his hands around the creature's chest, squeezing his arms together until its ribs snapped and blood fountained out its mouth and nose.\n\nThe coppery smell recalled the red joy he had known in Ninip's thrall. He had been able to forget himself, forget those who depended on him, forget the tasks left undone. There had been nothing but the feel of his body, his enemy, and the shrill joy of the kill.\n\nBut that had been before he knew his wife and son were alive.\n\nHe drove inward with his elbows, working the broken ribs until they pierced the heart and lungs, and the animal shuddered and lay still. He waited silently, listening. The forest had gone quiet around him. Still no sound of pursuers.\n\nHe rose, hefting the heavy deer easily over one shoulder, and sprinted back to where his wife and child lay. As he neared his back trail he could hear the faint patter of their heartbeats, the slow bellows of their breathing, each gust a moment apart. They were alive and still asleep.\n\nHe arrived at their side and slid the deer to the ground. He coaxed one of the bone spikes from his fingertips, skinning and gutting the animal, lost in the work until he heard the leaves rustle and turned to see his wife looking at him.\n\n\"Thanks, babe,\" she said. Patrick stirred weakly against her shoulder.\n\n\"Don't wake him,\" Schweitzer said. \"He needs all the sleep he can get.\"\n\nShe nodded as he held out a long strip of thick, red meat. \"Backstraps,\" Schweitzer said. \"Best part.\"\n\n\"We can't eat it raw, Jim,\" she said.\n\nHe looked down at the steaming strip of wet flesh. \"Right,\" he said, feeling farther from her than ever. \"I forgot, sorry.\"\n\n\"I don't have a lighter. I don't suppose you have heat vision or something?\"\n\n\"Something,\" Schweitzer said, scanning the ground until he'd located what he needed. He took a slab of bark and placed a stick against it, set his palms to either side. \"Watch this.\"\n\nHe rubbed his hands back and forth. His magical strength and speed soon had the stick twirling to a blur, smoke rising from the friction against the bark. Within moments, it was burning brightly, and he picked it up, carrying it to a pile of leaves.\n\n\"Baby,\" Sarah said, sitting up, eyes widening at the burning tinder against the meat of his hand. \"Doesn't that hurt?\"\n\nSchweitzer shook his head as the fire took, then set to clearing a ring around it. Sarah watched in silence as he built it, and the crackling flame sent embers sparking into the sky.\n\nSchweitzer looked up at the thick canopy of trees, branches interlocking to form a green carpet that barely admitted sunlight. Even a powerful drone with an infrared camera wasn't going to be able to spot such a small fire through that. He hoped.\n\nAs he wrestled for a way to ask her what was going on, Sarah sighed. \"Okay, champ. I can take it from here. Can you give us a little privacy while I get this cooked?\"\n\nSchweitzer's heart twisted. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Honey, I need Patrick to eat. He's not going to do that if he's . . . Please, Jim. Don't make this harder than it has to be. Patrick's had one hell of a shock. I just need him to have smooth sailing until we can figure this out.\"\n\nThe anger took him by surprise. _She doesn't trust me._ \"Damn it, I'm going to have to leave you anyway.\" Schweitzer snarled. \"Let me have another second with him. He's my son.\"\n\nSarah gave him a hard look. \"Then you'll want him to eat without shitting his pants. Jim, I am doing my level best to accept the new reality of . . . what you are. You can't expect that of a child. Work with me here.\"\n\n\"You _want_ me to leave.\" Her words made sense; his logical mind, the cold professional that was the Navy SEAL, accepted the calculus without batting an eyelash. But a deeper part of him didn't care. That part knew she was still hiding something from him. He could feel it in the sour edge of the emotions travelling down the link between them.\n\nSarah's expression softened at the hurt in his voice, and he cursed himself for letting it sound there loudly enough for her to recognize it for what it was. He couldn't control what she felt through the link between them, but he didn't have to make it harder on her by confirming it. Peter would have been disappointed. That wasn't the SEAL's way. \"No, Jim. I don't. I just want to take care of our son.\"\n\nSchweitzer could see that the exchange was hurting her too, that she was trying. _When she wants you to know whatever she knows about Steve, she'll tell you._ He could see himself through her eyes, a shambling horror, a walking corpse tied to her chest by the supernatural link their love had forged. There was no guile in the flow through that link now, only love, fear and exasperation. He knew he should say something, bow his head and tell he loved her, tell her that he understood.\n\nBut in the end, all he did was turn without a word, stalking off into the underbrush, letting his eyes roam the emerging heat signatures as they stood more starkly in the cooling air. Patrolling the perimeter gave the jinn part of Schweitzer his head, let the animal instinct to fight and defend take control. The sorrow and grief faded to a background buzz. Jinn Schweitzer didn't need to worry that his wife thought him a monster, that his son would likely grow up never knowing his father, fearing him as a thing that went bump in the night. Jinn Schweitzer was busy preparing to meet the enemy.\n\n# CHAPTER II\n\nHUNTING THE DEAD\n\nCold air billowed out of the open refrigerator doors, bathing Doctor Eldredge in chilly white clouds.\n\nEldredge wrinkled his nose at the chemical-vanilla smell of the coolant and pulled the gurney out into the bare white room. The walls were dotted with metal nozzles. Half of them flickered with tiny blue pilot lights, the other half crackled with chemical frost. At the touch of a button, the contents of the room could be burned or frozen solid in seconds.\n\nJawid Rahimi stood, hands clasped. His eyes were shadowed, dark curls unruly under his round, brimless cap. He looked sad, preoccupied. The same whipped puppy-dog look that made Eldredge want to both comfort and shake him. It had been this way ever since Schweitzer had escaped.\n\nJawid insisted on continuing to wear his traditional dress, a long and impractical shirt and ballooning trousers. He still prayed five times a day, a damned inconvenience when they were on an op and schedules were tight. Eldredge didn't have much patience for religion, but the psychiatrist assigned to Jawid had recommended he be allowed it, that any attempt to forbid it would only make him dig in deeper.\n\nEldredge put on a smile in spite of his frustration, hoping it put Jawid at ease. He might want to shake him, to fire him, but Eldredge couldn't afford to lose Jawid. The man's magic was the basis of the entire program.\n\nAnd Eldredge knew that being fired from Jawid's particular job was fatal. With what Jawid knew, with what he could do, there was no way the Director would ever just let him walk away.\n\nEldredge gestured at the corpse on the gurney, an Asian man, his body a network of scars. Tattoos were scrawled across his pale skin: a nautical star on his left pectoral, his blood type and serial number up his side just above the gaping hole where one of the Gold Operators had thrust its hand inside. A tattoo on his bicep showed his most important affiliation: an eagle perched on a trident crossing an anchor. In one set of sharp talons, it clutched the business end of a flintlock pistol.\n\n\"You recognize him?\" Eldredge asked.\n\nHe realized it was a silly question the moment he'd spoken. Of course Jawid recognized him. He'd tracked him, had helped run the op that took him down. His name was Steve Chang. His brother SEAL and best friend, James Schweitzer, was somewhere in the middle of the George Washington National Forest, a needle in a haystack nearly two million acres large.\n\nJawid nodded. \"You want me to put a jinn in him?\"\n\nEldredge sighed. \"It's been a few days since his death. Do you think his soul is still there to work with?\"\n\nJawid placed a hand on the corpse's forehead and closed his eyes. \"He's still in there.\" Jawid opened his eyes, but they focused on the middle distance.\n\n\"Jawid,\" Eldredge said.\n\nThe Sorcerer jumped, eyes snapping to him. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Nothing . . .\" Jawid looked down, face pained.\n\nEldredge swallowed his anger, took a moment to calm himself. The psychiatrist had warned him that the Sorcerer wouldn't respond to confrontation. He needed to be coddled. \"Jawid\"\u2014Eldredge forced a gentle tone, his knuckles white around the gurney handle\u2014\"I need you to focus here. It's all going to be all right.\"\n\n\"Schweitzer escaped because of me,\" Jawid whispered.\n\n\"That's not . . . entirely true.\" Except that it was. Schweitzer had plumbed Jawid's past, discovering that his own wife and son still lived. It had been a watershed moment for Schweitzer, the instant he discovered that he was a tool, and not a partner, of the Gemini Cell. Jawid had stared at the video monitors as Schweitzer wreaked carnage on the facility, carving a bloody path to freedom. Men and women, the closest Jawid had ever come to friends, lay in tatters in the corridors. His greatest failure splashed in red across the walls. And now Eldredge had to make him feel better about it. _Damn it, I am not trained for this. I don't know how to be a therapist._ \"You want to make this right? You have to help us catch him.\"\n\n\"What if we can't catch him?\"\n\n\"He's got his wife and toddler with him. They're not immortal. They have no magic. He's not going to abandon them. Trust me, we'll catch him.\"\n\nEldredge winced as he realized that he was trying to reassure himself. It wasn't just Jawid's failure. Schweitzer had escaped on Eldredge's watch too.\n\nJawid looked down at Chang again, his face wistful, eyes looking off into the middle distance again. God, dealing with his moods was exhausting.\n\n\"We need to get it right this time,\" Eldredge said. \"I need you to fight hard to preserve Chang's soul. I don't want the jinn pushing him out.\"\n\nJawid looked up. \"I never want the jinn to push the soul out. I always fight to keep it. It's just . . .\"\n\n\"I know it's hard, Jawid.\"\n\n\"You don't know. You've never worked magic.\"\n\n_Like a whining teenager._ Eldredge bit back his retort. \"I suppose you're right,\" he breathed, \"but Chang was Schweitzer's best friend; we need to interrogate him. He might know some of Schweitzer's connections. Family members or friends we may have missed. A clue to where he's headed.\"\n\n\"The jinn are not interrogators. They are . . .\"\n\n\"I _know_ what they are.\" Eldredge's impatience got the better of him. \"I know this is challenging and that's why I'm asking you to _try_. You need to push on this one. I need you focused; I need you to put the effort in.\"\n\n\"We have drones and reconnaissance teams. They can find him.\"\n\n\"Maybe they can and maybe they can't. That forest is enormous. We need every advantage we can get. If there's something that Chang knows that can help us, we can't afford to pass it up.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Doctor. I just . . . I have been sad for home lately.\"\n\n_Jawid's loyalty must be transferred to this institution,_ the psychiatrist's report read. _So long as it remains embedded in his tribal roots, he will never be truly reliable._ \"This is your home,\" Eldredge said, putting a hand on his shoulder. \"Schweitzer escaped because he was special. He escaped because there was . . . something in his spirit that let him beat the jinn. Chang was the closest man in the world to Schweitzer, and I can't shake the hope that that means they are _alike_ somehow. Maybe alike enough that Chang could be a Silver Operator, too. That may be what we need to find Schweitzer, to catch him.\"\n\n\"If Chang is the master of his own corpse, he will never hunt his best friend for you. Even if I could do it, it won't work.\"\n\n\"Try anyway.\"\n\nJawid paused, stalling. \"You can't blame Schweitzer for leaving. He only wanted to be with his family.\"\n\nThe truth was that Eldredge didn't blame Schweitzer. The Cell had lied to him about Patrick and Sarah, had kept him a virtual prisoner. But he wasn't going to indulge Jawid. The Sorcerer didn't need a friend to agree with him. He needed a boss to get him on task.\n\n\"Schweitzer is dead,\" Eldredge said. \"He can't be with anyone. At least we offer him a way to help keep the world safe so the rest of the living can be with their families. You need to remember that.\"\n\nJawid straightened, nodded. \"Okay. I will try.\" He placed his hand on Chang's face again, looked awkwardly at Eldredge. \"Do you think . . . you could leave me to do this alone? It is strange to be watched.\"\n\n\"I watch you every time you do a Summoning,\" Eldredge said. \"Does it matter whether it's through a camera or in person?\"\n\n\"No, I suppose not.\" Jawid turned his head away from Eldredge and closed his eyes. Eldredge watched as his breathing slowed, deepened. At last, his body gave a tiny shudder, and Eldredge knew that he was working his magic. The muscles in Jawid's jaw moved; his eyelids twitched. Eldredge would have thought him in the midst of a dream if he hadn't been standing. Jawid murmured words, so soft that Eldredge couldn't make them out, the mumbling of a sleep-talker.\n\nExcept that Eldredge knew Jawid wasn't talking in his sleep, that the words of his mouth mimicked those coming from his consciousness, communicating with the souls that drifted in some world that Eldredge couldn't see. At last, Jawid grunted and whispered. \"I have him.\"\n\nEldredge couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice. \"Can you save Chang? Can you keep him in there?\"\n\nJawid and the corpse opened their eyes at the same time.\n\nJawid's were dark and distant, red-rimmed from lack of sleep.\n\nChang's were gone. In their place burned two flames, deep gold shot through with tiny threads of silver. Jawid looked at the silver and sighed. _\"Allahu akhbar,\"_ he said over and over again. \"Thank you, Allah.\"\n\nAnd though he didn't believe in God, Eldredge echoed him. \"Thank you, Allah.\" The silver threads meant that Chang was holding on, that the jinn had not driven him out into the void and taken the corpse for itself.\n\n\"Who is it?\" Eldredge always asked this. The question was partly motivated by a search for patterns, something that could help him understand the nature of the spirits Jawid drew across the line and bound into the bodies of the dead. But more than that, it was simple curiosity. The jinn were always ancient, and Eldredge thrilled at the idea that somewhere in the depths of the corpse before him was the soul of someone who had died millennia ago.\n\n\"He calls himself Partolan,\" Jawid said. \"His hair was red, his skin tattooed in blue.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\nJawid shrugged. \"He is a lord of some kind. They always are.\"\n\n\"Can you talk to Chang directly?\"\n\n\"No. He is there, but he is not as strong as Schweitzer was.\" The silver threads in the eyes were thin. Schweitzer's had burned solid silver from the start.\n\n\"Maybe he will gain ground,\" Eldredge said.\n\n\"Maybe.\" Jawid didn't sound convinced. He sounded exhausted. \"Can you leave me alone with him, Doctor? It will . . . help me to focus.\"\n\nEldredge paused. He didn't want to take his eyes off Jawid, not for a moment. The man was unpredictable, in need of supervision. But a good supervisor knew when to back off and let things evolve. Standing here staring at Jawid accomplished nothing.\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"I will try harder,\" Jawid said. \"I will.\"\n\n\"I know you will,\" Eldredge said, turning to go. But the truth was that the Director was losing patience, and Eldredge wasn't sure at all.\n\nHe felt sick panic boiling in his belly as he returned to his office to punch up the video feed that would allow him to watch Jawid's progress from one of the thousands of hidden cameras throughout the facility. Jawid was right that they had every technical advantage in the hunt for Schweitzer. Feeds from half a dozen drones, Ranger teams on the ground, and spotters in the air. Local law enforcement prowling the edges of the forest. But Eldredge had run hundreds of ops in areas this large and remote. Single men, even burdened by their families, were hard to find, and that was when they weren't immortal supermen who could hear a pin drop a mile off.\n\nHe shook his head, dismissed the thought. A free Schweitzer could out the program, could confront the public with the truth that magic was real, that death wasn't the end, that the government didn't really know how it worked or how to control it. That couldn't be allowed to happen. Schweitzer had escaped on Eldredge's watch; the buck stopped with him.\n\n_There's more here,_ Eldredge knew. The risk Schweitzer presented to the program wasn't the only reason he wanted him back, but he couldn't think about that right now. To do so would be to lose focus as surely as Jawid had.\n\nEldredge needed his head in the game. He pulled up his laptop and called the Director's office, steeling himself to make his report. He'd promised progress and thus far had failed to deliver.\n\nIn the Gemini Cell, that kind of failure wouldn't go unpunished for long.\n\n# CHAPTER III\n\nCALIFORNIA SUNSHINE\n\nDadou Alva walked through the California sunshine, smiling. Californians were always smiling. Frowning would mark her as an outsider, drawing as much attention as openly wearing the compact pistol she had tucked into the small of her back. She carried the gun for contingencies but knew to save the last bullet for herself. Her boss had made it clear: discovery was tantamount to death.\n\nShe had spent most of her life underground and she basked in the sun's strange warmth, the feel of the air on her skin. She was used to taking pleasure in the small luxuries: breathing clearly, a full belly, a clean body, and a warm bed. The people around her had no such appreciation. Americans never ceased to amaze her. They bickered and complained about the silliest things: reception for their mobile phones, whining that they brought them the wealth of the world's knowledge in five seconds instead of three. They were the richest, most comfortable people in the world, and they still managed to be miserable. Nothing was ever enough for them.\n\nDadou shook her head and laughed. American luxury had lifted her up out of the broken asphalt and septic mud of Port-au-Prince and given her things she had only dreamed of all her life. Actually, that wasn't entirely true. American luxury provided the wealth that created the Scorpio Cell, the vast and sprawling secret infrastructure that supported her, but it was her magic that made them want her in the first place.\n\nShe followed the directions in the text message, turning down the narrow alley where it cut behind the pizza parlor. As she glanced in the open door to the kitchen, she surveyed the cooks. They were completely convincing to the average observer, slack-jawed, broad-shouldered men in white aprons stained with marinara sauce, working with the bored and distracted look of veterans of underpaid, menial jobs.\n\nDadou recognized one of them. His hair had grown out from the buzz cut he'd worn as he stood to attention outside a door of her office, his military uniform so clean that it looked as if dust dare not touch him.\n\nThe alley ended at a low cinder-block building, white paint flaking from the surface of a metal roll gate. A rusted sign hung over it, nearly covered in graffiti and stickers: CORONADO IRONWORKS. Clusters of weeds crowded the broken path leading to a single metal door. She glanced over her shoulder, careful to make a show as if she were inspecting her back pocket, as her countersurveillance instructors had taught her. She caught a glimpse of the men in the pizzeria kitchen, looking alertly out the open door. They were \"covering her six,\" as the American soldiers liked to say, a comfort to her as she faced the door and tried the handle.\n\nIt didn't move, but she felt it warm as the pulse reader the Cell's agents had connected to the handle scanned the signature in her blood. There was a click and the door swung open.\n\nThe interior matched the outside. A single fluorescent-tube light cast shadows over the pitted cinder-block walls. Trash clotted the corners along with the discarded needles and condoms where druggies and prostitutes had plied their trade. The whole place stank of desperation and stale piss. She smiled. It reminded her of home.\n\nA thick length of rope had been looped over the flaking iron remains of a long-unused sprinkler system, hanging down to a thicker knot. A man hung by his wrists from it, skin gray-white. He had thinning hair plastered across the clammy surface of his forehead. His head hung, body limp.\n\nA man stood to either side of him. They were dressed self-consciously to imitate homeless people, complete with stereotypical watch caps, threadbare overcoats, and fingerless gloves. Dadou could tell that the filth on their clothing had been recently applied, knew that the gloves were fingerless so as not to impede the smooth action of their trigger fingers. One of them turned alert, killer's eyes on her. \"You're late,\" he said.\n\n_\"Komik,\"_ Dadou snorted. \"A wizard is never late. She arrives precisely when she means to.\"\n\nIt was a quote from one of the endless films they showed in the Scorpio Cell's rec room, and both men smiled at the response, but she could feel them tense. They didn't like to be reminded of her magic; it frightened them. That was good. Dadou found that men were more likely to do what she asked them when they were frightened or aroused. Much of the time, one was linked to the other.\n\n\"He can still talk?\" she asked.\n\n\"So far,\" one of the men answered.\n\nDadou leaned forward and seized a hunk of the man's hair. \"Wake up, Rodriguez.\"\n\nHis head rolled back, his hair wet in her hands, eyes staying stubbornly shut. \" _Reveye, sak t\u00e8._ Wakey, wakey,\" she said. Nothing. \"It will go easier for you if you talk to me.\" Nothing.\n\nShe turned to one of the thugs. \"You said he could still talk.\"\n\nThe man cursed and jammed a thumb behind Rodriguez's jaw, working it back and forth until the prisoner screamed, eyes opening and glaring at Dadou with a hatred that made her take a step back.\n\nBut only a single step. She took another forward and seized his hair again. \"Your brother picks up the money you send him at Salto del \u00c1ngel. When is he coming next?\"\n\nRodriguez stared. His mouth worked silently.\n\n\"Clearly, he appreciates it, _non_?\" Dadou asked. \"I'm sure he'll break in here any second to rescue you.\"\n\n\"Fuck you. I'm not telling you shit.\"\n\nSo clich\u00e9d. Like a bad movie on Tele Jeunesse. She gripped his hair tighter. \"Why are you being an idiot, Rodriguez? What do you think you are accomplishing?\" She pulled down on his head, his wrists straining against the knotted ropes. \"You feel that? That's real. This isn't a movie. You're not an action hero. No one is coming to save you. This ends in one of two ways: you talk and you live, or you refuse and then we hurt you and you suffer and you talk anyway and afterwards, you die. You're not a hero, Rodriguez, and your brother is a murdering bastard.\"\n\nRodriguez found his feet at that, jerking toward her before being pulled back by the rope, shouting a stream of Spanish that she couldn't understand beyond knowing it was unkind.\n\nShe reached into her vest and took out a picture, waved it in his face. \"You see this helicopter? Nice and crispy, isn't it? Did you know there were kids on it? Let me hold it closer so you can see.\" She tapped the edges of the photograph with her thumb, pointing out the black lumps that had once been hostages.\n\n\"Your brother took them,\" Dadou said, \"and he burned up our helicopter rather than let us rescue them. That's where your money goes. To terrorists who kill babies. This is what your brother uses his magic for, to burn up rescue helicopters. You're no hero, and your brother isn't either.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" he spat blood, narrowly missing her face. \"You fucking bitch!\"\n\n_\"Raz,\"_ Dadou drawled. \"Last chance to do this nicely.\"\n\nRodriguez swallowed. \"If you're going to torture me, just get it over with. It won't work, anyway.\"\n\nDadou smiled. \"I would never torture you, _moun komik_. People say anything when you hurt them badly enough. You would scream and mix lies with truth and listen for what you thought I wanted and tell me that just as fast as you could. Anything, just to make the hurting stop. By the time we untangled the lies from the truth, we would have lost even more time. I want to find your brother quickly, before he can use his magic to do more damage.\"\n\n\"That's why you want him, for his _brujer\u00eda_. Not for hurting no fucking kids. So, you'd better torture me, because it's the only way you'll get me to even lie to you.\"\n\nDadou sat cross-legged on the dirty floor before him, relaxed her shoulders. The truth was that this was the answer she'd known he would give, that she'd wanted him to give. It gave her the excuse to do what she'd been planning to do anyway. \"I don't need lies, Rodriguez. I need truth. And I also have the _brujer\u00eda_. Which is why I don't need to torture you.\n\n\"I told you that you'd talk, and you will.\"\n\nDadou gathered the tide of her magic around her, closed the eyes of her physical body, and pushed her spirit outward. She reached out into the void, racing through the blackness. There was a time when the inky dark had felt thick as molasses to her, but she had been a _S\u00e8vit\u00e8_ since she was four years old, and the journey was second nature to her now. She reached the soul storm in moments, the light broadening across her vision, filling her ears with screaming.\n\nThe tangled mass of souls whirled about her, the distinct undertow lapping at her like the waters in the bay where she'd swum as a child. She kept her distance, sifting easily through the voices, discarding the half-mad shrieks of apology, dire promises of vengeance that would forever remain unfulfilled.\n\nDadou drifted on the edges of what she called the _gwo fant\u00f4mes_ , the cyclone where the dead churned. She listened patiently, pushing enough of her consciousness into the twisting hell to let those within know she was present. The strongest would make themselves known. Sooner or later, they always did.\n\nDadou became conscious of a quiet ferocity from deep within the storm. It emanated from a spirit just as hungry and violent as all the others, but not wasting its energy on words. Instead, it clawed its way steadily to the edge, relentlessly following the tide of Dadou's magic, until it was close enough for her to single it out.\n\nDadou reached out and touched the presence, letting it mingle with her magic. The experience was always heady when she first touched a soul. It was a sudden immersion in the sense of a person, a storm of emotion and experience coming on in a rush. Like all of the _mist\u00e8_ , this one was freezing cold, ravenously hungry, desperate to reach the beating hearts and flowing blood it knew were just beyond its reach. It wanted to know some shred of warmth, even if only for a moment.\n\nDadou's spiritual eyes pictured the _mist\u00e8_ as a young girl, barely older than twelve, a red plume flying from a bronze helmet covering her pin-straight black hair.\n\n_I am Hua Mulan,_ the spirit declared in a little girl's voice. _I am the flower of Wei, the lord commander of the three armies. Kneel before me._\n\nThe language was unfamiliar, but it didn't matter. Souls communicated at a level beyond speech, and Dadou had no more need to translate the creole of her home when she replied. _I am honored to meet you, Mulan. I am here to give you what you most desire, in exchange for a favor._\n\n_You do not bargain with the blood of Emperors,_ the _mist\u00e8_ said.\n\nDadou only smiled patiently. _Call it a gift, then, bestowed upon a faithful subject as reward for an act of devotion._\n\n_What devotion do you offer me?_\n\n_I will return you to the world of men. Living men. Men that breathe and bleed. Blood that can be yours, so much that you can bathe in it._\n\nMulan grinned in the blackness. _Go on._\n\nDadou could feel the _mist\u00e8_ 's eagerness. It attempted to hide its anticipation, failed. It practically shivered with excitement. Dadou smiled inwardly. _Take my hand._\n\nThe _mist\u00e8_ let Dadou coil her magic around it, flashing another image of a little girl in armor, bronze halberd over one shoulder. Doubtless it expected Dadou to recognize her and be cowed.\n\nDadou only drifted back, pulling the _mist\u00e8_ with her, down the magical link that brought her back to her physical body, the endless depths of the void slipping past her in an instant. Mulan struggled as they came closer, Dadou's magic intensified, and the _mist\u00e8_ felt itself beginning to be roped into the form Dadou intended, compressed into the flow of the _vodou_ that pulsed in her veins. But by then, it was too late and Mulan was within her, filling Dadou with such an intense sense of power that she doubled over. She opened her physical eyes back inside the filthy cinder-block walls and looked at Rodriguez.\n\n\"I warned you,\" she said through gritted teeth. \"I gave you a chance to do this another way.\"\n\nShe focused her magic and Bound the _mist\u00e8_ into his body.\n\nThe two thugs backed away as she moaned in relief, lips curling in disgust at the sexual sound. In truth, it was closer to pissing after holding it in for hours, the doubled tide of magic pouring out and into Rodriguez.\n\nDadou could feel Mulan driving hungrily at him, desperate for his warmth and blood and life. Dadou tried to follow Mulan in, to see the souls mixing, to understand what was happening now.\n\nThere was the brief moment where the _mist\u00e8_ and Rodriguez's soul were joined, and Dadou came to truly know both of them. Mulan had been a child general, taking the place of her ill father in the army of some ancient emperor, rising through the ranks to become his concubine. Rodriguez was a two-bit thug who had grown up in the Colombian ghetto, cutting his teeth first on shell games and pickpocketing before graduating to second-story work. He'd never amounted to much, even as a criminal, but his brother had.\n\nWith the dead, this next part was easy. The Binding was simple, and Dadou had only to concentrate on the silence within, pushing her magic out and letting the jinn do the rest.\n\nBut Rodriguez was alive.\n\nDadou could feel his heart pounding, a steady rhythm of hammerblows that shook both Mulan and her. The heat of his blood might as well have been a searing furnace after the endless cold of the void. Where the souls of the dead were silent, the living shouted their connection to the world. Dadou could hear the soul's link to everything in Rodriguez's body. His cells dividing. His nerves reporting the pain in his wrists. The sick panic in his gut as he felt Mulan tearing into him.\n\nDadou weathered it all, feeling her physical teeth clench as she focused her magic on Binding Mulan into Rodriguez's body. Rodriguez's soul recoiled at the invasion. Dadou could feel his body contracting, muscles going rock hard, veins dilating. Her physical ears could hear his strangled howl, could smell the stink as his bowels let go.\n\nYet still the heartbeat hammered. This was the closest she'd yet come to success. The living soul would tear the body to pieces resisting the incursion of the _mist\u00e8_. Mulan would have to be held back just enough to let the Binding finish before it was turned loose.\n\nThe _mist\u00e8_ howled, scrabbling toward Rodriguez's soul, enraged and enraptured by the nearness of life. _No,_ Dadou said to her, _not yet._\n\nMulan strained against the chains of Dadou's magic.\n\nRodriguez screamed, his soul spasmed, and Dadou heard the sound of bones grinding, muscle tearing away from tendon.\n\nDadou coiled her magic back, pulled with everything she had. _Just wait for a moment,_ she shouted to Mulan. _Just a moment and you'll have what you want._\n\nShe might as well have pulled against a mountain. Mulan's only answer was a strangled shout of its own. The _mist\u00e8_ redoubled its efforts, pulling toward Rodriguez. Dadou was overwhelmed by images of Mulan's swinging fists, bronze squares flashing. At last, the wild beating of Rodriguez's heart began to overwhelm her, and Dadou felt her magic slip as Mulan strained forward. The _mist\u00e8_ shouted, pulled and broke free, Rodriguez's vitality and Mulan's fury kicking Dadou back and into her own physical body, the link broken. She felt a moment's disorientation as her physical eyes opened. Reality always shocked her when she returned to it, the universe suddenly a warm, hard thing of sharp edges and foul smells.\n\nRodriguez breathed his last. Swathes of purple mottled his pale chest where the vessels beneath the skin had burst. One of his pectorals had detached, slid into his armpit. His eyes stared sightlessly, the sclera completely red. Blood bubbled out of his mouth with his death rattle.\n\nDadou cursed, stood. The thugs backed away. Dadou knew what they had seen, Dadou sitting, teeth gritted, frowning in concentration as Rodriguez's body slowly clenched, purpled, and died.\n\n_So close. Just another moment and I would have had it._ It was the same problem every time. She couldn't perform the Binding quickly enough, locking the jinn in place before the victim's body tore itself apart from the shock of the incursion.\n\nThe thugs stared at her, horrified. The luxury that Americans enjoyed went hand in hand with a mad insistence on the sanctity of human life. It was not so back home. You learned quickly that people die easily, saw firsthand that life rolled on regardless.\n\n\"I got what I needed. _M\u00e8si._ Clean up here. Bring the body back to base,\" Dadou said.\n\nShe tried to keep her voice casual, but even she could hear the resignation. Another failure. The Director would not be pleased. She turned to go.\n\n\"You're supposed to wait another hour before you leave,\" the thug said.\n\n\"The Director will want to hear about this immediately.\"\n\n\"I have my orders,\" the thug said.\n\n\"And I have mine,\" Dadou answered. \"I also have the _vodou_ if you'd care to try and stop me.\" She nodded at the Rodriguez's cooling remains. _\"Sa se pa vre?\"_\n\nThe man's jaw set and Dadou grunted in satisfaction. It was as close to fear as these hard-operator types ever came. She turned on her heel and left, her back itching as she waited for one of them to try to stop her.\n\nBut they let her go, and the copper stink of blood followed her for a block or so before the breeze from the Santa Monica Bay whisked it away.\n\n* * *\n\nBack in her cell underground, the bright azure of the California sky locked away by miles of earth, her laptop chimed.\n\nDadou was just emerging from the shower, and she wrapped the towel around the wet mass of her dreadlocks, glorying in the water still dripping off her muscular body. She didn't bother to cover her nudity. Only one person ever called on her laptop, and she could never tell if he was bothering to look at the camera or not. At forty, Dadou knew she looked better than many half her age. Most girls spent their days preening and waiting for a man to lift them out of want. Dadou spent hers training. The difference was as obvious as it was stark.\n\nShe went to the computer, tapped in her password to unlock it.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Miss Dadou.\" The voice coming through her laptop was a mechanical rasp, as if the speaker had a mouth full of buzzing hornets. Dadou knew that there was better software out there, programs that could hide the speaker's voice without adding this creepy element, but she also knew that the Director preferred horror-show theatrics. She supposed it was no different from how she cowed the men she worked with, and she respected it.\n\n\"Good afternoon, _Direkt\u00e8_ ,\" she said. \"How's the view from the top?\"\n\n\"Anxious,\" he replied, \"I have received some concerned reports from my element leader at the temporary wetworks we established for your latest foray.\"\n\nDadou laughed through the thick rage she felt sour her stomach. Frightened men were worse than old women, always filing reports and making complaints. \"You know how these 'pipe hitters' are, _Direkt\u00e8_. They run screaming at the first sign of the _vodou_. Everything is fine.\"\n\n\"I hear Rodriguez did not talk, and that your efforts to Bind a spirit with him ended his life.\"\n\n\" _Se sa, Direkt\u00e8._ Both true.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you do not appreciate the need for progress in this particular operation.\"\n\n\"I came close this time, _Direkt\u00e8_.\"\n\n\"How close?\"\n\n\"Very close. If I'd had another moment, we would have had it, a _mist\u00e8_ in a living body.\"\n\n\"You've been close before, Miss Dadou. It only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades.\"\n\n\"I'll get it. I'll get it soon.\"\n\n\"I'll be delighted when you do. In the meantime, Rodriguez is dead, and we are no closer to capturing his brother. That man's magic is too valuable to let go unchecked. We need to bring him in or bring him down.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nThe silence on the other end of the line was as close as the Director ever came to an outward expression of anger. \"Miss Dadou, I am at the helm of a considerably well-resourced organization. Surely there is some insight you can provide me as to where the problem lies so I can find a way to help you?\"\n\n\"There's nothing, sir.\"\n\n\"Then, what is the problem? You said this would work.\"\n\n\"It _can_ work. I know it can. The problem is the Binding. It has to be done quickly, before the . . . shock of the Binding destroys the host body. It is so much easier with the dead; I don't know how to explain it.\"\n\n\"Yet you must try.\"\n\n\"It's the speed of the Binding. That's the problem.\"\n\n\"Is there anything we can do to make that happen faster?\"\n\n\"Not unless you've got another Sorcerer to help me.\"\n\nAgain the pause, and this time Dadou couldn't tell what emotion lay behind it. At last, he spoke again. \"Another Sorcerer.\"\n\nShe squinted at the laptop, as if she could look through the blank screen to see his expression. \"Not just any Sorcerer. Another _S\u00e8vit\u00e8_. One who speaks with the dead.\"\n\nSilence again; this time it dragged on.\n\n\"Sir? Are you still there?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking,\" the Director answered.\n\nDadou's gut clenched. \"Dare I ask what you are thinking about?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking about another problem I have, on the East Coast. You might be able to help me with it. In turn, I might be able to help you. Forget Rodriguez, turn everything over to the watch captain, and pack a bag.\n\n\"I want you in Virginia by tomorrow.\"\n\n# CHAPTER IV\n\nBRIEFING\n\nDoctor Eldredge sat at the cherrywood desk and stared into the video teleconference monitor. The light beside the camera was green, indicating that his image was being relayed to the person on the other end, but the move wasn't reciprocated. Eldredge had been working for the Director for most of his adult life now, and he still had yet to see the man. He didn't know his name or even what his voice sounded like. The deep rasping that came over the phone or video teleconference line had to be the work of a voice modifier.\n\nOf course, the Director didn't know Eldredge's name, either. Eldredge had worn his moniker so long that he thought of it as his own. There were days he couldn't remember his real name, a trio of foreign-sounding words that described a stranger he had known a lifetime ago.\n\n\"Doctor,\" came the Director's voice over the line. Eldredge had heard it at least a hundred times in his career, and it never failed to give him shivers. Eldredge could almost feel the man's satisfaction as the video conveyed the revulsion on Eldredge's face. \"It's good to see you.\"\n\n\"It's good to _see_ you too, sir,\" Eldredge answered, cocking an eyebrow.\n\nThe Director chuckled, distinguished from coughing only by cadence. \"The security of this operation is my chief responsibility. Given the recent breach, I think my concern is justified. Wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nEldredge felt his face color. The Director was referring to Schweitzer's escape. Schweitzer had been Eldredge's greatest achievement and his worst failure. He was the only Operator the program had ever produced whose own soul had triumphed over the jinn bound into his corpse. On Eldredge's watch, he had become the first Operator capable of ethics, of restraint, of anything other than the predator's instinct to kill. And on Eldredge's watch, he had escaped. He took the Director's meaning. Compartmentalization was a key part of keeping every aspect of the program secret. That meant that you didn't get to know what your own boss looked like. \"Of course, sir.\"\n\n\"I knew you'd agree. What's the SITREP?\"\n\nThe Director's insistence on military acronyms was the one clue Eldredge had to his identity. Civilians learned and used acronyms too, but only a former military man mingled them with everyday speech until it became a kind of creole.\n\n\"Jawid has succeeded, sir. Chang is paired with a jinn. From Jawid's description, he sounds like some ancient Celt or Norseman.\" Before Schweitzer had taken control of his own corpse, he had been paired with the soul of an ancient Akkadian god-king. All the jinn were older than dust, powerful, and hopelessly evil.\n\n\"And Chang?\"\n\n\"Jawid says he's in thrall to the jinn,\" Eldredge said. \"He's hoping we can learn something that will help us to locate Schweitzer.\"\n\n\"Outstanding. How soon until we send the teams?\"\n\n\"I'm certain Schweitzer and his family are in the George Washington National Forest, sir, but we've got nothing more than that. I already have Blue One, Two, and Six over the target. So far, they've got nothing.\"\n\n\"I thought those were your best direct-action teams.\"\n\n\"They are my best _regular_ teams, sir. Schweitzer has all the capabilities of a Gold Operator and the presence of mind to leverage years of training with the SEALs. That forest is over one point eight million acres.\"\n\n\"So, engage the Gold teams. You can add Chang to one of them. There would be a certain poetic justice to that, don't you think?\"\n\nEldredge's stomach clenched. The Director was all too quick to employ the Gold Operators, but the living dead monsters were ruled by their lust for blood. Any time they were put in the field, there was a risk of a massacre. Eldredge forced a shaking breath before he was calm enough to answer. \"Respectfully, sir, the Gold teams are unpredictable. Every time we use them in public, we run the risk of collateral damage with the potential to compromise this program. I'd rather engage them only when we're sure of the target.\"\n\n\"Get out there with the Blue elements and use your magic knife.\"\n\nEldredge's hand moved to his white coat, feeling the hard outline of the KA-BAR utility knife Jawid had ensorcelled for him. The blade was old and pitted from the sea salt that had scoured it during the Normandy landing when it had bounced along Eldredge's father's hip as the young marine had waded ashore.\n\nEldredge remembered handing it to Jawid when the Sorcerer had first been brought in, still covered in Band-Aids from healing cuts and taking a handful of antibiotics to drive out the parasites that had colonized his gut during years of hard living in the Afghan mountains. _Use this,_ Eldredge had said as Jawid's hand closed around the handle. _Show me what you can do._\n\nThe knife didn't look any different. It was hard to believe that the slim metal blade contained anything as mighty as a jinn, but Jawid had been ensorcelling talismans almost as long as he had been ensorcelling corpses, and Eldredge had seen the proof with his own eyes. _This jinn was mad in life, _Jawid said when he handed the blade back. _Death has not made him sane. He will not abide another soul near him._ Eldredge had kept the blade concealed in his waistband ever since. When one of the Golds had gone feral and leapt for him, he'd managed to rip the blade from its sheath and plunge it into the monster's calf. The thing had gone limp as the jinn inside was banished back into the void.\n\nAnd something else.\n\n_Why was it glowing?_ Eldredge had asked.\n\n_I do not know. Perhaps the jinn inside is angry enough to touch the metal._\n\nEldredge patted the knife, remembering a line from one of his favorite books. _My sword Sting. It glows when enemies are near._\n\nNot orcs but jinn. The closer they came, the brighter it glowed.\n\n\"That knife's effective range is less than two hundred yards, sir,\" Eldredge said. \"Until we have a better fix, I'd just be underfoot. Besides, I'm needed here to look after Jawid.\"\n\n\"How is he doing?\" the Director asked. He sounded bored.\n\n\"He's . . . shaken by Schweitzer's escape, sir. Doctor Empath is having a tough time getting the whole story out, but I've been having his food dosed with sodium amytal, and it's making him open up a bit more. It seems Schweitzer pillaged his memories, learned his wife and son were still alive, which was what predicated his escape. Jawid is . . . fragile. He lacked the strength of character to stand against Schweitzer. The experience left him shaken.\"\n\n\"Empath tells me Jawid is pining for a family.\"\n\n\"That's true, sir. He was apparently betrothed before we rescued him from the Taliban. He has remarked that he desires children.\"\n\n\"Will this be an obstacle?\"\n\n\"I'm not certain, sir. It's definitely a major distraction, even a preoccupation for him. He lacks the . . . patriotic motivations that drive the rest of us. This isn't his country. He's lonely, to be frank.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we can assign him a mate. A roll in the hay might put it to bed. No doubt one of the analysts would be willing to dive on that grenade for the sake of the mission.\"\n\n\"Respectfully, sir, I don't think it's sexual. I mean, that's part of it, but I think what he really wants is to feather a nest. He wants to make a home. You know the tribes in Waziristan, sir. Family is the only thing they hold more sacred than their faith.\" Eldredge thought of his own nights furtively masturbating on his cot, an efficient exercise designed to take the edge off a raw need that he would have surgically removed if he could. A part of him mourned the loss of the life he could have had, the woman he might have married, the children he might have raised. _That ship has sailed. You only have time for one life, and you chose this one._\n\n\"That's not possible,\" the Director's voice was flat. \"Magic has put him beyond that. Jawid must accept that he's not in the world as others are.\"\n\n\"I agree, sir, but that is precisely what he won't accept.\" Eldredge thought of Jawid's fearful eyes, the sad turn of his mouth. He had been a boy captured and abused by religious madmen when the army had found him. The Sorcerer had never had a chance to chart the course of his own life. _I wish there was some way to help you, but magic is like cancer. You don't ask for it, and it changes everything._ Eldredge was silently grateful that he'd been spared magical ability. His life wasn't that much different from Jawid's, but it was self-determined, and that made all the difference.\n\nThe Director was silent for a long time. \"Is he reliable?\" he finally asked.\n\n\"Honestly, sir? I can't say. There's something going on with what Schweitzer did to him that he's not telling us. Doctor Empath is sure of it. I spend a lot of time getting him over crying jags. He may need a vacation. Maybe we can send him somewhere, under guard, without freedom of movement, but some R and R, at least.\"\n\n\"There's no time for that, especially now.\"\n\n\"I know, sir, but if we lose our best asset, we're going to have bigger problems.\"\n\n\"Which is why I'm engaging a backup plan. Jawid isn't this program's best asset. I'm pulling Scorpio Cell's Sorcerer and bringing her here.\"\n\nEldredge managed to keep the surprise out of his voice. \"Understood, sir, and you know I'm grateful for the help. But won't that necessitate closing down Scorpio's operations? That's going to give China a big leg up.\"\n\n\"We'll have to worry about that later. Schweitzer is a loose nuke, which is how it's been presented to the President. He's declared this a Javelin Rain\u2013class incident. All options are on the table.\"\n\nEldredge swallowed. He knew the Director was being literal. The Javelin series of code words was generally used to describe nuclear incidents. The President had been lied to. He'd been told they'd lost a nuclear warhead, and not a magically reanimated, superpowered corpse. The power that lay in that level of secrecy terrified him.\n\n\"Understood, sir. Are you going to tap the reserve?\"\n\n\"You told me you don't have a lot of confidence in that Sorcerer's skill. Has your position changed?\"\n\n\"No, sir. It's just that you said that all options were on the table . . .\"\n\n\"All effective options. We're not desperate yet. Scorpio's Sorcerer is very, very good.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'm excited to meet her.\"\n\n\"She'll be here tomorrow. Pair her up with Jawid and get them to work. I want Schweitzer found yesterday. Every second he's at large jeopardizes not only the safety of this program, but of the entire nation.\"\n\n\"Understood, sir.\"\n\nThe Director's voice took on an edge. \"I've been very lenient with you, Eldredge. I put you in charge of this program and gave you a free hand because I was confident in your ability to get the job done. Don't make me a liar. You blow up whatever you have to. You kill whomever you have to. You steal and lie and break every damn law in the world if that's what it takes to bring Schweitzer down.\n\n\"Destroyed. Not captured, Eldredge. You make sure there's no piece of Schweitzer left bigger than a softball. It's safe to assume that his wife and child are fully aware of our operations here?\"\n\nIt was a rhetorical question. Eldredge's throat went dry as he nodded.\n\n\"Unfortunate,\" the Director's modified voice rasped. \"Make sure you deal with them, too.\"\n\n# CHAPTER V\n\nTOUCHING DOWN\n\nHours passed. Twice, Schweitzer resisted the urge to stalk back to his wife and ask her what was going on. He put thoughts of Steve Chang out of his mind. He avoided pushing back into the emotional link between himself and Sarah. Sarah could feel it on her end too, and he knew what it would tell him anyway. He could hear Patrick murmuring to her, the sizzle of cooking meat, the slow smacking of their chewing. He began to tune his hearing to make out their conversation, then decided he didn't want to, and dialed further down to focus on their beating hearts. The twin pulses reminded him of what was important: they were alive. He had done what he said he would he would do, would continue to do it.\n\nAt last, he turned and slithered on his belly, keeping to the shadows of a low copse of trees that got him close enough to the tiny orange-red flower that was their dying cooking fire. The smell of venison was strong enough to bring predators, but those same noses detected the strange, chemical odor of the glycerol and pungent cocktail of humectants and cell conditioners that kept his dead flesh supple. Schweitzer could hear the padding of tiny feet, the soft rustle of wings far overhead, but the animals always steered clear the moment they drew close enough to smell him.\n\nSarah had kept the fire low and stamped it out the moment she no longer needed it, not drawing any more attention to their position than necessary. At last, Schweitzer's patience wore out. \"Babe,\" he said. \"We have to go.\"\n\nPatrick stiffened, and Sarah bundled their son against her chest, hiding his face in her armpit and stroking his hair. She sighed. \"I know.\"\n\n\"Can you manage now? Can he?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"We'll have to.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I'll be more careful with you. I'll try to remember that you're . . .\"\n\n\"Human.\" She looked up, eyes wet. \"And you're not anymore.\"\n\n\"I don't know what I am, baby. I know I still love you and Patrick. I know I'd do anything for you, and that I'll keep you safe no matter what. I know that I would never have stopped looking for you, not for a minute. They tricked me, Sarah.\" He knew she was right, knew he'd have to leave, but he needed to know that she understood before he did.\n\nShe cradled Patrick closer to her, reached out one hand.\n\nSchweitzer crawled from the shadows a little way, reaching toward her. His son squirmed, but Sarah pressed Patrick's face more tightly against her, shushing him. Schweitzer crept quietly toward them, straining until their hands met, fingers clasped. He could feel the warmth of her hand, the steady rhythm of her pulse below the skin. She looked away, and he could see her working to suppress a shudder. She raised his hand to her mouth, kissed it.\n\n\"Oh God, Jim,\" she said. Her tears pattered on his knuckles. \"I miss you.\"\n\n\"I'm still here.\"\n\n\"You smell like formaldehyde. You feel like cold rubber.\"\n\n\"Doesn't change anything.\"\n\n\"I know, baby; it's just going to be . . .\"\n\nThe sound of the birds overhead solidified, thickened. Schweitzer heard a sudden snap as a vast pair of wings unfurled, catching the air and slowing the bird's descent. But the sound was too loud, too sudden, pregnant with the vibrating ring of metal.\n\nNot birds.\n\nSchweitzer seized Sarah's hand and yanked on her arm. She cried out as her shoulder wrenched in its socket, but Schweitzer managed enough leverage to throw her away from him. He rolled into a crouch, but not before he saw a long line of rounds stitch the ground beneath where his wife's arm had just been.\n\nHe craned his neck, caught the faint outlines of angels settling into the canopy, metal-framed wings falling from their backs as they descended. _Gliders. They knew I'd pick up on helo rotors from too far away._ They must have jumped from high altitude and deployed their wings only at the last possible moment to get them as close as they could without alerting him. Gliders meant they had no way to run. They were in the fight to win or die.\n\nThem or him. Them or his family.\n\nSchweitzer launched himself to his feet, claws and horns extending fully, jaw unhinging. \"Run,\" he hissed to Sarah. \"I'll find you.\"\n\n\"And get caught out alone? Not a chance.\" She thrust Patrick against her chest and bent to lift a rock.\n\nThe men began to descend from the canopy, slowly floating toward the ground. Schweitzer narrowed his eyes. He could see no ropes, no means of support. They were kitted out as operators: tactical vests, helmets, modified carbines nestled in the crooks of their arms, sighting in at Schweitzer. The first round cracked, and Schweitzer felt an impact in his cheek as the bullet holed it and whisked out the other side. Schweitzer knew that the shooter was targeting a three-inch triangle over his face. Schweitzer had trained to put his rounds in the same spot for his entire career as a SEAL. It was the fastest way to put a living target down.\n\nBut Schweitzer was no living target.\n\nHe leapt, rocketing across the intervening distance, claws piercing one the enemy's throat before he had time to pull the trigger. His head lolled silently and he went limp, sliding off Schweitzer's claws, sinking slowly to the ground.\n\nThe other men finished their descent, boots touching gently on the forest floor as if they had been set there by an invisible hand. Schweitzer could feel the column of hot air rising up off the ground. He could feel a flow in the midst of the air, a shimmering energy that permeated his veins, resonating with the substance that kept his dead body moving. Magic. This was how the men had floated down from the high trees.\n\n\"Jim!\" a thick Afrikaner accent, one he recognized. A man blazed in the sky, floating eight feet above the ground, wreathed in crackling lightning.\n\nThe split-second distraction was all the floating man needed. He flicked his wrist and the wind rose, vaulting one of the operators over Schweitzer's head toward where Sarah crouched behind him.\n\nSchweitzer leapt straight up, catching the operator's ankle. The operator's leg snapped as Schweitzer swung him over his head. Schweitzer reached out with his other hand, grabbed the man's weapon, and broke it free from the sling with a single twist of his arm, sending his enemy sailing back toward the floating man, crying out in pain as he went. The floating man laughed and rose two feet, and the operator whipped under him and crashed into a tree, fell limp to the ground.\n\n\"The fuck are you doing here?\" Schweitzer grunted. He remembered the floating man now. Raees Gruenen, a South African mercenary who had been contracted to help Schweitzer's team with an op in Botswana a lifetime ago. The Gruenen he knew had never floated. Schweitzer pulled the carbine up into his shoulder. A light on the weapon's upper receiver flashed red and he felt the trigger seize. They'd been developing this tech right when he'd been killed. The weapon wouldn't fire without the operator's wristband close by.\n\n\"Guess I'm just talented,\" Gruenen said. \"Had some wild dreams and woke up in the air. Brave new world, eh?\" He opened a hand and lightning sprang from his palm, plowing into the ground and blowing Schweitzer off his feet. He tumbled through the air, shoulder slamming into his son, popping Patrick free of Sarah's grip. The three of them rolled over and over through the smoldering leaves.\n\n\"Sarah?!\" Schweitzer scrambled to his feet just in time to feel one of the operators' boots brush his head as he leapt over him, borne on the updraft of Gruenen's magic. Schweitzer flailed out a hand, brushing the man's calf. The enemy landed behind Schweitzer and stepped on Patrick's arm, making for the greater threat that was Sarah.\n\nShe roared and rose to meet him. The operator raised his weapon and squeezed off a round before she crashed into him, snarling, wrapping her limbs around him like a spider embracing prey.\n\nGruenen frowned. \"Aim needs work, though.\" He extended his hand again, and Schweitzer threw the useless carbine at him. It spun into the next burst of lightning, the metal sparking and the magazine exploding in a crackle of gunshots. Gruenen rolled in midair, dove low to escape the sudden detonation of rounds.\n\nSchweitzer turned back to his family. Patrick sprawled on his face, bawling. He was red-faced and terrified, but the immediate threat wasn't to him. Sarah held the operator too tightly to throw a punch, and the enemy raised his hand, hooking two fingers over her sternum, yanking down on the cluster of nerves and vulnerable windpipe behind it.\n\nThe pain must have been excruciating, but Sarah was already screaming, leaning forward, fastening her teeth on the man's face. He shrieked as his nose and upper lip shifted, blood squirting over Sarah, misting the ground beneath their feet.\n\nSchweitzer thrust his claws into the man's lower back. The enemy's upper body stiffened, his legs went suddenly limp, and Sarah let him go. He turned toward Schweitzer, his face a twisted red horror, nose and upper lip sloughing away below the semicircular tears left by Sarah's teeth.\n\nSchweitzer let him fall, grabbing his carbine, yanking his wrist up along with it.\n\nSarah spit out meat, blood trickling out of the corner of her mouth, and turned to Gruenen. \"Stay away from my son.\"\n\nGruenen got to one knee. \"You crazy fucking bitch,\" he said, raising a hand. Schweitzer could feel the current of Gruenen's magic coalescing, focusing. The sky above them darkened, and Schweitzer could smell ozone, feel the static charge gathering in the air.\n\n\"That's my wife you're talking to, asshole,\" Schweitzer said, sighting the carbine one-handed, raising the dying operator's wrist to the bottom of the handle. The light on the receiver went green, and Schweitzer fired.\n\nIn life, Schweitzer would never have had the control to aim a carbine one-handed. In death, he was as steady as a rock. A small, dark hole appeared in Gruenen's forehead. His eyes widened, then crossed. Twin trails of black blood leaked out of his nose, and he pitched forward on his face, his current suddenly gone, the forest going deathly silent.\n\nSchweitzer paused, listening. The animal sounds had vanished. Only those insects too small to get away from the fight quickly could be heard, burrowed as deep as they could go into the fallen leaves. Patrick's sniffling reminded Schweitzer that his boy was alive. Whether or not he was hurt was another matter.\n\nHe turned to go to him, stopped himself. The boy didn't need to be scared any more than he already was. \"Sarah, Patrick might be hurt. Can you . . .\"\n\nShe crouched, her face and shirt painted with the operator's blood, eyes still fixed on Gruenen's corpse. \"Was he flying, Jim?\"\n\n\"Yes, baby. He was.\"\n\n\"What the fuck?\"\n\n\"It's magic. Same stuff that is keeping me upright and walking. There are other kinds. I fought a man who could mold his own flesh. They called it Physiomancy.\"\n\n\"How are we supposed to run from these people? How can we fight them?\"\n\nSchweitzer could hear the edge of panic in her voice, forced his own to stay calm. \"Baby. Sarah. Look at me?\"\n\nShe didn't move, but her dark eyes flicked in their sockets, sliding to meet his own. His wife's eyes were slits, focused, locked into fight mode long after the threat had passed. This was hurting her, the kind of hurt that would last.\n\n\"Sarah,\" Schweitzer said. \"You're right. We can't beat them with technology, and we can't beat them with magic. So, we have to beat them with heart. We control the one thing we can control.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"We don't quit. We stay in the fight until they kill us. We don't break and we don't give up. Can you do that?\" He put steel in his voice, willing the words across the intervening distance, praying they stiffened her spine.\n\nSarah only stared at him, eyes still narrowed, as if she wasn't entirely certain whether or not he was a threat. He focused inward, retracted his horns, spines, and claws, heard the slight slurping sound as the tips slid below the skin.\n\n\"Sarah. Can you do that?\" he asked again.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Say it.\"\n\n\"Say what?\" she asked.\n\n\"Say you won't quit.\"\n\n\"I won't quit.\" Robotic repetition. She didn't mean it, not like he needed her to. But it was a start.\n\nHe nodded. \"Okay. Patrick will freak if I pick him up. Will you please see to him?\"\n\nShe turned, took a step. Her leg didn't support her weight and she fell to her knees. Schweitzer reached her in a single stride, followed the scent of fresh blood to her hip. \"Fucker shot me,\" she mumbled.\n\nSchweitzer extended a claw and sliced into her waistband. The dirty fabric broke apart, peeling back from pale skin, slick with sweat and dusted with dirt and bits of leaves. The operator's round had clipped the meat over her hip, parting the skin neatly. Blood sheeted down below, soaking her thigh. Schweitzer could see the soft glint of exposed bone, going jagged where the bullet had tumbled, breaking off a small fragment.\n\nHer head lolled against his shoulder, and Patrick howled for his mother. Schweitzer looked up at his son, saw the boy facedown in a soft tangle of vines. Clusters of arrowhead-shaped leaves covered Patrick's face. He seemed whole enough, but Schweitzer knew that plant, knew that even now the oil covering it was working its way into his son's skin. Patrick would be an itching, screaming mess by nightfall.\n\nAnd they couldn't afford screaming. Because the Gemini Cell wouldn't have just sent Gruenen and a single fire team. They were a recon force, spotters deployed to locate Schweitzer and his family. And that meant the main thrust of the search couldn't be far behind.\n\nThey didn't have much time.\n\nSchweitzer took one more look at Sarah's wound and raced to Gruenen's corpse. \"Baby?\" He called to her as he rolled the body over onto its back, began checking the pouches in the tactical vest. \"Baby? Remember what you said. Don't give up, Sarah. Don't quit.\"\n\nBut Sarah didn't answer, her pale face settling in the crook of her arm, her mouth opening, her eyes shut against the gathering gloom.\n\n# CHAPTER VI\n\nMAMA DADOU\n\nJawid straightened, the stiffness in his back reminding him of his devotion. It was one of a series of small sacrifices that made his daily prayers cathartic. He raised his hands, softly whispering, _Allahu Akbar. Allah listens and responds to the one who praises Him._\n\n_Dear Allah, be with me. Help me to find Schweitzer. Protect me from Eldredge. Turn his anger from me. I will be patient. Bring me forth from here and send me home, where I can have a wife and children of my own, that I may spend the last of my days praising You and living as You intended._\n\nHe bent to roll his prayer rug, stowing it in the corner of his cell, the one flash of color in the otherwise bare expanse of white and stainless steel. It had seemed the height of luxury when he had first arrived, after years of sleeping out in the open on rock, root, and frozen mud. The hot showers, electricity, and endless food seemed the stuff of paradise. Now, just a few years later, Jawid saw it for what it was: the thing the _Talebs_ had warned against, a prison of comfort that was designed to keep him locked away from Allah's plan for mankind. He had no wife, no children, struggled against an enemy not his own, for ends that were valued only by the infidels. The sinking feeling that his life had gone wrong had solidified into a curdled horror, equaled only by the certainty that the Gemini Cell would kill him the moment they suspected he had real plans to leave.\n\nThe Qur'an counseled that there was no greater blessing than patience. He would watch; he would wait. He would find a way.\n\nUntil then, he had work to do.\n\nHe keyed in the code that slid open the door, no less a cell for the fact that he could leave it. He stepped out into the plain white corridor outside the ops center. They blindfolded him for the trips aboveground, so he had no idea how deep the complex went, but he imagined he could feel the great weight of the earth above him, the sun huge and bright over the false office complex that guarded the entrance.\n\nHe entered the elevator, waited through the silent descent, the flickering of digital numbers the only indicator that he'd moved at all. There were no signs in the facility. An interloper would be unable to find anything, but Jawid knew the way from memory. He made two sharp rights and found himself in a corridor that narrowed until only a single man could walk along it. Three-foot-thick seams appeared at regular intervals as he proceeded, home to massive metal barriers that could instantly seal it off.\n\nJawid struggled against claustrophobia, making his way toward the door at the far end. It was much thicker than the one to his room, the transparent palladium panel giving a distorted fishbowl view of the plain white interior.\n\nChang's corpse stood motionless in the middle of the room, back to the door. A Gold Operator had killed Chang with its claws, extending them up until they pierced his heart, leaving long rents in his side that extended halfway around his back. They were stitched shut now, crude purple-gray scars over raised welts an inch high. Chang's back was tattooed with angel wings, cresting his shoulder blades above a blotched scrawl that read ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.\n\nJawid could feel the eddying current of magic pouring off the corpse, knew that for all his stillness, Partolan was hard at work within the dead vessel, warring with Chang's soul. Jawid pitied Chang. His own life was a twisting purgatory, an enslavement to the agenda of unbelievers. But even that was far, far better than an eternity of unlife chained to the side of a jinn leapt from the breast of the _Shaytan_ himself. The jinn were infinitely cunning, infinitely strong, infinitely evil. How Schweitzer had managed to best one was beyond him. He tried not to think about it. Because, if Schweitzer's soul was so honored by Allah, then what did that say about Jawid and what he had done? What he was still doing?\n\nChang-Partolan stood completely still. Jawid summoned his current, sent it rippling through the door, feeling it mingle with the eddying tide that whirled around the standing corpse. Jawid focused his magic, opened a channel, and spoke to the jinn and Chang at once. _Good morning, I have come to . . ._\n\nA surge of animal lust came pouring up the channel he had opened between them. Jawid felt his knees go weak. He stumbled a step back down the corridor, terror competing with his instinct to sever the link and roll his magic back. He regained control of his body just before the tipping point, saving himself from a nasty tumble to the hard, concrete floor. The red wave that had assaulted his senses had been pure, uncontaminated by the smallest trace of humanity. He hadn't felt Chang at all.\n\nHis vision came back into focus, his hearing registering a rhythmic pounding in time with the vibrating of the cell door. Tiny cracks were appearing in the surface of the palladium panel, white spider webs of breaks in the transparent metal extending with each successive blow.\n\nJawid could see Chang's corpse hammering itself against the barrier, desperately scrabbling to get at him. Bone claws emerged from the shredded stumps of its hands, fingers hanging rent and useless like the sepal leaves of some bladed flower.\n\nThe thing's eyes burned pure gold.\n\nJawid did fall now, panic stealing what little strength remained, sitting down hard on his bony backside, the pain of the impact not even registering in his shock.\n\nPartolan had pushed Chang back out into the void. There would be no insight into Schweitzer. There would be no repeat of Schweitzer's strange success, no new Operator with silver in his eyes who was something more than an animal. Jawid had failed again.\n\nAnd in the Gemini Cell, the price of failure was high.\n\nPartolan threw Chang's disfigured corpse against the door. The thick metal shuddered, squealed, and held. For now.\n\nBut that didn't mean it would hold forever. Jawid walked backward on his hands until he could get his feet under him, then jumped up, thumbing his commlink. \"I'm in access corridor three. My subject has gone gold. I need a lockdown.\"\n\nHe was already turning, running back the way he had come. He fought against the instinct to keep his eyes on the threat. It didn't make a difference; facing Partolan or running from him, he was just as dead.\n\nEldredge's voice sounded in his ear. \"Calm the hell down; stay where you are. We're right around the corner. We'll be right there.\"\n\nJawid knew that Eldredge wanted him to stay where he was, but the panic gripped him, and he felt that his heart would stop unless he moved his legs. The cell door shuddered behind him, and he could hear a faint whining, the mewling of a predator overwhelmed with desire by the nearness of its quarry.\n\nHe ran, the motion of his body burning off a tiny fraction of the terror, both of what lay behind him and what lay ahead.\n\nHe reached the end of the corridor, his sandaled feet slapping against the concrete, and slid out into the junction as he turned the corner toward the elevator.\n\nHe rebounded off of something soft but firm, staggered backward, his nose suddenly filled with the pleasant odor of clean sweat, soap, and a woody, dry smell that reminded him of roots stretching below the earth.\n\nEldredge's hands were thrust into the pockets of his long white coat, his shock of hair spraying in every direction at once. Jawid had never once seen the man with his hair combed.\n\nThe pleasant smell came from the woman standing beside him. She was at least four inches taller than Jawid, made more towering by the pile of dreadlocked hair atop her head, bound in leather thongs twined with beads and tiny shells. Her body was lean as a whip and so strong, Jawid could see the striations of her muscles sliding beneath her dark skin. She wore a tactical vest and cargo pants bloused into combat boots. A pistol nestled in a paddle holster tucked against one lean thigh. Her eyes were dark and crinkled with amusement, her full lips ghosting a smile.\n\nJawid's eyes swept across her powerful shoulders, graceful collarbones, lean neck. The analysts in the Gemini Cell never bared themselves so. The sight of her naked shoulders mesmerized him. Her eyes were hard, pitiless, but no less entrancing for all that.\n\n\"Whoa, there!\" She laughed, putting out a hand. \"Who's this?\"\n\n\"This,\" Eldredge sighed, \"is our Sorcerer, Jawid Rahimi, who cannot seem to follow simple instructions, I'm sad to say.\"\n\nJawid started. The magical current from Partolan had died off, only to be replaced with a new one, every bit as powerful, but darker, deeper, the edges of it mixing and probing at his own.\n\nIt came from the woman.\n\n\"Easy, now,\" the woman said. \"What's got you running like a chicken?\" Her accent was deep and drawling. Jawid could not place it.\n\n\"Jawid,\" Eldredge said, \"this is Dadou Alva.\"\n\nJawid's jaw dropped; he shut it forcibly, eliciting another laugh from Dadou before he could form words. \"She is . . . like me.\" The thought transfixed him as he studied the feel of her magical tide, the monster battering down the door behind him all but forgotten. Jawid knew there were other Sorcerers in the world, but always they were enemies, targets of the program he had helped to build. He had never known of another working for the American government.\n\nEldredge nodded as if this were obvious, as common as the grass. \"We pulled her from Scorpio Cell to assist you here.\"\n\n_\"Achante,\"_ Dadou said, extending a hand.\n\nThe thought of touching a woman who was not a relative both terrified and thrilled him, and Jawid felt the lust surging in his hips and belly, stiffening him beneath his robes. Dadou waited, her smile fading.\n\n_God forgive me,_ Jawid thought, then reached out and took her hand. Her skin was dry and calloused, and her grip strong enough to make him wince.\n\n\"Looks like our timing couldn't be better,\" Eldredge said. \"Can you tell me what the hell is going on?\"\n\nJawid tore his gaze away from Dadou, breathed deeply. \"Chang is gone. The jinn has the body.\"\n\nEldredge cursed and Dadou's smile vanished. \"You're certain?\" Eldredge asked.\n\nJawid nodded. \"I saw his eyes.\"\n\n\"Show me,\" she said.\n\nJawid froze. \"I . . . I don't know if the door will hold . . .\"\n\nEldredge cursed again. \"Then we don't have time to stand here discussing it, do we? Go!\"\n\nThe command jarred Jawid into motion, and his sandals slapped the concrete back the way he came, the soft padding of Dadou and Eldredge's feet coming behind him. The door still trembled in its frame, Chang's dead face pressed against the cracking pane of palladium, Partolan dancing behind the gold flames of his eyes.\n\nEldredge stared for a moment before cursing a third time. \"Seal access corridor to prime subject,\" he said into his commlink. \"Barrier one. Prime for freeze.\"\n\n\"Barrier one, section one is primed\" came the response, buzzing in Dr. Eldredge's commlink loud enough to be heard.\n\n\"Do it.\" Eldredge said.\n\nLiquid nitrogen burst from the nozzles in the walls as the thick steel partition slid out of its home in the ceiling, dropping to close off the cell and its rapidly failing door. Partolan let out a savage howl, echoing down the tight space before the barrier slid home, the seal so tight that it cut off all sound behind it. The flow of magic around the jinn dampened from the interference, but Jawid could still feel it whispering through the thickness of the metal.\n\nHe turned to Eldredge. The old man's eyes were hard as flint.\n\nJawid struggled, blinked, looked at the floor. But the terror had him now, and he knew he could not stop the tears from coming. He had failed. His elation at discovering that there were other Sorcerers like him working for the government was eclipsed by the realization that she was there to replace him.\n\nSchweitzer had escaped on his watch, and now, at long last, Eldredge had lost confidence. Jawid couldn't get the job done, so Eldredge had brought in someone who could.\n\nThis was the Gemini Cell. Jawid wouldn't be fired. They wouldn't simply let him go.\n\n\"Please.\" Jawid was disgusted by his own voice. His legs trembled and he sank to his knees. \"I'm sorry. I did what I could. I thought Partolan understood he had to keep him. I'm sorry. I will find a way to fix this. Please don't . . . don't . . .\"\n\nDadou frowned down at him, disgust flashing across her face in time with Eldredge's deepening scowl.\n\n\"Get up,\" Eldredge said. \"Stop being so dramatic.\"\n\n\"Please.\" Jawid reached for Eldredge's legs. \"I beg you . . .\"\n\nEldredge jerked away. \"That's enough!\"\n\nEldredge's hand disappeared inside his coat. _He's got a gun; he's going to shoot me._\n\nJawid briefly considered fighting, dismissed it. He was no warrior, as the _Talebs_ had told him so many times. He had made a mockery of so many things. He would make a mockery of this as well. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned his mind to Allah, to reflect on Him in his final moments. It would hurt, but not for long, then paradise would be his.\n\n_Allah, the merciful and compassionate. You know I am a coward and a weakling, but I hope You will judge me gently._\n\nA stirring of the air above his head, a hand descending. Jawid tensed for the blow, for the bullet to tear through him.\n\nInstead, there was the dry smell of roots below the earth. A hand settled on the back of his neck, warm, callused. It massaged the knotted muscles there, spreading warmth through his shoulders.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Dadou said. \"It's okay. Everything is going be all right, dahling.\" Her voice was like warm milk.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Jawid said.\n\n\"I know, dahling,\" Dadou said. \"But it's going to be okay. Mama Dadou is here to help.\"\n\nJawid still couldn't bring himself to open his eyes, though the softness of Dadou's voice made the fear begin to subside. \"You're going to replace me. You're the new Sorcerer.\"\n\n_\"Pas enkie twa, mon chouchou,\"_ Dadou said, the lilting of her voice approaching a song. _\"Men anpil, chay pa lou.\"_\n\nAnd Jawid did open his eyes now, her face filling his vision. Her skin was wrinkled about the eyes, her mouth lined, and deep creases walking from the corners of her mouth to the edge of her nose. She had seen hard use, this woman. She had known trials. He could not take his eyes from her.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" he whispered.\n\nShe smiled, and the world went warm around him. \"It means don't be ridiculous, dahling,\" she drawled. \"Together, you and I are going to do great things.\"\n\n# CHAPTER VII\n\nPATCHING UP\n\n\"Stay with me,\" Schweitzer said. He paused long enough to hear Sarah's response, a slurred murmur that couldn't be called a word.\n\nGruenen stared sightlessly up at the sky, the look of surprise frozen on his face. The bullet hole in his forehead was dime-sized, but the back of his head was completely missing, the shattered eggshell remains testifying to the bullet's force. Schweitzer dug through the pouches in Gruenen's tactical vest. He didn't have to look; his hands knew each item as soon as they touched them, could almost guess where they'd be located. There was the pistol in its chest holster, three loaded magazines tucked just below. There was the knife snapped in behind it, just outside the body armor's intercept plate. He made a mental note to check the handle later. His own had been hollow and packed with supplies. Down over Gruenen's gut he found water-cleaning tablets, a headlamp. Not what he needed. Not now, anyway. _Come on, come on, damn it._\n\nPatrick had gotten to his hands and knees, crawled to his mother's side.\n\n\"Don't touch her!\" Schweitzer yelled.\n\nPatrick shrieked, but he obeyed.\n\nThe sound tore at Schweitzer, but he couldn't afford to have Sarah getting poison ivy on top of her wound. He only knew what little casualty care was necessary to stabilize a patient until medevac could dust them off. But there was no helo coming here. It was on him. Being yelled at was the least of what his son had suffered over the past few days.\n\nHe abandoned the vest, moving to the drop pouch strapped to Gruenen's thigh. He dug past a smartphone and a small wad of papers before his fingers closed on what he sought. \"Sarah! You're going to be okay!\"\n\nIt was a bulging ziplock refrigerator bag. He'd carried one just like it for his entire career; every SEAL did. He cursed himself for not remembering where he'd kept it, losing precious seconds in the search. Schweitzer popped it open, turned it over as he raced back to Sarah's side.\n\nTourniquet, alcohol pads, roll after roll of sterile gauze.\n\nAnd the dark-green vacuum-sealed packet that he would know by touch alone. HEMOSTATIC AGENT was stenciled across the front. CAUTION: WILL CAUSE EXTREME BURNS.\n\nSchweitzer rolled Sarah onto her side and ripped the remainder of her bloody jeans away from the wound, trying to ignore the exposed striations of muscle, the steadily flowing blood. He tore open one of the alcohol pads, wiping his hands as clean as he could before putting on the thin rubber gloves. He then turned to the wound, rinsing it with the alcohol, trying to scrub away as much of the dirt, sweat, and burned residue as possible. There was no sign of the round, and he was sure the bullet had torn straight through. That was good. He wasn't equipped for surgery out here.\n\nSarah groaned. \"Ow. Fucking ow,\" she said weakly.\n\n\"This is just foreplay,\" Schweitzer said. \"Hard part comes next.\"\n\nShe looked up at him, eyes focused. \"Bring it.\"\n\nHe smiled as much as the skin stretched over the metal armature of his jaw would allow. \"That's my girl. Here we go.\"\n\nHe fished the black plastic bite stick out of the trauma kit and pressed it to her lips. She accepted it between her teeth and met Schweitzer's eyes, held them.\n\nSchweitzer felt Patrick's hand against his hip, glanced down to see his son, one hand on him, the other on his mother's boot. Schweitzer felt a surge of emotion at the sight of his boy voluntarily touching him, fought it down. _Keep the bubble. Focus._\n\n\"Lock it up, lock it on,\" he said to Sarah, then tore open the package of the agent and dumped it into the wound.\n\nThe yellow powder began to sizzle the instant it came into contact with Sarah's blood, turning a deep red-orange as it sank in, sending up thin puffs of ochre smoke that stank of chemicals and cooked meat. Schweitzer thrust his fingers into the mass, pressing the powder deeper in, pinching the edges of Sarah's flapped flesh closer together. He wasn't careful about where he put his hands, and he could feel the heat of the agent burning through the gloves, scalding the fingertips beneath. That was fine. He wasn't going to need to be fingerprinted anytime soon.\n\n\"Going to fuck up my manicure,\" Schweitzer said, as Sarah's hand snaked out and gripped the back of his neck, pulling him down until their foreheads touched.\n\nHer face had gone the color of rotten fish, her eyes burning. Her forehead was sweating so intensely that it ran down her temples. Her teeth ground against the bite stick audibly.\n\nBut she did not scream.\n\n\"You are a machine, you know that?\" Schweitzer asked her as the first wave of agony subsided and Sarah relaxed a fraction, gulping air.\n\n\"I don't know why you hate me so much,\" she said, spitting out the bite stick. \"I bore you a child, for Chrissake.\"\n\n\"Guy can't come back from the dead and be hunted by the government in peace,\" Schweitzer said, rocking back to examine his handiwork. \"It's always nag, nag, nag.\"\n\nThe wound sizzled, but there was no visible blood flow, and the edges seemed elastic enough to withstand some movement. It would dry over time, and that meant it would crack. There was also no way to tell if she wasn't bleeding internally. Sarah's life could be pouring out below the surface of her skin, and neither of them would know until she collapsed. She needed medical attention, and she needed it soon.\n\nHe would worry about that later. First, he had to see to the boy.\n\n\"Don't move,\" he said, turned to Patrick.\n\n\"No! No!\" his son said. \"Mommy! Want mommy!\"\n\n\"Shh, now,\" Schweitzer said, pulling the boy closer as gently as he could. \"Mommy's going to be okay. I have to fix you now.\"\n\nPatrick whined and called softly for his mother, but he submitted as Schweitzer tore open more alcohol pads, wiping down his face and hands, anywhere the exposed skin had touched the poison ivy.\n\nAt last Schweitzer released him, sitting back, letting his augmented vision dial down into the infrared spectrum. Red blotches covered Patrick's face, arms, and hands, the heat blazing out to Schweitzer's magically powered eyes as the skin below the surface became inflamed by the plant's oil.\n\nHe'd missed the window. Patrick was going to be in a bad way very soon.\n\nSarah was sitting up, gently touching the edge of the wound, hissing.\n\n\"Knock it off,\" Schweitzer called to her. \"You'll infect it.\"\n\n\"It's going to get infected either way,\" she said. \"We need something to keep it clean.\"\n\nSchweitzer pointed to the corpses of the operators. \"They'll each have trauma kits. Should be enough alcohol and sterile pads to handle that for a while. Anyway, we've got another problem. Patrick rolled in poison ivy.\"\n\nSarah winced. \"Maybe he's immune. Not everybody gets it.\"\n\n\"He's got it,\" Schweitzer said, \"and bad. He's going to be a mess very soon.\"\n\n\"Is there anything in the trauma . . .\"\n\nSchweitzer shook his head before she'd finished speaking. \"I must have packed a hundred of those things in my life. It's for handling gunshot wounds, not stuff like this. We need calamine, hydrocortisone, and some cold packs.\"\n\n\"Maybe he can ride it out.\"\n\n\"Do you think he'll ride it out?\"\n\nSarah cursed. \"No. He'll scream his head off. What's the worst-case scenario?\"\n\n\"For poison ivy in a kid? Anaphylactic shock. We can't have that, Sarah. We've got to fix this.\"\n\n\"We need a drugstore.\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded. \"There's one in every small town. I'll break in at night and get us what we need. Might be I can steal some antibiotics for you, too.\"\n\nSarah rolled onto her knees, and he raced to her side. \"Baby, you have to . . .\"\n\n\"Stop,\" she said. \"Get your head on straight. You want to risk breaking into an alarmed store in the middle of the night like some petty thief? You think that's going to make us safer?\"\n\nShe slowly got to her feet, wincing. Schweitzer winced with her, reaching out to support her elbow, backing off at a look from her. \"I'm fine,\" she said. \"I can stand.\n\n\"Jim, that team was coming for _you_. We have to split up. You have to go after them, and you have to do it now.\"\n\nSchweitzer swallowed the grief and rage, let it pass down into his spiritual gut to churn there. The SEAL was in charge again; he was focused. \"Okay. Just let me get you to a town and make sure that you have what you need. Then we'll come up with a plan.\"\n\n\"Jim . . . Please don't think this is easy for me. I just . . .\"\n\nHe raised a hand. \"Sarah, I'm with you on this. I just want to make sure there isn't another team inbound that might catch you out in the open. Once I'm certain we've got some breathing room, I'll leave. I swear I will.\"\n\nThe grief churned in him, rose up through his spine so that he felt it in the back of his throat. He knew it was riding the link to Sarah, that she could feel it too.\n\n\"I love you, Jim\" was all she said.\n\n\"I know you do,\" he said. \"It doesn't change anything. Let's get this done.\"\n\nShe looked down at herself. \"I'm a mess. I look like I've been through a battle.\"\n\nSchweitzer cocked an eyebrow. \"You have been through a battle.\"\n\nShe quirked a smile, the tiny motion a gut-punch reminder of how it felt to have things normal between them. \"Can you find me a river? I'll wash up.\" She pointed to Gruenen's corpse. \"Those are plain khaki cargo pants. No camouflage pattern. They're clean enough.\"\n\n\"Those are tactical pants. They're made for operators.\"\n\n\"You're telling me hikers never buy and wear that stuff?\"\n\nSchweitzer paused. She was right.\n\nShe looked down at her shirt and pullover. They were dirty, but not beyond salvage. \"We can wash these. If anyone asks, I can say we were camping.\"\n\n\"This is risky.\"\n\nPatrick ran to her, and she stripped off her pullover, bundling him in the cloth before picking him up, keeping the inflamed skin well covered. \"What's more likely to raise the alarm: a hiker wandering into town out of the woods and buying some common first aid supplies, or a break-in in the dead of night?\"\n\nShe had always been smarter than him. The elite reputation of the SEALs was a legend that even the SEALs themselves bought into after a while. There were precious few people who could pop that bubble, remind Schweitzer of his own limitations. Sarah was one.\n\nAnd in the face of her logic, he found himself telling the truth. \"If I lost you, I don't know what I'd do.\"\n\nShe smiled sadly at that, touched his hand. \"You're not going to lose me, Jim. Not if you leave the thinking to me, anyway. Now help me get these assholes stripped, and then let's get me cleaned up.\"\n\nSchweitzer was glad to get to the business of salvaging everything they could from the corpses. They took two of the carbines and their matching wristbands, Schweitzer equipping himself with every spare piece of medical equipment and ammunition he could fit on his body, carrying the load of three men. He put on gear more out of habit than need, and was surprised at the comfort of the tactical vest and thigh-strapped go-bag's familiar weight. Sarah rigged herself out as best she could, slinging the carbine like a pro, or at least a gifted amateur. Schweitzer silently thanked himself for the hundredth time for all the time he had spent forcing her to go to the range.\n\nThey left the corpses for the coyotes. As they picked their way through the woods back to the river where Schweitzer had killed the deer, he could hear the beetles already starting.\n\n\"Feels wrong.\" Schweitzer jerked his head in the direction of the bodies.\n\nSarah gestured to the black, clotted furrow in her hip. \"So does this.\"\n\nAt the river bend, Sarah stripped and waded fearlessly into the freezing water, Patrick propped on her hip. Schweitzer didn't even bother chastising her about catching his son's poison ivy, and instead crouched, alert for threats, watching the water sluice down Sarah's body.\n\nIt glittered on her pale skin, standing up in gooseflesh, making the colored surface of her tattooed arms ripple. Her hair slicked back behind her ears, sending the water running down the graceful curve of her spine. She set Patrick down on the bank and bent to scrub at her shirt and pullover, caught Schweitzer looking.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You're beautiful,\" he rasped, suddenly aware of the distance between them. Sarah, still a young woman. Still beautiful and fertile, her body ready to carry the second child they'd started talking about before he'd been killed. He looked down between his knees, unable to meet her eyes, closing his own to avoid seeing the useless gray piece of meat that had once been his penis, nestled between the mass of hideous scar tissue and clumsy surgical stitching that was the body around it.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he mumbled before he had a chance to stop himself.\n\nSarah didn't answer, finishing in silence and lifting Patrick back onto her hip after she'd dressed. Her wet clothing wound up draped over Schweitzer's broad back as they travelled on, spread out and drying. The silence stayed with them for a long time. Schweitzer desperately wanted to bridge it, but there was simply nothing to say.\n\n\"So,\" Sarah said eventually, \"drugstore.\"\n\n\"I'll find a road.\" He paused, dialing his hearing out as far as he could, grateful for something else to think about. At first there was nothing but the trickle of the water, the soft scrabbling of squirrel claws as they raced through the trees. And finally, somewhere in the distance, so faint he could barely make it out, the low droning of a motorcycle engine, a Big Twin like the one he'd stolen to make his way back to Sarah. That meant roads, civilization.\n\n\"That way.\" He pointed.\n\nHis wife nodded and they pushed on, Patrick beginning to fidget, pawing at his face, sniffling as his skin turned red under the constant attention.\n\n# CHAPTER VIII\n\nWHAT IT'S LIKE\n\nThe door chime roused Jawid from his prayers.\n\nHe sat in the same position he used for his formal prayers, his left leg folded in so tightly that his thigh touched the ground. The cramped posture sent pins and needles through his hips, but he savored the sensation as a reminder of his devotion to God.\n\nHe stumbled to his feet, so surprised he forgot to answer, staring until whoever was outside lost patience and the door opened.\n\nDadou stood in the doorway, her eyes crinkled into a smile. She'd traded the tactical gear for a pair of slim-fitting jeans and a tank top that bared the slopes of her breasts and the strong muscles of her arms and shoulders. Jawid could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen a woman so revealed, and each time, he'd spent at least a week begging God's forgiveness for his sin. But standing here before Dadou, he found his mind far from repentance.\n\n_\"Bon apre-midi, chouchou,\"_ she said. _\"Ki jan ou ye?\"_\n\n\"I was praying,\" Jawid said, feigning irritation he did not feel.\n\nThe smile left Dadou's eyes. \"Yes. Eldredge told me you were a godly type. They don't listen, you know.\"\n\n\"God always listens.\" Jawid forced himself to relax. \"Whenever I am not working, I am here, praying.\"\n\nDadou entered without asking, surveyed the bare surroundings. \"And just think of everything you could be doing with that time, _non_? If you weren't spending it talking to something that isn't there.\"\n\n\"You think you're smart, but God will judge you.\"\n\n\"He has already judged me,\" Dadou laughed. \"God and I have been at odds for a long time now. As you can see\"\u2014she gestured to her own hard body, her clean clothes\u2014\"Mama Dadou isn't doing so bad.\"\n\nShe sat down beside him on the bed, her shoulder brushing his. Jawid felt the heat of her through the thin fabric of his robes.\n\n\"When I first learned that magic was real,\" Jawid said, \"I was not surprised. It was but one more example of the many ways in which God shows He can do anything.\"\n\n\"Or _Shaytan_ ,\" Dadou answered.\n\nJawid started at her use of the Arabic word for the devil. \"How do you know that word?\"\n\n\"Poor does not mean stupid, my friend,\" Dadou smiled. \"I've always been amazed at how godly men like you always assume the good things in the world are God's doing, when you have no evidence that it isn't the devil behind them.\"\n\nA sick ball formed in Jawid's stomach. The truth was that consorting with jinn was specifically forbidden in Islam, but Jawid wasn't sure that the things from the soul storm were truly the jinn described in the Qur'an. But there was no one to discuss it with. If there were other Muslims here, Eldredge had not introduced them to Jawid. The so-called chaplain wore a cross on his collar and spoke always of Jesus, and the doctor who Jawid was forced to constantly speak to only smiled silently when he spoke of his faith. There was no imam to advise him, no qaadi to judge him.\n\nJawid breathed deeply, letting his pride and anger go out on his breath, trying to expel the lust that rose in him at Dadou's nearness. \"Sometimes, I think this is my punishment, that I am trapped here for my sins.\"\n\nDadou nudged him with her shoulder. \"Back in Haiti, they raised us to be afraid of being women, to hide when we bled, to never want a man. They called those things sins, and I spent a lot of time hating myself for them. But you reach a point where you go over the edge, _non_? Might as well enjoy yourself. Plenty of time to repent while you're burning in hell.\"\n\n\"I am not going to hell,\" Jawid answered, but he wasn't so sure.\n\n\"No,\" Dadou breathed. \"I don't think you are.\"\n\n\"Magic is proof of God, but in the end you all continue to worship your science. You just assume there is an explanation, that if you just look hard enough, you will find it.\"\n\nHeat came into Dadou's voice. \"'You all'? I use magic, same as you.\"\n\n\"Yet you refuse to believe in God.\"\n\n\"I never said that I don't believe, _chouchou_ ,\" Dadou said. \"I believe with every bit as much passion as you. God exists, and He's a bastard, a mean little boy who pulls the legs off spiders.\"\n\nJawid knew he should grab her by her arm and throw her out. She was only a woman, after all. But he looked at the hard muscle of her arms and realized that throwing her out would not be so easy. And the truth was that he wanted the warmth of her shoulder touching his much more than he wanted her out of his cell.\n\nDadou placed her hand on his knee, just high enough to send shivering sparks up his leg. \"Let's not fight. I came here to help you.\"\n\nHe couldn't answer, unable to control his breathing, to tear his eyes from her hand.\n\n\"You're not the only one who's alone,\" she said. \"I have never met another person who can do what I do. Actually, that's not true. There was one, but I killed him.\"\n\nThe words broke the spell woven by her hand on his knee. Back home, no one could reach adulthood without seeing killing in abundance. Most of the men he had known were killers, but never the women. \"You've killed?\"\n\nDadou's face went serious. \"With my own hands, _chouchou_.\"\n\nThe dread certainty that she was telling the truth overwhelmed him.\n\nJawid blinked. It was strange, but the fear her words inspired only made him want her more.\n\n\"So, tell me what it's like for you?\" Dadou asked, as if they had just been talking of the weather.\n\n\"I have never killed.\" Jawid said. _That's not true. You've never killed with your own hands, but to say you haven't killed at all is a lie._ Another sin piled on the growing mountain.\n\nDadou laughed. \"Not that, _moun komik_! I meant what is it like for you to use the _vodou_?\"\n\n\"You mean the magic.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I see a storm. All the people who ever lived and died are tangled in it.\"\n\n\"I see the same thing,\" Jawid answered. \"They are screaming. It is awful.\"\n\n\"It is hell,\" Dadou said, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. \"Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting to hear someone else say that they saw it too? That I am not crazy?\"\n\n\"Of course you're not crazy. Do you think the American government would deal with you if you were?\"\n\n\"The American government has a long history of doing very stupid things.\"\n\n\"In this, they are not stupid.\"\n\n\"I know that, but it is not the same thing as hearing it from someone else.\"\n\nJawid's heart swelled at the thought that he was helping her, that he was finally talking to someone who understood what magic did. \"I see bodies, but also through bodies. It is chaos. It is impossible to see where one ends and the next begins.\"\n\nDadou was nodding, tears tracking down her face. \"That's exactly right.\"\n\n\"It is terrible,\" Jawid said, \"and I fear that some day it is where I will wind up.\"\n\n\"And yet you still believe in God.\"\n\n\"I do, and I pray He will save me from it. He is the only one who can.\"\n\nDadou shook her head, cuffing the tears away with the back of her wrist. \"Then I will pray the same. _M'espere bondye rete av\u00e8k ou e gade ou._ \"\n\n\"This is what helps me think that maybe what we do isn't evil. Maybe this is God's plan, to have us reach out and pluck the souls of the worthy from hell, give them a second chance.\"\n\n\"Eldredge tells me you call them 'jinn.'\"\n\nJawid nodded.\n\n\"I call them _mist\u00e8_ , and I do not think for a second that they are worthy.\"\n\nJawid looked at his lap She was right, of course. The jinn were unspeakably evil.\n\nSave one. Save Schweitzer.\n\nDadou's voice was flat. \"Have you met a single one of them that was not a monster?\"\n\n\"No,\" Jawid lied.\n\n\"Make no mistake,\" Dadou said. \"What we do is not benediction for the deserving. We summon devils, and we put them to use.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Jawid nodded. \"But without it, what would I be? A slave to stronger men. This has given me my life.\"\n\nDadou nodded. \"It is the same for me. I would be groveling in the gutter in Port-au-Prince if not for the Americans. I owe for that, and so do you.\"\n\n\"But . . . how much? When is the debt paid? And what comes after?\"\n\nDadou tilted her head, looked into his eyes. \"If you could have any after you wanted, what would you choose?\"\n\nJawid started to answer, looked down at his lap. Who was she? A stranger. \"It is . . . easy to talk to you.\"\n\nDadou laughed, touched his shoulder. \"Of course it is, _chouchou_. We are the same, you and I. You know what our magic controls?\"\n\n\"Devils.\"\n\n\"Communication. It is a way of talking. Have you ever tried it with a living person?\"\n\nJawid shook his head. \"It's impossible. Life is . . . too loud.\"\n\nDadou smiled. \" _Se sa_ , but see you said 'loud'? It's a sound to you. Summoning is really communication. And that is why you like talking with me. Because, deep down, our magic is already doing that.\"\n\nJawid smiled. \"That's . . . crazy.\"\n\n\"Is it any crazier than a man sitting in the sky and telling you to get on your knees five times a day?\"\n\nAgain, Jawid knew he should be angry, but it was so good to talk to someone. Not a doctor, not a superior, not even an American. Someone like him. The silence stretched and he realized he was staring at her.\n\nShe didn't seem to mind. \"So, if you could have any after, what would it be?\"\n\n\"A wife. A family. Isn't that what people do?\"\n\nDadou's face went hard for a moment, her eyes narrowed, the muscles on her neck tightening just a fraction. He sat up. \"I'm sorry; I've made you angry.\"\n\nBut as she turned back to him, her smile returned, only sad now, her eyes wide and mournful. \"No, _chouchou_. Don't be silly.\"\n\nRelief warmed his belly. Of course he was mistaken. \"You looked unhappy.\"\n\n\"I was only thinking that I had never let myself hope for such a thing. Our lives have been like the storm where the dead live. We are twirling this way and that. One day, we live in the mud and then we have the _vodou_ , and suddenly we are killers in another country. Who thinks of family then?\"\n\n_I do,_ Jawid thought, but he could not speak, because he felt like his stomach had shrunk into a tiny ball at the thought that this woman, this beautiful woman, might feel the same way. Was this magic too? Perhaps they really were communicating without words, like Dadou said.\n\nShe sighed. \"But this is misty-eyed talk. We are neither of us ready for an after. We must focus on the now.\"\n\nHer words were a bucket of cold water down his back. The warmth in his belly vanished, replaced with the knot that reminded him of his failure with Chang, his failure with Schweitzer.\n\nHe knew it made him seem weak, but he couldn't stop himself from asking. \"So, you are not here to replace me?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she said, \"but . . . I would be lying if I said the _Dokt\u00e8_ was happy with how things have gone.\"\n\nJawid looked up at her. \"What did he say to you?\"\n\nShe put her hand back on his knee, smiled, and some of the warmth returned. \"Don't worry about it, dahling. I can handle Eldredge. He just needs something to put you back in his good graces. Some success.\"\n\n\"How?\" Jawid asked.\n\nDadou moved her hand up his leg now, just a fraction of an inch, but enough to cause his head to spin.\n\nHer grin widened, her teeth gleaming under the fluorescent lights. \"Let me show you.\"\n\n* * *\n\nDadou sat up, rubbed the sore spot below her shoulder blades that had cramped as she hunched over the computer. In Port-au-Prince, people were nothing, scrabbling in wreckage like insects. There were a few, a very few, who had the money to be actual people, to have their lives count in any real way, to be loved, remembered. For most, living was much the same as dying, an involuntary function as random as the weather.\n\nIn America, it seemed that everyone mattered. Almost everyone, anyway. There were mountains of paper, computers full to bursting with legacy. Every doctor visit, every school grade, every idle thought on the Internet. She wondered how big the Gemini Cell's file on her was. She had been an actual person for only a few years now, but she didn't doubt that was more than enough time for the American government to put her in their endless databases, to note their speculations on her sanity, health, potential.\n\nThey'd certainly dredged enough up on Jawid Rahimi.\n\nHere was a digital photo, recovered from a Taliban laptop by a Special Forces team. Jawid was dressed in fabric so gauzy it billowed, perched on the knee of a hard-faced, bearded warrior. The man's skin was tanned like old leather, his eyes sharp in a way that spoke of a lifetime at war. One hand was curled around the barrel of an assault rifle. The other rested lightly on Jawid's hip, long fingers disappearing over the curve of his thigh.\n\nJawid was younger, his light scruff of a beard shaved away. He was made up like a woman, thick lines of black around his eyes, cheeks and lips rouged. His own eyes looked haunted. Distant. Dadou had seen that look many times before. Her sister's eyes had looked the same way. Dadou's might have too, if she hadn't killed the man who'd hurt her.\n\nDadou turned back to the case files and the notes of the psychologist assigned to profile Jawid, under the duplicitous title of HEALTH RISK ASSESSMENT. She had read them so many times that she knew them by heart, but let her eyes read over the words regardless.\n\nSubject's village was attacked by combined elements of the Taliban and Haqqani network, though subject believes the attack was not religious in nature but rather related to intertribal rivalry over access to grazing lands. Subject's grandfather, who he revered, was killed. Disposition of the rest of his family is unknown, but ground branch was unable to locate and they are assumed dead. Subject was taken as \"boy\" by band leader and subject to routine and repetitive sexual assault before rescue.\n\nAs a result of this experience, subject suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 309.81, with the following second-order effects: Generalized Anxiety Disorder 300.02, and Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent (severe, no psychotic features)\u2014296.33. Symptoms include intensely low self-confidence and preoccupation with religious observance. Subject has lionized his family and childhood, and seeks to recreate that experience, preoccupied with marriage, children, and a return to his tribal roots.\n\nFear-Up, Pride-in-Belonging, and Hammer-of-Justice approaches yielded negative results. Subject responds dramatically to female influence, and has basis for a substantial Madonna-Whore Complex that will likely prevent him from forming meaningful romantic relationships without persistent therapy.\n\nRecommend increased SSRI as a bulwark against both depression and libido and mirtazapine to reduce anxiety and increase appetite (subject is eight pounds underweight). Appealing to subject's religiosity remains counterproductive, as subject's religious beliefs are strongly weighted against magic use and likely to focus subject even more firmly on his goals of marriage and family.\n\nIt is possible that appealing to subject's pathology may yield more positive results. A female honey trap operator may make inroads, but it is unlikely that subject will respond to someone who is not a religious Muslim, and Waziristani tribal courtship rituals are notoriously slow. This could be circumvented by a talented operator with a powerfully connecting common trait.\n\nDadou smiled. _My magic. That's the common trait._ They had underestimated his weakness to sighs and touches. Jawid was as horny as a schoolboy and would likely have responded to any pretty girl who seemed willing. But she had to admit the magic helped. She thought of the look in his eyes as he described the soul storm. _Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting to hear someone else say that they saw it too?_ She had told him, _That I am not crazy?_ That had been no lie.\n\nHe was like a little boy who had been given something too big for him. He was innocent and adrift, and it tugged at her heart. The world needed more boys. By the time they became men, more often than not, they were like the one who had hurt her sister, like the killers who'd flanked Rodriguez in that warehouse back in California.\n\n_Stupid. You are here to do a job, and you will do it._\n\nShe turned back to his file, read it again. So much concern, so much attention.\n\nHow many people back home wandered every day in a PTSD-induced fog? How many had minds broken by rape, torture, the horror of watching their own children die because they could not feed them? Nobody kept files on them. There were no smart doctors making careful notes, staying up late worrying how to fix them. They were not actual people, not people who mattered. If not for her magic, Dadou wouldn't matter either.\n\nThe door chime sounded, startling Dadou up from her chair. It would be Jawid again, tugging at his scraggle of black beard and staring at her chest. He was so nakedly obvious in his hungers, showing the world how best to manipulate him. She almost felt bad as she went to the door, letting a smile play across her face despite her irritation at being interrupted.\n\nAlmost.\n\nBut the smile died as she saw Eldredge standing in the corridor, glowering from under his bushy white eyebrows. Where Jawid was the very picture of naivet\u00e9, Eldredge was stone. \"We need to talk,\" he said.\n\nDadou sighed and stood aside, gesturing into the cell. \"Have a seat.\" She motioned toward the chair at her desk. Had it been Jawid, she would have motioned toward the bed.\n\nEldredge ignored her. \"We need progress.\"\n\n\"Progress in what, _Dokt\u00e8_?\"\n\n\"Don't play with me. I just had a rather . . . uncomfortable conversation with the Director. He's of the mind that you need to push Jawid harder.\"\n\n\"This won't come from pushing, _Dokt\u00e8_.\"\n\n\"I don't understand why you can't involve me in this operation. I have worked with Jawid longer than anyone else in this program. I know him. I can help.\"\n\nDadou laughed, cupped her breasts. \"I'm afraid you lack certain assets necessary for this work.\"\n\nEldredge swallowed his anger, breathed for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was even. \"Doctor Empath has told me about his levers. I understand that you are leaning on . . . particular ones. What I don't understand is how this is going to help find Schweitzer. We lost Chang. We don't have anyone else to hand that we could possibly mine for information, even if they were able to resist the jinn . . .\"\n\nDadou put up a hand. \"Do you ever wonder how Schweitzer found his wife?\"\n\nEldredge froze, mouth open. At last, he closed it. \"Of course. I wonder that every day. The prevailing theory is that he has some kind of link to her.\"\n\n\" _Se sa, Dokt\u00e8._ You must understand that what we do, at its heart, isn't summoning. It is . . . a kind of talking. We know so little about the _vodou_. Perhaps there is some way that Schweitzer can talk to his wife. His soul to hers. Very romantic, _non_?\"\n\n\"Are you sure this link exists?\"\n\nDadou spread her hands. \"This is the _vodou_ , _Dokt\u00e8_. I am not sure of anything. Except for this: I must be left alone to work with Jawid if I am to have any chance of finding your missing Operator. Jawid and I have a better chance if we work together, and we can only work together if you leave us to it.\"\n\n\"Have you made any progress at all?\"\n\n\"Tremendous progress, _Dokt\u00e8_. Jawid and I have gone into the void together; we are learning from one another. But these things take time.\"\n\nShe could hear the edge of excitement in Eldredge's voice. \"If you're right, the implications are staggering. The ability to . . . find an Operator? But you're talking about Sarah, and she's alive. So, it would be the ability to find a _person_.\"\n\nDadou patted the air with her palms. \"I don't want to over-promise. We are a long way from that. I am merely telling you what we are chasing. In the meantime, you must work on finding Schweitzer the old-fashioned way.\"\n\n\"We are gearing up the follow on to Gruenen's team. There are three towns nearby. We think Schweitzer will head for one of them. He will need supplies for his wife and child.\"\n\n\"If you can get us close enough for the Golds to feel his magic, we won't need to worry about links. It will be a fox hunt.\"\n\n\"I would rather not use the Golds if we can avoid it.\" Eldredge swallowed. \"How much more time do you need?\"\n\nDadou shrugged. \"Jawid's heart is not in this. He is . . . distracted. Unhappy. To do this right, he needs to focus. I am doing what I can, _Dokt\u00e8_.\"\n\n\"The Director is emphatic that this move quickly.\"\n\n\"Tell me something, _Dokt\u00e8_ ; when was the last time you had a woman?\"\n\nEldredge blanched, then turned red. \"I am not going to discuss that with . . .\"\n\nDadou laughed. \"I thought so. I am not surprised. You have been locked down here for so long, _non_? If you were not so rusty, you would remember that these kinds of things can't be rushed. That would be the fastest way to make him feel like it was . . . false, _ou konprann_? I have to let it roll until it boils.\"\n\n\"And how the hell will you know when he's . . . boiling?\"\n\nDadou tapped her temple. \"I will know.\"\n\n\"The Director doesn't think we can run this program with a single Sorcerer. We need Jawid's head in the game.\"\n\n\" _Pas enkie twa._ His head is in the game.\"\n\n\"Doctor Empath isn't so sure.\"\n\n_Doctor Empath doesn't have him staring at her tits all day._ \"I've got this.\"\n\n\"If there are any resources you need . . .\"\n\n\"Just time and a little patience,\" Dadou said, then, glancing meaningfully at the door, \"and some privacy.\"\n\nEldredge frowned. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, left still shaking his head. Dadou let him hear her hiss of a chuckle as she slid the door shut.\n\nShe took a deep breath, let it go before returning to her computer. Jawid was easy. She had seen the way he looked at her, the way his breathing changed whenever she touched him. If his file was any indicator, he'd never even touched a woman who wasn't a relative. She already had him. Getting him to agree to help her Bind _mist\u00e8_ into a living subject would be much harder.\n\nShe thought of the lie she'd just told Eldredge. It was clumsy, to be sure, but the Director had been clear. Her orders came directly from him, and Eldredge was to be kept in the dark until the project was ready to be revealed.\n\nEldredge might look like a wise man with his white hair and his white coat, but in the end, he was a man. Dadou had met many, and most were, at their root, like Jawid. You started with sighs and glimpses of skin, then moved to guile and finished up with threats. Sooner or later, they did what you wanted.\n\nStill, she would tell the Director of their conversation. _Leave him to me,_ the man's modulated voice had rasped. _He will be of no help to you in this._\n\n_I understand,_ Dadou had said. _But will he be an obstacle?_\n\n_If he becomes one, you will let me know,_ the Director had said. _And I will deal with it personally._\n\nShe punched up her laptop and called the Director's line.\n\nHis rasping voice answered. \"You're calling about Eldredge.\"\n\nDadou smiled. She didn't doubt that the Director had her monitored. They'd taught her to sweep a room for recording devices when they'd brought her on, but she also didn't doubt that any device they used would be designed with her training in mind. \"However did you know?\"\n\n\"Because I spoke to him a little while ago, and I know him to be a man of action. You must understand, Miss Dadou, that he lacks certain pieces of information that are critical to his estimation of your progress.\"\n\n\"I gave him the story we agreed on. About the links. About how Jim Schweitzer found his wife.\"\n\n\"The best lies are mostly truth, Miss Dadou.\"\n\n\"Mostly.\"\n\n\"Anyway, when I deem Eldredge ready to handle it, I'll have him read on. I have some doubts about his ability to fully appreciate the criticality of what we're doing here.\"\n\n\"It's your show, _Direkt\u00e8_. I only work here.\"\n\n\"But Eldredge wasn't wrong about our need for progress. How is Jawid coming along?\"\n\nDadou was silent for a moment. \"I am almost there; he just needs a little push.\"\n\nThe Director didn't bother to keep the frustration out of his voice. \"You sound . . . reluctant.\"\n\n\"Your psychologist's assessment is correct, _Direkt\u00e8_. He wants a woman. That's the lever.\"\n\n\"If that is the lever, Miss Dadou, then you are to pull it, and with all expediency.\"\n\nAnger boiled in the back of her throat. She thought of her sister, of the long parade of men who had tried to tell her that she belonged to them. \"I . . .\"\n\n\"Listen to me carefully, Miss Dadou. I want to make sure I'm perfectly clear\"\u2014the Director's spoke slowly, enunciating each word\u2014\"that while you are a critical asset to this program, you are not so critical that I will tolerate shirking. I brought you here to do a job, and I need you to _do_ it.\"\n\nFear doused her anger. She knew the kind of power the Director wielded. She knew what he could do, what he would do. \"Sir,\" she said. \"It will be very tricky. The process of Binding a jinn into the living is . . . ugly . . . bloody. It may . . . frighten someone so delicate. I will have to bring him in at precisely the right moment. It's like pitching a source, _ou konnen_? You don't ask the question unless you already know the answer.\"\n\n\"Then make sure you know the answer. He wants a wife; he wants a family. Promise to marry him and have his babies.\"\n\nThe anger boiled in the back of her head, mixing with the terror in her gut. \"I'm not sure that . . .\"\n\n\"Let me tell you something about my leadership style, Miss Dadou. I don't get involved in the operational details of any of the programs I run. Instead, I recruit the most talented people I can find, and trust them to do whatever is necessary to get the job done. I trust them to do their jobs, Miss Dadou. I don't micromanage them. I am an executive. I _execute_.\"\n\nHe bit off the last word, raising his voice just enough to underscore the point. He waited for Dadou to reply, and when she didn't, spoke into the silence. \"Do we have an understanding, Miss Dadou?\"\n\nIt wasn't until she tried to answer that she discovered her mouth was dry. \"We do.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" the Director said. \"I look forward to great progress in your next report.\"\n\nThen he cut the connection. Dadou stared at her laptop for a long time. Jawid was just a man. It was nothing that she hadn't done before.\n\nShe looked in the mirror and ignored the void in her gut, swallowing the pinpricks of tears forming in the corners of her eyes.\n\nAllergies. Everything in America was strange and new. She'd get used to it.\n\n# CHAPTER IX\n\nHONESTLY, OFFICER\n\nIt was the kind of Shenandoah town where Schweitzer had kept promising to take Sarah: old clapboard barns converted to antique shops and used bookstores, little caf\u00e9s hung with the work of local artists, the semipermanent stalls of a farmers market. As the years rolled by and they never visited, she didn't nag him about it. _I always thought there'd be time._\n\nThe corpse of her husband looked over at her. The face of the man she loved was only faintly visible on the gray-purple skin stretched over its mostly metal skull. Jim's beautiful gray eyes were gone. The silver balls that replaced them were chilling, their flickering dance a constant reminder of the strangeness of the new world she'd woken up to in the Sentara Princess Anne Hospital. This was not the man who had fathered her child. This was not the man who had made her feel so safe, not because he could protect her, but because he could help her to protect herself.\n\nBut the magic that linked them would not be denied. She could feel it dragging at her chest, a physical thing, a ship's line tying them together. The love in that channel was thick and solid, as if everything they'd shared when Jim had been alive had been distilled into it, something she could smell and taste and touch, but outside of her. A museum piece. It reminded her that she loved him but was not in love with him. It was obligation and legacy and the raw knowledge that only he could protect her son from the monsters that were just like him in every way, save the color of the flames that burned in the eye sockets of their skulls.\n\nThat same link had nearly betrayed her as she had betrayed her husband. _No, it was not betrayal._ When she'd slept with Steve Chang, she'd thought Jim was dead, would never have done it otherwise. _You shouldn't have done it, anyway._ She loved Steve, but not in that way, and their lovemaking had been more a desperate flailing for something other than panic and agony, grasping for anything that felt good, even for a moment.\n\nThere was nothing to be gained by telling Jim. He had lost enough. The link between them had tipped him off. He knew something was wrong, but he also knew her well enough not to press her, and the urgency of their situation didn't exactly lend itself to a deep conversation at the moment. Even in this, her hiding something from him, they were working together.\n\nBecause the truth was that the core of their marriage had been more than passion. It had been the yoke they'd worn together, harnessed and straining for common goals. She looked at Jim now, not as her lover and the father of her son but as the person she would be working with to get the mission accomplished. _Oh God, Jim. I miss you._\n\nJim stared back at her, his dead face expressionless, devoid of the slow movement that breathing provided. She could feel his own emotions pushing down the link to her: love, but also desperation, and a rising impatience with her all-too-human limitations.\n\nShe ruffled Patrick's hair. \"You'll have to find a way to keep him quiet.\"\n\n\"I'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"Don't hurt him.\" She wished she could take the words back as soon as she spoke.\n\nJim looked away, and Sarah felt the pulse of anger, humiliation, and pain along the link. \"He's my son. What the hell do you think I'm going to do?\"\n\nShe knew she should apologize, try to salve the hurt. But the truth was that Jim was dead now, and she worried that with each passing day he grew less and less in touch with the demands of the living. She grunted and turned back to the gorgeous scene unfolding below them.\n\n\"I'm not seeing a drugstore,\" he said.\n\n\"There's a drugstore. See that?\" She pointed to a road winding its way up a hill that had been cleared of anything taller than a blade of grass. The sign beside it was large enough to be read at this distance. BRYCE RESORT, BASYE, VA.\n\n\"Looks like a ski resort,\" he said.\n\n\"It is. Big enough for a hotel. No way they're not going to have a way for guests to buy aspirin.\"\n\n\"Doesn't mean they'll have what we need for Patrick.\" The boy stared sullenly down the hill, rubbing absently at the growing red welts on his arms.\n\n\"Itches,\" Patrick whined.\n\n\"I know it does, sweetheart,\" Jim said, \"but you can't scratch it. No matter what.\"\n\nPatrick ignored his father, looked up at Sarah instead, his eyes questioning. \"Do as Daddy says,\" Sarah said.\n\nPatrick was sullen, but he stopped rubbing his arms. She spoke quickly, before Jim could say anything, before she had to reckon with the pain filtering down the link between them.\n\n\"Ski resorts run year-round,\" Sarah said. \"Big ones do, anyway. There'll be a zip line and mountain bike trails and a conference center. They'll have what we need.\"\n\nJim grunted. \"Not too late to do this my way.\"\n\nSarah's answer was to stand, dusting off her pants. \"He's going to start screaming bloody murder the minute I walk away.\"\n\n\"I'll head back into the woods far enough that nobody will hear him. He'll cry himself to sleep eventually.\"\n\nShe bent, gave Patrick a long hug. \"I can't even begin to think how this all is hurting him,\" she said.\n\n\"Best not to,\" Jim answered.\n\nThey looked at one another then, and Sarah felt a tremor pass along the link connecting them. She suppressed a shudder at the sudden intrusive memory of Steve moving on top of her and inside her, watching him couple with her as if she hovered outside her own body, looking down at his pumping hips, her trembling shoulders. Could Jim tell? Did he know? She had thought she was certain he didn't, but the magic had power beyond anything she understood. It enabled her to know things that she shouldn't. She had been able to tell where Jim was and how far away. She knew that Steve was dead, had been certain of it the same way she'd been certain that Jim was alive.\n\nShe looked at the grinning skull of his face, the embalmed skin stretched across it. _Not alive. Not anymore._\n\nShe kissed the top of Patrick's head and tried to ignore his cries as Jim bundled him into his dead arms and turned for the woods. _Commit to the fight,_ Jim had taught her. _Go all in and stay in until one of you is down. Half measures are how you lose._\n\nShe walked down the hill, her clothes mostly clean, her stride mostly even, reciting her story, falling into character. Nobody would ask, but if they did, she was camping in the forest and had hiked in to grab some medical supplies. The ground sloped sharply, the sun warming her neck and shoulders. Birds shouted out competing claims to territory and roots crunched under her boot soles. For a moment, she could almost believe she was alone, walking in the sunshine toward some Shenandoah Valley art town, instead of on the run for her life from an army of the undead.\n\nShe took refuge in that thought, turned away from her anxiety over Patrick, the museum piece of her love for Jim heavy in her chest, and spared a glance for her surroundings. A low barn had been converted to an antiques showroom to her right. An ice cream parlor, closed for the winter, topped a trio of a barber, sandwich shop, and small motor repair store. Further along, the art galleries and coffee shops crowded the narrowing road as it wound its way toward the ski resort. There were few people on the main road between the ski resort and the town proper. A young couple with a baby in a sling smiled at her, another set of parents smiled sheepishly as they tailed screaming children. None gave her more than a second glance.\n\nShe passed the repair shop and angled toward the broken gravel road that began the long climb to the resort's top. She felt the aching in her hips and knees, the fatigue brought on by nights out in the open on hard ground. Too little sleep and far, far too much walking, Patrick's dead weight always on her shoulder. This entrance was designed for families coming from a long way off, driving cars that could carry them the miles up the hill to the main entrance. The view would be spectacular, but the climb would be punishing.\n\nSarah sighed, set her teeth, and headed off.\n\nAs she passed the corner, her eye caught a flash of white and red. A drugstore stood at the end of the row, sign bleached from long years in the sun. The glass door was propped open with an old brick. Rows of detergent bottles were on display in the dirty window.\n\nA brown car was parked in front, a five-pointed gold star emblazoned on the side. SHERIFF was written beneath it in angled letters, then SHENANDOAH COUNTY. The light bar on the roof glinted at her.\n\nSarah felt the sour panic boiling in her stomach. It was useless to fight it, Jim had taught her. Far better to acknowledge its presence and factor that into your decision-making. Grappling with fear honestly was the only way to mitigate its power over you. She kept walking, not looking at the cruiser again. For a normal person, it would just be part of the scenery, and Sarah was normal. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.\n\nThe car wasn't idling. The windows were rolled up and the doors locked. It could be parked for a minute; it could be parked overnight. The sheriff might be inside the store or on vacation in Florida. _Make a decision. You either go up that hill and see if there's another store or you go inside this one. You do not wander around in circles, drawing attention to yourself while your son's poison ivy gets worse._\n\nHer hip. She felt the throbbing ache of the divot in her flesh, the steady heat that she prayed was the aftereffect of the clotting powder and not an infection. She looked at the winding road up to the ski resort again. Steep, long, the broken gravel would spin a tire, slip with each footstep.\n\nShe muttered a silent apology to the training Jim had given her and let pain and fatigue make the decision. She turned to the store's open door even as she told herself that it was time and not exhaustion driving her to this choice, knowing it was a lie.\n\nThe inside of the store was organized and warm. Posters advertising everything from whitening toothpaste to chest rubs were yellowed with age, but the shelves were neat and well stocked. The silver edges of an old-style black metal cash register glinted under fluorescent lights. Behind it, an older man stood chatting, his enormous belly spilling over the brown braided leather belt that held up his khaki trousers.\n\nA sheriff's deputy leaned in toward him, hard lines of her jaw creased in a smile. Her uniform was brown and gold to match the car outside, her hair wound into a long braid coiled into a bun that popped out just below the edge of her ball cap. The deep lines in her skin spoke of a life out in hard weather. Her hand, sporting a gold wedding ring, was tapping against the butt of her pistol. Her head swiveled as soon as Sarah walked in, smile never fading, eyes out of the conversation, fixed firmly on her.\n\nSarah suppressed the sudden urge to turn and leave. _No. That's what someone with something to hide would do. You're here shopping._\n\nSarah smiled and looked up at the white poster-board signs hanging from clear fishing line over each aisle. _Calamine._ She headed to the aisle marked SKIN CARE. She bent, heart hammering, making a great show of scanning the rows of white and yellow bottles, the panic rising until they were all a plastic blur, labels unreadable. She felt a sharp pain as the cauterized skin over her wound stretched taut, and worked to keep a grimace off her face.\n\n\"Help you find something, ma'am?\" The man behind the counter's voice drifted over to her.\n\n\"Got any calamine lotion?\" she asked, hearing the edge of fear in her voice, praying the deputy didn't notice.\n\n\"You're in the right aisle,\" the man answered. \"Should be two shelves from the bottom. Look for the pink.\"\n\n\"Pink, right,\" Sarah said, focusing. _Don't lose the bubble,_ Jim's voice echoed in her head. Where was he now? Could his magical senses tell him where she was? She felt for the link but was interrupted by footsteps coming toward her. \"It's okay,\" she said, looking up to the man, \"I can find . . .\"\n\nThe deputy stood there, eyes crawling over Sarah, looking for indicators. \"Let me show you,\" she said. \"I practically live here.\" Her voice was high, with a slight southern twang. Clusters of freckles dotted her cheeks and nose.\n\nSarah swallowed. She only noticed these kinds of details when she was truly panicked. She swallowed; it was an indicator, but she needed it to get her voice back. \"I've got it,\" she said, tapping a pink bottle that she hoped was calamine.\n\nThe deputy's eyes flicked to it, and Sarah could tell she'd missed her guess. \"What else are you looking for, ma'am? Might be I can help you.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Sarah said, standing and working the kinks out of her spine, wincing at the pain in her hip. The deputy didn't appear to miss that one, either. _Engage her. That's what a normal person would do._ \"Need aspirin, hydrogen peroxide, and antibiotic ointment. An extra tent stake would be awesome if you sell that stuff.\"\n\nThe deputy relaxed a bit at that. \"You camping out here?\"\n\nSarah nodded, following the woman into the next aisle. \"Been a disaster so far. Tent blew over, my son cut himself 'trying to help.'\"\n\nThe deputy nodded, handing her a bottle of aspirin and moving farther along the aisle. \"Boys do that,\" she said. \"Got two of my own. Spend half my time putting Band-Aids on 'em. You need a doc? The ski lodge has an EMT on call.\"\n\n\"Nah, he's fine. Just scraped up. My husband's with him.\"\n\nThe deputy nodded as Sarah collected the rest of her things and headed to the counter. \"How long you in town?\"\n\n\"I'm not in town,\" Sarah smiled. \"Just discovered that we hadn't packed enough. We don't do this a lot.\"\n\n\"Where you from?\" The man behind the counter's voice was light, and his eyes easy and open compared to the deputy's.\n\n_Good lies are as close to the truth as possible._ If there was an APB out, then the information Sarah was providing would be giving the deputy what she needed to make a positive ID, but that was a risk she was simply going to have to take. \"Tidewater,\" she answered. \"Outside Norfolk. My man's in the Navy. You?\"\n\nThe man laughed and even the deputy seemed to relax. \"Been here my whole life.\" He handed her the purchases and her change. \"Now, you be sure to thank your husband for his service from us.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Sarah said, picturing Jim's dead face.\n\n\"Bye, now,\" said the deputy, as Sarah turned and left. She could feel their eyes on her back, following her out. She forced down the urge to hurry, keeping her stride even and casual. She strained her eyes, hoping against hope that the conversation would start up again, that she would hear the light strains of their chatter, showing they had turned from her and back to the life before she'd wandered into town.\n\nBut instead, she heard the crunching of shoes on the gravel behind her.\n\n\"Ma'am?\" The deputy's voice.\n\nSarah froze, thrust her hands into her pockets to stop them trembling, forced herself to turn, smile. \"What's up?\" _Please tell me that I forgot my receipt . . ._\n\nThe deputy had hooked her thumbs into her gun belt, took a few steps closer, looking at her feet. She stopped outside striking range, crossed her hands in front of her buckle, looked up. \"Ma'am, I've been in law enforcement all my life. I've got something of a sixth sense when it comes to trouble. There's trouble here. Is there anything you want to tell me?\"\n\nSarah rolled her eyes and tried to keep from bolting. \"Trust me, if there was something I needed police help with, I'd be asking.\"\n\n\"You running away from something, ma'am?\"\n\nSarah fought the urge to swallow again, put a little edge into her voice. \"I'm a thirty-three-year-old mother. I am a successful artist. I am married to an amazing man. What the hell would I be running away from?\"\n\nThe deputy looked sheepish. \"That's what I'm trying to figure out.\"\n\n\"Well, there's nothing to figure. I'm going back to my camp. We'll sharpen a stick or something for the stake.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you look a little banged up. This amazing man of yours, he hitting you?\"\n\nAnd now Sarah did swallow, tamping down on the sick certainty that this woman wasn't going to let her go.\n\n\"They just keep doing it unless you stop them,\" the deputy said. \"I see it all the time. Happened to me once. No shame in admitting it.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Sarah said. \"Jim would never do that. We're just lousy campers, is all.\"\n\nThere was a long silence, during which Sarah was suddenly very conscious of how empty the street felt, deserted save for her and the deputy, eyes narrowed and tracking Sarah's hands. _Commit to the fight,_ Jim's voice in her head. _Even long odds are still odds. Make a plan._\n\nSarah didn't want to hurt this woman who was, in all likelihood, trying to protect her. But she had driven a knife through the throat of a man who would have kept her from her son, had bitten the face off another. She would not hesitate if that's what it took to get her back to Patrick.\n\nAt last, the deputy sighed. \"All right, ma'am. I'll let you be on your way. If you change your mind, I eat my lunch in my car right here most days. Just come on down and we'll talk it over. No need for a report or anything. Just us girls.\"\n\nRelief flooded Sarah with such intensity her knees went weak, but she put a smile on her face. \"That won't be necessary, but thanks anyway. It's good to know that people like you are out here, keeping us safe.\"\n\nThe deputy smiled but said nothing, eyes kindly suspicious.\n\nJim had taught her this technique, how police and military interrogators had been trained to use the silent stare. Most people abhorred silence, and would fill it with anything, clues, even confession, if it went on long enough.\n\nBut Sarah was not most people. She turned on her heel and took a long and confident stride back toward the woods. It was the sort of purposeful step she imagined an innocent woman would take, the fast pace of a camper anxious to get back to her living husband and child, who were just out for a pleasure trip and not being hunted by the government. She felt the deputy's eyes on her back, but each step lifted her confidence. _Keep going. Long strides. You've got somewhere to be. Move quickly, but don't run._\n\nSarah felt a stinging in her hip, then a sudden warm wetness.\n\nToo fast. Too long. Too confident.\n\nThe wound had reopened.\n\nBefore she could stop herself, Sarah had clapped her hand to her hip. Her jeans were already soaked, the red stain easily seeping through the thick fabric to glisten wetly in the sun. Even a casual observer couldn't miss it.\n\nShe was already turning as she heard the deputy's shocked voice. \"Ma'am? My God, ma'am, are you okay?\"\n\nThe deputy's eyes were wide. She was already advancing on Sarah, eyes fixed on the spreading bloodstain on her hip.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Sarah mumbled, backpedaling.\n\n\"Like hell you are! You sit down right now; we're going to get you help.\" The deputy thumbed the radio clipped to her shoulder. \"Don, I'm going to need your help over here, Fairway and Ridge. Ten fifty-four, uncontrolled bleeding. Over.\" Sarah's stomach turned over. She knew this type of cop. There was no way she would let her go now. They would take Sarah to a hospital. That meant identity checks. It meant radio chatter. It meant the Cell would find out.\n\n_Make a decision._ She had no doubt the deputy could draw and fire before she could close the distance between them.\n\nThe radio crackled a reply, but it was lost in the blood roaring to Sarah's ears. Her vision was graying at the edges, coming into crystal clarity as she focused on where the deputy was vulnerable, how she would disable her before she had a chance to draw her weapon.\n\n_No. Even if you could, you're not going to hurt her. She's done nothing wrong. She's trying to help._\n\nSarah backpedaled faster, her hip throbbing. \"I said I'm fine! Leave me alone.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you are badly hurt. You are not going anywhere until an EMT tells me that you're not going to bleed out. I am trained in first aid. Just let me stop the bleeding until we can get an ambulance here.\"\n\nTires crunching on gravel, another police cruiser pulling up alongside.\n\nNow or never.\n\nSarah broke for the line of storefronts, her boots spraying dirt and making her feel as if she was wading through molasses. She heard the dull clunk as the deputy dropped the radio and it banged against the body armor beneath her shirt. \"Oh, shit. Ma'am! Stop right now! Go, Don, go!\"\n\nTires peeling as the driver of the other cruiser threw it in gear and picked up speed. Sarah ran with every ounce of will she possessed, feeling the seared wound in her hip tear wider, fresh blood soaking her waistband. The storefronts drew closer with dreamlike slowness. _Damn it, Jim. You were right. You should have just come in the dead of night and stolen this stuff._\n\nShe heard the sudden roar of an engine, the sound of crunching gravel, and the other cruiser leapt around the building corner, fishtailing to a stop between her and the door. The driver jumped out and took cover behind the engine block, pistol trained on Sarah's face. \"Police officer!\" He shouted through a thick accent. \"Stop right there! Let me see your hands!\"\n\nHe had a black flattop cut close enough for a Marine to envy. He was a caricature of a southern county cop: huge paunch and jowls, red pug nose, aviator glasses. His ball cap had flown off in his hurry to draw down on her.\n\nSarah slowed, stopped. She wouldn't do Patrick any good with a hole in her head. She looked left and right, saw only the female deputy slowly coming closer, eyes locked on her gun sights, staring down the barrel at Sarah.\n\n_There's no running now,_ she thought. _Only dying._\n\nAnother thought came close on its heels. _Maybe that's best. If they take you, they can use you to get Patrick, to get Jim._\n\nHer husband was a superpowered immortal. He might be able to rescue her, and she knew he wouldn't stop trying until he succeeded. And that was the problem. Because there were other superpowered immortals, and as soon as they had confirmation of where she was, they would be coming.\n\nShe swallowed. _I'm sorry, baby._ She felt the tremor of the communication pass along the link, could feel Jim tightening at the other end. He would be coming. Even now, he would be coming for her.\n\n\"On your knees,\" the male deputy said. \"One knee at a time, nice and slow. Right knee first.\"\n\nSarah hesitated. \"Ma'am, do it right now!\" the female deputy shouted.\n\n_Patrick._ She wasn't sure Jim could care for him. But then again, she wasn't doing such a great job either.\n\nShe heard gravel scuffling as the female circled around to triangulate her, keep both guns on her without the risk of shooting one another.\n\n\"Knees!\" the man shouted. \"Do it now!\"\n\n\"We're trying to help you!\" the woman called.\n\nSarah willed herself to run, but her legs refused to obey her. _Oh God, baby. I'm sorry._\n\n\"Fuck you,\" she said.\n\n\"Damn it.\" She heard the female stalking toward her, the loud _shick_ as she snapped open her metal baton. \"This is going to hurt you, ma'am. Watch it, Don.\"\n\n\"I've got her,\" the male said, angling his head to get a better sight on his weapon. \"I've go\u2014\"\n\nAnd then his head was gone, and the bright red of his arterial blood was spraying into the sky, mixing with the powdered glass of his cruiser's shattered windshield.\n\nSomething had landed on the cruiser's roof, its weight bowing the car inward, the windows exploding in sprays of shining dust. It crouched, slowly rising, gray-white body slashed across with the deputy's blood, as if it had been hit by an errant paint roller dipped in crimson.\n\nIt was one of the monsters she'd fought back on Drew's farm. It looked so much like Jim. It wore the same leering skull, the same Frankenstein stitching, the same haunting imprint of the living thing it had once been. Bone spikes projected from its elbows, hooked upward from its shoulders. Purple-black mottles showed where it had been grafted together, woven and stitched from the fabric of other corpses. It raised its head on a stub of a neck held to its torso by an armature of metal cables straining beneath thin scraps of dead flesh.\n\nIts eyes were twin flames.\n\nBright gold.\n\nGunshots. The female deputy was screaming now, her cop's sangfroid a memory. In its place was the sound of a little girl, hiccupping sobs as she poured on panicked fire, in no danger of hitting anything.\n\nSarah leapt back from the monster on the cruiser, looked over toward the deputy.\n\n\"Run!\" Sarah shouted to her.\n\nGray shapes loped along the blasted gravel path to the ski resort, at least ten. She could hear the distant growls, the sound of breaking glass. There were more of them in the town. She whirled, trying to pick a safe direction. The way she'd come looked clear.\n\n\"Run,\" Sarah breathed, shoved off the ground, started running.\n\n\"Wait!\" the deputy screamed.\n\nSarah didn't wait. Because she knew what these monsters were. Because just three of them had nearly been more than a match for her and Jim together. And now there were more than double that number, racing through the streets of Basye, crashing through the storefront windows, savaging the occupants. Sarah stumbled through a slick red pulp that had once been a person. She swallowed bile and ran as fast as she could, knowing it was useless. There was no way she could outrun these monsters, no way anyone could.\n\n\"Wait!\" the deputy shouted again, whether to her or to the Gold Operators, Sarah couldn't tell. Her world narrowed to the six inches in front of her face, the burning agony in her hip as she ran as fast as she could.\n\n\"Waaaaaaiiiiiit!!!\" The deputy dragged out the scream a third time, trilling on until it ended in a wet ripping that reached Sarah even across the wide distance she had opened up in her panicked run.\n\nShe could hear the pounding gallop of feet on the road behind her. If an animal had been pursuing her, she'd have heard the panting exertion of its breath as it put on speed. But the Gold Operators didn't breathe, and they came on silently, revealed only by the light touch of their clawed hands and feet on the ground. She could feel her back prickling at their nearness, heard the change in their gait as they went from four limbs to two, reaching toward her.\n\nShe threw herself to her right, crashing through a window. For a sickening moment, she felt the surface vibrate and hold, thought she would bounce off and into the arms of her pursuers, but then the glass gave way and she fell in, sprawling across the concrete floor.\n\nThe glass made a jagged carpet below her, and she left skin on it as she rolled to her hands and knees, lurched back into a run.\n\nShe was in a potter's studio, rows of tables, each with a wheel, fanning out before a central desk below a grease board. Cupboards lined the walls, bulging with bricks of clay.\n\nTwo women crouched behind the desk. They were both blonde and fortyish, hair in buns meant to keep it clear of clay. One was shouting frantically into a phone.\n\n\"Fucking run!\" Sarah shouted to them. She tore between tables, eyes roving frantically for a back door.\n\nThe woman stared at her and she ran past. \"Nobody is coming to help! Move!\" she called back over her shoulder.\n\nThey shouted something at her that she ignored, concentrating everything she had on running. She glimpsed them starting to run after her, knew they were too slow, too late.\n\nSarah tried to shut out the sounds, to focus instead on finding a back exit, to not hear the tinkling of the glass as the Gold Operators came through behind her, the slapping of their bare feet on the concrete floor.\n\nThe studio ended in a wall of metal shelves stacked with boxes; if there was a door hidden behind them, Sarah didn't have the time to search for it. She swallowed the sick panic that boiled in her stomach and turned to the side window. She tried to avoid looking at the central desk, but it was impossible.\n\nThe two women had bought her precious seconds. Three Gold Operators were crouched behind the central desk, up to their elbows in red. The screaming had stopped, replaced by growling and liquid gurgles. Blood had begun to spread out on the floor, as if a bucket had been upended. _I didn't know there was that much in a human body._\n\nSomething thick and wet flew out of the feast, struck her in the shoulder as she slammed into the window and crashed through. The metal frame groaned on its hinges and slammed open, spilling Sarah out into the side street. She rolled to her knees, oriented herself, and raced toward the ridge where she'd crouched with Jim.\n\nShe kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on her pumping legs, on ensuring the muscles were stretched to the limit, that she was putting on as much speed as possible. She knew that if one of the Gold Operators decided to pursue her, it could close the distance and overtake her in a matter of seconds.\n\nBut all around her, she could hear the ripping flesh, the shattering glass, could see the low gray shapes in her peripheral vision. There was enough living prey to keep the monsters busy. She didn't know how much time the unfortunate population of Basye had bought her, but she was determined to make the most of it. She poured her desperation, her fear into the channel that linked her to Jim. Jim could hear a twig breaking from a mile away; there was no way he could miss the screaming as Basye came apart around her. _Come on, baby. Get your ass over here._\n\nThe thought was followed by a stab of guilt. He couldn't leave Patrick in the woods, and bringing the boy would mean bringing him into danger. But _damn_ , now that she saw a chance to live, she realized how badly she wanted to.\n\nShe ran on, the solid road giving way to broken chunks of asphalt and then to the flat expanse of gently rising grass. Her hip screamed at her; she could feel the edges of the wound ripping wider with each long stride. The plastic bag full of the supplies she'd bought to clean it was lost in the wreckage somewhere behind her. _All that for nothing._\n\nIt seemed as if she ran through molasses. A soft fog was forming in the corners of her eyes, stubbornly staying in her vision after she blinked. She raised a wrist, rubbed hard at her eyes, let it drop. The fog remained. It might be infection or blood loss, but she was starting to come apart. Her vision became a stutter-flash of staccato images, like an old film reel running too slow.\n\nOne moment, she was running on open grass, and then the grass was suddenly interspersed with packed gravel, and Sarah vaulted something boxy and black. She heard a low hiss, smelled the dull scent of gas. She glanced down long enough to see that she was running through a small grill park, the white canisters of propane scattered among the half-cooked hot dogs and hamburgers, grills knocked on their sides as the Golds had lit among the families here. A woman lay on her side, cut in half, face pressed against the black bars of a hot grill. Sarah was grateful the corpse's head was turned away from her, so she couldn't see what the metal was doing to its face, but she could hear the sizzle and pop of the melting skin, could smell the cooked-meat stink mixing with the stench of the leaking gas. Her gorge rose and she focused on picking her way through the field of scattered propane canisters. The gravel thinned and Sarah gulped air, feeling her lungs inflate with hope with each passing stride. The Gold Operators may have come for her, but Jim had said they were driven by bloodlust, happy to slaughter whoever was closest. By the time they realized their original quarry had escaped, she would be in the woods and with the one person in the world who could protect her. _And what then? You're bleeding out and you know it._\n\nSomething heavy and hard hit the backs of her knees, sending her flying.\n\nSarah didn't even have time to land before she was snatched out of the air by her ankle and swung around. She felt the tendon cry out, the bone creaking against the strain. _If my ankle breaks, I can't run, and if I can't run, I can't get back to my son._\n\nAnd then the ground rushed up to meet her and she was tumbling across it, the sharp grass tearing at her face, a propane tank smacking into her gut, knocking the breath out of her, her vision going black. She skidded across the ground, flopped and rolled for a few feet, and finally slid to a stop on her back. She groaned, struggled to suck in air. _Get up get up get up get up._\n\nShe could hear a slow tamping in the grass, something stalking toward her.\n\nSarah scrambled with both hands, hoping to come across a rock, a stick, anything she could use as a weapon. But she didn't look away. When it made its move, she would be ready.\n\nThe Gold Operator looked like it had once been an Asian woman, slight and lean. Its body was remarkably well preserved, with only a long gash across its throat that had been lasered shut, the long burn scar puckering between holes where stitching had failed. There was even the stubble of hair clinging in patches to the skull. The mouth was drawn in a wide smile; the only spines were two short bone spikes protruding from the gray remains of small, high breasts. She couldn't have been more than twenty when she died.\n\nBut its eyes were the same hungry gold flames as the rest. It advanced like a stalking cat, shoulders hunched, clawed fingers spread, enjoying Sarah's distress. It whispered something in a voice like broken glass, a low, harsh string of language that sounded like Russian. The burning eyes flicked to Sarah's belly and she noticed that her shirt had hiked up during the tumble.\n\nAnd then Sarah's fear overpowered her, and she scrambled back on her hands, because she knew what the Gold Operator was thinking, could imagine those teeth and claws slicing into the taut skin of her stomach, digging out the soft organs behind. \"No,\" Sarah said in spite of herself. \"Nononononono.\"\n\nThe Gold bent at the waist, smile widening further, until the face threatened to rip open, cheeks stretching so thin, Sarah thought she could see daylight through them. Thin, articulating tusks slipped out of the corners, curling around below the mouth, sharp points clicking together.\n\nSarah scrambled back, trying to get her feet under her, succeeding only in tangling her ankles together and folding her legs painfully beneath her thighs.\n\nHer knuckles barked painfully on something hard and cool behind her. The propane canister that had knocked the wind out of her rolled away. She reached for its edge, felt her fingers close around the thick metal ring of the valve guard handle.\n\nThe Gold Operator shrieked and lunged.\n\nSarah shrieked back, throwing herself to the side and using her momentum to wrench her arm forward. The heavy tank swung so hard, she thought her arm would tear out of its socket. For a moment, she feared she'd missed and the tank would pass through empty air, turning her around so the Gold could savage her back instead of her front.\n\nBut then she was rewarded with a heavy thud that sent a satisfying tremor up her arm as the tank crashed into the Gold Operator's head, sending it stumbling back. She heard a soft crack as one of the thing's tusks snapped off.\n\nIt crouched, howling, bone spikes sliding out of its fingertips.\n\nThe tank settled back into her grasp, bottom thudding into the ground beneath her. She pushed herself up to her feet. For a moment, the world went gray and Sarah swayed. _No no no stay up stay up stay up._ She blinked, shook her head furiously, nearly sobbed in relief as her vision came clear and she found she was still up. She had a handle on it now; she was standing. She was fighting.\n\nShe heard a familiar hissing, close by now, followed by the faint rotten-egg stink of the gas. The valve had been jarred by the blow, the pressurized contents starting to leak out.\n\nSarah smiled, lifted the tank.\n\nShe couldn't outrun a Gold. This would either work, or it wouldn't.\n\nEither way, she was fighting, and in spite of the life slowly leaking out of her hip, in spite of all she had lost over the past months, it felt amazing.\n\nShe screamed defiance and hurled the tank at it.\n\nSarah didn't wait to see what Gold's reaction. She was already turning, already diving for the ground, throwing her arms up to shield her face, watching through slitted eyes.\n\nThe Operator grinned, raised its bone claws, and slashed the tank out of the air.\n\nSarah heard the metallic clang as the razor-sharp bones struck the tank, saw the sparks as they ripped it open. Only then did she allow herself to close her eyes.\n\nShe didn't hear the explosion. She was only conscious of sudden heat roaring over her, of a high ringing in her ears, of the feel of something sharp and hard cutting through her side, her cheek, her arm, her shoulder.\n\nShe lay for a moment, breathing. _Maybe I've lost too much blood; maybe the explosion got me too. Maybe the Operator survived and will cut into me any second . . ._\n\nBut a second passed, then two.\n\nSarah opened her eyes.\n\nThere was precious little left of the thing. Scraps of gray meat twitching in a black pit of ash dotted with smoldering grass. Sarah turned her attention to herself. The pain in her hip was worse than ever; the fog was still gathered in the periphery of her vision. She was weak as a kitten, but she wasn't going to die just yet. She sat up, passing her hands over her body, assessing the damage. If another Gold came, it wasn't as if she were in any condition to outrun it now, anyway.\n\nShe blinked; another dead thing stood there. Rage flooded her. She was so close. She was almost home free. She snarled, preparing herself to fight. She wouldn't make it easy.\n\nAnd then she saw its eyes. Burning silver.\n\nJim.\n\n\"Fucking . . . took you . . . long enough . . .\" Sarah breathed, unfolding her legs and staggering unsteadily to her feet.\n\nJim was looking over her shoulder into the town. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"Do I fucking look okay?\"\n\n\"Fair enough. You're standing, so that's something.\"\n\n\"I can walk. Come on.\" She turned back toward the town.\n\nHe stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. \"Sarah, this is bad; we have to go.\"\n\n\"I can't.\" Her lips were numb, her hands shaking. She tried to take a step, found she couldn't. \"I lost my bag. I have to go back and get my bag.\"\n\nShe saw it now, even as her vision grayed and the ground pitched unsteadily beneath her. She had come to town to get supplies. If she just left the bag behind, then it was all for nothing, and she couldn't have that. She had to go back.\n\nJim cocked his head to the side. \"Your bag? Oh God, baby. Your hip.\"\n\nHe reached for the sopping wound, and Sarah saw he was going to stop her. She had to get her bag. But she was so tired. She slapped his hand away. \"Don't touch me.\"\n\n\"Baby.\" The rictus face grimaced. \"We have to go; we have to get you some help. You're going to bleed out if we don't treat that.\"\n\n\"The bag!\" Sarah shouted. \"It has Patrick's calamine!\"\n\nJim cast a worried glance over his shoulder. She heard the howl of the Golds getting closer. \"We're going now.\" He reached out, scooped her up like she was a toy, threw her over his shoulder. His grip suffocated her. The press of his cold, dead skin was more than she could bear. She gagged on the faint smell of glycerol.\n\n\"Get off me!\" she screamed. \"I can walk!\" Though she wasn't sure that was true.\n\n\"Not this time,\" Jim whispered as he set off running so fast that the grass turned into a green blur beneath his feet. \"This time, I'm carrying you.\"\n\n# CHAPTER X\n\nCOLLATERAL DAMAGE\n\nEldredge sat in the swivel chair, facing the monitors. The huge screens dominated the ready-room wall, expensive liquid crystal displays framed in businesslike stainless steel.\n\nEvery one of them showed sickening carnage.\n\nHere was a trio of Gold Operators overturning a shuttle bus, dragging one of the passengers out through the driver-side window. There was a Gold Operator stalking out of a burning building, the crisped corpse of what Eldredge assumed had once been a person impaled on a single bone horn projecting from its forehead. As he watched, the propane tank on a parked RV exploded, the flames racing up the side of the vehicle to engulf the building beside it.\n\nThey moved like a flock of geese, the tip of their vaguely triangular formation led by the Gold Jawid had made of Chang's corpse. They forged deeper and deeper into the town, drawn by the promise of those they hadn't yet unburdened of their lives. There were too many still cowering in cellars and closets. It would be the devil's work convincing the Golds to give up the hunt and get on Schweitzer's trail.\n\nEldredge flicked his gaze to two screens set down and to the right of the rest. One was dark, reflecting his mop of white hair back at him. The other showed a pale green and orange palette of a map, flashing teardrops corresponding to each camera shot overhead, feeds from the drone cameras independently tracking the scene from ten thousand feet above. Right now, they were all clustered around a dot nestled in the broad green patch that took up most of West Virginia. BASYE, it read, or it had read before the feeds had engaged and the densely packed orange teardrops had blotted out the words.\n\n\"This is not good, sir,\" Eldredge whispered.\n\n\"No, it's not, but it's a price I'm willing to pay,\" the Director's voice replied from the speaker below the dark screen. \"The Gold teams are engaged because Schweitzer is nearby. It's just a matter of time until we find him.\"\n\n\"Sir, did Dadou . . . say anything to you?\" Eldredge's stomach tightened.\n\n\"You know she did. I brought Dadou here to find Schweitzer, and she's close to doing just that.\"\n\n\"Sir, I think her theory of an emotional link shows promise. It matches up with my thoughts about how Schweitzer located his wife and son so quickly. We need to give that angle a chance to work.\"\n\n\"Of course, but in the meantime, Gruenen's team has given us a location.\"\n\n\"An _approximate_ location, sir. Not specific enough to risk using a Gold team, let alone . . . Jesus, it looks like you used all of them. Schweitzer is west of there, and he's widening his lead every minute.\"\n\n\"I am done being played for a fool by a single Operator and his living wife and child. We should have caught them all long ago. Approximate is good enough. They have the scent now; they'll find him.\"\n\n\"Sir, they are not finding him. They are pillaging.\"\n\n\"Pillaging? How dramatic.\"\n\n\"Sir, are you not seeing what I'm seeing here?\" Eldredge swept his hand across the abattoir that had once been a Virginia resort town. \"Basye has over twelve hundred residents. Add in tourists and you're talking at least fifteen hundred.\"\n\n\"I understand this must shock you, but this is a Javelin Rain incident, Eldredge. We're authorized for whatever measures are necessary to bring things to a speedy resolution.\"\n\nEldredge bit down on his anger. The Gemini Cell had always killed. It was part of the job, what Eldredge had accepted when he'd come on board. But never in these numbers, and never at once. \"We're talking about an entire town. Of Americans.\"\n\n\"Have you been laboring under the delusion that we don't target Americans, Doctor?\"\n\n\"This isn't an American in another country. This is on American soil.\" But even as Eldredge spoke, he saw the holes in his own logic. They had targeted dozens of Americans on home soil over the years. _It's the scale. It's the scale that bothers you. It's the carelessness._\n\nThat thought was followed by another, even more chilling. _It's not the scale. Working with Schweitzer has broken something loose. The joint has come unglued for you._\n\n\"Schweitzer's last op was off the coast of Hampton Roads,\" the Director went on. \"Are you forgetting Operation Stable Hammer? That took out a city block in the most densely populated city in the country. We have to take lives so that we can save lives, Eldredge. This isn't your first day on the job. You know this.\"\n\nEldredge sucked in his breath, tried to gather his thoughts. He looked down at his lap, but the grisly scene unfolding on the screens still danced in his peripheral vision. He knew that even though he couldn't see the Director, the man was surely watching him. The thought kindled anger and resolve.\n\n\"We can't control them, sir,\" Eldredge said. \"They're animals. They go for whatever heartbeat is closest. Schweitzer's heart isn't beating. We have to do something.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" the Director said. \" _You_ do have to do something. Which is why you have Dadou Alva putting her head together with Jawid. It's your job to extract results from those two, Eldredge, and it's my job to extract results from you. The sooner we get Schweitzer, the sooner we can pull the Golds out. You seem so hell-bent on an exact location before the Gold teams are employed, so I'd like to hear your plan on getting one.\"\n\n\"Dadou is working on it, sir.\"\n\n\"How is she working on it? How exactly does this link theory of hers work?\"\n\n\"I'm not clear on that, sir. Right now I'm pretty much proceeding on a basis of 'trust me, I know what I'm doing.'\"\n\n\"I am not entirely comfortable with that basis.\"\n\n\"It's magic, sir. I'm open to ideas if you've got any.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Well, you can chat with her about the collaterals after all this is over,\" the Director finally said. \"Talk to Dadou, have her and Jawid rein the Gold teams in, get them headed in the right direction.\"\n\n\"What do you plan to tell the press, sir? There's no way a massacre of this size is going to stay out of the public eye.\"\n\n\"Gas explosion. Happens all the time in these country towns.\"\n\nEldredge couldn't resist casting a glance up at the monitors, shuddered at the sight of the broken asphalt strewn with the corpses hewn beyond recognition. \"That doesn't look like a gas explosion, sir.\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" Eldredge could hear the Director's smile. \"Go talk to Dadou. Find Schweitzer. I am tired of how long this is taking.\"\n\n* * *\n\nEldredge caught himself running, forced himself to slow down.\n\nHe remembered standing outside Schweitzer's cell just a few days ago. The undead SEAL had been talking about a comic book, his telepathic projections translated through Jawid. _There was a scene where a prisoner passed a letter to another, _Schweitzer had said. _\"It is the very last inch of us,\" she said of integrity, \"but within that inch, we are free.\"_\n\nSchweitzer's last inch had been needless notions of his former life: nodding, sitting, scratching his head. Eldredge's last inch was not running to do to the Director's bidding. He breathed deeply, slowing himself to a walk and biting down on the voice in his head that told him delay was tantamount to suicide.\n\nJawid and Dadou were in the prep room, seated on one of the metal gurneys, eyes closed, thighs gently touching. Eldredge knew that for Jawid, touching a woman was a very big deal, and he doubted the Sorcerer was focused on the task at hand. It also meant that Dadou was making inroads on his affections, as ordered. _Progress._\n\nThe refrigerated units were closed, with the corpses inside. A monitor above them showed the carnage unfolding in Basye. Whatever Jawid and Dadou were doing, it wasn't focused on this world.\n\nEldredge thought of clearing his throat, stopped himself. They might be close to finding Schweitzer's exact location. He couldn't risk interrupting that. He leaned against a wall instead, thrust his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat. The coat was completely unnecessary, but the look helped calm the analysts and military members in the facility. It was better to project the image of a doddering scientist and not the brains behind a military program dedicated to developing weapons from beyond the grave.\n\nHe waited, feeling ridiculous, and finally sighed, cleared his throat loudly.\n\nDadou's eyes stayed closed, but the corner of her mouth quirked. \"We are working the _vodou_ , _Dokt\u00e8_ , but that doesn't mean we can't hear you.\"\n\nEldredge smiled, feeling his cheeks redden. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nNeither Dadou nor Jawid moved. The bare, still room made Eldredge's skin crawl. He was at least used to seeing corpses arrayed on the gurneys. The two Sorcerers sitting silently was unnerving. \"No need to apologize, _Dokt\u00e8_. How can we help you?\"\n\n\"The Golds are rampaging through Basye, heading in every direction except the one Schweitzer ran in. I need them reined in. I need them going after him.\"\n\nJawid tensed at this, but Dadou's smile only widened. \"The Golds are not easy to convince, _Dokt\u00e8_.\"\n\nEldredge bit down on his frustration, struggled to keep his voice even. \"Convincing them is your job. This was the whole point of putting you two together.\"\n\nDadou smiled, as if at some private joke. \"We're very, very close to being able to do just that,\" she said.\n\n\"You are out of time,\" Eldredge said. \"The Golds are massacring that town. There's a pretty bad body count and it's only going to be higher by the time it's over.\"\n\nDadou shrugged. \"It is an addiction. Like rum or sleeping pills.\"\n\n\"What is?\" Eldredge asked.\n\n\"Slaughter,\" Dadou said. \"Do you like your beating heart? The warm blood in your veins?\"\n\nEldredge frowned. \"You're wasting time.\"\n\n\"Do you?\" Dadou's smile didn't waver.\n\n\"I've never really thought about it, to be honest. I guess I take it for granted.\"\n\n\"All those who do not touch the _vodou_ do, because we never have to live a single day without it. Our bodies are always warmed by blood. Our hearts always beat. When these things stop, so does our perception of them.\n\n\"But the jinn, as you call them, live thousands of years knowing the absence of both. And when they are returned, they want it more than anything. They want to bathe in blood, if only so they might enjoy the smallest reminder of life for even a moment. With time, it becomes compulsive. Like all compulsions, it eventually becomes all-encompassing.\"\n\n\"Not for Schweitzer.\"\n\nFor the first time, Dadou's smile faded. \"No, not for him. He is different.\"\n\n\"What makes him different?\"\n\nDadou's voice was cold. \"I have never touched him. But once we have him, I intend to.\"\n\n\"Well, I need you to get on that. I can't have the Gold teams ripping a hole in every human inhabitation they come across. I need you to influence them.\"\n\nDadou's smile returned. \"Your so-called jinn may be addicted to shedding blood, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own wills. I can't control them.\"\n\n\"Schweitzer could.\"\n\n\"Schweitzer is rare. Maybe even unique. And the only jinn he ever controlled was the one in his own corpse.\"\n\n\"Damn it, stop playing games. Can you get the Golds moving on him or can't you?\"\n\nDadou opened her eyes, glanced over at Jawid. Her smile faded. \"Yes,\" she said, confidence slowly dawning on her face. \"Yes, I think we are ready now.\"\n\nEldredge swallowed, found the courage to say the next words. \"Good. I'll leave you to it. I need you on this right away, and I'll need your report the moment you're done.\"\n\n\"All right, _Dokt\u00e8_. We'll get started immediately.\"\n\nEldredge paused, swallowed. \"One more thing. You're right about Schweitzer being unique. That's why I need him brought in alive.\"\n\nNow Jawid opened his eyes. \"Schweitzer is not alive,\" Dadou said.\n\n\"You know what I mean. I want his corpse returned intact and with his soul still in it.\"\n\nJawid's eyes shone with gratitude. Dadou was inscrutable. \"Those were not my orders when I was pulled from Scorpio Cell.\"\n\n\"New orders. We need him.\" Eldredge pictured the Director as a tall man in a black suit, pistol in his hand.\n\n\"Why do we need him?\" Dadou asked.\n\n\"Because we have to understand him,\" Jawid answered.\n\nEldredge nodded. \"If this program is ever going to be effective, we have to find a way to control the Gold Operators. Even trained dogs are more reliable.\" But Eldredge knew that wasn't the whole truth. _Schweitzer is a good man. Floating in that chaos for eternity is less than he deserves._\n\nDadou's face was stone, but her eyes smiled again. \"And I assume you have no objections to his wife and child being put down, also per my original orders?\"\n\nJawid turned to her, eyes widening. She put a hand on his knee, squeezed, and the Sorcerer stayed silent.\n\n\"No, they should be brought in alive as well.\" Eldredge tried to keep his voice calm.\n\n\"That will be a . . . challenging task. Some might say impossible,\" Dadou said.\n\n\"Can you do it?\"\n\n\"We can try, sir,\" Jawid answered for her.\n\n\"Try hard.\"\n\n\"Why do you care?\" Dadou asked.\n\n_Because if I have a way to keep Schweitzer united with his family, even as prisoners, I will do it. Because if I can do that, then maybe I'm not completely evil._ \"I'm working on a theory that living family members can be used as a means of control. Hostages are a crude method but often an effective one. You said yourself that love, if it's intense enough, is itself a magical bond.\"\n\nDadou didn't look convinced at all. \"I'm not certain you fully appreciate how it works, _Dokt\u00e8_.\"\n\n\"Oblige me.\"\n\n\"You're the boss.\" She shrugged. \"The Director may not be happy with this turn.\"\n\n\"I'll deal with the Director. This is my call.\"\n\nDadou nodded, and Eldredge turned and left. Eldredge knew he would have to explain his actions, but he doubted that even the Director would order Schweitzer or his family destroyed once they were in custody. Not if Eldredge could come up with a convincing-enough argument for keeping them. What he had was thin, but he would work on it. The Schweitzer family was dead either way; he had nothing to lose by trying.\n\nSave his life.\n\n# CHAPTER XI\n\nTOGETHER\n\nDadou and Jawid sat in front of the video monitor watching the pack of Golds race through Basye's burning wreckage. Chang's golden-eyed corpse ran in the lead, forming the tip of a long, narrow delta of gray flesh. Dadou had seen it before when Golds were deployed in groups. The pack followed the fastest and strongest one. She supposed it was because they thought it would lead them to the most abundant slaughter.\n\nOr maybe it was something else. She didn't know. She had never seen this many Golds in one place before.\n\n\"Well,\" Dadou said as Eldredge left. \"It seems we have a task before us.\"\n\n\"An impossible one.\" Jawid looked at his lap, eyes sad.\n\n\"Nothing is impossible.\" Dadou leaned toward him. \"We only need to try.\"\n\nHe looked up, lip trembling, eyes wide. The melodrama made her sick with anger and she drove her fists into her lap so he could not see them clenching.\n\nShe kept her voice gentle. \"Remember when I told you that magic is a conversation?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered. She watched his eyes darting to the curve of her chest, back up to her face. His file said he came from a religious hinterland where they never saw a women unveiled. She had dressed accordingly, a tank top to bare her arms and shoulders, long trousers bloused into combat boots.\n\n\"We need to reach out to the _mist\u00e8_. To talk to them.\" _Keep raising the idea of conversation, of connection._\n\nIt was clearly working. Jawid's eyes were dewy with a mix of desire and admiration. \"There is no talking to them. They are beasts.\"\n\nDadou smiled, shrugged her shoulders, watching his eyes follow as her breasts rose and fell. \"Beasts can still be clever when it gets them prey or a mate. They can be devious. Do you think the _mist\u00e8_ answer our summons because they must? We _can_ force them, but it is so much harder. Better to convince them it is what they want.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Jawid nodded. His face fell.\n\n\"Does that upset you?\" she asked.\n\n\"I promise them . . . I promise them blood if they will help me.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"It is the blood of men they want. I am promising them murder.\"\n\n\"Everyone does a thing because they want a reward. A dog will guard your house for a bone and a pat on the head. A soldier will fight for money or if you wave the right-colored flag in front of him. Is it any different to offer a _mist\u00e8_ the thing it prizes the most? You are only doing what you must, _chouchou_.\"\n\n\"They are hungry for blood.\"\n\n\"The _mist\u00e8_ are hungry for _life_. They have been dead so long that they have forgotten that living is about more than warm blood and a beating heart. With time and practice, we will teach them again.\"\n\n\"How?\" Jawid look doubtful and hopeful in equal measure.\n\n\"It is a conversation, as I said. You convinced them to follow you into the world of the living, to let themselves be Bound into a corpse. You can convince them to go after Schweitzer. This Partolan, the one you put in Chang, it is out front. It is the one we will talk to.\"\n\nJawid shook his head, a hint of flush behind his beard. _He doesn't want to fail in front me._ A good sign. \"It has what it wants. It is in the living world; it has the chance to kill. Why should it do anything I say?\"\n\n\"Because you won't be alone. Because we will go and speak to it _together_.\"\n\n\"We can do that?\" His eyes lit. \"Working magic beside one another isn't the same as working it together, truly sharing it.\"\n\nShe shrugged, tried to look bored. \"We can try.\" She forced the bored look to shift into shy uncertainty. \"That is, if you want to?\"\n\nJawid smiled. \"Of course I do. \"\n\nShe took his hand, brought it to her, careful to let the back rest on her thigh. She heard his breathing quicken, could feel his pulse racing in his hand. Too easy, really. He was like a little boy.\n\n\"I . . . I . . .\" He wouldn't admit that he didn't know what to do next. It was always this way with the deeply religious. They would rather run screaming off a cliff than confess ignorance of anything. If she didn't offer help, she would sit there, listening to his stammering forever.\n\n\"It's all right,\" she said. \"Just do what you usually do. Seek the void, and I will seek you.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes, Drew her magic about her, and sent it spiraling out into the fabric between the two worlds. The truth was that she'd never done this before either, was as nervous as he was. She didn't know if it would work, didn't know what she'd do if it didn't.\n\nBut she hadn't clawed her way out of the gutters of Port-au-Prince by shrinking from risks. Her eyes closed and the cold dark of the void settled around her, and for a moment, her stomach clenched in panic at the thought that she had lost him, that he was far away, seeing the soul storm from a different angle, and that he wouldn't be able to hear her.\n\nThen she felt his current, stronger here, more intense. It was his emotion distilled, nervousness and wonder and delight and overpowering lust. The void was as empty as ever, only the faint line of the soul storm breaking the black monotony. _Are you with me, Jawid?_\n\nHis presence beside her pulsed, invisible but as evident as if he'd been a glowing star. _I am. Allahu akhbar, I am!_\n\nShe suppressed her annoyance and laughed, trying to send him a pulse of delight. _I knew it would work. I knew it. I knew we could do it together._\n\n_Allahu akhbar._\n\n_Are you seeing what I see?_ she asked. She knew perfectly well he was, but the shared experience would help him feel a bond.\n\n_The storm,_ he answered, _in the distance._\n\nSe sa. _Can you find your jinn? The one you put in Chang?_\n\n_Of course I can. I have done this many times._ She felt his wounded pride, his need to impress, more lust.\n\nShe felt his magic concentrate, pull them forward together. She had always viewed her own connections cutting through the void as a blue lane, and she was shocked to see that Jawid's looked much the same, a ribbon of azure pushing through the uniformity and ending somewhere in the distance. She edged her presence toward the line, reaching out with her magic to dip into it.\n\nShe felt the presence at the other end instantly intensely enough to make her reel. Rage, lust like Jawid's, only darker and more urgent, and above all, a tautness, like a piano string tuned nearly to breaking, every straining atom tuned to the frequency of carnage. She pulled herself back from Jawid's connection, gasping. _That is the jinn?_\n\n_That is the one I put in Chang. It is called Partolan. It is . . ._\n\n_Strong,_ she finished for him. _But you are stronger._\n\n_You've felt it. How can you say that\u2014_\n\n_Stop it. You are a Sorcerer. You survived months with the warriors who defeated both the Russians and the Americans. You have run ops for the greatest military in the world. Whatever you need to move this Partolan, you have it._\n\nJawid hesitated. She could feel him trying to summon the courage to reach out to Partolan, failing.\n\nShe pushed her presence out toward him, pulsed an image of her hand taking his. _Go on; I am with you._\n\nHe sighed, pushed off into the channel, and Dadou went with him.\n\nInstantly, the rage and hunger slammed into her. This Partolan was powerful, both in strength and appetite. Jawid's terror was palpable. Dadou felt it instantly, could tell that Partolan felt it too.\n\n_I am the one who called you. I am the one who gave you life again,_ Jawid said to it. _You must do as I command._\n\nDadou nearly rolled her spiritual eyes. The _mist\u00e8_ were always proud, always haughty. It was exactly the wrong thing to say. She could feel Partolan's contempt come reverberating back up the link between them.\n\nIt sent an image of itself in life, a squat, naked man, so hairy that Dadou almost thought him an ape. His hair and beard were fiery red, thick and matted. Blue paint covered his skin, spiral patterns that interwove with crude pictures of men and animals. In one hand he held a primitive, copper-headed spear. The other was hidden behind a rudimentary shield, rawhide stretched over a wooden frame. _I am Partolan, father of nations. I kneel to no one._\n\nDadou had promised herself that she would let Jawid handle this, knew it would help him build confidence, but he was already putting them on the wrong footing. She had to step in. _Do not kneel,_ she sent to Partolan, _only follow._\n\nShe could feel Jawid stiffen at her intervention, but he composed himself and answered. _There is one who escaped. One like you. He flees to the west. You must go after him._\n\nDadou cursed inwardly at Jawid's use of the word \"must.\"\n\nPartolan only laughed. _Why? There is sport enough here. Why should I chase the dead when I am hip-deep in the living?_\n\n_We need him,_ Jawid said.\n\n_You need him,_ Partolan answered. _I need nothing save a spear in my hand and ground enough for my chariot to run._\n\nIf she let Jawid keep talking, Partolan would never obey them. Ancient lords respected only strength. It would do no good to hold back bargaining chips.\n\n_You will have all the spears and all the ground you require,_ she said, _but you will only have them if you help us._\n\n_And if I do not?_\n\nDadou sent an image of an American bomber flying low over the ruins of Basye, black metal cylinders plummeting earthward, a lake of fire that turned every Gold for miles into gently drifting clouds of ash.\n\nPartolan was quiet; the lust and rage were reeled back as it considered. This worried Dadou more than the rage. Thinking monsters were the worst kind.\n\n_So, then I will return to the void and wait for the next Summoner to call me forth._\n\n_You will not go back to the void if the body I put you in is destroyed,_ Jawid lied. His deception was plain in his heightened anxiety, the emotion flowing back down the link to Partolan, who only laughed.\n\n_I think you are a stupid thrall,_ Partolan sent back. _I will speak with the woman._\n\n_You will return to the void,_ Dadou answered, ignoring the humiliation emanating from Jawid, _but it may be that you will not be called again._\n\n_I will be,_ Partolan answered. _The strongest always are._\n\nHe had drifted in the soul storm long enough to know, and it didn't matter either way. Schweitzer was getting away. They needed him to move now. She had only one card to play, and now she had to play it. Dadou sighed. _Then I will give you something more, something greater._\n\n_What more could I possibly want? I am in the sunlit world. I am swimming in blood. I have rid this shell of the coward who believed he was a great warrior because he was given machines that let him strike blind men in the dark from a field away._\n\n_A dead shell,_ Dadou answered.\n\nShe could feel Jawid's emotions shift, humiliation giving way to confusion.\n\n_You can offer me a living one?_ Partolan asked.\n\n_No, she ca\u2014_ Jawid began.\n\n_I can_ \u2014Dadou cut him off\u2014 _but only if you go west and after the one we seek._\n\n_I think you are lying,_ Partolan said.\n\n_I am not lying,_ Dadou answered. _You can stay here and stop the hearts of others, or you can go west and have one beating for your very own._\n\n_And if you are lying?_\n\n_Then I am lying, and after you have taken your quarry, we will send you out to kill more, because as you have said, you are the strongest, and the strongest are always put where the fighting is thickest._\n\nPartolan was silent, considering. Jawid's emotions went sour. Shock and fear mingling with anger. Dadou ignored it. She would deal with him in a moment.\n\n_Well?_ she sent back to Partolan. _We don't have much time._\n\n_Very well,_ Partolan replied, though she could feel his excitement down the link Jawid had opened. _Where does this hunt take me?_\n\n_For now, only go west,_ Dadou replied. _We will guide you as you near him._\n\n_Make sure the . . . others . . . make sure they follow you,_ Jawid added.\n\nPartolan laughed again. _They always follow me, as the carrion crows follow an army. Because they know that is where the feast will be greatest._\n\nAnd then Jawid cut the link, the blue lane winking out, his presence pulling back from her. Dadou said nothing, only shunted her magic back and pulled herself back into her physical body, opening her eyes back in the room, the video monitor showing the delta of Golds turning, veering away from the ruins and streaming out of the town to the west.\n\n\"What . . .\" Jawid began, \"what was that? You lied to it. You can't put it in a living body.\"\n\nDadou shrugged. \" _Se sa, chouchou._ That's right.\"\n\n\"It will be angry that you lied. It will never do anything for us again.\"\n\nDadou laughed. Jawid's eyes were wide, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. \"No, dahling. Partolan will be in a living body and grateful to us for putting him there. It will be the beginning of a great partnership, just like yours and mine.\"\n\n\"But you can't . . .\"\n\n\"You're right, _chouchou_ , _I_ can't. But _we_ can.\"\n\nJawid sat in stunned silence, eyes as wide as dinner plates. Dadou suppressed a laugh, reached out, and took his hand again. \"I know this is a shock to you. I know about your work on the Virgo Cell. I know how it turned out.\"\n\nHe stammered, head shaking gently, and Dadou suddenly wished they were back in the void together so she could feel his emotions, know if she'd pushed too far, too fast.\n\n\"They were abominations. They were murders. It is one thing to put a jinn in the body of the dead, but putting one in the living\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014is the greatest work two people can accomplish together. Look at what we just did! Partolan is a savage animal. We _turned_ it, Jawid. You and I. We went into the beyond together and we bent the monster there to our will. There is nothing, _nothing_ we can't do if we do it together. Can't you feel that?\"\n\nJawid snatched his hand back, shook his head. \"Not this. I will not do this.\"\n\nThe anger was a ball in her throat and she choked as she swallowed it down. He _would_ do it, and all of this posturing and pious angst were just wasting her time. Her hands twitched. She wanted to choke the life out of him, to shake him until his neck snapped.\n\nInstead, she took his hand again, and he let her guide it back to her thigh, rest it there. \"Very well, _chouchou_ ,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter. We have done what we set out to do; we have turned Partolan to our will.\"\n\nJawid glanced up at the monitor and Dadou saw the flicker of pride in his eyes, the twitch at the corner of his mouth. \"It was mostly you. You should call Doctor Eldredge and tell him,\" he said.\n\nShe squeezed his hand and he squeezed it back. \"We'll call him together.\"\n\nHe glanced sidelong at her, then at the floor, suddenly shy. But Dadou could tell the hook was in, and it was only a matter of reeling now.\n\nHe would help her, and soon.\n\n* * *\n\nDoctor Eldredge punched the cipher code into his office door and entered the closet-sized space, slumping in the rolling chair at his desk. The cheap wooden surface was cluttered only with papers and office supplies, the edges of his laptop monitor. There were no pictures of family, no Christmas cards stood on end. No knickknacks. _Is that why you want Schweitzer back? Because you felt a connection with him? Because he was something other than the work?_\n\nThe thought made Eldredge feel pathetic. It didn't matter anyway; whatever his motives, he had to get Schweitzer back, he had to find a way to corral the spiraling appetite of the Golds.\n\nHe reached into his waistband, pulling out the KA-BAR fighting utility knife. The weight of the weapon in his palm steadied him. He hadn't noticed his heart had been racing until he began to feel it slow. With this, he could defend himself. It wasn't much, but he wasn't completely helpless against the superhuman might of the Golds.\n\nIt also meant that, if he could just get close enough, he could find Schweitzer himself. Slim hope, but slim was better than none at all.\n\nThe chime sounded at his laptop. He winced as he pushed the button to connect, he wasn't ready to talk to the Director just yet.\n\nBut it was the ops boss on the other end. \"White, this is ops.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, ops,\" Eldredge said.\n\n\"Sir, we just got word from the eyes-on over Basye.\"\n\nEldredge sighed relief; even if the news was bad, at least ops didn't scare him. \"What's up?\"\n\n\"The Golds are surging en masse to the west. Observers report them in pursuit of one Operator, one woman, and one little boy. That's confirmed. We've got him.\"\n\nEldredge felt his stomach turn over. They didn't need links anymore. Dadou's fox hunt had begun.\n\n# CHAPTER XII\n\nPURE GOLD\n\nSchweitzer felt his wife go unconscious. He rolled her off his shoulder and into his cradling arms. Her head lolled, drool trailing from the corner of her mouth, but the pale sclera of her eyes rolled back and the pupils inside the deep brown irises fixed on him.\n\n\"It's okay, baby.\" He tried to keep the worry from his voice. \"We got out of there. We're safe.\"\n\nIt was a lie. His augmented hearing could make out the frantic padding of the Gold Operators as they hurried after him, fixed on the scent of Sarah's blood. He could feel the constricted flow as her veins dilated, her circulatory system responding to the loss of blood. Precious little was making its way to her brain He glanced down at her hip. The wound was completely open now, the flesh beneath burning hot.\n\n\"Baby?\" he asked again.\n\nShe blinked, made no response. Her eyes glowed with fever. He reached down the link that connected them, felt only confusion, exhaustion.\n\nPatrick had wandered out from the shelter of the rock where Schweitzer had left him. He'd known the boy would, had counted on him not being able to get far. He knew that racing up on his son would terrify him, but there was no time.\n\nPatrick was sobbing, walking downhill through a low thicket of berry bushes, slapping at the thorns. His face was a red mottle of poison ivy rash, the heat beneath the skin so intense that it glowed to Schweitzer's augmented eyes. The boy turned and screamed at the skull-faced gray monster bearing down on him. Schweitzer shifted Sarah back to his shoulder and scooped Patrick up, folding the boy into his mother's arms, switching Sarah back to his own. Sarah clutched Patrick tightly to her, repeating the same words Schweitzer had said to her just a moment ago. \"Oh, baby, it's okay. It's okay,\" she breathed. \"Mama's got you.\"\n\nSchweitzer tightened the muscles in his arms and chest, but his family flopped like rag dolls as he vaulted a downed log. Sarah and Patrick hunched closer as the tree branches tore at them.\n\nA whooshing sound to his right told him one of the Golds had leapt into the canopy, was pushing off a tree trunk in an effort to get ahead of them.\n\nSchweitzer came down, skidding on his heels as he tried to stay upright. The Gold Operator hit the ground in front of him, landing on its shoulder, rolling down the grade. It extended a hand, trying to stop its momentum and get onto its feet. In life, the thing must have been at least seven feet tall, with shoulders like a linebacker. Bone spikes jutted from the point of each. One of them dug into the ground as the thing began to rise, sending it into a tumble again. It stuck out a hand to change the direction, forcing it into Schweitzer's path.\n\nTo slow was to lose Sarah and Patrick, to lose everything.\n\nSchweitzer didn't break stride. He counted his steps, made sure that his right foot was swinging forward with everything he had.\n\nHe felt some of the small bones in the top of his foot snap as his instep slammed into the Gold Operator's ribs. But some of the crunching bones were not his own, and the monster launched into the air, flipping head over feet until it struck a trunk hard enough to crack it, Gold Operator and tree going over in a splintering crash.\n\nSchweitzer took long strides to keep himself upright, each one hammering Sarah as his arms shook. She screamed, and Patrick screamed with her, wrapping his arms around her neck.\n\nSchweitzer heard a snarl as another Operator galloped along behind them, reaching out to snatch at his heel, missing by inches. Rotor blades were sounding in the distance.\n\n\"Put me down,\" Sarah gasped.\n\n\"Are you fucking crazy?\" Schweitzer asked. \"They'll kill you.\"\n\n\" _You're_ going to kill me if we keep going.\"\n\nShe was right. They had to get that wound closed.\n\nA rock hammered into Schweitzer's shoulder, knocking him off-balance. He pitched into a roll, taking the impact on his head and neck, locking his core muscles to use his own bulk as a shield for Sarah and Patrick. He felt one of his cervical vertebrae snap.\n\nHe flung himself off of his wife and child, springing clear. The crack in his spine would have paralyzed a normal man, but for him it was just a footnote. The structural integrity of his back held, and that was all he needed for now. There was no time to turn to Sarah or Patrick. The thing that had thrown that rock was coming on fast, ignoring him to angle for the beating hearts of his wife and son.\n\nHis augmented hearing picked up racing wind and he knew the Gold Operator had leapt immediately after it had thrown the rock, was descending on him from above. It hit him just as he looked up, sending him rolling. Something hard and metal slapped against his thigh, spinning fast enough to burn his skin. For the living, the first thing adrenaline robbed you of was your fine motor skills. SEALs trained to compensate, emphasizing big and easy movements. They didn't waste time punching. The striking surface of a fist was tiny.\n\nThough Schweitzer no longer had adrenaline in his body, the training held, and he clubbed the Gold Operator's neck with his forearm, striking solid metal hard enough to crack his ulna and to throw his enemy off.\n\nSchweitzer rolled to his feet, clenching and unclenching his fist. The break was hairline thin; he could still use his arm. He turned to his enemy rising to its feet.\n\nHe could glimpse flashes of the slate-gray skin, the now familiar clumsy surgical stitching common to its kind, the flashes of burning gold he knew were its eyes. But most of it was covered by thick metal plate that looked bolted to the thing's skeleton, screw heads and lug nuts crowned with rust. Its left arm had been removed below the elbow, replaced with a metal armature clenched around a circular saw spinning madly, buzzing like an angry hornet.\n\n_That's for me. This thing was custom-built to cut me to pieces._\n\nBut whatever the machinery, the Operator lusted for beating hearts and warm blood. Schweitzer was cold and dead.\n\nSarah swayed on her feet, limping away, Patrick dragged along by one wrist, face chalk white.\n\nThe Gold turned from Schweitzer, the spinning blade missing Sarah by inches as Schweitzer tackled it to the ground. It bucked, snapped at him. Schweitzer held on, using his weight to pin it in place, wrist locked on the metal forearm, pushing the blade into the dirt. The buzzing muffled; dirt and rocks sprayed into the air.\n\nHe could hear the thudding of feet on earth, the speed of the intervals too rapid for living men. Other Golds, inbound. At least a klick out but closing fast.\n\nSchweitzer lifted his weight long enough to get both hands around the metal shaft that had replaced the Operator's arm. The metal bolted to the thing's body gave it the weight advantage, and it used it, pulling against him, trying to rip the spinning blade out of his hand. Schweitzer kneed it in the face, kneecap rebounding off the metal plate bolted to the skull.\n\nHe pulled with everything he had, bracing one foot against a root. There was no way to bring his training to bear now; this was a contest of raw strength against strength, and the monster beneath him had the advantage of an extra hundred pounds of metal.\n\nSchweitzer felt the saw slide an inch, another. He was losing his grip on it. The Gold Operator hissed.\n\nPatrick cried out, then Sarah.\n\nIt was unforgivable to break concentration now. Schweitzer knew he should keep his head in the fight, but he was powerless before the sound of his wife and son's voices raised in fear.\n\nHe looked up.\n\nGold Operators were cresting the rise behind them, gray shapes flashing between the tree trunks, coming closer. One was in the lead, not galloping on all fours but jogging steadily, gray-white fists clenched and pumping before its bare chest.\n\nSteve Chang.\n\nDeath hadn't changed Schweitzer's closest friend much. Bone claws emerged from the shredded remains of his hands. There was what had once been an ugly wound in Chang's side, three matching jagged holes in the opposite shoulder, all stitched shut with more care than Schweitzer was used to seeing in these monsters. Chang's head was down, the skull shaved. Schweitzer could see the top half of the eagle, flintlock, and trident Chang had tattooed on his arm the day after he'd pinned on. Schweitzer had sat in the chair next to him, waving the twenty-dollar bill he'd bet that Chang would wince before the two-hour job was over.\n\nSchweitzer couldn't remember the last time he'd been that happy to lose twenty dollars. Because it meant Chang could hack it. Because it meant they could stick together.\n\nHe knew the thing stalking toward him wasn't Chang, but he had come to know that face so well that he recognized it even though Chang's head was lowered.\n\n_Oh God, brother. They got you. They fucking got you._\n\nWas this what Sarah was hiding from him? That they had made Steve into a Gold? Steve was dead. His best friend, his brother. The closest person to him on the team. Sarah had told Schweitzer of the persistent, nagging belief that he was still alive. Had she told Steve? Had Steve gone looking for him? Had the Cell found out and . . . done this to him?\n\nThe thoughts drowned in sick sadness. Steve Chang, dead. He remembered watching the banner on the bottom of the TV screen as the news relayed Peter's death even before the Navy could send a chaplain to tell the family in person. U.S. NAVY HELICOPTER CRASHES IN AFGHANISTAN\u201417 DEAD. Peter, gone. And now Steve. A brother by birth and a brother by shared trials, both family.\n\nThe grief nearly overwhelmed him. Hope mingled with it, mad and fluttering. Because if Chang was an Operator, that meant that Schweitzer might still be able to reach him. Chang was a SEAL, as strong a man as any Schweitzer had ever known. Maybe he hadn't gone Gold? Maybe he was coming to save them.\n\n_Then why does it look like he's leading the charge? Why aren't the other Golds attacking him?_ He knew it made no sense, but his dead heart still surged at the sight of his best friend. He wanted to abandon everything, run for him, pull him into a hug.\n\n_No. That's not Steve. You are looking at a corpse._\n\nBut while Schweitzer had lost focus, the Gold Operator beneath him hadn't. With a jerk of its metal limb, it ripped the spinning saw free and lunged.\n\nFor Sarah.\n\nSchweitzer dropped his weight on the thing's arm, giving Sarah a moment to twist away, dragging her son with her, the saw swinging wide and digging into the tree trunk beside them. Schweitzer rolled off it, felt the Gold struggle to jump to its feet. Schweitzer grabbed its ankle, twisted his back and pulled. The Gold Operator spun off the ground, saw breaking free of the wood, the flat of the blade rebounding off Schweitzer's head, notching the top of his ear. The Gold Operator flew, spinning in a slow circle until it smacked into Chang and sent them both tumbling back into the pack of monsters ranging through the trees.\n\nThe shock over seeing Chang would have to keep. \"Hold on to Patrick!\" Schweitzer shouted, then scooped Sarah over one shoulder and leapt for the trees. The branches gave, but not before he was able to leap for the next one, Sarah folding herself over his back and shuddering as the sharp branches dug at her, Patrick wailing like a siren.\n\nSchweitzer's vision became a staccato of still images. Branches, tangled leaves, blue sky. He pulled them along as fast as he could, arms and legs pumping, wood splintering with each leap. The forest floor sped by beneath them, and Schweitzer lost all sense of where he was heading, focused only on the sound of his pursuers smashing through the wood behind him. Part of him railed against the lack of a plan, but SEALs also knew when it was time to throw planning to the wind, when it was time to fight like an animal. When it was time to run.\n\nMore images. Pulses of gray and pale blue. Skin taut over tight muscle. Flashes of flickering gold.\n\nSplintering from overhead.\n\nMore of them, in the trees.\n\nSchweitzer thudded into a landing on a thick bough strong enough to hold, overbalanced, let his momentum carry him forward to the ground.\n\nThe jarring landing forced a cry from his wife. \"Jim, stop.\"\n\nThere was no time to stop. He kept running, trying to lock her in place with his arm, unable to stop her bouncing regardless. He could feel Patrick crushed against his neck, the tightness in her arms as she held him there. \"Jim, I can't keep hold of him.\"\n\nHe raised a hand to Patrick, trying to pull the boy from Sarah so he could secure him under his arm. Patrick screamed and kicked, began to slip free.\n\nSchweitzer slowed to keep him from falling, and the first Gold Operator was upon them.\n\nSarah spasmed in his arms, dropping Patrick and pushing off Schweitzer's chest, breaking free as the Gold's gray tongue whipped over Schweitzer's shoulder, missing his wife by inches and wrapping around his neck instead. The Gold Operator lacked discipline and training. It squeezed, cutting off his windpipe, a futile tactic against a being that didn't need to breathe.\n\nSchweitzer reached back, pointing his fingers and punching into its mouth, feeling a long tooth scrape along his hand until the crux of his forefinger and thumb snapped it off. He grabbed the tongue at its root, yanked forward.\n\nThe thing came over his shoulder, biting down on his hand as he'd known it would. Schweitzer hooked his fingers through the golden flames, found the edges of the skull, pulled forward and down. The Gold turned in the air, slammed down on its back, ribs cracking. The sound of the pursuit drawing closer fueled a desperate strength. Schweitzer knew that the second best thing to cold professionalism was hot rage. Lukewarm was the zone where you lost the fight.\n\nHe channeled his despair into a stomp that collapsed the Gold's chest, crushing the sternum and revealing the gray edges of a heart pierced by its shattered ribs. He lifted the thing by its neck and hauled it over his head, slamming it on the ground again and again, stomping and wrenching.\n\nCrack. Crack. Crack. Bones crunching like gunshots. The thing writhed in his grip, but it was helpless to fight, first against his brutal strength and then its own steadily reducing armature, as its own bones broke into fragments. He threw the thing away, writhing as it rolled but powerless to rise. He thought briefly of the gun he'd taken from the operator on Gruenen's team, but the weapon was gone, the sling having snapped during his flight through the trees. It didn't matter. A gun would do no good against this enemy.\n\nSarah was on her knees. Her skin was chalk white, her hip a sheet of red. Her beautiful pink hair was streaked with blood, leaves, and the grime of the forest floor. _I'm losing her._\n\nCrashing, branches breaking. The Golds getting closer. Chang was somewhere at the front of the pack. Schweitzer turned back to Sarah, reaching for her. \"Get ahold of Patrick,\" he said.\n\nShe reached down with surprising strength, swatted his hand away. \"We can't. They're too many and too fast.\"\n\nShe got shaking to her feet, pushed Patrick roughly into his arms. The boy cried, reached for her, but Sarah's eyes were pitiless.\n\nSchweitzer's spiritual stomach turned over. He didn't bother keeping the panic out of his voice this time. \"Sarah, we don't have time. What the fu\u2014\"\n\n\"You're right\"\u2014her voice was calm\u2014\"we don't have time. I'm leading them away. Get Patrick out of here.\"\n\nShe took a shaking step away from him, got her legs under her, started to move more quickly.\n\nSchweitzer knew how much blood she'd lost, could feel her lowered body temperature, could hear her weakened heartbeat. He was amazed at how much strength she showed, but even Sarah at her fastest couldn't compare to his superhuman speed. He reached her in a single step, snaked an arm around her waist. \"Baby, I am not dealing with this martyr shit right now! They are going to . . .\"\n\nShe screamed, tore at his arm, flinging it off her. \"Save my son, damn it!\" He could feel the rage and desperation down the link they shared.\n\nSomething gray flashed in their peripheral vision. Schweitzer reacted instinctively, grabbing Patrick's wrist tightly with one hand and punching out with the other, snatching the incoming Gold's arm and swinging it around into a tree trunk with enough force to send the thing into the wood a half an inch. He followed with a knee hard enough to shatter its pelvis. It collapsed under its own weight, slumping to the ground, reaching out to stop its fall.\n\nPatrick yanked at Schweitzer, trying to twist away, but the boy may as well have struggled against a metal vise. Schweitzer turned his attention to the immediate threat, reaching over the Gold's head and yanking down on a thick bough, driving the splintering branch into the monster's shoulder, pushing the wood through its chest and down into its ravaged hips, until at last he felt the softer surface of the earth beneath, and the monster was staked in place. He kicked it in the ribs savagely, once, twice, until his toes passed into the hollow beyond.\n\n\"Sarah!\" He ran to her, hearing the rest of the Golds crash closer.\n\n\"Jim, for the last time, take Patrick and run! I'll get them to follow me!\"\n\n\"Sarah, no!\"\n\n\"Didn't you see Steve? He's with them.\"\n\n\"That's not Steve, Sarah. That's . . .\"\n\n\"Maybe he's like you, Jim. Maybe there's some of him left in there.\"\n\n\"You've lost too much blood; you're not thinking straight. Sarah, Steve is dead. That is something else wearing his corpse.\"\n\nHer eyes were fever bright; Schweitzer could see the dark circles under them fading to pale white from blood loss. \"He loves me!\"\n\nSchweitzer tucked Patrick against his side, reached for her waist. \"Fuck this. I am not wasting another sec\u2014\"\n\nSarah grabbed his wrist, gritted her teeth, and concentrated so hard that she screamed. The link that bound them throbbed, the dull pulse of emotions went from a thematic buzz to a sudden spike as Sarah desperately pushed her feelings for Steve Chang down the channel.\n\nSchweitzer froze, stunned.\n\nIt was the most intense burst of emotion from her yet, so strong that it evoked the link he'd been able to forge with Jawid, to plunder his memories, to learn that his wife and son were still alive. The link began to throb with memories, images.\n\nThe tangled burst surged out of Sarah: love, so strong it crackled, but not for him. Loss and need, despair so keen that it was a hole inside her, a yawning gulf opening below her, vast and black and endless, a living soul storm. The desire to feel warm and safe, desperate and heady, dull and addictive. Love, not romantic, not lustful, tangled now, lost in the fear of the void of loneliness. Tripping up her judgment, chewing away at caution, until the only thing she wanted was to not feel awful, just for a moment.\n\nSweat, moaning, flesh on flesh.\n\n_This._ This is what she had been hiding from him. Steve had come around after Schweitzer had been killed. Steve had done what a brother was supposed to do. He had taken care of Schweitzer's family.\n\n_Steve. We were supposed to be brothers; how could you?_\n\nA part of him knew he wasn't being fair. Both Sarah and Steve had every reason to believe that Schweitzer was dead. His best friend and his widow were trying to move on, build something new. If Schweitzer had been dead, he would have wanted her to find someone else, someone who could make her and Patrick happy.\n\nBut he wasn't dead, not really. Not in the way that would dull the pain of the revelation that his wife had slept with his best friend.\n\n\"I'm sorry, baby,\" Sarah whispered so softly that only his augmented hearing allowed him to make out the words.\n\nJames Schweitzer couldn't move. For all his magical might, he stood rooted to the spot, hurt burning in his silver eyes.\n\nSarah turned and ran.\n\nShe moved with incredible strength and speed for someone so badly wounded, a desperate tapping of her reserve to lead the chase away from her son. She ran with everything she had, arms and legs pumping, straight toward the pack of monsters that were finally emerging from the wood. She ran and Schweitzer stood, his spiritual nerves still paralyzed with the shock of realization.\n\nThe Golds reacted as Sarah predicted. They veered after her, ignoring Schweitzer's cold corpse and Patrick's smaller, fainter pulse. Steve Chang led them, though whether he was led by the nearness of blood, of a beating heart, or his love for Sarah, Schweitzer couldn't tell. The corpse of Schweitzer's best friend put on speed, dogging Sarah's heels, close enough to put a hand on her shoulder. And now Schweitzer found himself praying that Sarah was right, that it really was Steve Chang in there, that he was battling the jinn for supremacy of his own body, as Schweitzer had.\n\nBecause even as his paralysis broke, he realized there was no way he could reach her in time. Not now, not with Patrick in tow, not with so many enemies so close together.\n\nHe tried anyway. He crouched to leap toward her, tucking Patrick into his belly, locking him firmly in place with one arm. One of the Golds flagged behind the pack, a tall thing with impossibly long limbs, scrabbling along the ground like a spider. Bone spines sprouted from its back in looping lines that matched the curve of its ribs, covered with leaves and clods of dirt. It darted toward Sarah, saw the other Gold Operators would have made short work of her before it arrived, and turned for closer prey.\n\nIt leapt, catching the tops of Schweitzer's feet before he could clear it, sending him rolling.\n\nPatrick tumbled from his grip, got to his feet, and raced away from the fight into the woods behind them. Schweitzer rolled, came up on one knee.\n\nChang had caught Sarah, had turned her around. His hand was on the back of her neck, his head bent to look into her eyes. One of the other Gold Operators tried to surge around him, and Chang backhanded it into the brush. His other hand, the one on Sarah, looked gentle. Sarah raised her own to grip his wrist. They looked like lovers, leaning in for a kiss.\n\nMaybe she was right. Maybe Chang was as Schweitzer had been with Ninip. Maybe there was enough of him left in his own body to hold his humanity. Schweitzer's heart rejoiced, because it meant that Sarah might live.\n\nChang lifted his head.\n\nHis eyes were shining, shimmering gold. Untarnished, pure.\n\n\"Sarah!\" Schweitzer shouted. \"That's not Steve!\"\n\nBut the jinn wearing his best friend's dead skin had already started to squeeze.\n\n_No. Oh God. Sarah, no._\n\nSchweitzer screamed. A wordless, high cry. A ringing grief so keen, it cut the air. Schweitzer hadn't known he had such sounds in him. The SEAL was gone, leaving only the grieving husband, reeling in shock. The love of his life. The mother of his child. The woman he'd fought so hard to get back to.\n\nBlood shot out of Sarah's nose. Her hand on Chang's wrist pulled frantically, the backs of the knuckles purple. Her chalk-pale skin turned the same gray as the dead things pursuing her. She opened her mouth to scream, but only blood came out, thick and dark. Schweitzer heard the cracking of bones.\n\n_Oh God, Sarah._ He tensed to spring again, heard Patrick scream, the scuttling of the bug-like Gold racing over the cold ground after him.\n\nClear fluid sprayed out with the blood, Sarah's eyes glazed, and Schweitzer knew his wife was gone. The link between them buzzed, faltered, cut off. Rage and grief competed in his dead gut, his legs straining to push him after the body of his wife, to wreak useless revenge, to kill things that were already dead.\n\nThe SEAL bulled the impulse aside. _Sarah is dead. Patrick is alive. Grieve later._\n\nSarah's voice, panicked, feral. _Save my son, damn it!_\n\nThe Gold reached Patrick, grabbing ahold of his ankle. Patrick shouted, fell, twisting free of the Gold's grip, sprawling on his face.\n\nSchweitzer spun, flung himself after the insectile Gold. He grabbed the spines, hauled himself up onto the creature's back. The monster swatted at Schweitzer. Schweitzer snatched one flailing wrist, held it easily, then the other.\n\nSchweitzer slammed the Gold's wrists down, impaling both arms on its own spines. The thing flailed, rocking its shoulders, stuck fast. Schweitzer's mind chanted a ceaseless litany as he worked: _SarahGoneSarahGoneSarahGone._\n\nPatrick was up and running, heading blessedly deeper into the woods. Schweitzer made sure he had a fix on his son, then reached back, seizing one of the Gold Operator's flailing ankles. He bent it back, pulling on the leg until the knee snapped, spiking it on the spines as well. He grunted, placing one knee on the monster's head, driving it deeper into the dirt. \"Hold still, you fucker.\"\n\nWhen he was done, the Gold was bundled in a neat package, shuddering as it tried to untangle itself, broken limbs sagging under their own weight, impaled on its own spines.\n\nPatrick had disappeared into the woods, but Schweitzer could hear his son's footfalls and sobs. Schweitzer glanced over his shoulder to see if any of the Golds would follow.\n\nHe looked away before he could focus on the details, pick the lines out of the quivering red gray mass behind him. The shredded mess that had been Sarah.\n\nGrief and horror warred within him until his training locked them down. For now, he only needed to know one thing. He had a few minutes to find his son and widen the lead on the pursuit. They wouldn't be coming after him for a little while at least.\n\nThey were busy.\n\n# CHAPTER XIII\n\nPROGRAM REVIEW\n\nSenator Donald Hodges looked like he had stepped out of a library portrait. The effect was so pronounced that Eldredge half expected a gold-leaf frame to appear around the man's head. His jaw was chiseled, just beginning to run to distinguished jowls. His hair was a shellacked dollop of cream. His face was creased in a semipermanent expression of warmth.\n\nThe creases didn't reach his eyes. They were steel gray, never settling in one place for long. Now they were narrowed, watching the digital map on the monitors. Faint green lines sketched out the elevation of hills and the path of streams, dotted with dark blotches that were stands of trees. Layered over it were seven blinking gold triangles, floating as the Operators they designated moved. Four were still, covered with red _X_ 's.\n\n\"We can effect repairs on them, sir,\" Eldredge said. \"In some cases, Schweitzer broke the bones so completely that they'll need complete alloy armatures. Even then, they still may not be fully mission-capable, but we won't know until we fix them and put them back through trials.\"\n\nThere should, of course, have been a silver triangle marking Schweitzer's position, but there wasn't.\n\nThey'd lost him. All that damage, that bloody massacre, and they'd still lost him.\n\n\"Doctor Eldredge\"\u2014Hodges's voice had a slight New England aristocratic lilt\u2014\"the exact amount of the line item that funds this program is classified in channels known only to myself and the President.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nThe Senator brushed some imagined dust from his lapel. \"But I want you to believe me when I tell you that it's an awful lot of money. I'd even go so far as to call it a staggering amount of money.\"\n\n\"I believe you, sir.\" _Now stop wasting my fucking time and get to the point._\n\n\"You should,\" Hodges said, not getting to the point at all. He gestured to the expensive liquid crystal screens, the ergonomic office chairs, the stainless steel and graphite furniture frames. \"We've spared no expense with your program.\"\n\nIt wasn't his program, but Eldredge figured it was best to let the overstatement pass. \"We're very grateful, sir.\"\n\nHodges looked down at him. \"Well, gratitude is always a good thing. It's nice to know one's contributions are appreciated.\"\n\n_They're the taxpayers' contributions, you self-important ass,_ Eldredge thought.\n\n\"But do you know what I like even more than gratitude?\" Senator Hodges went on, stabbing an angry finger at the screen. \"Results.\n\n\"So, perhaps you can explain to me why this . . . shall we just say more-than-adequately-funded program, is now responsible for the wholesale slaughter of a popular Shenandoah resort town, laying waste to several miles of countryside, all for the ultimate loss of a single man and his little boy?\"\n\n\"We got the wife, sir.\" The words made Eldredge's stomach twist.\n\n\"Do you think\"\u2014Hodges's mild voice slowed\u2014\"that I give a damn about the wife? Do you think we called Javelin Rain on some hippie artist from the ass end of Norfolk? Schweitzer. Where is Schweitzer?\"\n\nEldredge took a deep breath, repeated the same answer he'd been giving for over an hour. \"We don't know, sir.\"\n\n\"This is the biggest deployment of Gold Operators we've ever endeavored, supported by as many conventional operators as we can beg, borrow, or steal. He's a walking corpse burdened by a screaming child. He's in the continental United States in a specific national park. How the hell is it that your Golds can't find him?\"\n\n\"They're . . . they're animals, sir.\"\n\n\"What the hell is that supposed to mean?\"\n\nEldredge knew that he needed to pick his next words carefully, that the Director would be furious if Hodges lost faith in the program based on something Eldredge said. \"They are driven by their appetites,\" Eldredge said. \"Like dogs. They have some free will, but in the end, they go after what they want.\"\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\n\"Blood, sir. They're addicted to the stuff.\"\n\nHodges pursed his lips. \"And Schweitzer doesn't have any blood.\"\n\nEldredge sighed, stood. \"Glycerol, sir. Keeps everything lubricated so he can move without seizing up. But if you're a Gold, that doesn't tickle your pickle, as my dad used to say.\"\n\n\"The boy . . .\"\n\n\"Is small. Fainter heartbeat, less of the stuff they're after.\"\n\n\"And you're sure of this?\"\n\nEldredge thrust his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat. \"No, sir. This is magic. Jawid's not even sure of it and he's the one using it every day. When we still had Schweitzer, he told me that the jinn were both addicted to blood as the stuff of life and angry at those who still lived for living. He said it was some kind of twisted mix of dependence and vengeance. But I don't think even he was sure, and he's not around to ask.\"\n\n\"Well, that's the crux of the matter. How the hell do you propose to get him back?\"\n\n\"More of the same, sir. We round up the Golds and have Jawid and Dadou parlay with them. We can trot out incentives to nudge them left or right.\"\n\n\"Incentives?\"\n\n\"Livestock, sir. Or convicts.\"\n\n\"Convicts?\" Hodges's lip curled. \"You mean people?\"\n\nDeath row inmates, but people all the same. The Director had only recently floated the idea. It didn't sit well with Eldredge, but he couldn't let that show. \"It's just to get their attention. We dust them off before the Golds catch up with them.\"\n\n\"Can you guarantee that?\"\n\nEldredge was quiet for a moment. \"No.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nHodges folded his arms across his chest. \"Okay, so you do your human sacrifices and your Sorcerers send the remaining Golds out after him.\"\n\n\"No, sir. The Sorcerers round them up, and we lock them back down. We don't drop them in again until we're sure that we're right on top of the target. What happened at Basye has convinced me that we just don't have the control we need. I am not risking collateral like that again.\"\n\n\"Collateral happens in war,\" Hodges said.\n\n\"Respectfully, sir, this isn't a war. It's an experiment gone haywire. I have not yet looked in a mirror and faced what just happened out there. I'm putting it off until after I get Schweitzer back, because I don't want to lose focus. But sooner or later, I'm going to have to, and it's going to sting.\"\n\n\"You're not getting him back,\" Hodges said. \"You're destroying him.\"\n\n\"Sir, that is the wrong call. Schweitzer is unique. Throwing him away would be like turning your back on a gun because you prefer swords. The Golds are wild dogs. Schweitzer is a person. He is a rational, ethical, thinking person, and when you combine that with what magic has made of him, there is no limit to what he can do.\"\n\nHodges's eyes narrowed. \"Is he your friend?\"\n\n\"No, sir. He hates me too much for that. Even before he got away, he harbored resentment at not being in control of himself and his own fate. He never trusted me. But the truth is that he is a good man, probably better than either of us, and we did him wrong.\"\n\n\"We gave him a second chance.\"\n\n\"We lied to him about his family. We kept him prisoner here. Do you know what tipped the scales for him? The point when he finally pushed the jinn out and dominated his own body?\"\n\n\"Enlighten me.\"\n\n\"When he began asserting himself. When he began defying orders and saving people. When he acted less like Ninip and more like Jim Schweitzer. He's good, sir, and that's what makes him different. That's what makes him strong. I want this program to be good, so we're not going to destroy him. We're going to get him back and find out what makes him tick.\"\n\n\"You yourself have told me multiple times that Schweitzer is more powerful than any Gold Operator.\"\n\n\"Not more powerful, sir, as powerful. He combines this with a highly intelligent, rational mind that has the ability to discipline itself. He's also able to access his training and experience in a way that the Golds can't. He's not blinded by bloodlust. He can think.\"\n\nHodges waved the words impatiently away. \"Whatever, Doctor. You know what I mean. Schweitzer is more . . . dangerous than the Golds? He's a tougher adversary?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. That's accurate.\"\n\n\"Doctor, every second Schweitzer eludes us, we run the risk of him deciding that he'd rather go in front of a TV camera than fight. He could grant interviews to bloggers, or decide to walk into the middle of Times Square. That would be a very bad day.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It would.\"\n\n\"I am this close, Doctor, _this_ close to just ordering that entire forest razed. Bomb it until no two stones are left atop one another.\"\n\n\"If your goal is to avoid press, sir, that might not be the best move.\"\n\nThe politician's mask fell away. \"Don't talk to me about what the best move is, Eldredge. You lost Schweitzer and now you've failed to recapture him. Even men more charitable than I might call your judgment into question at this stage of the game.\"\n\nEldredge had no answer to that.\n\n\"We are not capturing anyone,\" Hodges went on. \"We are going to pinpoint a location, we are going to cordon it off, and we are going to have a Spectre cover it with enough fire to shred every chipmunk, ant, and inchworm down there. Then we will bomb what's left. We'll chain the story to Basye, say it was another rupture farther down the same gas line.\"\n\n\"You might want to make sure there are actually gas lines running through there first.\" _Good lord. How does a man this stupid get elected?_\n\n\"Don't get cute with me. I need you to locate Schweitzer so that we can get this done.\"\n\n\"Sir, please. That's the wrong call.\"\n\n\"There is only one thing you need to know about this call, Eldredge,\" Hodges said, \"and that is that it isn't yours to make. I am done negotiating with you. I want to speak to the Director.\"\n\n\"Sir, he can be . . .\"\n\n\"SOCOM is making a power play and the Secretary of the Army is delivering a passionate argument for why his branch is the only one in the service capable of acting as the executive agent for what they're calling the 'Arcane Domain.' That means your precious program here would be dissolved. That means all your resources would be moved to MacDill. Maybe they'd let you stay on. Maybe not. You want to avoid that happening? Let me talk to your Director.\"\n\n\"The Director prefers me to handle these interactions, sir. He doesn't talk to anyone.\" _That's not true, though, is it? He talks to Jawid and Dadou now._\n\n\"That's fine,\" Hodges said. \"I'll just call my staffer and let her know that I'll be voting to give SOCOM control.\"\n\nEldredge sighed, nodded. \"Give me a minute, sir.\"\n\nHe walked down the hall to his office and took a moment to cool himself down. His desk was buried under stacks of paper, chaotic and sprawling: personnel files, budget spreadsheets, lists of equipment, and project schedules. The morning operations and intelligence briefing was still on his computer screen, half prepared for presentation to the Director the next morning. That briefing was the Director's main window on to the day-to-day operations of the Cell, the litany of tasks that, after all these years, it seemed only he knew how to do. Eldredge had lost count of how many times he'd prepared the document. The thought made him tired.\n\nHe double-clicked the shortcut labeled simply COMMS and waited. A moment later, the Director's voice whispered to him through the speaker under the monitor. \"Ah, Doctor. I'm glad you called. Did we work out the coolant contracts?\"\n\n\"Almost, sir. Entertech is negotiating the purchase, but we're having a tough time coming up with a justification for the bulk order. Entertech is well backstopped. They'll look legitimate to anyone investigating, but it's still not a good idea to make anyone suspicious.\"\n\n\"Surely there's some front technology we can claim to be using. Say it's for a nuclear plant.\"\n\n\"That's not liquid nitrogen, sir. That's helium, or molten salt, or just lots of water.\"\n\nThe Director made a strangled cough that Eldredge decided was meant to be a sigh. \"You'll figure it out, Eldredge. You always do.\"\n\n\"That's not why I called, sir.\"\n\n\"One more thing: I do want the reserve Sorcerer brought to this facility. I know he's not the best we have, but I want him on deck in case this situation with Schweitzer grows more complex. Might be we can find a way to put him to use.\"\n\n\"Understood, sir, I'll take care of it. That's still not why I called.\"\n\n\"Why, then?\"\n\n\"It's Senator Hodges, sir. He's here.\"\n\n\"I'm aware.\" The man's voice was distracted, tired. \"I trust you are handling him.\"\n\n\"He's not happy that we lost Schweitzer. He wants to talk to you.\"\n\nA pause, then: \"Find a way to put him off.\"\n\nA chill worked its way from Eldredge's balls up his spine to freeze the base of his skull. _Has he gone insane?_ \"Sir, did you hear me? It's Senator Hodges.\"\n\n\"I know perfectly well who he is, Eldredge.\"\n\n\"Then you know that he's the man who funds this program.\"\n\n\"I do. I'm not available right now. I need you to handle this.\"\n\n\"Sir. He can defund our line item. He can shut everything down. He's threatening to put us under the army, make us report to SOCOM at MacDill. In Tampa, sir. They'll make us tear everything down before we move.\"\n\n\"No, they won't.\"\n\n\"With all due respect, sir, how the hell can you know that?\"\n\n\"Trust me. Things are about to change. We're going to find Schweitzer.\"\n\nIt was a moment before Eldredge could speak. Scenarios raced through his mind. The Director was on drugs. The Director was insane. The Director was under duress. He forced himself to breathe evenly, spoke as if to a child. \"But we just lost him. Finding him means more teams out, more helos up. More gas and more bullets and more bribes to the press and police. More drones in the air and sources on the ground. All of that costs money, and Senator Hodges can make the money stop.\"\n\n\"What we're doing is more important than money.\"\n\n\"Sir, I . . .\"\n\n\"I said handle him, Eldredge. Don't make me tell you again.\"\n\nThe connection cut and Eldredge stood, balling his fists. The Director was insane if he thought he could snub Senator Hodges. _Maybe he knows something he's not telling you?_ That had to be it. Why else would he risk losing funding?\n\nEldredge was shocked to feel a sick swell of relief in his gut, mingling with the anger and frustration. An end to the program would mean he would be free of this place and this man, whose will he had served for years despite never having seen his face.\n\nIt wouldn't bring redemption, but it would bring change, time above ground, the voices of people whose names he could know, whose faces he could see somewhere other than at the office.\n\nThat wasn't redemption, but it was something.\n\nHe didn't realize how long he'd been sitting there until a knock sounded at his door. A soldier stuck his head in, face sheepish. \"Sorry, sir. The Senator said he'd been kept waiting long enough.\"\n\nEldredge spun in his chair. \"All right, I'm com\u2014\"\n\nHodges pushed past the soldier, stuck his immaculate coiffure into the room. \"Your response isn't exactly endearing me to the program, Eldredge.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. It's just that . . .\"\n\n\"I already told you that I was done talking with you. My business is with the Director; now, am I on his calendar or not?\"\n\nEldredge exhaled, looked down. \"I'm sorry, sir. He's unavailable.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"Sir, I can assure you that . . .\"\n\n\"Spare me, Doctor. I appreciate your efforts, but I think I know everything I need to. My staff will be in touch.\"\n\n\"Sir!\" Eldredge stood and followed him out into the hall. Hodges didn't turn, didn't so much as acknowledge his presence, and Eldredge was not so stupid as to try and stop him, to do anything more than watching his receding back as he entered the elevator that would take him to the helo hangar, where his bird back to Washington was spun up and waiting.\n\n# CHAPTER XIV\n\nON TO THE LIVING\n\nDadou slid closer. The touch of her thigh against Jawid's own horrified and thrilled him in equal measure. He had grown used to voices inside his head. The magic brought them, the sorcerous link that conveyed both emotion and language between him and the souls of the dead. But there were other voices too, his grandfather Izat for one, who had been the ulema, the religious leader for the small cluster of huts that clung tenaciously to the slowly shifting rock face where Jawid had grown up. They had held on for generations until the _Talebs_ had fired their mortars into them. Thousands of years undone in an instant. Izat had lost his life then, but Jawid still heard his voice now.\n\n_And come not near unto fornication. Lo! it is an abomination and an evil way._ Jawid could hear the old man's voice as if it were he and not Dadou who sat beside him, leg brushing his own.\n\nThat village had seemed the whole world to him all those years ago. Jawid knew better now. All those huts, the goat paths and the mosque, the wells and even the trampled field where the men played _buzkashi_ could all fit in one corner of the squad bay where the Gemini Cell kept its helicopters. Jawid didn't know how many levels the underground complex had, but he knew he could have fit ten of his villages in just one of them.\n\nThe world was so big, and there was so much that his grandfather hadn't even imagined. _Do not let the infidels blind you. Follow the way of those on whom Allah has bestowed His grace, not of those who earned His anger, nor of those who went astray._ Jawid supposed Izat spun in the soul storm now, his admonitions mixing with the regrets and misdeeds of millions of others across time. All the prayers and all the studying and all the righteous living made no difference. Jawid had clung to the belief that only bad men went there, the sort of monsters that he called back into the corpses of the newly slain. Ninip, Partolan, an ancient archer who called herself Hippolita. A part of him, deep in his heart, knew this was wrong, but he had believed it with a stubborn faith that allowed him to do his work.\n\nUntil Schweitzer.\n\nAnd if Schweitzer had gone to the soul storm, then _all_ people must go to the soul storm, the Muslims and the unbelievers, the righteous and the wicked. Every last one.\n\nJawid inhaled Dadou's smell: soap and roots, clean and earthy. She was not a Muslim. He did not have his parents' permission. But the world was vast and complicated beyond anything the wisest men he had known had ever imagined. Surely, God would not judge him harshly for loving her.\n\n\"Look at those curls.\" Dadou hooked a long finger in a lock of Jawid's thick black hair, gave it a tug, laughed as it sprang back. \"Boink.\" She pulled again, released. \"Boink.\"\n\nJawid's head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. He was stiff beneath his robes, worried she might see, wanted her to see. \"It's too long\" was all he could manage. He sounded like he was gasping. Because he was.\n\nShe laughed again. \"You're so cute.\"\n\n\"I like that you laugh.\" He almost never saw women back home, and when he did, they were shrouded in burqa. They could have been laughing uproariously or weeping fit to fill a valley and he would never have known. The women here had men's names and never even smiled.\n\n\"That's what you like? When a woman laughs?\" Dadou sounded surprised.\n\n\"There isn't a lot of laughing here.\"\n\n\"Plenty of cryin' to be done in our line of work, dahling,\" Dadou said. \"You make hay while the sun shines.\"\n\n\"Do you like our line of work?\" Jawid asked.\n\nDadou shrugged. \"You want to talk about work now? I thought we were talking about you.\"\n\nJawid's cell seemed close and dark, his bed impossibly small. But it was private enough, and Eldredge had been giving him more of a free hand lately.\n\n\"I don't understand this.\" He turned to her. \"You are a . . .\" He couldn't bring himself to compliment her beauty; he didn't understand how men did it. He knew he should recite poetry, compare her to a flower or a jewel, but his head was spinning with the nearness of her and he couldn't find the words. \"You are . . . different. I don't understand why you are touching me . . . talking to me. Because you like my hair?\"\n\nDadou laughed a long time. Jawid didn't like this laughter. It felt harder. It bled the softness, the quiet intimacy out of the air. He felt his cheeks flush, tried to smile along with the joke. Failed.\n\n\"Oh, _mon petit chouchou_ ,\" Dadou said. \"Don't be angry. I'm not laughing at you. No, it's not just the hair. Though it is pretty.\"\n\n\"What, then?\" Jawid had always believed that he would first see his wife on their wedding day. The look he'd stolen at Anoosheh had almost cost him his life. She would also be seeing him for the first time; whether he was beautiful or not would not be at issue. If he was, he wanted to know; he was hungry to know, to hear her say it.\n\nDadou paused, sighed. Her eyes were huge, the pupils blending with the dark irises, so big that the sclera drowned in them, tiny slivers of white in an ocean of black. \"Have you ever met another person with the _vodou_ , Jawid?\"\n\nThe loneliness in her voice evoked it in his own heart. \"No,\" Jawid answered, his voice thick.\n\n\" _Se sa._ I don't know how I knew there must be others out there who were like me, but I knew. Maybe it is because of the _mist\u00e8_ , how we link to them and they to us. It is a . . . community, _non_? But I never met anyone. You can feel it when it is real. The _vodou_ has a touch.\"\n\n\"Like standing in a river, only it flows through instead of around you.\"\n\n\" _Se sa_ ,\" Dadou said again, \"only the river comes from you, and you can feel it coming from others. But I never did. I always searched for it, but I never found it. After a while, I started to wonder if I would be alone forever.\"\n\nJawid only nodded. How could this be wrong? She _knew_ him.\n\n\"And then the Americans came and took me,\" Dadou went on. \"Do you remember when you first came here? Everyone is so rich! Then I finally did meet others with the _vodou_ , but it was only to kill them. Once, I ran an op on a _S\u00e8vit\u00e8_ who used a homeless shelter as a cover. Most of her charity cases were dead.\"\n\n\"She was like us? A Summoner?\"\n\n_\"Non.\"_ Dadou shook her head. \"This was different. She did not call the _mist\u00e8_ as we do. She did not venture into the beyond. She simply made the dead stand up and walk. They only moved by her will, not their own.\"\n\n\"A Necromancer, Doctor Eldredge calls them.\"\n\n\" _N\u00e9cromancien._ That's what we call them back home. Even then I was alone. I couldn't even find someone like me to fight.\"\n\n\"You killed her?\"\n\n\"I sent my _s\u00f2lda yo an l\u00f2_ , my 'Gold Operators,' to deal with her. Against them, her creatures had no chance. Even among the dead, it is better to be clever than stupid.\"\n\nShe paused, turned her head to look at him, and he could feel the current flowing from her, a liquid note of kinship. Here was someone to whom he need make no explanation. She would just understand. How could Allah oppose this? How could this be sin?\n\n\"All my life, I have never known someone who could understand,\" Dadou went on. \"I have never thought I could have a family of my own. Not a brother or sister, certainly not a husband. I didn't even know I could have a friend. Back home, everything was family. Now there is nothing. So, yes. I like your curls, and I like your eyes. I like how you are a grown man, but you shake and stutter like a little boy. But most of all, I like that you _know_ what it is to live like this. I think this is part of why the program has put us together. They are not stupid. They know what we want, and they think by giving it to us they can keep us loyal.\"\n\nJawid felt as if he were floating. He could feel bubbles in his blood, so heady and intoxicating that he could no longer distinguish between the magical current and the giddiness brought on by Dadou so close beside him. \"And what do you think?\" he husked.\n\n\"I think,\" Dadou answered, \"that in this one case, I am happy to be their puppet.\"\n\nShe leaned in. Jawid knew he was supposed to do something. He had seen enough infidel television and movies, but the truth was that no one had taught him, and it was one thing to know how people did a thing, and another to have practice.\n\nBut Dadou didn't mind. She giggled, whispered at his stiffness. \" _Se byen, chouchou._ Let me drive.\"\n\nJawid was glad, because he wasn't sure that he could move under his own power now, anyway; the bubbles in his blood had made him weak, and the floating sensation was now competing with terror. What if he was clumsy? What if it made her change her mind? Made her laugh at him? And there was Izat and Allah Himself, shaking their heads in disappointment. _An infidel,_ they said, _and you unmarried._\n\nDadou's lips met his, and they were soft, the smell of her blotting out his senses. He could feel her dreadlocks brush his nose, his chin, his chest. He tried to return her kisses, but pursing his lips didn't seem to be what she wanted. She kept pulling away, then darting back in, following some rhythm that he couldn't understand. He raised a hand tentatively to the small of her back. He desperately wanted to touch her legs and her breasts, to plunge his hands into her hair, but his arms would not obey him. He was so terrified to do it wrong. He could not bring himself to think of Dadou as a wanton, but she knew so much more than him. At last she reached down, grasped his wrist, brought his hand to her breast. She was so soft, so beautiful. Shocks ran up his arm, as if he had touched a live wire. He left his hand there as she dropped hers, not knowing what to do, afraid to ask.\n\nDadou paused. \"This is your first time?\"\n\nIt was a simple question, but Jawid could not bring himself to answer.\n\nShe lifted her hand to his again, squeezed. \"Like this,\" she said, her breath coming ragged. \"Not so hard.\"\n\nJawid felt his hand move under her own, the whole world vanishing save for the softness of her beneath his touch. \"I'm sorry,\" he said before he'd known that he'd spoken.\n\nDadou laughed, kissed him again. \"Don't you worry, dahling. Mama Dadou will teach you everything you need to know, and the first thing you need to know is never to say you're sorry.\" But he couldn't help himself. Jawid apologized again and again as they fumbled through the act, wincing internally each time.\n\nIzat's voice was clear in his mind. _When you enter upon your wife, you have first to perform two rak'ats and then hold your wife's head and say, \"O Allah! Bless my wife for me, bless me for my wife, give her bounty out of me, and give me bounty out of her!\" Then you can do what you want._ But Dadou was not his wife, and the moment they shared seemed to be made of spun glass, as though any interruption might shatter it.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said again, cursing himself even as he said it. This time, it wasn't even for her. It was for Allah and Izat and Anoosheh. He was weak, and he was lonely, and he knew that he would be judged anyway.\n\nDadou stayed on top of him, his hand still crushed to her breast. His back had begun to ache, and he realized he was clenching his body so tightly that the muscles were hard as rock. He tried to relax, tried to stop his mouth from moving, but he failed and he failed, and in the end, he said \"I'm sorry\" again.\n\nDadou stopped him with a kiss, easing her hand down into his trousers, grabbing his flaccid penis, squeezing it, pumping it. \"It's all right, dahling,\" she breathed over and over, \"it's all right.\" Only now Jawid felt his face flush in humiliation. When he touched himself, when he thought of her, of nearly any woman, he had always been rock hard, but now the one time that it mattered, his manhood was as soft as the cushion of Dadou's breast. _Will she think I am unmanned? Am I unmanned? Will it never get hard again?_\n\nBut Dadou squeezed tirelessly, leaning down every so often to kiss him. He was getting a little better at that, parting his lips just enough to admit the tip of her tongue, bringing them gently together each time she pulled away. After what seemed like forever, his penis felt rubbed raw, but it was a little harder, at least.\n\nDadou stood, slid her trousers down to her knees. The curve of her was all hard muscle, only the faintest hint of the edge of her hip rippling over the bone beneath. A wicked scar, thick and badly healed, ran from the side of her buttock down her thigh before winding its way behind her knee and out of sight. The evidence of rushed, rough stitching made him think of the Golds, and then his penis was soft again, but by then Dadou had mounted him.\n\nShe spat in her hand, a harsh sound, massaged it into her cleft. She guided his limpness into her, but it was so dry that she winced, and spat again, and again, rubbing and rubbing until there was enough wetness to get him inside by dint of sheer pushing.\n\nAnd then the thought that he was doing it, actually making love to a woman who was not his wife, overwhelmed him. He had thought it would be the physical feeling, but it was something else. The knowledge that he defied Allah and his parents and the millennia of tradition that he had felt as heavy as the mountainside he'd grown up on, it was so incredibly, deliciously _wrong_. The thought set a fire in his loins, and before he knew it he was harder than he'd ever been.\n\nDadou grunted. She rocked back and forth, moving her hips like a saw. She closed her eyes tightly, concentration on her face. The workmanlike look diminished his own arousal, but the motion and the thought could not be denied, and within seconds, the pressure in him had built to a flood, and he slapped his palms on the bed, gripping the sheets tightly.\n\nHe cried out, feeling like the whole world, all his magic and all his soul and everything in him was letting go inside her. She was looking at him now, her movements slowed, satisfaction in her eyes. \"That's good, _chouchou_ ,\" she said. _\"Li bon.\"_\n\nAnd then it was over, and he lay flat on the bed, all his muscles unclenching. A voice was chanting, \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,\" over and over and over, and it took him a moment to realize that it was him. He closed his eyes, was amazed at how suddenly tired he was. All he wanted to do now was sleep.\n\n\"You don't have to be sorry,\" Dadou said. \"You've done nothing wrong.\" But he kept saying it, couldn't stop.\n\n_Will she get with child?_ he wondered, amazed at how the thought both delighted and terrified him. Surely Allah would judge him less harshly if a son came from all this?\n\nAnd suddenly his heart was full, swelling fit to burst out of his chest. He sat bolt upright, wrapping his arms around her, burying his face in her chest, breathing in her smell. He felt himself going soft inside her, fluid leaking out around him. It slid down his abdomen, soaking the sheets. He knew that seed staining his clothing made him impure in the sight of Allah, was fastidious about cleaning when need and weakness compelled him to touch himself. But now he didn't care. He loved this woman; they had joined. She would be his wife. He didn't care that she was an infidel; he didn't care that they had joined outside marriage. He didn't care about anything except for her.\n\nTears streamed down his cheeks and he pulled her close. Dadou's back went stiff. He could feel her pulling gently away. Perhaps she was frightened, but he would set her at ease. They could not have done what they had just done and not have love come of it. It was too wonderful, too magnificent. He gripped her more tightly.\n\n\"Gah,\" she gasped. \"Easy, _mon cheri_. You are going to break my ribs.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he gasped, releasing her to cuff away a tear, kissing the tops of her breasts. \" _Allahu akhbar._ That was wonderful.\"\n\n\"I'm glad,\" she said, touching his hair awkwardly. Of course. She was frightened. Loving someone was a frightening thing.\n\n\"I was betrothed,\" Jawid said, \"but now it is you. I love you, my Dadou.\"\n\nHe felt her ribcage hitch against his face, her belly spasming. She was crying too; it was too much for her to hear him say it. He strained his ears to hear her say the same things to him.\n\nA dry coughing, staccato barks from the back of her throat.\n\nLaughter.\n\nDadou disentangled Jawid's arms, putting a hand gently but firmly on his throat, pushing him back down to the bed and sliding off him. The thin mixture of her saliva and his seed ran down her thigh, ignored. She grinned at him, but the smile didn't reach her eyes.\n\n\"Love?\" she asked. \"You are too kind to me, Jawid.\"\n\nJawid tried to look stern. He was a man. It was not for her to deny how she felt. He opened his mouth to refute her, but the words felt childish even as they formed in his head, so instead what he said was, \"After what we have done . . . we must be married.\"\n\nDadou stared at him. \"Married.\"\n\n\"It is what is right,\" he said, aware of how petulant he sounded, at a loss as to how to sound any other way.\n\n\"Married.\" She swallowed. She was trying to contain something. She was struggling, too. It was so sudden, but it didn't matter. They didn't have the luxury of families to match them, of a common faith. Jawid had felt her magical tide flowing around and through him; he knew he would never feel that again with anyone else. \"What is right,\" she said, \"depends on where you stand.\"\n\nJawid's stomach felt as if it was packed with ice. The swelling in his heart reversed itself, became a violent contraction. \"You don't know what is right. People cannot do what we have done and then just . . . just . . . go on. This is God's will.\"\n\n\"God's. Will.\" She bit off each word, and the look in her eyes made Jawid suddenly afraid. He remembered their first private conversation together.\n\n_You've killed?_\n\n_With my own hands,_ chouchou _._\n\nWho knew what she could do? What she would do? _Don't be ridiculous. She is still only a woman, and now she is yours. She only needs time to understand._\n\nDadou drew a deep breath, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, the anger was gone. \"I am . . . not sure I am ready. This is . . . sudden.\"\n\nHe stood, took her hand. It felt hot, the muscles in her fingers stiff. She twitched, as if she meant to pull away from him, stopped herself. \"This is not a thing one waits for,\" he said. \"We are _joined_ ; don't you see? What if a child comes of this? Will we raise it like an animal? We must marry.\"\n\nAt the word \"child,\" Dadou's eyes snapped back to him, the simmering anger more intense than before. \"I will consider this,\" she said. \"I just need time.\"\n\n\"Time for what? What can I do to sway you, my love?\" His heart was suddenly full again, and he choked on his tears, throwing his arms around her neck. She was as hard as iron, unmoving. He didn't care; he loved her. \"Ask me whatever you need to be sure. I will do anything.\"\n\nShe reached up and broke his grip as easily as if he were a child, pushed him back until his legs hit the bed and he sat down hard. The anger in her eyes had been replaced by a coldness that frightened him more. \"Anything.\"\n\n\"Anything,\" he nodded, love and terror mixing in his gut.\n\n\"I need your help with . . . some work.\"\n\nSick relief washed through him, making Jawid's knees weak. Part of him was disgusted at himself for wanting this conversation to be over, for being frightened to push her on the matter. He was the man, and what they had done made Dadou his tilth, his fertile field. _Go to your tilth as you will,_ the Qur'an said. She was his now. She would come to see it; he would make her.\n\nBut not now. Maybe not just yet.\n\n\"What work?\" he asked, disgusted at the quaver in his own voice, hoping against hope that she wouldn't hear it.\n\nIf she noticed, she gave no sign. \"The most important aspect of our work,\" she said. \"This is big, bigger than anything we've done before.\"\n\nHe felt his eyes narrow. A part of him mourned the loss of the conversation about love and marriage, the other part of him was roused by curiosity. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I'll show you,\" Dadou said, taking his hand and pulling him up, leading him to the door.\n\n\"No,\" Jawid said. \"We have . . . joined. We need to wash. We are unclean.\"\n\n\"We can do it later,\" she said. \"I know what you smell like.\"\n\n\"It's not the smell,\" he said, \"it is ritual impurity; the Qur'an says that . . .\"\n\nDadou stopped short, her shoulder suddenly immovable, so that he bounced off her and staggered back a step. \"I do not read your Qur'an. Do not mistake me for a Muslim. Back home, many people mistook me for a Catholic. These assumptions are . . . not helpful.\"\n\n\"We must,\" Jawid said, dropping her hand and heading to the bathroom. \"Come.\"\n\nHe saw the struggle behind Dadou's eyes, the two Dadous, one murderously angry and the other warmly smiling, doing war with one another. At long last, the smiling Dadou won and she sighed. \"All right.\"\n\nShe suffered through his prayers and even consented to wash herself. She let him lead her to the bed and draw her down next to him. \"I love you,\" he said, and she didn't answer, but she put one hand on his head and traced circles in his chest hair with the other. He floated on the tide of joy and contentment, feeling the sparks through his whole body at her touch, his eyelids slowly growing heavy. He snuggled his face into her chest and shut his eyes. Not to sleep, just to inhale her smell and feel her softness against him.\n\nBut he knew he had slept for hours when he finally opened them again. The softness of Dadou's breast had been replaced by the firm cushion of his pillow. She was standing, looking at him, as if she had been waiting for him to wake the whole time.\n\nJawid opened his mouth and the danger returned to Dadou's eyes. \"You said you would do anything,\" she said. \"Did you mean it?\"\n\nAnd then she was pulling him along again, and even though she frightened him, he was grateful, because the touch of her hand meant she still loved him, meant that he hadn't dreamed what had passed between them.\n\nShe led him into the stairwell and took him down several winding flights, down a bare corridor lined with doors. The facility was big, but Jawid had been here a long time, and while he had been down each corridor at least once, they all looked the same. White, sterile-looking cinder-block walls, stainless steel doors with keypad locks above each handle. At last, they came to a door with a red sign engraved with white lettering: RESTRICTED AREA WARNING: IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THE DIRECTIVE ISSUED BY THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ON 10 DECEMBER 2005.\n\nDadou turned to Jawid, put a hand on his shoulder. The touch felt intimate at first but soon tightened painfully. \"This task comes to us straight from the program director. It is not from Doctor Eldredge. He does not know about it and you must not tell him.\"\n\nJawid's mind filled with questions. She had talked to the Director? When? How? Jawid had heard Eldredge mention him, but never anything beyond that. Why couldn't they tell Doctor Eldredge? Eldredge was his jailor, but he had been kinder to him than anyone. But the dangerous look was in Dadou's eyes again, so all he did was nod, swallowing.\n\nDadou gestured back to the sign: UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY IS PROHIBITED. ALL PERSONS HEREIN ARE LIABLE TO SEARCH. PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE FACILITIES IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT SPECIFIC AUTHORIZATION FROM THE COMMANDER. _DEADLY_ _FORCE IS AUTHORIZED_ _._\n\nJawid felt the muscles in his back cramp, a chill rippling beneath them as a bead of sweat worked its way from the back of his neck to the top of his buttocks. Dadou keyed in the code, the lock beeping and clicking open. She turned the knob and dragged him inside.\n\nThe room was simple enough, an old freeze-burn cell of the sort they used with Operators. The scorch marks on the wall had been painted over sloppily, the smell of the drying paint still lingering in the air.\n\nA single recessed fluorescent light shone down on them from the ceiling, the plastic cover partially melted and streaked with cleaning fluid where some enterprising soul had tried to scrub off the soot before finally giving up.\n\nBelow it was a padded chair like the one the post dentist had Jawid lie in when he worked on his teeth. It had straps over the legs and arms, wide and strong-looking, with shining metal buckles.\n\nA man struggled against them. He mumbled around a ball gag, powerful muscles bulging as he pushed against the straps fruitlessly. One eye was blackened, a lump rising just below his forehead. Jawid had seen enough gunshot wounds to recognize the hole in his shoulder. It was dressed, gauze soaked with still-moist red going brown around the edges. Whoever this man was, they were trying to keep him alive.\n\nDread blossomed in Jawid's stomach. He knew what the work was now and why Dadou had brought him here.\n\n\"Our new work is the same as our old,\" Dadou said. \"Only the vessel is different. It should be easy.\"\n\nJawid stared, nausea rising up his throat. He looked at this woman that mere moments ago he had thought he would marry, and shuddered.\n\nA man. Not a corpse. A living man.\n\nThey were going to put a jinn in him.\n\n# CHAPTER XV\n\nALL THE DEAD CAN DO IS PROTECT\n\nSchweitzer ran.\n\nPatrick bounced in his arms, no longer screaming. The boy had tripped over the line of terror and sadness into a pale-faced silence, meekly accepting the rough ride of Schweitzer's panicked gait.\n\nSchweitzer was just as numb. _You turned and ran while monsters killed your wife._ From what little he'd seen, there hadn't been anything left bigger than a softball.\n\n_Oh God. Sarah._ He pushed the vision of the red ruin of her body aside, only to find it replaced with memories of their life together. Applauding from the audience as she'd stood to accept the Best New Artist award from the Tidewater Chamber of Commerce. They'd made love in his car that night, so blind with passion that one of them had kicked the window out.\n\nHe remembered kneeling on the deep pile of the kitchen throw rug, his head in Sarah's lap as he shook and cried, the phone swinging by its cord, sentenced to hang after delivering the news that cancer and grief over Peter's death had finally taken his mother's life. His brother and his mother, just months apart. _I can't be strong right now,_ he'd sobbed.\n\nShe'd run her fingers through his hair, letting her hand drop to the back of his neck. _You don't have to be, babe,_ she'd said. _I can carry us until you're ready again._\n\nIt was one of the rare times Schweitzer ever fully gave himself over to another human being. It had taken him the rest of the night to get it together, and he had never felt so safe. She had his six. She wouldn't let him fall.\n\nHad he told her how grateful he was? He couldn't remember.\n\n_You're a coward._\n\n_No. You ran because she told you to._ He'd run because she'd told him to save their son.\n\nHe slowed, dialed out his hearing, listening. He could hear the helo rotors still in the distance, vainly circling above the canopy where the fight had gone down with the Golds, no doubt searching for him. He'd opened up a good-enough lead on them while they were busy with Sarah.\n\nShe'd bought him the time he needed. He had to make good on that.\n\nHe looked down at Patrick, pale as death save for the puffy red blotches on his face and arms, his blond hair so streaked with dirt and gore that it looked black. The boy was terrified of him. He would only respond to his mother. He needed her.\n\nSchweitzer needed her too.\n\nSarah's body had been destroyed, which meant her soul would be in the void even now. His link to her had helped him find her in life, would it in death?\n\n_Just a quick second,_ he told himself, _just to see._ He had let her die. He had watched her die. He needed to tell her he was sorry. _You should have saved her. You should have found a way._\n\nSarah was the strength he'd drawn on to do the dangerous work of a SEAL, and the lifeline he'd followed out of the Gemini Cell's facility and back into the sunlit world. Their love was a thing so strong that it was a magic in and of itself, a bond that linked them through death and time and distance.\n\nA part of him, the cold professional who carefully weighed risk and outcome, stayed focused on the mission, knew there was no good reason for this. Schweitzer couldn't bring her back to life, had no way to comfort or even communicate with her in the chaos of twisting souls.\n\nBut that part of him was crushed under the heel of the other part, the husband and best friend, the man who had known and loved Sarah from the moment he'd met her. That part of him had to see her in the beyond, just to know, just to . . . _just to say goodbye. You didn't thank her enough. You didn't tell her what she meant to you. Not clearly enough. Not nearly often enough._\n\nSchweitzer had felt the pull of the link between them even when he'd thought her dead, and he still felt it now. It pointed into the darkness of the void, the place where Sarah now tumbled, sucked into the spinning chaos of the soul storm.\n\nSchweitzer turned his focus inside himself, felt the darkness at the edges of his physical form, pushed out into it. The cold of the void wrapped itself around him. He felt the edges of his own body slip past and recede.\n\nSchweitzer felt the undertow of the soul storm, slowly reeling him in, hungry and grasping. He pushed against it, holding his position, keeping a watchful inner eye on his own body in the distance. He concentrated, reaching out for Sarah's presence, trying to feel the link that joined them.\n\nThere it was, so faint he could almost miss it. Sarah's distilled soul, always coming to him in the same way: the touch of her rosewater perfume, a phantom scent he could follow to its source. He inhaled deeply, filling spiritual lungs with the fragrance. It grew stronger as he went, clearer, until he could almost see the edges of the stream, the smell leading arrow-straight into the storm.\n\nThis close, the screaming was deafening. Schweitzer's spiritual ears pulsed with the chorus of shouts beginning to move past mere hearing, speaking directly into his mind. A litany of battle cries, regrets, and last testaments. Schweitzer felt them chipping at the edges of his consciousness, trying to suck his identity into the tangle, desperate to turn it over and over until he didn't know who he was anymore.\n\nSarah was somewhere in there.\n\nSchweitzer pushed deeper, hauling himself up the trail of his wife's perfume, calling her name. He was forging too far, too deep. The undertow had seized him, was pulling him deeper and deeper into the throng.\n\nA part of him didn't care. He was desperate to reach Sarah, no matter what the cost. He snarled, pushed on. But the other part of him, Schweitzer the SEAL, forced him to slow, to push back. _You're no good to Sarah, to anyone, if you get lost in this morass. Withdraw for now. Come up with a plan. Come back when you're ready._\n\nThe thought of Sarah screaming and tumbling in the maelstrom almost made Schweitzer continue, but then his own voice put the hammer down. _No good to Sarah. No good to yourself. No good to Patrick._\n\nPatrick.\n\n_Save my son, damn it!_\n\nSchweitzer turned back, following his own sense of self back into the limits of his body, feeling the void shrug off and reality snap into place with a ringing that sounded in his ears.\n\nNot ringing, crying.\n\nPatrick was sprawled on his face, nose bleeding.\n\nHe'd dropped him. He'd been so focused on exploring the void that his body must have relaxed. He'd dropped Patrick on his face.\n\n\"Oh, my god. Oh, Patrick. I'm sorry,\" Schweitzer knelt and scooped up his son, dusting the dirt off his face, checking the scratches. \"You okay, little man? Daddy's sorry. Daddy's so sorry.\"\n\nHe'd had years to build a bond with Sarah, something that could sustain their relationship in times of trouble. He'd had far less time to build it with Patrick. Their relationship was truncated, stopped cold the moment the men who'd murdered Schweitzer had entered his home. His uncle Peter was dead. His uncle Steve was dead. Now his mother was dead. All the warm hearts and kind faces who were ready to teach Patrick how to be an adult, all snatched away before the boy was old enough to appreciate how much he needed them.\n\nPatrick sniffled, but the crying stopped. _He's getting used to me. He's starting to realize that just because I look like a monster doesn't mean I am one._\n\n\"Want Mommy,\" Patrick said, cuffed at the poison ivy rash on his face.\n\nSchweitzer folded him to his chest. \"Me too,\" he said, feeling tears that would never come, the rigidity of his tear ducts, dried and hardened. The grief threatened to swamp him. His chance to be a father to Patrick had been stopped before it really started. They had no relationship beyond Schweitzer's duty to keep him safe and alive. \"I want Mommy, too.\"\n\nHe looked back down at his son, filthy, scratched, and with a serious case of poison ivy. He'd lost Sarah. He wasn't going to lose Patrick, too.\n\nAnd the boy would never be safe at his father's side. Not now.\n\n\"Okay, pal,\" he said, scanning their surroundings, dialing his hearing out for the sound of a neighboring road, a town, even a group of hikers.\n\n\"Let's get you fixed up and then find some place safe for you.\"\n\nThough where that place was, Schweitzer didn't know.\n\n* * *\n\nIn the end, Schweitzer broke into a convenience store.\n\nHe waited for Patrick to fall asleep, then tucked the boy over his shoulder and moved silently down into the parking lot, where he made Patrick a bed of cardboard and plastic bags. \"Just for a sec,\" he whispered, more to himself than his sleeping son, and stood.\n\nPatrick huddled, ragged and filthy, in the nest he'd built. His Tiny Tim, his beggar boy. _Oh God, Patrick. I've failed you._ And now he was walking away, leaving his child alone in the dark like an after-school special.\n\n\"I don't know what else to do,\" Schweitzer whispered aloud as he jogged over to the drugstore loading dock, tried the handle of the rusted blue door. The SEAL in him had replaced Ninip as his partner in internal dialogue. _Parenting is for the living. All the dead can do is protect._\n\nThe door wasn't alarmed. The tight-knit relations of a small town were enough to deter most of the crime. It was hard enough to steal from a stranger, and in these little hamlets, everybody knew everybody. For those who could overcome the instinct to do right by one's fellow man, a stout lock did the job.\n\nBut Schweitzer didn't know anyone here, and his magical strength twisted the lock off its mounting like it was soft clay.\n\nInside, darkness shrouded the stainless steel racks of greeting cards, laundry detergent, and shampoo in orderly rows. He remembered corpses in the same orderly rows when he'd stormed a freighter off the Virginia coast. He'd had a beating heart then, had breathed sweet air. _Stop it. Focus._\n\nHe grabbed a child's backpack from a section of the store marked by a giant cardboard ladybug with the words BACK TO SCHOOL blazoned across her back. He filled it with rubbing alcohol, calamine lotion, hydrogen peroxide, sterilizing pads, gauze, medical tape, and two boxed first aid kits. To this he added a Coleman stove and plenty of fuel, cans of spam and beans, and bottles of water. He grabbed a child's elf costume. The tights and shirt were brown and green, at least, and they were clean. At last, he leapt the counter into the pharmacy, snatching up a double handful of orange plastic bottles of antibiotics.\n\nHe paused, listening. Hushed whispers in a house some distance away. Someone had heard some noise, was debating going to check it out, being talked down by a worried wife. Schweitzer heard the relief in their voice as they acquiesced. No one was coming.\n\nHe rummaged back through the bag, paused as the moonlight caught his hand. It was shredded, more bone than flesh now, the ragged gray striations of the muscle visible where the skin had been peeled back, or burned off, or simply rubbed away. He could only imagine what it must look like to Patrick, to anyone. Dirt packed the holes, bunched around the tendons.\n\nSchweitzer cursed and roved the aisles until he found a roll of duct tape. He spent fifteen minutes taping over the various gaps and rents, pausing every so often to listen for breathing, footsteps, any indicator that someone was drawing closer. No one was. He could still hear Patrick's breathing, slow and steady and even. The boy was where he left him, sleeping.\n\nSchweitzer surveyed his handiwork. Striped with duct tape, he looked . . . less horrible, but no more human. It would have to be enough. He shouldered the bag and headed back out the door.\n\nHe crouched beside Patrick, gently lifted the boy up and over his shoulder again. His son didn't struggle, didn't moan, gave no indicator he'd noticed at all. He was dead weight on Schweitzer's shoulder, his slow breaths the only indicator that he was alive. The events of the past few days had taken that much out of him, or it was simply safer in dreams than in the waking world.\n\nSchweitzer made sure they were a good distance into the woods, and that the only sounds near him were animals, before he bent to his task. He cleared the ground as best he could and lay Patrick down, then set to work cleaning himself with bottled water and alcohol before doing the same to the boy's face. Patrick didn't scream when he came awake, merely stared at his father sullenly as he submitted to being washed, cleaned, and then liberally smeared with the calamine. Schweitzer cleaned his cuts and bandaged them as best he could. It wasn't until he was mostly done that he realized he had been humming softly out of instinct, an old nonsense lullaby that he'd used to sing to his son at bathtime.\n\nPatrick looked up at his father, staring exhausted into his skull face, his burning silver eyes. \"Daddy,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Schweitzer choked the words out. \"I'm your daddy.\"\n\n\"Are you a monster?\" Patrick's eyes were wide.\n\nSchweitzer almost said no, stopped himself. Patrick had seen so much. It would do no good to lie to him now.\n\n\"Yes,\" Schweitzer said, \"but there are different kinds of monsters, sweetheart. Some are good monsters, and some are bad monsters. Daddy is one of the good ones.\"\n\n\"Good monster,\" Patrick said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Mommy. Want Mommy.\"\n\n\"I know, sweetheart,\" Schweitzer answered. What else could he say?\n\nThe imagery from the link between them flared in his mind; he fought the memory down, but not before it gave him a painful glimpse of what had transpired. Sarah had been with Steve. She had fucked him. She had loved him. She had belonged to him.\n\n_She thought you were dead. What the hell did you expect?_\n\nThere were so many questions he wanted to ask her, both wanting and not wanting to know the answers. _Were you sure I was dead? Did you try to see my body first? Was Patrick close enough to hear? Was it good? Did you come? Did you think of me?_ But above it all were two questions pulsing in alternating tandem, one blinking on as the other blinked off: _Why? How could you? Why? How could you?_\n\nHis mind was quick to provide him with a flood of cuckold's fantasies: Chang's sweating back, Sarah's nails drawing red lines across it. Schweitzer still remembered the soft moans she made, the dirty words she used, the way she said \"please\" when she was close to orgasm. He remembered them now in vivid detail, always with Chang in the foreground. His wife, his best friend, a clich\u00e9 out of a bad movie.\n\nThe vision was replaced by the blurry distance, Sarah as a red mound, pieces of her detaching, the gray shapes of the Golds fighting over them. Schweitzer inventoried each lump. That might have been her arm, or her elbow, or her foot. He hadn't focused enough to tell; he'd known he wouldn't be able to bear it.\n\nThe temptation to go after her, to quest into the void, was so strong he almost succumbed, but he forced himself to look back at his son. _Sarah is dead. Patrick is alive. Take care of your son._\n\n\"Come on, big man,\" he said, taking his son's hand, \"let's get you somewhere safe.\"\n\nPatrick held his hand, toddled along beside his father. Frightened, shaken, but starting to realize that the thing beside him wasn't going to hurt him. Maybe the duct tape over the wounds helped, but Schweitzer doubted it. Schweitzer had to stoop low to walk beside his son, knew he should scoop him up so they could move at a faster clip. _Not just yet,_ he thought. _Let the boy walk for a moment. A few minutes won't make a difference._ More likely that it would, but Schweitzer forced himself to match his son's fumbling gait anyway.\n\n\"Good monster,\" Patrick repeated.\n\nSchweitzer nodded. It hurt to hear it, but that didn't make it any less true. \"The best.\"\n\n\"Where we goin'?\" Patrick asked.\n\n\"Well, where would you like to go?\" Schweitzer asked. His own mind worked feverishly. Where could he take Patrick that was safe? The Gemini Cell was a classified program embedded deep in the intelligence community; that meant it likely had its hooks in all over the country, the ability to tap local law enforcement or the FBI. They clearly had mercenaries at their beck and call, if Gruenen was any indicator. Where could he go where they couldn't find him?\n\nPatrick tripped over a root, clung tightly to his father's finger to stay upright. Schweitzer began to swing him up into his arms, relented when Patrick squalled, \"Nooooooo,\" continued to let the boy toddle at the maddening, slow pace.\n\n_Sarah was right. They want you. They aren't after Patrick. They'll take him if they can get him, but that's a lot more likely if he stays with you._\n\n_No. He's dead if you leave him. You're the only one who can protect him._\n\n_Protect him to what end?_ What did he think would happen? He was a walking corpse, animated by magic. He was a horror to look at, an immortal being purpose-built for war. Did he think he could go back to life as a father? Drop Patrick at the school bus each day? Go to his high school football games? Teach him to ride a bike? All of that was lost to him. His focus had been too tactical. It was time to pull the camera back, time to ask the big question. Sarah was dead.\n\n_Why go on?_\n\nTo protect Patrick. That was the obvious, the only, answer. _What do you want for him? What could be salvaged from this mess? He's still young. He can heal. He will have a hard time with what he's seen, but he can get past it._\n\n_You can't have a normal life. He can._\n\nBut not while the Gemini Cell existed. Eldredge had seemed kindly, Jawid na\u00efve, but Schweitzer's tour through the Sorcerer's memories had shown him what he needed to know. They would do anything, absolutely anything to further their \"program.\" While they lived, Patrick would never be safe.\n\nWhile they lived.\n\nIn all his time with the Cell, Schweitzer had never seen another person who could do what Jawid could. Maybe killing him would stop things cold. Maybe by holding him hostage, Schweitzer could extract a promise of Patrick's safety. Maybe by surrendering himself, he could get them to forget the boy. All of those plans were paper-thin, all of them more likely to end up with both him and his son physically destroyed and sent to the soul storm, but Sarah was right that they were better than the current option: run senselessly, endlessly.\n\nAnd all had one thing in common: they were dangerous. Infiltration missions requiring a lone operator with powers like his. He couldn't do it with Patrick under his arm. He had to find somewhere safe for the boy.\n\nA hundred strategies rose in his mind and were instantly discarded. He could drop Patrick at an orphanage. He could find a kind and good adoptive family desperate for a child. All were ridiculous. All would put Patrick and whoever took him in at terrible risk. Families weren't experts in OPSEC; they wouldn't know how to keep his son's origin a secret. The Gemini Cell would find them.\n\nHis mother and brother were dead. Sarah's sister was a flake with a mild drug habit and a string of questionable boyfriends. Her father was gone, her mother in the early stages of Alzheimer's. He needed someone frosty, someone trained.\n\nHe needed SEALs.\n\nHis heart sped up as he thought of Chang. The man had been completely dedicated to Schweitzer, his family as an extension of himself. He would have risked anything, gone any distance, to keep Patrick safe. _Maybe that's why he fucked your wife. Because he loved her._\n\n_Stop it. This won't help._\n\nChief Ahmad was a company woman. Her first and sole loyalty was to the nation. She would never sell out a teammate, but her by-the-book attitude meant that if the government came knocking, she'd salute and do what she was asked. He couldn't ask her to take that risk. Ditto for Lieutenant Biggs. Martin was a religious fanatic who believed an invisible man in the sky had told him to hate gay people. Who the hell knew what he would get up to? What things he would ask Patrick to get up to?\n\nThat left Perretto.\n\nSchweitzer's heart quickened a little at the thought. As the lone Coast Guard assigned to the team, he was outside the decision-making circle. If any of Schweitzer's brother SEALs had been co-opted by the Gemini Cell, it likely wasn't him. Schweitzer knew he had two children of his own. Perretto had botched his takedown during their last mission together, nearly getting the whole team killed. He was still stinging over it, but that didn't change his heart. Schweitzer remembered his quick and irreverent sense of humor, the mischievous turn of his mouth. Was he the sort of man who would defy his own government? Who would take in a child with no questions asked? Schweitzer had no idea, but he did know the bond between operators was strong, and Perretto was the best chance he had.\n\nSchweitzer knew that after his botched job, he wouldn't stay with the team in Little Creek; he'd be \"reattached\" to his original unit, the Pacific Tactical Law Enforcement Team in San Diego, California.\n\nNearly three thousand miles away.\n\nSchweitzer nodded internally. The distance would do double duty. It was a place to run to; it was a direction to run in.\n\nAnd he knew just how to get there.\n\n# CHAPTER XVI\n\nDOESN'T ANYONE KNOCK ANYMORE?\n\nThe analyst did her level best to look nonchalant, but she was trained to crunch numbers, write software, and pull needles out of giant data haystacks. Working for a spy service didn't make her a spy. Eldredge could see all the classic tells, refusal to make eye contact, increased breathing, sweat sheening from the hollows of her neck where they showed through her thin green blouse.\n\n\"What do you mean, I can't see Jawid and Dadou?\" Eldredge racked his brain for this analyst's name. Joseph? Daniel? \"I am the lead scientist on this program.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir,\" she said, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice and failing. He decided her name . . . her cover name, at least, was Matthew. \"They're cloistered right now.\"\n\n\"What the hell does that mean?\" It was times like this that the kindly Samuel Clemens look he'd worked so hard to cultivate backfired. On the one hand, it made others more likely to trust and open up to him; on the other, it made them less likely to obey him when he was trying to put the hammer down.\n\n\"It means they're unavailable, sir,\" the soldier behind her answered. \"It means you need to check back later.\"\n\nEldredge scanned the man's blouse for his rank, noticed there was none displayed. That meant he was assigned directly to the Cell. It meant he wasn't going to blink, but that wouldn't stop Eldredge from trying. \"I was here when they brought Jawid in. I have been with him every day since. I have never, not even once, been denied access to him.\"\n\nThe soldier shrugged. \"Guess there's a first time for everything.\"\n\nThe analyst frowned at the floor, looking pained.\n\n\"This is going to be bad,\" Eldredge seethed, hating himself for not having more self-control, \"for both of you.\"\n\nHe spun on his heel and stormed back to his office, feeling the soldier's smug grin burning against his back the entire way.\n\nEldredge slumped into his chair, crossing his arms over his chest, staring at the clutter on his desk. It soon became clear there was no answer there, so he pulled up the commlink and called the Director.\n\nHe heard the low buzz, saw the icon blink as the call went through.\n\nNothing.\n\n_What the fuck is going on?_ The Director had never failed to answer him before. Eldredge wracked his brain, going back the years since he'd come here. His secretary had at least answered. Eldredge had never had to wait more than fifteen minutes. He'd just assumed that the Director lived in his office, worked around the clock. _Like me._\n\nEldredge broke the connection and pulled up the overhead layout tracking the Golds. The triangles flashed. They were fanning out west, moving in a pack. Schweitzer had moved off along a ravine, and Eldredge was betting that he'd followed it. The mop-up team showed as a blue square, hovering over the last place they'd seen Schweitzer. They were busy cleaning all traces of the Golds' presence.\n\nThey were dealing with what was left of Sarah Schweitzer's corpse.\n\nEldredge had only glanced at the image before turning away. The Golds had been in a frenzy. They had been thorough. There wasn't much left. Eldredge swallowed his revulsion. Sarah was a threat to the program; he knew that. He knew what the price would be if she were allowed to leak details to the public. He knew how they would react. The Gemini Cell would be shut down, and repulsive as they might be, the alternative was worse. But it didn't change the fact that Schweitzer was a good man and Sarah a good woman. _What would you have done? Asked them nicely to come in? You know as well as anyone that Sarah Schweitzer wasn't going to allow herself to be captured._\n\nMore lives would have been lost if a human team had tried to engage Schweitzer. He'd watched the videos of Operations Jackrabbit and Nightshade over and over again. He knew what Schweitzer could do. Sarah had a good heart, but it was still just one heart weighed against the dozens or even hundreds that Schweitzer would stop beating if mortal humans tried to capture him. The Director had done what he had to.\n\nSo, why did it feel so wrong?\n\nHe looked back to the map, watched the blinking phalanx of Golds sweeping south and west, drawn by the promise of the heartbeat they had missed, Schweitzer's son, Patrick.\n\n_Sarah would have blown the whistle on the program._ He'd read her file. He knew how she'd fought like a cornered bear to save her son when her husband had first been killed. _She wouldn't have let it go. She would have found a way to have revenge._\n\nBut Patrick was a child. He was far too young to understand what he'd seen to be believed, even if he could communicate it.\n\nYet there were the Golds, running down his trail. Eldredge pulled the map out until the red rings representing the circling drones came into view. He toggled from camera to camera, trying to find one that had a clear shot through the dense forest canopy. He cycled through the feeds until he saw the flickers of gray shapes, then dialed in on the ground below.\n\nAnd froze.\n\nHe called up the commlink and dialed another number.\n\n\"Ops,\" came a woman's voice.\n\n\"This is White,\" Eldredge said. \"I'm punched into Eyes Seven, and I . . . I don't like what I'm seeing.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you have a clear view, sir?\" the ops boss asked. \"Might be you're not sure what you're seeing.\"\n\nEldredge fought the ball of rage threatening to make him shout. You never got anything done that way. \"I have a clear view. It looks like the action element has found . . . something.\"\n\nThe ops boss sighed on the other end. \"Yes, sir. That's a campsite. We're waiting for them to finish and then we'll send the mop-up team to their position.\"\n\n\"So, you knew what I was seeing.\" Now Eldredge couldn't keep the edge off his voice.\n\nThe ops boss sighed again. \"Just trying to make sure we're talking about the same thing, sir.\"\n\n\"How many?\"\n\n\"How many what, sir?\"\n\n\"How many did they kill this time?\"\n\n\"We won't be able to get a count until the mop-up team gets there, sir. The Golds aren't exactly great at math. From what I can see, it looks like somewhere around twelve.\"\n\nEldredge dialed in further, maximized the camera feed, squinted at his screen. \"Jesus . . . Are those . . . are those uniforms?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Ops sounded bored. \"Looks like Boy Scouts.\"\n\nIt was a long time before Eldredge could speak. \"We just massacred a scout troop.\"\n\n\"The Golds aren't responding to the incentives, sir. We were hoping you might be able to talk to the Ops Taskers.\" She meant Jawid and Dadou.\n\n\"Keep me posted,\" he said, and cut the connection.\n\n\"We will, sir,\" she lied just before the line went dead.\n\nEldredge stood, whirled, and stormed back to the lab entrance. The analyst had gone, but the same soldier was there, hands crossed behind the small of his back, eyes fixed on Eldredge's approach.\n\nAs Eldredge came within striking distance, the soldier put his hand out. \"Sir, please. Don't make me . . .\"\n\nBut Eldredge could tell that his narrow shoulders and white hair had already put the soldier at his ease. He didn't believe that this old man with his bushy moustache and white lab coat was any threat at all, wasn't prepared for any real resistance.\n\nEldredge knew he wasn't strong enough to fight him, was flying by his gut now, the strange feeling of working without a plan both exhilarating and terrifying. He needed to talk to Dadou and Jawid for just a moment. He had to find a way to bring the Golds under control. He'd figure the rest out as he went.\n\nThe soldier's expression went from smug and unafraid to shocked as Eldredge brought his hand up, spread his first two fingers and poked him in the eyes.\n\nThe soldier sputtered, seizing his wrist, bending double.\n\nEldredge reached smoothly under his elbow and grabbed the door handle. It was one of the newer ones, with an embedded palm reader, which was probably why they'd posted the guard in the first place. Eldredge felt it warm as it read the signature of his pulse and unlocked.\n\nThe soldier grabbed his elbow, blinked tears. \"What the hell do you think you're . . . ?\"\n\nEldredge smoothly switched hands, using his free one to turn the knob and open the door. He shook the other arm free from the guard's grip. \"What are you going to do? Beat up an old man?\"\n\n\"If I have to,\" the soldier said, seizing Eldredge's arm and jerking it back, locking his elbow, and bending his wrist painfully. \"You have lost your goddamn mind. Jesus, you little shit.\"\n\nEldredge struggled, unable to match the younger man's strength, knowing he was already beaten but refusing to give in. The soldier put more pressure on his arm, and Eldredge bent at the waist, desperately trying to give his shoulder some relief from the feeling that it might pop out of its socket.\n\nAnd then the soldier froze. Eldredge looked up from beneath his brows, and all thoughts of pain vanished.\n\nJawid and Dadou crouched over a chair, faces drooping in shock and guilt, like cheating lovers caught in the act by a husband who came home early. But Eldredge's mind only briefly acknowledged them, turning instead to the chair and the figure bound in it.\n\nIt was padded and fitted with buckled restraints, like some fetishist's dungeon prop, stuffed black faux leather with thick white stitches. Or, at least, he thought they were white. The entire assemblage dripped with blood, sheeting from the body of the man strapped into it. He looked like he'd bled from every orifice in his body. Thick crimson runnels streamed from his nose, his ears, his mouth, his genitals. Beads of the stuff had formed on his face and chest, as if he'd sweated it.\n\nEldredge looked at the purple blotches just beginning to form across the man's body. There were no visible lacerations, no bruising. This man hadn't been cut or beaten. He'd torn himself apart from the inside out.\n\n\"You shouldn't be here.\" Dadou sounded sheepish.\n\n\"What the fuck is this?\" Eldredge asked, the words choked off as the soldier hauled on his arm, dragging him back.\n\n\"Let him go.\" Dadou sounded tired. \"You've already failed to keep him out.\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am,\" the soldier said, sniffing and blinking, releasing Eldredge, who staggered forward a few steps before straightening.\n\n\"Get out and close the damn door,\" Dadou barked at the soldier. Eldredge had just enough time to glare at the soldier before he complied.\n\nJawid stammered, shot a terrified glance at Dadou. She gestured, a mere movement of her wrist, palm outward, and the Sorcerer instantly stilled, shoulders slumping. \"I'll handle this,\" she said.\n\n\"That\"\u2014Eldredge stabbed a shaking finger toward the man in the chair\u2014\"does not look like a corpse.\"\n\nDadou placed two fingers against the dark line of the man in the chair's carotid, slowly going an unhealthy shade of purple. The tips came away wet and crimson. \"He is dead.\"\n\n\"He is recently dead,\" Eldredge said. \"That is fresh blood.\"\n\n\"Dead is dead,\" Dadou said. Jawid swallowed.\n\n\"You killed him. Who was he? What the hell is going on here?\"\n\n\"What is going on here is not your concern, _Dokt\u00e8_.\"\n\nDadou was leaner than the solider he'd just evaded, but her body was all muscle, and there was something in the set of her mouth and eyes that made him think that she'd be more than happy to mete out those consequences herself. The soldier was a man in a uniform doing his job. Dadou had the look of a person who had a different relationship with the value of human life. The thought made his heart rate speed up, but he didn't let it show. \"I run this program, damn it. You do not tell me what is or is not my concern.\"\n\nDadou stepped closer. \"You do _not_ run this program, _Dokt\u00e8_. You are an employee, the same as I. This program is run by the taxpayers of the United States. You are just a public servant.\"\n\n\"I am the public servant from whom you take orders. There is a chain of command.\"\n\n\"Yes, there is, and you are bound by it just as I am. My orders come from a higher authority, and if you have concerns, you are welcome to take them up with him.\"\n\nEldredge's blood went cold. \"The Director ordered you to murder someone? Why?\"\n\n\"We are in the killing business,\" Dadou said. \"Or had you forgotten? The targets, the incentives, the collateral damage. Why is this one suddenly a problem?\"\n\nIt was a good question. Eldredge only knew that it was. _Because you met Schweitzer,_ he thought. _Because you got to know him. Because he made you realize that there is more going on behind those burning eyes. _He thought of the town of Basye, the offhanded casual manner in which the Director dismissed all those deaths.\n\n_That doesn't look like a gas explosion, sir._\n\n_Not yet._\n\nHe thought of the ragged remains of the scout troop, the ops boss's bored tone. _We won't be able to get a count until the mop-up team gets there, sir. The Golds aren't exactly great at math. From what I can see, it looks like somewhere around twelve._\n\nHe thought of the ruined pile of flesh scraps, all that remained of Sarah Schweitzer.\n\n\"Wait here,\" he said. \"Don't do another goddamn thing until you hear from me.\" He spun on his heel and stormed off, breezing through the door and past the soldier, who was chattering something into his radio. Dadou shouted something at his back, but Eldredge ignored it, the bit already between his teeth. A small part of him knew the truth, that he was leaning on momentum now, that if he stopped, the fear would take control, and he would lose the will to do what he was about to do.\n\n_This is what Schweitzer would do._\n\nHe stormed past his office and into the stairwell alongside the single elevator shaft at the end of the hallway. He took the steps two at a time, following the elevator shaft up one floor, two, then three. This was the subsurface level, the place he'd foolishly allowed Schweitzer to live on, never thinking he would try to make his break. _He played me. No, I don't think he was the type to play anyone. He wanted to be closer to the surface because it felt more like living. And that's what he wanted more than anything, to be alive._\n\nAt last, he crested the top flight, threw open the door, and marched across the hall to the opposite doors. They were big and metal, the only ones without cipher locks in the whole facility. That was because the Director's vestibule lay beyond, manned by his secretaries twenty-four hours a day. They were drawn from a pool of block-faced and broad-shouldered professionals, humorless, each one dedicated to protecting the Director's privacy. Eldredge had only met them the few times the Director had been unable to take his calls, or when he'd had to drop off a thumb drive for the Director's eyes only, a file too big or too sensitive to send over the network.\n\nThe fear pricked at the back of his neck, and he felt his knees wobble. _If you keep going, you might well be killed. But if you stop now, you'll live, and hate yourself for every second that you do._\n\nHe dropped his hand to the handle of the KA-BAR, tucked into its sheath in his waistband. The feel of the ridged leather handle steadied his nerves. He thought of his father, advancing under the withering fire of German guns. _This is just a conversation, and the Director is just a man. Grow a pair._\n\nHe drew the KA-BAR out. It was an antique weapon, but a weapon nonetheless, and the sharp edge against his thumb would remind him of that.\n\nHe froze, blinked.\n\nThe blade was glowing.\n\nA jinn was nearby. Eldredge stared at the blade, then looked around. Apart from the stairwell door and the doors to the Director's vestibule, there was nothing.\n\nHe paused, listening. The only sound was the static hiss of the climate control system blowing air through the vents overhead.\n\nWas the knife . . . broken somehow? Had the magic gone sour? _No, magic isn't machinery. It doesn't wear out. It has never been wrong before. A jinn is near._\n\nHe sheathed the knife, squared his shoulders, and with a final glance at the air vents, opened the double doors.\n\nThe secretary was already rising from behind the ebony desk, her reflection distorted by the stainless steel walls. \"Doctor Eldredge, you didn't call. How can I help you?\"\n\n\"Mark, good to see you.\" She could have been swapped with any of the other secretaries who manned the station and he would have been hard-pressed to spot the change. He hoped he'd gotten her cover name right.\n\n\"It's always a pleasure,\" she beamed, the polished presentation contrasting with the tension in her muscular arms. The welcoming smile didn't reach her eyes.\n\n\"Sorry for not calling in advance, but something's come up and I need to speak with the Director.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Doctor,\" Mark said, sitting down in front of her computer. \"I can block you out for a video conference right away.\"\n\n\"Thanks\"\u2014Eldredge tried to keep his tone casual\u2014\"but I think this time, I need to talk to him in person.\"\n\nMark's smile went from forced to pained. She snorted a quick laugh. \"Come on, now, Doctor. You know the Director doesn't see anyone.\"\n\n\"He sees you.\"\n\n\"Not very often. I'm afraid he values his privacy very highly, as I'm sure you understand. It's critical that we keep all aspects of this program, and identities in particular, as compartmentalized as possible.\"\n\nEldredge looked around for a chair, but there wasn't one. The office wasn't designed to accommodate those with a mind to wait around. Eldredge leaned on the corner of the desk, ignoring Mark's sour look. \"Well, this is really important. I need to speak to him right away.\"\n\nHis eyes drifted over the ebony desk's reflective surface. It was bare save for a phone and a computer, one of the upright models where the monitor housed the whole works. Sticking out of its side was her ID card, inserted to allow her access to the network.\n\nEldredge glanced to the door to the Director's office, noted the black contact pad beside it. He couldn't be sure that Mark's card would unlock it, but he bet it would.\n\n\"Certainly.\" Mark clicked her mouse and brought up the Director's calendar. \"Is this an emergency? I can . . .\"\n\n_Now or never._ Eldredge thought of the man in the chair, swollen and bleeding. He thought of his order to Dadou to bring Jim and Patrick in alive. He thought of the Director's drunken tone when he told Eldredge to handle Senator Hodges. He thought of the fires burning in Basye, the bodies in the streets. _Now. The Director has lost his mind. You have to talk to him now._\n\nEldredge wasn't as fast as he once was, but he was more than fast enough to reach out and yank the card out of its reader, turn, and reach the Director's office door in three strides. He slammed the card against the contact pad.\n\nNothing.\n\nMark spun in her swivel chair, leapt to her feet. \"God damn it . . .\"\n\nEldredge cursed, tapped the card against the contact reader again and again. Could he have been wrong?\n\nA sharp beep brought relief so strong that he nearly sagged against the door.\n\nMark's hand settled on his left wrist, clamped down painfully. \"This is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me.\"\n\nEldredge drove for the door handle with his left hand, but Mark's grip was like iron, and he knew he wasn't going anywhere. His right reached back for the KA-BAR, whipped it out of its sheath, the blade glowing so brightly it nearly blinded him. _Idiot. What do you intend to do with that? You're going to stab her?_\n\nBut Mark let him go, leaping back at the sight of the raised blade. \"Fine. Let's do this the hard way,\" she said, pulling open one of the desk drawers, hand reaching inside.\n\nEldredge saw the black plastic of a pistol in her hand as he slid through the door and felt it click shut behind him.\n\nThe room beyond was freezing.\n\nA second click sounded as the door lock engaged, sealing him in darkness so total that he thought he had gone blind. He raised the knife, holding it up like a torch. The light slowly adjusted his eyes, casting dancing turquoise shadows around the small space, energy smoking in the refrigerated cold.\n\nEldredge slowly became aware of a high, clacking sound, traced it to himself. His teeth were chattering, breath coming in plumed clouds from his nose and mouth. The KA-BAR's light intensified, glowing so bright that he had to hold it at full arm's length away from his slitted eyes.\n\n\"I don't recall you having an appointment.\" In person, the Director's voice was a wheezing, high-pitched rasp. The sound of it stole the last of Eldredge's resolve, and fear and revulsion took the reins, forcing him back a step until his back pressed up against the door. He fumbled for the handle with his free hand, failed to find it.\n\nThe teal light finally found the corners of the room, showed the edges of a plain concrete floor. The ceiling stretched high above them, a pitch-black shaft leading who knew where, beyond the reaches of the brave light. The room was bare of furnishings. A wheeled computer stand stood in the center, a closed laptop resting on the single narrow shelf.\n\nThe Director stood behind it. His muscular frame was draped with an ill-fitting black suit, a tie askew at his throat. His hands hung at his sides, covered by thin leather gloves. A single piece of stretched white fabric covered his head and face, a reflective surface against which the light played. He looked like a store mannequin poorly dressed for display. Only the movement of his lips under the white cloth gave any indicator that he was the one speaking.\n\nBehind him, three Gold Operators stood along the featureless far wall.\n\nTheir bodies were withered, ancient, the old muscle looking hard and narrow as braided plastic, the skin stretched across it brittle and peeling. They were crowned in beaten gold and tin, stepped geometric patterns of plants and faces, animals and people, all surmounted by the blazing corona of a stylized sun. Their necks and chests were hidden beneath massive pectorals of the same metals, studded with rough-cut gems that refracted the KA-BAR's light. Their waists were draped in dirty linen, gone to dusty rags at the fringes of what had once been gorgeous metallic brocade. Their withered feet were tied into rotten leather sandals, hints of bone showing through where the toes had worn away. Their arms were drawn up in _X_ 's across their chests, hands resting over their collarbones.\n\nTheir eyes burned, tiny pinpoints of flickering light, staring straight ahead. Without pupils, he could never tell when a Gold was looking at him or not.\n\n\"I assume there is a reason for this downright suicidal intrusion, Eldredge,\" the Director said.\n\n\"Sir, I . . .\" He couldn't form words. Couldn't think. He could only stare at the Director's shrouded silhouette, at the gloriously arrayed living dead behind him. Why had he come here?\n\n\"Eldredge.\" The Director slowed his words. \"You barged into my office. Now, if you want to barge back out again, you had better tell me why.\"\n\nThe threat jarred Eldredge's nerves, brought some of his focus back. He became conscious of the cold again, realized that terror wasn't the only reason he was shivering. \"Sir, I've just come from Dadou and Jawid. They . . .\"\n\n\"Dadou and Jawid are cloistered, Eldredge. They're not supposed to see anyone until they have completed their latest project for me. I had them under guard for that very reason.\"\n\n\"You didn't discuss it with me, sir.\"\n\nThe lips under the white mask twitched, sliding against the cloth as the Director formed words. No other part of him moved. \"I am not in the habit of discussing things with you. And you should not be in the habit of having things discussed. We have a chain of command in this organization. We follow orders.\"\n\nEldredge fought the urge to fumble for the door handle again. \"Sir, they had a freshly killed subject in there.\"\n\n\"I know what they had in there, Doctor. I am the one who ordered them to have it.\"\n\n\"Has there been a change to the program? We don't\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't until we do, and we do when I say it is time. We are reviving the old program. Virgo Cell.\"\n\n\"Virgo? Sir, that failed for a reason. A living subject can't house a jinn; we have stacks of results that\u2014\"\n\n\"I have reason to believe that Dadou has had a breakthrough in this arena. Working with Jawid, she is making progress.\"\n\n\"Sir, I just came from the room, and that subject is dead. The manner of his death is consistent with the Virgo Cell failures.\"\n\n\" _That_ subject is dead, Doctor. Maybe the next one will be as well. We will keep trying until we get it right.\"\n\n\"How many? If we're continuing along the lines of the Virgo program, these are _service members_ we are killing.\"\n\n\"As many as it takes. Service members sign up to die. That is part of the oath they take when they enlist.\"\n\n\"And our oath as leaders is to only spend those lives when we must.\"\n\n\"Agreed. And we must. These are not good men, Doctor. We are using the ones who would be breaking rocks in Leavenworth, or on death row. This way, they serve their country even on their way out.\"\n\n\"Sir, this is out of control. The Gold Element just massacred a scout troop in the George Washington National Forest. This is right on the heels of Basye. We are going to out the program. We were set up to defend American lives, not slaughter them.\"\n\n\"We are defending American lives. Eggs to omelets, Doctor. You of all people know the threat we face. We are making the hard choice necessary to keep this nation stable.\"\n\nAnger competed with the fear and, for a split second, won the upper hand. \"Senator Hodges is furious. We can't keep being this careless. I need Jawid and Dadou full-time on getting the Golds wrangled back under control. We need to find Schweitzer and bring him back intact. We need to figure out what makes him tick. That's the only way, the _only_ way we're going to be able to save this program. That's the only way we're going to be able to do this right.\"\n\n\"There is no _we_ , Doctor. There is _me_ giving instructions, and there is _you_ carrying them out. I am fully aware of the disposition of the Gold Element. I am fully aware of the current operational taskers set before our magical assets. I am fully aware of the challenges this program faces in the Senate. I am fully aware of you contravening my orders and directing Jawid and Dadou to bring Schweitzer and his son in alive and intact. I appreciate you underscoring your concerns, and now I invite you to close your mouth and sit on them. I and not you will decide the best way forward. If you do not feel you can continue, please submit your resignation to Mark outside _after_ you have apologized for whatever means you used to gain entry here.\"\n\nEldredge's mouth went dry. \"Resign?\"\n\n\"I grow tired of you questioning the decisions of executives. The Gemini Cell is founded on decisive action in the face of a rapidly growing and existential threat to the nation. We do not have the luxury of ethical struggles here. I value your work, Doctor. You have been an essential building block, a piece of the foundation of all we've built here, but if you labor under the delusion that you are _indispensable_ , that we cannot proceed with what is arguably the most critical work in this nation's history without the earnest trembling of your most endearing mustache, then you are sadly mistaken.\n\n\"Do you know why you are still alive, Doctor?\"\n\n\"I . . .\" Eldredge felt his knees go weak.\n\n\"You know every line item in every contract we hold. You know the idiosyncrasies of every soldier and analyst we employ. This program is a tangled weave of a million different threads, and you know just where they are whenever I want them pulled. I will be honest with you. It would take me years to train someone up to the point where they could handle your duties with the efficiency and competence you show, even if I could find someone who wouldn't run screaming at the first mention of magic.\n\n\"But I will also be honest with you in that I will find a way to soldier on without you if all this doesn't work out. If, like Jawid, you suddenly decide that your heretofore singular dedication to the advancement of this program is wavering, that other priorities are coming to the fore, I will lose my patience. Because, unlike Jawid, you are not a Sorcerer, and that means you can be replaced.\n\n\"Now, I have suffered your uninvited entry into my _sanctum sanctorum_. I have _explained_ myself to you, something I have never done in the history of this program. I am willing to chalk this up to some feverish humor of your brain and let it go, provided that you walk out of here, forget this entire ugly incident, and get back to work, this time providing whatever assistance Miss Dadou Alva requires. Her project is to be your first priority. You are to do whatever she asks. That is the alternative to your . . . resignation, Doctor. That is the choice before you.\"\n\nThere was no resigning from the program, Eldredge knew. He'd known it from the moment he'd first signed his nondisclosure agreement. It would be difficult to out the program even with specific evidence, because no one would believe him, but he also knew that the Director, even Senator Hodges would never risk it. Eldredge could dream of retiring from the government someday, living a comfortable life in Arlington, Virginia, under the watchful eye of the FBI, but resigning? Pursuing work in the private sector? Being free to travel to a foreign country or talk to the press? No way.\n\nTo resign was to die. Which, he supposed, was the Director's point.\n\n\"Do you have anything else you would like to say?\" the Director asked. The wet, rasping voice. The completely motionless body, save for the lips rising and falling behind the white mask. No skin exposed at all, not a sliver.\n\nEldredge's hand finally settled on the door handle. He didn't realize that it had been questing for it all this time, the fear giving it a mind of its own. His head worked side to side, a refutation of a number of questions, none of which had been asked. _No, I don't think I can defeat you. No, I don't want to work for you anymore. No, I don't understand what's going on here._\n\n_No, I don't want to die._\n\nUnasked questions. The Director responded to the asked one. \"No? Excellent. Dismissed.\"\n\nThe handle turned and the door opened. The three Golds along the wall twitched in time, leaning toward him. Eldredge quickened his step, nearly falling over himself in his sudden hurry to escape. The Director spread his fingers, turning one of his hands out, palm toward the Golds. They stopped as if he'd flipped a switch.\n\n\"Close the door, Doctor. We wouldn't want to let all the cold air out.\"\n\nEldredge stood gaping, grateful that his bladder was empty. It was Mark who reached across him, slamming the door shut.\n\n* * *\n\nThe vision of the Director was seared on his brain. The dark room, the biting cold, the shabby suit pulled clumsily over the vaguely human frame, the head shrouded in white fabric, like a lamp bulb stripped of its shade. Every inch of skin covered.\n\n_I didn't see him breathe,_ Eldredge thought. _I didn't see his chest move at all._\n\nOnly the lips beneath the fabric. Only the hand to gesture the Golds to stop, and only after a few minutes.\n\nThe room must have been below freezing. No living man could have survived in there long, not in such thin clothing. The warm blood in his veins would have eventually filled with ice crystals, gone solid.\n\nBut the living-dead Operators had no such concern. Their veins were full of glycerol, their skin waxen. Their chief worry was to preserve dead flesh that could no longer heal, and for that, you needed cold that a living man couldn't abide for long.\n\nEldredge shivered, and not from cold this time. The jinn were intelligent but slaves to their appetites. He'd always thought of them as animals, a step above trained dogs or messenger pigeons. So long as the blood addiction ruled them, they could never be a threat to humanity. Animals couldn't think, couldn't plan, couldn't make grand strategies.\n\n_But Schweitzer did, didn't he?_\n\nEldredge's mouth went dry. His eyes focused on his desk. He was back in his office with no memory of how he'd gotten there. He'd been so focused on the positives of Schweitzer's breakthrough that he'd been blinded to the threat behind the idea. _You wanted an Operator that could think. But what happens when that Operator's agenda isn't in sync with your own?_ That made Schweitzer a threat.\n\n_And what if the Operator's agenda isn't in sync with humanity's?_ That made it a loose nuke.\n\nEldredge remembered his conversation with Senator Hodges, when he described the thing that Schweitzer was now. He'd told him that Schweitzer wasn't more powerful than a Gold Operator, but _as powerful_. _He combines this with a highly intelligent, rational mind that has the ability to discipline itself. He's also able to access his training and experience in a way that the Golds can't. He's not blinded by bloodlust. He can think._\n\nEldredge leaned forward in his chair. His chest felt tight, his breath coming in whooping gasps. Sweat broke out along his brow and ran down his temples, tracking behind his ears. He put his hand to his chest. His heart was hammering, but it was doing it regularly. Not a heart attack, then. A panic attack.\n\nHe tried to slow down his thinking, to focus. What was the right call here? He couldn't get back in the Director's office, and even if he could, there was nothing he could do. He couldn't kill a dead man. He could go to the press. No. They wouldn't believe him, and by the time anyone could verify his story, _if_ they could verify his story, he'd be finished.\n\nSenator Hodges. Again, no. He had no way to contact the Senator. His regular reports went through the Director's office. The man had only visited the facility twice in the past year, and then with no forewarning whatsoever. And even if he could get off campus to contact him, he had no guarantee the Senator would help. Maybe the Senator even knew? _No, he wanted to see the Director, and the Director refused._ And now Eldredge knew why, knew why the Director refused to see not only the Senator but _anyone_ all these years. Only his secretaries. Were there others?\n\nBut not Hodges. He remembered the man's curled lip, his threats to shut down the program. It would be one hell of a risk to reach out to him. Just because it would be news to him didn't mean that he wouldn't support it, or be angry at Eldredge for going outside his chain. Politicians served their own interests first and foremost.\n\n_Doesn't matter. You can't stay. Your boss is walking dead. You've got to get out of here._\n\nHe forced himself to stand, felt his knees wobble. He thought briefly of contacting Jawid, dismissed it. If the Director hadn't killed him where he stood when he'd stormed into the room and put two and two together, it was because he wanted to keep Eldredge on, felt he could still extract use from him even with his identity revealed.\n\n_That means you have time. They're not going to kill you. You can figure this out. Are you sure you want out?_\n\nIt was the only real life he'd ever known. He remembered brief flashes of his past. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his brilliance as a fluid engineer leading to a career as a Navy scientist. That's where the Cell found him. It seemed so long ago that thinking on it was like watching a biographical film about a stranger. No, the Gemini Cell was his life.\n\nBut he thought of the ruins of Basye, of the overhead camera's view of Sarah's shredded remains. He thought of the Director snubbing Hodges, of his lack of concern with an end of funding for the Cell.\n\nHe thought of his father on D-Day, tried to recall the last photograph he'd seen of him standing in uniform, rifle slung over his shoulder. Eldredge imagined his strong jaw, his determined gaze. He pictured his father under the withering Nazi fire, churning the sands of Omaha Beach around him, advancing steadily regardless. He knew what his father would do in his situation. But Eldredge thought of the Director's chest, how utterly still it was, even as his mouth moved, telling Eldredge to close the door to keep the chill air from escaping. Eldredge thought of the crowned Golds surging toward him, stopping at a twitch from the Director's hand, and admitted that he wasn't his father, never had been.\n\nHe knew that now.\n\n# CHAPTER XVII\n\nTHE PLAN IS WEST\n\n\"You ready?\" Schweitzer asked his son. The metal wheels were thrumming on the rails, still a quarter mile out at least but as loud as pounding hammers to his magically enhanced hearing. He lifted Patrick up, tucking him tightly against his belly. Patrick hooked his hands into the ragged remains of his father's web belt. Even now he wouldn't suffer being close to the silver flames burning in Schweitzer's eye sockets.\n\nBut he wasn't crying, and the angry red welts on his face and arms were starting to recede under the medication's touch. Patrick still had his limits, but he was letting Schweitzer handle him more, responding to the sound of his voice. He was, with time, getting used to him. A part of Schweitzer grieved the development. He didn't want his son to live in a world where monsters, even good monsters, were a fact of life. He didn't want Patrick to understand that the walking dead came in varieties, that you could tell the tenor of their hearts by the color of the fire in their eyes. He could feel Patrick's youth warping under the pressure of what he'd been through, a plant permanently twisted by poisonous air. He turned away from the thought. He could no more dwell on it than he could on the thought of Chang's sweating back, hips pumping away at Sarah beneath him.\n\nSchweitzer set off at a run, keeping his center of gravity low, arms locked to hold Patrick in place, keep the boy from bouncing too much. Patrick's hands dug into Schweitzer's forearms as he picked up speed, sliding along the duct tape that held his wounds closed.\n\n\"We're going to see the train!\" Schweitzer said to him. \"Don't you want to see the train?\" The benefit of complete breath control meant that there was no panting, a weird even temper to his voice that defied the speed at which they were covering ground. \"See the tracks?\"\n\nHe spun Patrick in his arms, turning him outward as the ground rose alongside them, sloping gently up through a scramble of softball-sized stones until the surface suddenly flattened and twin metal lines cut across it, arrowing straight ahead and out of sight. The scent of creosote was cloying, interspersed with the thick smell of rust. The tracks began to vibrate, a high, metallic pinging sound as the train drew closer.\n\nPatrick squinted as the wind picked up his hair, but he pointed at the rails before Schweitzer spun him back around to shield his eyes.\n\nHe felt the ground shaking, heard the metal wheels rumbling louder and louder, until at last he turned and put on a burst of speed, Patrick's shriek drowned out by the noise of the train rocketing past them. Schweitzer watched the cars stutter-flash past, the locomotive well ahead, the freight containers flying by, corrugated sides painted in giant block letters. Schweitzer ignored them, looking instead for the sliding car doors, the huge padlocks that held them shut. A normal man might be able to run fast enough to grab hold of one of the speeding cars, but without a solid foothold, there was no way he'd be able to break the lock and open the door.\n\nA normal man.\n\nSchweitzer broke from the cover of the trees and pushed up the rise. The rocks slid under his feet, and for a sickening moment, he thought he might pitch under the spinning metal wheels, but he found his balance a moment later, picked up speed until he matched the car briefly. There was no keeping Patrick stable now. The boy jolted and bounced and cried as Schweitzer leapt, reached out, and hooked his fingers into the top of the lock, yanking downward. He felt the bones in his fingers tremble, and he sprang before they could give, providing him enough reach to clasp his entire hand around the piece of metal, shearing it away.\n\nAnd now he did stumble, his strides lengthening, feeling his balance pitching toward the train, the gravity of the spinning metal wheels pulling him, as if they were hungry, eager to chew up his dead body and his son's living one with equal gusto. He fumbled Patrick, staggered as he caught him, reaching out a hand to push off the train's side.\n\nHe missed the train's side, slipping under the car and into the undercarriage; the top of the spinning wheel blazed heat on his palm. He snatched the hand back, overbalanced, began to fall. Patrick slid in his grip, tumbled. Schweitzer growled, snatched him under his arm like a football, pushed off with his legs.\n\nHis shoulder collided with the train door, hard enough to dent the metal. His body rebounded, then fell back in toward the spinning wheels. He reached out, desperation welling in his throat as his hand slid down the flat surface.\n\nAnd settled on the handle, still trailing the remains of the broken lock.\n\nHis weight swung the clasp open, and the door hauled back, dragged by his body. He tucked Patrick in tighter, bracing himself for the door to slam into its terminus, the rubber stopper, making the whole structure shake. His arm straightened, taking his weight, and he grunted, pivoting his mass and pulling himself around, throwing them both into the car.\n\nThe door slid forward, Schweitzer's momentum momentarily stronger than the wind, and slammed shut, closing them in darkness as Schweitzer skidded into a pallet stacked with plastic pipes hard enough to shake them against the holding straps.\n\nThe train thrummed away beneath them, wheels pounding in time with Patrick's sobs.\n\nSchweitzer lay still for a moment. He'd shut his eyes out of instinct, and he kept them closed, letting his other senses paint the picture of the car's interior.\n\nA fresh breeze blew at them from the car's front end. A connecting door between cars, open. He could hear Patrick's little heart hammering away, just beginning to slow as his mind processed that he was safe, that they had stopped moving.\n\nA second heartbeat, rising as his son's fell. It was bigger, a man's heart. That man was crouched at the far end of the car, frozen by the sudden appearance of Schweitzer and Patrick. He wasn't trained for this. The scent of it was in his sweat, pores opening to exude adrenaline, the high stink of norepinephrine mixing with the sweet smell of a dramatic spike in blood sugar. A civilian, then. That was good.\n\nSchweitzer tucked Patrick against the stack of plastic pipes and rolled into a crouch, opening his eyes to let the silver flames dance for whatever audience they'd found.\n\nIt was a young man. He had risen to his knees on a dirty foam bedroll. A cloth knapsack was held together by patches and duct tape. His blond hair was formed into dreadlocks that trembled around his face. His chapped lips worked in his dirty beard as he said, \"Hang on, man; hang on, man,\" over and over. A hobo, a stowaway. He must have hidden himself somewhere as the train was loaded, before the locks went on.\n\n\"Shut up,\" Schweitzer rasped. The young man did.\n\nHe knew he should kill him. The man had seen him, seen Patrick. No good could come from letting him live to tell the tale willingly, or have it surface under questioning. The average cop, even a very good one, wouldn't believe him. But the Gemini Cell would.\n\nPatrick stirred against Schweitzer's thigh. \"Mommy,\" he sighed.\n\nSchweitzer cursed and slid the door open a fraction. \"Jump,\" he said to the hobo. \"Take the bedroll; leave everything else.\" The bag might contain food, or medicine, or camping supplies.\n\nThe young man started to speak.\n\n\"If you are not out of this car in the next five seconds,\" Schweitzer cut him off, \"you are meat.\"\n\nThe boy nodded, raced for the opening, hesitated at the prospect of drawing near Schweitzer.\n\nSchweitzer grunted and snapped out a hand, lightning-fast, tapping the boy's back. He squealed and jumped.\n\nSchweitzer didn't look to see where he landed. The fall might hurt him, but provided that he could still move, he would be able to find help if the Gold Operators didn't find him first. Schweitzer felt a twist in his gut like the one he'd felt when he'd slaughtered the guards keeping him in the underground Gemini Cell facility. But as with them, he shrugged it off. They had been keeping him from reuniting with his family. This boy's life and health were not going to take precedence over Patrick's. He didn't want to hurt anyone, but if he was going to be a monster, then he may as well be one to protect his own.\n\nHe knelt beside Patrick, checked him over for cuts or scrapes. The boy came to him, folding against his chest, crying into the ragged remnants of his tactical vest. Schweitzer held him apart just long enough to ensure he wasn't hurt, then brought him back in, conscious of his own chemical smell, of the chill, rubbery feel of his skin. His embrace couldn't convey warmth, which came from blood. He didn't have any of that, not anymore. At least the child's costume Patrick wore under his ragged clothes kept him warm.\n\n\"It's okay,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Hungry,\" Patrick said.\n\nThe word tore at Schweitzer, a reminder of how quickly his own humanity was slipping away. He didn't have to eat, so it was easy to forget that others needed food. He didn't have to sleep, so it was easy to forget that others needed rest. _You cannot protect him if you starve him to death._\n\nSchweitzer tucked Patrick against his side and went to rummage through the bag. The filthy leather buckle parted at a twitch of Schweitzer's fingers, spilling out the contents: a plastic bag that contained at least a pound of marijuana, a battered copy of a paperback novel, plastic bags stuffed with pills, and a dead smartphone wrapped in its charger. Deeper in the bag were things Schweitzer could actually use: a rusted pocketknife, a box of matches that looked like they'd been dropped in water but dried again. A ball of twine and a packet of wet wipes. A few unopened packages of chemlights.\n\nTwo old and dry-looking granola bars, mostly crumpled inside their bleached foil packaging. _How the hell did this kid eat?_\n\nIt wasn't like there was a caf\u00e9 car. The freight train had been heading west when Schweitzer had hauled himself and his son on board, and he slid the door open just wide enough to reckon the sun's position before shutting it again. Angling more south now, but still mostly west. He was trained as a maritime counterterrorism operator. If there had been a class on domestic rail lines, he'd missed it.\n\nSchweitzer pulled out a can of beef stew from the child's backpack he'd taken from the convenience store. He slid out a bone claw, punching easily through the thin metal and working around the can, peeling it back, then he handed it to Patrick. \"Here you go, little man.\"\n\nPatrick took the can tentatively, sat staring at it. He brought it to his face, frowned, his upper lip quivering.\n\nSchweitzer's dead stomach turned over. _It's cold, you moron. You need to warm it up for him._ If it had been mere stupidity, it wouldn't have caused his soul to contract in horror. But it wasn't. Schweitzer had forgotten that little children couldn't heat their own meals. He had forgotten that they needed help from their parents. He had forgotten how to be a father.\n\nAnd if he didn't remember, Patrick would die. _You're like a monkey playing with a gold watch. Just because you don't want to break it, doesn't mean you won't. _He would save Patrick from the Gold Operators only to lose him to his own new state of existence.\n\n_Oh God. Sarah. I need you. I don't know how to do this._\n\n_Stop. This doesn't help. Focus._\n\nSchweitzer set up the camping stove and set the can on it. Patrick stared at them doubtfully.\n\n\"Come on, little man,\" Schweitzer said. \"It'll just take a minute.\"\n\n\"No!\" Patrick said.\n\n\"Fine,\" Schweitzer proffered him the can again. \"You can eat it cold.\" _Idiot. He needs a spoon, at least._\n\n\"No!\" Patrick said, thrusting his hand into his armpit. \"No! No! No! No!\"\n\nSchweitzer winced.\n\n\"I don't want that!\" his son shouted. \"Hungry!\"\n\nBut all of Schweitzer's magical power couldn't conjure up a sandwich or a glass of milk. Anything to eat would be somewhere out in the countryside around them, rocketing past at one hundred and fifty miles per hour. If they jumped off, they wouldn't get getting back on. And the Gold Operators were somewhere behind them, sniffing out their trail.\n\n\"That's what there is,\" Schweitzer said. \"Sorry.\"\n\nHe held Patrick as the boy raged and sobbed, peeked his head out the door again to reckon the position of the sun once more. Still west.\n\nHe had no idea if they were on the same latitude as San Diego. He had no idea if the train kept on in this direction as it went. Maybe it would turn north. Maybe it would double back entirely. He had no idea how to find his former teammate.\n\nBut San Diego was west, and that's the direction that, for now, they were heading.\n\nIt was something.\n\n# CHAPTER XVIII\n\nPUSHED TOO FAR\n\nDadou came to Eldredge's office a few hours later.\n\nShe stood in the doorway, arms folded, shoulder casually resting against the jamb. \"I told you that you shouldn't have come in there.\"\n\nEldredge swallowed the ball of panic in his gut, resisted the temptation to reach for the KA-BAR. Dadou was at least twenty years younger than him and athletic. She'd take that knife away from him and stick it in his eye. \"Are you here to kill me?\"\n\nDadou laughed. \"No, _Dokt\u00e8_. I'm a Sorcerer. We have people who handle the wetwork; you know that. The _Direkt\u00e8_ wanted me to talk to you.\"\n\n\"You . . . you've seen him?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"No. That's an almost unique privilege you can lay claim to.\"\n\n_Should I tell her? Maybe she already knows. Would it make a difference to her?_ \"He's . . .\"\n\nDadou held up a hand. \"The less I know about him, _Dokt\u00e8_ , the better. All you need know is that he has been good to me, and where I come from, that kind of thing buys loyalty. _Eske ou konprann?_ \"\n\n\"I'm not going to try to talk you out of anything. Do I still run this program?\"\n\n\"No, _Dokt\u00e8_ , you don't. But there is still plenty of work to be done, and we can use your help in doing it.\"\n\n\"The Virgo project.\"\n\n\"That's right. You've seen it now.\"\n\n\"I saw the aftermath of a failure. A bleeding corpse tied to a chair. We've been down this road, Dadou. We know exactly where it leads. You can't Bind a jinn into a living man without killing him.\"\n\n\"You Americans are all so smart; you know that? The less you know about a thing, the more sure you are that you have nothing to learn.\"\n\n\"I know what I saw.\"\n\n\"Weren't you a scientist before you came here?\"\n\nEldredge thought of his lab at the university, whirlpools and model pipelines. Lab experiments to determine how fluid moved and why. \"I still am.\"\n\nDadou laughed. \"Really? You live in a world with a real afterlife. You live in a world where magic is real. How can you call yourself a scientist now?\"\n\n\"Magic isn't . . . it isn't magic. There's an explanation. Just because we don't know the science behind it doesn't mean we won't learn eventually. There just hasn't been time to test, to study. We've been too busy . . .\"\n\n\"Killing,\" Dadou finished for him.\n\n\"I was going to say 'protecting the country.' I still believe in science, Dadou. Magic hasn't changed that.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but your analytical skills are poor. You lack a skeptic's natural ability to instinctively question. Just because you saw one corpse doesn't mean that they all end like that. Some people are stronger than others. Some resist the jinn with greater . . . enthusiasm.\"\n\n\"Are you saying that you've succeeded?\"\n\n\"Come with me, _Dokt\u00e8_. I want to show you something.\"\n\nHe stood, followed her down the corridor and into one of the cold storage units. \"I hope this one is still alive,\" she said. \"If he isn't, then you'll have to take my word that he . . . Oh, good.\"\n\nShe stepped up to one of the sealed access doors, thick steel with a panel of transparent palladium in the center. She gestured. \"Take a look.\"\n\nEldredge stepped closer, squinting through the clear metal, adjusting to the sudden sense of vertigo that came from the fishbowl effect it always had on the view beyond.\n\nA man stood in the center of the plain white room. His soldier's uniform was stained with fresh blood. He stood with his back to Eldredge, arms hanging loose at his side. His neck was crooked at what look like a painful angle, head rigid on his shoulder.\n\n\"Another Gold,\" Eldredge said.\n\nDadou laughed. \"Golds are gray, _Dokt\u00e8_. Does he look dead to you?\"\n\nEldredge squinted, then his eyes widened. The soldier's neck was the angry purple-red of a sunburned bruise. That meant blood. He glanced around the room, looking for the telltale misting of the Freon injectors that kept the room refrigerated. Nothing. Dadou had put the soldier in here to keep him contained, not to keep dead flesh cool.\n\n\"So?\" Eldredge tried to keep his voice even. \"He's newly dead.\"\n\n\"Is he?\" Dadou reached across Eldredge's face and rapped on the transparent pane.\n\nThe soldier jerked, pivoted on one foot, faced the door.\n\nEldredge stifled a scream as he recognized the soldier who'd failed to stop him from getting to Jawid and Dadou. His uniform was unbuttoned at the front, the angry purple flush extending all the way down to where his stretched T-shirt cut it off. Badly corded muscle stood out around the ugly bend in his neck, blotched in darker purple where veins had clearly burst. Fresh blood tracked from his nose and the corner of his mouth.\n\n\"Private First Class Welch felt so terrible about letting you invade our privacy,\" Dadou crooned, \"that he asked if there was anything he could do to make up for it. It turned out there was.\"\n\nWelch's face was screwed up in agony, lips drawn back in a fixed grimace, teeth gritted together so hard that Eldredge was surprised they didn't crack. Men in pain moved, their lips twitching and chins trembling, but Welch's face was frozen, as if he had begun to scream and suddenly stopped. His eyes were wide, and Eldredge felt his mouth go dry at the sight.\n\nPupil and iris were nearly a matched purple-black. The sclera was the bright red of burst capillaries.\n\nBut they were whole, human eyes. There were no flickering flames.\n\nEldredge could see Welch's chest rising and falling rapidly. Hyperventilating, a rabbit's super-rapid, super-shallow breaths. At the sight of them, Welch took a staggering step forward, arms coming up. Eldredge knew the man was still alive, but he looked more the zombie than any of the dead Operators.\n\nEldredge gave a strangled cry and backed away from the pane as Welch lurched against it, hammering his hands against the palladium, leaving sticky red handprints. He gibbered in a language Eldredge didn't understand, the angle of his neck straining his windpipe and forcing the words out in a bubbling, choked wheeze.\n\n\"Jesus,\" Eldredge breathed.\n\n\"As you can see, he's very much alive,\" Dadou said. \"I have done better, and I have also done worse, as you have seen. But I am improving, and with the right . . . preparation, I know I'll be able to get it right reliably in the near future.\"\n\n\"How . . .\" Eldredge fought against the rising sickness in his gut. He had seen horrors in his time with the Cell, but this exceeded all of them. \"How soon?\"\n\n\"At the rate I'm improving?\" Dadou asked. \"Very soon, _Dokt\u00e8_. Very soon. I suppose we should thank you for convincing Welch to volunteer.\"\n\nEldredge shuddered. He had gotten the drop on the soldier for a split second, and the man had paid for it with his life. \"Is this supposed to be a threat?\"\n\nDadou flashed a vulpine smile. \"The Director asked me to underscore the consequences of . . . how did he put it? Violating strict rules of need-to-know.\"\n\nEldredge's head spun. \"Will he live?\"\n\nDadou shook her head. \"You're not asking the right questions, _Dokt\u00e8_. Whether he lives or dies doesn't matter. What matters is what this means for the future of our program. We are on the brink of . . . expanding our capabilities beyond anything we ever dreamed of. I will be able to have one of our jinn wearing a living man's skin. I do less damage to the host each time, and eventually the jinn will live behind their eyes. Dominating only the spirit, the space inside.\"\n\n\"That's . . . possession.\"\n\n\" _Se sa, Dokt\u00e8._ That is what you call it. For us, it is, as the soldiers say, 'an overmatch capability.' Do you know what a possessed man says, _Dokt\u00e8_?\"\n\nEldredge looked at her.\n\n\"Whatever you tell him to.\" Dadou's smile grew wider.\n\n\"How the . . . How can you control the jinn?\" Eldredge asked.\n\n\"By giving them what they want more than anything else in the world. With the Gold Operators, we have created your horror-movie zombie. With Welch, we are creating your horror-movie vampire. They are in warm bodies with beating hearts. The frenzy is dampened. They can _think_.\"\n\nEldredge looked back at Welch, his frozen face pressed up against the transparent metal pane, smearing the bloodstains across his nose. \"He doesn't look like he's thinking.\"\n\nDadou shrugged. \"He is _much_ better than a Gold, and as I said, I am getting better at this. I promise you, with time, I will be able to make them perfect.\"\n\nEldredge took a step back, shaking his head. Dadou put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"When they are perfect, they will be able to go undetected anywhere we choose to deploy them. Think about it, _Dokt\u00e8_. No more devastation as there was at Basye. A single Operator who responds to commands. We won't need to keep on with the Gemini program in the futile hopes that we'll get another Schweitzer.\"\n\nEldredge still said nothing, his stomach doing somersaults.\n\n\"Think about it! With a Silver Operator, we are dependent on the subject being . . . as unique as Jim Schweitzer. With a Virgo Operator, we'll be able to repeat the process at will. It will be reliable, a known quantity. A game changer. Isn't this what you wanted?\"\n\nEldredge nodded agreement. _No,_ he thought. _This is absolutely not what I wanted at all._\n\nHis conversation with the Director came racing back to his mind with such force that he almost sat down on the floor.\n\n_Sir, did you hear me? It's Senator Hodges._\n\n_I know perfectly well who he is, Eldredge._\n\n_Then you know that he's the man who funds this program._\n\n_I do. I'm not available right now._\n\nIt explained Basye. It explained the Director's almost-insane willingness to deploy the Golds without a second thought. Because if the Director could turn a living person into a jinn answering to him, then he wouldn't have to worry about answering to anyone.\n\n\"How fast can you do it?\" Eldredge asked.\n\n\"How fast can I do what?\"\n\n\"How fast can you master this . . . putting a jinn in a living host?\"\n\nDadou shrugged, but she sounded troubled. \"It takes as long as it takes, but we have time.\"\n\nEldredge cocked an eyebrow. \"Do we?\"\n\nDadou grinned. \"You're talking about Senator Hodges, aren't you? His threats to shut the program down and put us all under the Army.\"\n\n\"You know about that?\"\n\nDadou waved a hand. \"Of course I do. The _Direkt\u00e8_ doesn't trust you anymore. That means that he has to trust me. And I am not worried. Hodges is like all politicians. He yells and screams, and in the end, he does nothing.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure you're right.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter what you're sure about.\"\n\n\"Then why keep me alive at all?\"\n\nDadou squeezed Eldredge's shoulder firmly, her fingertips digging in just below his collarbone. \"You transgressed, _Dokt\u00e8_. You violated compartmentalization protocols. But the Director has told me that in spite of what you've done, you're needed on this program, and he is giving you a chance. I need to know that you're with us, Eldredge. I understand that this may frighten you, but you of all people understand the benefit here? The Golds are like . . . _yon eksplozyon_ . . . an explosion, _non_? This will give us a laser. No more . . . collaterals; no more shotgun blasts. Eggs to omelets.\"\n\nEldredge nodded, desperately trying to work saliva into his mouth, to keep his knees steady. Welch had slid away from the panel, was wandering aimlessly inside the cold storage unit, blood dripping from his twisted nose. He wasn't hurling himself against the door, which was an improvement over the Golds, but not by much. Maybe Dadou could do what she promised; maybe she couldn't. It didn't matter to Eldredge either way.\n\nDadou's grip tightened further, and Eldredge winced. \"Are you on board, _Dokt\u00e8_? The Director is giving you this one chance. We need to know that you're with us.\"\n\nEldredge couldn't make himself give her the answer he wanted, so he stalled for time. \"What about Jawid?\"\n\nDadou's eyes narrowed, a simmering anger gathering behind them. He winced as her grip tightened further. \" _Sa se pa yon repons, Dokt\u00e8._ Jawid is Jawid. I am asking if _you_ are with us.\"\n\nEldredge shook off her arm. \"Yes.\"\n\nDadou advanced on him, hands twitching. \"You're absolutely certain?\"\n\nEldredge's belly was sour with fear. Dadou looked like she was itching to strike him. \"Yes, of course.\"\n\nThe anger vanished as quickly as it had come, and Dadou smiled again. \"That's good to hear. I knew we could rely on you.\"\n\nEldredge took a step back, trying desperately to keep the horror off his face. He briefly considered telling her that the Director giving her orders was a walking dead thing, a corpse like one of the Golds, or maybe even Schweitzer, but he looked at her false smile showing entirely too many teeth and thought better of it. She wouldn't care.\n\n\"I'll . . . I'll go back to my office,\" he said.\n\n\"You do that.\" She smiled wider. \"The Director would like you to pack it up.\"\n\nSick fear churned in his guts, made his chest tighten. It was a moment before he could stammer a response. \"Wha . . . what? Why?\"\n\nDadou waited, enjoying his discomfort. \"He'd like you to move up on to the first tier, in the annex adjacent to his office. He thinks that, as part of the executive team, it would be good to have you close by.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Eldredge said. \"I'll go get on that right now.\"\n\nDadou said something to his back as he walked away, but Eldredge didn't hear and didn't ask her to repeat herself. It was time to go, as fast as he could and as far as he could. He'd figure the rest out from the road.\n\nThe moment he was back in his office, his knees went weak, the tightness in his chest worsened. He put out a hand to steady himself against his desk. He didn't have time. Even now Dadou was reporting the outcome of the meeting. He doubted he had convinced her, and it didn't matter if he had. He couldn't do this. Dadou was insane. If she achieved the desired outcome, she would be placing this power in the hands of a dead thing that had shown callous disregard for human life time and again. What would the Director do then? Would he put a jinn inside Eldredge?\n\nHe thought of the Director receiving Dadou's report, communing with the three monsters behind him, the things bedecked in ancient regalia, like kings ready to mount matched thrones. He shuddered at the thought. Maybe they were advising him to snuff out Eldredge even as he stood here wrestling with his own anxiety. It didn't matter. He was not working for a monster.\n\nAnother spasm hit him, a wave of nauseating weakness that almost took him down. More panic. The tightness in his chest solidified, welled upward, leaked out the corners of his eyes.\n\nNot panic. Grief.\n\nThe Gemini Cell was the closest thing he'd had to a home for as long as he could remember. At first, it was a cool job, then a calling, and over year after year, it simply was. He had accepted the threat that magic posed, his role in stopping it. The horizon stopped drawing nearer. Schweitzer had been the first nail in that coffin, the first tremor of the realization that what he was doing might not be good, that _he_ might not be good.\n\nAnd now . . . those thin lips, wriggling like worms behind the tight weave of the white fabric . . . Welch's canted neck, purple muscles bulging. Eldredge shuddered again.\n\n_Quit fucking around. If you're going, get on with it._\n\nHe was going. Eldredge thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and did his best to look preoccupied. _You always chew your moustache when you're really bothered._ He tucked the corner into his mouth and chewed on it, as if he were contemplating a problem that required great concentration, headed for the double doors that led to the main elevator bay.\n\n\"Sir.\" A male voice, commanding.\n\nEldredge kept walking. Boots tramped as the speaker ran to catch up. \"Sir! Sir! Doctor Eldredge!\"\n\nThere was no way to pretend he hadn't heard him now. _Act natural. You're in the middle of something; you'd be irritated._\n\nHe turned, frowned, faced a soldier he didn't recognize. \"You're wanted in the Director's office. In person. Not over the commlink, sir.\"\n\nEldredge's bowels turned to water. He had to pause for a moment, clenching his bladder to keep it from letting go. _They want to discuss things further, and by \"discuss,\" I mean they want to fucking kill you._\n\n\"I was just ordered to move my office up there. I'm getting started on that right now.\"\n\n\"I understand, sir, but apparently, he wants to talk to you first.\"\n\nThe Director had never wanted to speak to him face-to-face in all the days he'd been in the Cell. _Dadou told him she wasn't convinced. It's over for you._\n\n\"Director's elevator is this way, sir,\" the soldier said, gesturing behind him. \"It's been enabled for your use.\"\n\n\"I was actually on my way to the latrine,\" Eldredge said. \"Let me drain the vein, and then I'll head on over.\"\n\n\"He was real specific, sir. He wants you to come now.\"\n\nEldredge paused half a second too long for a man who had nothing to hide. _If you go back in that office, you are not coming out._ He pointed at his crotch, cocked his eyebrow. \"Sorry, man. When you gotta go, you gotta go.\"\n\nThen he turned on his heel and hurried toward the elevators. He could feel the soldier's eyes on his back, the thrumming of the blood in his ears drowning out the sound of him talking into his radio, no doubt calling Eldredge's reluctance upstairs. _Don't overthink it. Even angry spirits from beyond the grave understand that a guy has to go to the bathroom. They'll wait._\n\nAt the last minute, he veered away into the stairwell again, not wanting to risk being trapped in a metal box that could be shut down externally. He was slowly conscious of his excuse becoming painfully real. His bladder felt suddenly full, the need to vacate it overwhelming. _No way; you do not have time to stop for a bathroom break._\n\nHe took the stairs two at a time, his bladder jostling with each step, threatening to open up. If it opened, then it opened. He could die just as easily with piss running down his leg.\n\nOne floor, then two; the air in the stairwell was close and musty, trapped in the narrow space between the cinder-block walls and the metal staircase. The lights were low, dull fluorescents running on a separate, lower-powered generator to allow them to stay lit in an emergency. It had never bothered him before, but in his sudden panic, the space felt claustrophobic, the coiling shadows ready to congeal into a clutching threat. The tight space seemed to absorb sound, close as a womb, ready to birth him into the daylight if he could just climb fast enough. The only sound was his own breathing, labored and panting, the rubber soles of his shoes padding over the grip tape on the stairs.\n\nAnd something else.\n\nA dull scrape, something leathery whispering over the surface above, trying to keep quiet and very nearly succeeding.\n\nEldredge froze, and suddenly the light around him brightened, took on a faint teal cast.\n\nIt was coming from his waistband, the light so bright, it spilled the banks of his white coat, colored the air around him. He reached back, grasped the grooved metal of the hilt, drew it out.\n\nThe KA-BAR blazed, the jinn locked inside so agitated that it practically smoked, thick turquoise light filling the air. It chased the shadows from the corners, bounced off the white doors and their silver handles, the dimly lit EXIT sign one level up. The one he wanted. The way out.\n\nThe scrape again, and a whooshing sound. Something big and heavy falling toward him.\n\nEldredge stumbled back as something tall and lean fell onto the landing in front of him. It was an involuntary move, born of shock and fear, but it saved his life. The shadow swiped for him, bone claws ripping through his lab coat and the shirt beneath, digging bloody furrows in his chest. He felt them score his ribcage, but his heart, his precious lungs, were spared.\n\nThe light from the KA-BAR washed over the thing, reflecting off lines of rough-cut gems, playing across ridges of hammered tin and copper where they pushed through the layers of ancient dust.\n\nOne of the three crowned Golds from the Director's office. It must have been sent to ensure that he made his appointment. The striations of its gray muscles slid under skin gone thin as old cellophane. Its face was totally gone, any vestiges of humanity utterly wiped away. The bald skull was stretched taut with the old skin, peeling back in places to reveal the gray-yellow bone. The gold eyes flickered, brighter and larger than any others Eldredge had ever seen.\n\nIt said something in a language long dead, Eldredge guessed. What few jinn he'd heard described had been uniformly ancient. Its mouth folded into a tube, the jaw flexing and curling, until it was a lamprey tube ringed with sharp teeth. Its cheeks rose in a gross facsimile of a smile, and it lunged.\n\nEldredge shouted and leapt back, feeling his shoulders arc out over empty air. He tucked his chin, resisted the urge to flail with his arms. His one weapon was the KA-BAR, and he kept it tight against him as his shoulders slammed against the sharp lip of the stair. His head followed, stars exploding across his vision as he slid backward, each step cracking into his spine in steady, staccato rhythm, until his shoulder collided with the landing and darkness enveloped him.\n\nHe felt something heavy hit his stomach, knock the wind from him. His vision swapped places with his breath, air headed out, sight coming in. He was folded up around one sharp, bony knee, the ankle bent between his own legs, copper bangles sparkling with square-cut emeralds. A hand locked around his throat, the sharp edges of metal rings digging into the folds of his skin, drawing blood. Eldredge grabbed the wrist, pulled hard, desperately trying to swallow air. The wrist was so thin that his thumb and forefinger met with inches to spare, but it was stronger than iron and just as cold.\n\nIn the periphery of his vision, the crowned head reared back, the lamprey mouth flexed. Dust pattered against Eldredge's face.\n\nHe tried to stab it in the back with the KA-BAR, folding his arm down, bringing the monster into a tight embrace that drove its knee deeper into his gut. The monster put its weight on his throat, and he felt his windpipe collapse as it grabbed his bicep, pushing his arm down.\n\nEldredge coughed, the edges of his vision going as gray as the monster's skin. He pushed with all he had, but he may as well have pushed against a truck. The monster pushed on his bicep, and his arm went flying back down to the floor. Eldredge bent his elbow, let his forearm drop, stopping as the knife struck the monster's back. He tightened his grip, felt the blade's edge catch, bite.\n\nThe Gold screamed, a high-pitched sound like a bird of prey, and Eldredge felt the magic in the knife discharge. The monster shook as the jinn in the knife lunged for it, spiritually grappling it, pushing it out and back into the void from whence it came.\n\nThe teal light went sky-blue, then white, so bright that Eldredge had to shut his eyes.\n\nAnd then it was over.\n\nThe Gold King's body slumped against him, light as a bundle of dry sticks. He felt the crown slough off its head. It bounced down the stairs, clattering like a dropped pan.\n\nAnd then there was silence, broken only by the pinhole wheeze of Eldredge's breath whistling through the tiny hole left in his crushed trachea. He sat up, the Gold King rolling away, little more than a dusty mummy without the jinn to animate it. He dropped the KA-BAR in his lap and clawed at his neck, frantically trying to suck in air. _Stop. Think. Panic won't save you. You have to fix this._\n\nHe stiffened his thumbs, jamming them at angles in below his Adam's apple, pressing harder until he felt the edges of the airway, struggled against the nausea that threatened to swamp him. _Don't panic. You can breathe. That wheezing sound means you can breathe._ He pushed, massaging in and out, until at last he felt the airway spring open with an agony that blotted out his vision for the third time in as many moments.\n\nHe slumped against the floor, his neck searing agony, his tongue feeling several sizes too large for his mouth. _Get up. You can breathe, so get up! You bought yourself some time, but you don't know how much. You have to get out of here._\n\nHe staggered to his feet, his back singing out as his spine took the weight of his torso. _Slowly. Start with one foot._\n\nHe took a shaking step forward. A gleam of light caught his attention, brought his vision into focus. He slipped his hand around the KA-BAR's ridged leather handle. The jinn inside was sated with the banishment of its enemy, and the blade glowed so softly, he could barely make it out. He shook his head and winced as he swallowed involuntarily, slid the weapon back into its sheath in his waistband, and made his way topside again.\n\nHis tongue hung out of the corner of his mouth, the root of it thick and foreign in his mouth. His throat felt as if he'd swallowed a hot coal. His back and shoulders screamed with every step. Pins and needles in his butt and thighs.\n\nBut the pain was blotted out by the looming doorway, leading out of the stairwell and into the lobby beyond. Eldredge bit his lip, steadied himself, and checked his clothing.\n\nHis shirt was ripped and bloody where the Gold King's claws had sliced through. He pulled his coat tight, ensured that it covered him to the neck. It would have to do. He tucked his tongue back into his mouth and clamped his jaw shut. The movement caused him to swallow reflexively, the hot agony making his eyes water. He waited until the pain subsided to a manageable level, then opened the door, stepping out into the corridor beyond.\n\nIf there was an alarm, he couldn't hear it. To his right, the hallway ended at a door he knew led into the \"corporate\" foyer. This was the isolated facility's only cover, a manned receptionist desk that sported the Entertech logo, the corporate sponsor who'd lent their company name to the project, despite not knowing what it was used for. _Paid a pretty penny to get them to take that on._\n\nEldredge turned left, walking down the long hallway and badging his way through a door, which opened with a click and hiss of air. The elevator beyond required another swipe of his keycard. They hadn't disabled his accesses yet. _There was no need. Who would guess the Gold King would fail to do its job?_\n\nThe elevator opened on a short hallway that ended in another sealed door. There were no guards. There was no need for any. As far as Eldredge knew, the blast-proof doors would only open for the electronic IDs of Eldredge, Jawid, Dadou, and the Director himself. Each step down the hallway was two kinds of agony, the first physical, the second the dread certainty that at any moment, one of the other Gold Kings would settle a bony hand on his shoulder, claws sinking in, slowly turning him around . . .\n\n_Don't be stupid; it hasn't been a minute since you fought the other one. They can't know yet._ Still, he hurried the rest of the way and badged himself through the door marked simply CONTROL.\n\nIn the dark silence beyond, with his back to the door, he finally allowed himself to breathe. The small room featured a broad control board covered in buttons and blinking lights. The wall above was a series of monitors. This was the reason he had come here. The screens showed the inside of the facility from dozens of angles. There were other control rooms like it, manned by soldiers, but this was the only one that gave the full view: the cold storage chambers, the laboratories, the testing chambers dotted with burn-freeze nozzles. All the spaces where the true work of the Gemini Cell was performed. Even the Director's foyer was shown, the secretary's face bathed in the static glow of her computer monitor.\n\nEldredge saw no running guards, heard no alarm bells. He had a little time, at least. _Make it count._\n\nHe needed to get out of here, and fast. There was no hope of going on foot. The Cell's cover facility was an office park in northern Virginia. He would escape into a city crawling with police in the center of his nation's seat of government.\n\nHe looked longingly at the helo bay, the limbered helicopters crouching like huge insects. The duty pilots sat around a crate, playing cards. They knew him as the Cell's lead scientist and would follow his orders without question. If he went down there now, he had no doubt one of them would fire up one of the birds and fly him anywhere he wanted to go. _But what will happen when he radios flight control for clearance to take off? Or worse, what will happen when you're already in the air and he gets a call from base?_\n\nNo, the helos were out. He looked instead at the motor pool. The cars were specifically chosen to be discreet, a range of sedans and compacts common in suburbs across the country. No white vans, no black sedans with tinted windows. Eldredge could see license plates from thirty different states and knew each one of them was backstopped enough to stand up to scrutiny. Two guards stood near the shack beside the giant, rolling steel garage doors. Since there was a possibility of exposure to outside view, they wore jeans and pullovers, sunglasses propped on their ball caps. But Eldredge could see the thin bands wrapping the paddle holsters in the backs of their trousers, knew there were high-caliber pistols nestled inside. Two killers, dressed to look like a couple of manual laborers on a smoke break.\n\nSame problem there with the helos. They would let him check out a car, but they would also call it in. It also wouldn't take them long to chase him down even if he could get out of the garage. He needed them occupied. He needed the entire facility occupied, at least long enough for him to get a head start.\n\nHe checked the monitor in the arms locker. Claymore mines were stacked beside coils of det-cord, bricks of pre-casting Composition B. There was enough firepower in there to blow half the building sky-high, but he'd need to go several floors down to reach it, and unlike this control center, that _was_ guarded, and by people who would look askance at his presence there. Like everyone working for the Cell, Eldredge had received at least rudimentary explosives training, but that didn't mean guards wouldn't cock an eyebrow at him attempting to check any out.\n\nBesides, explosives weren't the Cell's real weapon. Those were the undead, immortal Operators, like the ancient, withered king he'd just dispatched. They were more powerful than any explosive. His throat throbbed as he thought of the creature's hand on it, slowly choking the life out of him while its gold eyes blazed into his.\n\nAnd suddenly, Eldredge knew. He couldn't fight his way out of here, but he didn't have to.\n\nSomeone else would do it for him.\n\nHe flicked his eyes between the cold storage chambers. The Golds stood like statues in the center of each one. With no blood nearby, all the heartbeats on the other side of doors and walls they couldn't break, they abandoned even the tiniest pretenses of the living: sitting or pacing, twitching or scratching. Eldredge had only seen one Operator continue going through these motions, a nod to a humanity he desperately clung to. Schweitzer.\n\nHe caught himself glancing between cells, trying to pick the best one. _Just do it. You don't have time._ He settled on Gold Eight, a thick-limbed Operator who had been short and stocky in life. It squatted on muscular thighs, sharp elbows perched on its knees, facing the back corner of the room, so still that it looked carved from stone.\n\nEldredge matched the number over the cell door to the button on the console, flipped the plastic cover up. He thought of the ruins of Basye, the tangled remains of the scout troop. The Gold King's knee in his gut, the window of his vision slowly narrowing, going gray as he struggled for air.\n\nThe Director had been willing to unleash the Golds on an innocent town, on a bunch of children, on anyone who got in his way. He had been willing to unleash one on him. He would do it again, Eldredge knew, the very moment he learned that the one he'd sent had failed.\n\nLet him learn what it was like to face one of them down.\n\nEldredge punched the button, watched through the flickering monitor as the cell door slid open. Gold Eight jerked upright immediately, head snapping toward the sound. It paused only to open its mouth in a silent howl, then crouched down on all fours, knuckle-walking out the door so quickly that it seemed to blink off the monitor.\n\nEldredge knew the run-books by heart for every emergency protocol affecting the facility. There was only one that called for every guard to leave their post. Only one that turned every eye inward. Its code word was _Sunspot_ , and it meant that a Gold had slipped its bonds, was loose in the facility.\n\nEldredge grabbed the radio that connected to the building-wide address system. He depressed the thumb switch, hearing the alarm sound in response. \"All personnel, all personnel,\" he said into the speaker, hearing his words echoing through the hallways, in every room. \"All personnel seal acc-points in East Wing, level two. East Wing, level two, is Sunspot. I say again, Sunspot, East Wing, level two.\"\n\nIt was, of course, the wrong information. The Gold was currently speeding its way down the open access tunnel on the level below, but it would take them a while to sort that out.\n\nEldredge wasted no more time, ignoring the pain in his back and throat, rushing out the door and back to the elevator, his impatience so great, he actually danced from foot to foot as the car rose and opened on the upper floor. He turned and raced toward the motor pool. He badged through the entryway just in time to nearly collide with the two guards shouting into their radios as they came on. \"Doctor Eldredge!\" said one. \"They called Sunspot; are we sur\u2014\"\n\nEldredge cut them off with a gesture. \"It's not a drill. Ruptured cold line put a crack in the door. There're three in East Wing. There's a flamethrower team there, but they could use someone at the junction acc-point. The duty roster isn't in the control room. I don't know where the axe team is, but I need one of you to check the rack room.\"\n\n\"Which\u2014\"\n\n\"Figure it out en route! Go right now!\"\n\nThe men exchanged a glance, and Eldredge felt his mouth go dry. It was thin, and he knew it. Hopefully, they didn't know it too.\n\nBut you didn't get assigned to guard the motor pool due to a surfeit of mental acuity. A moment later, the men were shouldering past Eldredge, guns drawn, the door clicking shut behind them.\n\nEldredge stood for a moment in the sudden relative quiet of the motor pool. The cars around him reflected the fluorescent tube lights stretching across the unadorned concrete ceiling. The alarm still sounded, faintly audible through the thickness of the door. A light swirled overhead, washing all in honey-colored waves.\n\nHe made his way over to the shack by the door, reached in through the window, and slapped the broad green button inside. With a groan followed by the rapid clicking of chains, the door began to rise. Eldredge blinked at the daylight flooding in.\n\nThe keys were kept in the ignition. Eldredge chose a small subcompact, the kind of car that an old man living alone might drive on his weekly trip to the grocery store. He almost signed the logbook checking the car out, as he had so many times before, before remembering his situation. He got behind the wheel and started the motor, his mind screaming at him to rev the engine and peel out of the lot.\n\nHe didn't. He drove slowly and deliberately, praying he wouldn't draw undue attention as the facility locked down, that by the time they had the situation contained, it would be too late to catch him. Again, thin.\n\nHe drove by rote and memory, letting his hands and feet guide the car out of the office parking lot, down the access road, and onto the entrance ramp for 66 West, out into the countryside, toward Basye and the forests where Schweitzer had last been seen. The route brought him closer to the deployed Gold team, but they had long since moved on from Basye, and he doubted the Director would have them double back if it meant taking the pressure off Schweitzer. If he was going to hide, the huge forest where they'd lost Schweitzer was his best chance.\n\nThe highway traffic was thick but moving, and Eldredge blinked in the sunshine, looking at the other drivers. None so much as glanced his way, just one more commuter in a throng. If he ignored the pain in his back, he could almost pretend that he was just another person. He had been outside many times before, overseeing ops, meeting with potential recruits, but this was the first time he'd ever truly left. In spite of the pain and terror, in spite of the pit in his stomach as he realized that he'd left without supplies, Eldredge found himself excited. The forest lay ahead of him, and all the cars in the motor pool were kept with a full tank. After he passed the first police cruiser and it didn't turn on its lights, Eldredge actually began to hope he would make it. As 66 snaked past Warrenton and the signs of civilization around him grew sparser, he was able to turn his mind to formulating a plan with more substance than simply putting the Cell facility behind him.\n\nWhat now? Would he run to the cops? Tell them that he was being chased by soldiers on the orders of a walking corpse in a bad suit and a white hood? They would hold him until they got direction from on high, and on high was precisely where the Gemini Cell was situated.\n\nThere was no one to tell who would believe him. He had lived in that bunker for so many years. He had no family with whom he was close. His room and his belongings were all back there, just a few floors below the crowned thing that had just tried to kill him.\n\nThe Gemini Cell was designed to take people in and keep them.\n\nThe only ones it let out into the world were dead. That had worked until Schweitzer.\n\nSchweitzer.\n\nThe man was still out there somewhere. Eldredge surprised himself by using the title, was more surprised to find it was true. Schweitzer might not be living, but he was still a man. More, he was the one man strong enough to oppose the Cell. He'd escaped, he'd eluded them, he'd shredded seven Operators, stopped the Cell's only living Aeromancer. He had been retreating ever since he'd run, but Eldredge didn't think it was because he was afraid. He was doing it to protect his family, and now just his son. Eldredge thought of the raw heap of meat that had once been Schweitzer's wife, and shuddered.\n\nNo, Schweitzer was protecting his family. It would be a long shot for him to oppose the Cell head on, but he was the only being in the world who had a shot at all.\n\nEldredge thought of the Director, the three kings behind him. Two now, thanks to Eldredge. He had seen them. He knew. They would never let him go.\n\nSchweitzer might be a thin hope, but it was the only one he had.\n\n# CHAPTER XIX\n\nTHE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE\n\nJawid turned away from the ruined piles of flesh that had been the flamethrower team. They'd managed to catch Gold Eight on fire before it had reached them, but even burning brightly, it had still been able to rip them limb from limb before the axe men had arrived to cut it down.\n\nThe soldiers had finished with their axes and now knelt among the remains, working with their knives. Sunspot protocol said there should be nothing left larger than four inches square. Even with a burned corpse, that took time.\n\nThere was nothing for Jawid to do, but they'd called him down anyway, also according to protocol.\n\nAfter a minute, one of the soldiers looked up from his knife work and cocked an eyebrow. \"So, are we good here? No nasty surprises coming?\"\n\nJawid shook his head. \"Of course not. The body is destroyed. Even if the jinn were still inside, it couldn't harm anyone.\"\n\nThe soldier went back to slicing through a tough knot of bone. \"So, no chance of it all . . . coming back together and giving us a fight?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Well, then . . . you're making me nervous standing there.\"\n\nJawid turned away, not knowing where he was walking, only that the burned-flesh stink of Gold Eight was growing fainter with each step. When at last he realized where he was, he stood outside a door, hand hovering over the only break in the otherwise reflective stainless steel surface. A black plastic plate had been slipped into two brackets, engraved in white letters. 202\u2014ALVA, DADOU. SCORPIO LNO.\n\nJawid realized with a shock that he was frightened, sickened. And so he had come here. Because he loved her. Still, his hand hung in the air.\n\n_Knock, you idiot! You love her. Tell her!_\n\nBut his hand wavered and would not move. He forced himself to think of her softly parted lips, her hips rocking against him, the earthy smell of her throat. But he had to force himself to recall, for when he didn't, a different vision took the fore: Dadou's curled lip, the rage simmering behind her eyes, the taut muscles in her arms and shoulders. Long, graceful fingers flexing. She had killed before. She could kill again. Magic had given Jawid many things. Strength was not among them.\n\n_Have some courage. She is your tilth now. What would you prefer? To stay here and put jinn in living men?_ He shuddered as he thought of corpse after corpse, of the men writhing in what Dadou called her _ch\u00e8z espesyal_ , her special chair. Their eyes bulging out of their heads, their arms straining against the straps, their death rattles sounding as Dadou threw up her hands in exasperation. _K\u00e8t! We are so close. The next one. It will work with the next one._\n\nJawid didn't doubt she was right. They were close. He could feel the living soul being pushed aside, making room for the dead one they were attempting to Bind in with it.\n\nBut he could still smell the smoking remains of Gold Eight, mixing with the copper tang of the soldiers' spilled blood. How had it gotten out? Had the door mechanism broken? Had someone been careless? Would he be blamed? It didn't matter; Jawid felt his guts roil, his breathing coming faster. He could suddenly feel the closeness of the corridor around him, the weight of the earth overhead. Wherever the jinn were concerned, there was always blood, one way or another.\n\nHe had to talk to Dadou. He had to take her away from this place. They had joined. They were one in the eyes of Allah now. The escape of Gold Eight was a sign. Allah was telling him it was time to take her and go.\n\nAnd soon as the thought occurred to him, Jawid knew it was right. _Allahu akhbar._ He had to talk to her now. Allah was with him. No matter how Dadou frightened him, he would tell her of his love.\n\n_You reached out to Schweitzer, and look what happened._ Jawid could remember himself opening to Schweitzer, and Schweitzer's sudden lunge into his own memories. _This is why he escaped._\n\nAnd now he was doing the same with Dadou, making himself vulnerable to her. The thought chilled him, stayed his hand as he tried to knock again.\n\n_What is your other choice? To stay here forever?_ _How else would a Gold have gotten out save by the will of Allah? He has sent you a sign. You wanted a family. She is your one chance._\n\nHis knuckles finally scraped against the metal. Once. Twice.\n\nJawid was about to turn away when he heard the soft click of the door opening.\n\nDadou's face in the crack of the doorway was the one he feared. Her eyes burned, narrowed slits sizing up targets. Her fingers curled around the doorjamb as if she were about to throttle it. Jawid froze as her eyes found him, simmered, unchanging, no recognition in them. He was just something close enough to hurt.\n\nAn instant later, the corners of her eyes turned up; her mouth followed. \" _Chouchou._ You lonely?\" She swung the door wide, stepped back so he could enter.\n\n\"The alarm . . .\"\n\n\"I heard. It's been handled.\"\n\n\"How did it get out?\"\n\nShe shrugged, the ease of the motion troubling him. \"Occupational hazard.\"\n\n\"They called me down to . . .\"\n\n\"I heard that too.\" She motioned him inside. \"Come in.\"\n\nHe had been in her cell once before. It was the opposite of his own. Clothing was heaped in the corner, mostly tactical gear, the sort he'd seen the soldiers wear when they weren't in uniform. There was one long dress of brown and gold laid out next to a pair of leather sandals beaded with seashells. They both looked very old. He had never seen her wear either one. Her bed was unmade, pillows lying on the floor.\n\nA shrine had been built in the corner opposite the clothing, a riot of objects surrounding a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary: a doll's head, a plastic Christmas tree, a string of beads and a bottle of rum, a plastic skull and a heart-shaped mirror. Just below the image of the Virgin was an unframed wallet photograph in black and white. It was curling at the edges, yellow cracks working their way through a smiling man holding two little girls.\n\nDadou noted his stare. \"That is my _vodou_ ,\" she said. \"It keeps my family close.\"\n\n\"You believe that?\"\n\nShe smiled sadly. \"Sometimes, it helps to try.\"\n\n\"But we know what happens to the dead. We know that doesn't make a difference.\"\n\n\"Do we now? You believe that a magic man in the sky gets angry when you make pictures of him.\" The anger returned to her eyes.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" He cursed himself. She hated when he said that. _Tell her the truth._ Holy Qur'an said that Allah did not forgive the worship of idols.\n\nBut he saw the murder in her eyes and quailed. He had not come to fight with her on this. That was for another day. Once they were together and away from this place, he would ensure she built no more shrines to idols. He watched as she forced the anger down, covered it over with the smile.\n\n\"Anyway\"\u2014he tried to sound relaxed, but his voice came out terrified instead\u2014\"I didn't come here to fight.\"\n\nDadou sat on the bed, patted it. The action should have stirred him, filled his head with thoughts of love, but all he could think of was the risk he was taking, and his manhood wilted. Nobody left the Gemini Cell, certainly not a Sorcerer. _Do you believe in the power of Allah, or don't you?_\n\n\"I didn't come for love, either,\" he said.\n\nDadou leaned back on her arms, her breasts rising toward him, cocked her head to the side. _\"Tr\u00e8 kirye,\"_ she said. \"What did you come here for?\"\n\n\"The truth is . . .\" And now that the moment had arrived, he found he could not say it. \"The truth is . . .\" He stammered, his tongue suddenly too big for his mouth. _Just say it! Why is it so hard to speak the truth!_\n\nDadou's face went serious. \"Stop,\" she said. \" _Rete, chouchou._ Nothing good can come of what you will say next.\" She pushed herself to her feet, pointed her finger at him. \"Time for you to go. We will talk more tomorrow.\"\n\nBut by then, he'd found some sliver of strength. It was little more than an ember, barely enough for him to call himself a coward, but it was enough to speak. \"The truth is that I love you. We are joined. You and I are to be together. And if you will not see that on your own, I only ask that you give me the chance to show you. If you come away with me, we will make a beautiful thing together, as God intended when He joined us. I know we are different, but all people are from God, and God will smooth these differences until we go forward as one. We only need to give it a chance. I love you, Dadou. You must be my wife.\"\n\n\"We were doing so well,\" she said, her voice flat. \"We were making such progress. We were working. You had managed to keep your stupid mouth shut for _days_. I thought we were . . . how did the _Dokt\u00e8_ say it? Out of the woods.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Jawid said. \"I love you.\"\n\n\"Love.\" Jawid could hear the rage rising in her throat. \"Love,\" she said again. \"What the fuck do you know about love?\"\n\n\"I know that when a man and woman do what we've done, that means they love one another. And I know what the Holy Qur'an says, that those who love one another must marry. Love is a thing that comes from God, Dadou.\" Jawid was angry now, and it felt good to be angry, because it made him feel safe, because maybe if his anger could match hers, she could not hurt him. His father had told him that when spiders joined, the female ate the male. That would not happen here.\n\nDadou blinked. Predator eyes. Like a coiling snake. Or a spider. \"You think because you dip your wick a time or two that you are in love? You think your stupid god cares whether we stand at an altar and mumble some words?\"\n\nShe stabbed an angry finger at her shrine. \" _That_ is not magic. _That_ is not even god. I am a _S\u00e8vit\u00e8_. I _know_ what happens when you die. I have _seen_ the soul storm with my own eyes. That is to help me remember my home, my family, where I came from. That is _not_ because I believe an invisible man in the sky is looking at me and judging whether or not I build a pile of trinkets for him, and he certainly does not care who I fuck, or when, or why.\"\n\n\"Alva, this is wrong. Us being apart is wrong. What the Cell is doing is wrong. We are murdering people. We are making piles of bodies. And now a Gold has escaped. He killed some soldiers, not as many as when Schweitzer escaped, but still . . .\" He shuddered.\n\n\"They are soldiers. They are paid to be killed.\"\n\n\"You didn't see . . .\"\n\n\"I have seen plenty. More than you. It's the mission, Jawid.\"\n\n\"The mission? You sound like an American.\"\n\n\"I sound like someone who does their job.\"\n\n\"What is our job? Whatever the Director tells us. Why should we care what he wants or what he doesn't? America was never my home. I am from the mountains above Bibiyal and wherever the Baba Khel graze their herds. You are from Port-au-Prince. Americans helped us, maybe even saved us, but they didn't do it out of love. They didn't do it because they want us to be happy, or well, or right with God. They did it because they want what we can do. We are machines to them. We are . . . assets, they call it. I owe them nothing. And if I did owe them anything, it has been repaid. I want my own life now, and now that I have met you, I know what that life is supposed to be. It is to be us, together. I am going back to the Korengal.\"\n\n\"You are not going anywhere.\"\n\nHe ignored her. \"You should see the Pech River, Alva. It is like a silver ribbon. You will come back with me, and we will make a home there.\"\n\n\"You are not listening to me.\"\n\n\"You are not listening to me! I am telling you that I love you!\"\n\n\"You don't know what love is! You don't even know what a woman is!\"\n\n\"Then you will teach me. You cannot be happy here. You cannot be happy killing people.\"\n\nDadou took a step toward him, and this time, Jawid didn't flinch back, closed with her. \"I have never been happier,\" she growled.\n\n\"You are wrong. You don't want to leave because you feel you will not be safe. But you will be safe in the mountains with me. My family is there, and if you are my wife, they will protect you too. If we work together, we can escape. If we work together, we can survive. This is what the American army is always talking about, teamwork. We are a team. And together we can be gone and safe in my home.\"\n\n\"Now, you listen carefully.\" Dadou looked at him from below her brow, fists clenched. \"There is _nowhere_ you can run. There is _nowhere_ you can go where they can't find you.\"\n\n\"You are wrong. It took them over ten years to find bin Laden. They never found Mullah Omar. And neither of those men had magic. Maybe they will find us, and together, we will be ready. We beat the Soviets, we beat the Americans before. _Ooba chi thur sur wawooshte, se yawa naiza, se sul naize._ I love you. That comes from God. He will see it through.\"\n\nDadou's anger peaked, and she shrieked, an incoherent animal noise.\n\n\"God?! God?!\" She spat out the words. \"Where was God when I crawled the streets of Port-au-Prince, down in the dog shit on my knees, sucking the cocks of old men for enough food to see the next dawn? Where was God when my brothers were killed for a rooster, when my sister was raped to 'teach her not to be so high and mighty'? Where was God when I lost my first baby? My second? When the army doctor told me I would never have any more?\"\n\nThe fire of her anger burned his to ashes, and with it, his resolve. Suddenly, he was no longer angry. Suddenly, he was afraid. \"You will have more,\" he said, but his voice sounded very soft, as if it came from a long way away. \"We have magic. We can do anything.\"\n\n\"That is not how our magic works,\" Dadou answered. \"It is not magic for making children. It is not magic for hiding. It is magic for speaking with the dead. That is all.\"\n\nThere was something in her voice now, something in her face, darker and more solid than what he'd seen before. His love had been a white-hot thing when he entered the room; now he could scarcely believe he had come at all, wished that Allah would reach down from heaven and turn back time, take him back to the hallway when he'd been hesitant to knock, make him trust his instincts. _No, you will have faith. You will trust in Allah._\n\n\"I'm leaving,\" he said. \"Come with me.\" He looked at her eyes and thought of female spiders eating their mates. He didn't want her to come with him anymore, only insisted now because it was Allah's will.\n\nDadou circled, stood between him and the door. \"Don't be stupid. I am not coming with you, and you are not leaving.\"\n\n\"You are a woman. You cannot stop me from doing anything. I am done with this place and with this work.\"\n\nDadou said nothing. She crouched before the doorway, long fingers hooked. Her spider eyes looked eager.\n\n\"You are mine!\" Jawid shouted. It was an angry sound, though fear was in possession of his body, as if it were a jinn driving his limbs. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulled her toward the door. She was a woman; he was stronger than her. That was the will of Allah.\n\nExcept that he knew he wasn't stronger than her, could see it in her ready stance, in the taut ripples of muscle. _Allah protect me._\n\nShe dropped her arm, casually, gently, the look in her eyes never changing. He tried to yank his hand back, but she clamped his wrist to her side, as if she were made of solid iron. He pulled harder; she didn't move.\n\n\"Ah, _chouchou_ ,\" she whispered softly, not sounding angry at all. \"This is going to hurt you a lot more than it is going to hurt me.\"\n\nShe whipped her head forward.\n\nBy the time Jawid felt the impact, he was three steps back, his vision a gray tunnel. Something wet and sticky was running into his eyes. The fear had given way to nausea, and he felt his stomach hitch as if it would try to push the panic out of his mouth. He ran, and suddenly there was pain in his nose, and he was reeling back from her closet. He had run into it. How had he gotten here?\n\nPain in the back of his head. She had grabbed his hair, was pulling his head back. _\"Mwen regret sa,\"_ she said. \"You think you fucking own me? You think you are the first man who has told me that I belonged to him?\"\n\nHe grunted, the pain a fire in his scalp. It brought some of the anger he so desperately needed back. He pumped his arm, throwing his elbow back into something hard but yielding.\n\n\"Fuck,\" Dadou gasped, her grip on his hair loosening. He jerked his head forward and felt some of his hair rip out by the roots. Dadou whooped a breath, tightened her grasp on what remained, holding him fast. He threw the elbow again, but it found empty air this time.\n\nDadou was screaming, a litany of unintelligible Creole curses that finally descended into an animal growl. Jawid couldn't recognize her voice anymore; it scarcely sounded human.\n\nHis need to be free of her grip became desperate. He felt his lungs constrict, his heart hammering so fast and so hard, he thought it would leap from his chest. At that moment, he knew he would do anything to escape, suffer any indignity, anything if she would only stop hurting him. He had misread the sign. This wasn't Allah's will. Or, if it was, he lacked the bravery to see it through. \"I'll leave!\" he shouted. \"I'm sorry! I'll leave!\"\n\nDadou didn't hear him. \"Think. You. Own. Me.\" She bit off each word. Her knee collided skillfully with his hamstring, perfectly placed to make the entire leg go numb. He leaned, desperately shifting his weight to his good leg, but Dadou held his head fast, and the pain proved too much for him; with a groan, he swung back to the weak leg, overbalanced, dropped to his knees.\n\n\"Stop!\" he shouted, not even trying to elbow her now. There was no point in struggling against her. She was so much stronger than him, so much better at fighting.\n\n\"Now you want me to stop?\" Dadou asked. \"What happened to us belonging together? What happened to the will of your stupid fucking God?\"\n\nHer knee again, this time in the base of his spine. Jawid felt the vertebrae flex, strain, and finally give, a low _crunch_ that sent pins and needles shooting down his legs at first, finally vanishing into numbness. The reality of it hit home. He was defenseless. She was pitiless. He was going to die. He tried to scramble to his knees, to find the strength to fight for his life, but his legs would not answer him and his arms and shoulders felt heavy, as if his veins ran with lead.\n\nDadou knelt over him, lowering him gently down, until his chest lay on the floor. He swatted at her weakly until she knelt on his hand, grinding the bones into the stiff carpet.\n\n\"Please,\" he whispered. \"Please.\"\n\n\"You love me, eh?\" she said. \"I'll tell you a little story so you know the woman you wanted to marry.\n\n\"When I was little, we begged on the steps of a church. The nuns were good to us, but the mason who worked on the church wanted to wed my sister. He said some funny things. Things like what you said: 'I love you,' and 'God meant for us to be together.' And when she refused him, he raped her. Said it was a lesson, to teach her 'not to be so high and mighty.'\n\n\"My sister was a good girl. She never hurt anyone in her whole life. She was always smiling, always kind. Men see that in a woman and they think her weak. That's what you think of me, Jawid. That's what you mean when you say, 'I love you.'\n\n\"That mason was the first man I ever killed. I faced him in the church nave, in front of the altar of the God who said, 'Thou shalt not kill.' I didn't rush it, _chouchou_. I took my time.\n\n\"That is what happens to men who try to own me and mine, Jawid. You're a stupid animal, so I will let you live, but like all animals, you must be trained.\"\n\nShe reached down and grabbed his hand, bending his finger back until he felt the bones begin to creak. He screamed, thrashed, and the hand came away. Dadou cursed and flailed for it again, but Jawid punched out with a strength born of desperation, his thumb jamming into her eye.\n\nDadou shrieked, ripping his hand away and punching him hard enough to make his head bounce off the floor. \"You fucking bastard!\"\n\nHe tried to roll to his feet, but she grabbed his hair again, hammered his head down.\n\nIzat was there, and Anoosheh, and his father and mother as well. The river sparkled behind them. The old man had his arms folded around a walking stick, his forehead creased with worry. \"It will flood,\" he said. \"You must take the goats to high ground.\"\n\n\"Where are the goats, Grandfather?\" Jawid tried to ask, but he couldn't speak; his head hurt too much. The riverbank flashed red.\n\nHis mother's burqa shivered. Gold lights glinted behind the mesh veil. \"The Americans are coming.\"\n\nJawid heard the roar of helicopters and tried to turn his head to see them, but the pain was too great.\n\nHe opened his eyes and suddenly, his family was gone. The river had melted into the iron-gray carpet on Dadou's floor, soaked through with red. Bits of wet gray slime floated in the fluid, along with yellow-white fragments.\n\nHis head whipped forward.\n\nIt was just Anoosheh now, washing in the river, as she had been on the day he had seen her. Her skin was the color of the dry ground, her hair as thick and curled as sheep's wool. She looked over her smooth shoulder, her graceful neck arching, caught his eye, smiled.\n\n\"There you are.\" Izat, at his shoulder. Jawid's bowels turned to water. The old man had caught him looking at her. He would be furious.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Grandfather,\" Jawid said, eyes filling with hot tears.\n\nIzat put his hand on the back of Jawid's head, ruffled his hair. \"I do not judge. That is for Allah only.\" He smiled. \"He is merciful and compassionate.\"\n\nJawid felt relief so great that he sank to the dusty ground. \"Thank you, Grandfather.\"\n\nIzat kept his hand on the back of Jawid's head. \"Don't thank me; thank Allah.\"\n\nAnd then he whipped Jawid's head forward and threw him into darkness.\n\n# CHAPTER XX\n\nWHY DID YOU GO?\n\nEldredge squatted next to the pickup parked in the discount store lot, grateful its owner had parked it nose into the light. The shadows pooled behind the tailgate, giving Eldredge plenty of cover as he unscrewed the license plate using the screwdriver in his car's toolkit, swapping the plates out with his own. The front was dicier, but the lot was deserted at this late hour, and he made short work of it. The Cell had given him basic training they'd intended to be used if he had to roll out on ops with fire teams. They'd never meant it to be used to make good his escape, but it had taught him enough to remember to swap the plates. It would throw off law enforcement, but not for long.\n\nHis body still ached, but not as much as before, and each time he woke up and saw the sun rising outside the window of his car, he felt lighter.\n\nBecause he was still alive. He'd evaded the Cell another day. _Why bother? What is the point of staying alive?_ He was running nowhere; he had no idea where to find Schweitzer, the only weapon that stood a chance of bringing the Gemini Cell down. And then what?\n\nBut the truth was that he wanted to live. Even through the pain and the loneliness and the dislocation, he desperately wanted to live. Even in an old body, a damaged one. The strangers he passed on the road, families singing in SUVs, college students with their hatchbacks crammed with furniture, all occupied a different universe, one he could never set foot in. They didn't know that magic existed. They didn't know that the government had a hidden hand in it. They didn't know that hidden hand was attached to an arm no longer living, governed by a dead mind, cold and ancient, driven by an agenda they couldn't possibly understand.\n\nIt was isolating, but the isolation was followed by a fierce, animal need to protect them. These were the people he'd dedicated his life to keeping safe. These strangers. He'd sacrificed everything for them. He'd given up family and friends and future. Staying alive as long as he could wasn't so much more to ask.\n\nIn addition to the toolkit, the glove compartment had a tiny brown envelope with a hundred dollars in twenties, the petty cash included with each vehicle for road emergencies. Added to the forty in his own wallet, it was enough to buy a cheap T-shirt to replace his ripped and bloody one, keep the tank full, and eat at roadside diners for a few days, but the time was coming when he'd have to steal some more money to keep himself going.\n\nWhen he'd last been tracking Schweitzer, he'd been heading west with his son in tow. That was an incredibly vague set of directions, but it was all that Eldredge had to go on. Years of working targets for the Cell had taught him some of the basics. _Focus on the target's immediate needs._ Schweitzer didn't need to eat or sleep. He didn't need clothing or shelter. There was no one for him to check in with. The entire world thought he was dead. Hell, Schweitzer _was_ dead.\n\nBut Patrick wasn't.\n\nThe next morning, Eldredge bought a cheap scissor and disposable razor in a gas station. He shaved in the restroom and hacked his hair down. It looked wilder than ever, but it also looked different, and without his walrus mustache, he would be a little harder to recognize, at least.\n\nThirty minutes later, he pulled up outside the town's public library, little more than a couple of ramshackle trailers linked together and parked behind a church. Eldredge walked past its soaring white steeple and fresh-painted siding, and realized where the town fathers were putting their money. He'd been religious once, back in another life. He laughed to think of it now. Christians were always talking about the Rapture, a glorious day of the dead crawling out of their graves and walking the earth. They had the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, an example of shining hope, the benevolence of a kind and gracious God. For a time, Eldredge had even believed it. But that had been before he'd actually seen the dead walk, had learned firsthand that there was nothing kind or gracious about it.\n\nEldredge hauled the door open; it creaked on spring hinges and banged shut behind him. The library was as unimpressive inside as it was outside, just walls of beaten-looking pressboard shelves and stacked plastic milk crates jumbled with old and poorly used\u2013looking books. Yellowing posters extolling the virtues of reading adorned the water-stained walls.\n\nBut Eldredge didn't mind, because he saw the two things he'd most hoped for. The first was that the library was empty save for the receptionist, a teenager who sat behind a battered and peeling desk, eyes glued to his phone.\n\nThe second was a computer sitting below a battered plastic laminated sign, which read PUBLIC INTERNET.\n\n\"Just going to use the computer for a bit,\" Eldredge said. \"I'm afraid I forgot my library card.\"\n\nThe boy behind the desk waved at him, not looking up.\n\nEldredge sat down at the computer and woke it up, suppressing an almost violent need to run. He'd swapped out the plates, but it was still the same car. He'd cut off some hair, but he was still the same man. He was far from the Cell, but not far enough. They would find him, and every second he delayed made it more certain. _Focus; you can't run forever with no place to go. You have to do something._\n\nDoing something meant taking some risks. This would be his first. He knew the Gemini Cell could read his Internet browsing history, but he had to hope that either he wouldn't alert them, or if he did, that he would be gone before they found him here. He pulled up Google and searched for \"Burglary and Virginia,\" narrowing his search results to those articles posted in the last week.\n\nThe results were staggering, and he wrestled with them for more than an hour, dialing in on drugstores. The thieves always took the same things: cash, drugs from the pharmacy. But Eldredge kept looking. It was the best lead he had.\n\nBecause when the mop-up team had found the bag Sarah Schweitzer had dropped, it had been full of supplies necessary to treat a bad case of poison ivy: antibiotic ointment, calamine lotion.\n\nJim Schweitzer's dead skin wasn't reactant to anything. He didn't have living nerve endings to report itching sensations. That stuff was for Patrick. Dead men also had no use for money, and Schweitzer was that rarest of creatures, the Boy Scout who always did the right thing. He wouldn't steal money beyond what he needed to take care of his son.\n\nEven with Schweitzer's superhuman capabilities, he couldn't have gone far after escaping Basye. Not with a little boy cradled in his arms, crying and scratching at the swelling rash the plant's oil had set to burning beneath his skin. Eldredge narrowed his search. Robberies in and around Shenandoah County, focusing on the limits of what a man could do at a fast walk. Patrick would be nestled in his father's dead arms, but Eldredge knew Schweitzer's determination well enough to know that the man would never stop moving, no matter how much his son squalled.\n\nNothing. If there was a needle in the haystack, Eldredge couldn't see it. Judging by the pieces on blogs and local Virginia papers, all anyone did out here was steal. The kid had stepped outside for his third smoke break when Eldredge finally came across a searchable crime blotter from a tiny police department in Timberville. It was basic and old-looking, but the information was up-to-date and, more importantly, he was able to search robberies and burglaries by type. The drop-down menu had a few options: ARMED, RESIDENTIAL, BUSINESS LARGE (>10 EMP), BUSINESS SMALL (<10 EMP).\n\nEldredge arched an eyebrow. \"Here's hoping,\" he muttered to the empty room, and clicked through.\n\nIt was as he expected. \"BUSINESS SMALL\" burglaries were almost exclusively convenience stores and gas stations when this far out in the country. The blotter laid out inventories of the stolen property like all the other articles. Drugs and cash, always drugs and cash. Eldredge rubbed his eyes as the kid came back in, looking askance at the strange old man who'd been sitting at the public computer for over two hours.\n\n\"How's it going over there, sir? You need any help?\" the kid asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Eldredge answered, barely noticing he had spoken.\n\nBecause he'd just clicked on a link, and there it was.\n\nA little town called Fulks Run, less than twenty miles southwest of Basye. A healthy man could have walked it in a full day. Schweitzer would have been able to make it by nightfall.\n\nThere were pharmaceuticals stolen, but they weren't the usual targets: sleep aids, painkillers, opiates, and narcotics. A few bottles of antibiotics were missing, and the rest of the aisles had been ransacked, leaving almost everything of value in place. The thief had packed a child's school pack with first aid and cooking supplies, what food was available.\n\nCalamine lotion was listed among the missing items, along with a child's Halloween costume.\n\nThere were a thousand possible explanations. Maybe it was a prank. Maybe the antibiotics were part of a homemade drug recipe. Maybe the thief was a crackpot with a penchant for dressing up his dog. It didn't have to be Schweitzer.\n\nBut somehow, Eldredge knew that it was.\n\nThere were no major highways leading to Fulks Run, and the drive seemed painfully slow, despite the fifty-five-mile-per-hour limit on most of the bigger roads. Eldredge kept it strictly at the limit; despite his impatience, he absolutely could not afford to get pulled over now.\n\nFulks Run itself was little more than a wide space in the road, a collection of vinyl-sided houses that were just a step above trailers. It was rustic and beautiful in the way that drew rich, urbane government contractors from DC on romantic-getaway weekends with their wives and mistresses. The convenience store was alongside a diner just off the main drag, sheltered in the shade of the thick Virginia pines that made up the edge of the National Forest.\n\nThe investigation was long since concluded, any broken windows repaired. The blotter had said the break-in occurred at night, when no one was working. It wasn't like he could interview the clerk. Why was he even here? He walked past the windows once, twice, drew a few stares before adjourning to the diner. _You need to figure this out fast or you are going to get caught._\n\n_Ah, hell. You're going to get caught anyway._ The Director would be angry. It would not be painless. It would not be quick.\n\nEldredge ordered a coffee and avoided making eye contact with the waitress, who acted like an old man wearing dirty clothes was an everyday occurrence. He ran his fingers through the tangles in his hair, feeling the grease that had settled in over the past day. It would get harder and harder to blend in, unless he was trying to appear homeless.\n\n_Think. This was the last place he was. Where would he have gone?_\n\nAway from the Cell; that meant south or west, or both. He could be in Arizona. He could be in Florida. He could be anywhere. _No. He has no transportation. Wait. If you can steal a car, so can he._\n\n\"Jesus.\" He couldn't stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth. He didn't even know if it was Schweitzer who'd robbed that store. He had nothing to go on. Any minute now, the local sheriff was going to come in and . . .\n\n\"Hey, can you turn the volume up on that?\" Eldredge pointed to the flat-screen TV hanging behind the counter, the only thing remotely modern-looking in the place. It was turned to the news, showed a young man in his twenties with a dirty yellow beard and matching dreadlocks. He looked like a privileged runaway, or one of those children of CEOs who decides to spend a year homeless on the streets of a big city. His face and body showed the signs of weather and rough living, but the set of his mouth and the hurt entitlement in his eyes told Eldredge that this was someone born into money. The kid had been worked over badly. One eye was swollen shut, and thick black stitches showed where a long gash had been sewn shut in his forehead. One ear was cauliflowered.\n\nThe news banner marquee rolled past too fast for Eldredge, but he could make out the words: CLAIMS TO HAVE BEEN THROWN FROM TRAIN BY ZOMBIE.\n\n\". . . had a kid with him; I think he kidnapped him,\" the man was saying.\n\nThe TV cut to a sheriff in a dark green uniform, gray moustache quivering on red jowls. \"Of course, we are taking Mister Colridge's story seriously, and will keep you updated as we have more information. However, given the outlandish nature of his claims, and the positive results of his drug test . . .\"\n\n\"That kid is crazy,\" the waitress said, drowning out the sheriff's next words. \"I used to know . . .\"\n\n\"Shhh!\" Eldredge jumped out of his chair, jamming a finger against his lips.\n\n\"No need to be a jerk,\" the waitress said, sauntering away with a wounded look.\n\nThe news had already cut to the next segment, a story about a car wreck on I-64. The young man's face was replaced with a burning segment of blacktop rolling through the verdant Shenandoah Valley.\n\nBut Eldredge was already digging through his pockets, fumbling for the money to pay the check.\n\nBecause he'd managed to hear the young man say one more thing in spite of the waitress's nattering, a burst of profanity the news station had only just managed to bleep out.\n\n\"His eyes, man. They were silver. They were on fucking fire.\"\n\n# CHAPTER XXI\n\nLAST RESORT\n\nThe need for supplies forced Schweitzer off the train somewhere in Kentucky. The magic that augmented his senses didn't come with a built-in map, and he was sure of their location only by virtue of a state border sign that whipped past while he peeked out a crack in the door.\n\nThe poison ivy was healing well, but Patrick's steady sobbing had been replaced by something far more troubling, a stone-faced silence, inscrutable eyes that looked shockingly wise in such a young face. Life in the SEALs had been a steady parceling-out of hell; Schweitzer's life had been spent wading through the depths of human depravity, the sewers peopled by human traffickers, narco-terrorists, and those organized-crime operators strong enough to threaten the power of states. It had offered him a glimpse of not only what was done in those depths but how it impacted those it was done to. He looked at his son again and shivered. He'd seen those eyes before. He knew what they meant.\n\nBut even a steady diet of traumatic terror couldn't dampen Patrick's need to eat and sleep, and so Schweitzer jogged his way along, his boy nestled against his shoulder now, cheek placid and accepting of the cold, dead skin beneath it. Patrick would grow up in a world where it was possible to trust a corpse. As far as Schweitzer knew, he was the only one who could be trusted. Anything else remotely like him would kill Patrick as soon as look at him. He thought on that, on the hard conversation that he was going to have to have, how he was going to explain all this to Perretto, if Perretto would even speak to him, or would just draw and fire when he saw what Schweitzer had become? He would worry about it when he got closer; for now, the only plan he had was to keep moving, to keep his son fed and alive and as far from the Golds as possible.\n\nSchweitzer kept returning to his augmented hearing, straining to hear a stealthy approach, a muffled hiss, anything that might indicate the approach of pursuit, but there was nothing. If the Gemini Cell had his trail, then they were not following it for some reason or had found a way to silence pursuit effectively enough to take him unawares. He doubted that, but he couldn't doubt the fact that Kentucky was disappearing under his feet, a steady drumbeat that took them west, moving through the woods just off the roads, ducking low whenever he heard a car approaching.\n\nAfter two days, he had become a petty thief. The routine of smash-and-grab robberies of boutiques and small shops was too easy, given his powers. _You are an immortal superman,_ he told himself, _and you use it to lift premade sandwiches and bottles of sports drink from gas stations._ It was for Patrick, he reminded himself; that had to make it okay.\n\nHe told himself this as he broke the lock off the freezer cabinet in a gift shop that was self-consciously rustic, lacquered rough wood garlanded with plastic ivy and flowers. Patrick was getting better about being alone, learning to sit tight and keep quiet, secure in the knowledge that this cold, dead thing that claimed to be his father would return eventually and would bring food with it when it did. He'd promised the boy ice cream, and he intended to deliver. The trick was to be quick enough that Patrick wouldn't lose patience and start wandering off. Schweitzer was confident that he would overhear anyone drawing near. He scanned the soggy cardboard dividers, the brightly colored packaging. What hadn't Patrick tried yet? Schweitzer remembered Peter passing him a tricolored rocket pop, blue eyes crinkling at the corners as Schweitzer's face lit in response to the sweet tang of it hitting his tongue. Would Patrick have a similar reaction? Had he ever tried a Creamsicle? Schweitzer felt another stab of grief as he realized that he didn't remember. He thought of Patrick's hard eyes, wondered why he was bothering. _You are dead. You are just trying to get him to a safe place. That doesn't require ice cream. There is no fathering left for you to do._\n\nBut he remembered his early days of unlife, navigating his dead body around the refrigerated cell they'd kept him in. He hadn't had to sit, but he had. He hadn't had to nod or shake his head when he \"spoke\" through Jawid to Eldredge.\n\nBut he had. Those tiny gestures had saved his humanity, and his humanity had cast out Ninip and given him himself.\n\nSitting for him, ice cream for Patrick. It was something.\n\nHe snatched a chocolate-dipped Popsicle out of the freezer. Best to go with the classic when he wasn't sure what Patrick's tastes were. He straightened, closed the lid as gently as he could, slipped the broken padlock back through the hasp. The longer the morning shift took to notice the break-in, the more time before they called it in. He turned to head back to the corner of the store, where Patrick sat among a pile of plush toy owls. He wouldn't play with them, Schweitzer knew. He would stare off into the distance, face pale and eyes blank. _What did you expect? For him to chatter, babble, and play nice while you rob the place?_\n\nSchweitzer paused, concentrating, dialed his hearing out, straining to pick out anything from the chorus of usual night sounds: insects chirruping, distant cars, and the stealthy padding of nocturnal mammals going about their routines.\n\nHeavy breathing, the thumping of running feet.\n\nMale, out of shape, hoofing it alone down the center of the main drag. Schweitzer sniffed the air. It was still too far out for him to smell the fear in the interloper's sweat, but he could hear it in the high edge of his labored breathing. The man was terrified. Wincing huffs. In pain, too.\n\nSchweitzer dropped the ice cream and hefted the bag of canned food as he raced to the back of the store. Patrick was standing, one toy owl in each hand. He was making low noises in his throat, flying them in circles over his head, one chasing the other. His eyes still had too much thousand-yard stare in them, and he was not smiling, but the small gesture of genuine childhood made Schweitzer's dead heart clench. He wanted nothing more than to stand there and watch his son just be his age.\n\nThe thumping steps, the heavy breathing. Closer now.\n\nThere was no time. _He can't be a kid. Not for five minutes. Not ever._\n\nHe raced to scoop up his son, saw the surprise on Patrick's face as he swooped in, shifting briefly to fear as he caught him around the waist and swung him up over his shoulder. Schweitzer knew he should say something, make it appear he was attempting to play, but all of his senses were focused on the sound of the breathing and the feet, the lone man running closer and closer. A tiny part of him registered the damage he was doing, that this was hurting Patrick, but the focus of the SEAL and the super senses of the magically augmented being bulled them aside. _Got to see what I'm dealing with here. Need high ground._\n\nThere was a staircase behind the register, but it was close to the storefront window, in the direction of whoever was coming. Schweitzer pushed open the back door to the building, but he still couldn't prevent it from squealing on the hinges he'd broken getting in.\n\nThe footsteps slowed to a jog, then stopped. Whoever it was held their breath as they tried to listen. _Damn it._ It didn't change anything. He still needed the ground. Patrick might have been frightened by the speed with which Schweitzer had appeared and scooped him up, but he was quiet for now, settling into the familiar rhythm of nestling into his father's shoulder.\n\nSchweitzer turned and looked up. The building could barely be called two stories, more like a single floor and an attic, but it was higher off the ground than anything else around. It would have to do. Schweitzer jumped. The strength in his legs with so great that he barely had to crouch to get the momentum he needed. Patrick pressed close as the wind swept over them and the weathered brick wall rushed past. For a brief moment, it was only the two of them, washed by the light of the moon and the cold blast of the passing air. Under other circumstances, it would have been wonderful.\n\nHe vaulted the lip of the roof and put his son down on the torn tar paper. Behind Patrick, Schweitzer could see the open door leading down into the storefront. \"Shh,\" he said, putting a finger to the gray smears that had been his lips, before making his way to the opposite edge.\n\nA man stood in the street, head sawing left and right, dirty white hair wild on his head. Schweitzer recognized him, not just his face and body, but the tenor of his winded breathing, his bouncing gait. _It can't be. Why the hell would they send him alone?_\n\nIt didn't matter. It would be good to kill him. Schweitzer conjured Sarah's mangled corpse in his mind and prepared himself to spring.\n\nThe man reached into his waistband, pulled out a long-bladed knife. Teal light spilled off the blade, so bright that it washed the street before him, chasing shadows into the gutter. He turned away from Schweitzer, and the light dimmed, he turned back toward him, and the light grew brighter. He took a step toward the building, lifted his eyes to the lip of the roof. \"Jim!\" he shouted.\n\nThere was no doubting the voice. It was Eldredge.\n\n\"I know you're there!\" Eldredge called. \"Please! I just want to talk! I need your help!\"\n\nScrabbling in the darkness behind him. Patrick was stirring, crawling on his hands and knees over to his father. Schweitzer put out a hand and he stopped, crouched, listening.\n\n\"Jim!\" Eldredge took a step closer, and now Schweitzer could feel the magic washing off the blade, the current eddying toward him, faint but powerful, the light brightening as it drew nearer.\n\nSchweitzer stood, head and shoulders rising above the roof's lip. His SEAL mind told him he presented a good target for a sniper, backlit against the moon. It was bad tactics, but there was something in Eldredge's voice, his ragged appearance, that let him take the chance. He heard no one else, and a sniper's round would do nothing more than punch a hole in him.\n\n\"You've got to be out of your fucking mind, Eldredge.\"\n\n\"Jim. Oh, thank God.\"\n\n\"You've got about thirty seconds before I rip your fucking head off.\" He was conscious of Patrick listening at his side. The boy had seen so much, curses and threats were nothing now.\n\n\"I know about Sarah, Jim. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Are you, now? I am too. Killing you might make me feel a little better about it.\"\n\n\"I'm dead anyway. I went against the Cell, Jim. I'm on the run. Sarah was the last straw.\"\n\nSchweitzer could hear the lie in his voice, the change in pulse and breathing, the rush of blood as his heart pumped faster. Sarah might be part of the reason he'd left, but not the whole.\n\n\"Is that why you're here? You want me to do it before they do?\"\n\n\"No. I want to live. I want you to help me to live.\"\n\n\"And why the hell would I do that?\"\n\nEldredge's eyes were wide, his cheeks tight, forehead lined. Schweitzer saw no guile in him. He was terrified. He was desperate. \"We both know the Cell will never stop hunting you. It's either you or them.\"\n\n\"I'm dead, Eldredge, in case you hadn't noticed. Now my wife is too. Let them come. I'll make a good fight of it.\"\n\n\"You have Patrick, Jim. He's with you.\"\n\n\"Patrick's dead.\" Schweitzer tried to put his hand on his son's shoulder, but Patrick had moved back from him. Schweitzer turned his head to look for his son as he spoke to Eldredge. \"Funny thing, but life on the run from a SOF unit that fields killer zombies isn't conducive to the health of small children.\"\n\n\"You're lying,\" Eldredge said. \"Patrick's alive, but he won't be much longer if you don't stop the Cell. You're the only one who can do it, Jim. Whatever you may think of me, I didn't have a hand in killing Sarah. Our interests are aligned here.\"\n\n\"What the fuck do you expect me to do? Go running back to Virginia with my son in my arms?\" The deep shadow on the roof forced Schweitzer to dial into the infrared spectrum to find his son. Patrick was standing now, walking toward the open door downstairs.\n\n\"I will stay with him,\" Eldredge said. \"I will keep him safe.\"\n\n\"Don't move,\" Schweitzer whispered to his son, then leapt. The movement and the emotion that drove it were so sudden that he didn't realize he intended to kill Eldredge until he was already in the air. Shades of Ninip, Schweitzer's jinn self, made manifest.\n\nHe landed on the broken asphalt in a crouch, bone claws slid out, spines and horns working their way through the rents in the skin along his back and head. Eldredge stumbled back a step, thrusting the knife out before him. Up close, Schweitzer felt the magic in it more strongly. It thrummed against his own, checking him, cooling his anger. He didn't want to go near that blade. He straightened instead, leaned in. \"You want me to give you my son?\"\n\n\"Even a small cut from this will destroy you,\" Eldredge said. \"Don't come near me.\"\n\nSchweitzer wasn't sure he believed him, but it didn't matter. It would be easy enough to move around the blade, rip the old man's arm off at the shoulder. The key would be to get close enough to the wrist to control the weapon's movement.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" Eldredge said. \"The Cell is everywhere. There is no place in this country where they can't reach you, probably no place in the world. Whoever you entrust with Patrick is going to be discovered, and that means they're going to be killed. Like it or not, Patrick is a death sentence.\"\n\nSchweitzer thought of Perretto. He'd known this, of course, that to entrust Patrick to him was to condemn his own children to lives without a father, if they lived at all, but he had been desperate for a direction, for some kind of _hope_ that Patrick could have something approaching a normal life. His rage surged as Eldredge spoke the words. Because once said, they couldn't be unsaid; because now he couldn't give Patrick to Perretto.\n\n\"You need someone who already has a death sentence.\" Eldredge spoke in a rush. \"Someone with nothing to lose. Someone who will believe stories about a secret magical military unit that marshals an army of superpowered corpses. As far as I know, I'm the only person in existence with that resume, Jim. We need one another.\"\n\nSchweitzer heard a rapping from behind him, turned to see Patrick banging on the locked glass door to the store. Schweitzer could hear the boy faintly through the barrier. \"Daddy!\" The same word he had cried when Schweitzer's enemies had broken into his home and ended his life.\n\nSchweitzer moved just as quickly as he had against Eldredge. Before he knew it, he had raced to the door and ripped it open, the shattered lock flying. He reached down for his son.\n\nPatrick paused, hand on Schweitzer's leg, stared shyly at Eldredge. Schweitzer ruffled his hair, only touching a few strands before his son detached from his leg, closed the distance to Eldredge, and froze, staring up into the old man's eyes. Eldredge lowered the knife, mouth crinkling into a smile. \"There you are,\" he said to Patrick, then looked up at Schweitzer. \"You're not a very good liar, Jim. You never were.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" Schweitzer said, heading toward his son. But Patrick had already closed the rest of the distance, grasped Eldredge's fingers. Schweitzer came closer, but didn't intervene as Eldredge bent down to the boy. _How long have you kept Patrick on the run?_ Schweitzer asked himself. _How long has it been since he touched another warm, living hand? Looked into eyes that aren't made of fire?_\n\nSchweitzer remembered when he had visited the Cell's command center before he'd escaped. He'd shaken hands with one of the analysts, thrilled to the warm pulse in her palm. He knew the power of that contact, knew what it meant to Patrick, young as he was.\n\n_You can never give him that. No matter what you do. Not ever._\n\n\"How the hell did you find us?\"\n\nEldredge looked up, the ghost of the smile he'd had for Patrick still playing on his lips. \"I got lucky. I caught a news segment on TV saying that you chucked a guy off a train.\"\n\n\"I didn't chuck anyone. I told him to jump. Is he okay?\"\n\n\"Banged up but fine. It gave me a positive location for you and told me how you were travelling. There's only one cargo line through here, Jim, and it goes in a straight line. From there, it was a question of calculating time and distance. Luckily, we're in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. There aren't a lot of towns, and I figured you'd have to resupply. The rest\"\u2014he hefted the knife\u2014\"came down to this.\"\n\nPatrick stared up at Eldredge, and the old man ruffled his hair. \"Ah, Jim. All those years shut underground. You get bent on a task and you start to forget why you do it. The thing itself becomes its own reason. There is no end state.\"\n\n\"Patrick is my end state, Eldredge. There's nothing else.\"\n\n\"And this is the only way Patrick will ever be safe,\" Eldredge said. \"Take out the Cell, or sooner or later, they'll take out your son.\"\n\nHe was right, of course. Nothing would make Schweitzer happier than to see the program that had birthed him into this new life, that had kept him prisoner and lied to him about his family's survival, pay. He could see himself tearing through the hallways, the blood of his enemies, the soldiers, the analysts, painting the walls.\n\n_No. They are serving their country the best way they know how. They don't deserve this. Only the people at the top. You have the remember that. That is the difference between you and Ninip._\n\n\"Why did you run?\" Schweitzer asked.\n\n\"The Director, he . . .\"\n\n\"I thought you were the Director.\"\n\n\"No, Jim. I'm the 'Lead Scientist' in a program that involves no real science. I run things, but I took my orders from him.\"\n\n\"And he is?\"\n\n\"He's an Operator, Jim. All the years I worked there, and I never knew. But I know now. He's as dead as you are.\"\n\nSchweitzer looked at his face, smelled the chemicals in his bloodstream. He was telling the truth. \"How did you find out?\"\n\n\"We always communicated over video chat without the video. I finally went to see him.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it's out of control, Jim. He's killing indiscriminately; by the time we caught up with you and Sarah, the Golds had wiped out an entire town.\"\n\n\"I know; I saw.\"\n\n\"No, you didn't. Not the aftermath, the gutted buildings and corpses. It was . . . It's too much. They got a Boy Scout troop later. Boy Scouts, Jim!\"\n\nSchweitzer said nothing, his eyes fixed on his son, who clung to Eldredge's leg now, cheek pressed against his thigh.\n\n\"And there's more,\" Eldredge said. \"They brought in another Sorcerer to work with Jawid. She's . . . better than he is. They're Binding jinn into living subjects. We tried it before, years before you . . . before we got you. The subjects never lived through it, and eventually, we called it off. But this time, they've kept on trying, and they're having some success. They'll get it eventually.\"\n\n\"Why would they want to do that?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but it's not hard to guess. A Gold Operator can't walk in the daylight, can't attend board meetings or make speeches. They are monsters, Jim. A jinn in a living person? They could go hidden. They could do something other than kill.\"\n\n\"No, they couldn't. You didn't live with a jinn, didn't share your body with one. Killing is all they know how to do.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's different with a living soul. Maybe it's different in a living body. Maybe it isn't different, but they've figured out some other way.\"\n\n\"I can't believe you expect me to believe any of this. I may be the corpse, Eldredge, but you're the monster. You've murdered and you've lied and you've worked in the shadows for years, and you expect me to believe that you've suddenly found a conscience. You expect me to leave my son with you and race off to my own destruction. How convenient that would be for you, for the Cell.\"\n\nEldredge's face twisted in grief and anger, but his smell didn't change. Schweitzer's words were hurting him, but he still wasn't lying. \"You're right, Jim. I have done terrible things. I am the monster. Even dead, you're a better man than I am. But in this case, in this one case, we need one another. Everything I've done, I've done with the idea that it was better for the country, for humanity. I broke eggs to make an omelet. You mean to tell me that you never killed innocents on all your scores of operations?\"\n\nHe was right. Schweitzer had killed people to keep ops from being compromised. In a small Eastern European hamlet owned by the self-styled \"Amir of the Caucasus,\" he'd put a bullet in a girl in her early twenties for turning a corner too fast. She had just been a blur in his vision, and then she had been dead. His training had put her down; it helped him with the shock and grief, too, kept him focused on the op. It was within rules of engagement, but it still ate at him. He'd never discussed it with Sarah. Why bother? It wouldn't bring the girl back to life.\n\nHe didn't discuss it with Eldredge now, but he saw the man's point.\n\n\"It all went so fast,\" Eldredge said. \"By the time I realized it was too much, Basye was already gone. I always assumed that I was working toward a goal I could understand, could share in. I was taking on a burden so that others wouldn't have to.\"\n\n_So others might live._ Schweitzer knew the oath well, had almost sacrificed his own marriage on that altar.\n\n\"The Director is . . . maybe not a Gold. He's patient; he's smart. He has control of his appetites. I wonder if he's like you. He's definitely dead, Jim. Whatever he's got planned, it isn't part of the national agenda; it isn't event part of the _human_ agenda. This Binding into the living, I shudder to think of what he plans to do with that.\"\n\n\"Put himself in a living body.\" The thought lanced through Schweitzer. A living body. A beating heart again. Warm arms to hold his son. _There's no end state,_ Eldredge had just said, but if magic could put Schweitzer back in a living body, then maybe he was wrong. \"Someone important,\" Schweitzer went on, grateful that his unlife enabled him to keep emotion out of his voice.\n\nEldredge nodded. \"I don't want that to happen, Jim. I want to enjoy some of this freedom I've supposedly been fighting for. I want to live.\"\n\n\"Death's not so bad. You get used to it.\"\n\n\"Please, Jim. I'm not a SEAL. Nobody's going to bring me back.\"\n\nSchweitzer looked at Patrick, reached out a hand toward him. Patrick took it tentatively, but he didn't let go of Eldredge's leg. \"You are not taking my son.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Eldredge said, detaching Patrick and gently pushing him back toward his father. \"I'm not. I'm sitting tight with him, wherever you tell me, giving you whatever reassurances you want, until you've killed the Director and whomever else you have to in order to make sure the program stays dead.\"\n\n\"That might be a lot of people.\"\n\nEldredge shrugged. \"However many it takes, Jim. It isn't much of a chance, but it's a better idea than running until Patrick really does expire.\"\n\n\"I can't protect you, Eldredge.\" The thought of Sarah materialized too fast for him to squash it or the spike of remorse that followed. \"I can't protect anyone.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to protect me. I want you to help me bring it all down. It's the only way I'll ever be safe. It's the only way your son will ever be safe.\"\n\n# CHAPTER XXII\n\nNEW MANAGEMENT\n\nDadou knelt over Jawid's corpse for a long, long time.\n\nHis head had come open at the top, the skull cracking along the forehead, spilling its contents onto the rug. His nose was broken, both eyes swollen shut. If she looked at him from the right angle, he looked like he'd passed out after being in a barroom brawl. She followed the procedures, checked his pulse, both carotid and radial. Nothing. He was gone.\n\nHer mind sorted through and discarded any number of excuses. He had turned traitor. He was going to run. He'd put his hands on her. But the truth made a cold and slow crawl up her spine until it seated, immovable, in her mind.\n\nThe fact was that she barely remembered the moments between Jawid telling her to come away with him and now. The rest was stuttering, red-tinted flashes, like glimpses of the countryside seen through the slats of a boxcar hurtling along the tracks, or when booze and _ariwana_ had begun to shut off her mind.\n\nShe had been so _angry_. But the anger that had propelled her through the killing vanished as soon as the deed was done, leaving her only the memories of Jawid that she liked. His sweet shyness. His earnest honesty. His bone-deep understanding of what she lived with every day. She blinked at the corpse before her, the one she had made.\n\nHe was a man, and the worst kind of man, a _religious_ man. All religions were built to subjugate women, to make them bend their knees and spread their legs for entitled children. She had seen what had become of that for her sister. Jawid wanted the same thing, no matter how sweet his sighs and protestations of love. She had tolerated them because they made him pliant in the short term at least, but combined with his desire to betray the program, they were past enduring.\n\nSo, why was she sorry he was gone?\n\nBecause the truth was this: the anger, the simmering rage, had made her another person. She had meant to hurt him, frighten him.\n\nNot to kill him.\n\nShe looked up at the shrine she'd built, the picture of her mother and sister. She wondered what her sister was doing now. Married, she assumed, or dead in a ditch. It didn't matter; there was no way Dadou could talk to her now, no way to explain what had become of her life.\n\nMaybe that was why she was sorry Jawid was gone. Because he was one of the few people who had known who she was now. Because that pool seemed to be forever shrinking.\n\nThe isolation gripped her, and she went mad for the second time that day. She sobbed, the tears turning into laughter. She grabbed the small, thin pillow off the bed, put it over his purple face, covered some of the blood and brain that pooled on the floor. He looked better that way, more peaceful. Dadou lay down, placed her head on his back, pulled the tight curls of his thick black hair. It was clotted with blood and tiny chips of bone, but it still had that delightful spring to it. \"Boink,\" she said, with each pop of the curl. \"Boink.\"\n\nHe was still warm. She nestled against him, felt some of the blood reach her shoulder. It was still warm too. She was two Dadous, one who knew that lying beside Jawid's corpse was sick and crazy, and another who reveled in his warmth, in the close contact, in the knowing that another person was nearby.\n\n\"Ah, _chouchou_ ,\" she breathed. \"I didn't mean to; I am sorry.\" It changed nothing, but it felt good to say it.\n\nDadou didn't realize she had fallen asleep until she was awakened by a low beeping. She had closed her laptop while she had touched herself before Jawid had come to her door, and she hadn't wanted the Director to be able to see. She was sure there were other cameras in the room, but she controlled what she could. Now the light on the side of the webcam flashed as the call came in.\n\nDadou shook sleep from her head. She was foggy, but her mind had returned to her. The blinding rage and crippling loneliness were gone, and she was Dadou again. Jawid's body had gone stiff and cool beneath her, his blood gelling to a thick paste that stuck to her neck and shoulders. She propped herself up on her elbows, blinked at the pallor in his skin, the dull copper smell rising from him. Too weak to be brought back as a Gold Operator, even though it was probably still soon enough to return his soul. She glanced at the laptop. It was likely the Director or his secretary. She would have to report what had happened here; it couldn't be hidden. Fear roiled in her belly. Her lack of control had cost the Cell one of its most valuable assets. The Director would be furious.\n\nShe calmed the fear with an effort, reminding herself that without Jawid, she was the Cell's _most_ valuable asset. _No, they may have others._ Dadou doubted it, but there was no way to know.\n\nThe laptop's chime sounded again. The Director knew her whereabouts at all times; hell, he had probably seen what she did to Jawid already.\n\nShe flipped up the laptop to see the Director's secretary, disingenuous smile already melting away as her eyes roved over Dadou's shoulder to take in Jawid's corpse. \"Miss Dadou . . . I. Are you all right? Is that Mister Rahimi?\"\n\n\" _That_ ,\" Dadou said, \"is none of your business. I will discuss it with the Director directly. Please put me through.\"\n\n\"No need.\" The secretary found her composure, smile springing back to her face, stretching her improbably bright lips. Dadou thought she looked like a circus clown. \"The Director wanted to see you personally. He should be . . .\"\n\nThe chime outside Dadou's door sounded and the transmission cut off. Dadou felt fear sinking in her belly, turned to face the door. Its stainless steel surface reflected a funhouse mirror image of herself, down to the knees where a spray of drying blood interrupted it.\n\nShe didn't have time to approach it before it clicked open, lock manipulated by the master electronic key. A man in a black suit entered, gun drawn, eyes roving the room, never alighting in one place. He ignored Jawid's corpse, gestured with the barrel at one corner. \"Ma'am, I need you to step over there and face the wall. Do not turn around, no matter what happens.\"\n\n\"Do\u2014\"\n\nThe barrel hovered over her heart. \"Ma'am, do not speak. Move to the corner and face it. Do it right now. I won't ask you again.\"\n\nDadou knew she should be angry, knew that if they already had decided to punish her for Jawid, that she was better served by going down fighting. _No. If he wanted you dead, he'd have shot you by now._ She stepped into the corner, so close that her nose almost touched the wall. She heard the man bustling around behind her, going through drawers, kneeling in front of the bed.\n\nHer back and shoulders itched, anticipating the bullet that could come at any moment. _If it's my time, then it's my time. It is no great loss if the world goes on without me._ She thought of the long years ahead of her, angry and alone, and wondered if she might not like it better that way herself.\n\nThe thought gave her some peace, and she focused on the ache in her heart and stomach that contemplating her own death brought.\n\nShe didn't know how long she'd been lost in thought when she finally noticed that all sound of movement had stopped. The room was silent. The air vents did not hiss. She shivered, cool air on her shoulders. She waited another moment before mustering the courage to speak. \"Sir? I'm sorry; can I turn . . .\"\n\nNo sound of movement, no breathing, no answer. Dadou risked a glance over her shoulder.\n\nThe door was closed; the man with the gun was gone. In his place was another man, tall and muscular. He also wore a suit, rumpled and threadbare, draped carelessly over his body. The chipped buttons were misaligned, the cuffs bagging around his black shoes. His hands were enclosed in black gloves, fake leather flaking off in patches. His head and neck were covered in stretched white fabric, giving only the vaguest outline of the depression of his eye sockets, stub of a nose, cut of a mouth. The cold air came from him. As if he had just been wheeled out of a refrigerator.\n\nHe was completely still. No rise and fall of his chest, no twitching of his fingers. For a moment, Dadou wondered if she was the victim of some prank, if the man had placed an eerily dressed mannequin behind her before he departed.\n\nBut then the thing in the suit spoke. \"Do you know who I am?\"\n\nIts lips slid against the constraining fabric, adding a whisper to the crooning, monster-movie voice. She'd never heard it before, not without the aid of a computer modulator, but she knew precisely who he was, had always known, really.\n\n\"You are the Director.\"\n\n\"It's nice to meet you in person, Miss Alva.\"\n\nDadou said nothing. It was not nice to meet this thing in front of her, this freezing thing that didn't breathe, didn't move, save for its lips behind their mask.\n\nOne finger on the gloved hand twitched toward Jawid's corpse. Otherwise, the thing was stone. \"I appreciate your work, Miss Alva, first for Scorpio Cell and now for our joint effort here. You've made stunning progress in a very short period of time, and I'm pleased to see the psychology reports indicating that Jawid had become more compliant thanks to your efforts to . . . convince him.\n\n\"So, you will forgive me,\" the Director went on, \"if I find the evidence before us\"\u2014the finger twitched again toward Jawid\u2014\"somewhat to the contrary.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Dadou echoed what had become Jawid's favorite words since they'd first made love. It was the truth. She was deeply and truly sorry. She hadn't meant to kill him. But the deeper truth was that her remorse was far outmatched by the possibility of incurring the wrath of the thing standing before her.\n\n\"I am too,\" the Director said. \"Mister Rahimi was an enormous asset to this program, and the most effective we ever employed. He'd have given you a run for your money in his early days, I'd wager. Would you mind telling me what happened?\"\n\n\"He told me he loved me,\" Dadou said. \"He wanted us to marry.\"\n\n\"Those were your orders, Miss Alva. To woo him. To win him. It sounds like you succeeded. Why, then, is he dead?\"\n\n\"He wanted to take me home with him. He was planning to escape. You ordered me to deal with him if he turned traitor.\"\n\n\"And you are certain he would have been successful in this enterprise? You could not have subdued him, bound him, waited for assistance?\"\n\nDadou swallowed. She didn't like being questioned. It made the anger burn behind her eyes, her throat tightening and her hands flexing. But she looked at the tall, thin figure, and the tension in her muscles went slack. She didn't think she could fight him. She didn't think she could win. \"I got angry,\" she said, her hands making useless circles at her side.\n\n\"You got angry,\" he repeated.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" she said. \"It was . . . like going crazy. There were some things that happened . . . to my sister, when we were little.\"\n\n\"You mean to tell me\"\u2014the Director cut her off\u2014\"that you murdered your coworker because you have unresolved issues from your childhood? You think that is an excuse?\"\n\n_Now is where the rubber meets the road,_ Dadou thought. If she was going to pay, it would be now.\n\nThere was a long pause.\n\n\"This is most unfortunate,\" the Director said. \"We cannot have team members inflicting violence on one another in the workplace, Miss Dadou. I'm afraid there will be consequences.\"\n\nDadou felt her fear reach a height where it finally lapped itself, leaving centered calm in its wake. She had seen the dead slaughter the living. Even in a world transformed by magic, dying was still dying. She was ready. When she answered, her voice was steady. \"What will you do to me? Arrest me? Feed me to the Golds?\"\n\nThe Director was silent.\n\nDadou laughed long and low. It was forced, but the action still felt good in the face of this thin, rumpled dead thing in her cell.\n\n\"I fail to see the humor,\" the Director said. \"You have cost me one of my most important assets.\"\n\n\"No, _Direkt\u00e8_ ,\" Dadou answered. \"I took out your garbage. I did you a favor.\"\n\n\"The work he was doing for the program . . .\"\n\n\"He was done working for the program. He was done working for you. It was time for him to go.\"\n\nHis horror-film voice sounded confused, frustrated. \"That is not your decision to make, Miss Dadou. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now.\"\n\nShe laughed again. \"There isn't one, unless you've got another _S\u00e8vit\u00e8_ running around? Maybe there is another cell you can call for a replacement Sorcerer?\"\n\n\"There are others.\"\n\n\"Others who can do what I do?\"\n\nThe Director was silent. Dadou smiled wider. She had guessed right. \"I am going to take that as a no.\"\n\n\"But you should not take that to mean you can write your own ticket. I can and will find other Sorcerers if I must, and you should not labor under the delusion that I will hesitate to kill you if I feel you are too far off the reservation. Is that clear?\"\n\nDadou nodded. It was clear, but now that she knew she was the only resource the program had, the boundaries of the reservation had just become a whole lot wider. Dead or alive, all men were the same. Give them the illusion of control, and they were docile as sheep.\n\n\"Anyway\"\u2014the Director flicked a finger at Jawid's corpse again\u2014\"we now have a small problem.\"\n\n\"We have two problems,\" Dadou said, \"and neither of them are small.\"\n\n\"I assume neither of these problems have anything to do with the act of unspeakable violence you have visited on my dear friend and colleague, Mister Rahimi.\"\n\nDadou shook her head.\n\n\"Then\"\u2014the Director's voice took on a hint of exasperation that made him a sliver less frightening behind his masked immobility\u2014\"kindly enlighten me as to your insights into the problems faced by this program.\"\n\n\"Your problems are people. One is a powerful man who wants to shut this program down. The other is James Schweitzer.\"\n\n\"Schweitzer is dead. I would hardly call him a person,\" the Director said.\n\n\"Yet the solution is the same for both of them.\"\n\n\"And that is?\"\n\nDadou smiled. _\"Se de bon ki f\u00e9 bonbon.\"_\n\nThe Director was silent for a long time. \"I know the French, but your dialect is hard for me to follow.\"\n\n\"How do you like to say it here? Kill two birds with one stone.\"\n\n# CHAPTER XXIII\n\nRETURN\n\nEldredge shivered at the base of the tree. He'd seemed a big man when Schweitzer had been his prisoner, the perennial white lab coat giving him a heft that Schweitzer missed now that it was gone. He was all knees and elbows, white hair sprouting from his ears and nose, skin so pale and thin that Schweitzer could see the tracery of veins beneath. He looked like some crazy, homeless grandpa, and of course Patrick loved him.\n\nIt had been the same way with Steve, with the old man who took Sarah in just before Schweitzer came for her. It was always this way with men. Schweitzer tried to write it off as coincidence, a quirk of character baked into Patrick's DNA, but he was too smart to see it as anything other than the accusation it was, as bold and clear as a pointed finger. Without a real father figure at home, his son sought them out wherever he could. He sat on Eldredge's knee, tugging gently on the old man's ear. Eldredge smiled at him, the corners of his eyes crinkling with genuine joy. When he spoke, his voice was thick. \"Such a cutie. I can see why you love him so much.\"\n\nSchweitzer stifled the urge to snatch him away from Eldredge. He had done enough snatching of Patrick as of late. Let the boy experience something other than fear for five minutes. He could sense Eldredge's intentions in the speed of his heartbeat and the smell of his sweat. If he summoned the will to hurt Patrick, Schweitzer would be ready.\n\n\"I am sorry we kept you from him,\" Eldredge said, looking up. The remorse in his eyes was genuine. \"We didn't see how reuniting you would do any good.\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" Schweitzer rasped. \"You thought separating us would help keep me under control.\"\n\nEldredge looked shamefacedly at the ground. \"That's true. Guess it didn't work.\"\n\n\"Might as well come clean now, Eldredge. Since we're on the same side.\" Schweitzer intended the words to be sarcastic but found that even with his increased control over his voice, he lacked the nuance to carry the tone. Eldredge looked up hopefully.\n\n\"Was it deliberate?\" Schweitzer asked. \"Did the Cell have me killed deliberately so they could use my body? Did you leak my identity to the Body Farm on purpose?\"\n\nEldredge was quiet for a long time. His increased heart rate and blood sugar told Schweitzer that the question rattled him but not why.\n\n\"If you'd asked on the day you escaped us, I'd have said absolutely not,\" Eldredge said. \"But now, I don't know. The Director isn't human, Jim. Who the hell knows why he does anything?\"\n\n\"Who is he working for? There has to be a human hand behind this.\"\n\n\"Does there? You don't work for anyone.\"\n\n\"I'm different. I'm . . .\"\n\n\"Good? That's what I thought too, that your essential sense of ethics was the thing that made you different. It certainly seemed that your 'good' acts were the thing that pushed Ninip out and kept you in. But the truth is that nobody has any idea of how this works except for Jawid and the Scorpio Sorcerer they brought in, and even they don't fully understand it.\n\n\"This Senator I was telling you about. He pulls the purse strings. He'd been threatening to shut us down over the . . . excesses of the Gold Elements we put in the field to find you.\"\n\nSchweitzer felt the lie in Eldredge's chemical cocktail. \"Don't fuck with me, Eldredge.\"\n\n\"He was going to shut us down for failing to find you.\"\n\n\"So? You want the Cell shut down. I don't want to be found. Everybody wins.\"\n\n\"He's going to replace it with something worse. Some new corps under SOCOM. It wouldn't be the end of the Cell, Jim. New boss, same as the old boss. I didn't entertain any illusions that they'd keep any of the old staff, though. We'd all get tossed in the trash or put under some asshole Army three-star who thinks magic is a satanic conspiracy.\"\n\n\"How was he going to do it?\"\n\n\"The same way government suits have done these things since they invented the red power tie. He was going to cut off our money.\"\n\n\"That got your Director's attention, I'll bet.\"\n\n\"It didn't. He didn't really care. Jim, you've been in government long enough to know that nobody ignores funding line items. _Nobody_ , no matter how self-interested, no matter how altruistic, no matter how cynical or idealistic, ignores threats to their funding. I know it seems crazy, but that was the scariest thing of all.\"\n\nIt was Schweitzer's turn to be quiet for a while. \"No, that makes sense.\"\n\n\"I don't know for sure, but I think that's the end game here. To put a jinn in him, to have the one man we answer to be our puppet.\"\n\n\"Our?\" Schweitzer asked. \"I thought you said you were done.\"\n\nPatrick grew impatient at the adult talk, tangled his hands in Eldredge's hair, pulling his head down toward him. \"Oh, hey, there! What have you found? Is there something on my head?\" Eldredge asked.\n\n\"Don't get too comfortable.\" Schweitzer couldn't keep the bitterness from his words. This bastard who had kept him from his son could give him something he never could, warm arms to fold him against a chest that housed a beating heart. \"You're not going to be with him long.\"\n\n\"I'll take what I can get,\" Eldredge said seriously. \"You weren't the only prisoner down there, Jim. I was locked underground for years. I came topside for ops, but that was it. I can't remember the last time I just sat and smelled the wind in the trees, or had a kid play on my lap.\"\n\n\"Do you expect me to feel bad for you?\"\n\n\"No, but I do expect you to understand that this isn't some sneak attack on your family. I am not lying to you, Jim. We are wasting time here. Every minute we delay is another minute for them to find us and make us fight them on ground of their choosing, pitted against the pawns instead of the king. We need to move east, Jim. They won't expect it.\"\n\nSchweitzer ignored him, dialing his hearing out into the wind-tossed tops of the trees behind the building. It was a trap. It had to be\u2014the Cell was desperate; both its regular and Gold teams had failed to bring Schweitzer to heel, so they'd set up this elaborate ruse to lure him in.\n\n_Come on. Ockham's Razor. What makes more sense? That Eldredge is on the run from his own leadership, or that you're being tricked?_\n\nSchweitzer laughed internally. This was the problem with the brave new world he now occupied. When the dead could walk and magic was real, all possibilities were equally unlikely. Logic wasn't going to work here.\n\n_Fine. What does your gut tell you?_\n\nHe studied Eldredge as the man returned his attention to Patrick, patiently enduring the boy's fingers up his nose.\n\nAnd then . . . something.\n\nThe stirring of something in his chest, like a wound reopening, a vein he'd thought severed and scabbed over pumping blood again. His dead heart clenched, his spiritual stomach turned over.\n\nWith Sarah's death, his sense of her, of the link that connected them, had gone dead. He'd been able to focus on it enough to confirm what he knew, that she twisted in the soul storm with the rest of the screaming dead, that she endured the torture that had turned Ninip into a monster over the course of millennia. He knew he would never find her in that morass, that trying would only pull him further from his son. He couldn't abandon the living for the sake of the dead. That was what the monsters did.\n\nSchweitzer didn't know much about magic or how it worked, but as far as he understood, dead was dead. The dead could be returned to the world of the living, but that wasn't the same thing as being returned to life.\n\nAnd with a thunderclap of sudden feeling, the instant resurgence of the link he shared with his wife, Schweitzer knew that was what had happened to Sarah. She wasn't alive. That was impossible. Much as he had tried to turn away from the sight, he couldn't. He had witnessed her horrible death. No, not alive.\n\nBut she was here. In the world of the living.\n\nThe link reported as it had when she lived: emotion and resonance, direction and distance. She was a long, long way away, battered and frightened.\n\nAnd not alone.\n\n\"Jim?\" Eldredge had been speaking, and Schweitzer stopped him now, raising a palm toward him. He concentrated again, wrestling with the strength of his certainty, matched only by the vagueness of the details he needed. She was northwest. Many, many miles. She needed him. He could feel her crushed in the grip of something, battered by it. His wife, pushed into a corner, fighting madly for . . . for herself.\n\nSchweitzer knew that feeling, could remember the sweet sense of corruption, Ninip constantly trying to slide his demonic filter over Schweitzer's perception of the world. Sarah was facing something like that now, save that, where Ninip had tried to slyly persuade, she was being battered.\n\n\"I have to go,\" Schweitzer heard himself say absently. He was already moving.\n\n\"Where? What's wrong?\" Eldredge stood, Patrick reached for Schweitzer, caught hold of his hand.\n\n\"It's Sarah; she's back.\"\n\n\"That's not . . .\" Eldredge paused. \"You're sure?\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded. He squeezed Patrick's hand, but the link yanked him in Sarah's direction as surely as if he were a fish on a line. The need to go to her was as overwhelming as it was instant. \"I have to find her, Eldredge. I have to do it now.\"\n\n\"It's a trap, Jim. It has to be. They wouldn't have brought her back without a very specific reason. They're probably hoping you'll come. They're going to be ready.\"\n\n\"Maybe she's alive . . . You said they were binding jinn into living bodies.\"\n\nEldredge shook his head. \"Not _her_ body, Jim. I saw what happened to Sarah's body. There's no way to put anything back in it.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2014\"\n\n\"Jim,\" Eldredge cut him off. \"This is the _Cell_. They don't do things to be nice. If Sarah's spirit is back in this world, it's because it suits them to have it here.\"\n\nThe need burned in Schweitzer. Already it was blotting out his senses, the strength of the link so intense that he set his shoulders back to stop it from physically dragging him forward. He knew he had an obligation to Patrick, but it felt fuzzy. It was hard to focus on anything other than the blazing, white-hot sensation of Sarah's presence. She was in the same world. She was so _near_. \"I still have to go. I don't expect you to understand.\"\n\n\"I don't need to understand,\" Eldredge said. \"I ran that program for years without understanding a goddamn thing. Makes things simpler. Jim, this is not a good idea.\"\n\n\"She's _hurting_ , damn it!\" Schweitzer snarled. \"There's something . . . with her.\"\n\n\"They've paired her up with another soul, then.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make sense.\" The jinn had always been summoned into the body of the dead. \"This would mean . . . _she's_ the jinn. She's not a monster, Eldredge.\"\n\n\"This new Sorcerer is good,\" Eldredge said. \"Really good. Who the hell knows what she can do?\"\n\n\"You know.\" Jim was surprised at how angry he was. The link ran on emotion, and it fed his jinn side, crushing the cool professionalism of his training, making him itch to get underway and moving toward her, to _do_ something. \"You're the one who's supposed to know!\"\n\nPatrick shrank into Eldredge's side. Schweitzer knew he was scaring the boy, but he could feel Sarah again, backed into a corner, savaged. He could picture her in his mind, arms up, sheltering under a rain of blows. Eldredge leaned forward. \"I don't know what you're going to find when you reach her, Jim, but it won't be friendly.\"\n\n\"I have to help her.\" The link to her pulsed like an ache in his chest.\n\n\"I know you do,\" Eldredge said, \"and I also know that the only way to do that is to put her back in the void.\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded. \"If I have to,\" he said, not at all sure that he meant it. The maddening feeling of Sarah _alive_ and so close . . . _No. She's not alive. It's not the same._ But he couldn't think, couldn't focus. He had to get to Sarah. He would deal with the rest then.\n\n\"Jim, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm going, Eldredge.\" In the face of the emotional onslaught, all resistance to the thought of leaving Patrick with Eldredge crumbled. \"I can't . . . I just can't . . .\"\n\nEldredge sighed. \"Okay. You have to go to her. I've got it. Let me help you.\" He drew out the KA-BAR, teal light spilling over them both.\n\n\"Jim, look at me. I know this is hard for you, but you have to focus.\"\n\nThe light from the knife blazed in Schweitzer's vision. It was a weapon; it could hurt him. The thought distracted him from the tug of Sarah's presence, let the SEAL in him assert himself just enough. A few more moments wouldn't make a difference. If he went after Sarah, he had to do it right.\n\nSchweitzer forced his feet to stay where they were. \"You said that knife would destroy me. What's in it?\"\n\n\"A jinn. One that can't abide others. I've killed a Gold with it already. The Director had three . . . I don't know what they were. Gold Operators, but wearing ancient jewelry. They had crowns. They looked like mummified kings. One of them came for me. I killed it with this knife.\"\n\n\"You want me to take it.\"\n\nEldredge nodded. \"There are only two ways I know to send a jinn back to the void: complete destruction of the body, or what I have in my hand here. The first option would be . . . hard on you. You want to help Sarah, you're going to need this.\"\n\nSchweitzer stared at the knife. It was insane, but the thought of sending Sarah back into the void felt like killing her all over again. Which was, of course, what the Cell was counting on him to feel. _You'll do what needs to be done. You owe her that._\n\nSchweitzer felt the tug in his chest again, stumbled a step forward.\n\n\"We both know it's going to be one hell of a fight, Jim,\" Eldredge said, \"and we both know we can't just stash Patrick in an alley and go mix it up. Someone's got to look after him. You have a better chance with this knife than I do. Go find Sarah. Wherever she is, the Gemini Cell will be there too.\"\n\nSchweitzer put out his hand. Eldredge slapped the knife handle-first into it. It glowed so brightly that Schweitzer had to dial his vision back to take it in. \"Careful of that blade,\" Eldredge said. \"So far as I know, it works at a scratch. Keep it sheathed. You don't want to send this whole thing south because you accidentally cut yourself.\"\n\nSchweitzer slid the knife into its leather sheath, held it in his hand, adjusting his vision as the light winked out. \"Will it even work on me? Maybe it only affects Golds.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not risk finding out. It's sure as hell glowing brightly enough for you.\"\n\n\"If I cut Sarah with this . . .\"\n\n\"It'll send her back to the storm, Jim. I'm sorry.\"\n\nSchweitzer stared at the knife.\n\n\"Maybe she's not a jinn, Jim,\" Eldredge said, \"maybe they've found some other way to bring her back. You're certain she's in this world?\"\n\nSchweitzer reached inward, felt the unerring compass needle of his link to her. \"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Magic is new,\" Eldredge sighed. \"There's more we don't know about it than we do. But I only know of one way a soul exits this world, and only one way it can reenter. Sarah definitely exited. If she's back, it's because the Cell brought her here for some reason and by some means you're not going to like.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I can kill her.\"\n\n\"She's dead, Jim. You can't kill her.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean.\"\n\nEldredge shrugged. \"Think of it as a mercy killing. Maybe you can find a way to . . . make her like you. Either way, you must destroy the Cell.\"\n\nSchweitzer looked up at him, held his eyes for a long time. Eldredge shrugged again. \"I'm not all bad, Jim. Wanting to live without fear isn't a crime. It doesn't mean I'm not trustworthy. The likes of you and Sarah are beyond me.\" He gave Patrick a squeeze. \"Now, this lad here, this lad I can look out for. We're going to have a fine time together, won't we?\"\n\nSchweitzer was silent for a long time, fighting against the pulling of the link. At long last, he felt himself regain some kind of balance. The insistent tug continued, but it wasn't yanking him off his feet now. He looked down at his son. Patrick looked back, and Schweitzer could see the trust in the boy's eyes. But Eldredge's leg was visible over his son's shoulder, the heat of his blood visible to Schweitzer's augmented vision. The warm pulse in Eldredge's femoral was in and of itself more fatherhood than Schweitzer could ever muster on his own. The boy would be better off with anyone other than him. Eldredge was right. If he was an agent of the Gemini Cell, Schweitzer would be destroyed and Patrick dead by now. And even life with the Gemini Cell was still more life than Schweitzer could give him. Living was beyond him.\n\n\"How will I find you?\" Schweitzer asked. And even though living was beyond him, Schweitzer felt a little piece of himself die with the question.\n\n\"Craigslist,\" Eldredge answered so quickly that Schweitzer knew he'd already thought it through. \"I'll put an ad in the personals once a week. I'll say I'm more Mark Twain than Bettie Page. You can find it in a Google search; whatever city it's posted under is where I'll be. Respond to the ad and we'll go from there.\"\n\nSchweitzer held up his mangled fingers. \"The fuck am I supposed to Google anything?\"\n\nEldredge rolled his eyes. \"You have to be the first zombie prima donna in history. You're a goddamn SEAL, Jim. You can figure out how to use a computer with no skin on your fingers.\"\n\nThey were quiet for a long time, Eldredge locking eyes with the flames in Schweitzer's sockets. He could smell the fear stink on the old man, but Schweitzer had to admit, he did a damn good job of not showing it. He was right, of course. Schweitzer was going after Sarah, and he was leaving Patrick with the good doctor, and he would break into a library and do a Google search if there was anything left of him bigger than a breadbox after it was all over.\n\nSchweitzer shook his head. \"I'll figure something out.\"\n\nEldredge nodded. \"This is likely certain death for both of us . . . well, death for me. Whatever passes for death for you. Can you give me anything?\"\n\nSchweitzer handed him the child's backpack that was all their supplies. \"I won't need it.\"\n\nEldredge took the pack, stared at it dangling from his hand. Schweitzer felt the pull of his link to Sarah. _Be patient. A few more minutes. For Patrick._\n\n\"I know it's not exactly Gucci,\" Schweitzer said, \"but it's what I've got.\"\n\nEldredge rolled his eyes, but he didn't return the pack. \"This is great, but that's not what I meant. I mean, is there anywhere for me to go? Do you have family who would take us in? Friends?\"\n\n\"I've only got one, and it's a long shot, but it's away from here. West.\"\n\n\"How far west?\"\n\n\"San Diego. Guy named Dan Perretto, Coast Guard Maritime Enforcement Specialist First Class. Assigned to PACTACLET. I don't know where he lives, but if you found me, you can sure as hell find him.\"\n\n\"And he'll help?\"\n\n\"Not sure, but I think so. Dan's a good man. Got kids of his own. We went through a lot together.\"\n\nEldredge paused. \"You know this could bring . . . scrutiny on your friend, Jim?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Schweitzer said. \"But I also don't have a lot of options here. And I'm not just dumping Patrick off with him. You're going to keep him with you, and you're going to find a way to keep this out of Perretto's living room.\"\n\n\"If he'll even talk to me.\"\n\n\"If. Anyway, whether you find Perretto or not, west is still a direction to move in.\"\n\n\"That's pretty thin, Jim.\"\n\n\"Whole fucking thing is pretty thin,\" Schweitzer answered. \"Entire world's turned on its head lately, or didn't you notice? If you've got a better idea, I'm all ears.\"\n\n\"How are you going to get there?\"\n\n\"I'll have to fly. Wherever she is, it's much too far to walk.\"\n\n\"You can tell that?\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded. \"We're joined; it's a kind of magic. Similar to what bound Ninip to me. I can tell direction, and distance more or less. She's a long way away, to the northwest. You got any idea what's there?\"\n\n\"Canada?\"\n\n\"That doesn't make sense. Why bring her back outside the country?\"\n\n\"Idaho? I don't fucking know. North of here is . . . Ohio, I think.\"\n\n\"What's in Ohio? Does the Cell have a facility there?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of. We had one in California, Scorpio Cell, but we shut that down and pulled the Sorcerer over to Virginia when you flew the coop.\"\n\n\"What's north? Think, Eldredge. This . . . makes it hard to concentrate.\" He gestured at his chest, as if Eldredge could see the magic link to Sarah.\n\n\"Jesus, Jim. I'm a doctor, not a cartographer.\" Schweitzer stared at him, stone-faced. \"Okay, fine. I-states. Indiana. Illinois. Iowa . . . Fuck, Jim. Iowa.\"\n\n\"What about Iowa?\"\n\n\"That's where Hodges is from.\"\n\n\"Hodges . . . Don Hodges?\"\n\nEldredge nodded. \"The Senator. He's the one I was telling you about. The one who knows about our budget and authorizes funding.\" He met Schweitzer's eyes. \"Someone important.\"\n\n\"Doesn't mean anything. Maybe they're taking Sarah to him for a demo.\"\n\n\"Maybe we're completely off base and she's in Nebraska. Or the Dakotas. Jesus, Jim. It's all a wing and a fucking prayer.\"\n\n\"You got any other details on Hodges? Where does he live?\"\n\nEldredge rolled his eyes again. \"How the hell should I know? He's a Senator. Start with the state house. Look him up on Goo\u2014 Oh, Jesus Christ.\"\n\nSchweitzer waved a hand. \"It doesn't matter. I can find Sarah. I can always find Sarah.\"\n\nHe knelt down before his son, wrestling with his impatience to be away. It would be so easy to just stand and go, leave Eldredge to make his excuses. Patrick was too young to understand. _No. That's bullshit and you know it. He's busted up enough by all of this. Do it right this time._\n\n\"Hey, little man.\" Patrick tucked himself against Eldredge's leg. Schweitzer winced. \"Daddy's got to go away for a little while, but I'll be back soon. Uncle . . .\" He realized with a start that he didn't know Eldredge's first name. He looked up at the older man.\n\n\"Julius,\" Eldredge said.\n\n\"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"I fail to see how that's any less of a decent name than James. And my last name isn't Eldredge. It's Whiting.\"\n\nSchweitzer stared, smelled the truth in him. \"You're serious.\"\n\nEldredge shrugged. \"They're just names. It's not like it matters now anyway.\"\n\n\"It matters to me.\"\n\nEldredge looked embarrassed. \"It's funny; I haven't used either name in so long. No, I think I'll stick with Eldredge. Julius Whiting died a long time ago.\"\n\n\"Eldredge it is,\" Schweitzer said.\n\n\"My middle name is Eustis. Glad to be shot of that.\"\n\nSchweitzer turned back to Patrick. \"Uncle Julius is going to take care of you until I come back. He's going to keep you safe until I can catch up to you\"\u2014he looked back up at Eldredge\u2014\"because Uncle Julius understands that if he doesn't, no matter what Hallmark moment we may just have shared, I will find him. Uncle Julius knows that if any harm should come to even a single hair on your head, then I will find him and I will make him pay.\"\n\n\"Uncle Julius is a coward,\" Eldredge said to Schweitzer, \"and you can always count on cowards acting in the interest of self-preservation.\"\n\nSchweitzer ignored him, reached out, touched his son's cheek. \"I'll come back for you.\"\n\nPatrick nodded, looked at the ground. His eyes were already somewhere else, taking him to the faraway place where none of this was happening, a world where dead men lay down and stayed dead. It was the best Schweitzer was going to get, and he took it.\n\nSchweitzer felt his spiritual stomach clench with grief. _This may be the last time you see him._ His son. _Oh, Patrick. We never had a chance._ He opened his mouth to say something more, but he didn't bother. What good would it do? In the end, all that came out was \"Take care of him, Eldredge. And don't forget to keep in touch.\"\n\nEldredge's hand tightened on Patrick's shoulder. \"Westward bound, Jim. We'll leave a light on for you.\"\n\nSchweitzer knew he should feel fear. He knew he should feel regret, disgust that he was leaving his son in the hands of a stranger.\n\nBut the truth was that as he turned to the northwest and began to move, as he gave himself over to the impulse to follow the link wherever it led, he felt his dead heart lift. His limbs felt light, his step longer. Every cell in his body vibrated with the pulse of the magic, every foot a foot closer to her. It was right. Going after her was right.\n\nSchweitzer broke into a run and the trees around him lengthened into brown and green blurs. He didn't know where he was going, but for now, it felt good just to run, away from Eldredge and his son, toward Sarah. He didn't have the details he needed: where she was, who she was with, what he could expect.\n\nHe'd played for higher stakes on less. No plan survived contact with the enemy, anyway. He put on speed and let the woods fall away behind him.\n\n# CHAPTER XXIV\n\nTHE FLIGHT IN\n\nAshland Regional Airport was a postage stamp, a tiny smudge of runway surrounded by poplars growing so thick that they blocked the breeze. A few planes dotted the flight line, two-seater private jobs for the most part, though he made out one small postal service cargo plane and an Air National Guard training jet.\n\nIt was too small for a control tower, just a collection of aluminum Quonset huts huddling together off the tarmac, beneath a ragged-looking wind sock and a fluttering American flag. There was no fence, no guards, nothing that marked the terror-addled culture of big-city airports, where he wouldn't have been able to get within half a klick of the runway without alerting a dozen armed guards.\n\nSchweitzer kept his ears tuned, heard the footsteps of someone down on the runway's far end, probably a night watchman, given the late hour. He heard the droning of the last flight to take off, the angry-insect sound he'd used to find the airport in the first place, homing in as the plane taxied and took off.\n\nHe sized up the tail numbers of the parked planes and then made for the largest of the white huts, a two-story building with a long bank of tinted windows facing the runway. If the flight controller had a desk, that's where it would be.\n\nThe door to the tarmac wasn't even locked, and Schweitzer made his way through the rows of desks and chairs unmolested, moving silently through the litter of real lives. Trophies, motivational posters, framed pictures of families. There was something about the small-town setting that tugged at him. Partly because it reminded him of his life back in Little Creek. Partly because, once again, it dangled the existence of families just outside of his grasp. But the tug was nothing compared to the tug he felt toward Sarah. It kept him focused, kept him moving.\n\nThe controller's desk was where he expected it. An old microphone stood beside a bank of dark equipment. Schweitzer could still smell the ozone from their being powered on to see the last flight off. He must have arrived just behind the departing shift.\n\nHe dug in drawers until he found what he sought, yellowed hanging folders, FLIGHT PLANS written in black marker across the top. He thumbed through them, checking the time and date against the huge red LED readout of the twenty-four-hour clock hanging above the desk. He paged back and through again, cursing under his breath. There was a flight due to leave tomorrow morning, ten hours from now. He had no choice. Unless he suddenly learned to fly a plane, he would have to wait.\n\nThe aircraft was also unlocked. It was a tiny, blue-striped single-engine plane, so clean that if Schweitzer hadn't just seen three logged flights for it in the past week, he'd have sworn it was brand-new. There was barely room for him behind the narrow seats, just enough to wedge himself into the tight space, lying on his back, knees drawn up to his chest. A blanket had been laid out there, loosely draped over a pile of towels, flip-flops, and bottles of sun block. Schweitzer huddled under it now, the odd plastic shapes digging into his back. As always, he was aware of the sensation of the discomfort, but it had no power to disturb him. Being dead had its advantages.\n\nIt grew hot in the back of the plane, long past the point where a living man would have been stifled, forced to throw the blanket aside to gasp for air, where the stink of his sweat would have filled the cockpit. It would have made him move, do any number of things that would have alerted others to Schweitzer's presence. But in death, he was completely still, the last hours of night finally shrugging off, the sun peeking above the treetops just as the rumble of engines announced the first members of the flight crew reporting for duty.\n\nThe pilot was late. Schweitzer didn't have a watch, but his augmented senses did give him a heightened sense of time passing, of the air heating by degrees as the sun rose. Before long, he heard a man making his way to the plane's side, whistling to himself tunelessly. He was overweight, the labored beating of his heart speaking of clogged arteries and old age. The door opened with a click, and Schweitzer felt the plane sag as the man lowered his weight into the pilot's chair.\n\nSchweitzer listened to the preflight checks, the man's deep southern twang as he went down the list, the dull scratching on the pen against the clipboard. Schweitzer would wait until they were airborne and away from the airport. He hadn't paid attention to the destination. It wouldn't matter. He just hoped the old man's ticker would hold out, given what was about to happen.\n\nAt last, the engine coughed into life, and the pilot spoke into his radio headset. \"Ashland Regional Unicom, five niner one niner for a radio check, over.\"\n\nThe response was muffled by the cups of his headphones, drowned out by the roar of the engines. Schweitzer dialed in his hearing, shutting out the engine noise and focusing on the buzzing crackle of the radio. \"Ashland Regional Unicom has you, Lima Charlie. Good morning, Frank.\"\n\nFrank smiled. \"Good morning, Paul. Five niner one niner is departing two-six.\"\n\n\"Roger that. Have fun and be safe.\"\n\nSchweitzer felt the plane begin to move slowly. It picked up speed, and Schweitzer watched the shadows play along the inside of the cockpit, racing faster and faster, until at last, Schweitzer felt the plane's nose come up, taking his weight as it pushed its way up into the sky.\n\nThe plane banked as Frank circled out from the pattern, and Schweitzer felt the airframe sag, shuddering. \"What the fuc . . .\" Frank muttered, looking over his instruments. He turned around and looked behind him, straight at Schweitzer's hiding place, then forward again as the plane banked once more.\n\n\"Ashland Regional, five niner one niner.\"\n\n\"Everything okay, Frank?\"\n\n\"Plane doesn't feel right. I'm dragging ass up here.\"\n\n\"Okay, how worried should I be right now?\"\n\nFrank looked at his instruments, shrugged. \"Not worried. Everything's responding; it just doesn't feel right. I'm going to set her back down. Is there anyone else on approach I didn't see?\"\n\n\"No, you're . . .\"\n\nNo time. Schweitzer slid out from under the blanket. Pushed his upper body into the passenger seat, never rising high enough to be seen over the canopy's edge. He lifted one skeletal hand, duct tape peeling away from the rents, and for the first time was grateful for his horrific appearance. He placed it on the pilot's chest. \"Don't say a goddamn thing into that radio. You speak and you're fucking dead.\"\n\nThe man, strictly speaking, obeyed him. He screamed, a high whining sound that made Schweitzer think of cats fucking, but Schweitzer didn't hear the rasping click that would have meant he'd toggled the radio. His meaty face went white, shook.\n\n\"You pass out, and I'll fucking kill you,\" Schweitzer rasped.\n\nThe man did not pass out; his chins quivered, tears leaked out the corners of his eyes, but he kept his grip on consciousness.\n\n\"You want to get through this alive, you do exactly as I say. I'm already dead, so you better fucking believe that crashing this aircraft is no big deal to me. I will walk away from it. You won't. You read me?\"\n\nThe man nodded.\n\n\"Radio back and tell them you figured it out. Tell them you're good to go.\"\n\n\"But I just told them that I'm dragging.\" The man's voice was high, whining. \"How do I explain\u2014\"\n\n\"You're the fucking pilot. You figure it out. And God as my witness, you'd better figure it out.\"\n\n\"I can't believe this. This isn't happening.\"\n\nSchweitzer let one bone claw extend far enough to pierce the man's shirt, brought it gently across his collarbone. _You bastard. This guy's done nothing wrong. He doesn't deserve this._\n\n_Fuck that. This guy is your chance to find Sarah. Mission first. Focus._\n\n\"You feel that?\" Schweitzer asked.\n\nThe man nodded. Whimpered.\n\n\"That's real blood coming out of you, pal. _Your_ blood. You better fucking believe this is happening, and you better start believing it right now.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"Good. Now use that radio and keep us in the air.\"\n\nThe buzzing click of the radio sounded as the pilot switched over. \"Ashland Regional, five niner one niner.\" His voice was halting, on the verge of a stutter.\n\n\"Lock it up,\" Schweitzer whispered. \"If they guess something's wrong, it's over.\"\n\nThe man's terrified eyes rolled over, his face asking the question: _A corpse just rolled out from behind me and is hijacking my plane. I'm fucking terrified. How do you expect me to sound like everything's normal?_\n\nSchweitzer bared his teeth. \"Find. A. Way.\"\n\nThe radio crackled as the tower replied. \"Frank, what's going on?\"\n\n\"It's me. I'm an idiot,\" the pilot said, still sounding rattled but better than before. \"I forgot my cooler from last time. Left it in the back. It's fine.\"\n\nThe voice on the other end of the radio sounded doubtful. \"You sure?\"\n\n\"Yeah, everything checks out. Everything responds. It must have been the cooler and a crosswind. I just got in a clear patch and the plane feels fine. Sorry about that.\"\n\nA long pause. \"Dude. Don't scare me like that.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Frank laughed nervously. \"Sorry about that.\"\n\n\"Well done,\" Schweitzer said. \"You just bought yourself another fifteen minutes. Now get us to cruising altitude.\"\n\n\"I have a wife,\" the man said. \"Children, grandchildren, please.\"\n\n\"You think I give a fuck about any of that?\" Schweitzer growled. But the truth was that he did care, that the words twisted in his spiritual gut. _Patrick was wrong. You are a bad monster. No better than the terrorists and human traffickers you operated against for years. It doesn't matter why you're doing this._ He remembered standing over the \"Amir of the Caucasus.\" The man had set fire to a school for daring to teach girls to read. Schweitzer had taken great pleasure in kicking down his door and putting a bullet in his gut.\n\nThe man had stared up at him from the floor, trying to keep the tangled mess of his guts from spilling up. There was pain in his eyes, but righteous fury too, and that had angered Schweitzer. He didn't want him to die feeling like he was in the right. \"How could you do that? You burned down a _school_ , you fucker. You killed dozens of little girls. Don't you have daughters of your own?\"\n\n\"I did,\" the Amir whispered, blood bubbling out with the words. \"Your drones killed them. Why should my children die and yours live?\"\n\nSchweitzer hadn't had an answer for him. He probably twisted in the soul storm now, there to while away the millennia until someone like Jawid brought him back. He'd make an excellent jinn.\n\n\"You're not going to kill me, are you?\" The pilot asked.\n\n\"Not if you do exactly as I say,\" Schweitzer answered. \"Get us up and where I want to go, and then I'll be out of your hair and you can fly on home to that family of yours. This isn't personal. I just need a ride.\"\n\n\"Are you dead?\"\n\nSchweitzer knew he should tell him to shut up, that revealing anything personal was a risk, but there was a limit to how much of a monster he could be. He waited until he saw the man gently pull on the yoke and the he felt the plane's nose lift.\n\n\"Yes, Frank,\" Schweitzer said, watching Frank's eyes widen as he discovered Schweitzer already knew his name. \"I am.\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" the man said.\n\n\"Magic is real, Frank. Sorry you had to find out this way.\"\n\n\"Where am I taking you?\"\n\n\"You have a smartphone?\"\n\nFrank nodded.\n\n\"Hand it to me.\"\n\nFrank dug in his pocket and handed it to Schweitzer. \"It's not locked.\" Schweitzer drew a finger across the virtual keyboard to open it up. No reaction. _You fucking idiot. These things work off the heat in your fingers._ He bit back on the spasm of grief that accompanied the reminder that he lacked even the body heat to work a phone.\n\n\"Looks like I'm going to need your help here, Frank.\" He handed the phone back. \"I need you to look something up for me.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Frank took the phone, hovered his thumb over it.\n\n\"I need the Iowa offices for Senator Don Hodges.\"\n\n\"You mean the address? Why?\"\n\n\"Because you're going to fly me there.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nThe cooling air told Schweitzer that they were well airborne now. He wouldn't be seen from the ground. He crawled up into the seat and turned to look at Frank. \"You have got to be out of your fucking mind, asking me questions like that, Frank. Did you miss the whole part of me walking away from a plane crash?\"\n\n\"You'll be too messed up in a plane crash to walk, even if you are dead. You'd be burned to a crisp or in pieces.\"\n\n\"You want to test that theory?\" Schweitzer reached out and nudged the control stick forward. The nose of the plane dipped sharply and Frank let out a terrified squeal.\n\n\"Okay! Okay! I'll look it up!\"\n\n\"Good boy.\"\n\nFrank tapped on his phone for a moment. \"I have the address. Des Moines.\"\n\n\"Outstanding. Take me there.\" Hodges likely wouldn't be at his Iowa office, but it didn't matter. He would feel it as they drew nearer to Sarah, and the closer they came, the better he would know where she was.\n\n\"Flight plan says Little Rock, man,\" Frank said. \"We don't have the fuel to make it there. We'll crash, and then neither of us gets what we want.\"\n\n\"Look at me, Frank.\" Schweitzer leaned toward him. His elbow brushed a bobblehead hula dancer Frank had suctioned to the dash. \"Look at me.\"\n\nFrank looked at him sidelong, head still facing forward. The effect was comical, and Schweitzer felt a phantom smile rise to his face, a ghost of the man he'd once been, a living man who could laugh and appreciate irony. But his face was a skull now, and skulls grinned all the time, whether the joke was funny or not. \"Do you think that, in life, I was a stupid man, Frank?\"\n\nNo answer. Frank looked back out the windshield.\n\n\"I said, fucking look at me!\"\n\nThe eyes jerked back over. \"I'm looking at you!\"\n\n\"Do you think I was stupid?\"\n\n\"How should I know? I didn't know you.\"\n\n\"I'm very smart, Frank. Dying hasn't changed that. Smart guys like me know that Little Rock isn't much farther than even the far side of Iowa. I used to drop from light aircraft like this. I knew a thing or two about reckoning fuel. You can make it, Frank. You can make it and to spare. And if you try to trick me again, I will kick your ass out of the cockpit and see if all that hot air can float you down slowly enough to land on your feet.\"\n\nFrank said nothing, the tears still leaking out of the corners of his eyes.\n\n\"You may look away now, Frank. Always want to keep your eyes on the road.\"\n\nFrank looked back out the windshield and Schweitzer quelled his rebel conscience yet again. The ground was a swath of green pasteboard beneath them, the clouds a flat line of white over their heads. Schweitzer had the weird sensation of buzzing through a layer of a landscape painting, the reality above and below him too perfectly rendered to be real.\n\nSchweitzer heard the light click of Frank engaging the radio, whipped a claw out to hover below his chin. \"Don't.\"\n\n\"I have to radio the course change, man. I can't just fly wherever the hell I want. It's not like driving a car,\" he said, and Schweitzer's augmented senses assured him that Frank believed it to be true. \"Please, I'm not lying. I'm not trying to trick you; don't hurt me.\"\n\nSchweitzer considered. The midair course change would require a reason, would set the authorities on alert. An unreported and unscheduled flight change would also raise alarms, but it would take more time for ground crews to figure out what the problem was and to coordinate a response. \"Just keep flying,\" he said.\n\n\"Even if you don't kill me, man, you're going to get me arrested as soon as I land.\"\n\n\"You can tell them there was a stowaway.\"\n\n\"A zombie stowaway.\" Frank rolled his eyes. \"Nobody is going to believe that. I don't even believe that.\"\n\n\"Believe it. And tell them that I had a gun on you if it helps.\"\n\n\"It won't.\"\n\nSchweitzer shrugged. \"I'm fucking dead, dude. You'll forgive me if I lack sympathy for your predicament. Just keep flying and you'll live through this. Keep it as low as you can without drawing attention.\"\n\nSchweitzer felt the plane slowly shed altitude as Frank obeyed. The man started to speak again and stopped at a shushing from Schweitzer. The next two hours were an odd silence, Frank with his eyes straight ahead, the plane engines droning, and the airframe shaking under the pressure of the currents of wind and Schweitzer's dead weight on the cockpit floor. Schweitzer could feel Sarah's signal getting stronger, the emotions passed along the link more intense. They were moving in the right direction. Schweitzer imagined the distance dropping away, stifled the urge to drum his fingers on his knees as the agitation at her growing nearness almost overwhelmed him.\n\nSchweitzer kept his bone claw extended and near Frank's throat, a reminder of what was at stake. Schweitzer could feel Frank's chemical scent change as he calmed, slowly realizing that he wasn't going to die, at least not yet. Schweitzer could hear his heart slowing, feel the pressure in him change as his veins dilated back to their regular diameter. Schweitzer thought of amping his fear up again with some menacing gesture but decided he didn't want to. It was exhausting being a monster. He had done it enough to Patrick. He wanted a break.\n\nSchweitzer knew Frank was going to speak before he opened his mouth. \"So . . . who were when you were alive?\"\n\n\"The fuck do you care about me?\"\n\nA spike in the fear, but not as high as before. \"Hey, man. It's a long flight. We might as well make conversation.\"\n\n\"I was a man.\"\n\nFrank actually smiled. \"Well, I figured.\"\n\nSchweitzer knew this wasn't good. There was no reason to connect with this man, no reason to communicate with him at all. He was the ride to Sarah, nothing more. Schweitzer's training tried to kick in, to dehumanize, to reduce Frank to his functional role, to keep Schweitzer's situational awareness. But the truth was that Schweitzer was exhausted. Since his death, Schweitzer's every conversation had been fraught. Cutting deals with Eldredge, getting briefed by Jawid, explaining the new lie of the world to Sarah. He had forgotten the gentle rhythms of easy, adult conversation, the micro-connections that small talk forged. And once he remembered, he realized that he wanted it, desperately.\n\n\"I had a family.\" Schweitzer said.\n\n\"They died too?\" Frank asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Schweitzer answered. Best not to let the man know there were any levers on him.\n\n\"I'm really sorry to hear that. I don't know what I'd do if my kids died.\"\n\n\"You'd find a way to go on, same as everyone else.\"\n\n\"Not everybody finds a way. I know I couldn't.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised at what you can do. You ever serve?\"\n\nFrank arched an eyebrow at that. The question itself gave him information Schweitzer knew the man probably shouldn't have, but he cared less and less. He'd lost his life. He'd lost Sarah. He could have this one thing. \"You were . . . in the military? When you were alive? I kinda guessed when you talked about dropping out of planes.\"\n\nSchweitzer nodded.\n\n\"What branch?\"\n\n\"None of your fucking business.\"\n\n\"Hey, man. That's fine. I was in the Army. I only did four years, though. You could do four and get out back then. I drove trucks.\"\n\n\"Then you remember what it was like. They take you in, they break you down, they build you back up. By the time they're done with you, you're capable of amazing things. Things you never thought you'd be able to do.\" He'd had this conversation with Sarah when they'd first dated. _I could never paint like that,_ he'd said. She'd fixed him with a serious look, and her voice had been stern, even scolding. _Yes, you could. If you were willing to put in the time, willing to give up your leisure and your freedom and your money, you could be the greatest painter that ever lived. The only difference between you and I is focus, commitment, and desire._\n\nHe wasn't sure of the exact moment when he figured out that he would love her and no other for the rest of his life, but that was certainly a candidate.\n\n_Oh God. Sarah. I miss you so much._\n\nFrank shrugged. \"All I learned to do was drive a truck, man. And stand in line a lot.\"\n\n\"You'd adapt to it,\" Schweitzer said, \"but I hope you never have to.\" Showing sympathy was a terrible idea, and it felt fantastic.\n\n\"Everybody's got to go sometime,\" Frank said. Schweitzer waited for him to say more, but he was content to fly on in silence, and eventually, Schweitzer settled into the lull of the throbbing engines and the whoosh of the air over the wings. He watched the clouds scud by above them. Frank was keeping the plane low per his orders, and Schweitzer watched the sun peek out between billowing white banks. The brightness was dazzling, but he had no eyes left to damage. For the first time in his existence, he stared directly into the center of the fiery ball, letting his vision play over the rippling plasma, seeing the sparking tendrils of heat even from this distance. It was amazing. Every moment he existed as a dead man, he found new ways to experience the world. In some ways, he was like a newborn baby.\n\n_I can look straight into the sun. For as long as I want._\n\nHe heard a dull click, felt the faint vibrations of the radio trembling through the headphones around Frank's ears. Schweitzer dialed his hearing up to pick up the frequency.\n\nA normal human ear wouldn't have been able to hear over the ambient noise of the moving plane, but Schweitzer wasn't a normal human.\n\n\"Cessna one seven two, tail number November five niner one niner, November five niner one niner, this is Air National Guard India Alpha three one two. You have entered restricted airspace. I say again you have entered restricted military airspace. Assume heading two seven zero and depart the area immediately.\"\n\nFrank stayed quiet, a bead of sweat slowly working its way from his forehead behind one of the earphones. His eyes flicked to Schweitzer, only for an instant, back to the windscreen. Schweitzer smelled the burned-sugar stink of his blood sugar spiking, the chemically sour odor of adrenaline, heard the hammering of his speeding heart.\n\nSchweitzer waited for Frank to turn the plane.\n\nHe didn't. It wasn't an accident.\n\nThe radio crackled again. \"November five niner one niner, this is India Alpha three one two. If you do not leave the airspace on heading two seven zero, we will engage you. If you are in distress and cannot respond, please toggle your radio three times in one-second intervals, over.\"\n\nSchweitzer sat bolt upright. \"What the fu . . .\"\n\nFrank kept his eyes straight ahead, his hand on the controls. With the other, he reached down and toggled his radio. _Click-click. Click-click . . ._\n\nFrank didn't get a chance to sound a third click before Schweitzer snatched his wrist, but the radio was already sounding again. \"November five niner one niner, this is India Alpha three one two. We are in receipt of your distress indicator and are inbound to intercept. Assume heading two seven zero and maintain speed and altitude. Toggle your radio twice in one-second intervals to indicate that you will comply, over.\"\n\nFrank clicked two more times as Schweitzer reached over to snatch his wrist. \"Roger that,\" the radio crackled. \"We're on our way. India Alpha three one two out.\"\n\n\"Are you a fucking idiot?\" Schweitzer asked.\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about, man,\" Frank practically squeaked.\n\n\"I'm talking about you deliberately flying over a fucking Air National Guard base,\" Schweitzer hissed. \"What part of 'Do what I say and you'll live through this' didn't you understand?\"\n\n\"I didn't do anything!\" Frank screamed.\n\nSchweitzer sat up, his head and shoulders flattening against the canopy as he seized Frank's neck, the man's fat jowls spilling over his grip, eyes bugging out of his head. Schweitzer pointed at his throat with the other finger, letting the bone claw extend until it touched Frank's Adam's apple. \"You stupid motherfucker.\"\n\n\"You know, man,\" Frank gasped, \"I don't think you're going to hurt me. I don't think that's what you're going to do at all.\"\n\n_You idiot,_ Schweitzer screamed at himself. _Why did you fucking talk to him?_ Too much sympathy, too much humanity. Enough to give Frank the glimmer of hope that Schweitzer was too soft to do the deed. Schweitzer wasn't too soft to do the deed, but he would have to do it now. There was no intimidating Frank into anything, and the Air National Guard jets that were scrambling would be there soon.\n\nSchweitzer cursed, retracted the bone claw, and punched down on the controls. The plane's nose dipped sickeningly and Frank shrieked as it dove, engines roaring. Schweitzer saw the green paste of the Iowa plain below him, a flashing blue ribbon that he knew meant one of the rivers that crisscrossed the state. He'd always planned to travel there with Sarah, see the fields where the Indian Wars had been fought, the edges of the frontier where the nation had been born.\n\nThe ground rushed toward them; Frank grabbed the controls and pulled futilely against Schweitzer's strength. \"Please! Please!\"\n\nAbove them, a long way off but coming fast, Schweitzer could hear the high-pitched whine of a jet engine burning hard.\n\nThe Air National Guard jet, inbound at speed. An F-16, most likely. It wouldn't take them long to arrive, and he had to be gone by then.\n\n\"Please!\" Spit trailed out of the corners of Frank's mouth. \"Let me level her off! I have a family!\"\n\nThe green stretch of ground sped toward them; a thick swath of trees came and went. The bright, shining line of the river rushed closer. \"Keep us over the river,\" Schweitzer said, and Frank nodded enthusiastically, hauling back on the yoke as soon as Schweitzer released it.\n\nIt was a near thing. Frank pulled and the plane groaned, straining as if, now that it was committed to the dive, it didn't want to pull out of it, had its heart set on crashing straight into the river glinting silver-white now that the sun was behind them. Schweitzer heard the airframe groan as the metal strained against the wind, the high-wire twanging of the wings cutting through the rushing air. Frank couldn't hear those sounds, had no idea how close his tiny little airplane was coming to ripping itself apart. Better for him that way.\n\nThe radio crackled again. \"Five niner one niner, India Alpha three one two. I say again, maintain your current speed and altitude on bearing two seven zero or we will open fire.\"\n\n\"They might kill you,\" Schweitzer said. \"I definitely will. Get as low and slow as you can get us without stalling. Keep diving.\"\n\nFrank banked the plane until the electronic compass pointed to two seven zero but otherwise kept the aircraft steady. Schweitzer pressed the claw into his throat. \"Last chance, Frank. I'm done being nice.\"\n\nFrank swallowed and slowed the plane, pushing the nose gently down. Schweitzer watched the river grow beneath them until it filled the entire horizon. The whine of the jet engine came louder.\n\n\"Fuck,\" Frank whispered. \"They'll just fire a missile. We won't even see it coming.\"\n\nSchweitzer retracted the claw and squeezed Frank's shoulder. \"Then I'll get off. Thanks for the ride, man.\"\n\nSchweitzer forced the side door open, struggling briefly against the rush of wind that tried to hold it shut. He heard Frank curse as he leapt.\n\nThe plane must have slowed to little more than fifty knots, but the tail still swept over him so close that he could feel the rags of his clothing stirred by its passing. Then he was falling, letting his body stretch to keep himself stable, creating as much wind resistance as possible. The Iowa countryside was beautiful out here, the air sharp and clear, the river winking at him, breaking the sunlight into a shivering screen of diamonds. The whining of the jet engines became a roar as the river rushed upward and he arced into a graceful dive, tucking his chin, pointing his arms, and breaking the surface with little more than a splash.\n\nThe river wasn't deep down here. No sooner had the cold water admitted him than Schweitzer saw the sandy bottom racing upward, dotted with slimy rocks. He arched his back again, widening the angle of his descent and giving himself more time to shed speed. The resistance of the water continued to break his momentum, but not enough to keep him from colliding sharply with the bottom. He felt his ribs take the impact, flex enough to crush the lungs and heart of a living man but hold without more than a couple of minor breaks. He spun onto his back as he rebounded upward, swatting away a cloud of minnows and focusing his eyes up toward the surface.\n\nThe reflection of the sun and the wavering surface made it harder, but not impossible, for his magically augmented eyes to see out and into the open air, but it was still an oily and wave-washed image of Frank's little Cessna slowly gaining altitude below two gray streaks that were the F-16s finally arriving, overshooting at their higher airspeed, banking around for another pass. Schweitzer was certain that Frank was even now shouting into the radio, desperately telling them to wave off, that he'd been hijacked, that he was complying.\n\nThere was no fireball, no whoosh and roar of explosive ordnance being deployed. Schweitzer had gambled with Frank's life, to be sure, and there was a part of him that curdled at the thought, but it was a gamble that paid off as the Cessna motored on and out of sight.\n\nSchweitzer nodded in satisfaction. Sarah was close, the tug of her through the link dragging him along like a fish on a lure. He gave into it, turning on his belly and swimming down into the dark, sweeping up against the current to where he knew his wife awaited him.\n\n# CHAPTER XXV\n\nCOMBINED\n\nSchweitzer swam the river's oily length, pulling himself along the river bottom, ragged fingers digging into the silt and rock. He could feel the dark water pressing in on him from all sides, and the current worked furiously against him, desperately trying to sweep him down and out into the Mississippi, as if the water itself were trying to keep him from reaching his wife.\n\nIt could do as it liked. It couldn't stop him. Schweitzer pulled himself relentlessly along, so deep he knew he wasn't as much as a shadow to someone on the surface, even though the river was clear as glass and the day bright and sunny. He didn't need to rest, and his legs were strong enough to kick his way along upriver faster than a man could walk. With each yard, the maddening closeness of Sarah's presence grew, until he had to force himself to keep from scrabbling at the riverbed and take long, deliberate strokes. _Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Focus._ Hand over hand, Schweitzer climbed the river bottom north and west.\n\nThe sun was setting, the rippling surface of the river blazing orange and red above him as he became aware of the shadows of buildings falling over the water's surface. He could hear the churning of motors, taste the rancid tang of garbage that told him he'd entered the dirtier water that carved its way through a major city. Sarah blazed like a coal forced down his throat and into his chest.\n\nThe sun sank farther as he pulled his way farther into the city, until the river bottom was shrouded in gloom, and Schweitzer had to adjust his vision to take advantage of the scarcer light. A few garbage bags had been sunk around him, old boots and crushed tin cans. Soggy fur and scattered bones. The detritus of a people living cheek by jowl. The river bent back on itself, and as he turned to follow it, he felt Sarah's presence growing farther. If he was going to find her, he'd have to go the rest of the way on land.\n\nSchweitzer rolled onto his back, let himself surface by inches, fighting against the impulse to race up and out of the water, to go after her. _Go ahead; come up in the middle of a bunch of couples out for a stroll, or in front of a cop car._ He knew what he looked like. He could pass for a man if he had a man's clothes and at least something to cover his face, but his leering, dripping skull wouldn't leave room for doubt, especially with his burning silver eyes.\n\nDes Moines was not New York, and while the water muted the sounds of those on the surface, Schweitzer could still hear the thrum of car wheels against the ground, the distant tread of footsteps. Nothing close. At night, it was a city of the dead.\n\nSchweitzer let the top of his head break the surface, felt the soft touch of the air on his scalp. A high wall of gray stone rose sheer to one side, a wide stretch of grass between it and the road that wound its way along the river. As he watched, a car sped past, headlights painting two white cones on the asphalt. They wouldn't be able to see him from there. Not at night. Not even if they were looking.\n\nHe swam to the wall, tested the stone. It was uneven, the tiny ledges between the bricks slick with river slime, but he swarmed his way up with ease, his magically augmented muscles making short work of the climb, his shredded fingers and toes as strong as a living man's arm or leg. He threw a hand over the top, holding himself flat against the side of the wall as another car rushed past.\n\nWhen he finally pulled himself up, he was greeted by a white stone building in classical style, flanked by bronze lamps and covered with sweeping arched windows. A wide stone staircase led up to the huge bronze double doors, closed and locked for the night. Some government building, full of the pompous grandeur that men used to deceive themselves into thinking the things they did had meaning, that they could protect anyone. That was fine. The architectural overstatement cast many shadows, offered an endless series of alcoves. It was perfect for a creature that wanted to shroud itself in darkness, to hide.\n\nSchweitzer squatted beneath a stone eave and scanned the city skyline, feeling Sarah pulse in his throat, a steady rhythm that he could nearly hear. If his heart still beat, he knew it would be surging. A modern-sculpture park sprawled on the river's far side. Schweitzer could hear someone snoring fitfully beneath one of the pieces, a gang of kids whispering around a can of something just a few feet away from him. Easy to avoid, easier to scare off if they got wind of him. Beyond the park, tall glass-sided buildings reared into the night, limned in neon that only set them more starkly against the plain black-gray of the Iowa night sky.\n\nThere. Sarah was there.\n\nSchweitzer bolted from cover, raced to the river's edge, leapt into the air. The river was at least fifty feet across. Schweitzer cleared it easily. A part of him knew that he should be amazed, filled with wonder at the fact that with a better running start, he could have jumped twice as far, but Schweitzer felt that part of him slipping away. This new creature, the one who could bend cold iron with its bare hands, the one that didn't need to eat, didn't need to sleep, didn't need to breathe, was more and more of who he was. That creature couldn't take care of a little boy, couldn't love a wife.\n\n_Lock it up. Patrick is with Eldredge now, for better or for worse. You can't do anything for him until you finish this._\n\nFor now, this creature was who he needed to be. All warriors needed to remember what they were fighting for, but it didn't change what the warrior had to do to win the fight. War was monstrous. To win, you had to be a monster.\n\nAnd he was.\n\nSchweitzer landed in a crouch on the far bank of the river, dropping into the shadows of the sculpture park. The kids stopped talking, swiveled their heads in his direction. There were whispers of \"Did you see that?\" But Schweitzer knew he had jumped too far and too fast. There would be too much for their minds to take in, and by the time they made sense of it, he'd be gone.\n\nHe took off at a sprint, sticking to the shadows of the office park, until he had to risk the streetlights along a broad avenue that wended its way toward the straight metal teeth of the skyline.\n\nAs the shadows of the buildings fell over him again, Sarah's signal grew focused, and Schweitzer fought against the edges of a tunnel vision threatening to settle on him. He had felt the same thing when he'd put down the kickstand on the stolen Harley-Davidson, stepping onto the front lawn of the farmhouse where Sarah had taken refuge while she'd still been alive.\n\nThe tallest of the buildings loomed closer, a modern, star-shaped tower with a beaten-copper roof that had failed to deliver the promised verdigris and instead turned a sick-looking dark brown. Schweitzer's powerful eyes could see the directory posted in the lobby, the prominent brass plaques posted below it, the guard behind the marble-topped desk. An office building, then. If Senator Hodges lived there, his was one of the very few residences.\n\nBut it didn't matter, because Sarah was in there. Schweitzer was sure of it. Schweitzer had thought that once he'd pushed Ninip out, he'd mastered his new self, was in complete control. He'd had no idea. The compulsion of his link to Sarah took hold of him now, batted all resistance aside. His years of training to be a SEAL, his gift for self-denial, his pridelessness, his endurance, all were swept away in an instant, replaced by an animal need to _get to her_ no matter what the cost.\n\nSchweitzer the SEAL wanted to case the target, to surveil the entrances, figure out the path of any guard patrols, to wait, to plan, to do things right. But Schweitzer the jinn just galloped across the road, vaulting over a parked BMW sports coupe and hammering through the front doors so quickly, he nearly took them off their hinges.\n\nThe one guard was already rising, eyes fixed on a monitor that no doubt showed Schweitzer's approach, so fast that he didn't have time to register what he was seeing. He winced as the doors banged open, turned to face Schweitzer, eyes widening, before one hand disappeared beneath the desk.\n\nSchweitzer smoothly vaulted the countertop, closing the distance between them and seizing the man's wrist. He ripped it away from the white button the guard had been reaching for, bent it painfully back. The guard drew breath to cry out and Schweitzer seized his throat. \"You can scream, or you can go on breathing, but you can't do both.\"\n\nThe guard was bald, in his thirties, his thick torso covered by a black cable-knit sweater. He stared at Schweitzer, slowly closing his mouth, raising his free hand. \"It's cool, man. Be cool.\"\n\n\"Cool is my middle fucking name,\" Schweitzer whispered, running his hands over the man's waist. There was a thick utility belt there. Ring of keys, flashlight, handcuffs, radio. No gun.\n\nSchweitzer did a quick once-over of the guard's armpits and ankles. No hidden holsters. He was unarmed. \"What's your name?\"\n\nThe guard was staring into Schweitzer's silver eyes. \"Are you for fucking real, man?\"\n\nSchweitzer shook him hard enough to make his head rock side to side. \"I ask the questions. What's your goddamn name?\"\n\nThe man coughed, sputtered. \"Raoul, man. Fucking Raoul.\"\n\n\"All right, Raoul. You're going to come with me, and you're going to be very quiet while you do, or I'm going to kill you.\"\n\n\"I'm going crazy. You're dead, man. You're dead.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am dead. But you're not, and you have a chance to keep it that way, but only if you do exactly as I say. Now, are you going to be good? Or are you going to be meat?\" With the last word, Schweitzer let a single bone claw slide from his fingertip.\n\nRaoul didn't answer, raised his hand instead. The terror in his face was evident, but he forced a weak smile.\n\nSchweitzer relaxed a hair. \"Good.\" He snatched the radio from Raoul's holster. \"How often do you check in?\"\n\n\"Every hour; due in another twenty minutes.\"\n\nSchweitzer disconnected the battery and put the two pieces beside one another under Raoul's metal chair. \"Stairs?\"\n\nRaoul pointed to a black door set in the reflective stainless steel of the lobby wall. A broad white sign glowed red above it, blaring the words EXIT to anyone looking. Schweitzer would have rolled his eyes had he had them to roll. His mouth reflexively stretched into a smile, failed as the taut skin met resistance from the metal armature beneath. But he was able to sound sheepish, at least. \"Should have seen that. There an alarm on that door?\"\n\nRaoul shook his head, and Schweitzer pulled them both through the door and into the white-painted stairwell beyond. Metal stairs wound their way up out of Schweitzer's sight, obscured by a series of concrete landings above. Schweitzer glanced to his right, found what he was looking for, a water pipe rising out of the concrete floor, disappearing into the landing above. Schweitzer snatched Raoul's handcuffs out of his belt, slapped the guard's wrist to the pipe. The man resisted, but Schweitzer overpowered him as easily if he were a child. He wisely didn't raise his other hand.\n\n\"You're not going to kill me, are you?\" Raoul asked.\n\n\"No,\" Schweitzer said, cuffing him to the pipe. \"So long as you don't make a lot of noise. All you have to do is sit here quietly, and I'll be done and out of here in about fifteen minutes. You can be quiet for fifteen minutes, can't you?\"\n\nRaoul nodded vigorously. \"Not a peep, man. I'm cool.\"\n\n\"You are cool,\" Schweitzer said, \"which is why I'm not going to kill you. But, unfortunately, I am going to have to hurt you, but I promise not any more than I absolutely have to.\"\n\n\"Wait . . .\" Raoul began, but Schweitzer had already lifted his shoulder, keeping his elbow hooked and raising his right hand in an uppercut that would have been the envy of a prizefighter. He planted it precisely on the point of Raoul's chin, snapping the guard's head back hard enough that his brain sloshed in the hard housing of his skull, the stem stretching and snapping back as the muscles and tendons engaged to keep his head from spinning all the way around. Raoul gave a brief groan, the light went out of his eyes, and he collapsed, hanging by his cuffed wrist.\n\nHe wouldn't be down long. He would scream when he came to. Schweitzer had to make sure that by then, it wouldn't matter.\n\nHe felt Sarah's signal, rising in his chest, pull him on and up. He surrendered to it, letting his legs and arms pump, taking the stairs two, then five, then entire flights at a time, pausing only to hook the railing with his arm to propel him around and up again at each landing. He lost count of how many floors he'd gone up, seeing only the flashing white of the cinder-block walls blurring along beside him. He could see the faint heat signatures of people on the floors, could hear hushed conversations, muted breathing, the sounds he'd expect to hear in a late-night office building. He ignored them all, listening only to the siren's call of Sarah growing more intense with each step.\n\nSchweitzer realized that he was suddenly in silence. The SEAL side of him began to curse his lack of caution, even as the jinn continued to plunge upward, listening only for the sound of his lost love. He slowly mastered himself, ripping his eyes from the dwindling pinnacle of the stairwell, turned to the thickness of the wall and its black steel door leading out to the floor beyond. The floor number, 38, was painted in white stencil beside it. Schweitzer squinted, just barely able to make out the outlines of five heat signatures. They were incredibly faint, far more than they should have been, but Schweitzer could make out men lined up beside the door, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man before him.\n\nSchweitzer knew the formation well, the snake formed behind the point man, stacked on the door. Trained professionals. Trouble.\n\nBarreling ahead was not the answer here. They were ready. But he could feel Sarah's soul screaming down the link between them. Whatever she was paired with was hurting her. There was no way he could slow-roll this. Not when she was so close.\n\nSchweitzer drove forward as the door slammed open, the first two operators buttonhooking into the stairwell, one mounting the stairs and the other moving to the corner of the landing. Cold came off them in waves, a light dusting of frost on their body armor and helmets. They had been hosed down with Freon, or stood in a refrigerator before being sent against him. He could smell the Composition B explosive in the oversized drums hanging beneath the barrels of their carbines. They'd been loaded out and prepared to fight against an enemy who could see into the infrared spectrum. The Comp B meant they knew that regular bullets weren't going to do the job. They were waiting for him. They were ready.\n\nSchweitzer growled and leapt as the first one fired. The round ripped through the air, narrowly missing his head.\n\nBut instead of thudding into the wall, Schweitzer saw a light on the operator's weapon flash red and heard a dull _whump_ behind him as the round exploded. A hot hand slapped his back, turning his leap into a spin. He crashed into the men, lowering his shoulder to catch one of them under the chin and slamming him into the wall. The operator's throat collapsed under the pressure, and he fell to the floor, clawing at his neck and rolling down the stairs into the boiling black smoke left by the round's detonation. Schweitzer didn't have time to fully assess the damage, but he could feel the backs of his ribs exposed where the shrapnel had torn the flesh away, the chips of concrete flaying the backs of his arms and thighs.\n\nThe other operator raised his weapon, cursed as he realized he was too close to fire the explosive round, and whipped the carbine off the sling. A long axe blade swung out of the stock with a loud click. He lifted the gun up by the barrel, stepping into the swing as another of the operators came through the doorway.\n\nSchweitzer rolled to his knees, got a hand up in time to intercept the axe blade, catching the operator's wrist and crushing it with a quick squeeze. The bones snapped, grinding together, the operator screaming. But the weapon already had the momentum, and the axe blade was heavy. It flew down, sinking deep into Schweitzer's shoulder. The scar left by the fight with Jackrabbit had left a divot in that shoulder, a relic of where the bone cleaver had cut in, nearly severing the arm. The Gemini Cell had spent hours repairing the damage, shoring it up with metal cables that held the arm in place, giving Schweitzer the freedom of movement he needed, strength he could rely on. In the days since the repair, it had been so reliable that he'd forgotten about the damage.\n\nBut the divot guided the blade in, the axe biting into the old wound, sharp metal cutting effortlessly through the soft flesh until it caught on the fibers of the metal cable at the joint. Schweitzer could feel a few of the precious threads part, springing back on their own tension with a metallic twanging sound muted by the dead meat around them.\n\nThese men were trained to fight him. They weren't wasting time with bullets. They would blow him apart or cut him to pieces.\n\nSchweitzer reached across his chest, grasping the back of the axe blade. The operator was well trained, and he released the weapon, dropping his hand to a hatchet hanging at his waist. He jerked it out by the head, letting its own momentum carry it upward before catching it by the handle.\n\nSchweitzer jerked the carbine-axe head up and out of his shoulder, spun it around so the blade faced his enemy. The operator's eyes widened briefly as he realized his mistake, and then Schweitzer plunged the axe head forward, punching it through the black Kevlar of his helmet, feeling it cut through his skull and into the soft brain behind. The enemy collapsed, sliding down the stairs, carbine bouncing against the metal as it trailed from the blade, still stuck in his head.\n\nThe other operator dropped his carbine to hang by its sling and already had his hatchet out. He swung it just as Schweitzer turned back to him, planting the head in the wound opened by the carbine-axe. The metal head cut deeper into the cable, more threads snapping, the arm going slack to hang by a slim line of gristle and metal wire. Glycerol squirted against the wall, dribbled down Schweitzer's side.\n\nSchweitzer reached out and grabbed the man's throat, expecting him to try to back away, but he should have reckoned that an operator would follow Schweitzer's own oath: _so others might live._ Schweitzer was an enemy, a monster. Of course the operator would be willing to sacrifice himself. He had been training to die his entire professional life.\n\nThe operator leaned in, letting Schweitzer's hand cut off his windpipe. Schweitzer was lightning-fast, but the operator still had precious seconds to react before Schweitzer's magical strength collapsed the flesh of his neck onto his vertebrae, began crushing the bone. He used those seconds well, grasping Schweitzer's wrist and yanking it with surprising strength, the strands finally parting, the arm ripping away even as Schweitzer snapped his neck and he collapsed.\n\nSchweitzer followed his corpse down, catching up the carbine with his remaining hand, leveling the weapon and firing even as the other operators tried to clear the doorway. The round sped so quickly that the contrail sucked the door in behind it, slamming it shut. The subsequent blast bent it, knocking it askew on its hinges, but it had been designed to hold back fire, the thick metal sagging but holding steady. The men beyond were not so lucky; Schweitzer could tell by the screams. His heat vision was suddenly alight as their warm remains were spattered by the explosive round, dripping off the walls and ceiling.\n\nThrough it all, Sarah's proximity, her agony, still vibrated through the link they shared. She was just a floor or two above, so close he couldn't concentrate. He stared down at his arm, looking tiny now that it was parted from him. The gray muscles were ragged, covered more by duct tape than skin, the metal cables trailing from the shoulder turned blue where the scraping of the hatchet and axe blades had heated them.\n\nHe left it where it lay. He was past sentiment, had no place for keepsakes. Only the Gemini Cell's technicians could fix it anyway, and they weren't exactly inclined to help him. He felt lighter as he bounded up the remaining stairs, compensating for the sudden change in his balance by leaning against the heavier pull of his remaining arm. At last, he could bear it no more and jumped straight up, cresting the metal railing and vaulting over to land at a crouch outside the landing doorway.\n\nThere were no heat signatures beyond it, but he could feel Sarah just a few feet away, separated from him only by the thick piece of metal on its well-oiled hinges. He reached for it instinctively with his missing arm, corrected himself, pulled it open with his real one. His senses screamed out in warning, the SEAL within him long since bludgeoned into silence by the jinn. This direct approach was idiocy, had already cost him an arm. That those operators had been cooled to dampen their heat signatures showed that the enemy was ready for him.\n\nBut the pull of the magic was far too strong. A wild, mad part of him truly believed that if he could only get close enough to Sarah, there wasn't a force in the world that could stop him. That love, contrary to everything he'd learned in a lifetime of running ops, really conquered all. The SEAL in him knew this was wrong, that he was running headlong into ambush, that he was down an arm. It didn't matter; the signal was all. Ninip had spoken of his addiction to the blood of the living, likened it to heroin. Schweitzer understood that now, as helpless as a rowboat on a storm-tossed sea. _Sarahsarahsarahsarahsarah._\n\nSchweitzer gave his jinn aspect free rein. The horns broke his scalp, the line of spikes punching through the open remains of his back, more vertebrae exposed than covered. His claws came out on his remaining hand, and he was surprised to feel a bone spike jut out from the stump of his shoulder, projecting out into the space where his arm used to be.\n\nHe reached out for the door handle, hesitated at a sudden strong sensation from just beyond the metal. Liquid power washed over and through him, as if he stood in the midst of a current, a tide that drowned and carried him up in the same moment. Magic. Sarah's terror and urgency, her love and anger, her need came roaring down the link that bound them, signal boosted by the presence of whatever magic was beyond the door.\n\nSchweitzer could see a heat signature now, faint but growing as the human behind it drew closer. If it was another operator, he was alone.\n\nAnd then the tide of magic and Sarah's nearness overwhelmed Schweitzer and he lost control, yanked the door handle so hard that it ripped free of the metal, sending slivers of metal sparkling through the air. Schweitzer stumbled back, victim to his own momentum, as the door shivered in its hinges and held fast.\n\nThen it exploded.\n\nThe door flew out of the jamb, corner striking Schweitzer on his sternum, crushing him into the railing so hard that the metal bent. The door spun away, clattering down the stairwell. Schweitzer reached out to stop himself, realized the arm he'd used was missing, and flipped over sideways, tumbling. His face struck the stairs and he rolled, flopping down the steps until he skidded to a stop on the landing below, beside the broken remains of the door, his arm, and the operators he'd killed just moments before. The feeling of the magic at his back grew stronger, followed by the sound of heavy tread crunching on the metal fragments left by the shattered door.\n\n\"Jim Schweitzer.\" A woman's voice, rich and low, with the slightest trace of an accent. \"You've lost an arm. _Pa bon._ That's government property, you know.\"\n\nSchweitzer got himself up on the right hand this time, flipped himself over.\n\nRaees Gruenen stood a few steps up, gray skin waxy under the fluorescent light.\n\nThe bullet hole Schweitzer had put in his forehead had been plugged and melted over, leaving a wet-looking round scar. The process of rebuilding his skull had stretched his face, as it had with Schweitzer, but with Raees, the Cell had been careless, favoring one side. The result was a leer, long and rising, his mouth lopsided as if mirth had dragged it too high and too hard, a dead man laughing out one side of his mouth. Long bone spines curved upward from his back, the frames of featherless wings. Others projected from his knees.\n\nOver his shoulder, Schweitzer could see a woman, lean and muscular, her dreadlocked hair gathered into a long braid tossed over one shoulder. She was kitted out as an operator and carried a pistol, which she didn't bother to point at him. The tide of her magic was so strong that Schweitzer felt his dead skin prickle in response.\n\n\"'Lo, Jim,\" Gruenen said from the corner of his canted mouth. Schweitzer could tell from the wheezing flexion of his chest that he was doing the same bellows-dance Schweitzer had done before he pushed Ninip out and took control of his own corpse.\n\nSchweitzer felt his link to Sarah vibrate, his wife's presence so close that she was almost on top of him. The edges of Schweitzer's vision narrowed again, the same sign he'd had when he'd first escaped the Cell and found Sarah, the surefire sign that the link they shared had reached its terminus.\n\nHe looked at the twisted smile with dawning horror. Gruenen took a step down, the link pulsed, and Schweitzer knew his wife was inside that mercenary's broken corpse.\n\n# CHAPTER XXVI\n\nSO OTHERS MIGHT LIVE\n\n_Jim,_ the link throbbed. Gruenen took another step, his fists began to crackle, blue arcs of electricity spanning the knuckles. He could feel Gruenen battering Sarah aside, slamming her against the walls of the body they shared. _Jim_. Sarah's voice. _Jim, run._\n\n_What did you expect,_ Schweitzer asked himself, _that she'd be walking and talking? Body whole and heart beating? That they'd truly brought her back to life?_ The truth was that he hadn't had any expectations, that he had only been drunk on the bond between them. _Enough. She's trapped in there and she's hurting. Use the knife; set her free._\n\n\"Jim.\" The Sorcerer's voice was soft, reasonable, but she was careful to keep Gruenen's corpse between her and Schweitzer. \"Can you feel your wife, Jim? She's in there, you know. The love of your life.\"\n\nThey had brought her soul back. They had paired it with the still-cooling corpse of that mercenary. Their souls were linked, her memories and experiences laid bare as his had been to Ninip. The thought filled him with rage and grief, propelling him to his feet, sending him flying forward, an insensate growl escaping his mouth, a howl not unlike the one Ninip had uttered when he'd been in thrall to his bloodlust, scenting beating hearts and the stench of fear.\n\nBut Gruenen was not afraid. His eyes narrowed, the gold threaded with thick lines of silver that showed he was in control. He raised his buzzing hand and lightning exploded, blue arcs sizzling across Schweitzer's chest. Schweitzer's dead muscles seized, and he felt as if a hammer struck his chest, launching him back down to the landing. Smoke rose from his shoulders, flame licking the earlobe of his remaining ear.\n\nDeath had not robbed Gruenen of the magic he had commanded in life. Schweitzer could feel Gruenen's magical current looping and coiling around him. It felt the same as the magic he'd felt around the Golds. All a single element. Was it linked to the dead mercenary's body? His soul? \"Stoo . . . pid,\" Gruenen managed, descended another step.\n\n_Jim._ Another burst of emotion along the link they shared, carrying the hints of Sarah's voice.\n\n\"Don't be stupid,\" the Sorcerer said. \"You're missing an arm, and what's left of you is held together by duct tape, literally. You want to be with your wife again, don't you? I can arrange that.\"\n\n\"That's not how it works,\" Schweitzer growled, struggling to get up.\n\n\"You don't know how it works,\" the Sorcerer answered. \"Nobody does. You have only ever worked with Jawid. You don't know what I can do. I brought your wife back, and I can put you two together. How would you like to share a body with her, Jim? How would you like to be linked to her, soul to soul, for the rest of eternity? I can make that happen.\"\n\nSchweitzer felt his dead heart jump at the thought. Eldredge had said that the Cell was learning how to put souls in living bodies. If there was a way . . . _No. If there is a way, it isn't this one._ \"I'm not working for you again.\"\n\n\"Nothing in life is free, Jim. You know that.\" She nodded to Gruenen's corpse.\n\nSchweitzer jumped onto his haunches, sprang aside as Gruenen extended his hand again, and Schweitzer felt the electrostatic charge building in the air around him. A thick cable of lightning arced into the landing, sizzling just behind Schweitzer's heel as he dove through the singed remains of the doorway, tumbling through the scattered bodies of the operators he'd fought before. There was precious little left to them, most of it spread across the blackened walls by the explosion of the airburst round. Schweitzer rolled in the ash and dust, putting out the fire Gruenen's lightning bolt had kindled on his back. The landing behind him burned brightly.\n\n\"Jim!\" the Sorcerer called. \"Stop playing games! What do you think is going to happen here? If by some miracle you beat this one, I'll bring your wife back in another body. And another. I am not Jawid. I can find anyone in the void. I can find your son after he is dead. I can even find you. Would you like a new body? A whole one? A strong one? I can make it happen for you.\n\n\"What do you plan to do, Jim? Kill Gruenen and Sarah goes back into the void. You lose her again.\"\n\nShe was right, of course. The link to his wife had dragged him all this way, and now all he could do was cut her free. \"You only want one thing, Jim, and I have it. Let me give it to you.\"\n\nThe Sorcerer made her way around Gruenen's corpse. The dead thing put out an arm to hold her back, but the Sorcerer pushed the hand aside as confidently and easily as it had been a living man. \"Jim, please.\" Her dark eyes were honest, sympathetic. Schweitzer tried to sniff out the scent of the chemicals in her bloodstream, listen to the beat of her heart, but the tide of her magic blotted out his senses. He couldn't focus, not with Sarah so near. \"We didn't bring you back here to destroy you. Eldredge was right about you. You're unique. Your country still needs you. I can reunite you with your wife. Is that so much worse than life on the run? You can't care for your son. You must know that.\"\n\nGruenen stood on the stairs, the tension in his muscles making him shiver, but holding his position for now.\n\n\"Eldredge told me about the Director,\" Schweitzer said. \"You work for a Gold.\"\n\nDadou smiled. \"I work for a soul. Dead or living, we all have them. The body means nothing, Jim. You, of all people, should know that.\"\n\nSchweitzer could feel her magic focusing, reaching out to him, probing and touching, tugging experimentally. \"Let me get you out of this pile of rag and bone. Let me set you free.\"\n\nSchweitzer thought of the feral madness of Ninip, of what he'd seen the Golds do to the old man and his wife when he'd fought to save Sarah at that Virginia farmhouse. He thought of the hours trapped in the clear white expanse of his underground cell.\n\nHe thought of the chance to be in a living body, to feel his heartbeat, to feel it in time with his son's, with his wife's.\n\nBut he felt the nearness of Sarah again, her agony pulsing along the link to him. Summoned back after death, it was stronger, clearer. He could hear her voice now. _No,_ she sent. _Don't._\n\nSchweitzer let his hand drop, scooping up one of the operator's fallen carbines, angling the barrel up toward the ceiling.\n\nThe Sorcerer bared her teeth, not bothering to cry out. She raised her pistol, and Schweitzer felt the forty-five-caliber round tear through his chest, exit his shoulder. He went tumbling backward, but not before he felt the carbine fire, the airburst round tearing into the concrete slab overhead. It detonated with a sharp kick, the shock wave driving him into the floor and knocking Gruenen from his feet. Schweitzer felt the concrete fracture, the huge chunks of masonry tumbling down around them. He'd hoped to catch both the Sorcerer and her creation in the sudden fall, but the round in his chest had thrown off his aim. Most of the debris fell harmlessly down the stairwell.\n\nAt last, the momentum of the explosion spent itself, and Schweitzer got to his feet.\n\nThe Sorcerer lay on the floor of the hallway, her leg twisted at an unnatural angle, blood pooling beneath her knee. The joint was flattened beneath a piece of fallen concrete, the rebar support disappearing into the flesh below. Her face was twisted in pain, her breathing coming in great gulps.\n\nGruenen sprang to his feet behind her, pointed a finger at Schweitzer, who dove aside as the lightning tore a hole in the landing, leaving a ring of flames around a black scar in the floor.\n\n\"Gah!\" the Sorcerer shouted to Gruenen. \"Just rip that fucker to pieces! I'm done talking to it.\"\n\nSchweitzer scrambled to his feet. He couldn't take Gruenen head to head, not if he hoped to win. But he could feel Eldredge's knife tucked into the waistband of his trousers, a cold firmness nestled into the small of his back. He reached for it now, drew it out, let the angry teal light wash over Gruenen's leering dead face.\n\n\"Come!\" Gruenen bellowed, leaping down to the landing and standing in the pool of flame. \"Come! Wife! Have!\" _Jim,_ Sarah sent along the link. _Run._ Then Gruenen bulled her aside and Schweitzer could feel the rage and pain along the link as she struggled against him.\n\n_No,_ Schweitzer sent back, not sure if she could hear him. _I'm going to set you free._\n\nSEALs trained for knife-fighting, and Schweitzer instinctively fell into his old stance, bringing the knife hand back, waving the free one forward as a visual distraction. It wasn't until Gruenen charged him that he realized that he'd once again forgotten his missing arm. He swung the blade crosswise, hoping Gruenen would be as careless as a Gold, let Schweitzer stab him in an effort to close.\n\nBut Gruenen wasn't a Gold. His burning eyes were threaded with silver, and they flicked to the glowing weapon, sensing the magic or guessing at it from the glow. He danced back, the knife tip missing him by inches, and then stepped in, grabbing Schweitzer's wrist and elbow carefully, pulling his arm across his chest.\n\nWith only one arm, Schweitzer had no leverage to grapple with him. He twisted his body violently away, and Gruenen slid his fingers up Schweitzer's wrist, pinching the KA-BAR by its metal hilt, yanking it from Schweitzer's grasp and tossing it down the stairwell.\n\nThe only real weapon he had. Gone. Schweitzer listened to the hollow-sounding clatter of the blade as it tumbled and finally came to a stop a floor below.\n\nGruenen laughed and punched Schweitzer in the face. The blow would have broken a bone jaw, but Schweitzer's was made of metal, and the shot only made his head spin as Gruenen threw him down the hallway.\n\n_Stupid move. He had me. He should have ripped me up._ But while Gruenen was a trained Operator, he was no SEAL. The dead mercenary howled again, thumping his fists against his chest. _He's enjoying this._ That was good. It would make him careless.\n\nPanic began to well in Schweitzer's spiritual gut at the thought of his disadvantage, but he pushed it aside. _Focus. He's got one up on you. You need to find another way to win._\n\nGoing after the knife would take him straight into Gruenen's arms, so Schweitzer ran the other way, pelting down the industrial carpeting, faux-wooden office doors a blur to either side. Plexiglas plaques proclaimed business names beside windows reinforced with wire. Sarah's signal came behind him, maddeningly close, calling him back to her.\n\nBut there was no Sarah. Her soul was bound into the corpse that shambled after him. She was there and not there. She was with him and lost to him. Grief blurred his senses, even as he felt the electrostatic charge rise as Gruenen readied himself for another burst of lightning. Schweitzer shot to his right, yanking a door open as the blast tore after him, the electricity exploding the cheap pressboard into splinters, the glass melting and running down the wall. The cloud of dust filled the hallway, and Schweitzer knew he couldn't keep on like this. The narrow space was a shooting gallery, giving Gruenen the range and tight quarters he needed to hem his target in. Schweitzer had to get out of there until he could close the distance.\n\n_And then what?_ To kill Gruenen was to kill Sarah. _No, Sarah's already dead._ He remembered Jawid's words. _The great death. The last one._ If he destroyed Gruenen, would that condemn Sarah to something beyond the void? It didn't matter. He couldn't leave her tangled with Gruenen's rotten soul.\n\n_Position first. You need out of this hallway._ It stretched out ahead of him for at least another thirty feet. He wouldn't make it before the dust cleared. Schweitzer veered left, throwing his shoulder into the next office door, smashing it open and sending himself hurtling into the darkness within.\n\nThe wall behind the reflective metal desk was made of the same cheap wood as the door, and Schweitzer caught his own reflection as he cleared the dust cloud and caught his hips against the desk, sending him flipping over and into the chair on the other side. A huge embossed seal dominated the wall, brass silhouette of a rifleman standing on farmland before an American flag. THE GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE OF IOWA.\n\nSchweitzer rolled off the chair, picking it up and flinging it through the door. It wouldn't take Gruenen long to clear it, but it would buy him a second to survey his surroundings. There was nothing; a door led to adjacent offices from their side of the desk, and a small hatch in the wall likely led to a trash chute below. Schweitzer dared to hope that there was an incinerator at the bottom of it, but he already knew there wasn't. He would have been able to see the heated air wafting up the shaft.\n\nA crash as Gruenen tore through the dust cloud and stumbled over the wreckage of the chair. He smashed through it, the bones rising from his shoulders tossing the twisted metal back down the hall, then pushed into the doorway, knuckle-walking like a gorilla. \"Jim!\"\n\n_Sarah._ Schweitzer tried to reach back down the link, fumbling to connect to his wife. He tried to push his love to her, to give her some comfort as she struggled against Gruenen's relentless battering of her soul. He moved upstream against a strong current, as he had when he'd reached out to Jawid, Gruenen forcing the tide against him. For a moment, he felt Sarah's presence, so near it was like a physical touch. With that touch, he again lost the bubble, his training knocked aside by a need so powerful that he could no more stand against it than he could against gravity.\n\nA professional never let grief or anger drive. A professional didn't believe in fair fights, let alone fights where they were at a disadvantage, down an arm, body slowly coming apart, skeletal integrity compromised by hundreds of breaks, flesh held together by duct tape. A professional chose their ground and their moment, made damn sure that they didn't take on fights they couldn't win.\n\nBut with Sarah so close, Schweitzer was a professional no longer. He stood, hurling the desk up and into Gruenen's face, following close behind. _No,_ Sarah passed along the link as Gruenen rose, driving his head forward into the desk, breaking it in half. He strode through to meet Schweitzer, hands blazing lightning. Schweitzer kicked at his knee, succeeded only in nearly impaling one foot on the bone spike before Gruenen extended a hand. Schweitzer leaned aside as a lightning bolt sizzled over his shoulder, striking the hatch to the trash chute and sending it spinning away, leaving a dark, smoking hole in the wall.\n\nSchweitzer swung back, head-butting Gruenen in the ribs and driving a bone horn into his side. He could feel it grate against the dead mercenary's ribs, locking in place between the two of them, taking Gruenen's weight. This close, Schweitzer could feel the tide of Gruenen's magic so strongly, it was nearly suffocating. He shouted, straightened, jerking his head back and feeling Gruenen's feet come off the ground.\n\nGruenen shouted, bringing his fists down against Schweitzer's lower back hard enough to make his whole skeleton vibrate. The impact set Schweitzer off-balance, and he fell backward a few steps. Gruenen's weight sagged forward, and he brought his knees down, driving the spikes into Schweitzer's chest, then ripped them free. Schweitzer could feel his dead flesh tearing as the bone projections pulled out, Gruenen's thighs tensing to drive them in again. He would not be able to hold against more of those blows. He had to get Gruenen off of him quickly.\n\nSchweitzer let Gruenen's weight carry them the rest of the way, toppling over, waiting for the body to slide off the horn, freeing him to turn and fight. There was a shuddering impact and Schweitzer's forward momentum was halted. Gruenen flailed, legs kicking before he remembered the knee spines and tried to drive them forward again. Schweitzer got his good arm up in time to intercept Gruenen's right leg, but his left cleared the empty space where Schweitzer's other arm should have been, driving into his chest again. Schweitzer howled and wrenched his neck, desperate to get free. Gruenen worked to the same purpose, trying to rip himself off Schweitzer's horn. There was a moment of strain, a loud crack, and at last, Schweitzer felt the horn rip away from his skull, cracking in half along with Gruenen's ribs. The weight dropped away from his neck, and he whirled.\n\nGruenen was getting his feet under him, hands planted against the wall. Schweitzer's fall had slammed his head and shoulders into the trash chute, and the spider-webbing of cracks through the white cinder-block wall testified to the force of the impact. It wouldn't hold him for long.\n\nSchweitzer didn't need long. He kicked Gruenen in his ass. The dead mercenary shuddered, shoulders breaking as he hammered forward into a chute designed to accommodate boxes of paper half his size. His hands ripped off the wall as his arms were pressed to his sides. His legs twitched. Schweitzer could feel the rise in his magical current as he gathered it to him.\n\nSchweitzer stepped back, ran forward, leaping into a final kick that drove Gruenen the rest of the way through the wall and down into the chute below, his body jerking as he flailed himself to a stop a few feet down, knee spikes digging into the thin metal of the chute sides, claws dragging rents through the bright surface. As he stopped, the metal's shriek was replaced by Gruenen's animal cry. \"Jiiiiiiimmmmm!\"\n\nSchweitzer thrust his head and shoulders into the chute top, looked down at Gruenen's tangled corpse. The chute was twice the width of the entryway, and the dead mercenary jerked his broken shoulders, ripping his arms free, pulling himself forward and up.\n\nGruenen's shoulders were broken but still broad enough to wedge him into the tight space. Schweitzer was one arm slimmer and had the high ground. If he was going to fight Gruenen head on, circumstances would never favor him more.\n\nSchweitzer came down the chute boot-first, planting his sole against Gruenen's forehead, snapping the dead mercenary's head back. Schweitzer heard a dull cracking of Gruenen's cervical vertebrae as they took on Schweitzer's full weight. Schweitzer jammed his fist against the chute side and pushed, wedging himself in and keeping himself from falling farther. He planted one foot on Gruenen's shoulder and lifted the other to stomp him again.\n\nBut Gruenen, for all the beating he had taken, was still more whole than Schweitzer, stability and skeletal integrity lending him speed. He swept a hand up, catching Schweitzer's ankle and yanking it down.\n\nSchweitzer came off-balance, shoulder slamming into the rent left by Gruenen's claws. Gruenen pulled harder, pinning Schweitzer's arm against his side. Schweitzer struggled to free it, but even his magical strength was useless against the feet of concrete wall behind the thin metal sheeting. Gruenen hauled on the leg, pulling it taut and hauling himself up. He flailed out with another hand and grasped Schweitzer's other foot. Schweitzer tried to kick his feet free, but Gruenen held him fast, slowly hauling himself up Schweitzer's body, hand over hand.\n\nSchweitzer swept a knee up as soon as Gruenen's hands left his ankles, but it was impossible to get enough leverage in the tight space, and he succeeded only in keeping Gruenen below him, pinned to the back of the chute. All the while, Sarah's nearness tore at him, a moth fluttering against the side of a glass jar.\n\n\"Got you,\" Gruenen whispered. \"Got you.\"\n\nThe dead mercenary reached up, claws sliding out from his finger tips, and plunged them into Schweitzer's stomach. Schweitzer flailed, pushed, kicked, all for naught. Gruenen's feet were braced against the chute sides now, his broad bulk solidly wedged into the tight space, stable as if he stood on firm ground. Schweitzer felt the claws digging in, tunneling up as Schweitzer had done so long ago, when he and Sarah had fought the Golds in a Virginia field. But where Schweitzer had grasped his enemy's spine, Gruenen's hands curled around Schweitzer's floating ribs.\n\n\"Got you,\" Gruenen repeated, and began to pull.\n\nSchweitzer felt the pressure torquing him in two directions, his spine quivering, sternum sliding off center. The tendons in his torso began to tear, ligaments straining, muscles starting to fray. Gruenen's leverage was unbreakable. He was going to tear Schweitzer in half.\n\n_Jim._ Sarah's voice. She was so close. Schweitzer looked back up the shaft to the hatchless opening. He couldn't reach it with his arm trapped against his side. He flailed, pushed, stayed firmly locked in place.\n\nHe felt the first tiny cracks shudder through his ribcage.\n\nHe wondered if his soul would stay attached to his body once Gruenen broke him. How destroyed would he have to be before he was freed to return to the churning of the soul storm? Maybe he would be able to find Sarah there. With no way to resist Gruenen physically, he instead channeled his energy into the link with Sarah, trying to get a last touch of her. Maybe if he could scent her, truly feel her one last time, he would be able to follow her in the void. Maybe they could find one another in that churning chaos. He didn't think it was possible, but just a short while before, he had thought that life after death was impossible too.\n\n_Sarah, I'm sorry._ He'd failed her; he'd failed the mission. Love didn't conquer all. Righteousness was not stronger than death, not when you were down an arm, not when you had more duct tape than skin holding you together. The SEAL never ascribed to idiot notions of failure not being an option. Failure was always an option, and understanding that was the first step to avoiding it. And understanding failure meant accepting it when it came.\n\nGruenen's focus was on breaking Schweitzer in two, and for the moment, Sarah swam back down the link to him, her love so intense and immediate that it made his senses buzz. He drowned in the sensation, the nearness of her, so close it felt as if the stuff that made them up was mingling.\n\nSince Schweitzer's death and reanimation, their bodies had separated them, a gulf riven by her warm blood and beating heart. Now, here in the link forged by the magic that connected them, they were truly together, for the first time since a gun barrel had been shoved under Schweitzer's chin. He felt Sarah's soul anchored in the dead mercenary's body, as if only a branch of her flowed out to him. Schweitzer wrapped himself around it, wove into it.\n\nAnd for a moment, it was as it had been in their apartment on the night he'd been killed, with the moonlight making hammered silver of their skin as they made love. As it had then, the line between the two of them blurred, until Schweitzer forgot where he left off and she began, and they were one thing, drowning in love.\n\n_Oh, baby. I'm so sorry,_ he whispered.\n\n_Patrick is . . ._\n\n_He's safe. I'm sorry; I had to try . . ._\n\n_It's okay. It's okay._\n\n_I can't leave you in here with him; I've got to get you out of here. I'll find a way. I'll come back._\n\nAnd now Schweitzer could feel Gruenen's presence turning, reaching back from its focus on making the dead hands pry Schweitzer apart, focusing instead on the rosewater tide that linked Jim and Sarah Schweitzer blazing like a flower in the midst of the dark inner space within the dead mercenary.\n\nSarah turned from Schweitzer, facing her enemy, ready for the next round.\n\nSchweitzer focused on the link, visualized Gruenen's presence, hulking and black, dwarfing the tiny silver light that was his wife. He could feel the mercenary's malevolence, his anger. Schweitzer had snuck into his spiritual backfield, and Sarah had helped. There would be plenty of time to tear Schweitzer's body apart. For now, Sarah would be made to pay for speaking to the enemy.\n\n_No! You fucker! I'll kill you!_ Schweitzer was vaguely aware of his physical mouth emitting a howl of rage that rebounded off the chute's reflective metal walls. He funneled his anger through the link, as if by the very heat of it, he could blast Gruenen back.\n\nBut the only person to hear his words, the only person to feel the heat of his anger, was Sarah. She squared herself against Gruenen, buzzing hate so strong that Schweitzer could feel it in the back of his throat. Schweitzer could see her spiritual form, the silver outline of her body glowing orange with the heat of Schweitzer's anger, growing.\n\nIt was impossible to tell in the darkness of Gruenen's inner space, in the confusion of emotions that buffeted him, but Schweitzer imagined that he saw Sarah look back down the link toward him, saw the silver-washed contours of her face. She smiled at him, turned away.\n\nShe launched herself against Gruenen, the rage making the dark space within him reverberate. Gruenen was driven back, his huge darkness staggering under the assault of Sarah's onslaught. He reeled, fell against the edges of himself. Sarah pressed forward, buffeting him, pushing him back.\n\nBut Gruenen was strong. It only took him a moment to find his spiritual footing, to begin pressing back. Schweitzer continued to scream, helpless to move, to aid her. Unable to do anything but feel what she felt through the link.\n\nAnd so it was that he saw the plan forming in her mind, knew what she was about to do.\n\nAnd even now, when he knew it would free her from pain, he didn't want her to do it. Because he had fought so hard and come so far. Because at last, he had found her, and even agony was agony _together_.\n\nOnce Bound, two souls shared one corpse. The stronger could control the body. A spoken word, a bent finger, a footstep.\n\nSarah was not stronger than Gruenen, but the dead mercenary was knocked back for the moment.\n\n_Don't,_ Schweitzer found himself sending to Sarah, even as she swept up, seizing control of Gruenen's magic.\n\n_So others might live._ Sarah's voice was faint, wracked with the agony of her constant struggle with Gruenen. Schweitzer felt her tap into the flow that Gruenen commanded, drawing it about them. Schweitzer's physical senses heard the crackle of electricity as it wreathed Gruenen's lower body, well clear of Schweitzer. He smelled the burned stink of ozone and metal.\n\n_So others might live,_ Sarah repeated.\n\nHis oath.\n\n_I lost you,_ Schweitzer said. No matter how badly he wanted her, there was no way to have her back, not now. Sarah was dead; there was no changing that. Patrick was still alive in the hands of a stranger. He had solved the mystery of Sarah's return. He had found as much as there was to find. Now he had to destroy the Cell so Patrick could go on living. The void wasn't going anywhere. It would be waiting for him when the tattered remnants of his body finally gave out. _But the longer she twists in the soul storm, the more insane she'll become._ He knew that Ninip had not always been the ravening monster who shared Schweitzer's corpse. He had been a man once, before the maelstrom had its way with him. Schweitzer couldn't bear the thought of Sarah being slowly warped into a creature like that. _No,_ Schweitzer thought. _Ninip had millennia. You'll end this one way or another in less than a month._\n\nThe emotion travelled down the link, resonating with Sarah's spirit on the other end. The bolt of love and loss that she sent back up staggered him. _I'll find a way back to you, Jim. I always do._\n\nGruenen growled, tore after her. Sarah gave him a final spiritual shove, sending Schweitzer one last message. _So others might live. I died, Jim. Help him._\n\nPatrick. Help Patrick.\n\nGruenen's presence slammed into Sarah, dragging her back from her control over his magic. His malice flowed down the link between them, so strong it threw Schweitzer back, knocking him into his own physical form, wedged into the chute, trapped between Gruenen and the concrete behind the thin reflective metal.\n\nBut not before he saw Sarah smile, release the magic she'd Drawn around them.\n\nBright blue lightning flashed down from Gruenen's waist. Arcs of electricity danced up the metal chute, the smell of smoke and ozone nearly overwhelming to Schweitzer's augmented senses. A sudden burst of heat engulfed his head and shoulders. He kicked off, pushing Gruenen away, launching himself up toward the chute entrance, throwing himself through.\n\nTongues of lightning chased him, the cool air of the office rising up to embrace him. The lightning storm inside the chute collapsed the wall, and Schweitzer could see it crackling, rebounding off the chute's reflective metal surface. Gruenen's corpse hung in the center, flesh smoking, tongues of flame rising as he was consumed by electricity of his own making. _Not his making. Sarah pulled that trigger._\n\nGruenen tried to roar, the cry reduced to an insect buzzing as his throat melted. The flames of his eyes vanished as his face sheeted down, a gray liquid mixing with the sizzling ruin of his chest. Schweitzer tried to reach out for Sarah, but the link was static noise now. He had a vague sense of struggle, of agony, but nothing close to the detail he had known before Sarah had triggered Gruenen's magic against himself.\n\n\"Sarah!\" Schweitzer shouted as the lightning reached a fever pitch, the blue arcs self-sustaining now, independent of the magic, the entire chute turned into a glittering column of fire. The heat forced Schweitzer to back away, throwing his arm across his face, but not before he saw Gruenen shiver and finally explode.\n\nThe dead mercenary's flesh pattered off Schweitzer's face and shoulders. The broken link with Sarah throbbed, her absence a punch in his gut. Smoke was rising from his head and shoulders, one of his eyes closing as the skin melted over it, fusing the socket shut until the silver flame burned back through a moment later. He stumbled back into the wreckage of the desk, his enhanced hearing picking up the splattering sound of the pieces of Gruenen pattering down into the Dumpster below.\n\nThe link with Sarah was silent, the emotional funnel gone dead. Gruenen's magical tide no longer eddied. Schweitzer tried to roll his shoulders, felt the melted ruin of his skin catching, inhibiting the movement. But in the confines of the chute, the damage had been magnified a hundredfold. Schweitzer didn't need to look back in the hole to know that Gruenen was gone, and with him, Sarah.\n\nHe went back out into the hallway. The Sorcerer had managed to drag herself most of the way toward a bigger office farther down, where Schweitzer could see the heat signatures of five men crouching by the cold, dark square of a window. One of them was bent, arms working to uncoil a rope ladder.\n\nThe Sorcerer looked hopefully over her shoulder, her expression turning sour as she realized that it was Schweitzer and not Gruenen who has returning for her. \"You fucking . . . With one arm. You beat him with one arm!\"\n\n\"Don't need it,\" Schweitzer managed, snatching her up by her collar. Her shattered legs dragged on the carpet and she cried out.\n\n\"Shut up,\" he said. He dragged her the rest of the way to the door, the loss of Sarah making him savage. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and he felt her magical tide reaching out into the distance, and he knew she was seeking the void as Jawid had. Her magic washed over him and he bulled it aside. It got easier with practice. Each time he felt another's magic, he got a little better at controlling his own.\n\n\"You think because you are winning that you are a hero,\" the Sorcerer snarled. \" _Salle bette_ , you're a walking dead man. My kind created you. I'm the hero!\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Schweitzer said. \"How're your legs?\"\n\nThe Sorcerer twitched in his grasp. She flailed her fists, drumming them against the melted scar slurry of his hips. \"You don't fucking own me! You don't control me!\" she screamed.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Schweitzer said. \"You're your own woman. You chose to lock my wife in with a monster. You chose to stand by while he hurt her. You chose to work for the enemy. All your choices. All your responsibility.\"\n\n\"Listen to me! I can still help you. I can bring you together with your wife. I can protect your son.\"\n\nSchweitzer smiled his rictus grin. \"I've run against people like you all my life. You always bargain at the end.\"\n\n\"Please! I know how you won out against Ninip, Jim! You have to be good. You can't murder me.\"\n\nThe final door was thick; a cipher lock blinked red beside a shaded glass window. The state seal hung below the great seal of the United States, the eagle pronouncing that from the many, they had built one. Schweitzer planted his foot in the center of the seal.\n\nHis grief had tripped the scales, gone so far into the red that it lapped itself. It gave him a hideous focus, a strength beyond even what he'd known when he'd first pushed Ninip out and taken control of his corpse. The door folded in on itself, bending double, the doorknob popping off, the cipher panel sparking. The figures beyond froze, hands dropping to pistols. Two of them pushed down another, forcing him to shelter behind the desk. The last redoubled his efforts to get the rope ladder out.\n\nA second kick and the door flew inward. Schweitzer followed, the Sorcerer dragged in the wreckage, screaming as Schweitzer kicked the receptionist's desk out of the way and hauled her upright. The office was configured just as the last one, with doors at both sides of the room. Schweitzer went to the doorway where the red outlines of the figures ghosted the thickness of the walls. He heard the tension on trigger springs, the men around the Senator drawing down on the entrance. They would fire at the first thing to come through that door.\n\n\"I'm not going to murder you,\" he said.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\" the Sorcerer asked him as he swung her around to the doorway.\n\n\"You're the hero,\" Schweitzer said, \"prove it.\"\n\nHe shoved her forward, letting her go and sending her tumbling through the door.\n\nThe bullets tore into her even as she crumpled on her broken legs. She twitched in the air, spinning as she collapsed, her blood misting the far wall. Sarah had danced that way the last time Schweitzer had been alive, Patrick too. He supposed everyone looked like that when the gunfire came calling.\n\nHe felt her current wink out, saw her body sprawl, limp as a rag in a darkening pool. White dust settled slowly over her, broken away when the bullets had pierced her and torn divots in the wall.\n\nSchweitzer knew that the shooters would stay covered down on the entrance, scanning after their target had dropped. He had done the same thing a dozen times himself, and so he knew that a few moments later, they would relax just a fraction, their guard dropping as they slowly came to believe that nothing was coming in after them. They would begin to move toward the door, confusion sapping their focus.\n\nHe waited, heard their footsteps, heard the miniscule creak of the triggers as they let them out just a fraction, just enough to give him the time he needed.\n\nSchweitzer flowed around the door.\n\nHe immediately heard the trigger springs take on tension, could smell the adrenaline dumping into the gunmen's veins, wafting into the air from the sudden sheen of sweat that sprang out on their foreheads at the sight of him. They had just gunned down one of their own, flopping like a rag doll on broken legs; now they faced a one-armed monster, a shambling thing of ragged bone trailing scraps of meat.\n\nYet they still moved as if in slow motion. The operators in the stairwell had been prepped with cutting weapons, staged and ready to face him. These men had no such advantage. Schweitzer had been fighting the Golds for so long now that mere humans were no contest. The enemy closest to him swiveled his wrist to follow Schweitzer, loading the trigger, slapping it to the rear. Years on the range had taught Schweitzer that the rush would yank the pistol's muzzle low and to the left, and he leaned in the opposite direction, chopping out with his arm, expertly striking the man at the base of his neck, snapping it sideways. As the man fell forward, Schweitzer brought his knee up, cracking his ribs and sending him hurtling into the man with the rope ladder. He had just enough time to scream before the corpse of his comrade slammed into him, sending them both crashing through the window, his scream fading as they fell.\n\nThe next man got a shot off, and Schweitzer knew right away that his aim was true, could tell from the shooter's steady stance, his calm breathing. He also knew that the man was a professional, and professionals didn't shoot center mass. The bullet would be headed for the three-inch triangle that ran from the top of his mouth to the center of his forehead. Schweitzer tilted his head, bending his neck low enough to touch his ear to his shoulder, a move that would have given a living man whiplash.\n\nThe bullet skidded through the flesh, digging a furrow as it whined along the surface of his skull. Schweitzer felt the intense heat of its touch, and then it was gone again, flying on and through the wall behind him. The man had been so sure of his shot that he'd released the trigger, giving himself a split second to see that his target was down. It would have been a fatal mistake for a lesser shot, but this man was good and he knew it. His eyes widened in shock as the round missed and Schweitzer closed the rest of the distance, kicking straight up, catching the enemy on his chin and snapping his neck. He turned a twitching somersault, landing in a limp pile.\n\nThe final enemy reached down behind the desk, dragging an older man into view. His hair was immaculate despite sheltering in the midst of the fight, his kind features crunched with worry. He stayed low, crab-walking with his escort, clearly a man trained for protective security details.\n\n\"Senator Hodges,\" Schweitzer said as the last enemy leveled his gun at him.\n\n\"Stop right there!\" The man's voice was panicked; he knew he couldn't beat Schweitzer. He'd just watched him take out his three squadmates in as many seconds.\n\nHodges had more sangfroid. He shook off the man's hand, straightening. \"Hello, Jim.\"\n\nSchweitzer turned to the remaining man. \"Time for you to go,\" he said. \"I've had enough killing. You can tell your bosses that you blew it.\"\n\nThe man looked at the Senator, and Hodges put a hand on his shoulder. \"I'm glad you're being reasonable, Jim.\" Hodges's voice was a cartoon of New England gentry, and Schweitzer remembered it now from televised committee hearings.\n\n\"I'm not being reasonable,\" Schweitzer said. \"I'm being exhausted. Last chance.\" He nodded to the man.\n\n\"Now, Jim.\" Hodges patted the air with his palms. \"I understand that you're angry . . .\"\n\nSchweitzer heard the tension coming out of the trigger spring in the man's hand. He couldn't leave his charge. He was a professional. Schweitzer could respect that. He would have done the same thing, had taken the same oath. So others might live.\n\nHe punched the man's wrist, the gun going off, bullet discharging harmlessly into the ceiling. The pistol's hammer struck the man in the eye at the same time his wristbone snapped, and Schweitzer heard him groan as he dropped to the floor, hand clapped to the bleeding socket, desperately trying to hold the popped remains of his eye in his skull.\n\nHodges winced. \"Christ, Jim. It's hard to believe you used to be a good man.\"\n\n\"I'm not a man anymore,\" Schweitzer said, \"but good or bad, I just saved your life.\"\n\n\"You just took the lives of four service members, Jim. Men just doing their jobs. Men protecting me.\"\n\n\"They weren't protecting you,\" Schweitzer said. \"They were holding you hostage.\"\n\nThe man on the ground groaned, driving the heel of his hand into the ruined remains of his eye. His free hand held the broken wrist. He was definitely out of the fight. Schweitzer jerked his thumb at the Sorcerer. If she was like Jawid, there would probably be more. Who knew if they would all be able to do what Eldredge said she could have done? Hodges wouldn't be safe, not now.\n\n\"Why the hell would my own people hold me hostage?\" Hodges asked, but Schweitzer could hear the vibration in his throat, the tiny upward lilt at the end of his words. The seeds of doubt were already planted.\n\n\"That\"\u2014Schweitzer gestured to the Sorcerer again\u2014\"was going to do something terrible to you. I take it you know about the Gemini Cell?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to tell\u2014\"\n\n\"So, yes, you do. Eldredge had mentioned that there was only one person in the government who knew about it.\"\n\n\"Doctor Eldredge is a traitor. He is in the employ of a foreign\u2014\"\n\nSchweitzer waved the statement away. \"Maybe, but the truth is that I don't care. You know about the jinn. What you don't know is that that woman was going to put one in you. Because they wanted to keep the program going. Because they knew you would shut it down.\"\n\n\"You're lying,\" Hodges said, but Schweitzer could tell that the Senator believed him.\n\nSchweitzer shrugged, feeling the tension in his melted skin. \"Maybe, but you're out of choices, Senator. You can't fight me and I'm not letting you go.\"\n\n\"Where are you taking me?\"\n\n\"Away. There'll be more coming. There are always more. First, we're going get someplace safe, then you're going to call off the dogs and save my son. After that, we can work on taking this program apart.\"\n\n\"Just who do you think you are?\" Hodges's voice was full of wonder.\n\n\"I'm the monster who saved your life,\" Schweitzer answered. He took hold of Hodges's elbow, began to steer him toward the rope ladder. \"They had the right idea, at least. Makes more sense than going out through the lobby.\"\n\nHodges shook off Schweitzer's hand. He had courage. Schweitzer would credit him with that, but he knew it was always the way with people used to being in charge. \"What do you want?\" the Senator asked.\n\nSchweitzer thought about that for a moment before answering. \"I want my wife back.\"\n\nSchweitzer wasn't sure if Hodges was genuinely sympathetic or merely seeking leverage, but his voice sounded genuine enough, sorrowful. \"She's dead.\"\n\nSchweitzer gave Hodges a shove, steadying the Senator as he got his feet onto the rope ladder. The man refused to climb down, staring up into Schweitzer's face. \"I'm truly sorry, Jim, but she's dead.\"\n\nSchweitzer didn't bother trying to smile. He was too tired. The fatigue gave him strength, put an edge on his doggedness. This life after death had painted the whole world with a patina of despair, but it had turned everything he'd ever known about what it meant to be alive on its ear. That wasn't quite hope, but it was close. \"That never stopped her before,\" Schweitzer said. \"Come on, Senator. It's a long climb down.\"\n\nHodges went, and Schweitzer followed. The Iowa night was cool and still. A thick sheet of cloud had rolled out over the sky, blotting out the stars behind a wall of spun cotton. It pooled shadows around the base of the building, wrapping itself around an island of sodium street lights marching in orderly rows all the way to the river.\n\nHodges looked up at Schweitzer, and Schweitzer saw no fear in him, knew that if he listened for his heartbeat, he would find it steady and calm. \"You're not going to hurt me, are you?\"\n\nSchweitzer shook his head. \"Hurt enough in the world already.\"\n\nHodges nodded and started moving again, until his feet touched down on top of an access ledge that marked the rope ladder's end. From there, Schweitzer scooped him up over his shoulder and vaulted the rest of the way down. Hodges suffered the indignity until they reached the lake of shadows around the tower's base, and the darkness swallowed them whole.\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\nCOASTLINE\n\n\"You're late,\" Eldredge said, tapping his watch. \"If we're going to be in business together, we can't have that. I need to be able to trust you.\"\n\n\"This isn't exactly what I call a big purchase,\" the kid answered. \"You want to be treated like a high roller, you have to pay for it.\" A breeze blew in from San Diego Bay, ruffling the kid's hair. He couldn't have been older than sixteen. The thought of one so young making a living at crime twisted Eldredge's gut, but he quelled the sympathy before it had a chance to make him lose focus. He had one kid to take care of already.\n\n\"I only get a fifteen-minute break.\" Eldredge nodded at the night watchman's booth behind him. \"I'm gone too long, I can get in trouble.\" Knuckling under to his twentysomething manager for minimum wage stuck in his craw, but it was the only job Eldredge could find where they wouldn't ask questions.\n\n\"No way you can afford this from this bitch-ass job.\" The kid gestured at the booth. \"Where you get this kind of money?\"\n\n\"Let's just say I have some other skills. I moonlight.\"\n\n\"The fuck you do. You're like ninety, dude.\"\n\n\"I don't have time for this. Do you have it or not?\"\n\n\"Relax, man. I have it.\" The kid produced a manila envelope. Eldredge took it, but the kid held on. \"Dude. Money.\"\n\nEldredge passed him a wad of cash and the kid let go. Eldredge tore the envelope open, trying not to let his eagerness show. The birth certificate looked real enough, right down to the raised seal. \"Carlos?\" he asked.\n\nThe kid shrugged. \"I wrote a script that generates the names randomly. Trust me, a lot less likely to get caught that way.\"\n\n\"This backstopped?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I told you. I've got remote access to the citizens registry database. You want out of this job? I can get you a fucking doctor's license if you want. It'll check out.\"\n\n\"Thanks; if this works out, I will definitely be back for some more items.\"\n\n\"I always appreciate repeat customers, man.\"\n\nEldredge knew he should end it there, but he couldn't help himself. \"Look, kid. You need to get an interlocutor. You don't want to be meeting with your clients in person.\"\n\nThe kid looked up at him, eyes hard. \"The fuck you know about it?\"\n\n\"I was in a . . . similar business for a long time.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Well, then, you know that the more people involved, the more chance you're going to have a fucking rat.\"\n\n\"That's why you need someone you trust.\"\n\n\"You trying to get in on my business?\"\n\nEldredge laughed. \"No, no. I've got enough on my plate. I'm just saying that you're getting lucky here. Sooner or later, you're going to get burned. If you don't have someone you trust, you need to use a dead drop to drop off the goods and pick up the money.\"\n\n\"What the fuck is a dead drop?\"\n\nEldredge looked back down at his watch. \"Google it.\"\n\nHe turned to go. \"Hey,\" the kid said.\n\n\"Yeah?\" Eldredge turned.\n\n\"What do you need that for? You're not . . . like you're not . . .\" There was a glimmer there of the kid he'd been before whatever had happened to him had flipped the switch that made the difference between legitimate computer programmers and hackers.\n\n\"I'm not a kid-toucher,\" Eldredge said. \"He's my grandson. His dad's a violent drunk who also happens to be a cop. Court wouldn't give me custody, and his dad was about one bender away from killing him. I had to get him out of there.\"\n\nThe kid raised a skeptical eyebrow, but Eldredge knew the tells on his face. He'd wanted a story he could repeat to himself when his conscience came calling, and Eldredge had given him one. He wasn't dumb enough to go chasing the truth. Besides, what he wanted to know _was_ true. Eldredge wasn't exploiting Patrick.\n\n\"Okay,\" the kid finally said, turning to go.\n\n\"Oh, hey, one more thing,\" Eldredge said. \"You know Sector San Diego? That Coast Guard building near the . . .\"\n\n\"The museum, on Guadalcanal Avenue. Yeah, I know it.\"\n\n\"Do you know if they take Transport Workers Identity Cards to get on the pier near there?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but I can get you a TWIC. Email me at the same address.\"\n\n\"All right, I will. You remember what I told you about dead drops. Google brush passes while you're at it.\"\n\n\"Whatever. What do you want with the Coast Guard?\"\n\n\"Old friend,\" Eldredge said. \"Fan of my grandson. I figured he'd like to see me again.\"\n\nThe kid nodded and vanished into the gloom. Eldredge turned and headed back to the booth. He'd probably said more to the kid than he should have, but that was the trick with these sorts of things. Sooner or later, you had to stick your neck out if you wanted to get anything done. When he tried to think about the complexity of the way forward, how he was going to contact Schweitzer's old shipmate, how to approach him, how to keep himself and Patrick hidden until he was ready, what to do if Perretto wasn't sympathetic, it seemed overwhelming. Best to take baby steps, then. Eat the elephant one bite at a time.\n\nFirst, he would go back to the booth and call Patrick's babysitter, make sure everything was okay. Second, he would finish his shift doing research on schools where he could get Patrick enrolled with the forged birth certificate. That was enough for tonight.\n\nEldredge looked up at the pink streaks on the horizon. Tomorrow was coming on fast.\n\n# GLOSSARY OF MILITARY ACRONYMS AND SLANG\n\nABC'S\u2014Airway, breathing, circulation. First responders check these to ensure a patient's vitality. Direct-action teams check them to ensure a target has been neutralized.\n\nBIRD\u2014Aviation asset such as a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft.\n\nBLEED OUT\u2014Die via blood loss.\n\nBMF\u2014Boat Maintenance Facility.\n\nBUD\/S\u2014Basic Underwater Demolition\/SEAL training. The six-month training course that all sailors must graduate to become US Navy SEALs. BUD\/S alone does not make one a SEAL, and additional training is required. BUD\/S is intensely grueling, with an 80 percent attrition rate.\n\nCARBINE\u2014A long gun with a shorter barrel than a rifle. Carbines are better suited to combat in close quarters than their longer cousins.\n\nCAS\u2014Close air support. Action taken by fixed or rotary-wing platforms to assist ground troops.\n\nCHEMLIGHT\u2014Also known as \"glow sticks.\" A short plastic tube filled with chemical compounds in separate compartments. When the stick is bent, the barrier between the compartments breaks, allowing the compounds to mix. The resultant chemical reaction causes the tube to emit a strong colored glow.\n\nCLEARED HOT\u2014Authorized to open fire.\n\nCO\u2014Commanding Officer.\n\nCONDITION BLACK\u2014A state of paralysis brought on by sudden, unanticipated violence.\n\nCONDITION YELLOW\u2014A state of hypervigilance where a person is constantly anticipating sudden violence.\n\nCONEX\u2014A type of intermodal shipping container.\n\nCOP\u2014Combat Outpost.\n\nCORPSMAN\u2014Job title for United States Navy personnel assigned to field medical duties.\n\nCQB\u2014Close quarters battle. Refers to the tactics of breaching and clearing confined spaces, such as a building or ship.\n\nDANGER CLOSE\u2014Indicates a friendly force in close proximity to a target of fire, usually from artillery or close air support.\n\nDFAC\u2014Dining facility.\n\nDUST OFF\u2014Evacuate via helicopter.\n\nDYNAMIC\u2014An operational state wherein the enemy is aware of the assault team's presence, rendering stealth unnecessary.\n\nEMBED\u2014Embedded or one who is embedded.\n\nEMT\u2014Emergency Medical Technician.\n\n\"EYES ON\"\u2014Indicates the speaker is observing the subject of the sentence. \"I have eyes on the door.\"\n\nFIRE TEAM\u2014The smallest operational military unit, usually composed of 4\u20135 members.\n\nFNG\u2014Fucking New Guy\/Girl. A person who is newly assigned to a military unit. This friendly pejorative is meant to indicate the likelihood that the described will make mistakes.\n\nGROM\u2014Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno-Manewrowego. Poland's elite counterterrorism unit.\n\nHAWK\u2014Armed aviation asset such as a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft.\n\n\"HONEY TRAP\"\u2014A clandestine operation in which an agent sexually attractive to the target is used to entice the target into a compromised position. Honey traps are also used to elicit information from pliant targets.\n\nHVAC\u2014Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning.\n\nK-9\u2014Canine. A unit that employs working dogs for law enforcement or military operations. The term is also used to refer to the dogs themselves.\n\nKC\u2014Kill-Capture. A direct-action mission wherein the team's first goal is to capture a human target. If the team is unable to capture the target without risking harm to their own number, they will kill him\/her. A successful KC must conclude with the target either captured or dead.\n\nKLICK\u2014Slang for a kilometer.\n\nLNO\u2014Liaison Officer.\n\nMAM\u2014Military-aged male.\n\nMANPAD\u2014Man-portable air-defense system. A shoulder-mounted missile launcher.\n\nMCPO\u2014Master Chief Petty Officer.\n\nMEDEVAC\u2014Medical evacuation. An emergency retrieval and removal of a casualty from a crisis zone. The patient is stabilized and transferred as quickly as possible to a medical facility where adequate care can be provided.\n\nMGRS\u2014Military Grid Reference System.\n\n\"MIKES\"\u2014Minutes.\n\nMWR\u2014Morale, Welfare, and Recreation center.\n\nNODS\u2014Night Optical Devices. Mechanical devices that permit the user to see in the dark.\n\n\"OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD\"\u2014Slang used to indicate a visit to a mental health professional.\n\nOP\u2014Operation. Refers to any military undertaking with a discrete beginning and end.\n\nOPERATOR\u2014Members of Special Forces elements who engage in special operations. Term connotes members of direct-action elements whose primary tasking is breaching hardened targets and neutralizing a dug-in enemy.\n\nPAX\u2014Passenger or passengers.\n\n\"PINNING ON\" OR \"PINNED ON\"\u2014The act of physically attaching the insignia of a new rank or qualification to a uniform.\n\nPIPE HITTER\u2014A fighter. A person whose principal occupation is the use of force.\n\nPJ\u2014Pararescue Jumpers, also known as Pararescuemen. A special operations element within the United States Air Force.\n\nPLATOON\u2014A military organizational unit consisting of twenty-eight to sixty-four members.\n\nPTSD\u2014Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.\n\nQRF\u2014Quick Reaction Force. A standby troop of warfighters positioned to respond rapidly to an emergency.\n\nR AND R\u2014Rest and Relaxation.\n\nROE\u2014Rules of Engagement.\n\nSEABEES\u2014CBs, the construction battalions of the United States Navy.\n\nSEAL\u2014\"Sea, Air, and Land.\" A special operations force of the United States Navy.\n\nSITREP\u2014Situation Report.\n\nSO2\u2014Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class.\n\nSOAR\u2014Special Operations Aviation Regiment. A special operations force of the United States Army that provides both general and specialized aviation support.\n\nSOC\u2014Supernatural Operations Corps.\n\nSOCOM\u2014Special Operations Command.\n\nSOF\u2014Special Operations Forces. Also referred to as \"SF,\" as an acronym for \"Special Forces.\"\n\nSPECTER\u2014A flying gunship.\n\nSQT\u2014SEAL Qualification Training.\n\nSQUIRTERS\u2014A colloquial term for those enemy who flee a targeted location.\n\nSSG\u2014Special Services Group. Pakistan's special operations forces.\n\nSSRI\u2014Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. Medication typically used to treat anxiety and depression.\n\nSST\u2014Special Security Team. An elite counterterrorism unit in the Japanese Coast Guard.\n\nTCCC\u2014Tactical Combat Casualty Care. First-responder medical training given to operators. It is designed to allow nonmedical personnel to engage in triage under fire, and to stabilize casualties for medevac.\n\nTIC\u2014Troops in Contact. Indicates that the speaker is engaged and fighting with the enemy.\n\nVTC\u2014Video Teleconference.\n\nWIA\u2014Wounded in Action.\n\nYN1\u2014Yeoman First Class. A senior enlisted member of the US Navy or Coast Guard specializing in administration.\n**Looking for more?**\n\nVisit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.\n\n**Discover your next great read!**\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Praise for Myke Cole\n  3. Ace Books by Myke Cole\n  4. Title Page\n  5. Copyright\n  6. Dedication\n  7. Acknowledgments\n  8. Contents\n  9. Epigraph\n  10. Author's Note\n  11. CHAPTER I: THE PLAN IS SOUTH\n  12. CHAPTER II: HUNTING THE DEAD\n  13. CHAPTER III: CALIFORNIA SUNSHINE\n  14. CHAPTER IV: BRIEFING\n  15. CHAPTER V: TOUCHING DOWN\n  16. CHAPTER VI: MAMA DADOU\n  17. CHAPTER VII: PATCHING UP\n  18. CHAPTER VIII: WHAT IT'S LIKE\n  19. CHAPTER IX: HONESTLY, OFFICER\n  20. CHAPTER X: COLLATERAL DAMAGE\n  21. CHAPTER XI: TOGETHER\n  22. CHAPTER XII: PURE GOLD\n  23. CHAPTER XIII: PROGRAM REVIEW\n  24. CHAPTER XIV: ON TO THE LIVING\n  25. CHAPTER XV: ALL THE DEAD CAN DO IS PROTECT\n  26. CHAPTER XVI: DOESN'T ANYONE KNOCK ANYMORE?\n  27. CHAPTER XVII: THE PLAN IS WEST\n  28. CHAPTER XVIII: PUSHED TOO FAR\n  29. CHAPTER XIX: THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE\n  30. CHAPTER XX: WHY DID YOU GO?\n  31. CHAPTER XXI: LAST RESORT\n  32. CHAPTER XXII: NEW MANAGEMENT\n  33. CHAPTER XXIII: RETURN\n  34. CHAPTER XXIV: THE FLIGHT IN\n  35. CHAPTER XXV: COMBINED\n  36. CHAPTER XXVI: SO OTHERS MIGHT LIVE\n  37. EPILOGUE: COASTLINE\n  38. Glossary of Military Acronyms and Slang\n\n  1. Contents\n  2. Cover\n  3. Start\n\n  1. i\n  2. ii\n  3. iii\n  4. iv\n  5. v\n  6. vi\n  7. vii\n  8. viii\n  9. ix\n  10. x\n  11. xi\n  12. xii\n  13. xiii\n  14. xiv\n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. \n  317. \n  318. \n  319. \n  320. \n  321. \n  322. \n  323. \n  324. \n  325. \n  326. \n  327. \n  328. \n  329. \n  330. \n  331. \n  332. \n  333. \n  334. \n  335. \n  336. \n  337. \n  338. \n  339. \n  340. \n  341. \n  342. \n  343. \n  344. \n  345. \n  346. \n  347. \n  348. \n  349. \n  350. \n  351. \n  352.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n# Landscape Painting Essentials\n\n## Lessons in Acrylic, Oil, Pastel and Watercolor\n\n## with Johannes Vloothuis\n\nCINCINNATI, OHIO\n\nartistsnetwork.com\n\n### Thank you for purchasing this _Artist Network_ eBook.\n\nSign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to free content, and information on the latest new releases and must-have art resources! Plus, receive a coupon code to use on your first purchase from NorthLightShop.com for signing up.\n\nor visit us online to sign up at\n\n<http:\/\/artistsnetwork.com\/ebook-promo>\n\n# Contents\n\nSpecial Offers\n\nIntroduction\n\nMaterials\n\n### Chapter 1\n\n## Paint How the Eye Sees\n\nVisual Perception vs. Photographic Perception\n\nReference Photos: Friend or Foe?\n\nThe Peripheral Area\n\nSimplifying Foregrounds\n\nBlurred Edges\n\nDemonstration: Paint a Landscape with a Simplified foreground\n\n### Chapter 2\n\n## Design With Abstract Shapes\n\nSymmetrical Brain vs. Artistic Brain\n\nLandscape Shapes\n\nTechniques for Promoting the Artistic Brain\n\nNegative Painting\n\nDemonstration: Use Negative Painting to Create Abstract Shapes\n\nComposition With Abstract Masses\n\nDemonstration: Paint With Abstract Shapes\n\n### Chapter 3\n\n## Vary and Enrich Colors\n\nControlling Monochromatic Color Schemes\n\nDemonstration: Color Matching\n\nColor Temperature\n\nEstablishing Color Harmony\n\nDemonstration: Variegate Color in a Painting\n\n### Chapter 4\n\n## Create Melodic Movement\n\nProblematic Implied Lines\n\nValuable Implied Lines\n\nLost-and-Found Lines\n\nSolving Problematic Implied Lines\n\nVisual Paths\n\nEstablishing Rhythm\n\nDemonstration: Create Melodic Movement in a Painting\n\n### Chapter 5\n\n## Simplify\n\nZoom In and Cut Out\n\nSimplifying Nature\n\nSimplifying Architecture\n\nDemonstration: Simplify Your Painting Composition\n\n### Chapter 6\n\n## Avoiding Clones\n\nIdentifying Clones\n\nOffsetting Clones\n\nAvoid a mirror effect\n\nDemonstration: Offset Clones in a Landscape Painting\n\n### Chapter 7\n\n## Accentuate Depth\n\nMethods for Accentuating Depth\n\nDemonstration: Accentuate Depth in A Background\n\nAbout the Author\n\nDedication\nTo my wife, Patty, who always supported me in my painting ventures and to my sons, Johannathan, Christopher and especially Kenny, who is also an artist and contributed some of his knowledge to this book.\n\n## Introduction\n\nI fell in love with landscape painting when I was in my thirties. I was thrilled with the idea that I could create my own worlds. As happens with all artists, my early attempts were to copy photographs exactly. I erroneously thought that if I could copy nature from a good photo, I would end up with a successful painting. I chose the most outstanding scenes, set my studio up and started to paint... but it just was not working. I said to myself, \"This doesn't look right. I don't like what I am painting. \"\n\nFor years, I battled to get the answers to what it took to paint successful landscapes. I went to several instructors, got a few tips here and there, but nothing that could really make a big enough impact in my artwork. I remember promising myself, \"If I ever get good at this, I will share everything so others won't have to go through the same frustration\".\n\nAfter reading countless books and carefully observing top artists' work, I started to see patterns that they all repeated in their artwork. So I back engineered their paintings and figured out the commonality in their compositions. This is when I began to apply a science to my process, and my paintings started to click. I won the top award in a nationwide contest in Mexico and began to sell many paintings.\n\nA few years later, I joined WetCanvas, an art focused social network where people share their paintings and tips. I remembered my promise and offered help and advice to other artists seeking answers. Eventually, I was recognized by the publishers of this book, who named me a Master Painter. They approached me to teach live online classes and workshops that would reach out to even more artists.\n\nSince then, I have taught over 15,000 artists, including professionals. These classes enabled me to verbalize in simple understandable terms the science of beauty in landscape painting, and much of it is now being revealed in this book. I part with this notion, I don't believe in ugly paintings because it is a human expression, but I do believe one should pursue venues to make them more beautiful.\n\nThe Teton\n\n**Open acrylics on linen glued to masonite board, 8\" \u00d7 10\" (20cm \u00d7 25cm)**\n\n## Materials\n\nThere are entire books devoted to the topic of how to choose the best supplies and tools for creating your artwork. Here is a brief overview of the materials I prefer to use when creating my paintings. Experiment with different brands and mediums to find the products that work best for you.\n\n#### Easels\n\nI use a Soltek easel. This is the diamond of all easels. Set up is fast and easy. There are no wing nuts to turn. It is all metal and light weight compared to many other easels. I have done over 500 plein air paintings with it.\n\n#### Brushes\n\nI prefer brights for all my mediums. The square heads help me design abstract shapes. Rigger brushes work well for thin lines. I use a pastry brush for grass in watercolor.\n\n#### Sponge Tools\n\nThese PanPastel washable applicators are made with a special sponge to apply the paint in a thin film.\n\n#### Palettes\n\nThis homemade palette has a glass panel with a mid-value gray sheet under it. The surface makes scraping off unwanted paint a breeze.\n\n#### Oil Paints\n\nI prefer Winsor and Newton Artist's Oil Paints. They cooperate very well without the need of a medium.\n\n#### Acrylic Paints\n\nAtelier acrylics are buttery and feel like oil paints.\n\n#### Pastels\n\nPanPastel is a marvelous pastel medium that is applied like paint. It feels like a cross between oils and watercolors, with the advantage that you can erase unwanted areas. You can also add stick pastels to it.\n\n#### Watercolors\n\nWinsor and Newton Artist's Watercolors are much better to work with than the lesser-quality pigments.\n\n# Chapter 1\n\n# Paint How the Eye Sees\n\nCrowfoot Glacier, banff\n\nOil on linen, 24\" \u00d7 20\" (61cm \u00d7 51cm)\n\nOne of the most common phrases art instructors use is, \"Paint what you see!\" This needs some clarification however, because many artists assume this means to copy what they see literally, rather than designing their paintings to be compatible with how the eye anatomically sees. This applies to both plein air and painting from reference photos. Once you understand the way the human eye perceives reality, you will be able to tailor your paintings to look the way the scene would appear as the information is processed in the brain.\n\nTry this: Look at the first word in this paragraph. Without moving your eyes from that word, read as many adjacent words as you can. You'll notice that you can only bring a few words into focus and will not be able to read the rest of the sentence unless you move your eyes. The same applies to nature scenes\u2014as long as you are looking at one specific area, definition elsewhere becomes lost. You will get better results if you keep this concept in mind: Paint how the eye sees, not what you see!\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to avoid distractions in the peripheral areas of a landscape scene.\n  * How to blur edges in the distance.\n  * How to simplify foregrounds.\n\n## Visual Perception vs. Photographic Perception\n\nOne of the most common mistakes beginning artists make is attempting to recreate exactly what appears in their reference photos\u2014everything in sharp focus, everything in detail\u2014but this is not the way the eye actually sees a given scene. The eyes have only a narrow range of sharp visual perception, and the camera does not capture an image in the same way that the eye sees it. In images captured by a camera, everything is in equal focus and all edges are well defined because all the light sensors are equally dispersed in the camera chip. So if an artist copies that photo exactly, the painting will seem \"off\" to viewers.\n\nTo illustrate this, imagine you are playing a game of pool. When focusing on the white cue ball several feet away from you, your eye will bring only that specific ball into sharp focus. All the surrounding balls, even the ones that are actually closer to you will appear to become blurred round objects with undefined edges. This is an important concept to keep in mind with your paintings.\n\n#### How Cameras Work\n\nA digital camera has millions of pixels. This picture shows the way they appear evenly spaced. Each pixel works like a sensor cell in our eyes, but in this case the cells don't become more dispersed towards the outer regions of the eye. That's why everything in a photo is in sharp focus, but with the human eye it is not.\n\n#### Peripheral Vision\n\nThis is the way sensor cells in the human eye look under a microscope. There is a much higher concentration of cells in the center of the eye. These cells become more spaced out the further away they get from the middle. This is why our peripheral vision is blurry and cannot see detail outside of the parameter we are looking at directly. Every cell receives visual input much like camera sensors. The closer the cells are together, the sharper the image becomes. The more space between the cells the blurrier the image becomes.\n\n#### Real Life Scenes Are Not Cropped\n\nBecause of the format of a canvas, paintings become cropped, which results in unnatural and abrupt interruption to eye flow and contradicts how we perceive the world. Therefore, we must rely on artistic techniques to offset this.\n\nIn the eye's peripheral vision:\n\n  * Darks become lighter.\n  * Color saturation is less pronounced.\n  * Details become blurrier.\n\n## Reference Photos: Friend or Foe?\n\nThe answer is both! Photographs can help or hinder us as artists. They can trick us into copying them exactly, yet provide excellent visual information to tell a story. When I first began painting, I relied heavily on photos. I copied exactly the values, colors, edges and every detail. Yet, no matter how good a reference photo I had, I could not produce a solid painting. I kept asking myself what I was missing. Finally it dawned on me\u2014you can rely on reference photos for details and shapes, but colors and values cannot be trusted.\n\nPhotos will show outdoor mid-dark objects as a colorless black. This will contradict daylight ambience. To make matters worse, once you print out a digital photo there is even further deterioration of colors, which end up being muddy. After this revelation, my artwork surged to a new level.\n\nTo understand this, it helps to understand a bit about how a camera works. The shutter opens and closes in a fraction of a second. The amount of time the shutter stays open relates to the degree of light allowed in, which results in more light in the photo. The auto setting of the light meter of the camera measures a specific area and shoots with a predetermined shutter speed. If the sensor sees a bright light such as in the sky, the values in the photo will be accurate only in that specific area. Everything outside of that center point will get darker. If the light meter registers a dark area such as a group of evergreen trees, the sky will appear overexposed. This is how it's possible to end up with two completely different photos of the same scene.\n\n#### Camera Exposure\n\nThe photo on the left is under exposed because the center of the camera was aimed at the bright waterfall. The photo on the right is overexposed because the camera measured the dark evergreen trees. The naked eye would never see masses of evergreen trees that dark during the daytime like in the second photo. Likewise, you wouldn't see a bleached out waterfall such as in the first photo. There were also far more colors in the rocks than could be seen in either photo.\n\nYou don't want your painting to end up with dull, flat dark or over-exposed areas\u2014so which photo should be used as reference? The answer is: both. The best thing to do is take several pictures of the same scene with variances in shutter speed. Even if the real scene does not have color variances, you as an artist should enhance monotonous colors to make the painting more interesting. Proficient artists basically use photos only for ideas and details, much like a movie director bases a film on a storyboard.\n\n## The Peripheral Area\n\nDo you remember the notebook paper you used in school that had blue lines and a red margin on the left? When I was a kid I constantly got scolded for writing in the margins because that was a forbidden area that was supposed to remain blank. You can apply this same principle to all four sides of your paintings\u2014the \"margins\" being in proportion to the scale of your painting surface. This area is also known as the peripheral area.\n\nInside the peripheral area, it's best to avoid:\n\n  * obvious value contrasts\n  * hard edges\n  * saturated colors\n  * intricate or outstanding details\n\nThe peripheral area will simulate how detail fades in the peripheral vision of the eye. Applying this will help the eye agree with how things are naturally seen. The objective is to encourage your viewers to visually wander within the center portion of your painting so they do not exit it easily and will not get distracted by too much interest being created near the edges.\n\n#### Conveying the Illusion of Daylight\n\nIn most art instruction, there is usually reference to a ten-value scale, but this would only apply if the artwork is inside a room. Outdoors in nature, you can see hundreds of values because of the sun's intensity. Trying to replicate this light in a painting is an impossible task. So here, _paint what you see_ , goes out the window. Again we need to implement ways to mimic reality.\n\nBefore the Cadmium pigments were invented to add a glow to colors, the Old Masters had real problems depicting sunlit areas. They had to purposely exaggerate the dark areas to compensate. This practice contradicted nature... until the Impressionists started using Cadmiums and became successful at mimicking sunlight.\n\n#### Reduce Interest in the Peripheral Area\n\nIn this painting of a small fishing town in Nova Scotia, distractions have been reduced in the section marked as peripheral area. There was a choice of placing the window where it was originally, on the right edge of the canvas. After applying these principles, the window was moved to a better location in the painting.\n\n#### Don't Usher the Viewer Out of the Painting\n\nThe white building is not in a suitable place. It should be removed or darkened in value. If painted as is, it will become an eye magnet luring the viewer to exit the painting at the right side.\n\n## Simplifying Foregrounds\n\nWhen painting the way the eye anatomically sees, it is a good policy to generally leave the foreground alone. Remove obstacles and details so your viewers look past this area and deep into the painting. You might be inclined to think that the things closest to you should have the most detail, but the reality is that nobody looks directly at the ground unless is they're looking for something they dropped.\n\nLikewise, a painting should resemble how the eye sees in accordance to where it is looking under normal circumstances. The logic of where things are situated in the various planes, even if it they are closer, does not apply. By keeping your foreground simple, that area will not compete for attention.\n\nThe general practice by most accomplished landscape artists is to compile the most attractive visual information in the middle ground, where the head would be level and the eyes looking straight ahead. Details and objects in sharp focus should appear where the eye is looking, even if they are further into the distance.\n\n#### Example of a Simplified Foreground\n\nThe immediate foreground in this photo was altered to be used as an analogy of how to handle foregrounds. You cannot clearly distinguish the wooden ties and grass. The steel rails are not sharp either. The area that comes into focus is about fifteen feet ahead. This is how the eye would function if you were walking down those train tracks. Apply this principle to your paintings, and your viewers will feel more encouraged to \"walk in.\"\n\n#### Invite Your Viewers in from the Foreground\n\nThe immediate foreground should have no strong value contrasts, no strong color saturation and no outstanding detail. The foreground just serves the purpose of inviting you in.\n\nAlso note that the other three borders of the painting do not have eye-catching visual information. The intent is to invite the eye to see the arbor and the flowers and hold the attention there.\n\n#### Reduce Clutter in Foregrounds\n\nMerge stones in the immediate foreground or avoid them altogether. If you must have objects in those areas, match their values so they don't stand out. The original scene was cluttered with rocks. They were removed from the painting.\n\n#### Foreground Grass\n\nIt is not necessary to indicate grass strands at the very bottom margin. Take a step into the painting then add grass strands, rocks, flowers, etc., if this is what you wish to do. Like many professional artists, leave out grass strands entirely in paintings smaller than 16\" \u00d7 20\" (41cm \u00d7 51cm).\n\n#### Plan Your Mid-Values to Convey Daylight\n\nTo convey the illusion of broad daylight, plan your paintings to have predominant mid-values in most areas.\n\n#### Avoid Vertical Objects in the Bottom of a Frame\n\nCompare these two versions of the same plein air painting. The distraction from the foreground was removed in the bottom painting so that you are looking into the distance without the vertical objects pulling your eye.\n\n## Blurred Edges\n\nIn reality, both background and foreground objects in a scene have hard edges on their contours. The background objects won't get any softer, no matter how far away they are. We never give this any thought because the brain has its own mechanism of determining that something is further back in comparison to another object. The field depth is never questioned. Three-dimensional perception in reality is never compromised.\n\nHowever, if you paint those contours exactly as they are in reality (with hard edges), this can result in flat, hard edges all over the painting and a scene that looks two-dimensional. The trick here is to convey a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional surface.\n\nBlurring edges, also known as softening edges, is an efficient method you can use to fool the viewer's brain into seeing background objects as further away, creating depth and the illusion of three dimensions in a painting.\n\nAnother advantage of softening edges is that it simulates the eye's peripheral vision, as well as detracting viewers from getting \"stuck\" in certain areas of a paintings.\n\nRemember\u2014the secret is to paint _the way the eye anatomically sees_ , not how the reference photo looks!\n\n#### Soften Edges in Backgrounds\n\nThe blurred edges in the furthest plane convey the illusion of depth. As a general recommendation, blur as many edges as you can in backgrounds, especially if they appear behind buildings.\n\nIn this piece, I decided that adding too many bulrushes in the foreground would be distracting, so I just indicated a few as visual pointers.\n\n#### Photos Always Have Sharp Edges\n\nIn reality, you could easily distinguish which parts of a tree recede and which parts are closer to you. As soon as a photo is taken, however, the three-dimensional perception is nullified because all the foliage ends up looking hard edged. If painted this way, the foliage will look pasted on. Instead, render trees like portraits, softening edges of leaves and branches the same way you would do when painting hair at the back of a subject's head.\n\n#### Photos Flatten Planes\n\nCan you distinguish the different planes of those trees? Truthfully, the tree on the left is in front of the other trees, separated by at least fifty yards. If you just paint what you see, you will lose field depth.\n\n#### Lost-and-Found Edges\n\nBecause of the play of soft edges vs. hard edges, the tree looks round and you can tell which parts are closer to you. This is referred to as lost-and-found edges. The foliage against the sky has soft edges as well as hard edges. The soft areas convey the leaves in that cluster are more distant, while the harder edged leaves indicate they are closer.\n\n#### Stay Away from Tree Tops\n\nAvoid unnecessary branches that are too distracting, especially at the top of trees. Your viewers are supposed to look in the middle area without feeling somebody is waving at them from another part of the painting. This helps to agree with the out-of-focus peripheral portion of the eye. The tree on the right has just enough tree trunks to avoid a \"cotton ball\" aspect.\n\n#### Manipulate Edges to Recede Foliage\n\nThe hard-edged tree conveys the idea it is closer than the soft-edged tree, which is situated in a more distant plane. Wet-on-wet watercolor application allows for great edge diffusion.\n\n#### Walls, Bricks and Roof Tops\n\nThe back wall has fewer grooves than the front portion. The roof tiles are reduced at the far top corner. (The naked eye would not see all the tiles at the same time.) The indentations in the adobe bricks become less distinct higher up.\n\n#### Pros and Cons of Plein Air Painting\n\nPros of Plein Air Painting\n\n  * Strong emotional response instills motivation to paint the scene.\n  * Atmospheric perspective is more evident.\n  * Subtle variations in color are more easily picked up.\n  * 3D reality is true and can be depicted better in a painting than working from photos.\n\nCons of Plein Air Painting\n\n  * Many colors are too garish, monotonous and monochromatic.\n  * The sky colors in an average blue sky don't work in a painting.\n  * Values are broken and scattered.\n  * Many shapes in nature are too symmetrical.\n  * The blue hue of mountains is too cool.\n  * There are hard edges everywhere.\n  * There are many cloned shapes.\n  * Capturing sunlight and translating it into pigment is challenging.\n\n### Creating the Illusion of Motion\n\nMaking people, animals and other landscape subjects appear as though they are moving in a painting and not just posing can be one of the greatest challenges for beginning artists. How do you create the illusion that water is falling, or that a horse is trotting?\n\nTry this experiment: Wave your hand in front of your face. Do you see that the crevices at the back of your hand are no longer noticeable? The same concept applies for creating the look of motion in a painting.\n\nFor example, when a photo is taken of falling water, the shutter stays open for a fraction of a second. This ends up \"freezing\" the water, making it appear it is suspended in midair. However, the brain does not take still photos, so water would never appear this way. It would be blurred. If an artist copied a waterfall exactly from a photo, then the viewer would sense something isn't right.\n\nThe best way to convey a sense of movement is to blur things like moving water so they lose definition. Likewise, smudge the legs of animals and people that are in motion. In the latter case, don't add any facial features and place the subjects well within the middle ground. Merge the bottom part of their figures into the wet paint more than the rest of the body. Just allow for a silhouette of the legs. Create the \"V\" shape of distant birds, then smudge their forms.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\nThe camera shutter opened and closed in a fraction of a second. The water appears frozen in time. This is not a natural way we see water moving.\n\n#### Painting Water In Motion\n\nDo you get the impression the water is toppling over the cliff? The soft edges give the appearance of movement. Blurring foam in seascapes works great as well.\n\n#### Can These Concepts Be Applied to Portraits and Still Lifes?\n\nYes! Edge manipulation tactics come in handy with all kinds of subjects. Do not rely solely on diminishing the size of objects that are further back, but manipulate their edges to create depth as well. If a piece of fruit is behind another piece of fruit, soften the edge of the background fruit where the forms intersect. Also try to avoid distracting colors and strong edges in the peripheral area. Many artists cast shadows into these regions and only highlight a limited area in still lifes.\n\nYou can make the rump areas of animals recede by placing them at a 3\u20444 position and painting the back part with softer edges. Merging fur into the background is also effective. If you want your viewers to notice the animal's finer details, design the background so everything is out of focus.\n\nIn portraits, hard edges will be evident everywhere in photos as well as with real life subjects. If you do not manipulate these edges in a painting, the back part of the head and the ears will not recede. Instead of the portrait appearing 3D, it will look like a wall poster. Hyperrealism will not offset this. One solution is to take advantage of the subject's hair and clothes, blending and merging them into the background and allowing only a few defined edges. Ears should be depicted conceptually, not in detail. The lost-and-found edge technique works great for this.\n\n### Optical Hard Edges\n\nIn nature, hard edges are non-existent in objects that are motionless. If you can get away without diffusing edges and distorting a certain sense of reality, all the better. You can have a soft-edged shape in your painting that will still appear to be hard-edged, especially when seen from a distance, as long as there is a strong value shift between that shape and the area around it. This is referred to as an _optical hard edge_.\n\nOn the other hand, you may have a shape with hard edges within an area that has little to no value contrast. That shape will not appear hard edged anyhow, so it would be useless to soften it.\n\nA good rule of thumb is: Hard edges attract the eye, and blurred edges dissuade the eye from staring at an area for too long. Remember\u2014too many hard edges will make things look pasted on in paintings. Trick the eye into perceiving depth by:\n\nPurposely blurring edges in backgrounds. (Don't do this with rocky mountains or they lose their character.)\n\n  * Adding details such as individual leaves and tree branches to only the middle ground of a painting.\n  * Keeping foregrounds simple with the least visual information of all areas in the painting.\n  * Softening or blurring edges by blending some of the foliage into the sky or background.\n\n#### Optical Hard Edges vs. Physical Hard Edges\n\nCompare the tall evergreen tree on the left that appears in front of the white snow with the other tall evergreen in front of the blue area of the mountain. The left one appears more defined, even though it has been blurred. Yet that tree is optically hard edged due to its value contrast. The other trees are physically hard edged, but optically soft edged, because the value contrast is not outstanding.\n\n#### The Adjusted Painting\n\nThe sharpness of the evergreen tree has been corrected. The value contrast is reduced. Now we have a physical and an optical soft edge.\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * Blur everything except rocky mountains behind buildings. Allow for lost-and-found edges for variances.\n  * Don't paint under a very bright light source if this kind of light will not be present where the painting will hang.\n  * Placing mist where water is agitated helps create the illusion of movement.\n\n## Demonstration: Paint a Landscape with a Simplified foreground\n\nFollow the steps to create blurred edges and a simplified foreground in a landscape painting.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\nSurface\n\nArches 300-lb. (640gsm) cold-pressed watercolor paper\n\n**Brushes**\n\n1\u20444\", 1\u20442\" and 3\u20444\" synthetic brights\n\n**Watercolor Pigments**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Hooker's Green, Indian Red, Payne's Gray, Permanent Rose, Raw Sienna, Ultramarine Blue\n\n**Other**\n\nHB pencil\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Sky\n\nSketch the composition with an HB pencil. (Watercolor paintings need a good base drawing in order to create soft edges in the background.) Soak the paper up to the roofs of the buildings. You can never over-wet watercolor paper.\n\nLay in the sky wet-on-wet to create undefined edges while keeping the general forms distinguishable. Use Cobalt Blue for the sky and a mixture of Cobalt Blue and Indian Red for the clouds. The clouds at the top should be darker than the clouds at the bottom.\n\nAdd a hint of red for flavor and darken the corner to keep the viewer's eye in the painting a little longer. Allow time to dry.\n\n#### STEP 2: Begin the Middle Ground\n\nRewet from the top of the roofs upward. Paint the background trees. Use Payne's Gray, Indian Red and Ultramarine Blue. Paint the brick house with a mix of Indian Red and Burnt Sienna and a hint of blue to gray down the brick colors. Indicate only a few bricks. Concentrate them around the window to offset the symmetrical shape and to stay away from the edges. Use the same colors for the bricks as for the house, but a darker value. Negative paint out the form of the bougainvillea. Use Permanent Rose for the flowers. Paint the uneven stone wall. Use Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna and a touch of Raw Sienna. Place some shadows under the stones. Reduce the stones near the edge. Define the bottom part of the flowers and leave highlights at the top.\n\nDrybrush the fishing shack wall to create texture. Use warm colors to indicate sunlit wood. For the shingles, start dark in the closest corner and get lighter at the top. Make the roof line irregular and protruding, like some shingles are broken. Create an irregular pattern for the shadows. Make the wood look weathered by indicating a few hairline cracks in the boards.\n\n#### STEP 3: Paint the Remaining Buildings and the Grass\n\nPaint the remaining buildings, modifying the colors of each for interest. Lift out some individual boards with a thirsty brush. Tap in some broken boards, vertically, so they're opposite to the adjacent building. Use a drybrush technique when painting the tin roof, and skip the paint to indicate rust with Burnt Sienna. Hold back on texture closer to edges of painting.\n\nDrybrush in the grass with a mixture of Hooker's Green, Burnt Sienna and Raw Sienna. Leave room for the flat rocks that lay on the grass. Skip the brush to indicate stones and. Allow the grass to bleed right against the rocks. Vary the colors within each four square inches or so.\n\n#### STEP 4:Paint the Water and Finish with Details\n\nWet the entire water area. Lay in color from bottom up with Payne's Gray. While still wet, reflect the objects on dry land by dragging the brush vertically. Then at the end of the reflections, use choppy strokes. This will give the illusion that the water is moving lazily. Indicate the warm yellowish glow of the clouds in the furthest part of the water and the darker part in the foreground.\n\nOut Fishing in Glouster\n\nWatercolor on Arches 300-lb. (640gsm) cold-pressed watercolor paper, 9\" \u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm)\n\n# Chapter 2\n\n# Design With Abstract Shapes\n\n**The Storm Is breaking**\n\n**Watercolor and PanPastel on Fabriano cold-pressed watercolor paper, 12\" \u00d7 16\" (30cm \u00d7 41cm)**\n\nAbstract shapes are beautifully designed asymmetrical symbols. Understanding and applying abstract designs to your paintings will give you the backbone of successful renditions whether they be landscapes, portraits, figures or still lifes. The application of this concept is the most important key to all hand-painted works.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to think in terms of pictorial symbols and then design them.\n  * How to see and paint not just forms, but the spaces surrounding those forms.\n  * How to prioritize when massing shapes.\n  * How to avoid problematic shapes.\n  * How to build a pictionary of attractive landscape symbols that will represent real objects so you can avoid directly copying them.\n\n## Symmetrical Brain vs. Artistic Brain\n\nIn the previous chapter you learned about the ways paintings cannot compare with the real macro scene as far as size and the three-dimensional aspects of nature.\n\nThere are many unattractive shapes present in natural settings. Artists can design objects in paintings to look better than they do in reality. Nature's canvas is much bigger than you could ever paint, but as an artist you have the ability to produce more beautiful shapes and lines than nature does, even if the forms are much smaller in scale.\n\nThe macro world will provide you with an abundance of visual information, and the left side of your brain (the symmetrical brain) will naturally want to document visual information in close detail for the viewer. This is one of the most common challenges beginning artists face, because many operate under the belief that the closer they get to realism the better the painting will be.\n\nThe real landscape world has little to do with the painting landscape world, and the right side of the brain (the artistic brain) prefers the poetic license aspect of artwork. Instead of imitating exact forms, you will depict symbols that represent trees, rocks, bushes, etc.\n\nContrary to photography, as a painter, you have the freedom and ability to relocate and resize the diverse landscape elements. A tree in your painting may be the size of a mere few inches, but that tiny size can be very attractive due to its abstract design, which should outdo its equivalent in a photo.\n\nWe won't go into right brain\/left brain theories in depth in this chapter, but rather focus on techniques to help you tap into your artistic brain in a more functional way so it becomes a useful tool to strengthen your landscape symbol designs.\n\nFrom the time we are babies and first open our eyes to the world, the first thing we see is the symmetrical interior of our homes. These images get imprinted into the subconscious mind and stored forever. From then on every time we produce a shape, we tap into our subconscious mind and feel compelled to create circles, ovals, squares, straight lines etc.\n\nWe practiced these shapes in our early elementary school drawings. We kept reinforcing by repetition the symmetry of these and developed habits. So when we paint or draw, the subconscious mind wants to continue on with the childish practice of drawing triangular Christmas trees and round trees that makes the abstract designs so much more difficult to depict. To make matters worse, nature has a strong tendency to produce visually implied symmetrical shapes, and we feel compelled to copy these because they are in sync with our symmetrical brain.\n\nWe will always war against symmetry from nature and symmetrical brain influence. Even artists with decades of experience still struggle from overstating details and depicting geometrical designs. The good news is you don't have to train the artistic brain. With the proper approach you will automatically tap into it more thoroughly by implementing certain techniques. You can double your artistic IQ!\n\nNow that you are aware of what may put the brakes on your paintings from escalating to new levels, you can overcome your own symmetrical brain's interference.\n\n#### Symmetrical Shapes in Nature Are not Pleasing\n\nNature produces many symmetrical shapes. They may look good outdoors but once scaled to mini sizes in your artwork they become painfully obvious. This takes a toll on the artistic beauty. Note the symmetrical triangle shapes of the pine trees to the left and the obvious round and almost perfect oval shapes in the foliage pictured above.\n\n#### Switching Between Your Artistic and Symmetrical Brains\n\nYears ago Betty Edwards, author of _Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ , did ground breaking research and proved that the opponent to producing attractive shapes is our own symmetrical brain, which fulfills the function in the level of logic to scientifically process and register data. In this hemisphere of the brain we store symmetrical shapes. On the other hand, the artistic brain is the area that functions for the production of artistic beauty. Edwards demonstrated that when novice artists focused on the surrounding air and the empty space between the legs of a chair instead of the object per se, they produced more accurate drawings. Your consciousness can switch back and forth between the two brain hemispheres and from that you can increase your artistic ability.\n\n#### Symmetrical Isn't Always Aesthetically Pleasing\n\nThe tree trunk has a cylindrical shape and the tree branches protrude like a fork equally on opposite sides. Frankly, this is an ugly tree.\n\n## Landscape Shapes\n\nNature will also give us very pleasing shapes. But these do not appear very commonly. Just like with a crowd of people\u2014you see the occasional impressive good looking human. In the same manner a modeling agency keeps files on beautiful people, an artist should be a shape collector and keep reference photos in a file from which to derive various landscape symbols. With time and practice, these will be stored in your mind. But first, let's identify the criteria a shape needs to meet to be part of your pictorial language.\n\n#### Which Shapes Are Most Appealing?\n\nYou probably voted for the oval because it has a different height than width. If a tree shape fits inside a circle, no matter how realistically you render it, the shape will not be attractive. Tree shapes look better if their foliage is oval in shape rather than circular.\n\nThe same applies to a square format vs. a rectangular format. If a waterfall or a rock fits inside a square, the abstract design is compromised. You would want to change the anatomy of a waterfall and stretch it to fit in a rectangle rather than in a square.\n\nIt's not what you do inside the shape that makes the symbol look good. It is the shape itself. The key is to make the overall shape appealing. Details within the boundaries of the shape are less important.\n\n### Determining Symmetrical and Abstract Shapes\n\nA handy method for determining whether a shape is abstract or not is to draw an imaginary line through the middle of it and compare both sides. If the two sides are similar, chances are you have a visually implied symmetrical shape. Redesign the shape to show different sides. Also make sure your symbol does not resemble a geometrical shape.\n\n#### Symmetrical Shape\n\nThis foliage is equally balanced on both sides, meaning it is a symmetrical shape and not ideal for painting in landscapes.\n\n#### Abstract Shape\n\nMuch better! Both sides of the tree are very different. This is an example of a nice shape seen in nature. Store these oddities in your landscape pictionary. You can use this shape in several paintings.\n\n#### Abstract vs. Non-Abstract Shapes\n\nThe first rock is a non-abstract shape. It looks like a loaf of bread. Try not to paint rocks such as these. The second rock is an abstract shape\u2014all four contour lines are different.\n\n#### Depicting Rocks\n\nAvoid concave semi-circles when depicting rocks. This weakens their character. A good way to practice rock shapes is to get some stones that have interesting shapes from a gardening center. Place them in alternate positions, even some grouped together and draw their shapes with a Sharpie marker.\n\n### Visualize Landscape Forms as Silhouettes\n\nThe black pictorial silhouettes resemble portions of the photos but they are not identical. They have been designed to be more appealing symbols. The drawings were done with a Sharpie Magnum marker, which is a great tool because it has a large blunt edge just like a brush. It is a crossover between a pen and a brush, so you will feel comfortable drawing with it. As a discipline and for practice, draw all kinds of abstract silhouettes.\n\nThe secret is to ensure each gap in between the trees is visually different from the others. Not one tree shape is repeated.\n\nThe waterfall in the photo is a visually implied rectangle. The two sides are not visually different. The silhouette shows a correction.\n\nThe mountain peak in the photo is too close to a triangle and the protrusions on both sides are cloned. The silhouette is an improvement.\n\nEven though the shape of the tree in the photo is not scientifically symmetrical, from an artistic standpoint it is implied to be symmetrical. The black tree silhouette is quite different on both sides and its contour is very interesting. The artistic version resembles the tree in the photo. It is not a copy.\n\nThe photo is displaying a rare case in which the rocks are abstract by themselves and needed very little tweaking. The silhouette was done almost to face value. Sometimes nature will cooperate with you. (This photo got added to my pictionary.)\n\nThe parallel sides are gone. The cylindrical shape is no longer present. The smaller branches are different from each other. This artistically designed tree trunk shape by far is better looking than what we see on that front lawn.\n\n## Techniques for Promoting the Artistic Brain\n\nKeeping aware that your strongest opponent to producing beautiful artistic designs is your own symmetrical brain will make you pay more attention during your painting process and break the spell of producing shapes that visually fall into implied triangles, squares, circles, rectangles and ovals. Here are some scenarios to help you identify the symmetrical brain interference more clearly.\n\n  1. **Think in pictorial symbols instead of real objects.** Avoid speaking to yourself in terms of painting trees, rocks, etc. Instead of saying, \"Now it's time to paint the evergreen trees,\" tell yourself, \"Now it's time to paint the shapes that symbolize evergreen trees.\" This awareness will keep you on track. Keep in mind that the landscape painting language is composed of symbols that _represent_ the real object, like than the word _orange_ represents the fruit. When I give workshops and someone asks me how to paint a green tree, I will reply jokingly, \"Buy a can of spray paint and spray graffiti on it.\" A skilled landscape artist will use attractive symbols that have been practiced many times, even repeating some of these in different paintings, just like using the same words in different sentences.\n  2. **Double your artistic intelligence by negative painting.** In the case of pastel, acrylics or oil painting, you can put the sky in afterwards and paint in a reverse format to carve out the contour of a tree from the sky point of view. The artistic brain will acknowledge how valuable this approach is.\n  3. **Draw an imaginary line down the middle of a shape.** Compare both sides. If they are visually mirrored, the attractiveness of the design is probably compromised.\n  4. **Pretend you are designing a puzzle.** This reduces the complexity of shapes when translating the pictorial information onto your painting surface. Imagine you shrink wrap things. The resulting contour is what you draw.\n  5. **Build your own personal pictionary.**\n\n#### Symmetrical Brain Intentions\n\n  * Build tree shapes with leaves.\n  * Indicate many separate rocks when grouped together.\n  * Single out deciduous or evergreen trees in a group.\n  * Painstakingly indicate many unnecessary branches.\n  * Make boxes out of rocks.\n  * Depict grass with strands rather than large clumps.\n\n#### Artistic Brain Intentions\n\n  * Build trees in designed clusters with a few brushstrokes that indicate thousands of leaves at once.\n  * Group rocks into one unit and only suggest a few.\n  * Join foliage together to read as one unit.\n  * Indicate the main tree branches and suggest just enough smaller branches to make the point.\n  * Ensure rocks appear unequal with each other in their shapes and look carved out.\n  * Only indicate a few grass strands to hint at the idea of grass, or leave them out completely.\n  * Group evergreens together into a mass.\n  * Think in landscape silhouettes instead of landscape objects.\n\n#### Think In Puzzle Pieces\n\nThis scene is quite complicated. If you apply a puzzle-piece technique to break things down and assemble those pieces to form the entire painting, it will not be too overwhelming to represent on the canvas. First decide on the major masses when you are doing the drawing outline. Next visualize the smaller portions inside those larger masses and convert them into your own version of mini abstract shapes until you assemble the entire puzzle. The painting should end up with a pleasing abstract design. By thinking in terms of puzzle pieces, you will require less effort from the artistic brain to construct this scene.\n\n#### Simplify Complex Details\n\nThere is a widespread movement in the art world called Representational Landscape Painting. Most professional landscape artists who are not hyperrealists apply this concept. As the names states, you represent scenes by reinterpreting everything into pleasing abstract-designed puzzle pieces that, when snapped together, make up the whole painting.\n\n#### Simplify Contours\n\nThese rocks have many bumpy protrusions which weakens the abstract shapes of the rocks. By putting these into a mental shrink wrap we will ignore all these unnecessary small protrusions. Once we file off those protrusions the design will improve.\n\nFrom this visualization technique we can derive the thumbnail sketch. The abstract designs are very clear now.\n\n#### Imagine Things are Shrink Wrapped\n\nDrawing nature's very complex contours onto your painting surface can be time consuming. To make it easier, pretend you shrink wrap the objects. Wherever the plastic molds itself around the form will be your contour drawing. This will enable you to catch deficiencies in shapes and find cloned objects. Simplify these contours to end up with the overall abstract design.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\nThe rocks in this seascape have a vast amount of crevices. In the painting many protrusions were dramatically simplified and the whole painting was reduced to basic abstract designs. The left rock in the distance in the photo was visually symmetrical. In the painting it is edited so it would be asymmetrical. The technique mentioned earlier about dividing that shape in the middle with an imaginary line and comparing both sides was applied.\n\n#### Focus on Shape Contours, Not Inside Details\n\nThe more you work a painting, the more the viewer will have to work to put the visual information together. The viewer should be able to understand simple shapes effortlessly.\n\n## Negative Painting\n\nNegative painting is extremely important. It will become one of your most valuable assets. If you want to grow as an artist, you must acquire this tool.\n\nSimply defined, the negative space is the surrounding space or the air that is adjacent to an object as well as the in-between space. In the case of a portrait or still life, it will be the background. In landscapes, it is the sky when a tree shape is added. For objects such as chairs, it is the space between the legs. For any painting to hold together in a pleasing way, both the negative space and the positive space have to be abstract. For example, if your tree shape resembles an egg, you will have a poor positive shape. The deficiency will be doubled in the adjacent negative shape.\n\nEvery advanced artist works from his artistic right side of the brain as much as possible. In all the previous silhouettes, the white space was given as much importance as the black silhouette. Reverse painting will help you work from your abstract brain to correct unpleasant shapes. Let's get a better understanding about this before we see the direct application of negative painting.\n\n1. Positive Space in White\n\n2. Negative Space in Black\n\n#### Positive vs. Negative Space\n\nRubin's vase will appear as a vase or as two faces in profile. When you see the vase you are connected to the symmetrical brain. When you see the two profiles you are using the artistic brain. Do you feel how your brain switches back and forth between the forms? This will happen to you automatically when you learn to focus on the surrounding space when painting by the same token as you depict the positive shape. If you were to draw the object while solely looking at the positive (white) space, you would have a harder time replicating the form. If you only paid attention to the negative (black) space, then you would end up with a much better result. You would bypass the stored symmetrical influence coming from your left part of the brain. Try it!\n\n#### What Makes a Master?\n\nAndrew Loomis was a master at abstract shape design. To avoid symmetrical round heads in his portraits he depicted bumps on the hairlines to make them a bit wavy. Other expert portrait artists such as Anders Zorn will put hats and bandanas on their subjects to offset the helmet-head effect.\n\nStill life artists will change round fruits into attractive carved out angled forms as if the round convex protrusions were sliced with a knife, and both sides would be altered slightly. That way they don't end up being too circular or oval.\n\n## Demonstration: Use Negative Painting to Create Abstract Shapes\n\nFollow the steps to use negative painting to create abstract forms derived from symmetrical\/\/ shapes. Remember to check your negative and positive space simultaneously while painting.\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\npermanent marker\n\nliquid corrector with foam applicator\n\n**STEP 1:** Draw a black oval about 6\" \u00d7 4\" (15cm \u00d7 10cm).\n\n**STEP 2:** Using a liquid corrector applicator, \"carve out\" by reverse painting a tree shape. Use only the white liquid for the first stage. Work randomly to avoid cloning. Keep comparing both sides of your form. Pay equal attention to the white space, not just the black form.\n\n**STEP 3:** Do as much as you can only using the white liquid. Then you can go in with a black permanent marker and refine the shape from the positive point of view. If necessary, resort back to the corrector fluid to make further corrections until you are content with the tree symbol. Go back and forth from positive to negative painting. If you have not done this before, your brain has no preconceived stored input of this procedure, so you may feel confused and uncomfortable when starting. That is normal. After several attempts your artistic brain will kick in and you will probably come to enjoy this technique. (If you were to depict a tree in your painting, you could use the blue sky color and carve into the tree shape.)\n\n**STEP 4:** Apply the same process with other shapes.\n\n## Composition With Abstract Masses\n\nChapter 1 discussed how nature scenes never get abruptly cropped, but rather gradually fade into blurry forms in the peripheral vision of the human eye. Due to the limited space in a rectangular canvas format, we need to budget the space of pictorial areas, so whatever fits in the constricted area must be well planned.\n\nWhen approaching a subject, the best thing is to first decide what the painting's main setting will be. Just like with movies, they are categorized into action, drama, suspense, etc., and the movie director emphasizes one of those to be the general theme.\n\nLandscapes can be sorted into the following categories:\n\n  * Sky\n  * Mountain or cliffs\n  * Lake, river or waterfalls\n  * Terrain\n  * Foliage\n\nTo simplify even more, you must determine whether the sky, the vertical plane or the horizontal plane takes up the most space. They should not be similar in size to each other. A well planned composition will show one of these areas (here on referred to as a mass) to be the predominant one in size, and the masses will be designed into abstract masses. When possible that mass should take up roughly two-thirds of the space in your painting. A common mistaken procedure is to try to show several masses competing in sizes in one painting, which will result in those areas competing for attention. For example, if your theme is a skyscape, then everything else should shrink in size. The mountain peak should not be higher than one-third of the way up from the bottom.\n\nIf you decide to make your main theme about a rocky mountain, then the peak of that mountain should be close to the top of the painting in order to stretch its mass as far as possible to gain square inches and reduce the sky. The surrounding trees should get a \"haircut\" and diminish in size. The horizon line of the lake should be just a few inches up from the bottom.\n\nWhen you decide which mass will be predominant in size, there should be sufficient interest to make it attractive for the viewer. For example, if you have a clear blue sky and decide to make the painting about the sky showing it to be the largest mass, you will end up with lots of dead square inches because you won't have enough variances. On the other hand, a sunset or a cloudy sky with weather effects may merit dedicating a large percentage to that mass and make everything subordinate to that. The same will apply to a lake mass. If there are no reflections or boats to fill the void, a lake mass can be quite boring if most square inches are just showing flat water. If a lake does have reflections and boats, however, then it may merit being the main mass of your composition and dominate in size.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\nThis is a good reference photo to work from for creating a thumbnail sketch (about the size of a playing card) to plan the sizes of the masses and make them abstract. If the masses were painted as they are in the photo, the mountain would be minimized.\n\n#### Thumbnail Sketch\u2014Budget Your Space\n\nThumbnail sketches will help you catch weak lines and shapes. They do not have to be detailed. They are great for working out the bugs in your composition so you don't hit obstacles during the painting process and can anticipate them early in your painting strategy. It is not necessary to indicate the smaller shapes within the masses. The purpose is to visualize the masses as abstract puzzle pieces and check the predominance or subordination of the surrounding masses.\n\nIn the reference photo, all the masses are competing for attention. The lake is void of visual richness because too many square inches are equal and take up most of the space. This will work better as a mountain scene. The evergreen trees can be reduced in height. The sky does not need to take up so much space either.\n\n#### The Finished Painting\n\nYour eye is now wandering around the mountain and it appears to be large and majestic due to its predominant mass. The lake, trees and sky are just supporting actors.\n\n### Cropping\n\nIt is very easy to fall into the trap of taking a photo at face value. However, if you apply the concepts of mass planning, you will be able to crop out the other competing masses.\n\n#### Poor\n\n#### Improving On the Reference Image\n\nAn example of a poor cropping and mass design is the photo on the left. The terrain and sky are both demanding the same attention. One of the two masses should be obviously smaller. This photo on the right will make an interesting skyscape. There are interesting lines and forms because of the rain clouds. You may even want to add rain pouring down. The sky mass takes up about 70% of the space which definitely establishes predominance.\n\n#### Better\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * Avoid boughs that protrude equally on both sides of evergreen trees. They take on an airplane wing effect. Make sure evergreens vary in width and height from each other.\n  * Avoid equal slants on rocks even if they are opposite.\n  * Make round rocks more angular with straight lines with some convex protrusions for variety.\n  * When trees are adjacent to each other, paint them together as one unit by merging the foliage into one mass. The highlights can somewhat show their individuality.\n  * To help search and destroy implied symmetrical shapes, turn the photo upside down before working out the drawing.\n  * Vary negative space gaps between trees.\n  * Check the negative space between your bare tree branches and mountains for negative-shaped triangles.\n  * Another effective way to determine if a shape is well designed is to pretend you cut it out of context with a utility knife.\n\n#### Focus on One Mass\n\nAvoid the temptation to say everything in one image. It may be better to do two or three paintings of the same reference, each emphasizing a different mass.\n\n#### Photo Editing\n\nYou can use a graphics program to edit your photo to get a better idea how it will look. In this example, the mountain was trimmed and the sky was reduced as much as possible without suffocating the painting. After the cropping, do a thumbnail sketch to correct things. The most important mass would be the river in this case.\n\n#### Alternate View\n\nHere is an alternate take on the same photo. The mountain becomes the main mass and this time the river is subordinate in size. A painting based on either of the last two photos would work.\n\n#### Stretch Masses\n\nTo favor the composition, you will often need to stretch or reduce the size of masses. This is a good reference photo but even if we crop out some of the water, the mountain will still seem tiny because of the sky mass and the size of the evergreens. This gets solved in the thumbnail sketch.\n\nBow River\n\nOil on canvas, 24\" \u00d7 30\" (61cm \u00d7 76cm)\n\n#### Alternate Version 1\n\nYou can completely ignore the mountain and make the evergreen trees the main actors in a foliage scene.\n\nBow River (Alternate 1)\n\nOil on canvas, 24\" \u00d7 30\" (61cm \u00d7 76cm)\n\n#### Alternate Version 2\n\nYou can completely ignore the mountain, downplay the sizes of the trees and make the river the main mass.\n\nBow River (Alternate 2)\n\nOil on canvas, 24\" \u00d7 30\" (61cm \u00d7 76cm)\n\n### One Scene, Several Compositions\n\nHow many paintings can you make out of this scene? I have travelled all over North America in my RV and when I hit a gold mine like this, I tend to stay in that one spot and do several paintings from the same location.\n\nYou could do three different successful paintings derived from this photo, and they would all give a different yet effective message. The point is to try not to say too much in one painting and to focus on just one important mass. Feel free to alter your landscapes even if they are well known areas. Viewers do not memorize how things look in real life. The beauty of your painting with its shapes should always trump the precise anatomy of mountains, buildings and trees. There are resident artists that live in the Teton National Park area. They know all too well that the Teton peaks are very symmetrical and will alter them to end up with a better design. Buyers of these scenes do not return paintings because they are not exact copies of the mountains.\n\nAll three thumbnails emphasize a different mass and all the paintings derived will work. The water, the foliage, the sky and the buildings do not compete with each other in the different settings.\n\n## Demonstration: Paint With Abstract Shapes\n\nI selected this scene because rocks and cliffs tend to create their own beautiful abstract designs. I was also drawn to the beautiful warm colors of the rocks in Acadia National Park.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\n**Surface**\n\nArches 300-lb. (640gsm) cold-pressed watercolor paper\n\n**Brushes**\n\nsynthetic brights\n\n**Watercolor Pigments**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Hooker's Green, Indian Red, Payne's Gray, Raw Sienna, Ultramarine Blue, Winsor Violet\n\n**Other**\n\nHB pencil, pastel chalks, sandpaper\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Sky\n\nSketch the composition with an HB pencil. Wet the sky past the distant evergreen trees and past the horizon line, where the ocean meets the sky. Use Raw Sienna, Winsor Violet and Indian Red to paint the clouds. Fill in the sky with Cobalt Blue and Hooker's Green. Make a swooping motion with the brush. Take care not to create an exact balance between the blue sky and clouds\u2014you want them to compete with each other. The sky should be darker tone at the top.\n\n#### STEP 2: Paint the Trees\n\nRewet the sky and go past the distant cliff area. Carefully avoid wetting the rock\/cliff area\u2014 wet only the evergreen trees. Using the wet-on-wet technique, begin to paint the first row of trees using Payne's Gray, Hooker's Green and a touch of Burnt Sienna. Move the brush in a zigzag motion to create the distant trees. Try to avoid too many zigzag areas though\u2014just indicate a few and allow the rest near the top to bleed into the sky. Keep the greens cool. Paint the second row of trees in a slightly darker tone. Negative paint out the silhouettes of the brighter trees. Do not heavily define any of them at this point\u2014 show only hints of the trees within that grouping. Glaze on top of the sunlit trees to bring them into the sunlight.\n\n#### STEP 3: Paint the Distant Cliffs\n\nPaint the farthest cliff Cobalt Blue with touches of Burnt Sienna and a touch of Winsor Violet. Leave a tiny white spot at top for highlights. Apply Burnt Sienna at the bottom of the cliffs to pick up reflected light from the water. Gradually get darker as the planes get closer.\n\n#### STEP 4: Paint the Foreground Rocks and Water\n\nBegin to define some of the flatter foreground rocks using Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Winsor Violet and Cobalt Blue. Avoid subdividing too many times and avoid cloning the subdivisions. Think in terms of abstract designs. Do not darken the vertical planes too much. Feel free to exaggerate the warm color on the rocks. Then add the water with Ultramarine Blue allowing it to be hazier at the horizon. Gradually get darker in the middle ground. Add Hooker's Green to your water mixture as you get closer to the rocks. Drybrush the foam in the middle ground.\n\n#### STEP 5: Build Up and Define the Rocks and Cliffs\n\nAdd more definition to the vertical planes of the rocks by suggesting indentations. Add thin lines to suggest cracks. Using Cobalt Blue, glaze over the rocks where the cast shadow is. Create a darker flat rock where the water has made it wet.\n\n#### STEP 6: Add Details to Finish\n\nCarve out the rock indentations. Lightly drybrush on the rocks to add texture. Use a medium-coarse sandpaper to indicate the foam in the foreground. Negative paint into the sunlit evergreens to establish depth and roundness. If necessary, you can make corrections with pastels.\n\n_Otter Cliffs, Acadia National Park_\n\n_Watercolor on Arches 300-lb. (640gsm) cold-pressed watercolor paper, 9\" \u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm)_\n\n# Chapter 3\n\n# Vary and Enrich Colors\n\nSunrise Over Rockport\n\nOil on linen, 12\" \u00d7 16\" (30cm \u00d7 41cm)\n\nYou have probably noticed by now that I keep comparing nature against landscape paintings. This is because most artists believe they can use nature as a foundation for their paintings. While this is true for ideas and inspiration, we need to compensate where nature falls short.\n\nIn the previous chapter, you learned that one of the flaws of nature is the symmetrical, and in many instances unattractive, shapes it produces. Another drawback of nature is that much of the color you see is monochromatic, meaning it consists of various tones of only one color. It is our ability to vary and enhance colors that gives us artists the upper hand. Color variety is the flavor of your painting.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to avoid the common pitfalls of monochromatic color schemes.\n  * How to establish color harmony.\n  * How to simplify the value scale.\n  * How to mix and match colors.\n  * How to attain more pictorial beauty through subtle color variance.\n\n## Controlling Monochromatic Color Schemes\n\nDirectly copying the colors you see outdoors or in photos will only result in a flat dull painting. You may ask, \"Why can't I just mirror the colors I see in nature? They work just fine!\" The reason is the macro world compensates for the monochromatic colors with intense sunlight that dramatically increases the range of values. (Value is the degree of how dark or light something is.)\n\nIn addition, the enormous size of real landscapes creates a huge impression of beauty. These conditions can never be replicated in a studio, especially because the value range you can work with in the studio is very reduced. However, once you become aware of the pitfalls of the monochromatic color schemes found in nature, half of your problems will already be solved.\n\nThe key to making monochromatic color schemes work is to add touches and hints of other colors, even though they are not present in the real scene or the reference photo. For example, in a scene with monochromatic greens, you would add yellow-oranges such as Yellow Ochre Pale and Burnt Sienna, with the purpose of variegating the greens with other hues to break the monotony.\n\n#### Summer Greens\n\nThe scene that inspired this plein air painting was all green. Hints of Yellow Ochre Pale and Burnt Sienna were added to those greens to add light and break the monotony. The red-orange bushes also give relief.\n\n#### Example of Monochromatic Greens in Nature\n\n#### Consider Eliminating Greens\n\nThis pastel painting has no green in it. Leaving green out of paintings completely will result in instant color harmony.\n\n#### Variegate, Variegate, Variegate!\n\nThis zoomed in version shows subtle variations of greens. Many artists mute the \"neon\" greens we see in nature and add more of a red-orange hue. If your foliage ends up being the same color as a martini olive, your greens will be quite pleasing.\n\n#### Don't Paint Solid Gray Tree Trunks\n\nIn reality, you would never see this many colors in a tree trunk. You can justify the presence of the blue light on the shadow side of the tree as reflected sky light. Artists look for justifiable reasons to exaggerate color variegation.\n\n#### Example of Monochromatic Grays in Nature\n\n#### Paint Like a Hollywood Animator\n\nThe painting below has so much more life than the photo. There are more variations of color. If your painting ends up with a somewhat cartoonish aspect, you are on the right track. Because you need to reduce real life objects to just a mere few inches, the best thing to do is design shapes in an abstract way and liven them with variegation of color inside those shapes to compensate for the micro size, then convince the viewers to accept them as a representation of a real landscape objects.\n\nThe point is not to be concerned to make things look real in a painting, rather make them look good. The secret is to improve nature by enhancing colors where they would be otherwise dull.\n\n#### Advantages of Pre-Toned Canvas\n\nMany artists pre-tone their canvases with Burnt Sienna. They scumble the darks very thinly and allow some of the undertone to glow through. This can bring relief to greens and add warmth to snow scenes.\n\n#### Handling Whites\n\nFor anything white in a painting, such as snow, water foam or clouds, do not use white right out of the tube. Always warm it with a touch of yellow-orange, or orange or pink.\n\nWhite water can be a problem when there is too much of it because it is a note of silence due to lack of color. It's like a pause in a song. If you limit white in waterfalls, snow scenes and seascapes the smaller portion of it will stand out more. An analogy to remember is that three candles on a table look romantic. One hundred candles will make it look like a funeral. Too much white and your painting will die!\n\n#### Snow In Shadows\n\nI never paint blue skies, blue lakes, blue mountains or blue snow as far as hue is concerned. Why? Blue is considered the coolest hue in the color wheel. As such, it is unpleasant for the viewer so we artists find ways around it. Snow or water in shadows does not have color of its own. The snow in shadow in this photo will seem just blue at first glance, but a careful look will show it has more colors. It will be a compilation of the surrounding colors from the rest of the painting. In the zoomed-in version, you can see hints of red, green and violet in mainly a blue overall setting, which picks up the sky color.\n\n#### Detail View\n\n## Demonstration: Color Matching\n\nThere are already countless books on the color wheel and color mixing, so we won't cover that in great detail in this book. However, I will share an easy color-matching method with you. Once you learn to match your colors with this system, you will not need to resort to color recipes with pigment names. (Keep in mind that all those names that appear on paint tubes are the result of intermixing the three primaries.) Now, instead of the color wheel, imagine a clock\u2014with each hour on the clock representing a different hue. (To differentiate the terms hue and color: Hue is the raw blue, red or yellow and the combination of any two of the latter. Color is the result of adding a third hue to the mixture.)\n\n#### STEP 1: Identify the Hues You Want to Match\n\nIdentify which of the twelve hues corresponds to the one you want to match. The twelve hues are derived from only three: yellow, red and blue, known as primaries. Pinpointing a hue is done by elimination process. Ignore how dark or grayed it is for the first stage. Just locate the raw hue. The minutes on the clock would represent all the in-between color mixtures.\n\n#### STEP 2: Determine Value\n\nDetermine how dark or how light a color is on a gray value scale. You can guess the value easier if you squint your eyes. (This scale does not show white.)\n\n#### STEP 3: Judge the Hue Saturation\n\nIf you do not add a third primary you will have pure color by only mixing two hues. Once a third hue is added to a mixture, you have desaturation as well as a tendency to gray down. When you add the direct opposite of a hue, it becomes desaturated. For example, when you add blue (4 o'clock) to orange (10 o'clock) the color intensity diminishes until you end up with gray.\n\n## Color Temperature\n\nMost people prefer warm hues like yellow-orange over cooler palettes of greens or blues. I never paint an absolute blue sky, a blue mountain or a blue lake that would be at 4 o'clock on the color clock. Instead, I would add Viridian to a Cobalt Blue mixture for my sky. For a lake, I would lean towards a gray-blue violet so the hue increases slightly in color temperature because of the addition of red. The viewer would still see it is blue though. When it comes to mountains, I will bend the color temperature towards a blue-violet The red in the violet helps offset the garish primary blue and warm it up a bit. Even if a mountain in a plein air setting is a neutral blue, I will not match its color.\n\nIt may surprise you to learn then that winter scene paintings, if handled skillfully, can end up being warmer as far as color temperature than a summer painting with greens. This is where your artistic instinct will help balance this out. It is commonly understood that all hues from green to blue-violet on the color wheel are considered cool colors, the rest are warm.\n\n#### Cool vs. Warm Painting\n\nWhich do you prefer? Most people prefer warm hues like yellow-orange to cooler palettes of greens or blues.\n\n#### Avoid an Equal Balance of Warm and Cool Colors\n\nThis winter scene predominantly has orange and yellow-orange. As such, it is classified as a warm painting, which is pleasing to the majority of people. As a word of caution: Paintings can be too warm or too cool. The cool gray-blue water and shadows on the snow help soothe the hot oranges. Pictorial temperature balance includes the correct ratio of warm vs. cool temperature. Only one should predominate.\n\n#### Don't Give Your Paintings the Blues\n\nI did this plein air painting at the Teton National Park. The mountains were much bluer, but I had to distort reality and turned them more towards a blue-violet. The sky is a turquoise blue. Adding green, because it has yellow, warms the blue. Even the left cloud has some Ochre in it to avoid a cool gray.\n\n#### Judging Local Color\n\nJudging a precise color can be difficult when it is in context with surrounding colors. If you close your hand and leave just a small tunnel to peek thru, the local color will be more faithful.\n\n#### Reduce Value Ranges\n\nWhen dealing with mixing color, it is easiest to reduce the ten main values on the gray scale down to only four grays. (In this specified scale, we leave out most white and black since they are easy to determine.) An almost white would only be used for clouds, water foam, buildings and sunlit snow. The key is to distinguish each value between those four grays only when mixing and applying color by thinking how they would appear if you took a black-and-white photo.\n\n#### General Values\n\nWhen it comes to the major shapes, simplify by thinking in light, mid-light, mid-dark and dark when mixing paint for daylight scenes. Make a clear separation between them. After all the mixing, the final painting will inadvertently end up with the ten values anyway. On a side note, I tend to stay away from the dark value if I can help it and work with only three main gray values and will resort to the darker gray if only needed to separate planes. The idea is to work with predominately mid values for daylight scenes. In most cases, skies tend to be a mid-light value, horizontal planes will be a mid value and vertical planes will be mid-dark values. The general values are:\n\n  * almost white\n  * sky and grass highlight - mid light\n  * ground plane - mid\n  * mountains and trees - mid dark\n  * evergreen foliage - dark\n\n#### Visualize the Painting As a Chess Board to Variegate Colors\n\nTo avoid replicating the monochromatic colors of nature, a great technique to keep in mind while painting is to imagine your painting is subdivided, like a chessboard, into eight squares in width and eight squares in height. In each square there should be a subtle color shift, and when possible a value shift.\n\nThe application of this concept will help you make skies become more exciting. While you are painting, if there is one square with a blue color only, you will feel compelled to add some hints of clouds. You will detect the moment your summer trees are becoming boring and will feel the need to add a variance of color. You will notice when your grass is too monotonous and add more green or yellow as needed. It will pressure you to echo the surrounding color in your snow shadows.\n\nAfter a while, this will become second nature. Because of this chessboard visualization tactic, you will sense something is missing when you leave out the color variegation. When the viewers scan your painting, they will appreciate the interesting shifts. Be careful not to over variegate or your painting will become busy.\n\n## Establishing Color Harmony\n\nMany books have also been written on this subject, so I will just put my two cents in for what I consider a simple solution for making colors harmonize in landscape paintings. Use an analogous color scheme. This means keep your main colors close together where they appear on the color clock, only using opposite colors for graying and cooling. The best policy is to make sure as many colors as possible in your artwork share the same common mother hue. This applies to everything where color is involved, even interior decorating in which the walls, rugs and furniture have similar colors. When doing autumn scenes, avoid the red hue and green hue as isolated colors. They don't share enough of the common yellow-orange denominator. I tend to use green just as a spice in autumn scenes in small amounts, leaving the yellow-orange, orange and red-orange as the predominant hues.\n\n#### Eliminating Colors\n\nIn this color scheme, I eliminated yellow because it rarely appears in landscapes. Yellow Ochre Pale and\/or Burnt Sienna can be added to green to make it more agreeable with the other pigments. All the colors will share yellow-orange. For over-the-counter pigments, a working palette for autumn foliage can be Yellow Ochre Pale, Cadmium Orange, Burnt Sienna, Permanent Rose and Viridian.\n\n#### Add Red to Greens to Unify\n\nSpice up your color mixtures with touches of red. With the exception of the mountain, most of the areas share a yellow-orange hue. There was a risk that the evergreen trees ended up being too green. To offset this, adding Burnt Sienna that contains the influence of the red-orange hue pulled them together with the yellow-orange trees. To keep them from looking isolated or out of place in autumn scenes, I tend to avoid showing any summer green colors that would not contain some red mixed in. They would at least be similar to a martini olive.\n\n#### Echo Surrounding Colors\n\nAnother way to establish color harmony is by repeating surrounding colors all around your painting. Snow, waterfalls and white walls will sing if you echo colors in a subtle way that appear elsewhere. This concept is known as reflected light.\n\nIn real life, when you look into cast shadows on snow, rocks, waterfalls and white water, they will take on a gray-blue appearance. You won't see the echoed colors. Nature has its own way of harmonizing color. With pigment, we don't have that luxury so we have to go the extra mile to end up with color unity. This means we will need to borrow colors from different areas of the painting, add them to other areas, and find pretexts to repeat these colors. In this painting, the cast shadow is picking the pinks from the flowers and the orange from the walls. The sky is the primary source of influential color. This is another example of why you can't paint just what you see in nature. Not only are we to echo colors in shadows, we must also weave surrounding colors into main areas. There are touches of green in the pink wall on the right. You can justify this green addition as mold on an old wall.\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * Avoid any primary hue by itself in a landscape painting. Ignoring the rare exceptions, they don't exist in nature.\n  * Greens tend to be quite garish. If you match the color of an olive, the amount of red present in the mixture will tone it down.\n  * Cool your greens in distant planes.\n  * Spice up your color mixtures with touches of red. Rain clouds look much better with touches of Indian Red in the blues. Adding Burnt Sienna to greens helps decrease saturation.\n  * Consider working from a black-and-white photo so you can invent your own colors, especially if it's a summer scene.\n  * If you have dry grass on the ground, you can echo that at the bottom of clouds by adding Yellow Ochre Pale.\n  * Rich color shows up the best in mid values. As the value gets closer to black, color fades. If you cannot make out the color of area by standing back ten feet, then you know that value is too dark. The closer you get to white, the colors become bleached out and chalky, so plan your paintings to show as much mid value as you can in broad daylight scenes.\n  * When reloading your brush with paint, make a habit of picking up a variation from the previous color you just applied.\n  * If you have problems varying color, try using chalk pastels until you get the hang of it.\n  * Double-load your brush with paint for automatic variances\n  * Greens take on a strong neon color in sunlight. Consider painting greens on overcast days.\n\n## Demonstration: Variegate Color in a Painting\n\nFollow the steps to variegate your colors in a painting and learn how to get monochromatic greens under control.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\n**Surface**\n\nCanson Mi-Tientes paper\n\n**Pastels**\n\nPanPastels and pastel sticks in assorted colors\n\n**Other**\n\nfoam sponge blending tool, gum arabic eraser, pastel pencil, PanPastel applicator\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Background\n\nVery lightly sketch the composition with a pastel pencil\u2014just enough to see a hint of the drawing or it will show through the paint later.\n\nLay in the sky using a foam sponge tool and light blue PanPastel. Skip over some parts of the sky to allow the paper to show through in areas\u2014these will become the cloud forms.\n\nContinue working from the background forward. Indicate the hill with blue-violet.\n\n#### STEP 2: Lay In the Trees\n\nThe dark values of the trees must get cooler and lighter as they recede into the distance. Lay in the darkest greens first. Then build highlights on top of that. Try to avoid creating an equal balance of darks and highlights\u2014one should predominate. If some of the paper shows through, that's okay. Vary the greens to help break up the monochromatic color scheme.\n\nPaint shorter trees in front of the more distant trees to create depth. Use cool blues for areas of foliage in shade in the background. Warm up with violets in the middle ground. Each time you load the applicator, use a slight variation of the color you used previously. Double-loading it also helps. This will help you avoid making your painting too monochromatic.\n\n#### STEP 3: Build Up Layers and Texture\n\nNow that the base is down, switch to stick pastels to indicate a few individual leaves. Try to have them touch each other. Negative paint the dark indentations for depth. Add the sky holes, but be careful\u2014you don't want too many\u2014just enough so the trees look airy.\n\n#### STEP 4: Add the Tree Branches and Build Up Details\n\nPaint the tree branches. In nature, branches are quite dark. Keep the values close and try to hide them within the foliage so they won't stand out too starkly. Continue adding detail at the eye level and reduce the amount of detail in the top portion of the painting.\n\nNegative paint out a silhouette from the front tree to make it abstract. Use purple to carve out more indentations in the foliage and create depth. Don't go past one-third of the coverage of the total shape from the bottom up. Most of the time, artists place the sun at either 2 o'clock or 10 o'clock in order to have the light source come in at a ninty-degree angle. These areas should receive the most light.\n\n#### STEP 5: Lay In the Water and Grass\n\nYou can differentiate the horizontal plane from vertical plane by dramatically changing colors or values. Lay in the water in a curving \"S\" shape with gray-blue and blue-green hues. Lay in the grass with yellow-green. However, this will be too similar to the color of the trees on the left side of the painting, so it will have to be adjusted.\n\nLikewise, adjust the trees on the left to make them contrast more with the right-side trees and grass. Work some darker greens into the trees to take down the bright yellow glow.\n\n#### STEP 6: Define the Foreground and Add Details to Finish\n\nContinue building up the foreground layers and adding texture to the grass. Indicate just a few details like clumps in the grass and individual grass strands with Ochre hues using the stick pastels. Add the river bank, making it darker near the edges of the water to suggest erosion. This will also create a three-dimensional effect. Darken the corner to give a slope to the grass. Darken one side of the water and keep the other side lighter. Because of the overwhelming warm colors, add soothing grays at the bottom of the trees to represent dead branches and leaves. This will help subdue and unify the painting.\n\n_Summer Heat_\n\n_Pastel on Canson Mi-Tientes paper, 9\" \u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm)_\n\n# Chapter 4\n\n# Create Melodic Movement\n\nMisty Sunset\n\nOil on linen, 11\" \u00d7 14\" (28cm \u00d7 36cm)\n\nEach chapter so far has focused on the different virtues and defects of the macro world from an artistic perspective. In this chapter, we will address the concepts of visual lines and how important they are in relation to your paintings.\n\nA scientific study concluded that when subjects listened to music, their brains released endorphins. This is the reason they interpreted the music as pleasurable. This may very well be the case when viewers \"read\" paintings, so we artists must strive to produce melodic visual movement in our work. This is achieved by creating very interesting visual lines. Think of the lines in a painting as being sort of like the rhythm of a song.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to handle problematic implied lines in creative ways.\n  * How to capitalize on desirable implied lines.\n  * How to move viewers through a painting in a slow and pleasing way.\n\n## Problematic Implied Lines\n\nIn Chapter 2, we explored the concept of our subconscious mind influencing us to repeat undesirable non-abstract shapes. The same applies to lines. When people look at paintings, they will unconsciously follow implied visual lines to help them process the information they're seeing. Because of this, you will want to create implied lines that are pleasing to viewers.\n\nEvery time you create a shape adjacent to another shape, it will have a contour. This contour becomes an implied line, hence, you have visual movement, which can be pleasant or unpleasant to the viewer. It stands to reason that if a shape is well designed, its contour line will also be pleasing. The key is to design implied visual lines that move the viewer's eye at the right pace in a graceful and melodic way.\n\nOnce you understand where nature is deficient, it will be easier for you to redesign deficient lines and become a good \"visual musician.\" Let's look at some examples.\n\n#### Implied Straight Lines\n\nThese are very abundant in nature. You will see them at shorelines and at the bottom of trees against grass, hill tops, distant trees, roads, tree trunks, horizon lines on seascapes, and on man made structures, of course. The implied straight lines move the viewer's eye too quickly. In general, it is best to avoid straight lines or adjust them to slow the pace.\n\n#### Implied Zigzag Lines\n\nThink of lines as musical notes on a scale. These would have pleasant variations. If the same note plays over and over again, it would be boring and monotonous. Evergreen trees tend to grow in such a pattern that they end up looking like a print out of an electrocardiogram. Zigzag lines are very unpleasant to viewers and should be kept to a minimum.\n\n#### Implied Repetitive Lines\n\nThese are normally found on contours of rolling hills, tree tops and clouds. When these lines form concave and convex lines with shallow indentations and protrusions that repeat across a contour, they are monotonous and should be redesigned. In the linear drawing, you can easily see that the wavy line is repetitive. This is because several trees are at the same height. It would be like hearing a flat song with no high and low pitches. The mountain also falls into a boring wavy line, so that would have to be cropped or substituted by a mountain that has more jagged edges. An untrained artist would just copy the layout as is.\n\n#### Implied Round, Concave or Convex Lines\n\nThis goes hand in hand with symmetrical shapes. Obviously if we have a shape that is too oval or round, the \"C\" contour of that shape would form a boring and swift linear movement.\n\n## Valuable Implied Lines\n\nWhenever possible, any problematic implied lines should be reworked into melodic lines, graceful lines or interrupted lines, and should be exploited to the utmost. They are vital compositional tools. These lines will result in pleasing eye movement.\n\n#### The Most valuable Compositional Lines\n\nThis image illustrates the three most attractive ways to move the viewer's eye through a painting. Think of an orchestra director when he is waving his baton. This will be moved in a graceful way. You can substitute the fast moving lines for these slower ones that are more pleasing to viewers. With this, you create your visual melody. A melodic line has a staircase effect to it, whereas a graceful line has a roller coaster effect with prominent protrusions and deep entrances. An interrupted line is a line that would otherwise be straight but is broken up into shorter segments. Its purpose is to slow down the visual pace. The gaps would be the speed bumps. (You could also call it a Morse-Code line or a connect-the-dots line.)\n\n#### Where to Place Lines\n\nSo where do we create all these compositional lines?\n\n##### Melodic Lines\n\n  * where water meets land, rocks, grass, clumps and floating tree trunks are handy tools\n  * where trees meet grass\n  * the bottom of cumulous clouds\n  * contours of rocks and rocky mountains\n  * contours of artistically designed evergreens\n  * to offset straight lines on buildings and tree trunks\n\n##### Graceful Lines\n\n  * contours of cumulous clouds\n  * contours of crashing waves and waterfalls\n  * deciduous trees (in a group or singular)\n  * visual paths, such as streams or rivers\n  * Interrupted Lines\n  * portions of roads peeking through the snow\n  * accents on bushes, grass, trees and under rocks\n  * cracks in stone walls\n  * to connect the dots for stones, bushes and wild flowers near each other\n  * rocks peeking through snow\n\n#### Melodic Lines\n\nYou can identify melodic lines by their \"staircase\" look. The reference photo shows an exquisite melodic line formed by the rocks against the water. Melodic lines are key to a successful landscape painting.\n\n#### Graceful Lines\n\nI would say there are deep enough dips in the contour of the autumn trees in this photo to classify this as a roller-coaster graceful line. Also the tops of the trees vary in height. When you see lines like these in nature, by all means\u2014exploit them.\n\n#### Melodic Line Shoreline\n\nThis is a good example of a designed melodic line. The eye enjoys \"reading\" the visual sentence until it reaches the crashing wave.\n\n#### Graceful Line Stream\n\nThe stream forms a pleasant graceful line that ushers the viewer to the sunlit area.\n\n#### Interrupted Line with Stones\n\nThe stones peeking through the snow form a Morse-Code pattern that slows down the visual speed.\n\n#### Seascapes\n\nSeascapes are very attractive because the contour of a wave can be designed into a graceful line. The rocks against the water form a melodic line.\n\nHere you can see the application of all the concepts you've just learned in one painting.\n\n## Lost-and-Found Lines\n\nOnce we have established which of the aforementioned lines is the most suitable in our composition, we will need to determine if the visual line should be well defined\u2014meaning hard edged, blurred, or a lost-and-found line, which is a combination of both.\n\n#### Diffused Contour Graceful Line\n\nThis is a graceful visual line whose entire contour is diffused.\n\n#### Lost-and-Found Graceful Line\n\nThis is a lost-and-found graceful line. This is the most exquisite and entertaining visual line. The diffused edge would read as foliage that is more distant. The hard edge would seem like the foliage is closer. The blurred-edged graceful line works well for waterfalls, foliage and clouds.\n\n#### Rain Clouds\n\nThe bottom of clouds that have shadows underneath make excellent melodic, lost-and-found implied lines. The fluffy part of the clouds forms a graceful line. The viewer's eye will travel along this line like reading a book, enjoying the process.\n\n#### Snow Scenes\n\nSnow scenes help offset the rigid lines of man made structures. I strategically placed the snow so that it would appear bumpy along the fence railings and roof lines. Be creative to slow the pace of the viewer's visual reading.\n\n#### Lost-and-Found edges\n\nIn this detail view of the above painting, note the lost-and-found edges on the contour of the trees against the sky. The hit-and-miss eye movement is well accepted by the viewer.\n\n#### Blur Portions of a Painting\n\nTo achieve blurred portions in watercolor, you can spot wet the paper, leaving some dry areas. To get blurred portions in other mediums, smudge randomly.\n\n## Solving Problematic Implied Lines\n\nYou will find many implied straight, zigzag, wavy and curved lines in nature. Here are some solutions:\n\n### Solving Implied Straight Lines\n\nImplied straight lines are most commonly found where water meets land, at the base of distant trees, distant hills, man made structures and roads, just to mention a few.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### Implied Straight Lines In Tree trunks\n\nThe bark peeling off the broken branches was all strategically made into melodic lines to avoid having the tree trunk show straight lines, as seen in the reference photo above.\n\n#### Implied Straight Lines at Shorelines\n\nWhere the river meets the land, we see a straight line. The visual movement is too fast. This also results in the river having a rectangle shape, which is not an abstract shape.\n\nBy adding a fallen tree trunk, some rocks and small coves, I was able to offset the straight line and slow down the visual thrust converting it to a melodic line. The tree in the foreground helped offset the rectangular shape of the water. On a side note, the mountain peak in the painting is now less triangular than in the reference photo. It is now an abstract shape.\n\n#### Implied Straight Horizon Lines\n\nSeascapes tend to have straight lines at the horizon. This can be counteracted by blurring that line, by adding fog, or by allowing waves and rocks to interrupt the line.\n\n#### Neutralize Straight Lines in Man Made Structures\n\nTo avoid rigid straight lines, subtle indentations were added to the edge of the stone wall that were not in the original scene. The tile roof looks damaged, but in paintings this adds character. Adding flowers to cover long straight lines is an excellent strategy. Many artists have made a living by applying this sole principle.\n\n### Solving Implied Zagazig Lines\n\nImplied zigzag lines are common when evergreen trees are grouped together.\n\n#### Pesty Zigzag Contours\n\nWhen the negative space between evergreens becomes repetitive and the widths of the evergreens are cloned, the result will be a zigzag eye movement. The solution to this is to open large gaps between some of the trees that are to be unequal and to vary the width and heights of these evergreens to the degree that the repetitive zigzag is gone. The contours of the mountains were designed into melodic lines.\n\n#### Advantages of Smudging\n\nSmudging to blend the distant forest into the background or sky will remove a zigzag contour line. Just leave a hint of some evergreens to let the viewers know what they are. Take into account that zigzag lines will be barely noticeable if their value is very close to the background, so they may not need to be smudged. The contour would be physically hard edged but not optically hard edged.\n\n### Solving Implied Wavy Lines\n\nImplied wavy lines are commonly found on tree tops and hills.\n\n#### Cropping\n\nObvious lines become strong attractions in paintings. Ask yourself if the line is leading the eye with a compositional purpose. If it isn't, take it out. Many times by cropping out or covering up a shape with an unnecessary line, you can avoid having the eye run like a subway back and forth. The long diagonal line on the background hill was not necessary so it was cropped.\n\n#### Create Deep Indentations\n\nIn the original scene, the tree top had very shallow negative shape indentations. By applying artistic license, I added some deep dips in some of the areas. Follow the contour of all the green deciduous trees. You will feel there is a roller coaster movement to the line. This now becomes a graceful line. The last tree does not need to be an obvious \"C\" line, due to the concave indentations.\n\n### Solving Implied Round and Curved Lines\n\nThese are slightly better than a straight line. Just like when a car approaches a curve, it needs to slow down but not enough to slow the pace to a comfortable visual movement. You can find curved lines in cloud formations, roads, rivers, streams, symmetrical trees and the contour of round rocks.\n\n#### Add Visual Speed Bumps\n\nThe \"C\" shaped line was solved by creating areas that protrude more, such as ice and rocks.\n\nThe \"C\" shape on the left side of the river is symmetrical. If left as is, it will rush the viewer.\n\n#### Interrupt the C Line\n\nAdd protruding bushes to convert a fast-moving \"C\" line into a graceful line.\n\n## Visual Paths\n\nNow we know that viewers are compelled to follow visual lines in paintings much like readers to street billboards. You also will want to have your viewers \"read\" the message in your paintings. The shapes are the words; the linear paths are the sentences. The goal is to set up visual paths to usher the viewer throughout your paintings, as well as to go as far into the background as you possibly can in a slow interesting way.\n\nIt is a common practice for most accomplished artists to resort to the foreground as being the entrance point, somewhat like the stairs that lead up into a house. The visual path should start there. Melodic and graceful lines will make visual paths very agreeable to the viewer. The most common visual paths in paintings are:\n\n  * cast shadows\n  * streams\n  * rivers\n  * shorelines\n  * roads\n  * bushes and wild flowers organized in a connect-the-dots sequence\n\n#### \"S\" Path Linear Movement\n\nIn this design, you can see a lazy \"S\" format to the linear path. Many professional artists use the \"S\" linear movement to lead the eye into the painting. You will see many examples of \"S\" visual paths in this book.\n\n#### Other Visual Paths\n\nThere are other ways to create linear paths that are not as obvious as roads or rivers. In this painting, I lined the sage brushes up in such a way that it would lead the eye. First you follow the bushes, then your eye follows the dirt area, then connects to the darker trees until your eye goes to the very back. Landscape paintings do not need focal points as long as you can move the eye throughout the painting well into the background.\n\nThe bales and the tall grass are organized in a way that they lead the eye to the background.\n\n#### Avoid the Train-Track Effect\n\nThe dirt road had two parallel lines. I offset one of them by overlapping it with the sage brushes. The grass against the dirt road forms a melodic line. The wild flowers are designed to grab the attention and subtly take the viewer to the distant cabin.\n\nThe logs are cleverly placed like toothpicks to help the viewer make the transition from the foreground to the mountain range. The protruding branches on the logs keep the eye from running over a straight line.\n\n#### Creating a Visual Lead-In\n\nOccasionally you will encounter reference photos in which the scene in its natural state does not provide a lead-in. Rather the eye will be rushed from side to side, and the viewer will feel compelled to exit the painting. This eye movement is inevitable when shorelines are placed in a certain way. In this painting, I had to create a melodic line with the shoreline to slow down the eye. I also applied artistic license and added waves to form the visual path from the foreground. The highlights on these waves form an interrupted line where the viewer connects the dots.\n\n#### Left-to-Right Visual Movement\n\nIn Western culture, we read from left to right. You will find that placing the visual movement from the left to right in most cases is preferable than the other way around. This painting has several melodic lines that the viewer will read in a pleasing way.\n\n#### Tip\n\nFlip your reference in a mirror before you draw it on the canvas.\n\nYou may get a better feel for it. Which version do you prefer from these two?\n\n#### Stop Visual Paths From Exiting At the Sides\n\nIf copied as is, the viewer will follow the contour of the cliff all the way to the right edge of the composition and go right out of the painting. It is better not to allow the viewer to exit on the side unless you provide a way back in near that exit.\n\n#### Solutions\n\nThis issue can be solved in two ways: Place fog to make the line and the area ambiguous, or put a \"stop sign\" before the edge. In this case, the protruding evergreen stops the line from inviting viewers to exit.\n\n### How To Indicate Rivers, Streams and Lakes\n\nIt is a common practice for artists to allow the bank of a river to exit at one of the sides as long as there is a reentry point an inch or so from that exit. The eye will make the connection at the short distance. This anchors the shape nicely and helps to avoid the feeling that the river is being fitted into the rectangle like socks in a drawer.\n\n#### Rivers\n\nWhen one part of the body of water originates from the side and the other from the bottom, it will give the impression it is a wider body of water such as a river. Make sure the two measurements from the corners are not the same.\n\n#### Streams\n\nWhen both sides of a body of water originate from the bottom, it will give the impression it is a narrow body of water, such as a stream.\n\n#### Lakes\n\nWhen both sides of the body of water come out from opposite sides, it will convey the impression that it is a lake or an ocean.\n\n#### Leading the Eye by Connecting the Dots\n\nIn a sense, this is an interrupted line. You can move a viewer visually by placing rocks, bushes, flowers or other things that would form a \"Hop Scotch\" pattern. These don't have to touch each other, but the gaps should be close enough to visually connect. The grass strands were placed strategically to invite the viewer in from the foreground and by connecting them, the eye goes to the cabins. There are narrow gaps that separate the grass but the eye still bridges them and moves forward.\n\n#### Leading the Viewer from the Top\n\nSo far I have only addressed visual paths that originate in foregrounds. You can also provoke eye movement coming from the top, much like the way we read newspapers. You can set it up where clouds, hills or the round tree foliage will give the viewer a sliding-board effect, so the eye slides into the painting. This can be done in conjunction with a visual path that would also originate from the foreground at the bottom.\n\nThe tree top guides the viewer in.\n\n#### Leading In From the Bottom\n\nThere is no question the steps are inviting. Note also that there are no distracting details in the immediate foreground.\n\n#### Bridge the Darks to Help Eye Flow\n\nVisually connect the dark elements. Either have them touch each other, or be close enough for the eye to make the leap without large gaps. Avoid the scattered billiard-ball effect. This way, the eye flows instead of jumping. If you cannot bridge dark spots, then slightly lighten the value. This would apply to accents in bushes, trees and rocks. Notice the pattern of darks in the negative painting and how close they are to one another.\n\n#### Visual Pointers\n\nThese are handy tools to direct the viewer to a certain area. These are normally tree branches, logs, leaves, long grass stands, etc. Think of visual pointers like a traffic policeman pointing towards the street so you can continue. In this painting, the tree has a couple of branches that direct the viewer past the gate. The semi-exposed concrete walkway is functioning as a visual path.\n\n## Establishing Rhythm\n\nOnce you design the major visual path, it is a good idea to have everything else follow that direction. Avoid lines that will contradict this eye flow. In a subtle way, keep all your lines moving towards the same direction.\n\n#### Follow Natural Lines\n\nFollow the sides of the rocks, their crevices and the flow of the water. You can feel there is an overall eye flow towards the waterfall where those lines converge.\n\n#### Poor\n\n#### Better\n\n#### Vehicles, People and Animals Should Not Face Edges\n\nIn the first picture, the viewer will unconsciously exit the painting. Turn vehicles, people and animals around to face inwardly. If people or animals are walking, make sure they are walking towards the center of your painting.\n\n## Demonstration: Create Melodic Movement in a Painting\n\nFollow the steps to invite the viewer into your painting from the foreground into the background. You will learn to work with a mixed palette of acrylics and oils.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\nSurface\n\ncanvas glued to panel\n\n**Brushes**\n\nnos. 4, 6, 8 and 10 brights, thin riggers, thin watercolor brush\n\n**Acrylics**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Yellow, Permanent Rose, Ultramarine Blue, Violet\n\n**Oil Paints**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Indian Red, Permanent Rose, Ultramarine Blue, Winsor Violet\n\nOther\n\nneutral violet pastel pencil, Liquin, palette knife, Liquitex super heavy gesso (for underpainting white)\n\n#### STEP1: Prepare the Surface, Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Sky\n\nTone the surface with Burnt Sienna acrylic paint. Sketch the composition with a neutral violet pastel pencil. This will blend into the paint later on. Lay in the background sky with a salmon-colored acrylic mixture with Cadmium Orange, Permanent Rose and white. This will imply a late sunset sky. Subdue the color intensity towards the peripheral area. Be more intense with the color where the sun will be placed.\n\n#### STEP 2: Finish Laying In the Sky\n\nScumble on some Winsor Violet at the top, away from where the sun will appear. (Placing cool colors next to warmer colors will make the overall scene appear even warmer.) Use Cadmium Yellow to create the sun, twisting your brush in circles like a drill. Scumble softly around the edge.\n\n#### STEP 3: Paint the Winter Trees\n\nDrybrush to indicate twigs. With a thin watercolor brush, paint the tree branches in Winsor Violet. Start lighter with the ones farther back and get darker as you come forward. Vary some of the lines. The tree trunks in the distance should have thinner lines and get thicker as you move forward.\n\nAvoid repeating gaps so the negative spaces aren't repetitive. Vary the slants. Make the trunks irregular by drybrushing. Keep them from looking too similar by putting tree knots in.\n\nWith a no. 4 bright, add in some orange right where the trees cross over the sun and scumble the paint on with a light feathery touch.\n\nPaint some snow stuck to the trees by randomly breaking the paint. Paint in between the branches making sure to keep the gaps different.\n\n#### STEP 4: Add Bushes and Snow\n\nPaint some bushes in the left area so that you have two different sides to the painting. Use drybrushing for this and get darker as you come forward.\n\nCreate a melodic line at the bottom of the bushes. Add grass at the bottom of the bushes by pulling your brush upward from the bottom. Add snow to the bushes and to the ground around the bushes.\n\n#### STEP 5: Paint the Water and River Bank\n\nPaint the water using cool purple tones. Drybrush the bushes in with Burnt Sienna, Indian Red and Ultramarine Blue. Create visual movement by painting snow along the bank, creating a melodic line between the snow and the water. Vary the blue and red tones on the snow, showing more red in the distance.\n\nPaint grasses in the foreground, using a portion of that to draw the viewer's eye in. (This way you aren't relying solely on the snow to do that.) Allow some of the orange underpaint to bleed through. Use a rigger brush to indicate a few individual grass strands with a quick flip of your wrist while holding the very tip of the brush. Work very fast so they look spontaneous.\n\n#### STEP 6: Finish with Details\n\nTime to switch to oils! Apply Liquin thinly over the whole painting. Paint in some ice, making it lighter than the water but darker than the snow bank. Add reflections from the bushes across the pond. Start at the ridge where the water meets the land and pull down in vertical strokes. Carve out some ice shapes to create the melodic line. Ice will not have any reflections.\n\nCreate small choppy strokes across the vertical reflections to create movement in the water. Keep those strokes as horizontal as possible. Add more snow to the frosted trees. Indicate tree branches with a palette knife. Add a few dark accents under the snow to lift it off the water using an interrupted line. Echo the sunlight onto the grass and snow. Keep it very subtle. Think in terms of romantic candle light\u2014less is more.\n\n_Seeking for Warmth_\n\n_Oil and acrylic on canvas glued to panel, 9\"\u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm)_\n\n# Chapter 5\n\n# Simplify\n\nCarmel Mission\n\nWatercolor on Fabriano cold-pressed watercolor paper, 12\" \u00d7 16\" (30cm \u00d7 41cm)\n\nEvery time a new student asks me how I know when a painting is finished, my answer is, \"It is never finished. You just stop working on it in time.\" A painting is not ready to be framed until you have taken out everything that a viewer who has not seen your reference photo will not miss. Remember, you are taking a large scene from the real world and scaling it down to mere inches. Instead of the eye moving between objects that are several yards apart, those details in a painting are much closer together. Unless the painting is quite large, too much detail can cause it to feel cluttered and unpleasing to the eye.\n\nThere will come a point in time that you mature past the concern of _how_ to depict things and will be more interested in _why_ a certain shape should be present. Does it serve a compositional purpose? If you can justify its presence from a design aspect, include it. If the answer is simply because it's in your reference, there may be no justification for it. For the sake of simplifying, you may want to exclude it.\n\nJust like with poetry, a simplified painting will stimulate the viewer to mentally wander into your artistic story, rather than having to visually process unnecessary information. The purpose of simplification is to reduce the viewer's need to mentally process too much visual information. It's a similar concept to editing a story, where unnecessary words are left out. In painting, the brushstrokes are your words, and a few masses and shapes are all you need. You can say more with less.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to crop a scene in order to simplify its composition.\n  * How to reduce the amount of unnecessary detail in a painting.\n  * How to simplify natural and architectural elements found in reference.\n\n## Zoom In and Cut Out\n\nOne easy way to not try to say too much in one painting is to crop out what is not essential to tell the story. This allows the viewers to focus on only a few elements. Successful still life artists know this all too well. Too many objects will make the painting busy. Nothing changes in this regard to landscapes.\n\nThink of your rectangular canvas format like the square feet of your home. You want to make the best out of that limited space but not clutter things. I recommend you try to crop your photo several ways until you feel you have the right version. Most of the time, I find that zooming in ends up being the best policy as long as you don't suffocate the scene. Here you will need to rely on artistic asthetics and just follow your instincts on what to include or leave out.\n\n#### Competing Objects\n\nIn the top photo, there are two boats and several houses competing for attention. There is too much water and the stones with the bushes on the left will not add this to composition at all. After cropping and trying several alternatives, I ended up with the second picture that had enough of the information I needed to tell the story.\n\n## Simplifying Nature\n\nWe already know that the left side of the brain attempts to record and document literally, and this can cause artists to feel compelled to add unnecessary details to their work. The more detail you document, the less the viewer daydreams by adding his own ideas, because his brain will be too focused on interpreting the visual information. I believe a painting is successful when the viewer starts adding his own \"mental brushstrokes.\" When I create a lake scene and someone tells me that they can see themselves rowing and relaxing in a boat there, that's when I clap my hands and say, \"Eureka! I succeeded!\"\n\nOf all the paintings I have admired over the years, I have yet to see one that has been oversimplified. In nature, we will find an overwhelming abundance of details. There will be lots of individual stones by river banks, many tree branches on bare trees, countless sagebrushes squeezing themselves together in a field, and so on. The secret to making your artwork appealing is to reduce details. You can reduce the amount of detail to simplify a painting if you do _not_ :\n\n  * Indicate separate grass strands.\n  * Add too many branches to trees.\n  * Include unnecessary rocks and stones.\n  * Show too many white snow patches on mountains.\n  * Indicate too many cracks and indentations in cliffs or mountains.\n  * Depict too many separate leaves on trees.\n  * Show too many boughs on evergreen trees.\n  * Subdivide rock crevices too many times.\n  * Depict too many small clouds in a sky.\n  * Add too many wavelets to choppy water.\n\n#### Remove What Is Unnecessary\n\nThe cliff had too many crevices. Reducing them to the bare minimum helps calm the mental overload so viewers can instantly determine they are looking at a cliff. You will always find yourself battling the two different sides of your brain. Ultimately, if a photo doesn't need to be improved, then why paint a scene from it at all? You might as well just frame the photo and call it a day. Improving photos means removing unnecessary visual clutter to tell the same story.\n\n#### Simplify the Periphery\n\nCan this painting be more simplified? Yes! The cactus plant is distracting in the peripheral area and the stones are not adding to the scene. Out they go! Remember a painting is not done until you go back and remove what is not necessary with a giant mental broom.\n\n#### Limit Individual Stones\n\nJust a few stones are defined in the artistic interpretation of the photo, but your mind is putting many more in there like an optical illusion. Think of melting smaller things together. Also many of the subdivisions in the rocks in the foreground were merged into large forms.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### Visualizing Foliage\n\nAn effective way to visualize how to paint foliage is to depict it just like it appears on a non-high-definition television. The blurry television image simplifies trees, and leaves are fused into large clusters.\n\n#### Limit Individual Leaves\n\nHow many leaves can you count? This plein air painting was done on a 9\" \u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm) canvas. Because of the small size, I refrained from indicating individual leaves. I merged all the single leaves into large clusters. If the painting were larger, then it would look over simplified with no individual leaves showing, even when working at a larger scale, such as 18\" \u00d7 24\" (46cm \u00d7 61cm).\n\n#### Reduce Small Sky Holes in Foliage\n\nThis is one more example where you cannot apply how things appear in real life into your paintings. Trees in nature tend to have an overwhelming amount of small sky holes. You want to avoid this polka-dot effect, which will just tire the viewer.\n\n#### Create Larger Gaps\n\nViewers like to visually explore what is behind another plane by looking in between foliage. This tunnel effect enhances depth. The rest of the tree is quite solid with just a few sky gaps at the top third. Without these, it would appear to be pasted on.\n\n#### Reduce Sky Value to Blend With Foliage\n\nReduce the value of the sky in the gaps so they blend in better with the foliage, especially if the tree is dark. The value contrast will make them stand out too much otherwise.\n\n#### Merge Adjacent Trees and Bushes Together\n\nImagine your trees are made of plastic like the artificial plants you buy at a craft store. Pretend you heat the foliage with a blow torch. The moment they start to melt, you take away the heat. The way they end up looking melted together equates to how you would do foliage-related symbols with paint. Think of your foliage and grass in terms of metaphors.\n\n#### Sweep Away the Clutter\n\nWhen I did this plein air painting, I confess, I felt compelled to paint the fence into the scene simply because it was there. Once back in my studio, I applied the concept of sweeping away the clutter in order to simplify. I asked myself, \"What can I take out that would not be missed?\" I decided to remove the fence. If you had never seen the reference photo or the setting itself, you would not even know the fence was absent.\n\n#### Create Rest Areas\n\nIt's a good policy to have a patch that is void of detail right before the center of interest to bring relief. You can compare this to a carpet in a living room. The white snow void on information right before the house serves as the rest area in this painting.\n\n#### No Need to Paint Individual Grass Strands\n\nThink of your painting as the background for an animated movie. The viewers don't need details to put the story together. The mind will add grass strands. I drybrushed some texture in to create the illusion of clumps of grass.\n\n## Simplifying Architecture\n\nBecause buildings are man made structures that we can really associate with because of their symmetry, they become a strong attraction for an artist to depict at face value. The intellectual symmetrical brain will want to indicate all the details. The skill is to resist this and end up with just an impression of the scene, even a cartoonish look if possible.\n\n#### Do Not Emphasize Windows\n\nThis alley scene would be overwhelming to paint in detail. This was done in about three hours. The windows away from where the eye normally looks were down played so they would not be distracting. It's amazing how the mind adds to a simplified painting. The goal of this painting was to end up with only a simplified impression. As a result, you feel the place rather than seeing it.\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * If you have a small portion of sky you may not need to add clouds.\n  * The use of fog is an excellent agent for simplifying.\n  * When your paintings look like the background of an animation studio-produced movie, then you know you are on the right track.\n  * If you can count the brushstrokes in a shape you know it is not overworked.\n  * If you end up with a disastrously busy painting, try putting the entire scene into heavy fog by scumbling. You may end up loving it!\n  * Reduce the amount of white snow, white water on waterfalls, rapids and seascapes to a minimum.\n  * When facing a scene with clutter during plein air, pretend you are a well known movie director and you have a whole crew with cranes that can remove objects until you leave only the characters necessary for your story.\n\n#### Simplify Roofs and Reduce Stones and Bricks\n\nRefrain from indicating all the shingles an d tiles on roofs. Suggest just a few bricks and shingles placed well within the boundaries of the painting while respecting the peripheral area. Remember, let the viewer's imagination do the rest. Make them larger than scale so they can be easily distinguished from a distance. There is no need to do architectural renderings.\n\n#### Merge Leaves\n\nFor flowers and foliage, merge all the smaller flowers together in large clusters. The same applies to deciduous tree leaves. The presence of bushes and flowers also helps offset rigid straight lines in buildings. Notice the diffused edges of the flowers where they meet the walls.\n\n## Demonstration: Simplify Your Painting Composition\n\nUse acrylics for this painting in order to keep the hard edges of the mountain. As you work, use a fine-mist spray bottle to spray the pigments with water every fifteen minutes or so to keep them from drying out on you.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\n**Surface**\n\nlinen glued to masonite board\n\n**Brushes**\n\nnos. 6, 8 and 10 brights (stiff from previous use with oils)\n\n**Open Acrylics**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Dioxazine Purple, Permanent Deep Green, Transparent Red Oxide, Yellow Ochre\n\n**Other**\n\nfine-mist spray bottle, gel retarder, Liquitex super heavy gesso, neutral violet pastel pencil\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Sky and Mountain\n\nSketch the composition with a neutral violet pastel pencil. (This will go muddy and blend in with the paint later on.) Lay in the clouds with Yellow Ochre and a hint of Dioxazine Purple. Lay in the sky with Cobalt Blue and a bit of Yellow Ochre. Plan for the sky to be a lighter value than what the river will be, since water is always darker than sky. Position the sun on the left side so that the sky will be darker on one side than the other\u2014this creates a gradient plane. The two sides of the mountain look identical, so offset the symmetry by placing more clouds to one side. Paint the clouds with Liquitex super heavy gesso\u2014 it performs more like oil paint and will give you a good heavy texture, and increase the drying time.\n\nUse a blue-violet mixture for the mountain. (Keep in mind that acrylic paint dries a touch darker.) Variegate the hues slightly, adding more red in some areas and more blue in others. Do not simplify the ridges of the mountain or it will lose its character.\n\n#### STEP 2: Lay In the Hills and Begin Painting the Trees\n\nFor the distant hills, get darker and warmer as you begin to move closer to the foreground. Add more red into your blue-violet mixture. To keep the hill edge on the left from competing with the mountain edge, scumble and feather in the paint along the area to soften the edge where the hill meets the sky. Block in the evergreen trees with a muted green. Think of them as one unit when massing in. Do not repeat the gaps between the boughs, rather, simplify by reducing the number of boughs.\n\n#### STEP 3: Continue Painting the Trees and Lay In the Mid-Ground Rocks\n\nContinue painting the trees, varying the hues between the closest and receding trees, adding in Burnt Sienna to the closer ones. Keep the distant trees cooler. Ideally, no tree should be the same width or height, and the gaps between them should differ as well. Use a yellow-green mixture for the mid-ground cotton wood trees. Negative paint in the rocks with light gray-brown.\n\n#### STEP 4: Lay In the Water and Foreground Rocks\n\nLay in the water with a blue-green mixture. (Never use straight blue for water\u2014there is no way to harmonize it!) Make sure it's darker and more gray than the sky color. Paint around the rocks, trying to get lighter as the water recedes. This helps keep it from looking flat. Keep your brushstrokes straight and horizontal. Lay in the foreground rocks, focusing on the abstract shape of them rather than trying to copy them exactly. Create a melodic line at the bottom of the rocks where they meet the water. Eliminate the fallen trunks from the reference photo.\n\n#### STEP 5: Refine the Trees and Paint Reflections\n\nAdd highlights to the evergreens. Keep them darker than the mountain. Add some smaller trees in front and some taller trees in the back to avoid having them look like one big wall. Scumble the edges of the trees against the sky to break up the paint and create soft edges.\n\nAdd retarder to the water before you begin the reflections. They should be more subdued than what is on dry land. Keep all reflections about the same value. Negative paint around the rocks. Don't paint any reflections farther back, just in the foreground. Use vertical strokes for the reflections on the right and horizontal strokes for reflections on the left so they don't compete with each other.\n\n#### STEP 6: Add Details to Finish\n\nHighlight the mountain with white and a warm gray mixture. Think of the highlights as abstract shapes. Don't try to copy them directly from the photo. Use a mixture of white and a touch of yellow-orange for the snow caps. Make sure there is no confusion between what are clouds and what is snow. The cloud value should be darker. Lightly drybrush over the snow to break it up. Add blue shadows to the snow, but keep them slightly darker and more gray than the sky. Square off the rocks. Exaggerate the presence of brown in the trees to add interest.\n\n_The Teton_\n\n_Open acrylics on linen glued to masonite board, 8\" \u00d7 10\" (20cm \u00d7 25cm)_\n\n# Chapter 6\n\n# Avoiding Clones\n\nGrandma's Flower garden\n\nOil on canvas, 16\" \u00d7 20\" (41cm \u00d7 51cm)\n\nA painting can be technically perfect in terms of technique, but still turn out to look boring if the visual information you have on one side of the painting is quite similar to what is on the other side, or if one shape is similar to another. This creates what is known as _cloning,_ or a mirror-like effect. It is the artistic equivalent of telling the same story twice. The interest in your painting will dramatically increase if you ensure both sides are completely different.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn:\n\n  * How to identify the most commonly found implied clone shapes in nature.\n  * How to use artistic license to vary the size, shape and color of objects in a landscape to avoid cloning.\n  * How to plan your composition to avoid a mirror effect in your painting.\n\n## Identifying Clones\n\nI have done many field studies and I am still in awe of how so many nature scenes contain clones. Mother Nature once again throws curve balls at us artists. When I refer to cloned shapes, I mean that they are visually implied from an artistic point of view. Shapes can differ in height or width, yet still appear similar. It will not benefit the painting to have repeating forms demanding equal attention and competing with each other.\n\nDuring your artistic endeavors, you will find yourself recognizing and changing all forms that appear to be alike. When determining clones, take into account the negative space, not just the positive shape. Triangular shapes in the negative space between evergreens, mountain peaks and bare trees are common and can be repeated several times.\n\n#### Watch for Repeating Shapes\n\nThe trees in the first photo are cloned several times. Such a degree of repetition of forms is rare but it can happen. The three trees in the bottom image are somewhat different in size but close enough together in likeness to still be considered visually implied clones.\n\nArtistically speaking however, it is better for the shapes in a painting to be dramatically different from one another.\n\n#### Stones\n\nStones tend to appear like coins scattered on the ground.\n\n#### Mountain Peaks\n\nMountain peaks end up looking alike in a triangular fashion.\n\n#### Evergreens\n\nClones are easily found in evergreens. They tend to be about the same height and width as the adjacent ones.\n\n## Offsetting Clones\n\nOnce you know how to identify clones, there are several tricks you can employ to offset them and improve the harmony of your paintings.\n\n#### Depict Evergreens in a Clump\n\nThis avoids the singled-out aspect. The viewer will see this as a mass, which makes it easier to process the visual information.\n\n#### Change Colors\n\nConstant repetition of color is also cloning. The brown-orange tree is only stated once.\n\n#### Vary Height and Width of Objects\n\n  * Careful consideration was given to vary the size and width of each tree in this painting. There are variations with their colors as well. The two right trees are somewhat fused together to appear larger than the adjacent trees. The negative space between the evergreens is abstractly designed. None of the gaps are duplicated.\n\n#### Merge Rocks Into Larger Units\n\nSome rocks on the left are too close in size. This becomes a common problem when they appear in groups. By combing three smaller rocks into one, there is better diversity. While you are painting, think of the analogy of Goldilocks: Father, Mother and Baby Bear, with each representing a variation in size.\n\n#### Depicting Winter Trees\n\nWhen depicting trees in winter settings, offset any possible cloning by painting each tree so that it leans differently and all diameters are unequal.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\nThe furthest mountain peaks are too similar. If copied at face value, they would be considered clones. What makes matters worse is that the negative white space between the peaks is too triangular.\n\n#### Manipulate Negative Space\n\nQuite a bit of artistic license was taken with the detail of this painting, which was based on the reference photo above. I modified the peaks by resizing them. The symmetrical triangular space in the blue sky is much less obvious. The last mountain peak is now blocked by an overpassing cloud to avoid creating a clone.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\nThe erosion of water running over the wall of this mountain has formed some natural crevices. Painting these would section the areas into similar puzzle-piece sizes and make them appear too identical. They are so similar that they look like teeth.\n\n#### Avoid Crevices in Cliffs\n\nIn this close up section of a painting inspired by the photo above, just a few crevices are indicated. Each section is quite different from the next, and the divisions are simplified. All the puzzle pieces are different and abstract.\n\n## Avoid a mirror effect\n\nWhen you are out on the field or when selecting reference photos, draw an imaginary line down the middle and compare both sides to see if they are quite diverse in the information. The mountain range below looks asymmetrical, but the weight of the trees, the pond and the grass is about the same on both sides. If we put this photo in front of a mirror and reverse the image, it won't change much. It is doubtful this photo, without dramatically changing one of the sides, would make a successful painting. You will encounter many situations like this. Another key to being a successful artist is to know which elements will work in a painting and which ones won't. Some photos would make great posters, but good paintings will not necessarily result from them.\n\nTry to avoid having competing visual information on both sides of the image.\n\n#### Too Much Balance\n\nIf you looked at this Grand Canyon scene in real life, it would be breathtaking. If you put this in front of a mirror, both sides are too similar. As soon as you crop it, the visual information ends suddenly and does not gradually fade out in the peripheral vision. The duplicate sides will become very noticeable. Therefore we have to make the scene very entertaining to hold the viewer's attention.\n\n#### Use Several Reference Photos\n\nThis is from the same scene in the reference photo on the previous page. The group of rocks in the foreground was not in the original photo. Because two different views on each side was a priority, the vertical rocks were imported from a different photo. Think of your artwork like a movie script. Incorporate several photos to form a story board. You can literally move mountains with your artistic license. There are now two visually different sides to the painting.\n\n#### Offset Parallel Sides\n\nThe cactus plants in the foreground of this painting serve the purpose of offsetting parallel sides.\n\n#### Avoid Repeating Corners\n\nNormally when we paint blue skies or grass it is very easy to provide the viewer with the same visual information on both sides. This can lead to a boring outcome, and both corners will become rivals. Being aware of this will help you design your skies or foregrounds better. You can have a blue sky showing in one corner and a cloud on the other. The trees were purposely brought to the top to offset similar corners in the sky. The values of the water in the bottom corners are different.\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * Take a picture of your painting. Look at it as a thumbnail in a graphic editing program. You will spot discrepancies easier. Flip the image horizontally for a fresh view. Turn it upside down as well. You will notice things you may have missed in the original format.\n  * Because the symmetrical brain wants to participate in the activity, clones can creep into your painting when you least expect it. Be on guard!\n  * Turn your artwork upside down. You may be able to detect clones and symmetrical shapes easier because of the fresh view.\n\n#### Vary Corners With Clouds\n\nThis plein air painting shows a blue sky in the left corner and white clouds in the right corner. When I painted this outdoors, there was no blue sky. Skies will have blue areas, white clouds and clouds with shadows when they accumulate moisture for rain. Take advantage of these weather variances to offset equal corners on opposite sides. If you don't see them, then invent them or use an additional reference photo.\n\n#### Depicting Outdoor Stones, Bricks and Walls\n\nCareful consideration was given to just indicate a few individual bricks. The viewer will fill in the missing information.\n\n## Demonstration: Offset Clones in a Landscape Painting\n\nUse acrylic for this painting to easily overlayer the taller evergreen trees. As you work, use a fine-mist spray bottle to spray the pigments with water every fifteen minutes or so to keep them from drying out on you.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\n**Surface**\n\ncanvas on masonite board\n\n**Brushes**\n\nnos. 6, 8 and 10 brights (stiff from previous use with oils)\n\n**Acrylics**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Dioxazine Purple, Permanent Deep Green, Yellow Ochre\n\n**Other**\n\nfine-mist spray bottle, gel retarder, Liquitex super heavy gesso (for underpainting white), neutral violet pastel pencil\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Sky and Distant Hill\n\nSketch in the drawing with a neutral violet pastel pencil. (This will blend in with the paint later on). On the right side of the sky, lay in the clouds with Yellow Ochre and Liquitex super heavy gesso. It performs more like oil paint (allowing for texture) and it takes longer to dry. In this sense, white gesso is better than ordinary Titanium White. For the left side of the sky, use Cobalt Blue with a touch of Permanent Deep Green. Plan for the sky to be lighter in value than what the river will be. Bodies of water are usually darker than the sky. Use Cobalt Blue with a touch of purple and Burnt Sienna to indicate the very distant hill in a mid-value. Take into account that acrylics dry darker than when first applied. Soften the edges.\n\n#### STEP 2: Lay In the Hills and Begin Painting the Trees\n\nMix your colors until you achieve a blue violet in a mid-dark value. Block in the middle ground hill with that mixture. On top add the evergreen trees slightly varying the greens to about the color of an olive. Indicate some evergreen trees with Burnt Sienna. Add touches of light to the closer ones.\n\n#### STEP 3: Continue Painting the Trees and Lay In the Mid-Ground Rocks\n\nLay in the hill on the right side in the same manner as the last hill. Be careful to vary the gaps where the evergreen trees meet the sky to avoid cloning the trees. Indicate the rocky area with Cobalt Blue and Burnt Sienna. For the taller evergreens, make a mixture of a muted green (about the same color as an olive) with Permanent Deep Green, Burnt Sienna and purple. Make sure none of the evergreens repeat their width and their heights. Indicate the tree between the rocks using Burnt Sienna as the predominant color.\n\n#### STEP 4: Paint the Water and Foreground Rocks\n\nUse Cobalt Blue, Permanent Deep Green, purple and some Burnt Sienna (to gray the color a bit) to paint in the river. Lay in the water with a blue-green mixture. Do not use straight blue for water. It is difficult to harmonize the color. Keep your brushstrokes as horizontal as possible. Get lighter as the water recedes. Add the rocks with a mixture of Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre. Make sure it gets pretty close to gray. The highlights on the rocks are done with the same mixture but with more Burnt Sienna and white. Apply what you have already learned and design those rocks into abstract shapes. Ignore the shapes in the photo.\n\n#### STEP 5: Refine the Trees and Paint Reflections\n\nAdd retarder over the river and immediately paint in the reflections with vertical strokes. Then break up the reflections close to where they end with horizontal strokes. Add just a few fallen tree trunks.\n\n#### STEP 6: Add Details to Finish\n\nDrybrush on top of the river with white and a touch of Yellow Ochre to indicate the white choppy water. Indicate some water ripples in the foreground only. Add the grass patch, but keep it simple. Be careful not to place the orange bush in the middle.\n\n_Yellowstone River, Yellowstone national Park_\n\n_Acrylic on canvas glued to masonite board, 9 \u00d7 12\" (23cm \u00d7 30cm)_\n\n# Chapter 7\n\n# Accentuate Depth\n\nWelcome In\n\nOil on canvas, 24\" \u00d7 30\" (61cm \u00d7 76cm)\n\nBy now you know that the three-dimensional field of depth is something that cannot be replicated on a two-dimensional surface. But we can convey the illusion of depth. Unfortunately, this aspect of painting is often ignored.\n\nThe ability to indicate depth was the skill that took longest for me to acquire. To make things appear as if they are receding requires skill and planning. For many years, I was more concerned with depicting shapes to be abstract rather than trying to make them appear three-dimensional. As a result, areas of my artwork ended up looking flat. The problem was the reference photos\u2014the field depth is totally lost the moment a photo of a scene is taken. This deficiency carried over into my paintings. I noticed my paintings dramatically improved when I began emphasizing and exaggerating the illusion of depth in my work.\n\nThe same applies when interpreting a scene done in plein air onto a flat canvas. Without proper application of techniques and deliberate intent to accentuate depth there may not be enough field depth simulation.\n\nIn this chapter you will learn how to use the following methods for accentuating depth in a painting:\n\n  * Overlapping\n  * Atmospheric Perspective\n  * Edge Manipulation\n  * Creating Multiple Planes\n  * Value Shifts\n  * Texture\n  * Foliage Indentation\n  * Gradient Planes\n  * Color Desaturation\n\n## Methods for Accentuating Depth\n\nAs artists we must go out of our way to create visual recession in the most convincing way possible by manipulating edges and forms. Use the following methods to convey a sense of depth in your landscape paintings.\n\n#### Overlapping\n\nBy placing one item in front of another, we send a message to the viewer that something is in front and something is behind. The fountain placed in front of the building helps convey a sense of depth. Take into account that the more we overlap something, we remove importance from the object when it is being partially blocked. Careful consideration is to be given how much you want something to overlap a center of interest, or you may minimize it.\n\n#### Atmospheric Perspective\n\nYou can see miles of depth in this painting. The closer cliffs take on a warm violet, shifting to blue-violet in the mid ground, and then blue in the furthest plane.\n\nUnless it is a foggy day, the obvious effect of atmospheric perspective is unnoticeable for planes that are just hundreds of feet away. In a normal day, you will start to see things getting bluer and lighter at about one mile away from you. You can really exploit this to create the illusion of depth.\n\n#### Fog\n\nNothing can beat this wonderful and handy tool to convey a sense of depth. It is great for separating planes. Otherwise they would all be the same value. In the forest area, it would be very difficult to convey the sense of recession without the fog. Solely overlapping the trees will not deliver a good enough sense of depth. Objects will always get lighter when they are yards apart and more simplified the deeper they recede into the fog. The fog also helps to keep the house from appearing as though it is sitting on top of the boat.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### Use Fog to Separate Buildings\n\nIf those fishing shacks were to be painted as they appear in the photo, the end result would be a sense of crowding them together. Logically we can measure the space in between each building, but visually we cannot. Because the photo flattened the scene, some buildings in this scene appear to be on top of each other. When there is nothing between the buildings, the sense of field depth is gone. This is why grass and fog were added between the houses.\n\n#### Exploit Thick Air for Moods\n\nWhen air molecules are thick because of high humidity, the atmosphere will absorb the warm rays of the late evening sunlight and give off a warm glowing light. This creates a mood which is very pleasant in paintings. Viewers tend to be drawn to paintings with moods.\n\n#### Ground Fog\n\nGround fog can give the viewer an out-of-the-ordinary view. Depicting ground fog in this painting is what got me Mexico's top award in watercolor media. This was done on a watercolor sheet called _Elephant Ear_ , which measured 60\" \u00d7 44\" (152cm \u00d7 112cm). I had to lie on the floor to do certain areas.\n\n#### Fog As a Cooling Agent\n\nA painting can be too cool or too warm. The trick is to find the correct balance between the two and to use colors of both temperatures to compensate each other. Autumn scenes can be disturbing because of all the warm colors that would look too garish. Fog can soothe this overwhelming color temperature. Also by not depicting sunlight, the oranges end up being toned down.\n\n#### Edge Manipulation\n\nContrasting blurry and sharp edges against each other is very effective for showing depth. Anything solid and static does not have diffused edges in the real world. Only things that contain water, such as foam or clouds will appear blurred. You will need to rely on blurring edges even though you cannot see them on solid objects. This becomes another tool to give the illusion that things are far away.\n\nThis house portrait shows overlapping from the lamp posts and the birch tree. The biggest asset for recession in this watercolor is the wet-on-wet technique in the background. When contrasted against the sharp edges of the house, it makes the foliage appear to recede several planes. Soft bleeding edges should always be present in watercolors. Watercolor allows for wonderful diffused edges, but lacks the ability to add thick impasto as texture.\n\n#### Diffused Edges\n\nBackgrounds will appear to be in a distant plane when the edges are diffused. In real life, a background is not soft. In this detail view, the house appears to come forward.\n\n#### Blurred Edges\n\nThe planes behind man made structures should be out of focus when it comes to foliage and hills. An exception to this would be rocky mountains. The angular structure which gives them character would become weakened.\n\n#### Create at Least Three Planes\n\nThe more planes a painting has, the more depth that is perceived. You can have sub planes within the three main planes (background, mid ground and foreground). Always create a minimum of three planes in your composition\u2014more if possible. In this painting, the idea was to make viewers feel like they could walk through the forest by creating layers of foliage as the forest gradually gets deeper. This painting gives a very convincing sense of depth in the background, which is nonexistent in the real life scene because the evergreens line up like birds on a wire and block anything behind them.\n\n#### Assign Values Per Plane\n\nThe principles of atmospheric perspective apply as long as all planes get the equal degree of light. All bets are off when a rain cloud casts a shadow over one plane and the sun is allowed to shed light on another plane. When this is the case, a background that is in shadow will not be lighter than a closer plane, such as the middle ground or foreground if the sun is peeking through the clouds only in those areas. When an overall plane is in a different value than another, the separation of these planes will be quite obvious as seen in this painting. Viewers will feel more invited when you darken a foreground plane and lighten the middle ground or background plane.\n\n#### Shift Values\n\nIn the first image, the closest plane of evergreens is lighter than the ones behind them. The value pattern was reversed in the second picture. The overall value of the planes can be interchanged and the sense of depth will still apply. If both planes of evergreens forests are in the same value, then our sense of field depth will be compromised and we would only rely on atmospheric perspective and size perspective to indicate depth.\n\n#### Texture\n\nHeavy impasto (thick paint) will convey that foreground objects are closer. You can reduce the thickness of paint for shapes in the mid ground. In the background avoid heavy paint\u2014use just enough to show the brushstrokes. Oil paint and acrylics have this advantage over other mediums.\n\n#### Building Texture\n\nThe surface was prepared with Liquitex super heavy gesso to build the texture before adding the colored pigment. The red-orange bush in the foreground was done with a drybrush technique and very thick paint. By applying a light touch, like tickling, the pigment peeled of the brush leaving the broken paint. Watercolor paper also works well for the drybrush technique. Hot-pressed (rough) paper leaves more gaps in between than cold-pressed (smooth) paper does.\n\n#### Foliage Indentations\n\nNegative painting creates visual orifices. Think of it as engraving an insignia in a ring. We can apply this same principle with foliage. Negative painting was used in this winter scene to bring out the positive shapes of the tree branches. This is a great way to create visual indentations for depth as well as establish the intent of design. This also forces you to work from your artistic brain, because as a child, you never did this so there is no preconceived memory of the process. No childhood habits will interfere. If there are no visual orifices in foliage, it will appear like a flat wall. There would be no place where a bird can protect itself from pouring rain and strong wind. The branches of the frosted trees were brought out by painting the dark spots into the lighter values. This reverse painting method brings out abstract negative shapes as well.\n\n#### Think Front-to-Back While painting\n\nIt is very common when foliage is about the length of a football field away from you that the bushes and trees seem to line up in a straight line like a wall. This will result in a visual pace that is too fast from side to side, and a rectangle will form from the horizontal grass planes. The sense of some trees being in front of other trees vanishes. Equate this to a chess game that has not begun. The trees and bushes in the picture line up like the chess pieces.\n\n#### Place Objects at 3\u20444 Position\n\nThink of a box. If we only show one side, it will look like a square, but as soon as we turn it we have a cube as long as both sides have different values. This concept applies to still lifes, portraits, wildlife and especially to buildings.\n\n#### Move Objects Like Chess Pieces\n\nWe all have the habit of writing from left to right in the Western world. We place words adjacent to each other. When we paint, we tend to repeat this habit with our landscape symbols like placing houses next to each other on a street. To break this habit, consciously position landscape objects unevenly in front of each other so there is recession from front to back. This is much more important than thinking side to side. Visualize a chess board and pretend you are moving trees, bushes, rocks, etc., like chess pieces coming forward. In the painting the large left tree was brought forward three squares. Some bushes were placed unevenly in front of the right tree, so the pawns were moved one and two squares.\n\nThe straight line where the foliage meets the grass in the photo, the rectangular portion of the grass, and the absence of field depth have all been corrected. Checkmate! I beat the photo!\n\n#### Recession Using Gradient Planes\n\nThis approach is used by animation illustrators and it is very effective. In a gradient plane, a value can become gradually darker or lighter in the distance or a color temperature can become warmer or cooler as it recedes. Gradient planes give a very good impression that horizontal planes are receding. Vertical planes seem to have more height and length when gradiated.\n\nThis foreground in the first picture is very flat. Since there is no river or stream to indicate a visual path, we can cast a shadow over the foreground to draw the viewer in. There is a convincing impression of depth in the second painting now. The value gradually gets lighter as it goes deeper in, hence the name, gradient plane.\n\n#### Avoid Flat Bodies of Water\n\nThis field study was done during an overcast day. I saw the same value of blue-gray in the entire body of water. Had I not lightened areas of that water, the painting would lack a convincing sense of depth. Lakes, seascapes and rivers give us great opportunities for gradient planes because they reflect the sky that can have so many variances of values.\n\n#### Gradient Planes Can be Reversed\n\nThis alternative view is showing a gradient plane, light to dark instead of dark to light like the picture above. The recession is still conveyed. It is just another version. This spot-lighting technique is an effective way to control where you want light. The rocks at the very bottom are darker than the ones further out into the distance. This also becomes a gradient plane. The grass in the middle ground gets darker towards the left edge as well. The ground becomes bluer and lighter near the far mountain range showing atmospheric perspective.\n\n#### Gradient Planes in Skies\n\nSkies can be boring and flat if the same value appears all the way across. In this painting, the right side is lighter indicating that the sun is just out of the picture. This is a great excuse to show a gradient plane in the sky for more interest.\n\nThe warm areas near the bottom of the mountains are reflected light off the lake, which would act like a mirror casting bounced sunlight near the bottom. This also is labeled a gradient plane. Some evergreens have a warm glow and are also gradient. This adds interest to that section. Again the transition from light to dark, warm to cool will achieve that.\n\n#### Gradient Planes on Vertical Walls\n\nThis scene has several subtle gradient planes. The wall with the arch is lighter and warmer at the bottom. The gray building is warmer near the bottom. The yellow arch is showing a lighter value right next to the wall. All this can be justified as reflective light bouncing off the adjacent planes. The cobble stone road is darker in the immediate foreground and gradually gets lighter as it recedes.\n\n#### Make Walls Recede\n\nReflective light will bounce off horizontal planes. In the stone building, the wall appears to recede much better than if it was a flat value all the way across. In real life, you probably would not see the wall progressively getting lighter. The roof starts with a cool blue and gradually fades into pink. This characterizes the house as being part of an animated movie. Under the eaves it is darker where the two sections of the roof form a \"V\". The bottom of the chimney is lighter than the top. Take into account that indicating gradient planes is an artificial technique, but very effective in paintings. Make sure the lightest value in the shadow side of a plane is darker than any area in the sunlit fa\u00e7ade. The 3\u20444 position of the building allows for these effects.\n\n#### Render Objects Into 3D Forms\n\nDepending on how the sun is positioned, many trees in photos do not show 3D volume, just height and width. If painted as they appear in real life or photos, they will have a flat two-dimensional look. These simple drawings show simplified versions of landscape shapes showing volume because of the shadow side. As you are painting, think of trees as spheres, tree trunks as cylinders, rocks and mountains as cubes, and evergreen trees as cones. Plan your light to come from the side so that the opposite side ends up with a darker side. Make sure that when you include animals, vehicles, people and buildings, you place them at a 3\u20444 position and have two different sides in two different values. All these factors accentuate to nullify the flatness.\n\n#### Desaturate Colors in the Distance in Grass Fields\n\nIn real life, the eye will see equal color intensity in a field of grass in the foreground compared to hundreds of yards away. Unless it is a muggy day, atmospheric perspective takes effect and becomes noticeable, not hundreds of yards away, but almost a mile away. We know the brain has its own mechanism to sense depth. Painted exactly as it appears, the grass will not recede enough in a painting. To achieve recession, reduce color intensity at the end of the field in case the colors of trees and grass are the same up front and in the distance. The color intensity in the bush was pumped up a bit to bring it closer compared to the one behind it. The furthest grass has been grayed down by adding Violet to the same mixture used in the foreground.\n\n#### Avoid Stacking light and Dark Values\n\nWhen areas of equal color and value are placed somewhere else and are disjointed, the top portion seems to hover above instead of receding.\n\nIn the first version of the painting, the snow patch in the distant mountain is the same value and color as the waterfall. It seems like two white poker chips on top of each other in the same stack separated by other colors.\n\nIn the corrected version, the snow was darkened. Now it seems that area recedes at least one mile. There is a better sense of field depth.\n\n#### Helpful Hints\n\n  * Liquitex super heavy gesso can be applied after your preliminary drawing where shapes of trees, rocks, fallen tree trunks, etc., are present before you apply the paint. This medium has quite a heavy body for texture.\n  * PanPastel, a relatively new medium that uses non compressed pastel powder, works very well in watercolors to indicate fog and add veils of atmosphere.\n  * Zinc White is a semi-transparent pigment that is very effective for depicting fog when scumbled over an area in oils or acrylics. Avoid placing a hard edge from one plane behind a hard edge from another plane. Where there is a plane shift, the closer plane should show a hard edge. Also avoid placing a soft edge behind another soft edge.\n  * Darken the bottom corner to make it more inviting to step in.\n  * Covert your artwork into a gray scale. You can spot flat looking areas more easily.\n\n## Demonstration: Accentuate Depth in A Background\n\nUse oils for this painting so the water foam can easily blend and create soft misty edges where the water meets the rocks.\n\n#### Reference Photo\n\n#### MATERIALS\n\n**Surface**\n\nstretched canvas or canvas board\n\n**Brushes**\n\nnos. 6, 8 and 10 brights\n\n**Oils**\n\nBurnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Indian Red, Underpainting White, Viridian, Winsor Violet, Yellow Ochre Pale\n\n**Other**\n\nneutral violet pastel pencil\n\n#### STEP 1: Sketch the Composition and Lay In the Water\n\nSketch in the drawing with a neutral violet pastel pencil. (This will blend with the paint later on.) Lay in the blue-green water using Cobalt Blue, Winsor Violet and Viridian. Show variances of each of these colors. Place the brush strokes in the same direction that the water would be running. Use thin paint so a second layer of paint can be added easily.\n\n#### STEP 2: Add the Rocks\n\nPremix Burnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue and a touch of Indian Red and white to a mid dark value. Don't over mix. Just allow the colors to mingle to kill the intensity. The colors should remain marbled on your palette. Paint in the rocks using abstract shapes. Add touches of Cobalt Blue with white to indicate the sky reflections on the wet rocks.\n\n#### STEP 3: Vary the Sides of the Waterfall\n\nContinue to indicate the rocks, but this time build, a larger rock and add Yellow Ochre Pale to it for variance so that left side has something different than the right side. Check that the water lines on both sides are quite different to avoid cloning. Add a few smaller rocks into the waterfall to give it a sense of belonging in the context of the scene.\n\n#### STEP 4: Create a Semi-Transparent Effect on the Water\n\nAdd more rocks into the waterfall, but this time make them semi-transparent to indicate that shallow water is running over them. Think of them as a bridal veil. Add the white water with a touch of Yellow Ochre Pale and white to the top third of the waterfall, only with thick paint. Keep it from mixing in with the darker blue. However, allow some the white to mix in with the blue foundation at the lower two thirds. You should be able to see two distinct values. Twirl your brush where the water meets the rocks until they form misty patterns.\n\n#### STEP 5: Add the Foliage\n\nThe front evergreens are done with a mixture of Viridian, Winsor Violet, Burnt Sienna and white. They should also be a mid-dark value. Add a gray mist behind the evergreen trees.\n\nHidden Falls, Teton national Park\n\nOil on canvas, 8\" \u00d7 10\" (20cm \u00d7 25cm)\n\n#### STEP 6: Create Rows of Trees to Finish\n\nFinally, add two more rows of evergreens behind the front row. Use the same mixture but add more Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna (to gray down the color) and white. Get progressively cooler and lighter as the forest recedes. Add mist behind the first row to enhance the sense of depth. Your painting should end up with three levels in the background. Add some bare tree trunks as seen in the finished version.\n\n## About the Author\n\nJohannes Vloothuis is a full-time professional artist and renowned art instructor with experience in all the main painting mediums. A frequent workshop instructor for WetCanvas, he has traveled all over North America doing plein air painting and giving painting workshops and demonstrations. Johannes has also taught classes online to more than 15,000 artists all over the world. He finds his true passion lies in sharing compositional secrets and seeing his students grow into better artists.\n\nNorth Light has labeled Johannes a Master Painter. He has won awards from the Mexican Society of Watercolor Artists, and his work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and museums worldwide.\n\nTo view more of Johannes' artwork and obtain more information about his classes, visit his website at improvemypaintings.com.\n**Landscape Painting Essentials with Johannes Vloothuis**. Copyright \u00a9 2015 by Johannes Vloothuis. All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by North Light Books, an imprint of F+W, a Content + eCommerce Company, 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. (800) 289-0963.\n\nOther fine North Light products are available from your local bookstore, art supply store or online supplier. Visit our website at fwmedia.com.\n\neISBN: 9781440336287\n\nThis e-book edition: June 2015 (v.1.0).\n\n# Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Special Offers\n  4. Table of Contents\n  5. Dedication\n  6. Introduction\n  7. Materials\n  8. Chapter 1: Paint How the Eye Sees\n    1. Visual Perception vs. Photographic Perception\n    2. Reference Photos: Friend or Foe?\n    3. The Peripheral Area\n    4. Simplifying Foregrounds\n    5. Blurred Edges\n    6. Demonstration: Paint a Landscape with a Simplified foreground\n  9. Chapter 2: Design With Abstract Shapes\n    1. Symmetrical Brain vs. Artistic Brain\n    2. Landscape Shapes\n    3. Techniques for Promoting the Artistic Brain\n    4. Negative Painting\n    5. Demonstration: Use Negative Painting to Create Abstract Shapes\n    6. Composition With Abstract Masses\n    7. Demonstration: Paint With Abstract Shapes\n  10. Chapter 3: Vary and Enrich Colors\n    1. Controlling Monochromatic Color Schemes\n    2. Demonstration: Color Matching\n    3. Color Temperature\n    4. Establishing Color Harmony\n    5. Demonstration: Variegate Color in a Painting\n  11. Chapter 4: Create Melodic Movement\n    1. Problematic Implied Lines\n    2. Valuable Implied Lines\n    3. Lost-and-Found Lines\n    4. Solving Problematic Implied Lines\n    5. Visual Paths\n    6. Establishing Rhythm\n    7. Demonstration: Create Melodic Movement in a Painting\n  12. Chapter 5: Simplify\n    1. Zoom In and Cut Out\n    2. Simplifying Nature\n    3. Simplifying Architecture\n    4. Demonstration: Simplify Your Painting Composition\n  13. Chapter 6: Avoiding Clones\n    1. Identifying Clones\n    2. Offsetting Clones\n    3. Avoid a mirror effect\n    4. Demonstration: Offset Clones in a Landscape Painting\n  14. Chapter 7: Accentuate Depth\n    1. Methods for Accentuating Depth\n    2. Demonstration: Accentuate Depth in A Background\n  15. About the Author\n  16. Copyright\n\n# Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Table of Contents\n  3. Start of Content\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nUniversity of Manitoba Press\n\nWinnipeg, Manitoba\n\nCanada R3T 2M5\n\nuofmpress.ca\n\n\u00a9 Sarah Carter 2016\n\nPrinted in Canada\n\n20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca, or call 1-800-893-5777.\n\nCover design: Frank Reimer\n\nInterior design: Jess Koroscil\n\nCover image: Sarah Minnie (Waddy) Gardner on her horse\"Fly,\"Mount Sentinel Ranch, Alberta, 1915. Born Wexford, Ireland, 1879, died Calgary, 1959. Museum of the Highwood, MH995.002.008.\n\nCataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.\n\nISBN 978-0-88755-818-4 (pbk.)\n\nISBN 978-0-88755-532-9 (pdf )\n\nISBN 978-0-88755-530-5 (epub)\n\nThis book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.\n\nThe University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.\nTO MY GRANDMOTHER JEAN MUNN (JENNIE MAY MARSHALL), 1899\u20131967, BORN ON HER PARENTS' HOMESTEAD, WELLWOOD, MANITOBA.\n\n_Photo: Family_ _Collection._\n\nDuring my stay in Canada I heard a good deal about farming for women, and how they ought to take up homesteads, therefore I was interested to come across the young daughters of a neighbouring farmer, who acted as hired men to their father. Mrs. Anderson [her employer] said they rode wonderfully, could handle a team better than most men, drive the \"binders,\" and do the whole work of a farm; but she considered that the life they led was unsuitable for a woman and was unfitting these girls for becoming wives and mothers in the future\u2014in fact, the feeling of the countryside was strongly against their father.\n\nElla C. Sykes, _A Home-Help in Canada_ , 1912\n\nPeople are beginning to waken up to the vast conception and imperialistic importance of tendering free homesteads as an inducement to women of strong moral force and high intellectual ability to come to our beautiful West and lend their aid in establishing a Canadian colony, a new and clean colony...\n\n\"Homesteads for Women,\" by \"Isobel,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 25 October 1911\nCONTENTS\n\nLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS\n\nLIST OF TABLES\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nLIST OF ABBREVIATIONS\n\nNOTE ON TERMINOLOGY\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n**NARROWING OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN:** FROM THE INDIGENOUS FARMERS OF THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE EXCLUSIONS OF THE HOMESTEAD REGIME\n\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n**\"LAND OWNERS AND ENTERPRISING SETTLERS IN THE COLONIES\":** BRITISH WOMEN FARMERS FOR CANADA\n\nCHAPTER THREE\n\n**WIDOWS AND OTHER IMMIGRANT WOMEN HOMESTEADERS:** STRUGGLES AND STRATEGIES\n\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\n**WOMEN WHO BOUGHT LAND:** THE \"BACHELOR GIRL\" SETTLER, \"JACK\" MAY, AND OTHER CELEBRITY FARMERS AND RANCHERS\n\nCHAPTER FIVE\n\n**ANSWERING THE CALL OF EMPIRE:** GEORGINA BINNIE-CLARK, FARMER, AUTHOR, LECTURER\n\nCHAPTER SIX\n\n**\"DAUGHTERS OF BRITISH BLOOD\" OR \"HORDES OF MEN OF ALIEN RACE\"?:** THE HOMESTEADS-FOR-BRITISH-WOMEN CAMPAIGN\n\nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\n**THE PERSISTENCE OF A \"CURIOUSLY STRONG PREJUDICE\":** FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nNOTES\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\nLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS\n\n_Figure 1._ Survey map of Township 12, Range 15, West of the Principal Meridian. Archives of Manitoba, N6411.\n\n_Figure 2._ \"Sioux Woman,\" the daughter-in-law of Hidatsa farmer Maxi'diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman), demonstrates traditional farming methods, 1912. State Historical Society of North Dakota, item no. 0086-0281. Photo by Gilbert L. Wilson.\n\n_Figure 3._ An 1882 map for \"intending settlers,\" showing the dominion lands surveyed west of the border of Manitoba. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Map 597.\n\n_Figure 4._ M\u00e9tis women and men at a sitting of the M\u00e9tis Scrip Commission at Devil's Lake, Saskatchewan, 1900. Saskatchewan Archives Board, S-B9750.\n\n_Figure 5._ Patent issued in 1883 to Manitoba homesteader Matilda McAskie. Library and Archives Canada, Western Land Grants, http:\/\/www.bac-lac.gc.ca\/eng\/discover\/land\/land-grants-western-canada-1870-1930\/pages\/item.aspx?IdNumber=461605&.\n\n_Figure 6._ \"The Primitive Farmer and Burden-Bearer, South Africa,\" from Otis T. Mason, _Women's Share in Primitive Culture_ (1899), 6.\n\n_Figures 7 and 8_. The Glynde School For Lady Gardeners in Sussex, England, established by Lady Frances Wolseley in 1902. Papers of the Viscountess Frances Wolseley, Hove Central Library, Hove, Sussex, Commonplace Book no. 196.\n\n_Figure 9._ Colonial Training Farm at Arlesey, England. _The Bystander_ , 16 September 1908, 610\u201311.\n\n_Figure 10._ \"Canada for Women\" promotion, Canadian Pacific Railway, 1910. _Daily Mail_ , 2 March 1910, 10.\n\n_Figure 11._ The Canadian Pacific Railway office, London, wants \"settlers, not suffragettes,\" 1913. Getty Images, no. 3424540.\n\n_Figure 12._ Englishwoman and Alberta rancher Agnes Bedingfeld. Glenbow Archives, NA-2467-12.\n\n_Figure 13._ Alberta homesteader Margaret de Tro earned extra income as a \"magnetic healer\" in Edmonton. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 December 1905, 4.\n\n_Figure 14._ The auction sale of the estate of Madam M. de Tro of Hardisty, Alberta, in March 1916. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 1 March 1916, 9.\n\n_Figure 15._ Rush for Free Homesteads at the Dominion Land Office, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 1908. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Postcard 18198.\n\n_Figure 16._ Homestead rush at Edmonton, Alberta, 1 September 1908. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Postcard 6839.\n\n_Figure 17._ Women homesteaders near Square Deal, Alberta, c. 1912. Glenbow Archives, NA-206-27.\n\n_Figure 18._ Jane Gentles and sons, First World War. Saskatchewan Archives Board, homestead file 2092263.\n\n_Figure 19._ Eva Iddings of Indiana in front of her claim shack near Fort Benton, Montana. Barrows Collection, Overholser Historical Research Center, Fort Benton, Montana, 1910, BC11, 244.\n\n_Figure 20._ Ontario sisters Caroline (Carrie) Louise MacGregor and Mary Frances MacGregor homesteaded in Sheridan County, Montana, c. 1909. Courtesy Judy Archer (Carrie's granddaughter), Orillia, Ontario.\n\n_Figure 21._ Alice (Alix) Westhead, c. 1906. Glenbow Archives, NA-2925-2.\n\n_Figure 22._ Isobel \"Jack\" May, Sedgewick, Alberta. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 23._ Louisa Wittrick farmed with \"Jack\" May, but her responsibilities focused on the domestic realm. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 24._ May and Wittrick at Sedgewick. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 25._ The \"bachelor girl settler.\" Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 26._ Qu'Appelle Industrial School students with older generation. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman,_ 70.\n\n_Figure 27._ Indigenous people at Victoria Day\/Empire Day at Fort Qu'Appelle, 1912. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 178.\n\n_Figure 28._ Portrait of Georgina Binnie-Clark. Courtesy Mr. Dennis Jenks.\n\n_Figure 29._ Doukhobor women pulling a plough in Saskatchewan, 1902. Glenbow Archives, NA-670-45.\n\n_Figure 30._ Press coverage from 1910 of Georgina Binnie-Clark's activities in England and Canada. _Gleichen Call_ (Alberta): \"Are Booming Canada,\" 9 June 1910, 7; \"Making Girl Farmers,\" 21 April 1910, 7.\n\n_Figure 31._ A pupil from Roedean School, Brighton, learning to farm at the Binnie-Clark farm, Fort Qu'Appelle, 1913. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 402.\n\n_Figure 32._ \"Land and The Woman,\" article by Georgina Binnie-Clark and photographs. _Canadian Courier_ 12, no. 12, 16 November 1912, 16.\n\n_Figure 33._ Homesteads-for-British-Women petition. Library and Archives Canada, Record Group 15, Department of the Interior, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2.\n\n_Figure 34._ Postcards of supporters of the homesteads-for-women campaign. Library and Archives Canada, Record Group 15, Department of the Interior, D-Ii-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2.\n\n_Figures 35 and 36._ \"Farmerettes\" of Ontario c. 1917\u201318. City of Toronto Archives, William James Family Fonds 1244, items 640 and 640A.\n\n_Figure 37._ Eaton's Department Store advertisement for \"Costumes for the Farmerette.\" _The Globe_ (Toronto), 25 May 1918.\n\n_Figure 38._ \"They Serve France.\" Canadian Victory Bonds poster. Library of Congress, 2003652830.\n\n_Figure 39._ \"Calgary's Land Army,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 10 April 1918, 32.\n\n_Figure 40._ \"Canada West\" poster, 1923. Canadian Pacific Archives, Image no. BR. 194 \nLIST OF TABLES\n\n_Table 1._ The gender of Western Canadian homesteaders and their success rates at \"proving up,\" 1872\u20131882.\n\n_Table 2._ Numbers of male and female agriculturalists in the Censuses of Canada, with percentages of female agriculturalists.\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nIf I were to identify when the initial seed of this project was planted it would be the first class I taught at the University of Calgary, a full-year night class in 1992\u201393 on Western Canada. We learn a lot from our students, and in that class one wrote an excellent essay on the homesteads-for-women campaign in Western Canada. It was new to me. Thanks to Richelle Brazunas, wherever you are! Having worked up to that time on how First Nations male farmers were stigmatized and excluded from the commercial grain economy I began to see other forms of exclusion through the distribution of land and roles in the settler colony of the West. And while some women worked to bring about a reconfiguration of this distribution, challenging and calling into question the reigning order of \"common sense\" about who could farm and own land, they (unfortunately) worked in the interests of a privileged few of British ancestry. Yet even if they had chosen another strategy, they would have found that this \"distribution of the sensible\" remained intransigent and impervious to calls for change.\n\nI have drawn on archives and libraries in Canada, the U.S, the U.K., and eventually as far away as Australia. I would like in particular to acknowledge the help of the archivists at the Saskatchewan Archives Board, the Archives of Manitoba, the Provincial Archives of Alberta, and the Glenbow Archives. Among the many archivists and librarians who have assisted me, I want to give special thanks to Sharon Maier, Regina Public Library; Susan Kooyman and Doug Cass at the Glenbow; Chris Kotecki and Eric Hallett at the Archives of Manitoba; Philip Hatfield and Carole Holden at the British Library; and Nadine Charabin at the Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon. Irene Kerr, Museum of the Highwood, searched their collection and provided the cover photograph for this book. Thanks also to Ken Robison and Henry L. Armstrong of the Overholser Historical Research Center in Fort Benton, Montana.\n\nThe Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada assisted me in this study, as did a Killam Research Fellowship. The research funds available to me as a University of Alberta Henry Marshall Tory Chair have been of critical importance to this project. My research in the U.K. was facilitated by several appointments for which I am very grateful: Eccles Visiting Professorship in North American Studies at the British Library; Visiting Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London; and Visiting Scholar, Centre of Canadian Studies, University of Edinburgh. I visited the Australian National Archives while a Visiting Fellow at Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences and its Australian Centre for Indigenous History. Thanks to Philip Davies, Eccles Centre at the British Library; Philip Murphy at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies; Annis May Timpson, Canadian Studies, University of Edinburgh; and Maria Nugent, Australian National University.\n\nCountless scholars over many years have inspired and encouraged me, and helped refine and clarify this project, as have conference sessions and invitations to speak or write. Special thanks to Ashleigh Androsoff, Jean Barman, Philip Buckner, Cathy Cavanaugh, Tonia Compton, Nancy Janovicek, Betsy Jameson, Fran Kaye, Nanci Langford, Briony McDonagh, Linda Mahood, Laurie Mercier, James Muhn, Maria Nugent, Adele Perry, Joan Sangster, Nikki Strong-Boag, Georgie Taylor, Nicola Verdun, and Angela Wanhalla. Thanks to my colleagues at the Universities of Alberta and Calgary.\n\nI am very grateful to my research assistants: Gretchen Albers, Alana Borque, Sydney Budgeon, Suzanne Daugela, Karine Duhamel, Corinne George, Patricia Gordon, Leslie Hall, Michel Hogue, Pernille Jakobsen, Amy McKinney, Erin Millions, Cheryl Purdey, Trevor Rockwell, and Claire Thomson. Special thanks to Catherine Ulmer for her help with the South African Scrip women homesteaders of Saskatchewan, and to Sara Tokay, who has been of great assistance with the many tasks of the home stretch.\n\nThe Alberta content of this book was enhanced by the University of Alberta's project Last Best West: The Alberta Land Settlement Infrastructure Project, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, with Peter Baskerville as principal investigator and Sean Gouglas (and me) as co-investigators. The project digitized Alberta homestead files and made them available on the Web. Students and other employees hired for this project created an enormous databank from these files. They also alerted me to interesting homestead stories. Special thanks to Katie Pollock, Leigh Johnson, Silvia Russell, Richard Fletcher, and Melanie Niemi-Bohun as well as to Peter Baskerville and Sean Gouglas.\n\nIt was remarkable the number of people who stepped forward with research and stories, sometimes of family members. Judy Archer of Orillia, Ontario, kindly shared the story and photographs of her grandmother and great-aunt who left Ontario to homestead in Montana because they were denied that right in Canada. Thanks to Douglas Ramsay for his research on Agnes Balfour, and to Matthew Ostapchuk for information on Sarah Cleverly. Doris McKinnon provided me with Marie Rose Smith's homestead file. Thanks also to Joan Heggie, Teeside University, who, after hearing a talk I gave at the conference Women and Land in Hull in 2015, dug into the mystery of farmer \"Jack\" May and made some startling discoveries. I am grateful to Juliet Gayton (Exeter University), who unearthed and clarified information on Alberta rancher Alix Westhead, and also to Lionel de Rothschild, Exbury Estate, and Melanie Aspey, Exbury Archives.\n\nFor information on Georgina Binnie-Clark, I am grateful to her great-nephews Dennis Jenks and Richard Jenks. During a visit to Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan, I received a warm welcome and a great deal of information from the late Lynn Anderson, and from Derek Harrison, Doug and Marg Dawson, and Beverly Van der Breggan.\n\nEditor Gretchen Albers skillfully prepared the manuscript for submission. Thanks to everyone at the University of Manitoba Press, and in particular David Carr, Glenn Bergen, and Jill McConkey. Maureen Epp did an excellent job of copy-editing this manuscript.\n\nA few sections of this book have appeared as: (1) \"Britishness, 'Foreignness,' Women and Land in Western Canada, 1890s\u20131920s,\" _Humanities Research: The Journal of the Humanities Research Centre and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University_ 13, no. 1 (2006): 43\u201360, a special issue from the 2004 conference \"Britishness and Otherness: Locating Marginal White Identities in the Empire,\" Australian National University, Canberra; (2) my introduction to the 2007 reprint of Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); (3) \"'Hordes of Men of Alien Race' or 'Daughters of British Blood?' The Homesteads-for-Women Campaign in Western Canada,\" _Great Plains Quarterly_ 29, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 267\u201386; (4) \"'My Vocabulary Contains No Such Word as Defeat': Clara Lynch and Her Battle for Her Alberta Homestead, 1900\u20131909,\" _Alberta History_ 61, no. 3 (Summer 2013).\n\nFinally, thanks as always to Walter Hildebrandt for his encouragement and assistance, including accompanying me on excursions to prairie archives, museums, and small towns. I dedicate the book to my grandmother Jean Munn, whose Manitoba homestead roots are a point of origin for this study. My other grandmother, Nell Carter, born Nellie Weaver in Dartford, Kent (1882\u20131973), arrived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as a bride in 1915. I thought of her, too, as I wrote this book, with its focus on British women, and also about her sisters, who stayed in Kent. Clara, Emily, Florence, and Alice Weaver were all employed from a young age, mainly as teachers, and they did not marry. I am certain that they would have detested the label \"surplus\" women. \nLIST OF ABBREVIATIONS\n\nBWEA - British Women's Emigration Association\n\nCIL - Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women\n\nCPR - Canadian Pacific Railway\n\nFANY - First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps\n\nIODE - Imperial Order Daughters of Empire\n\nOSC - Oversea Settlement Committee\n\nRCI - Royal Colonial Institute\n\nSAS - South African Scrip\n\nSOSBW - Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women\n\nUFA - United Farmers of Alberta\n\nUJFS - Union Jack Farm Settlement\n\nVBA - Volunteer Bounty Act\n\nWLA - Women's Land Army\n\nWNLSC - Women's National Land Service Corps\n\nYWCA - Young Women's Christian Association\nNOTE ON TERMINOLOGY\n\nWHAT DID IT MEAN TO HOMESTEAD?\n\nWe think of the term today as synonymous with farming, or generally establishing a home in a rural area. But in Western Canada (and the U.S. West) the word \"homesteader\" had a much more specific meaning. It meant that you were located on a free grant of 160 acres on offer from the federal government. You paid ten dollars to legally locate there, and you then had to cultivate and live on the land before you legally owned the land. While by no means entirely \"free,\" given the costs involved in establishing a farm, it was much cheaper than purchasing land.\n\nTHE DOMINION LAND SURVEY\n\nAll of the land in the North-West Territories, with the exception of the \"postage stamp\" province of Manitoba, was under the control of the federal government after 1870. The survey that began in 1871 affirmed Canadian sovereignty over these lands and facilitated non-Indigenous settlement. The land was surveyed into townships of thirty-six square sections. Each section was one mile square and consisted of 640 acres. Sections were further subdivided into four quarter sections of 160 acres each. Township lines run east and west and were numbered north from the international boundary. The lines that run north and south are range lines. The First or Principal Meridian in Manitoba was located just west of Winnipeg, and additional meridians were added as the survey advanced west. For example, the Fourth Meridian forms the Saskatchewan-Alberta border and bisects Lloydminster.\n\nADMINISTRATION OF LAND\n\nIn 1871 the Dominion Lands Branch, a branch within the Department of the Interior, was created to administer the 1872 Dominion Lands Act. There were Dominion Land Offices in towns and cities of the West, employing agents, sub-agents, and homestead inspectors.\n\nSPECIAL SECTIONS\n\nThe odd-numbered sections in each township were railway land grants. The Canadian Pacific Railway was granted 25,000,000 acres. The Hudson's Bay Company was awarded one- and three-quarter sections in each township. Two sections in each township were set aside to support educational facilities and were called school sections. Railway, Hudson's Bay Company, and school lands were available for purchase, and the idea was that as the homesteaders improved their quarter sections they would seek to expand through purchase. The value of the land would increase as the homesteaders improved the land, and other buyers would also be enticed. These sections could also be available for leasing.\n\nENTRY ON A HOMESTEAD\n\nThe even-numbered sections in each township were available as homesteads under the Dominion Lands Act. The homesteader paid a ten-dollar filing fee and chose a quarter section (160 acres). A variety of terms were used for this process: the homesteader \"filed on,\" or \"claimed,\" or \"made entry\" on a homestead, generally in person at the local land office. Homesteaders often found the land unsuitable and then filled out a Declaration of Abandonment that specified why they were unable to farm or reside on that land, after which they were free to file on another quarter section.\n\nWHO COULD CLAIM A HOMESTEAD?\n\n\u2022 Under the Indian Act (1876) no one who was \"Indian\" could homestead.\n\n\u2022 Before 1874, any single woman or any male over the age of twenty-one could homestead. This was changed in 1874 to eighteen years of age.\n\n\u2022 In 1876, entry could be made by any person who was a sole head of a family or any male over the age of eighteen. Single women were no longer permitted to homestead. A woman could homestead only if she was a sole head of household with a minor child or children. This was generally interpreted to mean a widow.\n\nPROVING UP\n\nAfter filing on a quarter section, homestead duties had to be performed for a minimum of three years (and in many cases the process took longer). This process was known as \"proving up\" or \"perfecting\" your entry. Duties included residence and cultivation on the homestead to prove that he or she was a bona fide settler. In each year for three years the homesteader had to reside for at least six months on the homestead.\n\nAPPLICATION FOR PATENT\n\nAt the end of three years, if the homesteader fulfilled all of these duties, she or he gave six months' notice in writing of intention to apply for patent. The homesteader filled out an application for patent or clear title (i.e., outright ownership) that contained information on the applicant and family, including nationality and proof of naturalization and details on breaking\/cropping, livestock, and buildings. Two witnesses, usually neighbours, were required to attest to the truth of the application. Application was made before the local land agent or homestead inspector. If the application was approved, a patent would be issued to the homesteader, who was then the owner of the land.\n\nPRE-EMPTION\n\nFrom 1874 on, a homesteader could obtain a second quarter section of land adjacent to the homestead. At the time of filing on a homestead, the settler could also claim a pre-emption (for an additional ten-dollar filing fee). The homesteader had the right to purchase that land after receiving patent to the homestead and was given three years to make that purchase. Pre-emptions were cancelled in 1890 and restored in 1908, when cultivation requirements were added.\n\nPURCHASED HOMESTEADS\n\nBetween 1871 and 1918, a settler could purchase 160 acres of land within a nine-mile radius of his or her homestead at three dollars per acre.\n\n_Figure 1_. This township map documents the author's family history. Great-great-grandparents John and Mary Graham homesteaded in section 36, and just to the south in section 25, great-grandparents Alexander and Sarah (Graham) Marshall homesteaded. Her grandmother Jennie May Marshall was born here in 1899. Only one woman's name appears on the map, widow Elizabeth Cameron in section 21. Archives of Manitoba, N6411. Dominion Land Survey Township Plan, T12, R15, W, 1873. \nINTRODUCTION\n\nThe map of perfect geometrical squares from southwestern Manitoba that records the homesteaders of Township 12, Range 15, West of the Principal Meridian is like other maps from across prairie Canada\u2014except that this one documents my own family history. In the late 1870s my great-great-grandparents Mary (Kilgore) and John Graham homesteaded the southwest quarter of section 36. Their daughter Sarah Jane, my great-grandmother, married my great-grandfather Alexander Marshall, who homesteaded the adjoining section to the south, and my grandmother Jean was born there in 1899. Other Grahams married neighbouring homesteaders, and the related families of Grahams, Marshalls, Kilgores, Munroes, and McKinnons helped to form the Wellwood community of Scottish and Irish settlers, some of whom had arrived in Manitoba by way of sojourns in Ontario. Many are buried in the Graham-Munroe cemetery on my great-grandparents' land. In the cemetery you can learn the names of many of the early women settlers, as they are not on the map. Homesteading, the right to a grant of 160 acres, was overwhelmingly a male preserve. Married women were not eligible for the homestead grant and single women were excluded after 1876, leaving only women who qualified as \"sole\" heads of households, generally widows with children. There is one woman on the map of Township 12, Range 15: Elizabeth Cameron was a widow whose husband, Hugh, died before he \"proved up,\" or fulfilled the residency and cultivation requirements that came with a homestead grant, and so the patent to the land was issued to her. The death of a husband was one of the main ways a woman obtained land in her own name. It is readily apparent from gazing at any township map how land laws and policies were used to shape a society of male heads of household and dependent females, how the land was not neutral, how ideas about proper gender roles were embedded in the landscape. For most women the only way to get land was to get a man, or have a husband die, or be a widow with minor-aged children, which qualified women to enter or file on a homestead of their own.\n\nThis book is primarily about the failed effort to redraw maps of prairie Canada to include the names of women. British women spearheaded the charge, and at the height of the campaign in 1908\u201314 sought to obtain homestead rights for British and British-Canadian women only, excluding \"foreign\" women and replacing \"foreign\" men. They aspired to settle on what I am calling \"imperial plots\" that would have otherwise gone to \"ignorant, uncouth, lawless foreigners,\" or so they argued, so that refined and educated gentlewomen could contribute to the spadework of empire and plant British culture as well as crops. But this book is about more than the campaign to secure homestead rights for \"British-born\" women; it involves broader questions and debates that took place in both Canada and Britain about the capacity of women to farm, whether it was proper for them to do so, and whether they should participate in activities that threatened to masculinize them and to provide them with independence. It also draws in a much wider ensemble of women agriculturalists than just British women, beginning with the Indigenous farmers of the Great Plains. The book is about how women sought and fought to obtain land and cultivate the prairies, bringing to light many forgotten women farmers and ranchers.\n\nThe promoters, planners, and plotters of farming for British women on the Canadian prairies were middle-class or elite and educated women, located mainly in London, who were devoted to the British Empire. They were obsessed with finding solutions to the perceived problem of \"redundant,\" \"surplus,\" or \"superfluous\" women of the mother country. This book is also about less-privileged women, many British or British-Ontarian and almost all widows, who could spare little thought for the Empire but who came to prairie Canada to claim homesteads to support their families. Many succeeded, others were thwarted, but all faced an obstinate, sceptical, and powerful Canadian federal government bureaucracy. Women with capital who purchased land to farm or ranch on the prairies could escape the surveillance of the bureaucracy that policed the homesteaders, but they were scrutinized in the press and other publications that tended to cast them as abnormal and suspicious. While widespread opposition to the prospect of women farmers began to decline slightly in Britain\u2014where the idea of middle-class women farming small acreages and cultivating the least remunerative and most troublesome crops found a degree of acceptance\u2014powerful opponents in Canada and Canadian officials in England remained fiercely determined to shut almost all windows of opportunity throughout the decades of this study. To find out why this intransigence persisted, the colonial context of prairie Canada is critical.\n\nPrairie Canada was crafted as a colony of the British Empire, and hopes were high for its destiny as the brightest agricultural jewel in the imperial diadem. But the British were to transplant and cultivate not only the crops that would make the prairies the breadbasket of the Empire: here was a \"sparsely-peopled or savage-haunted\" place where they could plant, grow, and prune a \"dominating race.\" Scotswoman Jessie M. Saxby equated cultivation and farming with civilization, using garden analogies and eugenic allusions in her 1890 book, _West-Nor'-West_ , that urged the women and men of Britain to settle on the prairies:\n\nWe should look upon the British Isles as the cradle and nursery of the world\u2014a nursery garden where the best kinds of seedlings and saplings are trained into vigorous young life for the purpose of transplanting into wide gardens, lawns, and woodlands!\n\nWhat sort of a place would the nursery-garden become, what sort of plants would the promising shoots develop into, if incessant and careful transplanting were not carried out? What sort of credit would attain to the gardener who consigned to his customers only diseased, pining, puny, malformed plants?\n\nWe ought to send to our colonies\u2014to the whole uninhabited, or sparsely-peopled, or savage-haunted places of the earth\u2014\"well-assorted specimens\" from our home nursery-garden, and our transplanting of those goodly young shoots should be more systematic, more discerning, and more wholesale than it is at present.\n\n... When shall we fully accept, and show ourselves equal to, our unique destiny\u2014that of a dominating race which must absorb within itself all lower-races, and make itself the ruling power for good of a planet?\n\nDuring the time frame of this book (the 1870s to the 1930s) most of prairie Canada was gobbled up by white settlers, the squares on the map filled with their names. The Canadian West was a settler colony where First Nations were dispossessed and relegated to small reserves and prevented from obtaining other land on their former territory. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, settler colonies are driven by a \"logic of elimination.\" Indigenous people were not to play any role in the development of the new economy and society, except to serve as relics of a primitive past that were useful for comparative purposes when demonstrating \"strides in the march of progress.\" \"Your noble and idle savage who lives by hunting is dead or doomed,\" wrote an advocate of settling gentleman English farmers in Canada's West in 1885. \"He will not work himself, though he is not ashamed to beg... Another nobler race, quickened with some of the best blood in the 'old country'... should be ready to take its place among the masters of the richest parts of a young dominion.\" Agriculture on reserves was stymied and stifled, a process that was assisted by prevailing views of Indigenous men as inept farmers and shiftless workers. The township of my Manitoba family was on the Treaty One ancestral territory of the Cree and Anishinaabe (Ojibwa or Saulteaux), and there are seven reserves within the boundaries of that treaty occupied by those First Nations. There are also five small reserves of the Dakota, who were not signatory to any treaty.\n\nBritish settlers were favoured, and they were assigned the task of improving the land, which was considered to be lying \"tenantless and silent, only awaiting the Anglo-Saxon race to be transformed into a prosperous and thriving country.\" As an 1888 promotional publication from Manitoba described the prairie, \"Man alone is apparently the missing quantity, and his energy, industry and capital are the required elements in developing the young, but sturdy Dominion into the Greater Britain of the West\u2014the worthy scion of the grand old Motherland across the seas, whose pride is in the colonial gems which adorn the imperial diadem, of which Canada is one of the brightest and most valued jewels.\"\n\nThe use of the term \"man\" was not in this case intended to extend to and include \"woman.\" The job of empire building was man's work; the white, British, male settler or frontiersman was the heroic figure, taming the \"wild frontier into productivity and profitability.\" A 1910 poem valorizing these men of the far-flung colonies praised their work: \"For glory and Empire for home and for beauty; \/ Away on the fringe of Canadian prairies, \/ Far up on the heights of African aeries, \/ Cut off from his kin on Indian stations. \/ The sentinel frontiersman watches the Nations \/ In the bush of Australia way over the Seas, \/ On Islands from Fiji to far Hebrides.\"\n\nMany (ghastly) poems about the Canadian West, including \"The Prairie,\" by Jack Damusey, celebrated the manliness of empire building and the work of agriculture:\n\nI have place for men\n\nWith windy spaces for their square-walled homes;\n\nMy lonesomeness awaits the laugh of those who are young.\n\nYoung men I want:\n\nYoung men,\n\nStripped,\n\nPloughing,\n\nBuilding,\n\nScheming.\n\nIn sweaty jeans,\n\nYoung men with blood and muscles taut and backs of steel\n\nTo tame my winds of winter bleak,\n\nTo bear my summer's heat.\n\nMy breast is rich for them,\n\nBut let them be cruel,\n\nEager like wolves for grain,\n\nI have no valleys for the old;\n\nNo sacred woods for ancient gods,\n\nOnly the dry, windswept waste\n\nThat must be quelled.\n\nEstablishing farms was white man's work in the colonies. In _Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization,_ scholar Jill H. Casid writes that colonial farms and plantations \"justified and glorified patriarchally organized and controlled agricultural production and heterosexual reproduction as the necessary bases for family and for national and _imperial_ stability, peace and prosperity. At the heart of this mythic construction of empire is the farm\u2014a cultivated, constructed site of agriculture, of nature improved by the intervention of 'man' that functioned as both the material impress and reproducing sign of empire.\"\n\nIn the colony of prairie Canada, the British man would become more manly than his weaker and effete counterpart in the factories and offices of the mother country. Scottish settler Thomas Spence reported from Manitoba in 1879 that \"his muscles will be iron, his nerves steel. Vigor will characterize his every action; for climate gives quality to the blood, strength to the muscles, power to the brain.\" E.B. Osborn, literary editor of the London _Morning Post_ , wrote in 1900 that \"to live for a year or two in Western Canada is to learn the essential meaning of a man's manhood.\" As historian Philippa Levine has written, \"This vision of masculinity as that which could transform unproductive spaces profitably was simply not on offer to women or to the colonized.\"\n\nColonialism, founded on ideas about racial supremacy, reached its apogee at the same time as the consolidation of the liberal political order, supposedly devoted to ideals of freedom and self-government. Patterns of domination, hierarchy, and exclusion were at the core of liberal states, some of which had extensive and powerful empires. Patriarchy was also necessary to the functioning of the liberal order. Historian Adele Perry argues that \"imperialism and patriarchy were not complications of or exceptions to the liberal order; they were necessary to its very production.\" The \"liberal order project was predicated on the privatization of women and the relegation of non-Western peoples to various states of reduced humanity, savagery, unfreedom, or containment.\" The liberal order was premised on the exclusion of women: Liberal subjects were male and European, and they were the genuine political and economic subjects, while \"women and racialized people were not so, only potentially so, or at best provisionally and partially so.\" The liberal male subject was defined through wives' lack of economic autonomy. Wives were virtually excluded from the basic principle of the liberal contract, the right to own property, and while this was challenged and began to erode over the nineteenth century, this study demonstrates how white, mainly British or British-Ontarian settler men continued to secure exclusive rights to property well into the twentieth century through the exclusion of women and Indigenous people. They were assisted in this task by powerful and pervasive ideas of who constituted a capable farmer and landowner, and who was excluded from this category because they allegedly lacked the necessary strength, determination, knowledge, and skills.\n\nIf the British man became more masculine by crossing the ocean and settling on the prairies, the British woman was supposed to become even more feminine, her domestic role to be confirmed and preserved. While sailing to the colonies was an act of emancipation for men, firing them with new hopes and aspirations, landing them on their own plots where they could be autonomous and creative, women colonizers were vessels to transport and perpetuate British culture and identity. Women were not to quell the windswept waste. British settler women were to be protected, cared for and cosseted, defined and managed. The colonial tasks assigned to them were to make homes and babies, and it was made virtually impossible for them to do otherwise. This was to be the immutable foundation of the new society, the order of nature. Women were to be models of feminine deportment and conduct and of a cherished gender order that was undergoing turbulent challenge and change in Britain, but was to be transplanted to the colony unspoiled and unsullied. Their central duty and mission was to reproduce and to tame the wild colonial males. As summarized by a promoter: \"Colonization without women is futile. Only when women go out at the same time is there a chance of the men settling down soberly and steadily; and besides that, whereas a thousand Englishmen in a colony are a thousand men and no more, every Englishwoman that you take out at the same time carries with her, as it were, four potential English colonists as well.\"\n\nFeminist scholars have pointed out that \"settler colonialism rested on control of female reproduction, not only of indigenous inhabitants, but also of settler women.\" As historian of Australia Jane Carey has written, if \"settler colonialism was driven by the 'logic of elimination' in relation to Indigenous peoples, then the imperative of vigorous white propagation was its necessary corollary.\" In the Canadian West, the category of \"white\" was complicated by the presence of the \"foreign\" migrant, heightening anxieties about the degeneracy of the British fabric of the colony. It was British women who were to reproduce the most vigorously in the face of these racial anxieties.\n\nBritish women were not to toil in the fields, to become muscular and masculine, tanned and dark skinned. Impeccable behaviour and demeanour was expected of them, as they were to serve as sharp contrasts to Indigenous women and to peasant settler women from Eastern Europe. In these \"primitive\" societies, women were understood to be abused and brutalized, made to work outside, while the British allegedly protected and respected proper womanhood by relegating women to the home. The Doukhobors, settlers from Russia, were used to illustrate the stark contrast between the desired and the condemned activities for women. Doukhobor women had hitched themselves to the plough to break land in their settlements and had to \"sweat in the fields instead of horses.\" In Canada they needed to be reclaimed from the \"brute level to which they had been degraded, to the home, with its cooking, its spinning and its weaving.\" Levine writes that \"women thus became a fulcrum by which the British measured and judged those they colonized. Women became an index and a measure less of themselves than of men and of societies.\" In the colonies, British women were to be symbols of cleanliness and purity in contrast to women of other ethnicities, and they were to maintain and display genteel dress and deportment. Kitchen gardens and flower beds were acceptable, as they upheld and perpetuated genteel identities. Farm labour was not acceptable.\n\nBritish colonial women were, as scholar Anne McClintock writes, \"ambiguously placed\" within the process of imperial rule: \"Barred from the corridors of formal power, they experienced the privileges and social contradictions of imperialism very differently from colonial men... [they] made none of the direct economic or military decisions of empire and very few reaped its vast profits.\" They were bound in \"gendered patterns of disadvantage and frustration,\" McClintock writes, as it was \"white men who made and enforced laws and policies in their own interests.\" Colonial women held positions of power over colonized women and men and were thus not \"hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting.\"\n\nIn prairie Canada, British women and Canadian-born women of British ancestry did not share in all of the privileges often associated with whiteness, such as the \"exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property.\" Whiteness did not equate with power and privilege for other groups in the Canadian West, as certain types of immigrants from Europe were denounced as \"foreigners\" who were beneath the British. In the Canadian West, a sense of Britishness combined with whiteness to distinguish the elites who would rule from those who would be subject to rule. Frustrated that they were members of this elite yet did not make decisions, did not reap the profits, and did not enjoy all of the privileges and power of that elite, British settler women behind the homesteads-for-women campaign hoped to garner support by articulating an imperialist vision to demonstrate their fitness for the land denied to them yet available to \"foreign\" men. Situated on their homesteads instead of \"foreign\" men, British women would transport and transplant British civilization. This campaign also involved the denigration and denouncement of \"foreign\" women, in order to elevate their own status and bolster arguments for their entitlement. First Nations women were scarcely even in the picture, as they were relegated to reserves and subject to intense surveillance, laws, and policies.\n\nBut for British women to establish and operate their own homesteads and farms and work on the land was in direct contrast to their assigned role as models of domestic, feminine demeanour and deportment. Working out of doors was a remnant of an earlier, darker time. Only \"primitive\" settler women were obliged to labour in the fields and barnyard. There were grave fears that women were \"changing to masculinity\" as a result of doing work \"which men ought to do.\" According to one expert from 1910, this was a reversion to savagery, as \"women in the savage state were so like men in form that it was well-nigh impossible to tell them apart.\" As this book demonstrates, other British settler colonies shared the same aversion to any public display of women working in the fields. It might be acceptable in England, it was declared in a 1906 letter in an Australian newspaper on \"The Female Farmer,\" because there \"surplus\" women were \"driven into working to support themselves.\" Where white women were in the minority in a colony, however, they were to revert to their proper vocations as wives and mothers.\n\nIf a woman in the prairie West did succeed in obtaining land of her own to farm, she was likely to be seen as suspect, eccentric, and aberrant in her community, belonging in neither the masculine nor the feminine realms. An example was Lizzie Hillis, from Ireland, who homesteaded 320 acres north of Hanna, Alberta, having purchased South African scrip (to be discussed in Chapter 3). Hillis was remembered in her district as being able \"to keep up to any man and do any work he did, even hauling bundles on the threshing crew.\" One year while threshing it took the men \"several days before some of them realized she was a woman.\" She was known as \"Old Lizzie,\" and years of living alone allegedly made her strange, even crazy. She was \"famous for taking after people she didn't like with a pitchfork,\" and that included a priest. Hillis could \"hold her own with anybody and cuss like a trooper.\" While \"her batching\" was described as \"no worse than that of most of the men who were homesteaders,\" the message was clear that for a woman this was deviant and unacceptable. She made her own clothes out of flour sacks, and one outfit she wore had \"a clearly visible 'Alberta's Best' right across her seat.\" She returned to Ireland in the 1920s and died there. But the story of the Hillis farm did not end there. Her sister Mary came from Ireland to Lizzie's land in the mid-1930s and built a new house with an \"absolutely useless\" fireplace. According to the local history she was an \"old maid and partially paralyzed.\" Although a nephew lived with her for a time, she was all alone when she \"took sick and was found by the neighbors frozen to death under her kitchen table.\"\n\nAlthough settler women were to confine themselves to the domestic realm in theory, all women on homesteads\u2014whether widows, daughters, wives, sisters, or mothers; whether British, Doukhobor, or Ukrainian\u2014did a great deal of the physical labour required, particularly in the early years of homesteading and farming. English homesteader Edward West described the work of women in his book _Homesteading: Two Prairie Seasons_ :\n\nOne would meet them trudging alone over the prairie, hunting among the bluffs for stray cattle, or see them helping their husbands to dig out stones, or mounted on a plough or disc driving a team of bulls, or hear tales of how they had helped their husbands to dig wells or build the little shack. In some cases they would hold down the homestead with two or three young children while the husband was earning money (getting a \"grub stake,\" as it is called), or even go out themselves to do the same as cooks while their husbands performed the homestead duties.\n\nLocal histories often detail the work done by \"mother\" to secure the homestead. One son of homesteaders near the Montana-Saskatchewan border described how his mother, Mary Kluth, dug rocks and stooked and stacked grain on their land and for neighbours. She gave birth to a son in their homestead shack a day after baking fourteen loaves of bread, and five days later she was cooking for a threshing crew. In 1914 she made fourteen trips across the border to Malta, Montana, \"hauling grain one way and bringing back posts, wire, groceries, and the year's needs. Sometimes the weather wasn't too good but most of the time she slept under the wagon. Dad dug rock, tried to get more land broke and looked after us kids while Mother was on the road.\"\n\nA mother of six small children on a Saskatchewan homestead described the work she performed in 1905 while her husband was away with a threshing crew. This included building their first sod barn:\n\nThe job was hard and we did not have hardly anything to work with. We had gotten a fireguard broken and it was from this that we got the necessary sod. The two oldest children carried the sod between them on a board and I did the building. As this was an exceedingly slow way as the poor children could not carry enough to keep me busy, I made a harness for the cow and made her help us in the hauling the [ _sic_ ] sod. This was a little better but as the harness was not very substantial, it was breaking continually and made things very trying and because of this I had a job every evening of either repairing the old harness or making a new one. The utensils I had to make the sod level with consisted of an old butcher knife and sticks we found lying around. Finally it was completed and a roof was made from poplar poles which we managed to get out of the valley near by.\n\nAs women's rights activist Nellie McClung wryly observed in 1916: \"Women are doing homestead duties wherever homestead duties are being done... No person objects to the homesteader's wife having to get out wood, or break up scrub land, or drive oxen, so long as she is not doing these things for herself and has no legal claim on the result of her labour. Working for someone else is very sweet and womanly, and most commendable. What a neat blending there is of kindness and cruelty in the complacent utterances of the armchair philosophers who tell us that women have not the physical strength to do the hard tasks of life.\"\n\nYet the conviction that women should not work in the fields and farm their own land, nor be given any official encouragement or sanction to do so, prevailed among lawmakers and other decision makers, and was pressed into service well into the twentieth century. As historian Kathryn Gleadle has argued, the \"perpetuation of a dominant discourse concerning the feminized nature of women's public presence obscured cultural knowledge as to the vigorous activities which women often performed on the ground.\" It was also convenient for authorities to ignore, belittle, or minimize evidence of women's labour on farms.\n\nEnglishwoman, journalist, and Saskatchewan farmer Georgina Binnie-Clark challenged the view that British women were incapable of work on the land. In a 1913 presentation on \"Land and the Woman in Canada\" to the Royal Colonial Institute in London, she made the case that women should farm large acreages and grow grain, the most lucrative crop. Binnie-Clark argued that they were capable of all forms of farm labour, and that British women should be eligible to acquire homestead land so they could play a critical role in the \"spade-work of British expansion.\" She was harshly criticized in the discussion that followed by powerful men in the audience. J. Obed Smith, in charge of the London office of emigration from Europe to Canada and responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to Canada, was utterly opposed to the idea of women farmers in \"this, that, or any other land.\" He said women were physically incapable of carrying on farming operations, and he \"dissociated himself entirely from the idea that a woman alone could pursue general farming in Canada.\" The next discussant agreed that \"it would be most disastrous not only for the woman, but for the reputation of Canada, for any woman to start grain farming in the West.\"\n\nInfluential men like J. Obed Smith and Frank Oliver, minister of the interior from 1905\u201311, were involved in controversial land speculation themselves, using their positions of influence and knowledge for their own benefit and, in the case of Oliver, to profit his allies and friends. Oliver was particularly adamant and unrepentant that the work of building empire and the profits to be secured were for men only, although this did not include Indigenous men. Oliver was also critical and sceptical of the capacity of \"foreign\" Europeans to assist in the development and settlement of the West.\n\nAll of these groups\u2014women, Indigenous people, Europeans of non-British descent\u2014were marginalized through a variety of political, material, and imaginative systems, or \"structures of constraint\" that perpetuated subordination and inferiority. The idea that women should not work outdoors was particularly imaginative as it defied what was happening throughout the prairies, where women's work was essential to the establishment of the agricultural economy of the West. But men such as Smith and Oliver had little interest in sanctioning any large-scale change that might undermine the benefits and profits accruing to them and their associates. They had a direct interest in asserting the representational system, however imaginary, that there was a \"true\" or \"normal\" gender order that relegated women to hearth and home and banished them from the fields.\n\nA primary reason that women in Canada were denied homesteads was because it would make them \"independent of marriage.\" Frank Oliver believed that \"women were already averse to marriage, and he considered that to admit them to the opportunities of the land grant would be to make them more independent of marriage than ever.\" In my book _The Importance of Being Monogamous_ , I detail Canada's determination to impose the monogamous, lifelong, intraracial, and heterosexual model of marriage on the diverse population of Western Canada as central to the nation-building project. The gendered ideals behind the homestead laws, which established the foundation of the economy and society of the prairies, ensured that women had little opportunity to stray from marriage. Nellie McClung summed up this mentality: \"The reason given for denying homesteads to women is that it will make them too independent of marriage and it is not independent women we want. It is population... It sounds as if the government was afraid that if women could do anything else, they would not get married.\"\n\nThe useful although imaginary idea that women should not work in the fields was clearly articulated by a Canadian general in 1921, when Canada sought to discourage British women, in particular the land army women of the First World War, from imagining they could come to Canada and work on the land or farm land of their own. Brigadier-General R. Manley Sims said that \"it must always be remembered that the Anglo-Saxon never willingly accepts the idea of women for outdoor labor. It is considered, and I think rightly, too heavy for them. It was a war emergency measure and we don't want it continued.\" This sentiment was echoed by a settler from England who wrote an account of his years in Western Canada and found that \"one of the finest of Canadian characteristics [was] the profound reverence with which their women are regarded. Quite rightly they believe that it is not a woman's duty to work the land.\"\n\nCora Hind, agricultural editor for the _Manitoba Free Press_ and a women's rights activist, was asked by an English journalist in the late 1920s if it was possible for a woman to farm in Canada. Hind replied that while it was possible, she did not advise it, and explained: \"You see, a woman can't go on the land as she would in England, for so many of the population of the prairies are low type Central Europeans, who, as a matter of course, make their womenfolk work outside. The result of this is that the Canadian farmer\u2014by that I mean a man of British stock\u2014says, 'I will have no \"white\" women working on my farm,' for he thinks if he does this he is sinking to the level of the 'bohunk.'\" Hind went on to point out that there were only two \"real openings for women in Western Canada. The first is domestic work, and the second is more domestic work\u2014marriage to a prairie farmer.\" There was little hope if even Cora Hind could not advise women to farm in Canada.\n\nThat British women colonizers sought land of their own in the colonies has been overlooked in sweeping studies of the \"great land rush\" or \"rise of the Anglo-world.\" Land seeking has been assumed to be and cast as a uniquely male and particularly British male obsession. Englishman Edward West described his \"hunt for homesteads\" on the prairies, writing that \"it was certainly interesting to see one square half-mile of land after another, with the prospect of owning one of them as a freehold, and one began to wonder if some of the immigration were not due to a sort of hereditary land-hunger, a sort of instinct, inherited from Saxon or other ancestors, to get hold of a bit of Mother Earth, there to have elbow-room and be able to develop ourselves and do our work, without cramping and artificial shackles.\" British women, too, exemplified this \"land hunger\" and tried \"to get hold of a bit of Mother Earth\" to participate in the \"great game\" and be true partners in empire. As many struggled to make a living to rise above poverty at a time when few vocations were available to them, they may have had even more need and desire for land than did the men, who had far more options.\n\nFrank G. Roe, homesteader, historian, and train engineer, described in his memoir how his mother, Mary Ann Roe, from Sheffield, England, proved up on her homestead in Alberta, earning her patent to her land at the age of sixty in 1902. Her husband and Frank's father died of pneumonia just over a year after arriving in Alberta, after he was \"lost on the prairie one night during a terrific rainstorm.\" Yet Mary Ann Roe persevered and flourished, according to her son, as she was a \"born pioneer\" who \"embraced the new life with joyous eagerness.\" In her estimation their tiny sod house, \"standing on its own acres and ours, was no step down in the world but a decided step up.\" Frank G. Roe described a \"passionate longing\" for land that was hardly reserved to men alone:\n\nIt will, one may hope, have been made plain that it was not from any poverty of ideas that such a woman found rest in her soul in the new sphere. Without some historical knowledge of the eviction of the disinherited English peasantry from these ancient \"common fields,\" which once, as their name indicates, were common to themselves conjointly with other classes, it is difficult to realize their passionate longing. The land was to them as the very marrow of their bones. Beyond measure, to such people the possession of acres of their own over which they could stride at will outweighed everything that could be thrown into the scales against it. This was their kingdom and even a sod house could become as a royal palace and she set about to make it one.\n\nSettler women were complicit in the enterprise of dispossessing Indigenous people. They too coveted Indigenous land and resources and were land takers. Migrant women, including those who were British, were homesteaders, speculators, squatters, and purchasers of land, including land fraudulently surrendered on First Nation reserves, and they profited and benefited from the core mission of the colonial project that rested on a foundation of dispossession. But as McClintock reminds us, colonial women were ambiguously complicit; they were both privileged and restricted. They had to struggle for a share in the bounty of Indigenous land, and they faced gendered roadblocks and barriers. As a columnist for the London paper the _Vote_ concluded with resignation in 1927, \"difficulties, almost insuperable, are put in the paths of women who wish, in our Dominions overseas, to be 'settlers' in the true meaning of the word.\" British women were largely unsuccessful in their quest for land of their own to farm in prairie Canada, unless they could afford to purchase it. But through understanding their efforts, their absence from the township maps, as well as the determination of colonial authorities to stymie and prevent them, we can better comprehend how \"the vast, fissured architecture of imperialism was gendered throughout.\"\n\nThe ideal of the independent colonial woman farmer was not confined to the British Empire. In German Southwest Africa there was hope that the single woman settler could farm independently, overcoming the prejudices that prevailed at home. Like Georgina Binnie-Clark, and at exactly the same time, travel writer Clara Brockmann promoted the idea of German women as farmers in African colonies. Brockmann was confident German women could do all the farming tasks a man could and also acquire the experience needed in \"the handling of their natives.\" And as we will see in the chapters that follow, women of many nationalities sought to establish themselves as farmers and landowners in British colonies. \"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills\" is how Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), from Denmark, began her memoir _Out of Africa_ about her coffee plantation and six thousand acres of land in the British colony Kenya.\n\nWhile the British colonial context is critical, Canada's proximity to the United States is also essential to understanding the gendered history of the prairies, as the makers of Canada were determined that this British outpost would be forged in the image of the mother country and be distinct from the perceived disarray that prevailed to the south. Canadian laws drawn from the British legal heritage deliberately constituted a world in which white men were the genuine political and economic subjects and women only provisionally so. A British model of gender relations was idealized and emulated, while the perceived gender chaos of the United States was condemned and abhorred. The U.S. West was a much more welcoming environment to migrant women who were single, divorced, separated, or widowed. While still a minority, women homesteaders were significantly more numerous south of the forty-ninth parallel. As historian R. Douglas Hurt has summarized in his recent study _The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century_ , \"homesteading offered an irresistible opportunity for thousands of women... who considered a quarter section (160 acres) of land nothing less than the promise of independence, freedom and security.\" They homesteaded for economic gain and to enhance family landholdings, and male homesteaders did the same. In states such as North Dakota, women constituted approximately 20 percent of homesteaders, and they proved up on their claims as often as\u2014and in some states with a higher degree of success than\u2014their male counterparts. Most were young and single, but there were also older women, many of whom had been widowed or were divorced. (In both the United States and Canada, married women were denied the right to homestead.) Like male homesteaders, they tended to settle among networks of family and friends, and also like male homesteaders, they generally had jobs that provided the capital necessary to establish a farm. Some, like male homesteaders, sold or rented their land after they proved up, while others stayed and kept their land in the family. The proportion of women homesteaders increased on the Great Plains of the United States in the twentieth century. Hurt concludes that \"homesteading strengthened the influence of women in their families, and it expanded their work roles in the home and community. Homesteading reinforced the ability of women to act independently as self-determining people who took responsibility for their own lives. By homesteading, single women gained access to property, managed their land, controlled resources, and decided how to spend their money.\"\n\nMigrant women to Western Canada were deliberately and systematically denied this access to property and the right to manage their own land and resources. The example of the United States as a situation to be avoided was paramount in the justifications Canadian officials provided for denying homestead rights to women. J. Obed Smith told Georgina Binnie-Clark after her 1913 talk at the Royal Colonial Institute in London that Canada had deliberately departed from the U.S. legislation that permitted single women to homestead, as in his view this had led to \"disastrous results.\" Looking back over the twentieth century, and basing his summary on many studies of women homesteaders in the United States, Hurt does not mention any \"disastrous results\" except that some women consolidated their homesteads with those of their husbands after marriage; that some, like men, failed to prove up; and that some used their land as an investment and moved on. Smith and other Canadian decision makers manufactured an imaginary but useful foil of a foreign land to the south where unscrupulous women were \"sham\" homesteaders, incompetent farmers, and devious manipulators of the laws.\n\nOver the course of researching and writing this book it became a project of unravelling the profound entanglement of colonial and metropolitan histories, and of discovering how the colonial culture of prairie Canada was constituted through a complex interplay of the local, the region across borders, the national, and the imperial. This book is an effort to write a history that looks beyond the nation in order to \"unsettle the naturalness of the nation-state as analytical framework.\" It is about the circulation of ideas and individuals within the British Empire and across the border shared with the United States. While the book stresses the importance of understanding the projects and the \"knowledge,\" assumptions, or understandings generated from metropoles, it is also about how imperial plots and plans were not monolithic but were contested, debated, and disputed in both the \"motherland\" and the colony.\n\nI begin with the ancient agriculture of the Great Plains of North America, where women were the farmers, owning their own land and raising produce for sale as well as for their families. The history of Indigenous agriculture is important in understanding that it was not natural or inevitable that women would be virtually excluded from the category \"farmer\" in the settlement era on the Canadian prairies. That the first farmers were Indigenous women is vital to comprehending why British women colonizers were to symbolize distance, departure, and progression from this earlier and ancient way of life. Chapter 1 then analyzes the gendered and racialized visions that were at the heart of the grid survey and homestead system that blanketed and suffocated Indigenous ways of living on the land. These visions had both American and British imperial antecedents, although there were significant variations in the opportunities for migrant women to own and farm land in British colonies and the U.S. West. There were no obvious and universally shared assumptions about which categories of settler men and women should be given land grants. In prairie Canada, First Nations people were relegated to small reserves where farming was encouraged among males but not females, and on a limited scale that would not require more land. Only a few widows managed to farm on reserves. Land grants to the M\u00e9tis, called scrip, were issued to men, women, and children, but the scrip system was designed to ensure that they were soon divested of their land. Once this stage was set, the Dominion Lands Act prevailed over the distribution of land on the prairies. Under this legislation, single women could obtain homesteads in prairie Canada, and this chapter traces the history of some of the women who claimed land in Manitoba. This right was abruptly removed in 1876 legislation, however, without discussion or debate, and while no official spelled out exactly why, this chapter speculates on the rationales for this deliberate eradication. From then on it was the white male colonizer only who was to make the wilderness productive and profitable. Single settler women were quickly dispatched and relegated to roles as domestic servants and as potential wives and mothers through this change in legislation. Although their labour on homesteads was expected and required, women were not to be the owners of land unless they were widows with children or could afford to purchase land. Just when the homestead right for most women was removed, one other short-lived opportunity was offered to them: the tree claim, which allowed women and men alike to acquire small plots of land to plant trees. The tree claim concept was soon abandoned, however, as it proved absurd in the prairie environment.\n\nThe focus of the second chapter is Britain, and particularly England, where in the nineteenth century the notion of women working in the fields and having land of their own to farm was vigorously debated and discussed. Prominent advocates of agriculture for \"gentlewomen\" arose by the late nineteenth century and succeeded to some extent in countering earlier views that women working outdoors was not feminine, civilized, or progressive. Farming on a small scale, in groups or settlements of women and concentrating on the \"lighter,\" more feminine branches of agriculture, was one of a number of useful vocations proposed as a solution to a perceived surplus of women. There ought to be an \"agricultural brigade of the monstrous regiment of women,\" as coined by one advocate. By about 1910 there was a \"widespread gardening and farming movement among women in England.\" The arguments and rationales that were advanced in Britain are important to understanding the debates in Canada, particularly during the years of the homesteads-for-women movement.\n\nOpposition to women farmers, gardeners, and horticulturalists remained intense, however, and there were hopes that the colonies could provide a more congenial environment where old prejudices and attitudes might vanish. Chapter 2 also considers the hopes and aspirations for British gentlewomen farmers in the colonies, particularly Canada, a cause that intersected and overlapped with that of sending \"surplus women\" to the colonies, as advanced by emigration societies and philanthropic individuals. Farming was one of a number of potential vocations for women in the colonies, and it was hoped that farming could attract migrants not drawn to domestic service, even when that was cloaked in more equal and respectable terms as \"home help.\" Many who advocated that British women emigrate to the colonies assumed that ultimately women of superior upbringing would not wish to soil their hands by working on farms, but would instead settle into their proper and expected functions as wives and mothers of a great imperial race on colonial soil. The colonies, including Canada, wanted domestic workers and were interested in few other categories of women. Colonial training schools for young women bloomed across Britain, and while some provided instruction in poultry or horticulture, all concentrated more on the domestic skills required in the colonies.\n\nIncreasingly, prairie Canada was seen as the most convivial destination for British women wanting to farm over more problematic colonies such as South Africa, where farm work was performed by \"Kaffirs\" while the white woman farmer would have to manage and direct their labour. The prairies were seen (incorrectly) as emptier\u2014a virtually Indigenousless land. The trend in favour of farming in prairie Canada is traced in the _Imperial Colonist_ , the journal published by the British Women's Emigration Association. Other organizations such as the Colonial Intelligence League, also with headquarters in London, sought to send women to Western Canada to farm. Fiction for girls set in the colonies presented robust and independent heroines who took on arduous outdoor work and often owned or managed land of their own. Advocates of the emigration of British women to prairie Canada included devoted imperialist Flora Shaw, of the _Times_ of London, whose proposals were augmented and advanced by Canadian journalist Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon, who advocated a training school for British women in the West that would prepare them to farm land of their own. In the very early years of the twentieth century, promotional publications of the Canadian Pacific Railway also cast women, particularly British women, as efficient owners and managers of farms on the prairies. There were also competing and compelling counter narratives presenting quite an opposite view of the woman settler in the colonies, some fictional and one based on the personal experience of a \"Lady Emigrant\" to Ontario.\n\nFollowing the 1876 legislation, there remained one category of women in Canada eligible to file for the homestead grant: those who were the \"sole\" head of their family. This was interpreted to mean a widow with at least one minor child entirely dependent upon her. A man over the age of eighteen and single was the \"sole\" head of his family even though he had no children, but the rules were read quite differently in the case of women. Chapter 3 details the experiences of some of these female household heads who homesteaded, many of whom were from Britain. The case of Virden, Manitoba, homesteader Susanna Willis, whose land was expropriated from her, demonstrates how very different rules could be applied to male and female homesteaders. Women who were unable to vote and had no political clout were easily expendable. The Willis case also demonstrates that when women homesteaders ended up with very valuable land, it was coveted by others.\n\nOver the years the categories of eligible women homesteaders were narrowed through rulings and decisions made by bureaucrats as they debated just what constituted a \"sole\" head of a family. The morality and virtue of the woman homesteader was policed through the legislation and the bureaucracy that interpreted and enforced it. The separated or divorced woman was subject to particularly intense scrutiny, as were those who adopted children because it was often assumed they had done so only to acquire land. Women were tenacious and inventive in their strategies to acquire and keep their homesteads. Through purchasing South African scrip, many women, regardless of marital status, were able to acquire 320 acres of homestead land in Western Canada, but they had to have significant capital to do so, and they were obliged to prove up on their land. A final strategy of women who wanted to acquire land was to cross the border and homestead in the United States, where single women could file on land and where there was greater leniency toward separated or divorced women.\n\nWomen were free to purchase land in Western Canada, regardless of their marital status, and if they did they could escape the surveillance of the Department of the Interior, although many were still subject to intense scrutiny and, in some cases, censure. Chapter 4 provides a range of examples of women who bought land as investors, speculators, farmers, or ranchers. Women bought land from the Canadian Pacific Railway, they obtained land through purchasing M\u00e9tis scrip, and they bought reserve land \"surrendered\" by First Nations. Jean Laidlaw, for example, originally from England, had a large ranch on Piikani (Peigan) reserve land that was placed on the market despite the protests of members of that First Nation. Some of these women farmers and ranchers attracted considerable attention from the press, becoming minor celebrities. Coverage varied in nature and purpose. Some was purely promotional, in an effort to generate sales of railway land. Feminist journalists were motivated to showcase women successfully establishing farms and ranches to counter prejudice and opposition. Almost all were careful to stress that the women farmers of the Canadian prairies retained their femininity. But some of the press coverage conveyed the message that this was rare, strange, and abnormal work for women. A particular focus in this chapter is the most famous woman farmer of the West, Isobel \"Jack\" May, who was well-known in England before she came to Canada. She was featured in articles throughout Canada, the United States, and the British Empire as the \"bachelor girl\" settler who dressed in \"male attire\" and had a female companion who took care of the domestic work on their Alberta farm. As a result May was subject to particularly close scrutiny. Some years later English author Patricia Carlisle (known also as Miss Peter Webber) briefly farmed in Alberta, wearing \"male attire\" and also with a female companion. The prairies, however, proved to be a hostile environment for women who did not conform to feminine ideals.\n\nThe other famous Englishwoman farmer of the prairies deserves her own chapter. In 1905 Georgina Binnie-Clark purchased a farm at Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan. She was a writer and had no experience with farming when she arrived on the prairies that summer to visit her homesteading brother. But from then on she became an ardent promoter of farming as a vocation for British women on the Canadian prairies. Binnie-Clark was also devoted to the British Empire and believed that there were many more women like her who could contribute to the \"spade work of British expansion.\" She not only farmed but published many newspaper articles, lectured in England between 1908 and 1914, and wrote two books about her experiences. For a time Binnie-Clark also trained young Englishwomen in agriculture at her Fort Qu'Appelle farm. Binnie-Clark had even grander schemes that never materialized, including cottage training farms that she hoped could be sponsored by the Canadian Pacific Railway. She was more radical than advocates in Britain, as she was not content with small holdings and \"lighter\" branches of agriculture, exhorting women instead that growing grain on large acreages was the most profitable return on their investment in land. She disdained housework, far preferred work on the land, and did not speak or write at any time that she or any other woman required a husband. She challenged the idea that women did not have the physical capacity to perform farm work, but unlike \"Jack\" May, Binnie-Clark was careful to appear in fashionable gowns when she spoke in public (although neighbours recalled her wearing \"britches and leggings\" on her farm.) She helped inspire the homesteads-for-British-women campaign that originated in 1908, was the first to advocate land grants for British women rather than \"foreign\" men, and was the central advocate of that cause in England.\n\nDrawn to the suffrage movement and confronting authorities of the Canadian federal government in various departments, however, Binnie-Clark alienated and aggravated less radical advocates of farming for British women, although she also had influential supporters. She became a lightning rod to those who were utterly opposed to women farmers, such as J. Obed Smith. While Binnie-Clark's 1913 presentation on \"Land and the Woman in Canada\" to the Royal Colonial Institute was perhaps the greatest achievement of her career and for the cause, it also generated harsh condemnation both in Canada and England. Her 1914 book _Wheat and Woman_ , published in England, should have helped to advance the cause of homesteads-for-British-women, but it appeared just before the start of the First World War and interest was diverted to much more pressing issues. Binnie-Clark helped to organize women workers on the land in England during the war, deserting her Saskatchewan farm, and she did not return until the mid-1920s. By that time she had dropped homesteads-for-women, although she continued to promote the settlement of British people in Canada, with an emphasis on families.\n\nWhile Binnie-Clark focussed on England in her lectures and publications, a homesteads-for-women campaign gained momentum on the prairies, and this is the subject of Chapter 6. The women's columns of the prairie farm journals became the focus of the campaign. Isabelle Beaton Graham of the _Grain Growers' Guide_ was the most determined and industrious in generating interest in and support for the cause _._ In 1910 an initial, Edmonton-based petition calling for homesteads for any unmarried woman in Canada over the age of thirty was organized by an American woman who had hoped to settle in Alberta and was surprised to find she could not homestead in Canada. This initiative did not go far but helped to inspire a much more concerted effort, led by women who took pride in their British ancestry and who eventually settled on the strategy of seeking homestead rights for themselves alone, excluding American and other women viewed as \"foreign.\" Like Binnie-Clark, they advanced an imperialist vision to justify their claims for land over the dubious claims of \"foreign\" men. As homesteaders they would help to squeeze out undesirable immigrants and cultivate British civilization along with their crops. Many other rationales were advanced: that women were interested in acquiring homesteads, that they had the strength and knowledge to farm, that they would not be lured to the evil cities but rather enjoy healthy lives in the outdoors, and that potential wives would be attracted to the West for the bachelors. Other rationales highlighted fundamental inequalities in Canada's land laws: families of boys could acquire large estates, while those with daughters were penalized. Women had helped establish homesteads all over the West as wives, yet the land was owned solely by the husband who, with the abolishment of dower rights, could sell without even asking his wife's permission. Single women could homestead in the U.S. West, and Canada was losing its \"daughters\" who headed south. But the rationale that took centre stage was that land should go to cultured and refined women \"of British birth,\" who were \"of strong moral force and high intellectual ability,\" rather than to uncouth \"foreigners.\" This was the core of a petition that was presented to the Canadian Parliament in 1913 with 11,000 signatures. But this tactic created fissures in the campaign, as some regarded it as a \"bald piece of discrimination.\" Opponents in government remained intransigent, even narrowing the eligible categories of women. The idea that women were not capable agriculturalists persisted. Some were convinced that British women were the least likely candidates for the tasks required of homesteaders on the prairies. The strategy of manipulating fears of racial and ethnic \"others\" in order to assist with the \"spade work of British expansion\" and to seek an alliance with and win the support of elite males failed. There were fundamental contradictions in the tactics around this petition, as they invoked prejudice and exclusion while calling for equality and justice.\n\nChapter 7 covers the era from the First World War to the late 1920s, demonstrating that if anything, opportunities for women farmers and homesteaders narrowed over time. The war set back the cause of educated British women farmers in Canada, and although it was revived and invigorated after the war, Canada's \"curiously strong prejudice\" persisted and became even more entrenched. Despite acute labour shortages, in prairie Canada there was no formal mobilization of women for farm work. This chapter analyzes why this was the case, in comparison to the land armies of the United States and Britain and the \"farmerettes\" of Ontario. Having told women they were not physically capable of farm work, it would have been difficult for authorities to suddenly reverse this stance maintained over decades and invite them into the fields. During the war and after, pressure to change the homestead legislation to include all\u2014not just British\u2014women continued, and there was hope that women's wartime service would help to bolster the claim. Advocates of emigration for British land army women hoped farm work and land on the prairies could be obtained in recognition of their wartime service. But there was deep and profound opposition at all levels of government in Canada to British land army and ex-service women as settlers unless as domestic workers. The women were viewed as potentially disruptive and troublesome elements whose wartime work experiences conflicted with the \"true\" and \"normal\" gendered identities perpetuated on the prairies. In the British settlement schemes of the 1920s there was an emphasis on families, or in the case of single landholders, on male agriculturalists and female domestics. Land and farming in the West remained overwhelmingly masculine, and the First World War helped to further this aim.\n\nThe goal of establishing British women homesteaders and farmers on the prairies withered and died in the 1930s. A brief conclusion makes this point by discussing the return of Georgina Binnie-Clark to her Saskatchewan farm and her short-lived and ill-conceived Union Jack Settlement, a plan to plant families rather than single women on imperial plots. There could not have been a worse time to initiate such a venture than the drought and Depression of the 1930s. In 1930, however, women (with the exception of First Nations women) were finally granted the right to homestead in Alberta under new provincial legislation, and hundreds took advantage of this offer. While a study of their experiences awaits their historian, they must have been disadvantaged by the Depression that gripped the prairies. Difficulties they faced would have been compounded by the fact that they had to choose homesteads in areas avoided by previous generations of settlers. The conclusion also discusses the persistent \"constraining myths\" that reinforce traditional gender relations and continue to marginalize women as farmers.\n\nImperial plots for British women were thus few by the 1930s, despite decades of effort to establish that they could be capable agriculturalists. They continually confronted the objection that farming would interfere with their ability to perform their most important work as wives and mothers. It was perhaps General Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army who put this most succinctly in 1921, when he declared that \"Canada's two chief needs are a more thorough cultivation of the land and more God-fearing mothers in her homes... there is need all over Canada for more attention to the cultivation of children.\"\nCHAPTER ONE\n\nNARROWING OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN\n\nFROM THE INDIGENOUS FARMERS OF THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE EXCLUSIONS OF THE HOMESTEAD REGIME\n\nOften in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the cornfields; and as I hoe the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our corn songs now.\" These were the words of Hidatsa farmer Buffalo Bird Woman (Maxi'diwiac) around 1912, when she was a resident of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. There she farmed a small plot of corn according to ancient methods. By that time there were very few Indigenous people who retained knowledge of their crop production methods, and fewer still who continued to practise them. In Indigenous America, women had been the farmers wherever there was agriculture, including on the Great Plains and in what is now Ontario. They were far more than \"gardeners\"\u2014the crops of women farmers of the Great Plains were the main economic drivers of their region's economy. These same crops continue to play a major role in the economies of Canada and the United States. The example of the ancient women farmers of the Great Plains demonstrates that it was not natural or inevitable that women were to be virtually excluded from that occupation in Western Canada as intensive settlement and the homestead regime took root. Nor was it inevitable that Indigenous people too were almost completely excluded from the new agricultural economy; both processes took work.\n\nThis chapter begins with Plains women agriculturalists and ends with the narrow and confined opportunities for immigrant women to obtain land and practise agriculture that were in place in Western Canada by the mid-1870s. It argues that gendered and racialized visions were at the heart of ideas, policies, and laws about property rights and land apportionment and improvement in Western Canada. Some were borrowed from the United States while others reflected the practices of the British imperial world. Yet women's access to land varied widely in these locations. Ideas, laws, and policies about which categories of women should have land and which could farm land were cultural constructs; they were not shared by all, as the example of homesteading single women in the U.S. West demonstrates. Canada made a very deliberate decision to depart from the U.S. model and ultimately excluded virtually all women but widows from the land grant of the homestead system.\n\nThe survey of the land into square homesteads covered and smothered Indigenous ways of living in the West, and it was intended to do so; those defined as \"Indian\" were denied the homestead land grant and instead relegated to reserves. The rights of immigrant women to homestead in Western Canada changed over the 1870s: single women could file on land until 1876, when the legislation was deliberately changed to exclude them. A significant number of women filed on land in Manitoba in the early 1870s and were more successful than their male counterparts at \"proving up\" and earning patents to their land. After 1876 there remained only one category of women who could homestead: widows with children. A short-lived opportunity to acquire a small grant of land was extended to all migrant women (regardless of marital status) in the late 1870s under the Forest Tree Culture legislation, but this window too was soon shut, as tree farming proved impractical on the prairies. In a few short years the Great Plains were transformed from a land where women had been the farmers to one where agriculture was overwhelmingly masculine, as was the ownership of land that was the foundation of this economy.\n\nFIRST FARMERS\n\nAgriculture long predated the arrival of Europeans on the northern Great Plains, and women were the farmers, raising corn, beans, squash, melons, pumpkins, and sunflowers. They excelled in the art of plant domestication, developing hardy, early maturing varieties of corn that could flourish even in the short growing season of the northern plains, and that could withstand hail and drought as well as early frost. Dried produce was made into a variety of products for families and communities, as well as for sale to neighbours and to European traders; the women were commercial farmers. For this time and place and available technology, this was large-scale agriculture and should not be dismissed or diminished as \"horticulture.\" It was also more than a trade or vocation; sacred songs and ceremonies were a central component that were critical to the work and success of the farmers and were handed down by women over generations. Indigenous women were deeply attached and strongly committed to caring for the land.\n\nEuropean observers wrestled with the sight of women farmers and traders; their comments generally contained a mixture of praise and disparagement. Describing the Arikara, one of the Upper Missouri village people, Scottish botanist John Bradbury wrote in 1810 that \"the women, as is the custom with Indians, do all the drudgery, and are excellent cultivators... I have not seen even in the United States, any crop of Indian corn in finer order, or better managed than the corn of their villages.\"\n\nThe most northerly of the upper Missouri River village agricultural people have long been assumed to be the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa, but there is archaeological evidence that the village agricultural complex reached farther north into Manitoba. There was an agricultural settlement at Lockport, north of present-day Winnipeg on the banks of the Red River, between 800 and 1700 CE. Archaeology has revealed storage pits, bison scapula hoes, grinding stones for milling seeds, charred corn kernels, and ceramic vessels at this site. There are strong archaeological indications of other early agricultural settlements in Manitoba, although much evidence has been lost because of intensive cultivation of the land. An agricultural earth-lodge settlement of Cree in the Touchwood Hills of present-day Saskatchewan in the early nineteenth century grew \"considerable quantities of maize and potatoes.\"\n\nHidatsa farmer Maxi'diwiac was born about 1839 in an earth-lodge village along the Knife River in present-day North Dakota and moved to the new Like-a-Fishhook village established in 1845 by the remnants of the Mandan and Hidatsa. In the mid-1880s the people of that village, including Maxi'diwiac, were dispersed onto individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Maxi'diwiac passed along her knowledge of agriculture in meticulous detail to anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson, who published _Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation_ in 1917 (later published as _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ ). Although Wilson's texts supposedly present the actual words of Maxi'diwiac, this is likely not entirely the case, but her knowledge is there, conveyed in words and sentences that were chosen and written down by Wilson. She did not speak English, so her son Edward Goodbird translated and interpreted her words. The text that resulted from this collaboration provides the most detailed account of Indigenous agriculture ever published, and as Jeffery R. Hanson writes in a new introduction to the text, \"One cannot read _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ without marvelling at the array of technical skills which Hidatsa women developed and applied to everyday life: agriculture, architecture, construction, storage, crafts, and cooking constitute just a few of the dimensions of knowledge which Buffalo Bird Woman and other Hidatsa women contributed.\" Men played virtually no role in farming aside from assisting with the harvest and cultivating tobacco.\n\n_Figure 2._ In a field of corn and squash, \"Sioux Woman,\" the daughter-in-law of Hidatsa farmer Maxi'diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman), demonstrates traditional farming methods of the Great Plains agriculturalists using a bison scapula hoe, 1912. State Historical Society of North Dakota, item no. 0086-0281. Photo by Gilbert L. Wilson.\n\nMaxi'diwiac explained that farmers preferred the bottomlands of the Missouri, where the soil was soft and easy to work, rather than the open prairies, where the soil was hard and dry. Before the introduction of iron implements, they could not have broken the prairie sod, as they used tools fashioned from the shoulder blades of bison. By Maxi'diwiac's time, iron hoes and axes were generally used rather than bison scapula hoes and wooden digging sticks, and her grandmother Turtle was one of the last women to use these traditional implements. Her hoe was precious; she kept it under her bed and \"when any of the children of the household tried to get it out to look at it, she would cry, 'Let that hoe alone; you will break it.'\"\n\nFarmers had individual plots, although there were also family plots worked with other women family members, particularly daughters. Maxi'diwiac's mother died when Maxi'diwiac was six, but she had three other women she called \"mother,\" sisters of her mother and wives of her father. She was also very close to her grandmother Turtle. These women worked their fields together. To prepare a new plot the land was first cleared, a task the men might assist with. The land was then burned, which \"left a good, loose soil.\" Every spring once the frost was out of the ground, the fields were dug up: \"Every foot must be turned up and loosened with the hoe\u2014a slow and toilsome operation.\"\n\nMost of Maxi'diwiac's narrative is devoted to the intricacies of corn cultivation. She provides a detailed account of the nine varieties of corn raised in her village, including their uses and characteristics. Corn planting started in May and could continue well into June, depending on the variety of seed. Hidatsa women were up before sunrise in planting season, preparing the hills they returned to each year. Of the varieties of corn that were grow, flint was the hardiest, as it could mature in just ten weeks and escape the early frosts of the northern plains.\n\nPlatforms or stages were built, where girls and women came to watch the crops, scare off predators, and sing. Maxi'diwiac explained, \"We cared for our corn in those days as we would care for a child; for we Indian people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children; and we thought that our growing corn liked to hear us sing, just as children like to hear their mother sing.\" Watching began in earnest in August as the corn ripened. The watchers' songs were usually love songs, as young men of the village would visit the platforms where the girls were stationed.\n\nThe corn was threshed in booths, under drying stages. The finest and longest ears of corn were braided, and from these the seed for the next spring was selected, using only the kernels in the centre of the cob for seed. Enough seed for two years was gathered from corn, squash, beans, sunflower, or tobacco, in case of a poor crop the next year. A family's corn supply usually lasted until August of the next year. Supplies were stored in deep cache pits, dug by the women and accessed through ladders. The caches held not only dried corn but dried meat and pemmican and dried wild produce, including berries and \"pommes blanches,\" or prairie turnips. Each family might have up to four cache pits. Fur trader, explorer, and writer Alexander Henry wrote in his journal in 1804 that \"so numerous about the village are these pits that it is really dangerous for a stranger to stir out after dark.\"\n\nWomen raised and dried produce for their families and also for sale. Their villages were visited by neighbouring Plains people, who traded their buffalo robes, skin, and meat for corn and other produce. Sometimes the village people travelled out to the plains to trade. Henry described Mandan women preparing for a trade fair: \"We observed the women all busy, taking their hidden treasures and making preparations for the approaching fair. I was surprised to see what quantities they had on hand: I am very confident they had enough to serve them at least twelve months without a supply of flesh or anything else.\" In 1804 Henry accompanied a party of Mandan and Hidatsa to meet the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Henry wrote that the women \"had their horses loaded with corn, beans, etc. themselves and children astraddle all over, like farmers going to the mill.\" They exchanged their produce for \"leather, robes, smocks\u2014as if at a country fair.\"\n\nThe agricultural people of the plains also established trade with Euro-American\/Canadian traders and explorers. Henry wrote that \"we purchased sweet corn, beans, meal and various other trifles. Having bought all we required, which was 3 horse loads, we were plagued by the women and girls who continued to bring bags and dishes full of different kinds of produce.\" American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 bought huge quantities of produce from the Mandan, noting on one occasion that \"a number of squaws and men dressed like squaws brought corn to trade for small articles with the men.\" Describing the trade in corn, geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden wrote that the women of one village sold from 500 to 800 bushels in a season to the American Fur Company and that the trade was \"carried on by the women, who bring the corn by panfuls and the squash in strings and receive in exchange knives, hoes, combs, beads, paint etc., also tobacco, ammunition, and other useful articles for their husbands. In this way each family is supplied with all the smaller articles needed for a comfortable existence; and though the women perform all the labor, they are compensated by having their full share of the profits.\"\n\nMany ceremonies and rituals, both public and private, were involved in achieving successful crops. The cultivated plots were sacred and thought to have souls that had to be cared for like children. The Goose society of the Mandan and Hidatsa, made up of women farmers, was devoted to the rites required to ensure good crops, including fertility and rainmaking rites. The largest and most important ceremony of the society was held when the first water birds arrived; it was believed that corn spirits went south each fall with the water birds, where they were cared for by Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies. Respected members of the Goose society were believed to have corn spirits in their bodies. Other rituals performed by society members to protect crops included saying a prayer when each seed was planted and rubbing their bodies and clothing with sage each day when returning from the fields. Women farmers left offerings of meat, hide, or cloth. Sacred bundles hung on poles protected the crops. All of the crop was to be cherished and none of it wasted. In the Arikara legend of \"The Forgotten Ear,\" a woman heard a child calling when she was about to leave her field. \"She searched and found a small ear of corn she had overlooked, and when she gathered in that ear of corn the crying stopped.\"\n\nEuropean male observers wrestled with the fact that Plains women worked the land, owned their fields and their crops, and traded their surplus produce. They diminished women's work in various ways. It was often noted that because women were the agriculturalists, men were disdainful of working the land. Artist George Catlin wrote that among the Mandan, \"the old women [were] the owners of fields or patches of corn (for such are the proprietors and cultivators of all crops in Indian countries, the men never turning their hands to such degrading occupations).\" Another tendency of European observers was to criticize and disparage the skills and technology of women farmers. In his _Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians_ (1877), Washington Matthews wrote that \"their system of tillage was rude. They knew nothing of the value of manuring the soil, changing the seed, or alternating the crops... they had no regular system of fallowing. They often planted a dozen grains of corn or more to the hill, and did not hoe very thoroughly.\" Matthews saw improvements in farming on the reservations, since ploughs were used, and also because \"the men apply themselves willingly to the labors of the field; and the number of working men is constantly increasing.\" This was not the opinion of Maxi'diwiac, who thought \"our old way of raising corn is better than the new way taught us by white men.\" Maxi'diwiac's people were instructed to plant corn on fields prepared by ploughs on the open prairie, but \"these fields on the prairie near the hills I do not think are so good as our old fields down in the timber lands along the Missouri. The prairie fields get dry easily and the soil is harder and more difficult to work.\"\n\nRudolph Friederich Kurz (1818\u201371), a Swiss painter and writer who visited the Upper Missouri village people between 1846 and 1852, carefully weighed the issue and was less condemnatory than others. He believed that \"agriculture is the basis upon which is builded [ _sic_ ] every firmly established state. In tilling his land the savage becomes attached to the soil and loyal to his native land. Upon husbandry depends settled habitations, spacious country residences; as the result of husbandry, business thrives, inventions are called into being, arts flourish, sciences are in demand, and laws are enacted for the better morality and better government that is essential to the prosperity of a state.\" Unlike other observers, Kurz did not dismiss Indigenous agriculture as \"gardening\" because it was done by women; he wrote that \"whether men or women worked the land when they first began to farm is a matter of no consequence. That the Indians did actually cultivate their land throughout the region lying between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Ocean is a fact to which travelers and adventurers who have visited this country since its discovery by Columbus collectively testify\u2014all of them, whether Spaniards, Frenchmen, or Britons.\" He also defended Indigenous women working the land against claims that this was cruel and brutal treatment: \"That Indian women work the land is not due to racial coarseness or brutality but to the fact that the men regard war as their chief aim in life... According to the contrary argument, European nations, where country women willingly work in the fields, must also be called cruel and brutal. It is far better for women to till the land, which is no disgrace, than to starve or beg alms.\" Kurz was certain, however, that once the land was densely colonized and settled, Indigenous women \"will have to adapt themselves to the same order of things,\" meaning that they would disappear from fieldwork. To Kurz, women working the land was not the normal or natural gender order.\n\nEven scholars who gained a deep appreciation for the knowledge and skills of Plains women farmers nonetheless labelled their work as \"gardening,\" as somehow less than \"agriculture,\" which was considered the work of modern man. George F. Will and George E. Hyde, who published _Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri_ in 1917, both praised and diminished the work of women farmers in this passage:\n\nMost of the early accounts give the impression that the women were drudges who were forced to perform most of the heavy labor, including that of the fields. To those who are acquainted with the Indians it will be easily understood that this conception of the position of Indian women needs to be considerably modified. While there is no question that the women's work was severe, yet there is abundant evidence that the women performed their tasks willingly and took great pride in doing their work well. To those who have seen the Indian woman patiently and solicitously working about her garden it must be evident that she loved her work there and enjoyed it. As a matter of fact in the Upper Missouri region the spring was longingly awaited as the time to commence work on the gardens which furnished much of the pleasure of the summer season; and the harvest time, though a season of rejoicing, yet was also a time of regret for the pleasant summer passed.\n\nThe Indian woman was a real gardener. Her methods were not those of the bonanza farmer of the present day, but resembled more closely that of the modern market gardener or greenhouse man. She attended to every little detail, working slowly and carefully and taking the utmost pains. She knew the habits of each of her plants and the habits of each separate variety of all the species cultivated, and she worked with careful regard for these differences.\n\nAside from being skilled in cultivating crops, the Indigenous people of North America, and particularly women, were experts in the science of plants and their environments, and they knew how to sustain and nurture the resources they drew upon for their own purposes and those of future generations. Over millennia they accumulated a vast, specialized, and complex knowledge about plants, their habitats, soil varieties, weather patterns, and seasonal changes. The Blackfoot, for example, drew on approximately 185 species of plants for food, ceremonies, housing, crafts, and medicines.\n\nGENDERED VISIONS: LAND SURVEYS AND GRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES\n\nThe land survey that Canada adopted from the United States and that carves up western North America has been described as \"one of the most astonishing man-made constructs on earth.\" The \"immaculate grid\" of perfect squares is particularly striking from the sky, forming a stunning patchwork quilt. It was not just lines that the surveyors set down on the land, it was a social ideology. As historian Ian McKay has written, \"Perhaps the _pi_ _\u00e8_ _ce de r_ _\u00e9_ _sistance_ of the Canadian liberal order was to carve upon the map, in lines that majestically remind us of Euclidean geometry and panoptical state power, the perfect geometry of the Province of Saskatchewan: perhaps even more impressive, however, than this quadrilateral demonstration of panopticism was the molecular checkerboard of quarter-sections and individual properties contained within the province's boundaries\u2014a social ideology set down on the land and hence made part of everyday western experience.\"\n\nThe grid, the policies and laws governing who could live on it and who could not, and the enormous bureaucracies needed to apply these rules and regulations moulded and sculpted the societies planted on it. The legacy of those rules remains, just as the grid remains. At the time of his retirement from government service in 1880, Canada's first surveyor general, Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, took pride in his role applying the perfect grid survey and formulating public lands policy in the Canadian West at a time when, in his view, \"the country was as a _white_ sheet.\" But the country was far from being a white sheet or blank slate. The West was home to ancient societies, and the grid obscured and ignored land use and tenure systems that were based on generations of accumulated knowledge of and sensitivity to the great variations in the landscape. The grid transformed Indigenous land into the \"public domain,\" meaning it was no longer owned by or available to the First Nations. Surveys created resentment, anger, and resistance. First Nations were excluded from living on the grid and confined to reserves. Immigrant women were discouraged from occupying land on the grid except within family units.\n\nThe grid framework was far from a uniquely _Canadian_ liberal order that was imposed on the land. The immaculate square survey is also the most obvious example of the long-standing and overwhelming influence of the United States on Canada. The graph paper extends seamlessly across the forty-ninth parallel\u2014a major step toward \"continental integration\" a century and more before the term was in vogue. As historian Chester Martin writes, the United States was a \"veritable quarry\" for Canadian policy. The perfect grid system was appealing to both nations because it expedited the mapping, absorption, and individual ownership of the terrain. It permitted the land to be sold, bought, and owned in the most uncomplicated and timely fashion. The grid set the stage for both Canadian and American federal governments to become real estate dealers on a massive scale.\n\nIt was American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson who decided after the American Revolution that the simplest, most advantageous method was to survey the land before occupation and divide it into simple squares, replacing the surveying technique known as \"metes and bounds,\" a haphazard system in which parcels of land were described by distinctive characteristics of the landscape and the property lines of previously surveyed lots. The master grid would be formed by \"principal meridians\" of longitude and \"base lines\" of latitude. There were to be thirty-six-square-mile \"townships\" divided into one-square-mile lots called \"sections,\" which were further divisible into half sections and quarter sections.\n\nThe grid system had many unique advantages. It facilitated the taking of the land from Indigenous inhabitants, creating instead an army of occupiers on small holdings. It assured clear boundaries and titles, avoiding turmoil and squabbles. Once a parcel of land was surveyed it could be singled out from any other square mile of territory from a land office hundreds of miles away. Every parcel of land had its unique identity. It was an ideal system for buying, trading, and speculating in land. There were disadvantages as well. The survey was laid down without any regard for terrain, climate, or soil. Many of the squares of land throughout North America would prove to be hopeless prospects as farms.\n\nThere was much more than commerce, convenience, and mathematics at the heart of the square survey. A desired cultural landscape was to be sculpted through land policies, and ideas of gender and race were at the heart of this ideal society. Jefferson believed that America's virtue rested on an agricultural foundation, and his vision was that these measured boxes would provide the framework around which a democracy would grow. At the centre of this agricultural economy would be the small family farm's independent yeoman\u2014an individual male who was \"virtuous, hard-working and faithful to the republic.\" Jefferson declared in 1787 that \"those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his particular deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.\" With farmers happily occupying their squares, it would be impossible for wealth and power to become concentrated in the hands of a few. Jefferson's vision was of a white, Anglo-Saxon republic of small-scale farmers, and he had concerns about other types of immigrants. Women were central to this vision as the reproducers of the ideal society of independent yeomen. Women were to be subservient to the yeoman farmer; they were to be on the land but under the control of men. As historian Peter Boag writes, \"The land itself then was to play a major role in the preservation of the 'natural' gender order.\"\n\nJefferson's system of survey for the land in the western territory was passed by Congress in 1785. The free homestead system came decades later, after acrimonious debate and in stages. The United States Homestead Act of 1862, setting out just who could live on the grid and with what settlement duties or payment, provided that \"persons over the age of 21 who were citizens or immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens\" were eligible to file on up to 160 acres of surveyed land on the public domain. A homesteader had to cultivate the land, improve it by constructing a house or barn, and reside on the claim for five years. If these conditions were met (called \"proving up\"), the homesteader received full title, paying a fee of only ten dollars. Homesteaders could also gain quicker ownership of their land by exercising a \"commutation clause\" after six months of residence, which allowed them to purchase their homestead at the minimum cash price of $1.25 per acre.\n\nGender issues were at the heart of the debate over the wording of the U.S. legislation. Determining the eligible and desirable classes of persons for the land grant was not straightforward or obvious. Should only married men be eligible, ensuring that families would be established on the land? Should married men get more land than single men? Should grants of land go to young single men, capable of bearing arms, to build up an army of occupation? What categories of women should be eligible for the land grant? Congressmen changed their minds on the issue over the many years of debate. Proposals included excluding women entirely, permitting only widows with children, and permitting single women with children. There were weighty and lengthy deliberations on the eligibility of abandoned and divorced women. Widows were the most unproblematic category. As historian Tonia Compton argues, widows \"had already demonstrated their commitment to the gender order by having married.\" If they had children, widows were legally considered heads of households, and it was unanimously agreed that the land should go to heads of households. The eligibility of women who had children \"out of wedlock\" was discussed, and the conclusion was that granting them land was an \"utter impossibility,\" although the stand was later relaxed in practice.\n\nIt was assumed from the start (as later in Canada) that a married woman\u2014who was legally, civilly merged with her husband\u2014was under the husband's protection and control, and that for her the homestead privilege was out of the question. The result was that other categories of women, such as those who had never married, as well as widowed or divorced women, were granted this privilege in the U.S. federal legislation of 1862, despite the fact that most other rights of citizenship, such as voting, were denied them at this time.\n\nThe place of single women in the homestead scheme was the most perplexing and troubling question. In 1852 one congressman mocked the suggestion that homesteading would benefit \"maidens\" by asking if it was intended to \"propose a clause, providing for all the old maids in the country?\" Some argued women would never take advantage of the offer of land because they could not endure the hardships. Compton found that for congressmen it was difficult to accept the idea of single women living by themselves on homesteads. Other objections included that women could be defrauded by devious men who would use them to obtain land. And what would happen when a male and female homesteader married, each having claimed land while single? (This was to become a thorny and vexing issue.) Arguments for the rights of single women to acquire homesteads included \"They have as much right there as bachelors,\" and that \"if a female desires to possess a home, and is willing to conform to the requirements of the law, there is no reason why she should be an alien to the justice or the charity of her country. If she is unfettered by marriage ties she has the same natural right to be provided a home from the public domain that the unmarried man of the same age has.\" Supporters argued that the land grant could serve as a dowry for single women, helping to encourage marriage and ensuring the growth of the population of the West.\n\nThe right of single women in the United States to homestead under the 1862 Homestead Act was not the result of, and did not result in, a high estimation of women's ability to farm. Women in the American West had to \"negotiate a rocky terrain, littered with the racialized and gendered expectations which accompanied the American efforts to establish an empire in the West.\" Nor was there any great disruption to the dominant gender order as a result of women's enhanced property rights through the homestead privilege. Women's right to land was still tied to marital status. Women figured largely in debates about homestead bills not because they were ever intended to be the primary beneficiaries of free land measures, nor because Congress intentionally sought to hold out the promise of land ownership to women, but because homesteading was the foundation of the \"imperial enterprise\" in the West and women were central to this enterprise. White woman loomed large as \"wives, mothers, potential wives and former wives through the discussions about free land and western expansion.\" They were an essential component of the plan to populate the West with the \"right kind of Americans.\" They were to be the foundation of the families of the West and were sent to fulfill traditional gender roles, but at the same time they needed to be adventuresome, plucky, strong, and capable. The role of African American women in homesteading received no attention in debates over the free land grant.\n\nIt was not obvious, either, which categories of men should be granted the homestead privilege. Congress debated extensively about whether to include only married men\u2014heads of households\u2014and exclude single men. Race was also an issue. In 1854, for example, a congressman from Alabama proposed that \"any single free white male\" should be allowed to claim land. The 1862 legislation permitted freed slaves to homestead, and the act also extended land grants to naturalized citizens\u2014those who were not yet but would become citizens. Running through the debates about the various homestead measures was the idea that the process of transforming the land would create and shape American citizens out of foreign immigrants.\n\nThere were variations in the land laws of the states and territories, indicating that there was no obvious category of persons for land grants. In Oregon, for example, the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 granted 320 acres to every unmarried white male citizen over the age of eighteen, and twice that amount (640 acres) to married couples, with the husband and wife each owning half of the grant in their own name. Also eligible for the Oregon land grant were \"half-blood\" Native Americans. In Texas, the federal Homestead Act did not apply because (as in British Columbia) Texas retained control of its public lands upon admission to the Union. Texas legislators limited the opportunities for single women to homestead, favouring single males and male heads of families. There were, however, approximately 1,500 women who filed homestead claims in Texas between 1845, when Texas was admitted to statehood, and 1898, when homestead land was no longer available.\n\nGENDER AND LAND GRANTS: THE BRITISH IMPERIAL CONTEXT\n\nThere was also a British imperial context to the system of survey and land settlement that was adopted in Western Canada. As historian John C. Weaver has explained, in the nineteenth century the globe was \"overlaid with rectangles, squares and triangles... maps defined the empire's nature\u2014transforming the exotic to the knowable, implementing science, dominance and separation.\" In each colony the appointment of a surveyor general was the first step in establishing a systematic approach to surveying acquisitions. In New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, the landscape was ordered into individual holdings with reference to longitude and latitude, although rarely was the North American checkerboard adopted completely. New Zealand was the first location of a systematic topographic survey for the purposes of land settlement. As a surveyor in that colony explained: \"The main object of a colonial survey is to enable the settlement of the Crown lands to proceed on a system of survey and record, which, for the settler, will give him possession of a definite piece of land which cannot ever after be overridden by a rival claim.\" A system of registering land rights, linked to the scientific colonial survey, also characterized the white settler colonies of the British Empire. Known as the Torrens system, it was first devised for South Australia in the 1850s.\n\nThroughout the British settler colonies there were significant variations in the opportunities for British immigrant women to obtain land and potentially farm that land; moreover, the rules and regulations did not remain static but continually changed. Historian Kathryn Hunter found that in southeastern Australia the issue of land for single women troubled colonial authorities throughout the nineteenth century. In 1819 Eliza Walsh arrived in New South Wales with her married sister and brother-in-law, and, as she put it, \"made up my mind to settle a Farm in this country.\" She purchased a farm, and then sought more land, asking to have the same grant of land available to male \"Settlers according to means,\" which would permit her to cultivate and raise stock on a larger scale. Governor Lachlan Macquarie refused, stating it was \"contrary to late Regulations to give Grants to Ladies.\" Macquarie explained his reasoning to another official: \"I consider it very bad practice (except in some extraordinary and pressing cases of necessity) and very injurious to the Interests of the Colony to give grants of Land to single women. I have declined for some time past making such Grants on the ground that such persons are incapable of cultivating Land, and thereby not adding to the resources of the Colony.\"\n\nWalsh persisted, pointing out that \"it does not appear altogether a just measure to exclude ladies from making use of their money for the benefit of the Colony in consequence of their sex, nor can it be deemed a real objection that a Lady should not be able to conduct a Farm as well as a Gentleman.\" In the mid-1820s legislators decided that women (and men) possessing capital were eligible to receive grants of land. Walsh eventually received a grant of land but not until 1827.\n\nBy the 1860s attitudes about single settler women and land in southeast Australia had shifted, so that married white women were excluded but single women included. Land was then available to any man, widow, or single woman over the age of twenty-one for a price of one pound per acre, and land was surveyed in blocks from 40 to 320 acres. Historian Patricia Grimshaw demonstrated that in the Wimmera district under the terms of the 1869 Land Act, single women over eighteen and widows could select land, while married women could not. Single women were also granted Crown leases. Grimshaw found that single women selected land by or near other family members, helping to increase the size of family holdings. Hunter found land files from the state of Victoria demonstrating that a considerable number of single women selected land and farmed. The probate records also revealed the \"constant presence of women in farming in this wheat growing region.\" In Horsham, female farmers represented 21 percent of probated farmers between 1874 and 1900.\n\nBy the late nineteenth century there was concern in Australia that allowing single women to select land was discouraging marriage in the colony. In 1878 the suggestion was made to the Victorian Crown Lands Commission that married rather than single women be permitted to select land, in order to encourage marriage and to allow married couples to increase the viability of their farms. The matter was debated again in 1884, when amendments were made to the Land Bill and one Member of the House of Representatives \"pleaded the claim of married women, who are debarred from selecting.\" In his view married women deserved land more than single women for the following reasons, as described in the newspaper _Border Watch_ : \"The wives of selectors have been in the colony for years, they have proved themselves excellent colonists, and yet they have fewer rights than the single woman who landed from the old country yesterday... The fairer plan, Mr. Dow thinks, is to permit selection by the mother of families.\"\n\nOne category of married women could obtain land in Australia, although they did not exactly own their land. Through a system of \"marriage grants\" in South Australia, New South Wales, and Western Australia beginning in 1848, sections of Aboriginal reserve land were granted to Aboriginal women who married non-Aboriginal men. The woman could occupy the land for life and was entitled to enclose, clear, and cultivate the land, and upon her death the licence could be renewed in favour of her \"lawful offspring.\" This was not outright ownership; the state acted as trustee of all reserve land and the woman had permission to occupy the land. As Protector of Aborigines Matthew Moorhouse explained in 1848, the wife would not be disturbed on her land \"so long as she lives with her husband and they continue steady and industrious.\" The policy was intended to encourage legal, Christian monogamous marriage between Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men. The land was a form of dowry or enticement, but one that could not become the property of the husband. Such policy was also meant to encourage \"steady and industrious\" habits. There were changes in the marriage grant system over the years, but versions of it remained until 1911, when attitudes of officials toward these marriages had changed, complications emerged about who could be categorized as Aboriginal, and available land declined. Historians Mandy Paul and Robert Foster found that the records of these grants reveal the persistence of applicants in their struggle for land. Typical was Julia Simpson, who wrote the Protector in 1905: \"Will you kindly help me by getting me so many acres of land that I am entitled to... I think I would be able to get a living here by keeping fowls pigs & also a garden.\"\n\nNew Zealand had similar land enticements as incentives for interracial couples to legalize their marriages. Land grants were awarded to couples from the 1840s, but the system departed from that of the Australian colonies, as the title was in the name of the European husband, although he had no right to sell, mortgage, or lease the land.\n\nTHE SURVEY AND LAND GRANTS IN WESTERN CANADA\n\nThe grid (with the exception of river lots in some of the settlements that had predated the survey) was quietly and quickly adopted for Western Canada by 1869. This was a departure from the systems of survey used in the older provinces of Canada, where there were several lot and road patterns. That the uniform grid would be imposed on the West was decided with little consultation outside of a small circle, and no debate. The people residing in the West, overwhelmingly Indigenous people\u2014First Nations and M\u00e9tis\u2014were left completely out of the discussion. Imposing the grid on the West was the task of Surveyor General Colonel John S. Dennis. Dennis consulted with the U.S. Land Office as well as with officials of the Canadian Crown Land Department in coming up with exactly the same rectangular survey of townships and sections as had been adopted in the United States, with one main deviation: Dennis proposed larger townships consisting of sixty-four squares of 800 acres each. However, this idea was rejected in the interests of perfect, seamless conformity with the U.S. grid.\n\nWith the exception of the \"postage stamp\" province of Manitoba (one-eighteenth of its current size), the land in the Prairie provinces, then called the North-West Territories, and the District of Keewatin became the Dominion of Canada's vast inland empire with a \"stroke of the pen\" in 1870, and the land remained in federal control until 1930. The Manitoba Act of 1870 provided that \"all ungranted or waste lands\" were to be administered by the Government of Canada. Canada's secretary of state was responsible for administering this land until 1873, when this responsibility was handed over to the new Department of the Interior. The main discussion about the North-West that took place in May 1869 focused on few details of the survey, as there was a sense that great haste was required to immediately secure the territory for the new Dominion in the face of potential U.S. encroachment. The survey, the maps to document the survey, and a railroad would together declare the land as belonging to Canada, and these needed to be accomplished immediately. There was brief mention of \"free grants\" of land in the House of Commons in 1869, but no discussion or debate. The survey was needed, and immediately\u2014after that decisions could be made about who would live within the squares.\n\nIn the summer of 1869\u2014before the transfer of Rupert's Land (as the Hudson's Bay Company named the territory they claimed) to the Dominion of Canada, before any treaties with First Nations, and before the survey plan was formally approved by order-in-council\u2014Dennis was sent to the Red River settlement to begin the survey of the Principal Meridian. At this time Canada had no legal right to send surveyors west, and they had no authority to begin surveying. Dennis's son later wrote in his history of the surveys made under the Dominion lands system that \"in doing this, an approval of the scheme was anticipated which might not have been obtained, but no doubt it was realized that any scheme adopted would, in its main features, resemble the one proposed, and would authorize the survey of the country into rectangular townships.\" In the fall of 1869, the survey was the catalyst for the \"troubles\" with the M\u00e9tis at Red River, under the leadership of Louis Riel. The M\u00e9tis made up the largest population segment of the Red River settlement and had existing claims to property. Dennis's surveys therefore alarmed them. They resented the fact that they had not been consulted or informed, they feared their land rights would be disregarded, they feared a loss of livelihood, and they objected to the kind of survey that was reshaping the landscape and disregarding their river lots. The complex events that followed are beyond the focus of this book and have been the subject of many studies. The M\u00e9tis achieved some of their goals through their resistance, including recognition of their French language and Catholic rights, and \"provincehood\" for Manitoba, although these achievements were ephemeral or soon undermined. They also received a land grant of 1.4 million acres, to be distributed according to an ever-changing set of rules quite distinct from the free homestead system. Thus the land disposal system of Western Canada was immediately more complex than in the United States due to M\u00e9tis resistance to the survey and the second, complicated tier of land allotment policy devised for them.\n\nWhen the \"troubles\" ended the survey continued, with a few deviations for the river lots of the M\u00e9tis settlements along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. The new lieutenant governor of Manitoba, Adams Archibald, appointed in 1870, helped to advance the process. He favoured adopting the U.S. survey with no deviations, arguing that this system was known \"all over the world to the Emigrant classes\" and that \"a lot of 160 acres is the acknowledged extent of an Emigrant's requirements for farm purposes.\" Archibald also looked to the United States in his recommendations regarding regulations governing the distribution of these lands. On 1 March 1871, an order-in-council endorsed the adoption of the American system of survey of townships of thirty-six sections, and the free homestead system, also as administered in the United States. In April 1871 the House of Commons debated some of the details of Canada's homestead legislation. An order-in-council approved on 19 April 1871 amended the policy in the light of some of these criticisms, bringing it even more into line with the U.S. legislation. Canada's 1872 Act Respecting the Public Lands of the Dominion was passed \"without opposition and almost without discussion.\" Ten years earlier the U.S. legislation was a stormy and protracted measure compared to the quiet and quick passage in Canada. A system of road allowances and adjustments for the earth's curvature were the main departures from the U.S. model. The proximity of the American West compelled Canada to adopt a similar approach, and quickly, in order to attract settlers to a setting that was already more daunting because of its colder climate and shorter growing season. It was also difficult to access, until the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885.\n\nINDIAN RESERVES\n\nAs the grid enveloped and altered the homeland of Indigenous people, small \"reserves\" of land were set aside for those who entered into the treaties that began in southern Manitoba with Treaties One and Two in 1871. According to these agreements, land was granted on the basis of 160 acres per family of five or less (in proportion to family size), although the Dakota received about half that amount of land, as they were regarded as \"not British Indians\" and were not permitted to enter into treaties. More land was granted in later treaties, but in comparison to the generous grant of 160 acres plus the opportunity to expand through second homesteads and pre-emption available to any male newcomer over the age of eighteen, the reserves were tiny. There were no mechanisms to expand reserve land; sons could not acquire neighbouring land as sons of settlers could under the homestead system. There were, however, detailed provisions under the Indian Act to alienate or \"surrender\" portions or all of reserves. Nor could any individual identified as an \"Indian\" obtain land off a reserve. In Treaty Three, the North-West Angle Treaty, reserves were not to \"exceed in all one square mile [640 acres] for each family of five, or in that proportion for larger or smaller families.\"\n\nWithin these reserves there was no individual ownership of land, although \"location tickets\" to small plots were issued to males who could pass these down to heirs. According to the federal Indian Act (1876), these location tickets could be issued to males or females, but in practice they were granted to males only. Women came into possession of location tickets generally only as widows; the widow would receive one-third interest and the rest would go to any children. In 1884 a new clause was added to the Indian Act stipulating that the widow would receive the location ticket \"provided she be a woman of good moral character and that she was living with her husband at the date of his death.\" The result was that widows were virtually the only women who farmed on reserves (just as they were the dominant category of women homesteaders), and they were fairly rare. Implements, oxen, and any other forms of assistance with agriculture promised under treaties were distributed to males, despite the fact that from ancient times women had been the agriculturalists on the Great Plains.\n\nExamples of widowed women reserve farmers include two on a Manitoba reserve in 1895 who had \"model homestead[s].\" One of them, the \"Widow Macleod,\" had \"a very fine new house, costing her some six hundred dollars.\" She was unusually wealthy. According to the agent, \"This was the last of a comfortable competency (eight thousand dollars) left by her father, the late Angus McBeth of the Hudson's Bay Company, a few years ago.\" Widow Macleod was one of the few reserve farmers who owned oxen, cattle, horses, chickens, wagons, mowers, and horse rakes, and raised grain and potatoes. Acreages under cultivation were tiny compared to the surrounding non-Indigenous farmers. A widow on the Alexander reserve in present-day Alberta was regarded as having a sizeable farm in 1896, with two acres of wheat, an acre each of oats and barley, and three-eighths of an acre of potatoes and vegetables. She also had \"a good house, two pretty fair stables, one steer, one heifer, ploughs, harrows, forks and axes.\" Widows could be moved off their location ticket land, however, at the discretion of officials of the Department of Indian Affairs and be replaced with a man perceived as capable of farming. This was the case with a widow on the Enoch reserve in Alberta who was removed and replaced in 1915 after her son died. She was compensated with $100 from band funds and signed a consent form with her mark.\n\n_Figure 3._ This 1882 map for \"intending settlers\" shows the dominion lands surveyed to the west of the border of Manitoba. The new and final route of the Canadian Pacific Railway to the south of the Qu'Appelle River and roughly parallel to it is illustrated. Indian reserves of the Treaty Four (1874) people appear on the map, not all in locations well-suited to agriculture. There was soon pressure to \"surrender\" Indian reserve land that was desirable for farming and close to the CPR. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Map 597.\n\nVirtually excluded from the occupation of agriculture, women on reserves had few means of acquiring income. In southern Manitoba, where the \"pass system\" meant to keep people on their reserves was generally not enforced, reserve women of the early twentieth century sold their baskets, mats, moccasins, and beadwork off-reserve. They also gathered and sold Seneca root and berries. A few worked as domestics and seamstresses. Some worked in the fields of neighbouring farmers at harvest time. It was a common sight to see them in the harvest fields after the threshing crews were done, \"picking up what grain they could gather off the ground around the straw stacks. This grain was put in bags and then loaded on their buggies or wagons to be taken to the local elevators to be sold.\"\n\nOn the Kainai (Blood) reserve in southern Alberta, the largest in Canada, there was only one woman farmer in the 1920s and '30s. Marcia Belly Fat had first worked as a dressmaker in Lethbridge and in the early 1920s returned to the reserve and asked for land that she could cultivate. She was the only woman to drive a truck, and it was said she \"worked like a man.\"\n\nThe possession of land through the homestead system was made possible through the dispossession of the land and resources of First Nations, who were excluded and isolated on reserves. Their economic marginalization and deteriorating health were the results of Canada's nation-building program. Famine followed the disappearance of the buffalo. With poor housing and inadequate substandard rations, reserve people were susceptible to tuberculosis. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 brought new waves of diseases; as historian James Daschuk writes, the railway was a \"fatal disease vector.\" Prairie reserve populations reached demographic lows by the early 1890s. As their lands were occupied and access to resources restricted, there were, as ethnobotanist Nancy Turner writes, \"direct impacts on virtually every aspect of their food systems, technologies, medicines, and Traditional Land and Resource Management Systems, including ceremonial practices and belief systems.\" Resources, species, and habitats were irrevocably changed.\n\nWhile officials disregarded and discredited Indigenous peoples' knowledge and systems of caring and managing their land and resources, there was some knowledge exchange, at least in the early settlement era. The daughter of homesteaders in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan remembered that the \"Indian women were a great help to my mother.\" They taught her how to keep a fire going, how to clear up diaper rash, how to \"wrap the babies Indian style when they were real tiny,\" and how to preserve berries for winter.\n\nReserve farmers faced many obstacles, including drought, frost, hail, and prairie fire; they also received little of the assistance promised in treaties in their transition to an agricultural economy. Yet by the late 1880s, agriculture was beginning to succeed on some prairie reserves, prompting their farmers to expand their acreages under cultivation and move in the direction of commercial farming. Yet just at that time reserve farmers were instructed to drastically limit their land under cultivation. The Department of Indian Affairs implemented a \"peasant\" farming policy on arable reserves in Western Canada that decreed reserve farmers cultivate only an acre or two, grow root crops, use rudimentary homemade implements, and have one cow (rather than cattle herds). The peasant scheme for reserves in Western Canada was devised to ensure that Indigenous farmers did not require any more land and that they not compete with non-Indigenous farmers. It was also intended to assist with the diminution of Indigenous land, which ultimately happened, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century. Agriculture never did become the foundation of an economy that could sustain people on reserves, despite all of the promises made in the treaties.\n\nM\u00c9TIS SCRIP\n\nAccording to Section 31 of the Manitoba Act of 1870, 1.4 million acres were granted to the M\u00e9tis of Manitoba. It was decided that those who were categorized as M\u00e9tis would not be granted reserves, nor would they be given parcels of land that had to be improved over a number of years before patent was granted, as with the homestead system. They were not assisted with agriculture as the treaty people were to a modest extent. Adams Archibald was an architect of the plan, and his goal was to ensure that the land did not long remain in the hands of the recipients. He recommended the land granted to \"half-breeds\" be surveyed in the same way as other land. He urged that Canada ignore the request of the French M\u00e9tis to have land laid off in one block, with no right to sell for at least a generation. Archibald was concerned that such land would be \"absolutely inalienable\" for a long period, which was \"feudal.\" He advocated that the M\u00e9tis be given outright title to land, an \"absolute deed,\" and he anticipated that they would \"as a class, be ready to convert their land into something they can use and will be sure to sell.\" It is clear Archibald hoped that the granting of outright title would mean that the land would quickly be sold and the M\u00e9tis dispersed. Archibald described the M\u00e9tis as \"hunters by profession, not farmers. Where the Buffalo go, they go. They could not bear the restraints which cultivation of a farm implies. They would rather forfeit their lots, than settle on them, if by settlement was meant, some degree of cultivation and improvement on the Lots.\"\n\nCertificates or notes, variously referred to as scrip, warrants, or bounties, were issued in Canada and the United States, and in colonies of the British Empire, as a means of payment for services and claims. In Western Canada there were land bounties for military and police service. Grants of land were awarded to early members of the North-West Mounted Police, to soldiers who participated in the Red River resistance in 1870, in the North-West Resistance of 1885, and in the South African War, although the terms of these varied. Most grants were devised and garnered support as a means of making the West white, military, and masculine, although we will see in a later chapter that purchasing South African scrip became one settler way for women to obtain homestead land in Western Canada.\n\nIn settler societies where lands and entitlements were awarded to Indigenous people as individuals rather than as collectives, the result was inevitably more lands transferred to the control of colonial powers or settlers. In Manitoba, adult M\u00e9tis were granted money scrip that could be exchanged for Dominion lands, while M\u00e9tis children were granted individual patents to 240 acres. Scrip commissions, inaugurated in 1885, extended the process to the M\u00e9tis of the North-West. They were offered money scrip (a coupon payable to the bearer and exchangeable at the Dominion Lands Office), or land scrip that required the grantee to be present at a land office to apply the scrip coupon to a legally defined parcel of land (240 acres), for which a patent would be issued. The scrip could be transferred or conveyed prior to the issue of the patent.\n\n_Figure 4._ M\u00e9tis women and men at a sitting of the M\u00e9tis Scrip Commission at Devil's Lake, Saskatchewan, 1900. Scrip was issued to M\u00e9tis women and girls as well as to M\u00e9tis men and boys, unlike the gendered restrictions of the homestead system. Saskatchewan Archives Board, S-B9750.\n\n\"Widespread corruption, if not outright fraud\" was the result of the individual and transferable rights awarded to the M\u00e9tis. William Street, a lawyer from Ontario who was a member of the 1885 scrip commission, described what happened to one M\u00e9tis woman at Qu'Appelle who reluctantly agreed to receive money scrip, despite the disapproval of her community about participating in the process:\n\nI prepared, and handed to her, scrip for $160.00, explaining its nature to her, and she went out of the door and was received by a crowd of curious friends, to whom she exhibited her scrip. They were not pleased with her for having allowed herself to be persuaded to come before us, and had almost succeeded in satisfying her and themselves that her scrip was valueless, when Charles Alloway, the agent of a banker in Winnipeg who, with other speculators, had come after us to purchase the scrip from the half-breeds, stepped up and offered her $80 in cash for it. This she gladly accepted, and the money was handed to her in clean, crisp $10 bills. The news quickly spread that we were really giving something which could be turned into cash, and from that hour we were besieged from morning til night by applicants.\n\nThe Qu'Appelle M\u00e9tis example demonstrates how a community could be quickly \"shunted to the fringes of the new society.\" From at least the 1860s there were many Qu'Appelle M\u00e9tis engaged in agriculture on an extensive and sophisticated scale, but almost all left their lands in the first few years after the advent of homestead settlement. Historian Lyle Dick has found evidence that they were divested of their lands by fraudulent means. Throughout the prairies there were frauds and abuses that deprived the M\u00e9tis of most of their land. Speculators used a number of tactics, including forgery and impersonation, to acquire land due to scrip holders. Imposters claimed to be the scrip holders at the land offices. As a columnist wrote in 1911: \"There are today in Winnipeg and elsewhere in the West, men who are in the millionaire and near-millionaire classes, who laid the foundation of their fortunes, and made the bulk of them, by their dealings in scrip.\" These included prominent men such as Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona. Charles Alloway, mentioned in the quotation above, had helped to establish the largest private bank in Canada, Winnipeg's Alloway and Champion Limited. The bank made huge profits by dealing in M\u00e9tis scrip, reselling lands to other speculators and to settlers. Charles Alloway, who was \"at home in the bush and fluent in Indian languages, facilitated most of this business.\"\n\nScrip was issued to women and girls as well as to men and boys, so there were many M\u00e9tis females as well as males who appear in the records of the Dominion lands. The files trace how scrip was acquired and reassigned. In 1905, for example, Isabella Favel made application for a quarter section of land in Saskatchewan, \"upon which I desire to locate half-breed land scrip to which I am entitled, and for this purpose I now deliver to Robert McIntosh of Saskatoon, sub-agent for the Regina district, scrip note number A7494.\" This land was then assigned to Winnipeg lawyer Benjamin Chaffey, who specialized in M\u00e9tis scrip, and the patent was issued in his name. Chaffey acquired thousands of acres of land in Western Canada. The local history of the Bailey district of Saskatchewan notes that the scrip of three M\u00e9tis women, Alice McKay, Agnes Archie, and Catherine Maurice, were all transferred to a Duncan McMartin through the work of the Regina law firm Balfour, Martin, Casey and Brown.\n\nWomen were among the purchasers of M\u00e9tis scrip, to be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. They included Sarah Green, the English wife of Scotsman John Sanderson, celebrated as Western Canada's homesteader number one, who filed on land near Portage la Prairie in 1871 and received his patent in 1881. Novelist and Manitoba settler Robert J.C. Stead wrote that \"although English, she [Sarah Green Sanderson] must have had some of the canny qualities of her husband, for she seized an opportunity to acquire a neighbouring quarter section by means of a half-breed scrip.\"\n\nHOMESTEAD RIGHTS\n\nThe definition of \"persons\" originally permitted to homestead under Canada's 1872 Dominion Lands Act closely adhered to the U.S. model. Homestead rights were not for First Nations\/Native Americans in either nation; they were to be confined to reserves in Canada (reservations in the United States). In Canada the 1876 Indian Act specifically excluded all those defined as \"Indian\" from the right to homestead. In the Prairie provinces a homestead was available from 1872 to \"any person who is the head of a family, or has attained the age of twenty-one years, who is subject to Her Majesty by birth or naturalization shall, after the 1st day of May 1871, be entitled to be entered for one quarter section [160 acres].\" The applicant had to pay a ten-dollar filing fee. Patents would not be granted before five years (later reduced to three), when the \"settler or his widow\" had to satisfy the land office that \"he or they have resided upon or cultivated the land for the five years.\" The homesteader had to prove up by having sufficient acres under cultivation, a habitable dwelling, and living for the required months per year on the land. To receive a patent (title in fee simple or outright ownership) a homesteader who was not a British subject had to be \"naturalized.\" (Naturalization was a process available to every person twenty-one or older who was \"not an idiot, lunatic or married woman\" who had lived in Canada for not less than three years. The applicant had to then swear an oath of allegiance and an oath that he or she intended to remain in Canada.)\n\nThis wording of Canada's original legislation, whether deliberately or not, permitted single women to file for homesteads. In contrast to the U.S. Congress debates about the suitability of women as homesteaders, there were no discussions about the issue in the Canadian House of Commons. If there were private debates, the records do not appear to have survived. An examination of earlier British North American colonial and later provincial legislation reveals that the place of women in free land grants was not obvious and straightforward, or natural. The instructions to Governor James Murray in 1763, for example, gave women\u2014except for Indigenous women (and men)\u2014remarkably equal consideration: \"one hundred acres of land [were to] be granted to every person being Master or Mistress of a Family, for himself or herself, and fifty acres for every white or black, Man, Woman, or Child, of which such Person's Family shall consist.\" Loyalist women acquired free land grants as married women and widows (although these grants were smaller than those received by men), and the daughters as well as the sons of Loyalists were entitled in equal measure to free land. These grants began as 100 acres for a head of household, plus 50 acres for each member of a Loyalist family. Prominent people, including women, got far more. Chief Justice Powell's family received over 12,800 acres; of this his wife and their seven children received 1,200 acres each. An 1848 free grant system for the Crown Lands in the Wellington and Huron districts, however, excluded women, permitting \"settlers being subjects of the Queen, males, and not under the age of eighteen years, [to] be assigned each a lot of fifty acres.\"\n\nThe most immediate Canadian precursor to the Dominion Lands Act was the Free Grants and Homestead Act of 1868, a statute of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario that was intended to encourage immigration and settlement. This legislation deliberately included both men and women, without regard to marital status. Following an 1869 amendment, allotments of up to 200 acres were available to any \"person... of the age of eighteen years or upwards.\" The wording of the legislation included both \"he\" and \"she.\" The person had to swear that he or she was eighteen or older, had not previously located any land under the act, and believed the land was suitable for settlement and cultivation. Patents to the land could not be issued for five years following \"settlement duties,\" which included at least fifteen acres cleared, at least two acres under cultivation each year, and a habitable house built.\n\nThe intensive labour that was required in Ontario to first clear the land and the hardships of the immigrant experience were described by English \"gentlewoman\" Susanna Moodie in _Roughing It in the Bush; Or Life in Canada_ (1852). Another memoir, the candid _Letters from Muskoka_ (1878), written by an anonymous Englishwoman and published in London, would not have inspired women to take advantage of the free land grants in that region of Ontario. The author was the widow of an army officer; they had been stationed in India, but since her husband's death she had been living in France. Her financial situation was dire, and the move to Ontario was part of a family strategy, as two sons and a married daughter also took up land. A son had gone out to Muskoka a year before. \"Emigrant Lady\" decided to join him there in 1871, taking with her an unmarried daughter. Her free land grant of 100 acres was beside her son's and son-in-law's grants. While the book contains humour and some happy moments, it is a grim portrait. The author describes life in the \"Bush\" as dreary, \"dull and primitive.\" There was no church, doctor, or town, nor proper roads to reach any of these. There were \"fearfully cold,\" \"dreadful winters of close imprisonment,\" followed by summers when they were besieged by mosquitoes. The neighbours were all \"steerage\" class people. It was possible to get a daughter of a settler to work as a servant, but such girls insisted on \"a footing of perfect equality with every member of the family, and have no inclination whatever to 'sit below the salt.'\" She described local Indigenous people as \"degenerate samples of 'Red Men!' The men appeared to me undersized and sinister-looking, the squaws filthy and almost repulsive.\" All of the settlers had to work desperately hard to clear land before they could cultivate anything. \"Emigrant Lady\" herself did not do this sort of labour but rather cooked, making do with few ingredients. There was almost no fresh meat, even wild game was scarce. But she wrote that \"an Indian officer in our regiment had declared she could make a good curry out of an old shoe,\" and she persevered. By the end of the second winter, she wrote, \"We remain striving, struggling and hoping against hope, that success may yet crown our endeavours.\"\n\nPart II of _Letters from Muskoka_ takes place two years later, but matters have improved little. \"Emigrant Lady\" feels deceived by the accounts of Muskoka that they had been given before they arrived; the \"capabilities of its soil for agricultural purposes have been greatly exaggerated.\" Years of extensive clearing would be required, and \"constant amelioration of the land by means of manure and other applications before it will be capable of bearing heavy grain crops; it is a poor and hungry soil, light and friable.\" The only reliable crops were oats and potatoes. Her eldest son's health and strength declined, as did her own. They all \"looked upon Bush life in the light of exile to a penal settlement without even the convict's chance of a ticket-of-leave.\" The conclusion to her account of four years on her free grant of land was bleak: \"I went into the Bush of Muskoka strong and healthy, full of life and energy, and fully as enthusiastic as the youngest of our party. I left it with hopes completely crushed, and with health so hopelessly shattered from hard work, unceasing anxiety and trouble of all kinds, that I am now a helpless invalid, entirely confined by the doctor's orders to my bed and sofa, with not the remotest chance of ever leaving them for a more active life during the remainder of my days on earth.\" Perhaps this description of the misery and destitution she endured inspired modifications to homestead legislation in Ontario.\n\nChanges to the Ontario legislation revoked the right of most women to obtain land grants or homesteads in that province, and privileged married men with children. In the 1890s (exact date not clear) the Regulations under the Free Grants and Homesteads Act were altered to narrow the categories of eligible women. Mirroring the changes that were made to the Dominion lands legislation for the prairies in 1876 (to be discussed later in this chapter) free grants of 100 acres were to be available to \"a single man over eighteen, or a married man without children under eighteen residing with him, or the female head of a family having children under eighteen residing with her.\" A free grant of 200 acres was available to \"the male head of a family having a child or children under eighteen residing with him... And such male head of a family is permitted to purchase another 100 acres at 50 cents per acre cash.\" A male head of family, then, was eligible for twice the amount of land as a female head of family, and he had the right to purchase more land at low cost. Some districts of Ontario departed from this model. In the Rainy River district the \"male head of a family or the sole female head of a family having a child or children under eighteen residing with him or her may locate for 160 acres, and may also purchase an additional 80 acres at $1 an acre.\" The term \"sole\" attached to the female head of family was also used on the prairies to limit the number of eligible women.\n\nBritish Columbia had separate and divergent land legislation that shifted and changed but eventually provided opportunities for immigrant women that were more generous than those on the prairies. While British Columbia was still a Crown colony, and under 1860 legislation, land could be acquired by \"British subjects and aliens who shall take the oath of allegiance to Her Majesty.\" There was no mention of gender. After 1870, British Columbia designed a land system that was distinct from the Canadian federal government-controlled Crown lands of the three provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (except for a belt of land along the right of way of the Canadian Pacific Railway), which initially offered no opportunity for most immigrant women to acquire land. Under 1870 legislation for the \"pre-emption\" of Crown land, \"any male person being a British subject, of the age of eighteen years or over\" could acquire the right to any tract of unoccupied land. In a 1908 act, however, categories of British women subjects were also permitted to pre-empt Crown lands, including \"a widow,\" \"a femme sole who is over eighteen years of age and self-supporting,\" \"a woman deserted by her husband,\" and \"a woman whose husband has not contributed to her support for two years.\" British Columbia was thus to become a much more welcoming environment for the immigrant woman landowner and farmer than the Prairie provinces were. As in prairie Canada, First Nations in British Columbia were not permitted to pre-empt Crown lands. The 1908 legislation, for example, set out those persons who could obtain land, and continued with \"such right shall not extend: a) to any of the aborigines of this continent.\"\n\nIt is likely that in Western Canada, single women and women heads of households were deliberately included in the homestead privilege as it was originally devised, as in the United States. Since there is no evidence of any debate about the issue, however, it is difficult to know for sure. But the precedent of the Ontario legislation and the intense desire to compete with and match the U.S. offer to homesteaders would have compelled this deliberate inclusion. Under Canada's initial legislation, first passed in 1871, it was possible for women heads of families and women who had attained the age of twenty-one to select a homestead. The first published memorandum of 1871 on the Subject of the Public Lands in the Province of Manitoba had provided that \"any person who is the head of a family, or has attained the age of twenty-one years\" could secure a homestead. This same wording appeared in the 1872 legislation. Chester Martin wrote that the origins of Canada's homestead policy, \"direct or indirect, in the United States was conceded on every hand.\" Yet Canada rather quickly and deliberately took away the privilege of homesteading from single women in 1876, a significant departure from the U.S. legislation.\n\nIn both the American and Canadian West the goal of free land and the homesteading scheme was to quickly populate the land with a \"preponderance of fit and preferably youthful males.\" Land policies of both the United States and Canada were \"efforts to 'hire' settlers\" in order to combat the \"Indian's simultaneous claim on public lands and the cost imposed by this dispute over property right.\" In helping to establish U.S. and Canadian claims in their western territories, homesteading was a \"least-cost strategy,\" a \"substitute for direct military force [that] acts to mitigate the costs of violence.\" A preponderance of fit and preferably youthful males suited this purpose best, and the residence requirement was intended to make them stay put. Settlement had to be scattered to quickly lay claim to vast territories. A homesteader could not reside in a village and head out to the land from there. But restricting the plot size to 160 acres was intended to create relatively dense settlement. Yet in both nations the state had the discretion over where to locate settlers, as homesteading was restricted to surveyed land.\n\nBoth Canada and the United States sought to create not just economic development, but a desired social and cultural landscape through land policies. In both nations, administrators were determined to create small-scale holdings reminiscent of an idealized European (particularly British) landscape (despite mounting evidence of environmental limitations). As mentioned, both nations excluded Indigenous people from the homestead privilege, although in the United States, Indian homestead legislation of the 1880s provided some access to land on the public domain. In Western Canada, M\u00e9tis scrip provided access to individual plots of land. But in both nations the hope was that a white and patriarchal landscape would be created through the homestead system.\n\nIn both the United States and Canada, married women were not permitted to homestead. Under the doctrine of marital unity, a married woman had no legal existence. As explained by a commissioner of the U.S. General Land Office in 1864, a married woman's \"services and the proceeds of her labor being due and belonging to her husband... that if permitted to enter land because of having arrived at twenty-one years of age, the legal restrictions growing out of her matrimonial relations would at once be violated.\" A married woman could not apply as \"head of the family,\" because the husband was the \"head\" during the marriage. This general rule was seriously challenged in the United States in 1882 by Rachel McKee, who applied for a homestead in Colorado where her application was refused because she was married. Her attorney Daniel Witter made some compelling arguments, including that the homestead law allowed anyone over the age of twenty-one to make entry, as the act stated that \"every _person_ who is the head of a family or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years... _shall be entitled to enter\"_ public land. Witter argued Mrs. McKee was a person as defined by John Locke, \"a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection.\" He also argued that Congress would have had to have explicitly excluded married women from making entry. Witter further argued that permitting married women to homestead would \"give new life to western emigration... and [would] send tens of thousands of families from poverty and dependence in the over populated east, to prosperity and independence in the new west.\" The appeal was lost, however, and the McKee decision settled the question of the eligibility of married women to make homestead entries in the United States.\n\nMANITOBA WOMEN HOMESTEADERS WHO FILED BEFORE 1876\n\nCanada's Dominion Lands Act of 1872 originally permitted certain categories of women to homestead\u2014single women and heads of families. And women took advantage of this offer. In the pages of the homestead land registers of the first homesteaders in Manitoba, the names of a few women begin to appear. The early 1870s saw a significant number of women applicants, some single, others widows, although the files do not always provide this information (See Table 1).\n\nThe first woman in Western Canada to apply for a homestead in her own name was Mary Walker, who made her entry on land in the House Creek district at the south end of Lake Manitoba in 1872 as homesteader number 214. She died in 1874 before proving up, and her land was patented to her son Peter in 1882, who amassed considerable land in the House Creek district but made his mother's quarter section his home until he sold the land in 1908.\n\nThe first woman on the Canadian prairies to receive a patent to her homestead was Isabella McKercher, who entered on a homestead in 1874 at Roseau Crossing, which soon became Dominion City, in south-central Manitoba. She was granted her title to the land in January 1878. She opted to purchase her land after fulfilling some of the homestead requirements, as her land suddenly became very valuable. McKercher came from Ontario with two brothers and her parents, Duncan and Mary, who were the \"first white settlers to arrive in Roseau Crossing.\" She filed on her land in September 1874 and by April 1877, when she swore an affidavit, she had lived on her homestead for fifteen months, and had a house measuring 16 x 12 feet, a stable and wood shed, and four acres under cultivation. In the spring of 1877 it was determined that the Pembina branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway would cross the Roseau River on McKercher's land, which was thus of \"exceptional value,\" in the words of Donald Codd of the Dominion Lands Branch in Winnipeg. McKercher decided to take the option to purchase her homestead, offered under a section of the Dominion Lands Act, and was likely able to sell the right-of-way at a sizeable profit. When in 1878 the last spike was driven on this branch line, a ceremony was held by the new trestle bridge, barely completed, over the Roseau River. While people took turns driving the spike, Isabella McKercher \"was too shy to get up in front of such a gathering, so she held back and watched the others tackle it.\" That same year she married Alexander Waddell, also a homesteader at Roseau Crossing.\n\nThe second woman to prove up was Susannah Jane Kennedy (homesteader number 591), who filed on her land in the Woodlands district in 1873 and received patent to her land five years later. Kennedy appears in the 1881 Manitoba census as born in Ireland, and age eighty. She was illiterate, signing her name on her homestead document with an X. Kennedy sold her original homestead and (incredibly) in 1892, at the age of ninety-four, applied for patent on another homestead, this time in the Souris district, where she was living with an adopted daughter and her husband.\n\nGlimpses of some of the earliest women homesteaders of the Canadian West can be gleaned from the homestead files, and local histories shed light on the identities and experiences of a few, particularly if the names of husbands or fathers or brothers are known. Many were single women to start with who later married. Elizabeth Moffatt, homesteader 615, married John Scott and her patent was thus issued to Elizabeth Scott.\n\nWhen a woman filed as a single woman, then married before applying for her patent, her husband often (but not always) had to swear an affidavit that his wife was the same person who had filed on land under another name. Malcolm Martin, for example, who married homesteader Kate Smith, had to swear that his wife was the Kate Smith who had entered on land under that name, and that Kate Smith and Kate Martin were one and the same. In 1883 William Ross had to swear that his wife was the same Margaret Campbell who had made homestead entry in 1874, and her brothers Robert and Donald were also asked to add their signatures to the document, verifying that Margaret Campbell and Margaret Ross were one and the same. The records do not always provide the marital status of women homesteaders, as in the case of Mary McLeod, whose land was in the Gladstone district of West Marquette. She filed on her land in 1874, began her residence in 1876, and applied for her patent in 1881, signing her name with an X, as did her witnesses Daniel Reece and John Ross. She was granted her patent to her land in 1882. Women homesteaders varied in age: Jane Leadbeater, who made her entry in 1874, was seventy-two years old when she received her patent in 1887.\n\nThese first homesteading women seem to have rarely travelled to Manitoba on their own; some were already residents and others arrived with family. Those whose background is known were not from overseas but from Ontario or Manitoba. Maria Barron filed on land in High Bluff in 1874 and began her residence and cultivation of the land in 1877. Her father was from Scotland and her mother from Ontario. Maria was born in Ontario and came to Manitoba with her parents and siblings in 1874 over the challenging Dawson Trail. Maria married Maxwell Wilton, and her patent was issued to Maria Wilton. The family acquired a lot of land in the High Bluff district.\n\nIt can be assumed that some of the women filed along with fathers, brothers, or sons, such as Catherine Doupe, whose entry is beside a Charles Doupe. Sisters filed together as was the case with Mary Matilda Corbett and Sarah Jane Corbett, who claimed homesteads in March 1873. Janet McKercher filed on land close to her parents and brother in 1874. She did not receive her patent until 1906, as her claim was controversial. Although her land had been cropped continuously since 1875, she did not live on her property, keeping house for her parents and then her brother. Two Lipsett women, Phoebe Louisa and Ann Jane, filed with two Lipsett men, Francis W. and James H., in July 1874. All cancelled out, but Caroline Matilda Lipsett, who had filed a few days earlier, eventually proved up in 1891. She was the mother of the other Lipsetts, and perhaps they combined their efforts on her land. Caroline was sixty-four in 1889 when she applied for her patent, declaring that she was a farmer by profession, that her family consisted of herself and eight children, and that when she first occupied her land in August 1875, all of the children were married but one. Her experience, like that of Isabella McKercher, indicates that women could acquire considerable wealth through the right to homestead. Early homesteaders had the right to pre-empt an adjoining quarter section, or to file on a second homestead. Caroline Lipsett became the owner of 320 acres of land in her section, as did other women such as Valletta Jane Nixon, who received her patent to 320 acres under her married last name, Edgar.\n\nIt is clear from the register of homesteads in Manitoba that times were difficult, by the number of cancellations as well as the number of years it took to prove up. Persistence was required. Louisa Irvine filed on land in Manitoba in 1874 but did not receive her patent until 1897, when title was issued to her under her married name, Louisa Munro. Weather, poor land, and grasshoppers accounted for delays and abandonments, but homesteaders also encountered bureaucratic problems. Louisa Irvine\/Munro first applied for the patent to her land in 1885, claiming that she had lived on her homestead from 1874 to 1877, had built a house, granary, and stable, and had six head of cattle and six sheep as well as one acre under cultivation. She was denied her patent in 1885 because at least fifteen acres under cultivation was required. The case was reconsidered in 1897, when it was noted that \"the land is unfit for grain growing\" and that regulations had since changed: \"more recently it has been customary to accept stock with a smaller amount of cultivation to satisfy the requirements of the Act, where it is clearly shown that the land is unfit for grain growing.\" It was decided that this was the case and Louisa Munro was finally granted her patent twenty-three years after she first filed on her homestead.\n\nFamily strategies included mothers homesteading beside sons. Widow Barbara Scott entered on land next to her son James Scott, who cultivated both his and his mother's land. All of his buildings were on his mother's homestead, however, and this proved a problem as he had not complied strictly with the wording of the legislation. In an 1884 memo, however, officials of the Department of the Interior decided that he had complied with the \"spirit\" of the law, and he was granted title to his land.\n\n_Figure 5._ Patent issued in 1883 to Manitoba homesteader Matilda McAskie, who filed on her homestead in 1874 as Matilda Graham. She was now the owner of the northwest quarter of section 36, township 12, range 10, west of the Principal Meridian. She also acquired an adjoining quarter section, becoming the owner of 320 acres of land. Library and Archives Canada, Western Land Grants, http:\/\/www.bac-lac.gc.ca\/eng\/discover\/land\/land-grants-western-canada-1870-1930\/pages\/item.aspx?IdNumber=461605&.\n\nIn 1874, the brother of widow Matilda Graham from Ontario filed on a homestead at High Bluff in Marquette West in the name of his sister. She married James McAskie in 1876 in Ontario, and together in 1878 they moved to Manitoba, settled on her claim, and lived there for one year. Her husband then took out a homestead as well, and they moved to his land in 1879, where they were living in 1881 when the land agent at Gladstone told them that \"it was not legal for her husband to hold a homestead [and] that one of them must be cancelled.\" A Matthew Harkness was interested in Graham\/McAskie's land and was trying to get her homestead cancelled, or \"jump her claim.\" In 1880 Harkness signed an affidavit (with an X) declaring that Graham\/McAskie had not resided on her claim for the last year. In 1881 Matilda McAskie opted to purchase her homestead at one dollar per acre, swearing that the land was \"entered by me as a homestead while a widow and a head of a family.\" She received patent to the northwest quarter section in 1882 and to the northeast in 1883.\n\nTragedies emerge from the files. Mary Mitchell filed on her homestead in 1873, later becoming Mrs. George Edie. She died in 1877, and her infant child was buried with her. When her husband applied for patent to her land ten years later, there were many hoops to jump through, including finding two people to swear that they had attended Mary Edie's funeral and had seen her buried. The homestead inspector wrote in 1887 that \"at the time of her death in 1877 settlers were few and much scattered, and these are the only two in the neighbourhood who were there at the time.\" Homesteader Hannah J. Whaley also died before she had the chance to prove up on her homestead that she filed on in 1873 in the Pine Creek district, and the patent to her land was issued to her husband Francis Blackmore in 1878.\n\nConditions were grim for Manitoba's first homesteaders. Plagues of grasshoppers (locusts) were an intermittent problem in Manitoba and the midwestern states to the south, and they returned with a vengeance in 1873\u201375, devouring all vegetation in their path. There was also a general economic depression to contend with that began in 1873, and in 1874 it was clear that the railway to and eventually through Manitoba would take many more years to build than anticipated. Settlers and Indigenous farmers lacked the equipment and the early maturing varieties of seed suitable to Western Canadian conditions. The number of immigrants plummeted: in 1875 there were 11,970, but in 1876 only between 3,000 and 4,000. Homesteads were deserted. Gerald Friesen writes in his history of the Canadian prairies: \"The rate of attrition\u2014the failure of the homesteader to 'prove up' and thus obtain a patent for his quarter-section\u2014was extraordinary. Chester Martin long ago calculated that four in ten prairie homestead applications were never fulfilled. Though admittedly rough, his statistics indicates a rate of failure of 20 per cent in Manitoba (1870\u20131905), 57 per cent in Saskatchewan (1911\u201331), and 45 per cent in Alberta (1905\u201330). This led him to note in his ironic fashion that 'in some respects \"free\" homesteads have been costly beyond computation.'\" The failure rate for the earliest homesteaders in Manitoba was likely much higher than the 20 percent Martin calculated.\n\nNotably, the early women homesteaders of Manitoba were generally more successful than their male counterparts at proving up. For example, of those who filed on land in 1874, 5 percent of the men proved up and 18 percent of the women; in 1875, it was 9 percent of the men and 57 percent of the women; and in 1876, 42 percent of the men and 75 percent of the women proved up. There were women homesteaders who proved up well before John Sanderson, \"Western Canada's first Homesteader,\" who filed on claim one in 1872 but did not receive his patent until 1881.\n\n_Table 1._ The gender of Western Canadian homesteaders and their success rates at \"proving up,\" 1872\u20131882. Note that statistics for applicants of unknown gender are not included in the table. Source: Library Archives Canada, Record Group 15 (Department of the Interior), Homestead Land Registers, vols. 1762\u20131766, reel T-2.\n\nCHANGES TO HOMESTEAD LEGISLATION: \"TO RENDER FEMALES... INELIGIBLE\"\n\nThe _Manitoba Free Press_ tried to report on the desperate conditions on the prairies while not completely scaring off prospective settlers. But on 7 July 1875 an editorial admitted that the people of Manitoba were in a state of destitution. The crops had failed in some districts for three and in others two successive years: \"The question that presents itself for consideration is this: Are the people of the Province, collectively speaking, in possession of the means to purchase their bread, in addition to other necessaries of existence? We answer, they are not.\" While many of the older settlers had livestock, \"the new settlers have but very little, and therefore have scarcely anything to fall back upon, in their day of need.\" Settlers needed relief, and they needed seed grain for the following spring. While settlers hoped to make a living off of the farm when crops failed, on the railway and city improvements, the market for jobs was saturated.\n\nThe \"homestead question\" dominated the editorials in the _Free Press_ in the spring and summer of 1875. Settlement of the province was in a precarious state. There was anger over speculators who, according to the _Free Press_ , had filed on homesteads but had no intentions of living on and cultivating their land. Distinctions were drawn between them and the \"actual\" or bona fide settlers, yet it was admitted that this was difficult to determine under the extraordinary circumstances of the grasshopper infestation. In April 1875 the federal government proposed that lands entered as homesteads and found without occupants in the summer of 1875 would have their entries cancelled, and the _Free Press_ had to admit this was not fair under the circumstances, as many \"actual\" settlers might not be found on their ravaged land that summer. \"Scarcely a day elapses that one or more cases of positive hardship, are not brought under our notice.\" The _Free Press_ in 1875 called not for cancellation but for a relaxation of the homestead requirements for a year, as was the case in the Dakota Territory and Minnesota, which were also experiencing the grasshopper devastation. There, settlers were allowed leaves of absence from their land. A problem with the wording of the homestead legislation had also led to some confusion. The original 1872 legislation read that to obtain a patent, proof was required of \"having resided upon _or_ cultivated the land for three years.\" According to a letter by a settler in the _Free Press,_ many homesteaders believed from this clause that they could cultivate their land without actually having to live there.\n\nOn 14 June 1875, an order-in-council was approved in response to a letter from Donald Codd, agent of Dominion lands in Manitoba, reporting on \"the depredations of grasshoppers in the Province, and the disastrous effects to the settlements in consequences thereof, unless some special consideration is extended to persons who have taken up homesteads by giving them leave of absence from their farms in order that they may earn subsistence for their families during the prevalence of the plague.\" Authority was given Codd to relax the rules and regulations so that those whose crops were destroyed and who were actually resident on their homesteads and prevented from putting in a crop because of the plague could, after furnishing unspecified evidence, receive written permission to be absent from their homesteads until 1 July 1876. This period of time could be counted as part of their three years' residence. (This was as recommended by the _Free Press_ and adopted from the U.S. model.) Such leave was only to apply, however, to a \"bona fide homestead settler.\"\n\nThe Honourable Luc Letellier de Saint-Just, minister of agriculture and immigration in the Alexander Mackenzie government, was sent in August 1875 to Manitoba to determine what measures should be taken to address the situation, including the destitution of the settlers. Letellier de Saint-Just recommended the expenditure of $60,000, authorized by order-in-council in August 1875, to purchase pork, flour, seed wheat, and barley. These were to be distributed as a loan or advance secured on the settlers' lands.\n\nIn his October 1875 report to Minister of the Interior David Laird, Surveyor Dennis wrote that he saw signs of hope for the future. The locusts had not left eggs in the soil, as in previous years. Dennis reported that the provision of seed grain and the permission to be absent for twelve months from homesteads had allayed discontent. He found that on the whole the Dominion Lands Act \"worked satisfactorily,\" but that \"there are certain important details connected with the operation of the homestead clauses in which it may be improved.\" From Dennis's wording it appears that Laird agreed with these changes, as he wrote that they had \"suggested themselves during your personal experience of the practical working of the law when in Manitoba and the North-West Territories last year.\" The very first of a list of eight recommended changes was \"to render females, not being heads of families, ineligible to enter for homesteads.\" Dennis provided no explanation for this change. There was no discussion or debate when the changes to the legislation came before the House of Commons. There was no debate about it in the press, and at the time, no protest from individuals or groups.\n\nIn May 1876, when the legislation was passed, the _Free Press_ explained that the changes had been made with a view to \"proper and efficient management\" of the land, at the suggestion of the minister or the land agent in the country, \"who watches closely the practical operation of existing land laws, and it thus enables him to make valuable recommendations from time to time.\" The second change mentioned in the same report (the first concerned military bounty warrants) was that \"women cannot obtain homestead grants unless they are _bona fide_ the independent head of a family.\" When the amendments based on Dennis's recommendations were passed, homesteads from then on were limited to \"any person, male or female, who is the sole head of a family, or any male who has attained the age of eighteen years.\"\n\nHistorians of the settlement era in Western Canada have not mentioned this as a development of any importance or interest, although to prohibit single immigrant women from homesteading was a major departure from the U.S. model that Canada wanted so desperately to match and even exceed. Why did this happen? As mentioned, women homesteaders during that small window of opportunity open until 1876 persisted and proved up on their land at a significantly higher rate than that of their male counterparts, but these statistics would not at that time have been available to policy makers (as it took many years for persistent homesteaders to prove up).\n\nThe most significant clue to the perception of the 1870s that Manitoba's single women homesteaders were not bona fide settlers comes from the 1879 observations of David Currie, who visited Manitoba as a special commissioner of the _Montreal Witness._ His letters were published the next year in pamphlet form as _The Letters of Rusticus: Investigations in Manitoba and the North-West for the Benefit of Intending Emigrants._ Currie was sceptical of the capacity and propriety of women farmers, reflecting views that will be further discussed in the next chapter. He believed they were incapable of homestead duties and that it was \"unnatural\" for women to cultivate land and live on their own. Currie noted the presence of single women homesteaders (and did not seem aware that as of 1876 they were no longer permitted to file on land), and he did not approve, writing that \"although the idea of single ladies faithfully performing homestead duties seems unnatural, yet a number of such have secured the land but that they have complied with the terms imposed by the Government is rather doubtful.\" Currie believed that by contrast, men were complying with the homestead laws: \"During my travels over this province I have met with a great many unmarried gentlemen who are fulfilling the letter if not the spirit of the law by 'baching' it on their homesteads; but I have not yet met with a single case where a maiden lady has been honestly endeavouring to comply with the law which gives her a title to her lands.\"\n\nCurrie admitted, however, that he had had little opportunity to observe single women homesteaders at their duties, as he found it difficult and improper for him to either search out or visit them, writing that \"indeed any attempt to do so would scarcely seem prudent in a country where the population is so very scattered.\" Yet he concluded that the \"only feasible way by which ladies might faithfully comply with the terms of the law giving them the right to 'homestead' land, is by forming a matrimonial alliance with some gentleman friend, in whose company homestead duties might be faithfully performed.\"\n\nCurrie was also concerned with the potential for fraud, that couples would delay marriage and would acquire more land than they were entitled to. He had heard of engaged couples where the man and woman each secured homestead rights in advance of their wedding, and \"by this means acquired double the amount of land that they could legally secure if they had postponed their homesteading until after they became man and wife.\" He continued that it was \"not desirable that persons after becoming 'one flesh' should each reside upon separate homesteads, consequently one of the claims must remain unoccupied.\" Currie assumed that this was why so many claims were unoccupied and found this \"reprehensible,\" writing that \"a large number [of homesteads] remain untenanted with only a few acres brought under cultivation, and perhaps the walls of a home erected, and not a few homesteads remain without any attempts to bring them under cultivation.\"\n\nIn the _Manitoba Free Press_ women homesteaders had not been singled out as part of the concern about bona fide settlers, but the serialized account of \"How Two Girls Tried Farming,\" published just at this time, might have encouraged readers to doubt the abilities of women farmers. The account, by Dorothea Alice Shepherd (pseudonym for Ella Farman Pratt), was originally published in the U.S. magazine _Atlantic Monthly_ and later as a book. It featured two friends, a \"housemaid\" and a teacher, who bought a small farm in Michigan after one of them inherited a thousand dollars. \"How Two Girls Tried Farming\" was a very popular story in the United States, as it was reprinted as a book several times; it was also controversial, raising issues of women's competency to farm on their own. It may have been serialized in the _Free Press_ to illustrate the mistakes, trials, and difficulties of women farmers (and they experienced many) and to show that farming was not a \"traditional\" enterprise for women. The two women of the story succeeded in some respects, although they had to abandon their \"small fruits\" plan in favour of corn, vegetables, and selling butter and eggs. It concluded with a reminder that for women, ploughing, shovelling snow, cleaning stables, and other chores were \"strange abnormal labours... But we do it, therefore others can.\"\n\nSurveyor Dennis made the recommendation to exclude single women from the homestead grant. Obsessed with the potential of the West, he was very concerned about the depressed conditions and possible collapse of the whole enterprise, and it may have been his personal view that women were not going to make the land productive. It is likely that Dennis shared his opinions with his friend and \"most trusted clerk\" at the Dominion Lands Branch, Donald Codd, who had been with Dennis on the original survey team sent to Red River. Codd had wide discretionary power in refusing claims, and the dramatic drop in the number of women homestead applicants in 1875 (when there were seven, compared to 109 in 1874), suggests that he may have been refusing or in some way discouraging women from filing on land in advance of the 1876 change in legislation. The decline in applications from women could not have had to do with grasshoppers; there were 1,920 male applicants in 1875, compared to only 416 the year before.\n\nThe necessity of wage labour for homesteaders to survive may have been an issue. Male homesteaders worked on railways, in lumber camps, and in the cities, and similar opportunities for women would have been limited. There was some talk of having homesteaders perform statutory labour. In an undated (early 1870s) set of recommendations about how land should be granted, James Cunningham, a member of Manitoba's first legislature of 1870, recommended that every settler be bound to work one day a week for five years on the railway at the rate of one dollar per day. Cunningham estimated this scheme would result in 1,100 men in each township working 250 days a year for five years. While ultimately this measure was not introduced, in any discussion of such a plan, women homesteaders would clearly have been seen as unsuitable candidates.\n\nSpeculation about other reasons for limiting women's right to homestead might include the paperwork that was required when single women homesteaders married before they proved up, as discussed above. The case of Matilda Graham\/McAskie also illustrates that complications emerged when a woman filed on a homestead as a single woman and then married a man who himself then filed on a homestead: one or the other was obliged to give up the claim, a problem that also emerged in the American West. There the legislation was changed several times to deal with the issue of \"entrywomen\" who married an \"entryman\" before proving up, and there were complex and contradictory legal decisions and interpretations on the matter. Bureaucrats at the Canadian Department of the Interior became increasingly obsessed with the opportunities for fraud in acquiring land, and women were seen as particularly suspect.\n\nCitizenship and naturalization may have also been an issue, one that was to complicate the lives of some female heads of households who filed on homesteads after 1876. Upon marriage a woman automatically was given her husband's citizenship; if a woman who had filed on a homestead married a neighbouring homesteader who was not yet a British subject, she lost her ability to apply for a patent until her husband changed his citizenship.\n\nThere may have been concerns about the dangers of settlement. The idea of immigrant women alone on isolated homesteads was perhaps unsettling to policy makers and legislators (although they did not waver in the United States, where there was more warfare and thousands more women homesteaders). Supporters of homesteads-for-women understood that the homestead right was rescinded because in the 1870s \"Indians were bold and bad\" and \"lawless\" and the railroad was not finished, and \"it was considered a big adventure for a hardy man to take up land in the genuinely wild and wooly West.\" (And they used this as a rationale for having the privilege restored, arguing that this threat from \"lawless\" Indians no longer existed.)\n\nMany people, women and men, were not prepared for the challenges of life on a prairie homestead. Englishwoman Mary (Mrs. Cecil) Hall described her first thoughts about the prairies in her 1882 book, _A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba_ : \"O the prairie! I cannot describe to you our first impression. Its vastness, dreariness, and loneliness is appalling.\" That very year there was a \"shocking fatality\" in Manitoba that was news across the British Empire. At Meadow Lea, thirty miles west of Winnipeg, a fire broke out during the middle of a roaring blizzard, destroying the home of the Taylor family. The mother and three daughters were all found frozen to death on the prairie.\n\nThe idea that women would be poor custodians and cultivators was likely a rationale, as was the idea they would probably be mere investors or speculators in land. In a 1908 article explaining some of the differences between U.S. and Canadian homestead rules, Canada was complimented for its law that \"permits a young man to get an early start in life, while it discriminates against those women whose cultivation of the soil is apt to be perfunctory, and the homesteading a mere investment, and favours those cases where there is a real incentive to the making of a living out of the farm for the dependent children.\" (It was assumed a single male would eventually have children, while a \"spinster\" would not.)\n\nRobert Rogers, minister of the interior (1911\u201312) and a politician from Manitoba, stated that while homestead privileges had at one time been available to single women, they \"failed to claim them, or having done so, did not fulfil the necessary duties and thus forfeited their rights.\" This does not appear to have been the case, however; there were significant numbers of women who filed on homesteads during the small window of opportunity available, and they proved up with greater frequency than men. In 1913, a woman journalist with the _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ said that Rogers's explanation sounded \"weak and spineless; not in keeping with that pioneer spirit which has made our women remarkable the world over.\"\n\nA few observers of Manitoba in the mid-1870s took note of the presence of women homesteading on their own. In 1874 the _Toronto Mail_ reported that \"under the Homestead Law, every individual over twenty-one years of age may take up a free grant of 160 acres of land, and happy are they who have large families of grown children. Our correspondent says he has known single families to have taken up five and even seven homesteads. Father, sons, daughters, maiden aunts and widows being entitled to enter each for 160 acres.\" This correspondent was not entirely critical of this, it seems, as he said that \"it would be of advantage to extend the right to all persons over eighteen years of age, as it would encourage early marriages, and consequent independence, and increase the number of actual farmers.\" His last comment, however, suggests that he did not include \"maiden aunts and widows\" in the category of \"actual farmers.\"\n\nWas the homestead privilege taken away from all but widows with minor children because farming and homesteading was not seen as suitably feminine for women colonists? This seems to have been in the mind of David Currie, who wrote that it was \"unnatural\" for women to perform homestead duties. A woman working in the field was not seen to conform to an idealized British femininity; they were to be delicate and fragile. Predominant representations of Indigenous women played a role by providing a contrast to ideals of a domestic and refined and British femininity. As stressed at the beginning of this chapter, women were the farmers on the Great Plains long before the arrival of Europeans. While Indigenous women working on farms and gardens might not have been very visible to newcomers of the 1870s because this work was being performed on Indian reserves, the representation of \"squaws\" as exploited and overworked drudges was widely promulgated. The corollary representation was that Indigenous men were reluctant and poor workers who relied on their women for all manual labour, while they relaxed and smoked. Travellers and other writers often commented on this. David Currie's 1879 description was typical: \"I observed two native gentlemen reclining on a small straw covered shed, smoking their pipes, seemingly at perfect peace with themselves and all mankind, whilst at the two nearest houses, and within less than one hundred yards of the two smokers, were two native ladies engaged in chopping the night's supply of stovewood from piles of poplar poles. The way that the ladies handled the axe showed plainly that they were no strangers to this occupation.\"\n\nA Toronto _Globe_ correspondent visiting the North-West in 1881 wrote that Indigenous \"men are nearly all, in the matter of physical strength, unable to endure manual labour. In the camp the women do all the hard work such as cutting wood etc.\" The men, by contrast, were \"indolent or incapable to do much.\" Indigenous men were frequently and widely condemned for the fact that women supplied wood for their families, while \"they themselves stay in the teepee, smoke, pound the tom tom with a club and see who can tell the biggest lie.\" The message was that manual labour was unsuitable for colonizing women, who must show superiority to these darker times and ways.\n\nIn common with the imperialist rhetoric of other colonial settings, it was white men who stood in contrast to Indigenous males. The white male colonizer would transform the wilderness into productive and profitable terrain. The ideal white male figure was physically capable, courageous, and industrious. The white woman colonizer was not to exemplify these traits. It was vital to demonstrate that the colonizers were superior, that they knew how to treat women in comparison to \"savage\" societies. Women were the farmers only in \"uncivilized\" societies, where they were cast as being forced unwillingly into such work by lazy men. In the 1899 book _Woman's Share in Primitive Culture_ by Otis T. Mason, a sketch of a sparsely clad woman, hoeing, with her unhappy child strapped to her back, was accompanied by the caption \"The Primitive Farmer and Burden-Bearer, South Africa.\"\n\nDid the arrival of women of varied ethnicities as immigrants play a role in excluding most women from the homestead grant? In this outpost of the British Empire, the colonizers needed to show superiority to the new arrivals of varying non-British origins. Immigrants from other places than the British Isles and Ontario began to arrive in the West in the mid-1870s, when Icelanders settled in the Interlake district of Manitoba and Mennonites from Russia on the plains south of Winnipeg. In these communities, as with the Doukhobors who arrived over two decades later, women worked in the fields and performed other critical manual labour. This was noted by the late 1870s. John Lowe, secretary of the Department of Agriculture and a Manitoba farmer (of an enormous farm of sixteen square miles), gave evidence before a federal committee on immigration to Canada that Mennonite women were seen \"ploughing in the fields.\" He also saw \"a woman thatching the roof of a building, the materials being handed up to her; and we next saw a girl plastering the outside of a house in apparently a very matter-of-fact way.\" He saw men, women, and children \"going out into the fields to work before the morning was grey. We also noticed these people working until it was dark in the evening.\" A member of the committee asked Lowe, \"Does this kind of work improve the condition of the women, or tend to their refinement?\" His reply was that \"this must be judged relatively. Their social ideas are certainly, in many respects, very different from ours, and I was told this hard work was considered to be of the highest good to the women. Any finery in dress is rigorously discouraged.\" It was to become a central rationale of officials, in response to requests for the right of British and Canadian-born women to homestead land, that to have them working in the fields would be \"disastrous... for the reputation of Canada.\" This was not the refined and genteel behaviour expected of them and required to set an example for Indigenous people and other immigrants.\n\n_Figure 6._ \"The Primitive Farmer and Burden-Bearer, South Africa,\" from Otis T. Mason, _Women's Share in Primitive Culture_ (1899), 6. According to British imperialist rhetoric, women were the farmers only in Indigenous societies, where they were cast as unwilling participants forced into the work by Indigenous men.\n\nGardening was acceptable; owning land and farming was not. As historian Dianne Lawrence has written, in the colonies gardens performed added functions. Through their gardens, genteel women colonizers \"contributed to the imperial cause by creating order out of chaos of the natural world.\" Their gardens were small-scale models of the wider imperial project. The flower beds and neat rows of vegetables proclaimed a superior civilization, triumphing over wilderness. Gardening or horticulture for women, rather than commercial farming on land they owned, was less threatening and challenging to the traditional gender order, as discussed in the next chapter. Women homesteaders such as Isabella McKercher could find themselves the owners of land that was very valuable as railroads were built and markets opened. Gender chaos could result if women had the opportunity for independence and incomes of their own. And profits, which were considerable when the economy boomed, would have to be shared. Women were begrudged small acreages while the predominantly male investors and speculators acquired massive landholdings in the West. For all of these reasons, the short-lived and impractical tree culture opportunity was seen as acceptable for women.\n\nA SHORT-LIVED OPPORTUNITY FOR WOMEN: FOREST TREE CULTURE\n\nAt the very same time as women, unless they were sole heads of families, were made ineligible to homestead, a new opportunity was offered them for land grants in the West\u2014tree farms, or forest tree culture. Minister of the Interior and Lieutenant Governor David Laird was particularly devoted to this initiative. In his report for 1875, Laird, from Prince Edward Island, wrote that during a trip from Fort Garry to Fort Qu'Appelle in the summer of 1874, \"nothing impressed itself upon my mind more than the treelessness of a vast portion of the country over which I passed. Day by day, as I crossed the wide extent of prairies utterly destitute of trees, the question presented itself: How is the settlement of these prairie provinces possible, if the settler is without wood for fencing, building and fuel?\" Laird had met with an experienced tree planter in Fargo, North Dakota, and learned how tree culture was to be encouraged there, and he was determined to provide the same opportunities north of the border.\n\nIn 1873 the U.S. Congress passed an act encouraging the cultivation of trees on the western prairies. This was available to anyone regardless of gender and marital status; the act stated that \"any person who shall plant, protect, and keep in a healthy growing condition for ten years forty acres of timber... shall be entitled to a patent for the whole of the said quarter-section.\" In the United States pressure had mounted from the 1860s to address the question of the cultivation of trees for the treeless prairies. As an editorial in an 1866 St. Cloud, Minnesota, newspaper showed, tree culture was considered work for women, who would be better off devoting themselves to the care of groves of trees than the \"patchwork quilts and other jim crackery upon which women waste their time and ruin their eyesight.\"\n\nIn his 1875 letter to Laird recommending that females who were not sole heads of families be ineligible to homestead, Surveyor Dennis urged similar legislation to promote forest tree culture in Manitoba and the North-West, which could transform small plots of \"apparently worthless\" prairie lands into valuable farms. These farms, according to Dennis, would improve the climate and provide fuel, building, and fencing material. Dennis reviewed the U.S. legislation and its early results at length, claiming that in Minnesota alone, \"the enormous area of 170,307 acres had been entered under the Acts encouraging tree planting.\" Dennis's glowing recommendations about tree planting indicate that he saw this as a more suitable task for women. Dennis wrote that \"this new industry, if prudently and patiently followed up, is even a surer source of wealth than wheat growing, and without the additional expense and anxiety connected with the latter.\" He quoted a U.S. expert who asserted that land properly cultivated and planted with trees could be sold for $100 per acre within twenty years.\n\nAs historian David M. Emmons has written, the Timber Culture Act of 1873 in the United States was prompted by a theory \"which gave expression to both the optimism and the desperation which accompanied the Americans in the settlement of their last frontier.\" Land previously seen as arid, sterile, and inhospitable had to be transformed into a green, bountiful, appealing prospect for agriculture and settlement. There were many theories about how rainfall could be increased, and the early 1870s saw influential champions of the idea that trees brought rain. The main authority was George Perkins Marsh, author of _Man and Nature_ (1864), who predicted that splendid forests could be grown on the plains, checking evaporation and ameliorating the harsh climate. Ferdinand Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, found rainfall increasing wherever there were settlers who planted trees, and he was confident that \"the Great American Desert had been converted; indeed as a continuous area it has already ceased to exist, even in imagination.\"\n\nCanada quickly followed with its own measures to bring rain and provide timber to the settlers, and new Forest Tree Culture provisions of Canada's Dominion Lands Act were added in the 1876. Enthusiasm for the measure was expressed in the _Manitoba Free Press_ , and an American expert was quoted who asserted that \"a grove of trees can be grown as surely as a crop of corn,\" that within five years ten acres of timber could supply fuel and fencing for a family, that \"apparently worthless prairie land\" could be sold within twenty years for $100 per acre if planted with timber, and that within ten years lands \"properly planted and cultivated with trees will... realize at the rate of ten to one as compared with the profits attending the raising of wheat.\"\n\nThe 1876 legislation provided women, regardless of marital status, as well as men, the opportunity to acquire land to plant trees: \"Any person, male or female, being a subject of Her Majesty by birth or naturalization, and having attained the age of eighteen years, shall be entered for one quarter section or less quantity of unappropriated Dominion lands as a claim forest tree planting.\" The use of both \"he and she\" throughout the complicated legislation setting forth the rules and regulations made it clear that this was quite deliberately inclusive. Was this to be a replacement for the right to homestead, offering all women an opportunity for a parcel of land in their own names?\n\nA tree claim was exceedingly complicated and demanding compared to homesteading. The applicant was to select up to 160 acres of land that was \"open prairie and without timber.\" One year after the date of entry on the land the claimant had to have cleared eight acres for tree planting, eight more the second year, and sixteen more within the third year. This acreage had to be planted with trees. After six years, and not before, the claimant could receive a patent if she or he had trees kept in good condition.\n\nSome of the significant differences from homesteading land may have convinced architects of the plan that tree culture was more suitable than homesteading for women. Claimants were not required to build a dwelling and reside on their land; tree farmers, unlike homesteaders, did not have to be isolated and alone living on the prairie. Presumably a tree claimant could live on a family homestead or in a town or city. It took twice as long, however, to be able to apply for patent to the land; homesteaders could apply after three years, while tree claimants had to wait for six years (and later eight). At any time during those six years, the tree grower was liable to forfeiture if he or she was not breaking land, planting, and tending the trees. For homesteaders the precise amount of land to be broken and cultivated each year was not specified until an amendment in 1884 that demanded ten acres a year, which was reduced to five in an 1886 amendment.\n\nTree claims did not catch hold of the imagination of prospective settlers, either women or men. Few seized the opportunity: in the first six months of 1877 in Manitoba, for example, there were 348 homestead entries and five forest tree culture entries. Problems with the initial legislation were addressed in the 1879 amendments to the Forest Tree Culture legislation. The number of acres that had to be broken each year was lowered from eight to five. Claimants were given two more years to plant and tend their trees; they could not apply for a patent until eight years, rather than six. After eight years the claimant had to prove that \"he or she has planted not less than two thousand seven hundred trees on each acre of the portion broken or ploughed and cultivated to crop.\"\n\nWriting in 1879 for the _Montreal Witness_ , David Currie stated that tree claims were being abused, that the scheme \"seems also to be only used as a means for securing unlawful possession of Government lands.\" He had \"not yet heard of one acre of these claims being planted with trees\" and knew of some who were cultivating grain on their tree claims.\n\nTimber culture was abandoned in the United States in 1891, when the act was repealed by Congress as part of a general reconsideration of land policy. It had been discovered that trees planted on the plains did not bring more rain. According to Emmons, \"nature did not prove quite as docile and malleable as the advocates of increased rainfall believed. Drought struck the plains in the mid-70s and again in the mid-80s. Trees planted in response to the Timber Culture Act withered and died.\" North of the border the same situation prevailed and the program was abandoned even earlier, in 1886. Tree claims proved utterly impractical. There was nowhere to acquire the thousands of seedlings and\/or cuttings the tree farmers were to plant. Winds could be severe, dry, and hot. Hail was also a frequent visitor. There was no income for the claimant for six to eight years. Donald Codd reported in 1878 that there were only thirty-five claims under the Forest Tree Culture provisions. Altogether there were only fifty-one tree claims entered in Manitoba. Most were south of Winnipeg along the banks of the Red River, where flooding was also an issue many years. Of these claims, only five patents were ever issued.\n\nInterviewed in 1913 about the homesteads-for-women petition, Isabelle Beaton Graham of the _Grain Growers' Guide_ spoke of the short-lived tree claim opportunity: \"They [women] were not allowed [homesteads] on the same terms as men, but could have tree claims and must have planted and have growing 500 trees before they could get a patent. Very few made good of course. The proposition was absurd because the trees were almost impossible to obtain, and even when induced to grow could yield no financial returns.\" Tree planting, another woman journalist wrote in 1913, was \"a healthful and interesting occupation... but when planted heaven sent no manna as fruit thereof. Even if the claimant succeeded in securing and getting into the ground the five hundred birch, elm soft maple etc. for which the Government clamoured she could not make a living out of them. She failed, and though it was from no fault of her own, the privilege was withdrawn.\"\n\nThe right of unmarried women to homestead was abolished in 1876, and the right, however impractical, to tree claim land was removed in 1886. But there did remain one category of eligibility for women\u2014the sole head of family. From 1876 the legislation read: \"Any person, male or female, who is the sole head of a family, or any male who has attained the age of eighteen years shall be entitled to be entered for one quarter-section.\" As understood by Canadian authorities, this meant that only widows with minor children dependent upon them were permitted to homestead.\n\nAs the homesteads-for-women campaign grew prior to the First World War, many commented that this was simply not fair. In a 1913 _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ column entitled \"No Way for a Single Woman to Get a Farm, Unless She Captures a Man,\" Valance Patriarche wrote that \"a woman who wants a homestead must prove she has been clever and energetic enough to have previously captured a husband and either kept him or let him die. If she has him on hand he obtains the homestead; if she has let him slip away to a better land she is solaced by having the grant made out in her own name.\" That same year journalist Lillian Beynon Thomas also used humour to criticize the law that seemed far from fair to her, noting that \"there are no homesteads for women in Western Canada unless such women care to qualify by killing off any inconvenient husbands they happen to own.\"\n\nBritish women interested in farming and owning land in the colonies were urged to emigrate to a not entirely hospitable environment in prairie Canada, and the individuals and associations advocating this, the subject of the next chapter, appeared to know little of the challenges and obstacles that awaited. Canadian authorities wanted British women immigrants, preferably young, single, and robust, who could be wives and mothers. They were not at all interested in encouraging women to settle and farm on their own. They wanted to plant and nurture a traditional gender order, not cultivate new strains of independent women. Neither the unwelcoming conditions nor the discouragement of authorities, however, prevented the creation of a modest momentum for the cause of British \"gentle\" or educated women farmers for the prairies, which reached its zenith in the years just before the First World War. \nCHAPTER TWO\n\n\"LAND OWNERS AND ENTERPRISING SETTLERS IN THE COLONIES\"\n\nBRITISH WOMEN FARMERS FOR CANADA\n\nAt a meeting of the Colonial Section of the Royal Society of Arts in London in March 1913, English travel writer Ella C. Sykes spoke on \"Openings for Educated Women in Canada.\" She stressed the several occupations they might find in that colony, all of which were suitably feminine, and she included farming on a modest scale and \"taking up land on their own account.\" She noted, however, that \"so far the Canadian seems to object to women working on the land, the reason of this, perhaps, being that he finds them so valuable in the house.\" Yet Sykes called on educated women to take up the challenge of this \"imperial\" work: \"Canada has shown unmistakably that she wishes to have the British stamp, and that can never be if the women of our race refuse to do their part... The girl of the right type who cares for the Flag and what it stands for, can be in very deed a missionary of Empire in the Dominion.\"\n\nOne month later, and also in London, English author and Saskatchewan farmer Georgina Binnie-Clark spoke on \"Land and the Woman in Canada\" to the Royal Colonial Institute. Binnie-Clark was much more radical then Sykes, urging British women to grow grain on large acreages in prairie Canada. \"The commercial farmer,\" she stated, \"is not to farm for mere livelihood, she is to farm for independence.\" Like Sykes, Binnie-Clark saw this as an imperial enterprise. British women could play a critical role in the \"spade-work of British expansion in this, the supreme place of prosperity among British lands.\" \"It is time,\" Binnie-Clark stated, \"to shoulder one's spade and get off into the unknown country where a further stretch of the Empire is calling for the pioneer.\"\n\nThese two talks before prestigious patriarchal colonial institutes represent the apogee, the summit of enthusiasm and optimism for the prospect of British women farmers for Canada. Modest and slow momentum for this cause had been gathering for several decades in Britain, particularly England, and to a lesser extent in Canada. But opposition remained formidable and powerful, and any momentum gained was lost in the First World War. There was a moderate revival of the cause after the war, but the opposition was even more entrenched. This chapter traces the growth of support for the idea of sending British women to Canada to farm, an idea that generated mild support from some and zealous, energetic, and fervent support from a few. Starting in the late nineteenth century, British proponents of agriculture for women, emigration associations, colonial training schools, and imperially minded journalists and travel writers advocated farming and land-owning for \"gentlewomen\" in the colonies, particularly Canada. A number of factors and causes intersected and overlapped to create modest momentum for this initiative, including alarm about the \"surplus women\" of Britain, concern about the \"surplus men\" of the colonies, devotion to the Empire, the push to expand educational, professional, and vocational options for women, the opposition to women farmers or horticulturalists in the \"mother country,\" and the fact that there had to be more options than housework to tempt British women to cross the Atlantic. Fiction for girls and young women set in the colonies presented robust and independent heroines who owned or managed land of their own.\n\nProponents of sending British women to farm in Canada faced many opponents and obstacles. The colonies wanted women for domestic service, marriage, motherhood, and little else. Gentlewomen were reluctant, however, to cross the seas to scrub floors. There was an effort to camouflage domestic service in the colonies as something acceptable for refined women; they were to be \"home helps\" and treated as family members, not exploited servants. This subterfuge did not succeed in attracting the \"surplus women\" in significant numbers, and farming emerged as one option they might pursue in Canada. This would not only be a vocation, it would permit British women to truly be Empire builders. In _A Woman in Canada_ (1911), English garden author Marion Cran wrote that the \"wild beautiful West\" provided opportunities for lives of independence for women willing to give \"their best of mind and body for the race and for the Empire.\"\n\nSHIFTING ATTITUDES IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY\n\nOpinions about the respectability of women working in the fields in Britain shifted dramatically and rapidly throughout the nineteenth century, and varied according to factors such as class, age, marital status, and region. There was heated debate about the suitability of farm work for the educated \"gentlewoman,\" and by about 1900 there had emerged a degree of acceptance, although sceptics and opponents remained. Aspects of these debates and the more tolerant attitude that developed, particularly within England, are an important foundation and context for this study. Advocates of farming for women in the colonies drew on the arguments that were mustered for the same cause in Britain. Among these were that this would solve the \"surplus woman\" problem, and that farming would provide a healthy and useful vocation. Other rationales were that women's work on the land would remain feminine, because it would be limited to a few acres and to the \"lighter\" forms of agriculture. They would farm in settlements or clusters of women so that they would not have to hire and oversee labourers, or need expensive machinery. Yet while attitudes changed and a degree of acceptance developed in Britain, the same was not the case in Canada, where opponents resorted to age-old arguments that women working in the fields was an antiquated and despised abomination, a remnant of primitive times. Canada was not to be promoted or crafted as a colony where women did fieldwork. If they did in fact work in the fields (as did happen), this would be ignored and concealed and never officially endorsed or rewarded. Drawing on attitudes that prevailed by the mid-nineteenth century in the mother country, Canadian authorities saw women's confinement to the home and hearth as a key indicator of superiority over earlier, \"darker\" times, over other nations and colonies, and over the Indigenous peoples of the colonies. Fieldwork was believed to demoralize and uncivilize women; indoors became the only setting for proper femininity.\n\nPromoters of agriculture as a vocation for women were seldom interested in working-class women, as it was presumed they had a natural function or calling\u2014domestic service. They were concerned with educated women of some means, or \"gentlewomen.\" For some advocates, agriculture for women was part of a larger movement to secure women's political, civil, and educational rights, and farming was one profession that could provide economic independence and an alternative to marriage. Others had more conservative objectives. Viewing women as unsuitable for intellectual careers or for professions such as medicine and law, they saw farming as a viable occupation that demanded less mental aptitude and education. Women's fields and gardens would be safe and secure places where they would be kept isolated from the world; there they would be kept busy and not tempted to join in political agitation. Marriage remained the ultimate goal to these thinkers, and a knowledge of farming or gardening had the advantage of remaining useful even after marriage, whereas other professions would have to be abandoned. Yet it is difficult to neatly categorize proponents of agriculture for women into radical and conservative camps, as it was shrewd to pose as non-threatening to the male domain of agriculture and land ownership in the face of fierce and powerful opposition.\n\nWOMEN IN THE FIELDS: A REMNANT OF DARKER TIMES\n\nIn 1898 an article on \"Ladies as Farmers\" proclaimed that in Britain farming was \"quite the most fashionable occupation for women nowadays,\" and that \"a craze for agricultural pursuits [had] taken possession of ladies of fashion.\" English journalist Virginia M. Crawford was more measured but largely in agreement in her article of the same year, entitled \"Englishwomen and Agriculture,\" writing that \"the whole question of agricultural employment for women is, so to speak, in the air. It has emerged somewhat suddenly from the sea of future possibilities, and is fast developing into one of the social questions of the day.\" While \"in the air,\" the question of agriculture as a vocation for women faced formidable opposition from those who insisted it was unbecoming and inappropriate. Crawford argued that an \"active and ceaseless\" propaganda and public education campaign had to be waged to combat the idea that farm work was unladylike and to supplant it with that of the \"dignity and beauty of farm life.\"\n\nUntil the end of the eighteenth century, there was little disapproval of women carrying out farm tasks. But with complex factors such as urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, the practice of women working in the fields came to be seen as backward, alien, a remnant of darker times. As an imperial power, Great Britain had to demonstrate that the women of its nation lived better lives than the Indigenous women of the colonies did. Historian Karen Sayer writes that \"as the urban became culturally superior to the rural, English culture was increasingly seen to be superior to that of native populations in the colonies.\" That the lives of British women were superior to the \"downtrodden\" dark and alien Indigenous women of the colonies and of \"foreign\" lands, who were allegedly treated little better than beasts of burden, was a common theme in Victorian imperial travel, missionary, and explorer narratives. As one English traveller to Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan) observed in in 1835: \"The Kaffir women do all the out-door work, and follow the plough; and it is said that they are sometimes yoked in it along with an ox.\"\n\nWomen of the fields who were strong, robust, and energetic questioned and threatened Victorian ideals of passive, weak femininity. They were \"unnatural women, unable to fulfill the natural, feminine role of motherhood because of their labour and economic activity.\" Because they were vigorous, strong, and tanned from their work, women who did farm work crossed \"the boundaries of race. They therefore moved into the realm of alien, dark, sensual, sexual womanhood.\" According to a clergyman: \"Not only does it unsex a woman in dress, gait, manners, character, making her rough, coarse, clumsy, masculine, but it generates a further very pregnant social mischief, by unfitting her or indisposing her for a woman's proper duties at home.\"\n\nAgriculture changed dramatically in nineteenth-century Britain as the consolidation of larger-scale capitalist agriculture and mechanization brought an end to the small-scale farming of cottagers. The vast majority of agricultural workers, whether male or female, became landless labourers. Capitalist agriculture hastened the trend toward women's restriction to a limited range of tasks. Women were pushed into \"monotonous, low-status jobs, and [they were] deprived of the range of skills possessed by the farmer's or cottager's wife in the pre-industrial period.\" The wives of wealthier farmers \"began to lead a life more resembling that of the leisured wives of the bourgeoisie.\" Male married farmers took pride in having wives who did not have to do fieldwork, \"apparently adopting the middle-class ideology of domesticity.\" Farmers' organizations supported women's invisibility from outdoor farm work, arguing for a male breadwinning wage so that women would not have to go to the fields. Since many male farm labourers found themselves out of work due to the mechanization of agriculture, it was useful to insist women did not belong in the fields. Women were unwanted competition because they were paid about half the wage of their male counterparts on the farm. They could get much better wages in factories.\n\nBy the late nineteenth century, women who did continue to do farm work had become invisible. It was not respectable to be seen working in the fields; farming was by then \"ideologically viewed as 'man's work.'\" Outdoor activity was associated with men, while indoors was the respectable setting for women. Women might continue to engage in farm work, \"as long as these activities were kept out of sight.\" The woman who worked in the fields was \"a figure of the past, a ghost.\" These were the attitudes that advocates of farming for women in Britain had to contend with, and these were the attitudes that had a much longer shelf life in Canada, lasting well into the twentieth century.\n\nSMALL HOLDINGS, \"LIGHTER BRANCHES\" OF AGRICULTURE, AND \"FRIENDLY BANDS\" OF WOMEN\n\nAdvocates of farming for women in the nineteenth century had a variety of arguments that they drew on to challenge these attitudes. One was that women would remain distinctly feminine and would not compete with male farmers, as their work would be relegated to small holdings of a few acres, to the \"lighter\" forms of agriculture (dairying, poultry keeping, and horticulture), and that they would band together in farm settlements or colonies. Proponents \"had to tread a careful line between promoting an unusual career for middle-class women and maintaining a sense of social refinement and feminine respectability. After all, for decades, women had been told that work connected to the land was improper and unwomanly.\" The result was a division of agriculture into feminine and masculine spheres, with \"lighter\" agriculture enabling women to \"maintain their reputation and dignity,\" while not posing a direct challenge to male ownership of land and to the more profitable sphere of grain farming and large herds of livestock.\n\nA small-holdings movement of the nineteenth century in Britain, supported by politicians, social reformers, philanthropists, and agriculturalists, constitutes another point of origin for the growing pressure to admit women to the profession of farming. The ideal small holding was a \"market garden or family farm large enough to support the cultivator and his family, and small enough to be cultivated by the labor of the occupier and his family without substantial amounts of permanently hired labor.\" Discussions of the virtues of small holdings intersected with and involved the promotion of even smaller \"allotments\" of half an acre or less, for the production of vegetables and flowers, as particularly suited to women. The widely held assumption was that women did not have the physical capabilities and strength for larger acreages. Fruit, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants were the best crops for the woman small holder, and poultry, dairy cows, and bees were more suitable than livestock such as cattle. The 1903 book _The Lighter Branches of Agriculture_ , by Edith Bradley and Bertha La Mothe, is perhaps the fullest articulation of the realms of farm work seen as the province of women. \"Petite culture\" or the \"lighter branches\" meant \"all the work on the land which required skill rather than mere physical strength. It embraces work in the dairy, work in the garden and greenhouse; supervision of market gardens, culture of fruits, management of poultry and bees.\"\n\nSupporters of farming as a vocation for women rarely saw this as an individual endeavour. In her introduction to _The Lighter Branches of Agriculture_ , Lady Frances Evelyn (Daisy) Warwick, an influential advocate of agriculture for women, wrote that she looked forward to a time when \"a number of these settlements working on co-operative lines [would be] dotted all over England.\" Lady Frances Wolseley, who wrote extensively on horticulture for women and established a school for \"lady gardeners\" in Sussex, recommended that women garden in colonies, grouping themselves in \"friendly bands.\" Settlements or colonies of women would address the issue of isolation in the country; the gentlewoman needed companions of her own social standing or she might \"sink\" to the level of her neighbours.\n\nThere was heated debate, however, about the future of small allotment farming, which included more radical voices. Among the critics was Louisa Cresswell, the \"lady farmer\" of Sandringham Estate, a tenant of \"Bertie,\" the Prince of Wales. Cresswell was opposed to small holdings for anyone. After the death of her husband, she farmed 900 acres on the prince's estate for many years (until, she alleged, the prince's hunting parties destroyed her crops.) In her 1881 pamphlet, _How the Farming in Great Britain Can Be Made to Pay_ , Cresswell wrote that \"the proposal to establish an extensive system of small holdings or petite culture, as it is called, and which is argued by some to be a panacea for all ills, is likely to be a very hopeless undertaking.\" She championed larger farms: \"Upon arable lands, whether they be light, medium or clay, I do not think that 10,000 or 20,000 acres will be too much.\" \"I would also,\" she wrote, \"buy mighty machines and use them whenever practical... use self binders at harvest and every description of labour-saving machinery that the ingenuity of man can devise.\" Cresswell predicted (correctly) that there would be a revolution in agriculture with machinery. She was proud to say that her farm, where steam machinery was used extensively, had been \"pronounced by one of the keenest judges in England to 'have been left in the highest state of cultivation' and 'as clean as a garden.'\"\n\nIn her 1883 book, _My Home Farm_ , Katherine Burton, who was an experienced tenant farmer, advocated small but not tiny farms for women. She engaged in mixed farming, having dairy cows for milk, butter, and cheese, and raising pigs and sheep, poultry, and vegetables. She farmed for profit and not for family subsistence. Burton was critical of much of the advice given to women farmers: \"My own private belief is that the reason for the persistent recommendation of 'poultry farming' to 'ladies' is that gentlemen are aware that it is the most troublesome and least remunerative branch of the business\u2014at least if pursued separately.\" Prominent English farmer Katherine Courtauld also did not agree that women should pursue only the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture, instead advocating commercial large-scale farming. She farmed 2,000 acres, and in 1900 employed fifteen men and boys.\n\n\"THE AGRICULTURAL BRIGADE OF THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN\"\n\nRationales for advancing the cause of women as farmers were varied and contradictory. Almost all, however, started with the assumption that there were \"surplus women\" in Britain who needed occupations or should be shipped off to the colonies (or both). The corollary was the \"surplus\" of men of the colonies (although this term was not used to describe them) who were in danger of degenerating. The problem of \"surplus,\" \"redundant,\" or \"excess\" women was first identified in the 1851 British census, which indicated there were 500,000 more women than men in the British Isles. The problematic \"surplus woman\" was middle class and educated; working-class women were not viewed as \"surplus,\" as they were believed to have occupations suitable to their station in domestic service or factories. Conventional occupations for the genteel single woman were as governess, companion, or seamstress, and these professions were underpaid and overcrowded. Who or what would shoulder the burden of supporting these women? And they were seen as burdens, as encumbrances, as pariahs. Women who did not conform to social expectations of marriage and motherhood had no obvious place in society. As will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, shipping \"excess\" women off to the colonies and dominions was widely seen as the best solution, proposed as early as 1862 by journalist W.R. Greg.\n\nLady Warwick was concerned with the educated \"daughters of professional men\" with large families but small incomes. Her object was to provide these daughters with a new field of work and means of livelihood through involvement in light agriculture. Women were advised to \"'go back to the land'; they can listen once more to the 'charm of birds,' and 'Nature, that sweet old nurse,' can teach them the wisdom and hope and love.\" Sending \"trained and cultured\" women into the country would \"have a salutary and energizing effect upon rural England. They can stimulate the local interest in village clubs, in cottage gardens, in the general principles of citizenship of a vast Empire, and in a hundred other ways can help to 'make the path a little brighter where they tread' by their sympathy and comradeship.\" If \"ladies\" could show they were healthy and happy working on the land, the more \"rustic damsels\" would be inspired to follow their lead.\n\nJournalist Virginia Crawford also saw agriculture as a solution to the problem of thousands of women from the country \"above the domestic servant class\" crowding into the cities, struggling to find work as teachers, governesses, bookkeepers, and secretaries. A few succeeded, but many failed, according to Crawford, losing their health and living a \"cramped and anxious existence in lonely lodgings or comfortless boarding houses and ... are thankful in old age to find a refuge in some governesses' institute or home for decayed gentlewomen.\"\n\nFarming as an occupation would be a blessing to the large number of \"idle women\" who would never become wives\u2014the \"surplus women.\" An 1879 article in _the Examiner_ , \"Gardening for Women,\" began: \"What is to be done with our surplus women?\" In her reply to an 1897 article entitled \"The Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" Edith Bradley, a social reformer who worked in partnership with Lady Warwick, wrote \"The Agricultural Brigade of the Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" proposing that women farmers could help to solve a myriad of problems facing England and the British Isles, including the \"surplus million.\"\n\nWomen of refinement and education were best equipped for the sort of outdoor work advocated by Frances Wolseley. She wrote that \"maidservants\" were \"totally unsuited\" to the profession of gardening, which required intelligent and educated ladies, \"daughters of professional men.\" The woman gardener who was untidy, had unkempt hair, disorderly clothing, and bad manners was not to be tolerated. \"Maidservants\" could work on farms if overseen by a farmer's wife who would \"look out for their moral welfare.\" The men employed in a private garden, according to Wolseley, would not tolerate a young woman of \"their own sphere,\" but would \"gladly allow a lady to direct their work.\" In her 1916 book, _Women and the Land_ , Wolseley gave further reasons why only refined and educated women were suited to the work, including that they were \"from their earliest days accustomed to riding and hunting; they play golf and out-of-door games, so that exercise in the open air comes to them quite naturally, and in fact many can barely exist without it.\" Women were required who could direct subordinate workers, and these \"should belong to the upper classes or upper middle classes.\" They had to be able to \"command and to exact respect.\"\n\nAside from addressing the \"surplus women\" issue, there were other rationales for involving women in agriculture. All sorts of anxieties that faced the nations and the Empire justified the cause. In \"The Agricultural Brigade of the Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" Edith Bradley wrote that women farmers could mitigate another of the most pressing national and social problems of the day, the \"wholesale desertion of the villages for the towns, or the emigration to foreign countries.\" The \"Agricultural Brigade of Women\" would \"stay the depopulation of our villages\" and \"keep some of the money in this country which is annually spent on foreign dairy, poultry and horticultural produce.\" Women of the agricultural brigade would be \"bringing back country life to England, and so assist in strengthening, not only the national, but the Imperial life of our Empire.\"\n\nRADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE ADVOCATES\n\nSupporters of agriculture and gardening for \"surplus women\" did not all share the same political views. Activists in the women's movement attempted to redefine the problem of \"surplus women,\" arguing that the issue was not the numerical excess but the lack of educational and occupational opportunities that could permit women independence outside of marriage. Useful work would be their salvation; the \"unproductive\" woman would become productive. Among the earliest of the nineteenth-century advocates of farming and land ownership for women were members of the middle-class feminist Langham Place Group, founded in the 1850s. They organized the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women and campaigned for married women's right to retain their property after marriage, for the right of women to take paid employment, and for wealthy women to own land and take up farming. Jessie Boucherett, the daughter of Lancashire landowners, was particularly devoted to this cause, but it was a small part of a broader campaign to expand women's involvement in skilled trades. She was determined to assist \"distressed gentlewomen.\" In her 1863 _Hints on Self-Help: Advice for Young Women_ , Boucherett proposed many professions, including home decoration, photography, nursing, bookkeeping, and shopkeeping. Farming was another idea proposed to enable women to support themselves. Social commentators such as Harriet Martineau wrote extensively about how attitudes needed to change toward women and work, that women as well as men should be educated for work, and that vast numbers of women were already working in industries. Martineau was the author of _My Farm of Two Acres_ , first published in 1865, which described her poultry, swine, and dairy enterprises and advocated women's economic independence through small-scale farming.\n\nThe significant number of women who operated farms on their own in Britain was cited by champions of women's rights, who raised questions about gender, land ownership, and the vote. Women farmers, who paid taxes and employed men who could vote while they could not, bolstered arguments for an extension of the franchise. Why, it was asked, should a woman farmer \"who in every way performs the duties of an employer... have no vote, whilst the keeper of a low beerhouse close by, who demoralizes laboring men, and is hardly able to write his name, exercises the right from which she is denied.\" An 1883 petition from 170 women farmers asked Prime Minister William Gladstone why \"the oft-time totally ignorant agricultural labourer\" should have the vote that was denied to them. Because they did not have the vote, \"widows and daughters of farmers are frequently rejected as tenants by large landowners for the sole reason that their sex disqualifies them from giving their landlord that Parliamentary vote which it has been his custom to expect from his tenants, and yet these same women have proved their undoubted business capacity by years of successful management during the illness or incapacity of their husband or father.\"\n\nIn 1884, Conservative Sir Robert Peel spoke of the injustice of women farmers being unable to vote while their male labourers could. He quoted an agricultural expert who stated: \"Fancy a woman farming 500 acres of land, and paying the usual contributions to the taxes of the country, having no voice in the representation of the country while her labourers have.\"\n\nSupporters of women's suffrage saw women gardeners and farmers as natural allies in the cause of the parliamentary franchise. Speaking in favour of women's suffrage at Birmingham in 1891, Millicent Fawcett declared there to be 38,000 female landowners in England and Wales, and of these 20,000 were actively engaged in farming. The census of 1891 \"showed that there were 21,692 female farmers and graziers in England and Wales, 564 female occupiers of market gardens or nurseries.\" Matilda Betham-Edwards, farmer and women's activist, and member of the Langham Place Group, was in favour of votes for women farmers. She wrote that in Suffolk in the early 1860s there were many \"lady farmers\" who were \"widows, sisters and daughters of deceased tenants to whom their lease had been renewed,\" with one widow leasing the largest farm in the parish.\n\nThe more radical advocates of gardening and farming for women advanced the rationale that this occupation could assist a woman in the event of marriage breakdown or the death of a husband or his failure to provide. As the author of a 1905 article observed, marriage \"did not necessarily mean for a woman provision for life.\" \"How many women,\" this author asked, \"one has known whose husbands have failed or been disappointed in life, to be thereafter chimney-corner encumbrances, leaving it to the wives to bring up, educate and launch the family?\"\n\nThere were also those with more conservative views, who did not wish to challenge or upset the gender order, who believed women's destiny was marriage and domesticity, but who nonetheless favoured some expansion of women's occupational opportunities to include certain forms of agriculture. Some advocated gardening or farming because they believed there were an \"immense number of women unfit for intellectual work.\" Farming and gardening was a \"reasonable\" vocation compared to \"unsuitable employments\" such as \"doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament, and heaven knows what else beside.\" The life of the gardener, small holder, or farmer was for \"our girls whose cleverness mainly lies in their hands... girls not brilliant at books.\" There would ever only be a \"small minority\" of women who \"would be able to embrace the learned professions, should those professions be universally thrown open to them.\"\n\nConservative advocates of farming for women were careful to stress that the \"lady gardener\" could retain her femininity. She could perform delicate work that did not require physical strength, such as \"budding dwarf fruit-trees... making cuttings, sowing and collecting seed, gathering and packing fruit, weeding, hoeing and the lighter parts of the tillage.\" Women gardeners were expected to have limited marketing ambitions and a low public profile; they would not supplant or compete with men gardeners, according to Frances Wolseley. Rather, they would \"supplement and increase the good work which men are doing for our land.\" They would assist by lending intelligence, refinement, and other womanly qualities. Another conservative impulse at work in counselling women to take up farming over other potential occupations, careers, or professions was that it would teach them skills that would remain useful after marriage. Women could garden both before and during marriage, which was still viewed by many commentators as the ultimate objective of a woman's life. As a writer for the _Leeds Mercury_ wrote in 1900:\n\nThere is one thing to be said of a training for women in gardening, especially which cannot be stated in reference to many another career for women, namely that, even if the student marries, the value of her training will not be lost, as is so often the case in other branches of industry. It is often said, with truth, that when a father goes to great expense in training his daughter for a profession or business, the outlay may be almost or entirely thrown away in the event of her marrying. But, unless a woman is to pass her life in the heart of a crowded town, training in horticulture will be valuable, and a source of delight to her, however much married she may be.\n\nPREPARING THE SOIL: EDUCATION\n\nAn obstacle identified by advocates of gardening, horticulture, and agriculture for women was the lack of available training and education. When Jane Chesney proposed a horticultural college for women in her 1879 article \"A New Vocation for Women,\" it was a \"bold suggestion.\" The lady gardener of her day, Chesney wrote, could learn only by reading, asking questions, and by \"sad and bitter experience,\" and as a remedy she advocated a course of training in horticultural principles and garden economies.\n\nGradual advances were made in admitting women to horticultural and agricultural education. The Horticultural College at Swanley, Kent, established in 1887, was originally intended for men only, but women were admitted beginning in 1891. By 1899 there were thirty-two women students taking the two-year course, and by 1903 it became a women-only institution, closing its doors to male students. Swanley reflected a shift in horticultural training from an apprentice-based system (that had excluded women) to one based on science and study.\n\nAt Swanley the students' time was divided between practical work and lectures. The students produced a regular supply of flowers, fruit, and vegetables for the London market. Professors from Oxford, Cambridge, and London lectured on natural sciences such as botany, geology, and entomology. Some women graduates from Swanley found positions as \"gardener's boys\" at the Botanic Gardens at Kew, and others at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh and Dublin. Soon women trained at Swanley were teaching horticulture at places such as Lady Henry Somerset's Industrial Farm Colony (for \"female inebriates\") at Duxhurst.\n\n_Figures 7_ _and 8._ The Glynde School For Lady Gardeners in Sussex, England, established by Lady Frances Wolseley in 1902. The caption written by Wolseley for the top photo (Figure 7) is \"Students before they wore the kit invented by Miss [Elsa] More which was after adopted by other women who worked the land,\" c. 1902\u20138. In the bottom photo (Figure 8), from 1913\u201314 the students are wearing the \"kit\" designed for work on the land. Wolseley and her students encountered criticism such as only a \"complete failure as a woman could adopt such a career.\" Papers of the Viscountess Frances Wolseley, Hove Central Library, Hove, Sussex, Commonplace Book no. 196.\n\nIn 1898 the Lady Warwick Hostel in Reading was established, offering courses to women on horticulture, dairy work, market gardening, fruit culture, and beekeeping. The demand was high; there was a full complement of twenty-four students in the first year of operation and soon two more hostels were added. In 1903, Warwick moved her students to Studley Castle in Warwickshire, near her own stately home, Warwick Castle, and established the independent Lady Warwick College. This later become the Studley Horticultural and Agricultural College for Women and remained an all-women institution until it closed in 1969. By 1904, it was reported, there had been 250 graduates of Warwick's college since 1898, and of these twenty-four possessed small holdings of their own that they operated as dairy or poultry farms or market gardens. Other graduates were working at country houses, superintending dairies, gardens, and conservatories. In 1905 one journalist proclaimed that Warwick had \"convinced her bitterest opponents that in the lighter branches of agriculture\u2014such as dairy work, market gardening, poultry and beekeeping, and in the growing of fruit and flowers\u2014there is a means of livelihood for the gentlewoman in which she can live far more happily than in our grimy cities.\" Warwick also established in 1899 the Lady Warwick Agricultural Association, and in the same year launched the _Woman's Agricultural Times_ as its official organ.\n\nOther educational options included private gardening schools that began to spring up. By 1940 there were some nineteen such schools in England. Among them was Lady Frances Wolseley's school of gardening at Glynde, established in 1901. These schools were the preserve of women with income and the time needed to devote to two or three years of training. Private initiatives included the scheme of Victoria Woodhull on her estate at Bredon's Norton, Worcestershire, where by 1908 there were between twenty-five and thirty women studying agriculture through lectures, reading, and demonstrations. The school's purpose, according to Woodhull (the first woman to run for president of the United States) was not only to address the \"surplus women\" problem but to \"regenerate England,\" because the \"future of the race\" was in the land. All of these initiatives stand in sharp contrast to the situation in Canada, where well into the twentieth century there were very few opportunities for women to study agriculture or even horticulture.\n\n\"A DELUSION AND A SNARE\": OPPOSITION AND DEBATE\n\nThe idea that farming was a suitable profession for women and that agricultural education should be available to them was opposed by many. Advocates contended with ridicule and bemusement. The major objection was that farming was a \"man's domain\": women working in the fields defied a gender order, cast as timeless and traditional, in which they were relegated to hearth and home, and farm work defeminized women, making them unattractive to men. As one anonymous journalist objected in 1910, after noting that women were ploughing fields, this \"invaded what I regard as the last ditch of man's domain.\" He wrote that it was not \"good for women to lead laborious days behind the plough. Heavy manual labour produces a rough, unpleasant type of woman, and the only thing it qualifies her for is to plough that lonely furrow in life, which, however suitable to some politicians, is not the true destiny of women.\"\n\nCritics argued that industries such as cheese making, although once the domain of farm women, were not suitable for gentlewomen because they could be neither \"mistress nor maid,\" and there was nothing in between these two social positions. To be mistress required considerable means, since land, cows, and their own training in the skills required had all to be purchased. Nor could she be a maid; it was not possible for a \"young lady... go into a dairy-farm, in some cheese country, and give her services in return for her training and board.\" The dairymaid worked for years, \"lifting great weights, wielding heavy implements, straining every muscle in her body with reaching over the wide tubs, screwing up the ponderous presses, and turning and weighing the mighty cheeses which the ordinary run of ladies could no more carry to the scale than they could carry the farmhouse to the next parish... They would find hoeing turnips, or digging potatoes, light work in comparison.\"\n\nAn idea of the nature and intensity of opposition to women in the field is revealed in scrapbooks of clippings and correspondence kept by Frances Wolseley. For example, she received an anonymous postcard that read, \"I think if you taught those young ladies how to cook, they would be far more use in the world than [\u2014\u2014] up an old garden. P.S. Why don't you teach them housework to make them useful.\" There was heated debate in the letters to the editor section of _Country Life_ , also preserved in one of Wolseley's scrapbooks. As \"Cherry Tree\" wrote in response to an article about Wolseley's school: \"It makes one rather sad to think that an educated woman should be reduced to do the work suitable to a rough uneducated man, losing as she must all feminine grace and charm, and also the vantage ground her education ought to have given her over him. I can scarcely think that any except a girl without any intellectual faculties, and consequently one who could not rise to any position requiring mental gifts, would choose such a career. In other words, I cannot think that anyone not a complete failure as a woman could adopt such a career.\"\n\nOpponents insisted that training in agriculture was wasted on girls who were destined for marriage. In _The Revival of English Agriculture_ , P. Anderson Graham wrote: \"Educate women for what purpose you please, and map out the future for them as carefully as if it were to go in a Government survey, Love steps in at the end and upsets all the plans.\" He was willing to admit, however, that there was a \"residue\" of \"well born women... who in many cases pass unwedded lives,\" and he supposed that they might be able to pursue _la petite culture_ , although \"they certainly cannot do the hard work\u2014no woman can without sinking into the position of a drudge.\"\n\nSupporters countered with an array of arguments. One wrote in 1891 that \"there is something in the female mind that is peculiarly conformable to field culture and the care of stock. I need scarcely point out that ladies have always been the best gardeners, and the more field culture is made to correspond to garden culture the better will it be for all who have to do with the soil in this country.\" Phillip Astor wrote favourably of \"Lady Farmers\" in 1900 after a visit to the school at Swanley. The article began with a photograph of students ploughing. He argued that Swanley \"proves that women find the work of ploughing quite within their capacity, and do not suffer physically from the hard work. Of course, it is not intended that women should oust men from the work of the fields, but it is considered desirable that they should have a practical knowledge of it.\"\n\nAn 1898 article on \"Lady Gardeners\" by \"Darley Dale\" weighed the cons and pros. The profession was not for delicate women, and it would involve sacrifice from any woman. The lady gardener would have to rise early, work hard, stand a great deal, and be exposed to all weathers. She would not have \"very white, delicate hands; potting, planting, sowing, weeding, taking cuttings, all spoil hands.\" Nor would she be able to take care of her complexion, as \"she must be exposed to the east winds of spring, the hot sunshine of summer, the gales of autumn, and all the freaks of an English climate.\" But the lady gardener who made these \"sacrifices\" to \"feminine vanity\" would be \"a very bright, happy cheerful woman; the freedom of her life, and the exhilarating effect of being so much in the open air, probably contribute to this.\" The result, according to this author, would be \"a thoroughly womanly woman who has gained some masculine advantages without losing any of the tenderer qualities of womanhood.\"\n\nYet as the strong opposition illustrates, women seeking an occupation and an income, whether through agriculture or most other professions, were viewed with suspicion. They were \"icons of unsettling change.\" Their independent earnings and autonomy from families were altogether a departure from the white, Anglo-Celtic norm of feminine respectability, a dangerous challenge to the traditional gender order. Low-paid, exploited, wage-earning women were regarded as a moral problem, and reformers devised various techniques of regulating and controlling their activities. Equally unsettling and controversial were the \"New Women\" of the educated and middling classes. These \"New Women\" contested Victorian definitions of gender, some fighting for women's rights and seeking professional careers, and some even opting for a single lifestyle. They further fuelled fears that the gender order, the foundation of society, was cracking.\n\nThrough expectations of appropriate feminine dress and deportment, women's bodies were moulded to be more docile than men's, and their mobility was much more limited. There were (and remain) norms of feminine motility, a disciplinary regime of femininity that restricts women's posture and movements. Women were (and still are) trained to move with \"grace\" and not to reach and stretch and extend the body in sports and certain physical tasks. As Sandra Lee Bartky has argued, \"the imposition of normative femininity upon the female body required training,\" and \"the modes of training are cultural phenomena properly described as 'disciplinary practices.'\" In Victorian times, the clothing worn by middle-class and elite women restricted their movement and ability to do any manual labour. Long skirts, tightly laced corsets, bustles, hoops, weighty petticoats, and high-heeled shoes made it virtually impossible to bend, stoop, or adopt the many other postures agriculture and gardening required. In wearing this gear, women \"were suggesting that they had others employed to perform these functions.\" Thorstein Veblen wrote in his 1894 \"Economic Theory of Women's Dress\" that the corseted Victorian woman's inability to move was evidence of her role as a decorative ornament who did not have to perform any manual labour, signifying her husband's wealth and power.\n\nThose women who exercised and altered their bodies, becoming strong and athletic, were censured. In a 1900 article on \"The Redundancy of Spinster Gentlewomen,\" the author \"T.P.W.\" criticized women who were \"almost wholly given up to outdoor pastimes of a more or less robust and muscular character\":\n\nThe very exercise of muscular achievements suitable only for men has the effect of hardening and the roughening the feminine exterior; while it is too often associated with a strident voice, a self-assertive manner, a brusque and abrupt address to malekind, and a general lapse of attractiveness. All of which attributes tend to damp a man's matrimonial intents.\n\nWomen with the physical attributes to farm risked being seen as not-women, as desexualized and unattractive and \"unnatural.\" They were \"not seen as real farmers by men but as inferior others who try to be like men and cannot therefore be taken seriously.\" Single women farmers did the work on their own, it was assumed, only because they did not have husbands to do the work. Fathers, brothers, and labourers were seen as indispensable to the woman farmer, confirming that women could not farm without men. Single women farmers might perform the work themselves, but were still not able to farm like men. \"Physical strength, sturdiness, aggressiveness, competitiveness, speaking one's mind and dominance\" were masculine qualities, while women were to be \"slim, fragile, submissive, nurturing, quiet and withdrawn.\" A single woman farmer was not a potential wife, as she did not embody and perform feminine attributes. She was excluded from both the feminine and the masculine realms.\n\nThis was the fate of two sisters, Sarah Spencer and Mary Spencer, who farmed in Sussex. In an 1842 article on \"Female Farmers,\" the author adopted a kindly tone when describing the Spencers, explaining that they farmed because their marriage prospects were slim, that \"their persons, though not uncomely, were not so attractive as to flatter them that without fortunes, they could marry advantageously.\" While the author felt they were farming \"without ceasing to be _gentlewomen_ \" and that their farm was \"much to their credit and advantage,\" he also observed that they were not \"popular characters.\" He wrote: \"This was the hard fate of the Spencers, who, instead of gratitude, long experienced little else than discourtesies and opposition in the neighbourhood. The more active of them was called _Captain Sally_ ; and her sister, her _Man Mary_.\" Things had not changed dramatically by 1907 when Estelle Long, a \"girl farmer,\" was described as a reclusive character to be shunned. On her eighteen-acre farm in Surrey, she lived in a hut (a \"dreary\" and \"desolate\" spot) and did everything herself: \"reaps, hoes, sows, kills and dresses her poultry, takes her produce to market, grooms her pony, and cleans the harness and trap, and mows her hay.\" Long was a graduate of Lady Warwick's school of agriculture, and her father, J. Long, was a professor and authority on agriculture, but none of these credentials made her any less suspect. In her neighbourhood, it was said, \"the more superstitious of the villagers look upon her... as having 'turned witch' or something of that sort.\"\n\nThe few single women farmers of Western Canada were to be similarly stigmatized, and well into the twentieth century. Farmers such as Lizzie Hillis (mentioned in the introduction) and \"Jack\" May (to be discussed in Chapter 4) were criticized and marginalized. But in the 1890s there was optimism for the cause of the \"lady farmer.\" One advocate declared in 1891 that Queen Victoria herself could be claimed as \"the first lady farmer in this country,\" as she took great interest in her farms and was an \"illustrious example\" of the fact that \"in respect to stock-keeping, women have softer natures than men, and delight to pet and cherish dumb creatures of all kinds.\" Her \"chief source of pleasure\" allegedly, was her prize-winning cows. While at Balmoral she personally inspected her home farm every day, particularly the dairy, and she advised on butter and cheese making. The products of her farms were sold in London, and \"her thrifty Majesty earns many an honest penny in this way.\"\n\nProponents of farming for women had made important advances in challenging the conviction that women who worked outdoors were rough, coarse, indecent, and masculine, insisting instead that respectability and refinement would not be lost. Things had changed from the early 1800s, when a woman with \"pretensions to gentility... had to distance herself from farm production.\" By the early twentieth century, the topic of women in agriculture and horticulture was very popular and highly visible. In 1910, for example, a series of articles appeared in the London _Daily Mail_ with headlines such as \"The Successful Woman Farmer: How Two Women Run an Agricultural Farm in England,\" and \"The Woman Poultry Farmer: Experiences of a Two-Acre Farm.\" At that time Georgina Binnie-Clark wrote inspiring columns describing her experiences as a farmer in Saskatchewan (to be discussed in Chapter 5). Yet opposition remained intense, and grew in new directions as the competence of college-trained women farmers was questioned and denigrated. Some advocates for the \"gentlewoman\" farmer hoped that the colonies might provide a more welcoming and congenial environment, as Binnie-Clark appeared to illustrate.\n\n\"SURPLUS WOMEN\" FOR THE COLONIES AS \"HOME HELPS\"... AND FARMERS\n\nA host of keen imperialists devoted to \"civilizing\" the colonies through the importation of women of the British \"race\" were active by the late nineteenth century, and they were anxious that women of \"superior breeding\" and education be pressed into service. \"If the Mother Country sends us enough people we shall grow strong as British powers,\" wrote one staunch Australian imperialist, and \"if she does not we shall either evolve quietly into races determined by our alien immigration, or we shall be swamped and effaced by invaders.\" Women imperialists worked to dispel attitudes of indifference, suspicion, and fear toward the colonies among \"refined\" women and awaken their sense of patriotism toward the Empire. These transplanted women were to transport British culture and identity to the colonies, and nurture it there. Anxieties about being \"swamped and effaced by invaders\" were heightened in colonies such as Western Canada, where Americans and ethnically diverse Europeans began to arrive in significant numbers starting in the later nineteenth century.\n\nPromoters of emigration tried to persuade colonial employers of the virtues of educated \"home helps,\" a description that was intended to create a category well above the rank of domestic servants. Women who were home helps would fit comfortably into the family circle, eliminating the need for costly servants' quarters. They would \"tackle labour with their hands _and_ their brains.\" Explorer and writer Arthur Montefiore Brice explained in his 1901 article, \"Emigration for Gentlewomen,\" that in the colonies \"you have to pay atrociously high wages for a miserable servant, who has vulgar notions of what are her rights and her duties, who cares nothing for your comfort or your welfare, who will not do any work which is distasteful to her, and who leaves you at a moment's notice.\" A \"home help,\" however, a \"healthy amiable woman, educated somewhat, able to cook and clean, sew and mend,\" would be regarded as \"an equal, as a friend, as a member of the family\"; she would be treated as \"a near relative, even a sister of the mistress.\"\n\nA problem, however, was that domestic work did not appeal to the educated gentlewomen, despite assurances that being \"companion helps\" or \"home helps\" would entail no loss of social status. They were told that they would find adventure, happiness, and quite likely husbands, and would be doing a great service to the Empire. They were \"encouraged to see emigration to the colonies and employment in someone else's home as a logical path to financial stability, self-fulfillment, and sanctified heterosexual love.\" Here the problem of the \"surplus\" educated woman of the \"motherland\" intersected with and was seen as a solution to the \"servant problem,\" and to the bachelor (or surplus male) problem in the colonies. White women were needed to work on the farms and ranches of the colonies, rather than the \"half-caste or full-blooded native\" or whites of the serving class, who were also undesirable.\n\nIn the 1880s, a network of female imperialists began \"an aggressive long-lasting promotional campaign to entice single women above the working class to emigrate.\" Various associations were formed, becoming in 1901 the British Women's Emigration Association, established to encourage and assist women of \"good character\" to emigrate. Domestic service for educated women, thinly disguised as home help, historian Lisa Chilton writes, \"was primarily a means to an end\u2014the end being the proper feminization of the empire.\"\n\nNot all of those concerned with the \"surplus women\" problem saw emigration to the colonies, where they would perform domestic work and then marry, as the solution. Some feminists criticized emigration as a strategy to discourage activism for women's rights at home, and as a means of maintaining and transplanting to the colonies women's traditional roles as wives, mothers, and moral guardians. Feminists \"began to realize that the unclear distinction between emigrating to find work and emigrating to find husbands was embarrassing.\" The problem, as they saw it, was not \"surplus women,\" but restricted education and employment opportunities. To Jessie Boucherett the solution was not emigration but extending opportunities for occupations and education and reforming the institutions that treated women as unequal to men. Women needed to be trained for occupations and pursuits other than matrimony.\n\nAs early as in her 1863 book, _Hints on Self-Help,_ Boucherett identified a central conundrum: the colonies were not interested in genteel educated women. It was impossible to persuade potential employers in the colonies that the educated woman made a good domestic servant. Boucherett quoted a Canadian emigration agent as saying that \"there exists but a very limited demand in this province for the class of women in question.\" He warned that \"the introduction of such a class into Canada would be attended with consequences far from advantageous,\" and he requested the Government Emigration Board to \"discountenance the emigration to this country of any grade of women higher than the domestic servant.\" Boucherett wrote that the same answers came from Australia, and continued:\n\nNow, if this little history of the proposed emigration of educated women were not tragical, it would be comical. England so anxious to send them away, the colonies so afraid of having to receive them; England says, \"Why don't you go to the colonies? You are not wanted here, you are burdensome to us, and we will gladly pay your passage to get rid of you.\" The colonies hearing this indignantly exclaim, \"For mercy's sake, don't send us your useless creatures! We want men to fell our Woods, cultivate our land, tend our sheep and cattle, and women to cook our dinners, and wash our clothes, but as to educated women, we don't want them, and we won't have them; if they come they will be worse off than at home, for we have no workhouses to put them in.\n\nBoucherett proposed the radical idea (in part tongue-in-cheek) that every young man in England be compelled to emigrate when he reached twenty-one. The scarcity of male labour would mean that women would be employed in many occupations identified as male, enabling the superfluous women to be provided for and thus no longer superflous.\n\nHistorian Jane Hammerton argues that female emigration was initially a feminist project in the 1860s but then became an un-feminist project, as supporters of emigration were committed to a separate-spheres ideology. Others have since questioned this interpretation, arguing that female imperialist organizations had powerful links to a broader British women's movement. Lisa Chilton found that the dominant image these organizations created for public consumption celebrated feminine power, nurturing visions of a \"new class of women for the colonies.\" Promoters of emigration saw in the colonies possibilities unavailable in Britain, and had \"unbounded faith in the abilities of suitably educated women to be successful in whatever venture they might undertake.\" In the colonies, they \"would carve out meaningful roles and identities for themselves, and... reshape the mutable male environment of the colonial frontier.\" But as one devoted supporter of emigration of women to the colonies, Lady Knightley of Fawsley, wrote, the goal of marriage and motherhood in the colonies was paramount in the minds of the philanthropists who assisted women to emigrate: \"Helping women of every grade to stand for all woman is worth, in Empire building, in evangelizing work, in going where women are prayed for to make homes for good living men, where women can be mothers of quivers full, without fear of there ever being one too many, for there will be plenty of work for every hard-working boy of every class, and a Jack for every Jill.\"\n\nAware that domestic service, even when relabelled as the more exalted home help, held little appeal to educated women, some advocates of female emigration to the colonies cast about for other potential occupations, and farming was one that emerged from a \"range of possibilities.\" The promise of land and the vocation of agriculture, it was thought, could be held out as an inducement to emigrate for genteel educated women who would not stoop to domestic service. Proposals included \"Tea and Silk Farming in New Zealand\" as ideal enterprises for \"educated yet reduced gentlewomen.\" This sort of work would not \"rob them of one iota of dignity, or lower them a single inch in the social scale.\"\n\nWriter Jessie Weston, who was originally from New Zealand but who settled in London, wrote in 1891 in \"Hints for the Single Women of the United Kingdom\" that there had to be some inducement other than marriage and domestic service for women to leave England for the colonies. \"Marriage may not be the desire of many of the female sex in the mother country,\" Weston wrote, \"and still they might be induced to emigrate if sufficient inducement were found.\" They should become \"land owners and enterprising settlers in the Colonies.\" Weston was sceptical of farming opportunities for women \"in a severe climate like that of the Confederation [Canada],\" instead advocating agricultural pursuits for women in South Africa, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia. She wrote: \"All the means of earning a livelihood we have mentioned are of and from the soil, the possession of which in all times and countries is, and has been, the source of dignity and power to its owners. To be the proprietor of an orchard, a honey-farm, a chicken farm, a vegetable farm, would fill the lives of women, now wasting away for want of an object upon which to devote their energies, with an absorbing interest, would make them useful citizens, and add to their happiness. Independence and plenty to do are powerful factors in the total sum of human happiness.\"\n\nWeston recommended small-scale farming, \"which we presume would be the aim of sensible women, who are not likely to ruin themselves with great undertakings, like the male sex have so often done. As in farming, a piece of land from ten to forty acres is a source of greater profit and pleasure than a block of five hundred acres.\" Farming on a large scale, Weston observed, required \"capital, labour, and, more than common sense, knowledge, while the profits are relatively less.\" Women who farmed on a larger scale, she believed, were successful only if they carried on as widows \"what was left in good working order by their husbands.\" While capital was required for a small farm, Weston saw no reason why women without capital could not emigrate and soon save enough to purchase land.\n\nFor Weston, the goal of sending women agriculturalists to the colonies was to preserve rather than challenge the status quo. The \"surplus\" single women of the United Kingdom were, or sought to be, wage earners, and they thus \"help[ed] to block the labour market, thrusting out the heads of families, whether male or female.\" (In Weston's view, heads of families ought to be the wage earners.) She also believed that sending women to the colonies as a means of addressing \"the utter helplessness, the apathy of despair of the poor\" \"would be more to the credit of the female sex than all their exertions on the Suffrage question,\" and more useful as well: \"A practical exposition of the ability of the female sex to become land-owners and enterprising settlers in the Colonies will be of more material advantage to woman than all oratory and literary efforts to prove the equality of the sexes.\"\n\nThere were many others who chimed in, arguing that occupations other than marriage had to be offered to women sent to the colonies. The author of a 1902 article, \"The Need of Women Colonists in South Africa,\" wrote, \"It scarcely sounds decent to cart women out to the colonies for the simple purpose of matrimony, however laudable in itself and approved by ancient precedent. Some women, I am told are not 'nice' to marry, whilst, strange as it may appear to mere men, other women do not care about marriage.\" This author advocated training for potential women colonists in gardening, poultry raising, and beekeeping.\n\nCOLONIAL TRAINING SCHOOLS\n\nAdvocates of colonial farming for genteel women from the United Kingdom, concerned that the women would be unaccustomed to manual labour and to farm work, issued calls for training schools. There was a model to emulate: the Colonial College for sons of gentlemen, established in 1887 in Suffolk, where practical as well as scientific instruction was offered on a host of topics, including agriculture, surveying, and forestry. This institution addressed the problem of the \"greenhorn\" who arrived in a colony, only \"to undergo\u2014likely among rough and ignorant strangers\u2014things which his previous bringing-up has rendered distasteful to him... to work in the open fields from dark to dark, to eat the coarsest of prepared food, and to lodge in a wretched shanty.\"\n\nAround the turn of the century a large number of colonial training schools for females quickly materialized. In most the emphasis was decidedly upon domestic rather than farm work. The earliest to be established was the Leaton Colonial Training Home in Shropshire founded in 1890. The objective was \"to give practical training in domestic work to ladies wishing to proceed to the Colonies to join their relatives, or as Companion helps.\" Pupils were \"those of the middle and upper middle class, who have been well educated at school, but who have had little to no training in domestic duties, and who being obliged to work for their living, prefer to try their fortunes abroad rather than to seek employment in England where almost every branch of women's work is overcrowded.\" Miss A.L. Vernon, the \"lady superintendent\" of the school, wrote in a 1905 pamphlet on the Leaton Colonial Training Home published by the British Women's Emigration Association that the school was intended to be a\n\nmeans of fitting women who have no particular talents or gifts, for a useful, purposeful life, more easily to be found abroad than at home... Anyone who has come much in contact with that most hopeless individual, the middle-aged, unmarried woman with no profession and an income only sufficiently large (and often not even that) to keep herself alive, must desire to save girls of the coming generation from a similar fate. Women of first-class ability will probably always be able to find remunerative employment in England... but to the large class with no special qualifications and not great ability, life in the Colonies offers much brighter prospects.\n\nThe \"mother country,\" Vernon wrote, derived the advantage of the \"removal of superfluous women,\" while there was an \"even greater gain to the Colonies of receiving capable useful women, who are needed as servants, teachers, or nurses, and ultimately as wives.\" Vernon admitted that this last consideration was of the utmost importance to all who \"see in our Colonies only a Greater Britain which they wish to keep in the hands of English men and women, and to see peopled by the descendants of English parents.\" Aside from learning how to wash clothes, cook, and scrub floors, pupils learned poultry keeping. The school was located in an \"old-fashioned\" manor house that did not have \"modern conveniences,\" helping to make the pupils \"adaptable and resourceful, and able to do their work with the simplest appliances.\" The Leaton Colonial Training Home moved to Stoke Prior in 1907, by that time boasting that over 350 women had been trained, and \"nearly all have gone to and are living in the Colonies.\"\n\n_Figure 9._ Article on the Colonial Training Farm at Arlesey, England, \"to prepare girls who wish to emigrate for the exigencies of Colonial life.\" For two years students took lessons in plain cooking, breadmaking, laundry, pickling and preserving, gardening, dairying, poultry and pig farming, carpentry, chopping wood, and digging up rough ground. Arlesey focused on Canada as the destination for its graduates. _The Bystander_ , 16 September 1908, 610\u201311.\n\nIn 1902 Lady Warwick established a one-year course of colonial training at her school in Reading and then at Studley. This program placed more emphasis on domestic skills than on farming and\/or horticulture, with three months each devoted to \"cookery, housewifery, laundry and dressmaking, dairy and poultry-farming, flower, fruit and vegetable gardening.\" The students were also taught substitutes for ingredients or how to manufacture their own, such as making yeast from potatoes. \"Their training in fact, will consist very largely in doing without things,\" was one description of the colonial course.\n\nThe Swanley Horticultural College also established a Colonial Branch in 1902, anticipating an increase in the number of women emigrants to South Africa, offering a one-year course of \"practical training in Gardening, Dairying, Poultry, Cooking, Fruit Bottling and Jam Making, Laundry, Hygiene, Sanitation, South African Languages etc.\" Among the many competing institutions and programs, Swanley was distinct because of its curriculum that aimed at educating women to fill skilled occupations in teaching, gardening, and agriculture in the colonies, although domestic work was also included. The Swanley program also aspired to the goal of settlements or colonies of women engaged in the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture. By 1909, however, a change in the program's name to the Colonial and Home Domestic Training Branch acknowledged that there were few placements in the colonies of graduates in horticulture.\n\nIt seems that very little accreditation or inspection was required to open a training school for women headed to the colonies, and programs proliferated. In 1904 a school in Domestic Training for Gentlewomen: For Colonial and Home Life opened in \"a small private Ladies Club in Chelsea at very moderate fees.\" The pupils were taught plain cooking, house and parlour work, and domestic economy. The school advertised itself as the only residential training school in London devoted to the purpose of colonial training, meant specifically for the benefit of girls who could not afford a long and expensive education. That same year a new Training Home for Ladies opened in Devonshire, where the emphasis was on domestic economy, including cooking, jam making, dressmaking, laundry, plain gardening, simple carpentry, upholstery, butter making, and poultry raising.\n\nThe Arlesey House Colonial Training school at Hitchin opened in 1907. Here, as at Studley, the training focused on \"making do\" when \"far from civilization.\" The practical instruction included \"plain cooking, bread making, riding, driving, stable-management, [and] simple carpentry.\" There was, however, instruction in farming small holdings, and after taking the full two-year course the graduate was pronounced equipped to farm her own land if she so wished. A critic of the school commented on the \"vagueness\" of the training, as it was not clear for what colony or region of a colony the women were being trained: \"You might keep house for fifty years in most parts of New Zealand and never want to do most of the things taught at this school.\"\n\nTraining for Canada was increasingly the focus at Arlesey. Journalist Sarah A. Tooley visited Arlesey in 1910 and wrote an article in the _Globe_ (Toronto) on \"Training Girls for Life in the Colonies.\" A conference with the theme of Canada was hosted there that same year. The principal of the school, Miss J.S. Turner, explained that the theme was chosen because \"such a very large proportion of the girls who wrote to her about colonial training wanted to go to Canada.\" In the conclusion to her article Tooley wrote, \"The aim of the school is to fit women for colonial life, whether as cultivators of land on their own account, as gardeners, poultry-keepers, or as the wives and mothers of homesteaders.\" She also noted that Miss Turner had plans to establish branch schools in the various colonies, but this did not materialize in Canada.\n\nSeveral other colonial training schools were established by 1912. There were so many by this time that staffing them may have constituted one solution to the \"surplus women\" problem. Battersea Polytechnic offered a three-month program through its Training Department of Domestic Science: Preparation for Colonial Life, which included household management, cookery, laundry work, and needlework. At Lane House, Brandesburton, Hull, a Mrs. Harrison established \"a small private colonial Training School Highly recommended and conducted by Ladies. The house stands on its own grounds a few yards away from the farm, and the work is conducted as much as possible as it would be on a Colonial ranch.\" The training here covered housework, cooking, dairy and laundry, curing bacon and hams, fruit bottling, preserving, poultry raising, beekeeping, and gardening.\n\nIn 1914 an Overseas Training School for Women was established at Hoebridge Farm, Woking Surrey, by Rupert Guinness, of the wealthy brewing family. Guinness was a keen agriculturalist, as was his wife, Gwendolen Guinness, who was also involved in emigration societies such as the Colonial Intelligence League. Encouraged by the success of the Emigration Training Farm for young men from the public schools, the Guinnesses extended this work to women and girls. The school was for Englishwomen of the educated class desirous of making homes in the dominions, and its emphasis was on \"domestic science.\" A farmhouse was equipped under the direction of a Canadian woman, a graduate of the Macdonald Institute in Guelph. Housework would be undertaken \"according to Canadian practice,\" and students would learn to cook \"all dishes common in Canada.\" A short course of eight weeks for \"Home Makers Overseas\" was recommended to all women \"going to join husband, brother, or father, as well as for home helps or those to be engaged in the lighter forms of agricultural work such as dairying, poultry raising.\"\n\nGirls and women who attended the colonial training programs must have come to Western Canada, but there are few traces of their presence. Emma (Roberts) Ducie was born in Yorkshire in 1883 and came with her family to Saskatchewan in 1907. She had attended the Home and Colonial Training College supported by the Anglican Church before coming to Canada, and credited the training college \"and its far flung students with making her realize there was a world beyond Great Britain.\" This may have been an institution that trained teachers rather than providing the sort of domestic colonial training detailed above, which was designed for girls with little interest in intellectual pursuits. Ducie \"used her training to advantage\" while teaching school in Saskatchewan. She married a homesteader, and they farmed together for forty-two years and raised three children. Ducie organized the local Homemakers Club (later Women's Institutes) and planned reading courses for rural women on topics such as \"farming, gardening, international affairs and education.\"\n\nTHE IMPERIAL COLONIST AND WOMEN FARMERS FOR THE COLONIES\n\nA growing enthusiasm for sending British women as farmers to the colonies can be traced in the journal the _Imperial Colonist_. In the late nineteenth century the Women's Emigration Society, the United Englishwomen's Emigration Society (renamed in 1901 the British Women's Emigration Association, or BWEA), and the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women all worked to ensure that women of \"good character\" were sent to the colonies, arrived safely, and received adequate reception upon arrival. The BWEA published a monthly journal, the _Imperial Colonist_ , inaugurated in 1902 and edited by Lady Knightley of Fawsley, who was devoted to the cause of women's emigration to the colonies and who had a particular interest in agriculture. This organization advocated farming for single women in the colonies, among many other occupations, all rather uneasily alongside an even greater emphasis on domestic service or home help as a training ground for marriage. In the wake of the South African War, that colony was a major focus of the journal when it first appeared, and Fawsley was particularly devoted to South Africa. The _Imperial Colonist_ was filled with references to the need for women to transform \"the blood-stained veldt\" into \"a loyal and prosperous community living in peace and harmony beneath the British flag.\"\n\nBut from the first issue of the _Imperial Colonist_ , much attention was paid to Western Canada as a destination for girls and women who wanted a life out of doors, as home helps, as mothers' helps, or as sisters helping brothers. Slowly there also crept into the pages suggestions that women might farm land of their own in Western Canada. In any case, they would bring culture, music, and refined ways that would improve the lives of men in the outposts of empire. Founder and first president of the BWEA Ellen Joyce announced in the first issue: \"The women wanted in Western Canada are those healthy, countrybred women who love and understand animal life, and who prefer the freedom of the country to the conventionalities of the town. They must be women of some culture, but who have training in domestic arts by practicing them, and who will keep up the tone of the men with whom they mix by music and book lore when the day's work is done.\"\n\nDespite no expressions of interest in women farmers from any of the colonies, the idea of agriculture as a potential occupation for British women settlers gained momentum in the _Imperial Colonist_. Opportunities for women to study or attend conferences on agriculture before setting out for the colonies were advertised in the journal. In the third issue it announced that Lady Warwick intended to hold a conference of women engaged in the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture. Small holdings and horticulture were advocated in the journal: raising poultry, dairy, fruit, vegetables, or some combination of these (despite the fact that these sorts of enterprises were not characteristic of successful farms on the prairies). Colonies of small holders close to railways and towns or cities, rather than on the isolated prairies, were proposed. By the twelfth issue (1902), an article on \"Woman's Position in Canada\" noted that \"there is room in the country for single women with a little capital, who may invest in the establishment of poultry farms, either near one or other of the cities within reach of the railway.\" It was anticipated that the women would first work as home helps, however. In 1903 the journal annouced \"offers on the spot\" in Calgary \"for yeoman class women to go on ranches to join family life; work is hard but life is healthy.\" Marriage remained the true goal and gauge of success, however; the same issue noted that because so many of the home helps sent to farms had married, there would be many openings in the spring in the \"Far West\" of Canada.\n\nDetails about difficulties, challenges, and disadvantages that awaited women who wanted to farm land in Western Canada were not dealt with in the _Imperial Colonist_. The specifics of the \"free\" grant of homestead land (160 acres for a filing fee of ten dollars), a privilege available only to widows with children, were not described in any detail. Advertisements that ran in many issues for several years in the _Imperial Colonist_ proclaimed \"160 Acres in Western Canada Free. Healthy Climate. Good Crops. Free Schools. Light Taxes. Abundant Water,\" but made no mention that most women were not eligible for this land.\n\nNor was it ever mentioned that single women could have a free grant of homestead land if they moved to the American West. British women were directed only to the British colonies and encouraged to see themselves as vital to the great British imperial enterprise. The _Imperial Colonist_ discouraged emigration of single women to the United States with warnings that there would be no one to meet and house them, which would \"leave the Englishwoman stranded,\" and that she could then be lured by Mormons into a life of polygamy. Women were urged to go to Canada \"under our own flag,\" where they were needed to stem the tide of immigration from the United States into Canada.\n\nHopes that British women could farm in the colonies were not solely trained on Western Canada, and initially South Africa received a lot of attention. The _Imperial Colonist_ reported in January 1904 that the Agricultural Sub-Committee of the South African Colonization Society had devised a scheme for a dairy and poultry farm near Potchefstroom in South Africa. It was to be operated by two graduates from Swanley and ten others who would rent a farm, and there were hopes that this might form the nucleus for a prosperous settlement of women farmers. The scheme did not materialize. This was followed in March 1904 by the announcement of plans for a Women's Settlement in the Orange River Colony, where plots of irrigated land were to be offered to \"lady settlers.\" It was also hoped that women could play a part in the agricultural and horticultural development of the Transvaal, and there were calls in the _Imperial Colonist_ for women who had a little capital, some knowledge of climatic and other conditions, and \"the tact and power necessary for the management of native labour.\"\n\nThere were many reports in early issues of the _Imperial Colonist_ of Swanley graduates being sought in South Africa for positions as gardeners, and of the successes of a few who took up these positions. These reports generally stressed the success of women gardeners in managing \"Kaffirs.\" In February 1906, Mary Hewetson, a former Swanley student and head gardener at Pietermaritzburg, was managing about thirty acres of fruit, flowers, and vegetables, as well as a poultry yard, with the aid of \"six Kaffirs.\" A year later Hewetson had taken up a forty-acre plot of irrigated land of her own in Natal with a woman friend. This announcement, however, was soon followed by \"sad news of the death of Miss Hewetson,\" with no explanation of the cause. Hewetson was heralded in the September 1907 _Imperial Colonist_ as \"a Pioneer and a most able one in the work of establishing women in agricultural and horticultural pursuits in South Africa.\" A few months earlier, Mrs. Macdonald, the secretary of the Pietermaritzburg branch of the South African Colonization Committee, had been \"murdered by her Indian servant.\" Following these events there was less promotion in the _Imperial Colonist_ on opportunities for women farmers in South Africa. Poultry farms in Natal, it was reported, were precarious because of \"thieves and strange new diseases.\" Vegetable gardening there was \"chiefly in the hands of coolies who rent and cultivate most patches by rivers.\" This was seen to be difficult for the British woman gardener, as \"the hard-working, frugal Indian coolie has made market gardening his specialty and it needs skill, perseverance and some little capital in order to compete with him.\"\n\nArticles on South Africa in the _Imperial Colonist_ often focused on topics related to managing local servants. Stories about successful Swanley graduates stressed the proficiency of women gardeners in managing \"Kaffirs,\" while other articles discussed matters such as \"The Wrong Way to Manage Black Servants\" and \"The Peril of the Black.\" Even the somewhat successful Mary Heweston had found it a challenge to \"manage\" her servants; she reported in 1906 that \"I have a dozen or thirteen 'boys' of all kinds, some utterly raw, ignorant, unintelligible and stupid\u2014others, with fixed ideas of what they should or should not do\u2014a difficult team to drive, and often at night I wondered how I should get through the next day.\" A 1919 article on \"Empire Migration\" warned potential home helps headed to South Africa that the work \"may probably be to superintend the native servants, and she must be able to keep them in their right place and prevent any liberties, as familiarity might have terrible results.\" Yet the author did not want to frighten or discourage, adding: \"Not that there need be any fear for the safety of a sensible girl who follows advice, especially where there is a white man to act as protector.\"\n\nBeyond the _Imperial Colonist_ , concerns were being expressed about South Africa as a destination for British women who wanted to farm. In a 1909 presentation to the National Union of Women Workers of Great Britain and Ireland, Frances Taylor spoke on \"Conditions of Life for Women in South Africa,\" emphasizing that it was impossible for white female (or male) colonists to perform manual labour on farms or elsewhere. She explained that \"most of the hard work is done by natives, and therefore, unfortunately, manual labour on the part of the superior, or White Race, is looked down upon as derogatory and undignified... How quickly does the girl just arrived to undertake the ordinary duties of a domestic servant learn to say, 'Oh, that is Kaffir's work, I could not possibly do that.'\" South Africa did \"not want women doing manual labour out of doors, contending that it would bring them down to the level of 'Kaffirs.'\" Edith O'Connor, who farmed with her husband in the Transvaal, was more explicit in her explanation of the obstacles to British women farming independently in South Africa, stating that \"the attitude of the native toward women is the big and predominant difficulty. Even a small picaninny will be deeply hurt if hit by a woman, it being not the slap, but the sex of the slapper that insults him. Carry this attitude to the grown man, who, in addition to despising women, is uncontrolled in his sexual appetite, and the difficulty for a white woman can be imagined.\" O'Connor warned that a woman alone on a farm would have to sleep with a revolver handy and to have a guard dog. For many reasons, then, farming for women in South Africa was dismissed as an \"absurd expedient.\"\n\nAgricultural opportunities also existed for British women in New Zealand and Australia, according to the _Imperial Colonist_. Particularly favourable conditions were seen to prevail in New Zealand for small holdings. But increasingly, Western Canada was cast as the most congenial destination for women who wanted to farm. There were none of the problems with \"native servants\" that prevailed in South Africa; there was plenty of cleared prairie land available; and the climate was healthy and exhilarating. In a 1908 _Imperial Colonist_ , for example, a woman reported from \"Sunny Alberta,\" north of Edmonton, that she had bought land adjoining that of her daughter and son-in-law, where she had a poultry farm that made a profitable business through marketing chickens, geese, and turkeys. She wrote that \"it is really a very happy life, a quiet one certainly, but have plenty of books and papers, and we are all interested in our poultry, and animals, and gardening, and though it is a very quiet spot the country is most beautiful and life ideal. The climate is cold in winter, but air so clear and dry, one does not feel it as in England.\"\n\nIn 1910 agricultural opportunities for women in the Canadian West began to garner much more attention in the _Imperial Colonist._ It was announced that a colony of women poultry farmers was to be established by the Canadian Pacific Railway at Strathmore, Alberta; the colony would provide eggs and poultry to the transcontinental railway. (The initiative does not appear to have ever materialized.) And as will be discussed in Chapter 5, articles and lectures by Saskatchewan farmer Georgina Binnie-Clark helped to generate interest in farming for English women in the Canadian West.\n\nBut calls for British women to farm the prairies also generated criticism and warnings. In 1910 Eileen L. Burns wrote to the _Imperial Colonist_ to say that she could \"not possibly recommend farming for women in Western Canada.\" It was unsuitable and impossible. Few women, she wrote, had the physical strength and endurance required, and she continued: \"When farming is advocated as a career for women in this country, I most positively and definitely state that it is an absolutely visionary scheme, foredoomed to failure.\" Burns knew of only a few cases where women had succeeded, apart from widows who carried on with farms that were already \"going concerns.\" (She was the wife of cattle baron and meat packer Patrick Burns, one of the wealthiest men in Western Canada.)\n\nOverall, however, it must be admitted that there were many more articles in the _Imperial Colonist_ devoted to opportunities for home helps (as well as for nurses, stenographers, teachers, dressmakers, and tea-shop owners) in Western Canada than to the potential vocation of agriculture for single women. And a great deal of emphasis was placed on the immediate matrimonial destiny of the home helps. A 1902 article declared that so many of the home helps sent out to the \"Far West\" had married that there would be as many fresh openings in the spring. A primary concern of the journal was to draw attention to the \"White Women's Burden.\" The editorial note in a 1911 issue was typical: \"The Empires' call to the women of our race is clear, urgent and inspiring: never before so insistent as it is today. Our young men want mates of their blood in the great sunny uplands of the Empire... The Dominion needs wives, sisters, mothers, teachers, nurses, domestic helpers and home makers.\" Women farmers were not on the list.\n\nJOURNALISTS FLORA SHAW AND MARY AGNES FITZGIBBON, AND THE SCHOOL FOR \"LADY COLONISTS\" IN WESTERN CANADA\n\nFlora Shaw, the colonial editor of the _Times_ of London, saw it as the duty of British women to settle the Canadian prairies and wrote a series of columns on the subject in 1898. At that time she did not advocate that women farm land of their own, but she came later to endorse the idea. Others, particularly Canadian journalist Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon, built on Shaw's observations of the needs of the region to point out the potential for women farmers, and together they became linked with the scheme for a school for \"lady colonists\" on the prairies who would learn the skills required to farm land on their own.\n\nA devoted imperialist, Shaw aspired to advance the cause of the British Empire through her journalism. She was an intense student of what was happening in the colonies, she advocated imperial expansion and colonial economic development, and she sought to influence imperial politics and policy makers. Her work had attracted worldwide press attention and praise by 1898, when she was sent to investigate conditions in the Klondike, and she welcomed the opportunity because it also allowed her to visit and write about other parts of Canada. As part of a series called \"Letters From Canada,\" Shaw wrote several long articles on the prairies and the ranching, grain, and mixed-farming economies being established there. Her main concern was the preponderance of solitary men on their solitary homesteads, living in tiny, poorly built shacks. The new verb \"to batch,\" she noted, \"upon the prairies represents perhaps the _minimum_ of pleasure in existence with which man, civilized or uncivilized, has been known to content himself with.\" Shaw proposed that sisters be encouraged to join their brothers in the enterprise of farming the prairies. This was not a new idea for this journalist; in 1894 she had given a paper to the Royal Colonial Institute in London on the \"Australian Outlook,\" and had called on younger sisters to accompany brothers settling in the colonies.\n\nShaw did not in her published letters touch on the subject of women farming on their own on the prairies, and did not deal with the thorny issues of ownership of the farm and land that the sister and brother had jointly established, or what would happen to her if the brother married. Shaw's idea of the sister companion to the male homesteader in Western Canada gained supporters, however, who did address these issues. Arthur Montefiore Brice adopted many of Shaw's ideas and phrases but went much further, advocating an equal partnership. Brice wrote that on the Canadian prairies, \"brother and sister... should take up a farm together and work it on terms of equal partnership for... not less than four or five years.\" When one or both wanted to marry, \"it is only right and practical that then there should be a basis for the equitable division of, or allowance for, the results of their joint labours.\"\n\nBuilding on Shaw's proposals, and also publishing in the _Times_ of London some months after Shaw's articles about Canada appeared, Canadian journalist Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon (writing under her pen name, Lally Bernard) proposed a scheme for the establishment of a school in Western Canada for lady colonists who would then obtain land there on their own. This would not be for \"female emigration in the lower rank of life,\" but be \"in the interests of the numerous gentlewomen who are capitalists in a small way... Often such is the daughter of a small squire or a land-owner.\" A few months of practical work at such an institute, Fitzgibbon wrote, would fit a woman to take up land and \"invest her capital at a much higher rate of interest in Canada than she could ever hope to get at home.\" These colonists would be released from the \"worrying grind of genteel poverty.\" Fitzgibbon was eloquent in her call for women to take up this challenge rather than join the \"spinster army of Great Britain\":\n\nGranted the lady colonists will have much to learn and much to endure, still how many women have to go about the Continent with some browbeating dowager or spinster aunt, whose petty tyranny leaves her unhappy companion, a nervous wreck of womanhood, to take her place among the spinster army of Great Britain. They cling to their tradition of caste. Let them prove their claim to intrepid blood and face life in this newer Britain, fighting, it may be against the elements and certainly against difficulties and prejudices in their new surroundings. This was surely better than the striving to make a tiny income cover expenses which very probably increase as their already small interest diminishes.\n\nYet even Fitzgibbon saw these women primarily and ultimately as reproducers of the \"race\" rather than as farmers. She called on women to help give to the \"Anglo-Saxon world a new 'Viking' race\" to rule over \"the boundless waves of the prairie province, that vast rolling sea of earth ready for the seed man shall scatter and plough.\" The mothers of this Viking race, in Fitzgibbon's view, should be the \"daughters of British gentry... practical, intelligent and cultured\" and trained to \"face the vicissitudes of existence in the sparsely populated districts of the North-West.\" Daughters of British gentry could not simply go upon Canadian farms the way the sons could, they needed training and to be shown that \"interesting absorbing work can be found in activities connected with agriculture.\"\n\nFitzgibbon was herself struggling with \"genteel poverty\" at this time. Born Mary Agnes Bernard in Canada, in 1881 at age nineteen she travelled to England with her aunt, Lady Susan Agnes Macdonald, the second wife of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, and made her debut in London that season. A year later she married an Irish lawyer of titled parentage, Clare Valentine Fitzgibbon. He was a grandson of the Earl of Clare, and the couple socialized among an elite London circle. Their daughter was born in 1885. But when her husband was confined to an asylum in 1896, Fitzgibbon had to find a way to support herself, her daughter, and her mother. She was a gentlewoman thrown on her own resources. She returned to Canada and lived in Toronto with her mother and stepfather, D'Alton McCarthy. McCarthy was killed in a carriage accident two years later. Fitzgibbon became a journalist, publishing mainly in the Toronto _Globe_. (After about 1900 she was known by the name \"Mrs. Clare Fitzgibbon,\" and she also published under the names \"Margo Meredith,\" \"Citoyenne,\" and \"Fitz-Clare\" as well as \"Lally Bernard.\") Her fourteen years in England had helped to make her a devoted \"Imperial Daughter\" who continued to return for visits, attending two coronations and \"helping to forge a strong link between Canada and the Mother Country.\"\n\nFitzgibbon's 1899 letter to the _Times_ on a school for lady colonists was soon followed by a _Times_ editorial endorsing the scheme, particularly the idea of a training school, but placing less emphasis on the women farming on their own. The editorial was clearly written by Flora Shaw, and she and Fitzgibbon were together associated with the scheme from then on. Shaw's \"Women and Colonial Settlement\" began by detailing the number of \"surplus\" of women that had risen alarmingly in the United Kingdom. Industrious, cheerful, and healthy women were needed in the colonies. The Canadian West was an \"admirable field\" for the initiation of an experiment of the kind proposed by Fitzgibbon, as the land was cheap, the soil good, markets were at hand, and \"nowhere more than the Canadian prairies are women needed for the purpose of investing the bare log houses known as 'shacks' with the comfort and dignity of homes.\" It was emphasized that there were no physical dangers to be faced on the prairies.\n\nThe _Times_ editorial endorsed the idea of a training home for women situated in Western Canada, operated at government expense in connection with a system of experimental farms. Women would be instructed in practical agriculture (dairying, gardening, poultry rearing, beekeeping) as well as in household arts, including cooking and laundry. The graduates \"might in some instances purchase and work land for themselves,\" but \"in the majority of cases it is supposed that they will in the first instance work in co-operation with their farmer brothers on a system of mutual profit.\" To keep the cost of this education within reason, Shaw called on the government to at least subsidize such an institution with the assistance of private subscriptions and endowments. She predicted that if such a scheme were successfully inaugurated, other colonies would soon copy the example, and Canada would \"render a service to the cause of Imperial consolidation.\"\n\nShaw explained why educated and refined women were needed for the colonies rather than working-class women: they were \"hardier, more active in out-of-doors habits, better bred and better fed than their contemporaries of the less-favoured labouring classes. They have the intelligence to initiate... and are driven by the wholesome spur of poverty either present or to come.\" She concluded with the hope that in one generation it would be commonly accepted that \"the young women no less than the young men of the United Kingdom should confidently seek a living wherever the British flag flies in a temperate climate.\"\n\nThe idea of a training school for lady colonists received widespread coverage in English and Canadian newspapers. Some were in favour. An editorial in the _Leeds Mercury_ of 12 April 1899 endorsed the scheme of training women in agriculture suitable to the region of prairie Canada. A school was essential for \"poor ladies, refined and well brought up, who may desire to exchange the pinched life and narrow means... for the greater independence, freedom and brighter outlook of which the colonial farm gives the assurance.\" The editors believed that the Canadian prairies would be the best colonial location for the scheme, as \"no better climate could be found, the soil is fruitful, and land so cheap that, we are told, one year's moderately successful crop will cover not only the cost of purchase, but the outlay on production.\"\n\nOthers, however, raised questions about the feasibility of the plan. Fitzgibbon elaborated and developed her scheme and addressed the concerns of critics. She stressed the efficiency of the North-West Mounted Police in ensuring a peaceful and law-abiding country. There was no influx of raucous gold seekers in the region. She faced the question of the cold winters with the reply about the \"dry cold\" that has since become standard when describing the Western Canadian climate. Fitzgibbon wrote that settlers on the prairies would rather face a temperature of fifty degrees below zero there than \"the cold which chilled them to the very marrow while dining in one of England's swagger country houses in November.\"\n\nIn October 1899, Fitzgibbon went to Western Canada for a six-week trip for the purpose of \"verifying exactly what life is like at the present there among the educated class of people.\" She also wanted to explore the feasibility of settling a number of women near Calgary, where they would raise poultry and market garden. Fitzgibbon continued to emphasize that the scheme was meant to promote women farmers, but she argued that they ought to devote their capital and energies to \"co-operative small farming, poultry-raising, fruit culture, dairying etc.\" It was nonetheless a radical plan, as she insisted there was scope for women \"as operators on their own account along co-operative lines.\" If they were \"girls,\" then they should go to the West as \"lady helpers\" rather than farmers. On this visit she declared Brandon, Manitoba, as a likely site for such a school, in conjunction with the experimental farm there. She also stated that she had submitted a plan to Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton, \"from whom I received a decidedly ambiguous acknowledgement.\"\n\nFitzgibbon developed further rationales for choosing Canada over other colonies. In Canada, British women \"could go forth and fight their way in any line they may choose, just as their brothers are doing.\" No \"special machinery\" was required \"for the protection and placing of lonely women.\" Ignoring the Indigenous population, the writer explained that Canada was a \"white man's land from end to end\" and added, \"There are other Colonies where the 'native' question renders such a line or argument impossible.\"\n\n\"Influential women in the motherland,\" Fitzgibbon hoped, would lend their assistance to the scheme of a school for lady colonists, but this did not materialize. As one letter to the _Times_ replied in response to the initiative, there _was_ a training school for lady colonists, the Leaton Colonial Training Home, which not only trained suitable women but weeded out \"those who were unfit\" before they ever arrived in a colony. Nor did Fitzgibbon succeed in persuading the Canadian government to support the plan. Her own newspaper, the _Globe_ , thought private enterprise rather than government should take up the scheme. Despite the fact that no such training school was ever founded in Western Canada, Fitzgibbon's campaign helped to focus aspirations for British colonists and farmers in that region. Fitzgibbon had successfully argued that \"of all the colonies Canada has the greatest advantages to offer as a field for the enterprise of the future lady colonist.\" As Mrs. Archibald Colquhoun stated in her 1904 presentation to London's Royal Colonial Institute on \"Women and the Colonies,\" for middle-class women emigrants \"it was to Canada that they must look for their chief field of colonization,\" if they could be persuaded to have more courage and patriotism.\n\nIn her regular columns for the _Globe_ as Lally Bernard, Fitzgibbon stressed her \"deep interest in the question of agriculture and horticulture as a vocation for women.\" She wrote, \"I am often amused at the scorn with which the majority of people regard the idea of agriculture for women as being practicable and desirable. As a matter of fact, both in the U.S. and Canada farms of all kinds are most successfully run by women, and all branches of horticultural work are being run by women in every part of the world.\" She compared the opportunities for women to study agriculture in Canada unfavourably to those in Britain and other nations. In a 1901 column she had asked why the government did not open the horticultural department at the Agricultural College at Guelph to women students, given that the head of the department was \"most anxious\" for this to happen. She noted that \"already in Great Britain women are doing most successful work in horticulture... Lady orchardists and florists are to be found both in the United States and Great Britain and Belgium.\"\n\nFitzgibbon was disappointed, however, at the colonial training schools in England, where she found little emphasis on sending student colonists to Canada. The colonial training branch at Swanley, she observed in 1903, was directed toward opportunities in South Africa. She hoped that a patron could supply the school with a kitchen and entire \"Canadian outfit\" such as would be found in the West. By this point, Fitzgibbon had backed away from promoting colonial training in Canada, writing that it was beyond the means of most women who had to pay for their passage and find a job right away. She now highlighted the domestic skills women needed for Canada and downplayed their potential as farmers and landowners on their own. She often returned to the theme that lady colonists were what the West needed, but placed greater emphasis on their roles as wives, mothers, and home helps rather than as farmers.\n\nTHE COLONIAL INTELLIGENCE LEAGUE\n\nFounded in 1910, the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women (CIL) was the creation of Caroline (Mrs. Norman) Grosvenor, a novelist and artist, and member of an influential network of elite women interested in the settlement of British women in the colonies. Grosvenor had been an activist with the South African Colonization Society. For her it was an imperial mission and duty for women to emigrate. She believed, however, that girls and women could not be simply sent out as potential wives, and that farming could be the vocation that awaited some of them. Yet the CIL was somewhat cautious and muted in its support for women farmers in Canada, not wanting to appear radical and alienate potential donors and supporters, but instead reflecting the consensus that women were best suited to lighter agriculture on small holdings, clustered in settlements or colonies.\n\nGrosvenor was above all an ardent imperialist, and this was combined with an obsession about the fate of the \"surplus women\" of the genteel or educated classes. The plan was to send these \"superior\" women to the colonies, and the focus of the CIL was soon Canada. Here would be employed \"a vast amount of splendid material which is now being either wrongly used or entirely wasted\"; this would \"bring hope and a future to many thousands for whom life at present looks infinitely dark and difficult, and last and most important of all, it will help to keep the British Empire for the British race.\" Grosvenor was concerned that Englishwomen, \"charming, pretty, amiable as they might be[,] are hopelessly unfitted for the life of hard work\" that awaited them. In a 1909 column in the _Times_ of London, Grosvenor addressed the issue of training Englishwomen for conditions in the colonies. She argued first of all that unmarried daughters _must_ go to the colonies where \"the very best of our British race are sent to plough their lonely furrow.\" The women had to be trained, however; they could not simply be sent \"on the chance of their meeting suitable husbands,\" and Grosvenor recommended the Colonial Training College at Stoke Prior. She urged any woman under thirty who had \"the ancient inheritance of her race\u2014the spirit of adventure and the longing of a home of her own\" to set forth, but to first attend a training home. Small groups of women could establish market gardens, or poultry, dairy, or bee farms.\n\nThe three goals and objectives of the CIL, as set out in the first annual report of 1910, were to (1) maintain an \"Intelligence Office\" in England that estimated the demands for women's work in the colonies; (2) establish in each of the colonies expert agents who would investigate local opportunities and conditions; and (3) establish in each a \"Colony of Settlements for Women,\" where they could be trained for local conditions.\n\nThe focus of the CIL was the educated \"surplus woman.\" While other organizations were devoted to sending women to the colonies primarily for domestic service, the CIL would be solely aimed at the \"educated gentlewoman, accustomed to country life, with a knowledge of practical affairs, and [who], with a little capital might find an opportunity in some one of the many departments of intensive agriculture.\" Grosvenor's organization was also determined to gather \"intelligence\" about conditions in each of the colonies. The existing organizations, Grosvenor thought, provided the machinery for emigration, but there was a \"crying need for a proper intelligence department which shall estimate the demand of the Colonies and bring it into relation with the supply which we believe to exist.\" She wanted to be sure that women left for the colonies only when they were assured of suitable work. The plan was for the CIL to establish in each colony an agency to investigate local needs. And Grosvenor did investigate local needs herself (to some degree), travelling to Western Canada in 1911, 1912, and 1914, quickly focusing on British Columbia as the site for an \"agricultural training home\" for Englishwomen.\n\nLike many other and earlier advocates of agriculture for \"surplus women\" in the colonies, Grosvenor sought women who were not interested in intellectual pursuits but instead loved the outdoors. As a novelist, she provided descriptions more eloquent than those of many of her contemporaries and predecessors. Grosvenor \"spoke of the girls who have been brought up in the country, who amidst the moorlands of Scotland or Ireland, the dales of the North of England, the broad pastures of the Midlands, or the wind-swept downs of the South, have got into their blood the love of outdoor life, of outdoor things and animals.\" More than previous advocates of emigration, however, Grosvenor was focused on Canada, and she was more willing to articulate the difficulties to be faced. She outlined these in her most sustained statement on the issue in the _Times_ in 1913, under the title \"Women Farmers in Canada: A British Farm Settlement.\" The major problem was that there were no salaried positions for women in Canada on poultry or dairy farms because it was difficult to house them (\"hired\" men could sleep in rough conditions, but hired gentlewomen could not); because few farmers produced eggs, poultry, and dairy products for market; and because \"there exists in Canada a curiously strong prejudice against employing women in outside work.\"\n\nThe structure of the CIL departed to some extent from previous emigration societies, \"breaking away from past practices of amateurism and female voluntary work,\" but the upper-class background of its founders kept it a \"patrician organization.\" Its honorary president was Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, and many elite women and men figured among the benefactors. Historian Andrew Yarmie has argued that the CIL was not as stridently imperialistic as its predecessors, placing less importance on imposing English ideas on the colonies and instead cautioning that the English woman must learn the \"ways and ideas\" of the colonies. While there was an emphasis on recruiting Englishwomen, the organization also had branch offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Some of the members were acquainted with Canada, such as Lady Sybil Grey, daughter of the Governor General of Canada Earl Grey. Lady Grey was an adventurous person (later a decorated nurse wounded in the First World War) who in 1909 visited the Yukon and staked a gold claim in the Klondike.\n\nEchoing the cause of Mary Fitzgibbon, Caroline Grosvenor believed that British women already trained in poultry farming or dairying in the \"Old Country\" required practical experience in Canada, in farm settlements, where they could learn about local conditions. She decided this following her 1911 visit to Western Canada. The belief that \"home help\" work was ill-suited to the educated woman was reinforced by the visit that same year of Ella Sykes, mentioned at the outset of this chapter. Sykes volunteered to visit Canada in 1911 on behalf of the CIL to investigate conditions for women in the West. Her book _A Home-Help in Canada_ was a result of this visit _._ She took five temporary \"home help\" positions in four provinces and was a guest on other farms. Her description of the life of a \"home help\" was negative, or at best ambivalent, and she did not recommend the work for the educated woman. Skykes was, however, like Grosvenor, convinced that British women needed to seek their fortunes in the colonies, that it was \"Imperial work to help girls of a high stamp to seek their fortunes beyond the seas\u2014women who will care for our glorious Flag and what it signifies.\"\n\nIt was after the 1911 visits to Canada of Sykes and Grosvenor that the CIL began planning a farm settlement in British Columbia, which began in 1913 with the purchase of fifteen acres. The Princess Patricia Ranch would train eight to ten women at a time, who would give their labour in return for board and lodging. The settlement would also demonstrate the capacity of British women as poultry keepers and vegetable growers and induce Canadian farmers to employ them. \"The Canadian needs 'ocular demonstration' to be convinced,\" Grosvenor wrote, \"but once convinced he will take up a new idea with lightning rapidity.\" The ranch was to be the first of others, as it was hoped that government aid would fund future such settlements. Grosvenor believed the scheme should appeal to both Canadian and British as \"sound Imperial statesmanship.\" As the first of many in Canada and other colonies, the Princess Patricia Ranch would be a \"stepping stone in a big movement, which will be of the greatest possible use in opening up enormous possibilities to women themselves, and to the country of their adoption.\" Ultimately these settlements would \"help to keep British possessions loyal to the flag.\"\n\nDespite its emphasis on \"colonial intelligence,\" the CIL appears to have gathered very little information on the conditions of farming, ranching, or gardening in Western Canada. In the organization's archival collection there is a substantial bound volume with the title \"Colonial Intelligence League Reference Book: Canada\" printed boldly on the front, along with \"N.B. The contents of this book are strictly private and confidential.\" Inside, however, there is surprisingly little \"intelligence.\" Most of the pages are blank. On farming there are a few entries, most of which are discouraging. From Calgary in 1912 it was reported that it was not possible for women to find positions there on poultry farms; they would need to work as hired helps, which meant \"grinding work.\" There was also no work in Calgary for women \"Jobbing Gardeners\" because of the \"long idle season. We are so high up that our gardens are always spoilt very early by a crushing frost. Last year it was in August, and after that there is nothing to do but gather up and burn the debris, cover all up with manure and wait until April.\" The real problem was, \"What would they do from October to April?\" From British Columbia it was reported that year that land was very expensive to purchase, that it took years to clear land and that it was arduous work: three to five years of \"waiting and struggling.\" Fruit trees did not produce for four or five years. Gardening in British Columbia was \"in the hands of the Chinese,\" and they undersold all others.\n\nThe CIL appears to have forged no links with the women who had been attempting to promote and facilitate farming for (British) women in prairie Canada through the homesteads-for-women campaign, to be discussed in Chapter 6. There is no record of any association with Binnie-Clark, for example, whose book _Wheat and Woman_ appeared in 1914. Binnie-Clark and others involved in Canada in the homesteads-for-women cause may have been viewed as too radical by membership of the CIL, anxious as the organizers were to raise funds for their \"experimental station\" in Canada. They likely could not afford to challenge the Canadian federal government in the way that Binnie-Clark and others had. Binnie-Clark spoke to suffrage organizations in England, and many of those involved in Western Canada were also committed to suffrage, dower, and other campaigns that posed fundamental challenges to property and land laws. Binnie-Clark's address to the Royal Colonial Institute in 1913, mentioned at the outset of this chapter and further discussed in Chapter 5, discredited her in the eyes of the Victoria _Daily Colonist_ as misleading to emigrants, particularly young women. For this reason it would not have been in the interest of Grosvenor and the CIL to make common cause with Binnie-Clark.\n\nThe CIL did, however, attract the notice and participation of Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon. The sole product of her campaign for colonial training for gentlewomen in Canada was the Queen Mary Coronation Hostel for Gentlewomen in Vancouver, British Columbia, founded in 1912 under the patronage of Queen Mary and with funding from Lord Strathcona. Fitzgibbon had moved to British Columbia in 1907, concentrating her energies there with the help of Lady Mary Minto (wife of the former Governor General). This initiative, along with the Princess Patricia Ranch, marked the growing tendency to see British Columbia rather than the prairies as the most suitable destination for the educated British woman emigrant. The hostel was operated in conjunction with the CIL. Unlike other hostels that received Canadian government funding and were intended for immigrant domestics, admission to the privately funded Queen Mary Hostel was restricted to \"gentlewoman.\" For a small fee, English gentlewomen were taught to become competent housewives. Gone was the emphasis on women owning and farming land of their own. They learned to split their own wood and to cook on a wood stove in a \"real Western shack\" situated on the grounds of the hostel, but that was the extent of their outdoor work. The majority of the women who stayed at the hostel found work in homes or clerical positions.\n\nYet the CIL's goal of training women to farm persisted (although it was not to last for long). In 1913 there were two women workers at the Princess Patricia Ranch at Vernon, British Columbia, along with a superintendent. Optimism was in the air, as British Columbia's Minister of Agriculture W. Scott was impressed with the potential for dairying, fruit growing, and poultry production. He recommended that the ranch become a government demonstration farm. Critics of the work of the CIL were also emerging. An editorial in a July 1913 _Daily Colonist_ of Victoria noted that an organization known as the Colonial Intelligence League had sent young English girls out to British Columbia to \"pick berries.\" The editorial continued: \"The _Colonist_ points out the absurdity of such girls working in the fields side by side with Indians, Chinese and Japanese. The League that is engaged in this particular form of pumping [ _sic_ ] the white man in to keep the yellow man out knows so little of British Columbia that it should be renamed the Lack of Intelligence League.\" According to the editorial, \"there is not an educated young woman in British Columbia who would think for a single moment of going out to the berry fields to work side by side with Indians, Chinamen and Japanese.\"\n\nMary Agnes Fitzgibbon was opposed to British women picking fruit, considering it a job for Chinese and Indian workers. Caroline Grosvenor did not believe it was suitable, either, but was willing to concede that it depended on the employer. Lady Sybil Grey was entirely opposed to British women fruit picking in British Columbia, \"where the work was usually done by Chinese or Indians, and by the less reputable workers of the district.\"\n\nThe _Daily Colonist_ was sceptical of the entire idea of women farmers in Canada. Also in 1913, they severely criticized Georgina Binnie-Clark's talk \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" and her claims that British women could aspire to farm in Canada. The _Colonist_ claimed the CIL plans for a farm settlement of women would cause suffering and disappointment. That the organizers were \"unintentionally deceiving many of your girls is beyond all question.\" The Colonial \"Lack of Intelligence League\" was guilty of \"Mischievous Benevolence.\"\n\n\"GIVEN HEALTH AND INDUSTRY THERE IS A FORTUNE WAITING FOR THEM\": MARION CRAN AND A WOMAN IN CANADA\n\nEnglish writer Marion Cran's voice joined those calling for the \"educated gentlewoman\" to take up farming in Canada, although she was careful to point out the challenges and obstacles. Cran was a prolific author of gardening books, including _The Garden of Ignorance_ (1913), _The Garden of Experience_ (1921), and _The Joy of the Ground_ (1928), in which she wove the story of her garden on rented property in Surrey with stories of her three husbands, her children and parents, and her problems with finances. Cran used her gardening books to draw attention to inequalities in marriage and other restrictions women of her era encountered. Born in South Africa, she was a devoted imperialist, believing in the superiority of the British \"race.\" Cran was asked by the Canadian government to investigate conditions for British women immigrants in Canada, and her visit took place in 1908, with her findings published as _A Woman in Canada_.\n\nCran was enthusiastic about the potential of Canada, where she spent six and a half months, finding that \"the Englishwoman in Canada is everywhere welcomed and valued. In the North-West, where wives are scarce, a work of Empire awaits the woman of breed and endurance who will settle on the prairie homesteads and rear their children in the best traditions of Britain.\" Yet she went beyond the demand for women as wives and mothers, arguing that Canada needed \"educated, middle-class gentlewomen, and these are not the women to come out on the off-chance of getting married. They may be induced to come to the country if they can farm or work in some way to secure their absolute independence. They want, every nice woman wants, to be free to undertake marriage as a matter of choice, not of necessity.\" Once settled, these women might \"throw in their lot with the bachelor farmers of the prairie and British Columbia,\" but there had to be more than marriage in order to entice them to immigrate.\n\n_A Woman in Canada_ called on British women to consider farming in Canada. Cran's second chapter, \"A Woman Farmer and an Experimental Farm,\" is about meeting a woman who farmed 600 acres in Ontario, and this example was used by Cran to promote the opportunities on the land. Cran claimed she had never met a woman farmer before and was deeply impressed. The farmer, never named, was dignified and beautifully dressed. She was cultured, \"transplanted from the hectic life of Paris and London to this healthy, busy land.\" Cran quoted the farmer as declaring, \"almost passionately,\" that \"it is an indescribable joy, this turning of the wild into fertile plains,\u2014I can never have enough of it,\u2014I do not grudge one second of the work, hard and exacting as it is,\u2014I am repaid a thousandfold when my days and weeks of anxious care are borne into blossom like this.\"\n\nLeaving Ontario full of enthusiasm for farming, Cran headed west, where she was disappointed to find little evidence of women farmers. She had hoped to find \"bachelor women,\" women \"working the land 'on their own,' singly or in clusters,\" but did not find any and concluded that \"there are no women on the prairies except the wives and daughters of farmers, and they are scarce enough.\" She wondered why women \"should not come out and work it as well as men,\" and did not seem aware that homesteads were not available to most women, writing that as \"the labour of 'homesteading' would be very great for women, I can understand their shirking it.\" \"To 'make good' on a free farm,\" Cran wrote, \"a woman would need either much courage and capital, or considerable male labour, besides agricultural skill.\" She concluded that instead of taking up 160 acres, a woman should buy a small acreage within a few miles of the railway, and that \"given health and industry, there is a fortune waiting for them in that marvelous prairie loam, just as surely as for the men who go out to grow wheat and run stock-farms. Above all there is a splendid opening for our women gardeners.\"\n\nLike most of her counterparts in England, Cran advocated taking up small holdings, writing that men might prefer the \"big gamble of wheat growing,\" but the surer, steadier road to fortune was through vegetable, fruit, and flower growing, and she urged English women to consider farming cooperatively or in colonies: \"Here then, is the opportunity for Englishwomen. Let them come out in twos and threes, unless any single woman has sufficient capital, and (just as important) courage for a lonely life; let them settle within marketable driving distance of such cities as Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, etc., and they will find awaiting them every facility for a life of independence and certain ultimate success in the grandest climate in the world. The brilliant bracing air, the bustle of industry and of hope which pervade the prairies are beyond my powers to describe.\"\n\nCran strongly discouraged women from homestead farming. She said it was not women's work, that the land would be so far from a railway that transportation problems would be endless and the loneliness \"unendurable.\" Wheat farming, according to Cran, was for men only. Wheat required large acreages; it was a venture that did not begin to pay until 160 acres were tilled, \"a feat which takes some doing in the bush-covered parts of the prairie with only a scrub-plough to help. The ploughing of a few acres, on the other hand, is not a very formidable undertaking, and returns in flowers and vegetables would be steady.\" Women could improve their smaller acreages at a slower, saner pace. Cran was particularly struck by the potential for women market gardeners at the Winnipeg Horticultural Exhibition, where she saw tomatoes, pumpkins, Swiss chard, cabbage, parsnip wine, cherry wine, raspberry vinegar, and sweet herbs such as thyme, sage, and marjoram. Poultry farming was another option for women in Cran's view, but she believed that British Columbia was a better environment for this industry and for fruit growing.\n\nCran concluded, however, that the majority of English \"bachelor women\" were not capable of facing the challenges and toils of life on the prairies. They were \"unfitted by our complete civilization.\" But she felt there were exceptional women, numbering \"in the thousands,\" who were \"fearless, enthusiastic, clean-bred.\" She wrote, \"There must be some who have the courage and health to leave the ready-made comforts of the old country, and come into this wild beautiful West, giving their best of mind and body for the race and for the Empire.\"\n\nFICTION SET IN THE COLONIES AND THE RECONFIGURING OF BRITISH NORMS OF FEMININITY\n\nAdventure fiction for girls set in the colonies bolstered the idea that it was possible to farm or pursue other occupations that might be seen as unfeminine, and thus unacceptable at home, while sharing in the task of building the Empire. In the late nineteenth century, British authors of adventure fiction for girls created independent, resourceful, and courageous heroines who rose to the challenges of the rugged environments they helped to colonize. These began to emerge decades after the appearance of equivalent books for boys by writers such as G.A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard. Author Bessie Marchant set her novels all over the British colonial world, creating robust heroines who took on arduous outdoor work (although most eventually married). Indigenous people are almost absent in her novels except as occasional \"expendable obstacles in the path of British rule\" and as extra players in the background. Marchant's books inspired her readers to question the idea that \"men must work and women must weep.\" Her readers were \"no longer content to be simply backers-up of male empire builders... [they] were seeking new worlds of their own to conquer.\"\n\nWomen's ownership or management of land and their responsibility for crops and livestock are prominent in several of Marchant's novels, as titles such as _Erica's Ranch_ suggest. In two of her novels written before the First Wold War, the protagonist is \"the sole possessor, in her own right and name\" of her \"own piece of the Empire.\" Often the father of the heroine is elderly and incapacitated, and she must run the farm or ranch. The heroines manage land, however, not to \"usurp the part of men, but [to] work toward self-sufficiency or the maintenance of family property in their absence.\" Many of Marchant's stories were set in Canada, including _Sisters of Silver Creek: A Story of Western Canada_. In this novel one of the sisters cultivates the land and attains self-sufficiency, becoming a manager of a jam business as well as a landholder. When she eventually marries, her command of her property and her work is curtailed, but Marchant had other heroines who remained autonomous and unmarried. In novels such as _The Loyalty of Hester Hope: A Story of British Columbia_ , the protagonist continues to enjoy hard work on her own land, irrespective of her marriage. Marchant's portrayal of strong and capable heroines presented hard work outdoors, independence, and self-sufficiency as all desirable qualities. Even the artwork on the covers conveyed the message that women could successfully farm and raise livestock.\n\nOther fiction writers of Empire helped women to imagine that they could have an imperial fresh start, take on new occupations, and lead invigorating lives in the colonies. In 1910 Mary Ward (who published under the name Mrs. Humphrey Ward) published her novel _Canadian Born_. The English heroine arrives in Canada as a widow and meets and marries a Canadian, after much consternation about whether she could bear to be transplanted to such an unfamiliar environment. But she and her husband buy a farm (with her money), and she hopes to not only set up a cottage hospital but also establish a \"training college for farm-students\u2014girls and boys.\"\n\nYet other writers conveyed more conservative messages about the potential for, or the wisdom of, British women farming and owning land in Canada. Scottish journalist and romantic fiction writer Annie S. Swan visited Western Canada several times and wrote a serialized novel, \"Prairie Fires,\" set in Alberta. One of the main characters is a British woman horse rancher, Lady Florence Belfield (Lady Flo), an accomplished rider who excells at \"men's talk,\u2014all about wheat, and stock and the breeding of horses.\" Hilary, the young, na\u00efve, and inexperienced English wife of Robin Merrick, an English homesteader, feels threatened by Lady Flo as her husband admires the horsewoman's knowledge and abilities. Hilary thinks Lady Flo is \"half a man,\" while her husband lectures her: \"It's a pity you can't take a leaf from her book, Hilary. Her's [ _sic_ ] is the only attitude possible for a woman in Canada if she's going to make a success of it.\" Hilary runs away to the United States but the couple reunites before long on the homestead. Hilary should never have been jealous of Lady Flo, it turns out, as her husband far prefers his wife, weak and fragile as she is. Lady Flo is far too masculine for any British settler to consider as a wife. Hilary becomes \"the mother of gallant sons and fair daughters... helping her husband to lift high the standard of life in the new country.\"\n\nCANADIAN INTEREST IN (BRITISH\/CANADIAN) WOMEN AS AGRICULTURALISTS\n\nThe topic of middle-class British women as potential farmers did not generate the same degree of interest in late nineteenth-century Canada as it did in Britain. There was no concern about a \"surplus women\" problem in Canada from which schemes to place women on the land in the colonies arose in Britain. Yet the work of journalist Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon indicates that there was interest in promoting the cause of British women farmers for the prairies.\n\nBenjamin F. Austin, principal of Alma Ladies' College in St. Thomas, Ontario, was one of the few vocal supporters of farming for women. In a chapter entitled \"Open Doors for the Women of To-Day\" in the 1890 book _Woman: Her Character, Culture and Calling_ , he argued that the cultivation of plants, fruits, and flowers was \"really adapted to woman's strength and tastes, opening a pleasant, profitable and health-giving occupation to her in the country.\" He believed that most of the labour required was not as hard as housework. Austin found the example of the United States most compelling, writing that there were \"sixty thousand female farmers, or agricultural laborers, in the United States,\" and that \"it is not thought improper for girls who work in the field to wear male attire. By doing so, they escape the cumbersome dress which would drag in the dirt and catch on weeds and briers.\" Austin asked, \"What would some of our small-waisted city belles, so tightly corseted, so unnaturally attired, so enfeebled by irrational modes of dress that a few minutes brisk walk, or the climbing of a flight of stairs throws them into palpitations, think of their sturdy sisters in the far West who plough, sow, pitch, cart and enjoy blessed exemptions from nervousness, heart disease and sick-headache?\" In Austin's view, light farm work was vastly preferable, better suited and \"far more wholesome in effect on health and happiness than the miserable slave life many women lead in factories, shops and stores where long hours, promiscuous associations and poor pay are the general rule.\"\n\nCanada's National Council of Women advocated agriculture as a suitable female vocation. Their 1900 publication _Women of Canada: Their Life and Work_ included a chapter by Adelaide Hoodless (founder of the Women's Institutes), in which she placed agriculture second on a list of \"women's industrial possibilities,\" after \"household arts.\" Through agriculture, Hoodless wrote, women could play a role in \"national development,\" as it is \"pre-eminently the great Canadian industry.\" The \"unlimited possibilities\" included dairying, raising poultry, bees, and fruit, and hot-house culture. She saw these as \"distinctly feminine agricultural pursuits,\" in contrast to grain farming and stock raising. Hoodless was an advocate of small holdings and colonies or settlements of women farmers: \"The tendency in Canada has been towards the cultivation of large tracts of land which has necessitated a greater expenditure in money and labor than would be possible for the average woman. These conditions, together with their attendant social isolation, have not proved sufficiently attractive to induce women to consider agriculture as a special vocation... Co-operative principles, with regard to farm labor, marketing etc., must prevail where women adopt agriculture as a means of livelihood.\"\n\nHoodless believed that agriculture for women would be a \"factor in promoting the health and morals of a nation.\" She was opposed to factory and office work for women, as she believed that women's primary role was as wives and mothers. Hoodless believed women should be educated in practical skills and roles that would strengthen the family. She was a strong advocate of agricultural education for women and of training in domestic or household science, then an emerging discipline that would be known eventually as \"home economics.\" Like some of the advocates of agriculture for women in Britain, she opposed female enfranchisement, arguing that women exercised their influence through their husbands and sons.\n\nIn _Women of Canada_ , the statistics compiled about women farmers were encouraging. According to the 1891 census there were \"11,590 women farmers in Canada. This is an increase of 4,794 in ten years, according to the census of 1881. These women own and work their own farms; 252 of them are in Manitoba, where in 1881 there were only 71.\"\n\nAt a 1909 Toronto meeting of the International Congress of Women, held under the auspices of the National Council of Women of Canada, a great deal of attention was paid to the topic of \"Women in Agriculture.\" Women with capital were called upon to purchase and farm land. They were exhorted not to sell inherited land but to \"keep your land; improve it; make it do your work and earn your money for you.\" They were urged to \"study, think, act intelligently; use judgement, study soil conditions and quality... Then set to work to master every detail of the business undertaken.\" The cooperative or colony farming option was gaining strength. Miss Yates of the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph urged the \"bright-faced women across the ocean\" who were \"longing to put their powers to the test\" to consider farming on the cooperative plan in Canada. Yates stated that \"the very energies that are so valued upon the hockey and the gold fields at home are exactly what are wanted here in the game of life that is being played on these farm lands.\" She suggested that colonies of women could rent or purchase land and grow fruit and raise poultry.\n\nWell into the twentieth century, there were few opportunities for women in Canada to study agriculture or horticulture. The situation was dismal and in stark contrast to the various options in Britain. In Canada, instruction in dairying (at the Kingston Dairy School, the Agricultural College in Guelph, and the Government Dairy School in Winnipeg) was about all that was available to women except at the School of Horticulture at Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where in 1898 eighteen out of forty-nine students were women, and at the School of Agriculture at Truro, Nova Scotia, operated in connection with the Normal School, where all students took the same subjects, including biology, soils, dairying, gardening, and agricultural chemistry. In the agricultural colleges of Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, \"farmers' daughters\" were steered toward courses in \"domestic sciences.\"\n\nSupport within Canada for sending educated gentlewomen from Britain to acquire land of their own on the prairies was occasionally expressed. In 1910 Marion Crerar of Hamilton, a regent of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, wrote to the _Times_ of London to endorse the scheme of settling educated women on imperial plots, although she clearly thought these should be very small. Crerar was motivated by the desire to \"draw our beloved countries together\" and objected to the \"wretched specimens,\" the \"scourings from London streets\" who were being sent to Canada. She asked, \"Cannot England spare some of her well-bred and refined people to raise the tone of the whole country? Have you not an army of women of education who could be spared to build up this part of our Empire?\" Crerar pointed to the great need of such women on the prairies. Here was the chance for \"our 'Frontierswomen.'\" She endorsed the cooperative plan, suggesting four ladies select a town with a clergyman and buy a little piece of land and a house. One could teach music and lead the choir, another could teach sewing, and one might keep poultry. Together they would be the leaven for the district, they would \"be the props of the new and struggling parish, and the one gentle and refining influence on all the farming life around it.\" The added joy would be that all was done for \"King and country.\" They would not be carrying swords into distant lands like their male counterparts, but would be bringing their refining influence.\n\nTHE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY'S PROMOTION OF THE WEST FOR WOMEN\n\nIt was in the interests of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to appeal to potential purchasers of their land in the West, including women. A series of pamphlets from the early twentieth century, aimed specifically at women, featured stories of women who were capable workers and efficient owners and managers of farms. They were cast as having made substantial fortunes and as supporting large families. The CPR wanted to entice homesteaders who might then be motivated to expand their holdings by purchasing railway lands. In order to compete with the U.S. West, where single women could homestead, the CPR needed to show that there were opportunities for women as well as men in Western Canada. Through its office in London, the CPR bombarded Britain and northern Europe with pamphlets, posters, and maps of Western Canada. Their immigration offices were \"seductive parlours designed to trap passing pedestrians\" with posters of lush fields of grain and prosperous, happy settlers. Travellers carried the \"gospel of emigration\" into the British countryside so that according to one historian, \"no corner of Britain was left untouched; no station wall or hotel lobby was safe from one of the CPR's poster maps.\" Travelling promoters gave lectures with lantern slides, and exhibits of posters, photographs, and soil samples were displayed in town halls, at agricultural fairs, and at mechanics' institutes. The CPR also had a horse-drawn exhibition van decked out with prairie products that travelled to small towns. In 1893 the van attracted an incredible 1.75 million visitors in 593 places.\n\nIn 1903 the CPR published _Words from the Women of Western Canada_ , which featured many women farming on their own. In particular, the opportunities for widows to homestead were highlighted, and the pamphlet also advertised CPR railway lands that were for sale. The successes of women settlers from Britain were emphasized, although women of other ethnicities were mentioned. Women from the \"Old Country\" included \"A Wiltshire Woman,\" \"A Scotchwoman's Success,\" and \"A North of Ireland Woman's Words.\" There were no women from the United States in the 1903 pamphlet, but Mennonite, Doukhobor, and Romanian women were included, although briefly, and are clustered toward the end of the pamphlet.\n\n_Words from the Women of Western Canada_ cast women as capable owners and managers of farms who still retained their femininity and attended to domestic work as well. They reaped and ploughed, although generally only when the farm was short of male labour. Varied occupations were featured, including a bee farm and a dairy farm. Despite all of this, domestic skills were praised above all, and the pamphlet depicted any unattached women emigrants as destined for marriage. The concluding words were those of an \"old timer\" who had come to Manitoba in the 1870s. Her message was that \"as soon as these women immigrate they are snatched up by the hordes of well-to-do bachelors.\"\n\nWidows were not the only women featured in the 1903 pamphlet, but they predominated. While the reasons for the deaths of the husbands were not made explicit, readers may have wondered why so many husbands died, often soon after arriving in Canada, leaving their widows to struggle on their own. Despite the rags-to-riches stories of successful, prosperous widows, the ubiquitous death of the husbands may have limited the appeal of emigrating to Canada. In a 1906 pamphlet called _Women's Work in Western Canada: A Sequel to \"Words from the Women of Western Canada_ , _\"_ there was much less attention given to the untimely death of husbands. Perhaps this was because overall the pamphlet featured fewer examples of women homesteaders and placed more emphasis on the wisdom of purchasing CPR land. There was also less attention to women farming and\/or owning their land, while the family unit working together was stressed.\n\n_Figure 10._ Through its \"Canada for Women\" promotion, the Canadian Pacific Railway appealed to Englishwomen living \"wasted lives\" to emigrate. Allegedly quoting one such woman, the caption read, \"Ten thousand Englishwomen could be ranged in a line and shot. No one would be sorry. Everyone would be glad. _There isn't any place for them._ \" _Daily Mail_ , 2 March 1910, 10.\n\nThere were widows featured in the 1906 pamphlet, however, reflecting the fact that this was still the only way women could obtain homestead land. Maria Bird of Pipestone, Manitoba, formerly of Gloucestershire, ran a prosperous farm and also published stories of prairie life in journals such as _The Family Circle_. Her husband had died shortly after she arrived in the West, and she buried him \"on the lone plains which took the last dollar.\" But \"she bravely took up the work of the farm, seven children depending upon her; how she stuck to the plow; stood by the grain stack and put 'Stow-on-the-Wold' vim and vigor into the work.\" She had found fortune, and so had her children. \"How a Widow Won\" told the story of Agnes Balfour of Lumsden, Saskatchewan. She had arrived from Ontario as a widow with eight children. Her homestead was \"one of the prize places of the west,\" and her children had all prospered; three daughters settled in the Lumsden area, two sons farmed the old homestead, two other sons were in the mercantile business in that town, and one son was a \"leading lawyer\" in Regina.\n\nThe pamphlet also featured women settlers of means. Under the heading \"An Irish Lady's Winnings,\" Mrs. Westhead of Alix, Alberta, was presented as an example of an independent purchaser\/investor in land despite being married. She had bought land on a visit with her husband to Canada, and they then decided to emigrate. Mrs. Westhead was shown as the more active partner in superintending their prairie estate.\n\nThe final pamphlet in the CPR series, _Home Life of Women in Western Canada_ (1907), also focused on the work of farm wives in partnership with their husbands and on the prosperity of settler families from the \"Old Country.\" It featured very few widows farming on their own. A major message was the dire need of domestic workers. Perhaps as the issue of women and homestead rights began to heat up, with the Canadian government steadfastly opposed, the CPR did not wish to appear to be as welcoming to women as farmers as it had been in earlier pamphlets.\n\nThe CPR advertised the West as a destination for \"surplus\" women of Britain through newspapers such as the _Daily Mail_ where a 1910 advertisement, \"Canada for Women,\" showed three women in a wheat field. Right beneath were the words, allegedly from a woman in England who felt her own life to have been wasted: \"Ten thousand Englishwomen could be ranged in line and shot. No one would be sorry. Everyone would be glad. _There isn't any place for them._ \"\n\n_Figure 11._ In 1913, the windows of the Charing Cross office of the Canadian Pacific Railway were smashed by suffragettes as part of a campaign to punish businesses that did not lobby in support of votes for women. The windows were boarded up and the CPR posted the notice, \"We are looking for settlers, not suffragettes.\" Yet the company advertised in suffrage journals, clearly seeing potential settlers and even farmers in suffragettes. Getty Images, no. 3424540.\n\nIn 1913 the windows of the office of the CPR on Cockspur Street in Charing Cross, London were smashed by suffragettes as part of a campaign to punish businesses for not lobbying in support of votes for women. The CPR boarded up their windows and posted a notice: \"We are looking for settlers, not for suffragettes.\" The suffragette journal _Votes for Women_ pointed out that \"the Suffragettes _are_ settlers.\" But surprisingly, the CPR advertised extensively in the suffrage journals, including _the Suffragette_ and _Woman's Leader and the Common Cause._ A 1913 CPR advertisement \"Canada for Women\" in those journals showed a young woman with a pail confronting a cow with the caption \"Dairy Farming.\" That same year the CPR placed an advertisement in _the Suffragette_ : \"A Welcome to Women in British Columbia.\" The notice began, \"In these days of women's independence, when girls set out to earn their own living, it is perhaps not out of place to point out the opportunities for making a comfortable living out of Dairy Farming, Chicken Raising and Flower Gardening\u2014branches of agriculture in which women are particularly successful.\" Young women \"fond of outdoor life\" were urged to club together and run small farms in the Windermere district of British Columbia.\n\nBy 1913, as indicated by the talks by Skykes and Binnie-Clark described at the outset of this chapter, there was a great deal of optimism in the air both in Canada and the mother country about the potential for British women to farm land of their own on the prairies. But in all of the ink devoted to this cause\u2014the lectures, organizations, and intelligence-gathering trips\u2014there appears to have been precious little knowledge of or contact with the women who were attempting to homestead or otherwise farm the prairies. Legal obstacles and disadvantages were seldom referred to by the proponents of farms for British women. Ideas about small holdings and the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture and colonies of women farmers clubbing together could not simply be transplanted to prairie Canada because of environmental and climatic factors, because of the nature of the land survey system, and because markets were small and scattered. Authorities wanted women immigrants, other than those who arrived as members of families, to work as domestic servants and certainly not in the fields (at least not visibly). And while attitudes about educated gentlewomen as potential farmers might have been changing somewhat in Britain at this time, opposition persisted. When women worked on the land there during the First World War (to be discussed in Chapter 7), detractors were many.\n\nSimilar objections to women farmers prevailed in Western Canada, well into the twentieth century. On the prairies Indigenous women and some recent immigrant women were condemned as the \"beasts of burden\" or drudges of their communities. British women were not to stoop to this level; they were to be models of domesticity and gentility and not sweat in the fields. In spite of these admonitions, women\u2014British and of many other ethnicities\u2014laboured in the fields, and some established homesteads and farms of their own, as the next chapter describes.\nCHAPTER THREE\n\nWIDOWS AND OTHER IMMIGRANT WOMEN HOMESTEADERS\n\nSTRUGGLES AND STRATEGIES\n\nMrs. Bachelor [ _sic_ ], a lady farmer... has the finest and earliest fields of spring wheat that I have seen this year. This lady is a widow, but conducts one of the best managed farms I have seen in the West. The grain fields are clean. The plowing is well done, and all the buildings are comfortable and remarkably well kept.\n\nF.W. Hodson, editor of the _Farmers' Advocate_ , 1909 __\n\nF.W. Hodson was describing the fine grain fields of Eliza Ann Batchelor near North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Originally from England, Eliza Ann and her husband, Thomas, first emigrated to Japan, where he was a tobacconist. Their three children were born in Japan. In 1905 they left Japan to homestead in Saskatchewan, and Thomas (aged sixty-four) died a few months later after being thrown from his horse. The children were aged nine, six, and four. Eliza Ann, then forty-nine, completed the homestead duties, earned her patent to the land, and clearly became an accomplished farmer. From 1876 virtually the only way for a woman to obtain a homestead of her own on the prairies was to be or become a widow. As journalist Lillian Beynon Thomas (quoted in Chapter 1) wrote, \"There are no homesteads for women in Western Canada unless such women care to qualify by killing off any inconvenient husbands they happen to own.\"\n\nThis chapter is about women who homesteaded land in prairie Canada. While the chapter concentrates on British women, homesteaders of other ethnicities are included, as it is important to recognize that women from many nations were interested in \"free\" land in Canada. To understand the full range of obstacles they faced and the strategies they adopted, it is necessary to cast a wide net that includes migrant widowed women homesteaders of diverse ancestries along with women from Ontario, Quebec, and other provinces of Canada.\n\nThe \"imperial plots\" thread of this book is not always obvious in this chapter. Most of these women left few records beyond what is available in homestead files and local histories. The existing sources do not indicate whether they were influenced by or associated with the organizations in the mother country advocating farming for British women on the prairies, which focused on single, never-married \"surplus women,\" not widows with children. Organizations such as the Colonial Intelligence League were concerned with educated single \"gentlewomen,\" and the widowed homesteaders of prairie Canada were not necessarily from that class. There are no indications that any of these widows attended the colonial training schools intended to equip the woman settler with the skills she would need; they would not have had the time or income for such training. It is likely that the homesteading widows were motivated more by their personal and family economic situations and needs than by the desire to contribute to the \"spade-work of empire.\"\n\nChapter 1 ended with the homestead right being removed for most categories of women. As of 1876, a woman (other than an \"Indian\" under the Indian Act) was eligible to homestead only if she could establish that she was a \"sole\" head of a family. This was interpreted to mean widows with minor children. A considerable number of women, mainly widows, managed to homestead and prove up on their land in Western Canada, but they faced many roadblocks and obstacles. A complicated welter of Department of the Interior and Department of Justice \"rulings\" and \"opinions\"\u2014never debated in Parliament but decided by bureaucrats\u2014governed which women could homestead, and individual cases were carefully scrutinized by officials in Ottawa with the overall goal of severely restricting the numbers of eligible women. Widowed women homesteaders enjoyed privileges that were denied to First Nations people, yet they did not have the same virtually unfettered access to land extended to male migrants. They were under intense scrutiny by the formidable bureaucracy of the Department of the Interior, whose employees were concerned about the most personal details of their lives and were convinced that they would readily resort to devious methods to obtain land. Women fought this bureaucracy and made remarkable efforts to acquire and retain homestead land. Women who were not widows (married, single, divorced, or separated) could obtain 320 acres of homestead land if they could afford to purchase South African scrip, and many did, but they still had to perform all of the homestead duties and were subject to the surveillance of the bureaucracy. Women could also cross the border and settle in the American West, where single women could homestead and where the bureaucracy was much more lenient in permitting divorced, separated, or unmarried mothers to file on land.\n\nA WIDOWED LAND\n\nA ruling that was never clearly spelled out in the Dominion lands legislation, but was made policy, was that to be a sole head of a family a woman had to have a child or children under the age of eighteen. Nor did the Dominion lands legislation ever specify that an eligible woman must be a widow, but in publications of the Lands Branch it was made clear that this was the only category of woman eligible. For example, the 1903 Dominion Lands Branch pamphlet _Homestead Regulations of North-Western Canada_ stated that \"a woman who is a widow, having minor children dependent upon her, is entitled to a homestead entry.\" In a 1912 publication of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, readers were informed that these children had to be the widow's own: \"A widow having minor children of her own dependent upon her for support is permitted to make homestead entry as a sole head of a family.\"\n\nWidows with their children soon started to arrive in the West to claim homesteads. Like the early male homesteaders in the West, the majority were from the British Isles or Ontario, and were British-Ontarian. In the spring of 1878, Elizabeth McGavin (1838\u20131904) arrived with her ten children and filed on a homestead at Prairie Grove, Manitoba. She and her husband, James McGavin, were from Scotland and had first immigrated to Paisley, Bruce County, Ontario. It was there that James died in 1877 of food poisoning following a church picnic, leaving Elizabeth with three daughters and seven sons. Elizabeth had family members homesteading in Manitoba, and they headed there, mainly by lakes and rivers, until they landed at the old Lombard wharf in Winnipeg. The family was very poor and lived initially on deer, rabbits, prairie chickens, ducks, and fish. But the children received good educations, and three became physicians, including daughter Jessie Margaret McGavin, who in 1895 graduated in medicine from a Chicago university.\n\nWidow Ann McGregor, from Edinburgh, arrived in Manitoba in the mid-1870s with five sons while three daughters remained in Scotland. She filed on a homestead near Keyes, and three of her sons also homesteaded. From this cluster grew what was known as the McGregor settlement, later renamed Mekiwin, Cree for \"gift.\" Ann McGregor was a midwife in that district and ran the post office out of her home.\n\nHannah Stott came to Manitoba from England in 1883 with her children. Her husband had been lost at sea in 1877. Through homesteading and purchasing she acquired extensive tracts of land near Brandon, first 320 acres that she sold in 1890, and then another farm that she personally cultivated and improved until her death in 1907.\n\nOne of the early homesteaders in the Moose Jaw district of Saskatchewan was Grace Keay, a widow from Edinburgh who settled in the spring of 1885 with her two daughters (aged eleven and eight) and her son (fourteen). It was reported in 1896 that she \"works quite a farm,\" and by 1899 she and her son had together acquired 960 acres.\n\nHomesteading widows were often referred to as \"grandma\" in their districts. \"Grandma\" Eleanor Bell Cairns was forty-one when she and her five children from Morpeth, Northumberland, arrived in Manitoba in 1882, together with her father, John Bell, aged seventy-seven. Eleanor entered on a homestead, as did her father. To prove up they were supposed to have separate dwellings, but Eleanor wrote for and received permission to live in one home. The family had some very lean years but persisted, and Eleanor's home became an important community centre, where church services began in 1884. She had the first organ in the district, and dances and musical evenings were held at her home as well. She died at the age of eighty-seven in 1928.\n\nIsabella Beveridge, born on a ship on the Atlantic Ocean as her parents sailed from Scotland to Canada, married Thomas Burns in Ontario in 1865. They and their seven children moved to Washington State in 1889, where Thomas died. In 1893 Isabella Burns filed on a homestead in the ranch land of the Pincher Creek district of Alberta and successfully proved up.\n\n_Figure 12._ Englishwoman Agnes Bedingfeld was the widow of a lieutenant in the Madras Infantry. She homesteaded at Pekisko, Alberta, as did her son Frank, and together they established a prosperous ranch, which they sold in 1919 to Edward, Prince of Wales. Mrs. Bedingfeld was regarded as \"one of the most competent agriculturalists and livestock breeders in Alberta.\" Glenbow Archives, NA-2467-12.\n\nEnglishwoman Agnes Katherine Bedingfeld (born 1845) was the widow of a lieutenant in the Madras Infantry. The daughter of Robert Cobb, a Norfolk rector, she married Francis William Bedingfeld in 1862 when she was seventeen. He was from the landed gentry, his family occupying Ditchingham Hall, also in Norfolk. Their son Francis, known as Frank, was born in 1866 in Suffolk. After Lt. Bedingfeld died in 1869, leaving Agnes a widow at a young age, she and Frank came to Pekisko, Alberta, in 1883. The next year she filed on a homestead. In her application for patent (acquired in 1899), Agnes stated that she had lived in a tent on her land for a portion of 1883 and built her house in 1884. It was necessary for her to file as soon as she could, as Frank was seventeen when they came to Canada, and if she waited until he was eighteen she would not have been eligible. Mrs. Bedingfeld also worked as a housekeeper for Fred Stimson, of the Bar U Ranch. Frank also homesteaded, and his and his mother's log cabins were built together but on each side of the line dividing their quarter sections. Agnes took out a second homestead adjoining her first and received her patent to this land in 1906. The Bedingfelds eventually owned 1,400 acres and controlled another 4,000 acres through leases. They concentrated on raising Clydesdale horses but also had cattle. Agnes Bedingfeld was regarded as \"one of the most competent agriculturalists and livestock breeders in Alberta.\" She retired to Hertfordshire and she and Frank sold their ranch in 1919, when it was purchased by Edward, Prince of Wales, becoming the EP Ranch.\n\nChristina Anne (Bethune) Ritchie homesteaded in the Blackie region of Alberta, filing on her land in 1904. She was born in Nairn, Scotland, and in 1880 emigrated with her family to the Falkland Islands, where she married Scotsman John T.M. Ritchie. She and her husband, along with their three children, settled in Calgary in 1898. John Ritchie died in 1901, leaving Christina at age thirty-three with thirteen-year-old daughter Jennie, ten-year-old son John, and daughter Dora, sixteen months. Christina Ritchie first had to ask for an extension of six months after filing on her land, as she did not have the resources to settle on her homestead. In a statutory declaration of November 1901, she stated that she had \"been waiting for the means to be able to go to said land with my cattle, & as I am a widow with children dependent on me find far more difficulty in getting same than a man would do.\" According to the entry in the local history, Ritchie arrived at her new home in 1905 with \"15 cents in cash, a sack of flour, a pound of tea and 20 pounds of sugar; pretty meagre rations for a new beginning.\" She eventually had cattle and milk cows, but also worked off the farm. Cattle baron Patrick Burns had a beef camp close to her homestead, and Ritchie took in the laundry, baked, and mended for the cowboys. In 1907 newly arrived neighbours from England set up a training farm for students who were \"mostly the rich mens [ _sic_ ] sons and remittance men from England.\" There were over thirty students, and Ritchie cooked and kept house for them. The oldest daughter, Jennie, also worked off the farm doing general housework. Daughter Dora wrote in the local history book that her mother \"kept her homestead free of mortgage\u2014the only piece of land that I know of that didn't become mortgaged at one time or another. Many men lost their land owing to having to mortgage it.\" In 1908 Ritchie received her patent to her land; in her application she described herself as a \"rancher.\"\n\nSarah Jane Hill (n\u00e9e Castle), from Sheffield, England, was a widow and mother of eight who homesteaded at Melfort, Saskatchewan (Pleasantdale district), arriving in 1906 with five of her children. She was a nurse and midwife in her district working, with African-Canadian physician Dr. Alfred Schmitz Shadd. With the help of her sons, she cleared and broke bush land and hauled her grain by team and wagon. In the spring of 1920, Hill moved to a son's homestead, where \"they worked and cleared the land and farmed together.\" She was remembered as \"one of Pleasantdale's first and great pioneers. She loved the land, people and her family.\"\n\nWidow Mary Elizabeth Birss arrived in Canada in 1905 from Aberdeen, Scotland, filing on land in the Stonehenge district of southwest Saskatchewan in 1908. Her husband James had died of a stroke in 1894, leaving her to raise their eight children. Three of her sons settled on the prairies, and she later followed them. When she filed on her land she was fifty-two years old, and her youngest child was twelve. She proved up on both her homestead and a pre-emption and with four sons filing on land nearby, they established a considerable Birss empire. Mary Elizabeth died on her homestead in 1937, in the small two-storey home that was built in 1908 and occupied by the Birss family until 1967.\n\nIn 1906 widow Frances Powell and her family of four daughters and one son arrived in Lethbridge from Wales. She filed on a homestead in the Coyote Flats district of Alberta. Her brother homesteaded nearby but left for Australia soon after proving up. Frances persisted, however, and became \"well known throughout the district as 'Aunt Fanny.' She was a nurse and midwife and \"regardless of the weather or of how busy, she was always on hand to take charge if needed.\"\n\nEliza (Landymore) Garwood, born in Walsham-le-Willows, England, proved up on a homestead in the Inverlea district near Crossfield, Alberta, in 1907. A widow, she and her two children first settled in Calgary in 1902, then she filed on land near her homesteading brother. Garwood was a nurse in the Crossfield, Carstairs, and Madden districts. She remained on her homestead until her death in 1938.\n\nCatherine Corbet Sommerville, from Glasgow, Scotland, her daughter Margaret and sons John, Hugh, Robert, George, and James settled in the Ghost Pine district of Alberta in 1908. Catherine proved up on a homestead and a pre-emption, becoming the owner of 320 acres, and her sons filed on adjoining land, so the family acquired an extensive tract. According to the local history, the whole family \"took a prominent part in the social life of the Ghost Pine community for years.\" (In the summer of 2014, about 160 family members, all descendants of the Catherine Corbet Sommerville family, gathered at the Sommerville farm, which had been recognized with the Alberta Century Farm and Ranch Award.)\n\nIn 1912, following the death of her husband and a two-year-old daughter that same year, \"Grandma\" Barbara Bradshaw, a widow and mother of (originally) eight from Ayrshire, Scotland, travelled to Parkbeg, Saskatchewan, where a son was homesteading. A year earlier another son who had also homesteaded at Parkbeg had been killed in a railway accident. Bradshaw filed on the land of her deceased son and applied for her patent in 1917, swearing that she was \"the head of a family having at the time of my son's death 3 minor children to take care of, and at the present time I have one, namely Grace, who will be 15 years in October this year.\" In her district she was remembered for her love of Robbie Burns and for her \"famous Scotch scones.\"\n\nEntries in the local histories on homesteading widows are often brief. We learn little about \"Grandma Holman\" except that she was an early Manitoba homesteader and was married several times, as she was described as \"nee Harrison\u2014nee Hornsby, nee Ingleby.\" Ingleby was likely her maiden name, since she was allegedly \"a granddaughter of Lord and Lady Ingleby of England. She delivered the babies that were born to other homesteaders' wives.\" Cathy Jamieson was a Scottish widow who filed on 160 acres in 1896 and later bought another quarter section near Lacombe, Alberta. A lake on her land is named after her. (Given that the lake was also described as a slough, her land was not likely the best.) Jessie Kinnaird, from Alloa, Scotland, \"in an effort to keep her family together,\" followed her three sons to Saskatchewan. In 1912 she filed on a homestead northeast of Gull Lake, bringing her daughter Margaret with her. In the same district was widow Mary Attridge from Tyronne, Ireland, who had settled in Ontario where her husband died in 1905. She was a mother of ten, and her two youngest children were living with her when she filed on a homestead in 1910. Three older sons had homesteads nearby. A \"tiny lady, only five feet tall with red hair, [Attridge] was a hard worker. She milked cows, canned fruit... and acted as midwife for many miles around... She occupied her 'leisure time' braiding rugs, making quilts and reading tea cups.\"\n\nFlora S. Law, known as \"Granny Law\" (whose full name is not even provided in the local history biography), was a widow from Scotland with seven children. She homesteaded in 1906 in the Swift Current region of Saskatchewan near two of her sons who were already established there. Her home was a stopping place for the North-West Mounted Police and other travellers because it was on the road to Swift Current. Church services were also held at her house. She died in 1917, and her body was taken back to Scotland for burial. Isabel H. Brookes, from England, homesteaded near Moose Jaw starting in 1911, along with her son Harry, and received her patent in 1914. \"Grandma\" Catherine Gordon, from Scotland, first emigrated with her husband to New Brunswick, where he and six of their children died of tuberculosis. In 1906, at age sixty, she and two of her sons arrived in Saskatchewan, and she entered the next year on a homestead north of Shaunavon, proving up in 1914. Two of her grandchildren were dependent on her, as their parents had died of tuberculosis. Marguerite Douglas, a widow with one child, came from England to Saskatchewan in 1908. She worked as a housekeeper in Moose Jaw while she homesteaded, and by the time she received her patent in 1911 she was married to a neighbour. Martha Lucas, mother of three from Birmingham, filed on land near Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, in 1904 and proved up by 1907. Her husband, a draper, had died of pneumonia.\n\nSarah Cleveley of Bangor, Wales, was a widow with eight children when she sailed to Canada in 1912, with Edmonton as their destination. In 1914 she filed on land at Roselea, next to a quarter section homesteaded by a son. Sarah married neighbour George McCoy in 1918, but the next year she died in the flu epidemic.\n\nHomestead files leave traces of the widowed women who were not recalled in local histories. Olivia Thompson, from Dublin, Ireland, was seventy when in 1909 she filed on a homestead at Elm Springs, Saskatchewan. She did not strictly qualify, as the youngest of her four children was twenty-two. She had, however, squatted on the land for about seventeen years at the time of her homestead entry, made as soon as the land was surveyed. When she applied for her patent in 1912, she argued that she deserved title to her land as she had broken fifty acres, even though she lived on the adjoining quarter section with her son. She wrote on her statutory declaration of 1912 that \"I have lived with my son as I could not live alone & think after being the first white woman in the south country I should be entitled to me deed after living here over 21 years & having done all the improvements.\" There may have been debate in the land office about Thompson's entitlement, as she did not receive her patent until 1917, when she was seventy-nine years old.\n\nNUMBERS AND DIVERSITY OF WOMEN HOMESTEADERS\n\nWhile the widows depicted above were British women, the origins of women homesteaders were more diverse. This diversity is important to understanding the narrowness and elitism of the campaign that was launched for homesteads for women of \"British birth,\" to be discussed in Chapter 6. In southwestern Manitoba, however, most of the women homesteaders were British or British-Ontarian. Historian Kathryn McPherson found that between 1872 and 1900 at least 283 women possessed title to 418 quarter sections. Most of this land was purchased, but McPherson found ninety-two women homesteaders, and these were British citizens \"by birth\" (which would have included those born in Canada). Preliminary results of a database of Alberta homesteaders indicate that up until 1911 there were 1,587 women who had filed in their own names in what became that province. Information on place of birth is available for only 25 percent of these Alberta women homesteaders. Of this 25 percent, there were 126 from the U.S., 128 from Canada, and 75 from the British Isles. (The rest were from Scandinavia, Austria\/Hungary, Germany, and Russia). It is notable that women proved up with a greater success than did men. While patent success for male homesteaders was 69 percent, for women it was 85.4 percent.\n\nCensus data demonstrate increasing number of women farmers, but their numbers were tiny compared to their male counterparts. In Manitoba in 1881 there were 71 female farmers, and in the Territories, 9. The 71 in Manitoba represented 0.65 percent of the total number of farmers. By 1891 there were 252 women farmers in Manitoba, who were 1.2 percent of all farmers, and in the Territories 102, comprising 1.3 percent. By 1911 there were 3,575 female farmers, 1.4 percent of all farmers, while male farmers totalled 254,561. Also in 1911 there were 83 female ranchers or stock raisers (3,838 male), or 2.16 percent of the total. The 1911 census recorded 52 women gardeners (7.54 percent). In the census of 1921 there were 3,930 female farmers, comprising 1.57 percent. That year there were 65 women ranchers (6.28 percent). By 1931 there was a considerable increase in the numbers of female farmers, with 6,786 female farmers (2.57 percent) and 263,642 male farmers (see Table 2).\n\nMy study of the women homesteaders of the Wood Mountain district of Saskatchewan found 114 women who filed in their own names as solo homesteaders. Of these, 57 were widows and 45 of them successfully proved up, receiving patent to their land. There were 34 other solo women who filed on land in their own name, whose marital status is uncertain, and of these 21 proved up. There were 23 women\u2014married, single, widowed, and of unknown marital status\u2014who homesteaded and received patent to their land through South African scrip (to be discussed later in this chapter). There were other ways that women of Wood Mountain acquired land. For instance, if a wife on a homestead was deserted by her husband for a period of five years, and if this desertion was verified by the homestead inspector, his entry could be cancelled and she could make entry.\n\nMost of the widows and other women homesteaders of Wood Mountain filed in the years 1908\u201311, and most received their patents in 1914. There were three who long predated this land rush, who had been squatters before the land was surveyed. Of the widows who proved up, ten also successfully proved up on an adjoining quarter section acquired as a pre-emption. Of those whose place of birth is known, only eleven were from the British Isles. Twenty-six were from Canada, the majority from Ontario, and about half that number from Quebec. At a close second were twenty-three women from the United States, followed by England with nine, Romania and Austria six each, Hungary five, and France four. There were two from each of Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and one from each of Ireland and Scotland. Thirteen of these women homesteaders of Wood Mountain signed with X. Those who signed with an X were mainly from Hungary, Romania, and Austria, although one women of Canadian birth in the Wood Mountain district also signed with an X.\n\n_Table 2._ Numbers of male and female agriculturalists in the Censuses of Canada, with percentages of female agriculturalists. Source: Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics. For 1881, Table 14, 319\u201320; for 1885, Table 11, 48\u201350; for 1891, Table 12, 145\u2013146 and 181; for 1911, Table 5, 52\u20133, 96\u20137, 228\u20139; for 1921, Table 4, 242\u20133, 270\u20131, 292\u20133; for 1931, Table 11, 346\u20137, 358.\n\nSome homesteading widows in Western Canada had no knowledge of English. Marie Goueffic, from Brittany, France, immigrated to Saskatchewan in 1906 with her four sons, all under the age of twelve. Her husband had died of yellow fever in French Indo-China. They spoke no English. A sister, however, had come to Canada two years earlier and was living at Carlton, Saskatchewan. The Goueffics lived in a crude and cold shack with furniture consisting of a wagon box filled with straw, where they all slept. Marie Goueffic delivered their grain to the closest elevator at Duck Lake, a trip that took three days. The family eventually could afford a \"ready-made\" house from the Eaton's catalogue, and by the First World War they had the necessary machinery, and an automobile. One of the sons served overseas. A daughter-in-law wrote that Marie, who died in 1926, \"did not die of old age. She died from being worn out from all the hard work and hardship she had gone through.\"\n\nIn his study of the Peace River Country of Alberta prior to 1915, historian David Leonard found fifty-eight women who applied for homesteads, and fifty-four others who filed on land \"as a free grant or with some form of scrip.\" Widowed homesteader Katherine Sampson was originally from South Carolina, and she proved up on land in the Grande Prairie district in 1919, becoming the first African-American owner in the Peace River country.\n\nThere were also M\u00e9tis women homesteaders. Marie Rose Smith, originally from Manitoba, ranched at Pincher Creek, Alberta, until the death of her husband. Smith filed on a homestead in the Lethbridge district in 1915, earning her patent in 1923. Julie Rowand (n\u00e9e McGillis) received a patent to her Deville, Alberta, homestead in 1915 when she was sixty-six years old and a widow with no children living with her. She signed her name with an X. Rowland was one of the early settlers in the district and had been a squatter on her land before it was surveyed.\n\nStudies of homesteading on the prairies have demonstrated that the process required income, particularly in the start-up years. As the short profiles of the homesteading widows at the start of this chapter suggest, widowed homesteaders often earned outside income, sometimes significant, sometimes small. Several of those already mentioned were midwives and nurses. Agnes Balfour, who entered on her homestead near Lumsden, Saskatchewan, in 1883 \"quickly developed a reputation as a practical nurse and midwife. There was no doctor in the area until 1898, so Agnes tended the sick and delivered the babies for miles around. She was called out at any time of the day or night and never turned down a request for her assistance.\" Some women homesteaders laundered and baked for neighbouring bachelors, or worked as cooks and housekeepers. Alberta homesteader Florence Lavelle worked as a farm labourer for a neighbour.\n\nMargaret de Tro, homesteader near Hardisty, Alberta, and widow with three sons likely had the most unusual job. When she first began to advertise in Edmonton in 1905 she was \"Dr. de Tro: The Lady Healer\" but by 1907 had become \"Madame de Tro.\" She was a \"magnetic healer,\" and she established a \"Turkish Bath with Magnetic Massage\" business that she also called a \"sanatorium.\" According to her advertisement, she could treat \"any and all kind of diseases,\" and she defied \"any one to bring anything to my office that I cannot relieve and cure if my advice is strictly complied with.\" She also offered bathing facilities to the public, including Turkish and vapour baths. All Edmontonians could \"afford to be clean and fragrant\" if they bathed at her sanatorium, and she asked them to \"come and try one: makes old young and cures what ails you.\" As bathing days were Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it is difficult to determine how much time she spent on her land. She received her patent to her land in 1909 but died in 1913, aged fifty-eight, on her \"ranch.\" She had gone out shooting and did not return. Her friends found her unconscious, lying over her gun, and it was assumed she had been stricken with apoplexy. She was taken to hospital but never recovered. Sadly, the Lady Healer homesteader was unable to heal herself.\n\n_Figure 13._ Most homesteaders, whether male or female, had to earn money to help establish their farms and for basic survival in the start-up years. Alberta homesteader Margaret de Tro was a \"magnetic healer\" in Edmonton from 1906 to 1913 when she was not on her land near Hardisty. She earned her patent to her land in 1909 and died there in 1913. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 December 1905, 4.\n\n_Figure 14._ The auction sale of the estate of Madam M. de Tro of Hardisty, Alberta, in March 1916 indicates that she had acquired about 562 acres of land. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 1 March 1916, 9.\n\nHURDLES AND TRIBULATIONS\n\nThe experiences of Marion Ferguson Frazer (Pearce) demonstrate some of the obstructions and handicaps the woman homesteader faced. Frazer was from Largs in Ayreshire, Scotland, and she was a widow, nurse, and mother of two young sons in 1905 when she left for North America with her sons and brother, settling first in Virginia on a plantation. A year later the family moved north to Ontario, where Frazer worked as a nurse, and in 1909 she left her sons in the care of her brother to take a job nursing in Regina and explore the opportunities the West had to offer. A year later they joined her there, and in the spring of 1911 they loaded up a wagon and all set out for her homestead about 240 kilometres away at Wood Mountain. Frazer was forty-seven, her sons were eight and eleven, and her brother was sixty. They were joined by Willie, a cousin from Scotland. None of them had any farming experience, and they were heading toward one of the more desolate and dry regions of the West. Frazer's brother had been a \"drayman on a big steam ship,\" while Willie had been a cook on a sailing vessel.\n\nWithin a few months of her arrival, Frazer became Mrs. Pearce, marrying the man from whom she bought her team of oxen. He had filed on a homestead on the same section and the new Mrs. Pearce wrote to the Dominion Lands Office in December 1911 to ask if they could build one house and live together on her land. She added that \"we intend making this our home it is not a case of speculation.\" But these were the cases that land agents were wary of. Had they colluded to obtain two homesteads? Permission was denied. The newly married couple had to each have a residence on their separate homesteads to prove up.\n\nMarriage did not bring an easier life. Marion (Frazer) Pearce continued to nurse and attempted to farm on her very poor land. Her crops often failed. Her husband left her in 1917, abandoning his homestead without proving up, and she asked permission for her son to file on his land. The homestead inspector was sent to report on whether Mrs. Pearce was truly deserted, and he learned through \"careful enquiries\" that Mr. Pearce was \"afraid they [her sons] would shoot him\" and had left that part of the country. Eventually her son James was permitted to enter on the land deserted by his stepfather. As Marion Ferguson Pearce, she proved up on her land in 1919. But her homestead file documents the difficult circumstances of farming on what was at best range land, long after she got patent to her land. She was in debt for taxes and seed grain well into the 1920s. The whole region suffered from severe drought from 1918 to 1922; many provincial and federal officials argued that southern Saskatchewan should never have been homesteaded.\n\nDiscrimination against women homesteaders such as Marion Frazer (she reverted to that last name in 1924) continued. Once their children grew up, as children tend to do, women homesteaders were not eligible for land offers made to other settlers. In 1928 the outlook brightened for settlers of the Wood Mountain district, as an amendment was passed granting all those who had obtained their patent before 1925 the right to make a second homestead entry on the usual homesteading terms. This was in part a recognition of the very poor land and difficult circumstances everyone in that district experienced. But this opportunity was denied to Marion Frazer. Since her sons were no longer minors, she did not qualify for a second homestead. She was informed by the Acting Commissioner of Dominion Lands: \"You obtained homestead entry [in 1911] on the ground that you were a widow with two minor children, aged eight and eleven years, dependent upon you for support. Under the regulations the privilege of a first or second homestead is only extended to a woman who is a widow with minor children dependent upon her. It would appear that you have no minor children now dependent upon you for support and I regret to inform you that you are not entitled to another homestead.\"\n\nMary Ann McNab, from Scotland, who settled in 1882 in the Moose Mountain district of Saskatchewan, also struggled to obtain the right to a pre-emption of an additional 160 acres. Her husband Alexander had died a year after they arrived in Saskatchewan, leaving her with two of their children; seven of her other children had also died. McNab continued to live on and prove up on the homestead and was granted patent to that land in 1887, but she wanted to pre-empt another quarter section. In an October 1890 statutory declaration, Mary Ann McNab, then forty-six, wrote that she \"intended to take possession of this land last year, but I had both my arms broken and was not able to, I have paid a neighbour to draw the material for a house on the land, and I will take possession shortly. I am most desirous of keeping the land. I have had a very hard time providing for myself and two children.\"\n\nJohn Geddes, the Presbyterian minister at Carlyle, Saskatchewan, wrote to the secretary of the Department of the Interior in October 1890, explaining the circumstances of Mary Ann McNab and asking that she be granted the pre-emption. Geddes reminded the government that McNab had lost her husband and seven of her children; accordingly, he asked that the government \"consider the number of times she has stood on the brink of the grave.\" She was a \"woman of indomitable courage... obliged to do many things that fall, no doubt, within the province of a man.\" Geddes further described her as \"a talented woman, considering that she got only a common school education in Scotland.\" In particular, he admired her ability (which would have been rare among settlers) to speak the language of the neighbouring First Nation: \"She has learned the Assiniboine language, which I believe she can speak as fluently as English... I have heard her keep up a conversation with the Indians without a stutter.\" Geddes said that she had many skills, that she was \"quite a mechanic,\" and \"likewise a good needlewoman, a laundress, and a weaver; and when occasion is necessary, she can solder tin-plate.\" She knew \"the kinds of prairie weeds and flowers [that] are applied by the Indians in the healing art.\" (He recommended that she be hired to work among the people of the neighbouring reserve.) Yet according to Geddes, Mrs. McNab's ambition was \"to be tilling the ground.\" She was an excellent gardener, raising many varieties of vegetables; her work \"might compare favourably with the crops of any man that has made gardening a profession.\" The major goal of the letter was that Mrs. McNab be allowed to \"perform her duties on her second homestead.\" Geddes quoted from the Bible\u2014\"Plead for the widow\" (Isaiah 1:17)\u2014and asked that the government \"plead for her against those that would deprive her of one of the chances of making a living.\" Geddes asked, however, that his name be left out of any investigation that might be made as the \"parties against Mrs. McNab are in my congregation.\" Department of the Interior officials were sympathetic to the claim of Mrs. McNab, and in November 1890 she was given a further opportunity to comply with the conditions of the Dominion Lands Act. Mary Ann McNab received her patent to the pre-emption in 1897.\n\nThere were many ways in which the intricacies of the Dominion lands legislation made life difficult for the woman homesteader. She had to build a habitable dwelling and live on her homestead for six months of each year for three years. As was the case with Marion Frazer, if she married after she filed on her land but before she proved up, and if her husband was also a homesteader, they had to have separate residences, each on his or her own land during the six months of the year they were required to perform residency duties. If the woman homesteader had a son who filed on adjoining land, she could not live on his homestead (except during the six months she could be absent). Yet a son could live with her, never build his own shack, and still \"perfect\" his own entry. The legislation permitted a son who had parents in the vicinity to reside with his parents. The clause specified that the son homesteader could live with \"the father (or the mother, if the father is deceased).\" But a woman homesteader could not live on her son's homestead and still \"perfect\" her entry.\n\nThis rule was tested in 1898, when Saskatchewan homesteader Louisa Hill asked for permission to reside with her son on his adjoining quarter section and still prove up on her own homestead. Hill was informed that there was \"no provision in the law by which you can do residence duties while living with your son... there is no way of meeting your wishes.\" Correspondence on the matter continued for several years, with Hill claiming she had to live with her son because of ill health and because she lacked the means to live on her own. In September 1905 she was thrown from her rig and her arm was injured. That December she wrote to land officials that she was \"under the impression a mother could live with a son just as a son could live with a mother.\" But she was wrong. She had to live on her own homestead to perfect her entry. In 1906 it was decided that because she had been under an erroneous impression of the residence requirement, Louisa Hill would be permitted to purchase her land at one dollar per acre, and this payment must have been made because a patent was granted to her in 1907.\n\nThe issue of citizenship also complicated the life of the woman homesteader. To receive patent, a homesteader had to be a British subject or be naturalized, which meant an immigrant had to have resided in Canada not less than three years. At that point, \"He must take the oath of allegiance, and also an oath that he intends to remain in Canada.\" This process was available to \"every person who is of the full age of twenty-one years, and not an idiot, lunatic or married woman.\" Upon marriage a woman assumed the citizenship of her husband; if he became naturalized she was automatically naturalized. A woman homesteader, therefore, had to take great care if she married before she proved up. If, for example, she was a British subject either by marriage or birth but married a homesteader from the United States who was not yet naturalized, she would lose her right to her homestead because when she married she would become a U.S. citizen.\n\nThis became an issue in the American West among single women homesteaders, particularly those near the border of the United States and Canada. If a single woman homesteader born in the United States married a Canadian (or any other \"alien\") before she proved up on her land, she would lose her U.S. citizenship and her right to her homestead. The cause of these women was championed in 1917 by Jeanette Rankin, congresswoman from Montana. Campaigning for re-election, she learned that \"many of the girls along the border with Canada love Canadian boys and cannot marry them without losing their American citizenship and therefore also their Montana homesteads.\" Rankin found the situation \"ridiculous,\" saying that \"men are allowed to choose their own nations. Women should be accorded the same right.\" (The U.S. citizenship legislation was changed in 1925 to address this, and the process began in Canada with legislation of 1932.)\n\nDEBATING AND NARROWING THE CATEGORIES OF ELIGIBLE WOMEN: THE CASE OF SUSANNA WILLIS, VIRDEN HOMESTEADER\n\nAs the experiences of homesteaders such as Marion Frazer indicate, women contended with vicissitudes and difficulties over and above those that challenged their male counterparts. They held no political clout; they were without votes and without wealth. They could be shoved off their land if it was desired by a neighbour or a speculator. This was the case with homesteader Susanna Willis, whose entry was cancelled because she had valuable land. The stated rationale was that her children were too old; she was likely the first woman to have her homestead cancelled because of this reason. Willis was a widow, originally from Ireland, who had emigrated to Ontario in 1830, and at the time of her 1882 filing on a homestead in Manitoba was about sixty-three. Her land turned out to be very valuable, as it was just where the CPR decided to locate the town of Virden. Land for a townsite was highly sought after, and many speculators tried to anticipate where these sites might be located. Willis was suddenly rendered ineligible to homestead and was told that this was because she did not qualify as a head of family. She had built a house and had part of her land ploughed when she was informed of this, and also told that her land was required for the townsite. However, the main argument used to disqualify her was that while she was a widow and had two sons, she did not have a minor child or children, so she was no longer a head of family.\n\nWillis's case raised many questions at the time and for years later. The _Manitoba Free Press_ was sympathetic to her cause, reporting that \"a very dirty trick\" had been perpetrated on her and suggesting that the CPR wanted her off the land to be able to profit from the townsite:\n\nThe Government appears determined not to do justice to the widow, Mrs. Willis, whose homestead was taken from her last spring on a technicality because it was wanted for the town site of Virden. An Ottawa correspondent states that, failing to obtain any satisfaction from the Local Land Agency, Mrs. Willis appealed to the Government, and a few days ago when her solicitor laid her case before the department, he was told by a government official that the provision in the Land Act enabling widows to acquire homesteads, only applied to widows with very young children. A number of other equally brilliant excuses were given for depriving the woman of her homestead at the request of the [CPR] Syndicate.\n\nThere was fierce debate, however, about the right of the \"Widow Willis\" to her land. The _Winnipeg Daily Times_ supported the government's stand and insisted that \"although a widow, [she] is not a sole head of family in the sense of having a family dependent on her for support... on the contrary her sons are grown up and have second homesteads and pre-emptions for themselves.\" The _Times_ stressed that the _Free Press_ was trying to present this as the story of an \"Irish eviction\" and that other issues were involved, including that Mrs. Willis had not improved the land and was two months late in becoming a bona fide resident of her homestead (while the _Free Press_ claimed she was delayed by flooding). According to the _Times_ there was subterfuge involved, and Willis had filed on land as \"simply an attempt to obtain a second homestead for the son in the name of the mother.\"\n\nThe debate continued well into the next century, when it was proven that Thomas Mayne Daly, a Brandon lawyer (and elected mayor of Brandon in 1882) and later minister of the interior, had made huge profits from land sales in Western Canada, including from his \"ownership\" of land that became the town of Virden. A 1901 Northwest Town Sites Commission found that Daly had entered on the south half of the township in question, while Willis had the northeast quarter as her homestead. She made improvements and was living on her homestead, while Daly had made no improvements and had been in residence there only ten days. Willis's entry was cancelled for the official reason that her son was not a minor, and she received no compensation. Daly, however, made an enormous profit selling his \"rights\" to the south half for $6,400.\n\nInquiries revealed the documentary evidence. In May 1882 the CPR land agent at Winnipeg, J.H. McTavish, wrote to C. Drinkwater, secretary of the CPR in Montreal, to the effect that the Willis\/Daly section had been chosen for the station and town, and that \"Mrs. Willis has failed to comply with the homestead regulations, and I am taking steps to have her entry cancelled. Daly is prepared to abandon if we pay him $20 per acre or $6400.00 cash.\" Drinkwater replied yes, that they should \"deal with Daly and take the necessary steps against the widow Willis.\" Daly's claim was to be settled from the first sale of town lots in Virden. The matter was still being discussed in 1908, when the _Brandon Daily Sun_ asked, \"Would the CPR have made fish of Mr. Daly and fowl of the widow if Mr. Daly had not been backed by the Government at Ottawa? Was Mr. Daly as Minister of the Interior under any obligations thereafter to promote the interests of the CPR?\" No one, it seems, thought of asking Susanna Willis herself about the issue. She was still in Virden as late as 1901, when at age ninety-two she was living with her son Thomas (fifty-three), a farmer. At the time she was forced off her land in 1882, Thomas would have been nineteen, just out of \"minor\" status. Daly, by contrast, has been honoured for his \"distinguished legal and political career\" by the Historic Sites Advisory Board of Manitoba. There is a plaque outside his home, which is a museum in Brandon, and a pamphlet that recognizes his contribution to public affairs in Manitoba and Western Canada.\n\nWHO IS A \"SOLE\" HEAD OF A FAMILY?\n\nThe wording of the 1876 amendment to the Dominion Lands legislation left room for many questions, including whether in certain cases a \"spinster\" was a head of household and could homestead. In 1886 there was concern that an amendment to the law was necessary to make it clear that a spinster was not a head of household. The minister of justice concurred with the opinion of William Wilson, law clerk of the House of Commons, that \"under no circumstances can a spinster be considered eligible to make homestead entry.\" Wilson wrote, \"I fail to see how a spinster could be the head of a family in terms of the Dominion Lands Act. If she had servants or dependents they would, subject to the terms of their agreements, be free to go when they like and therefore could hardly be deemed to be a family... I therefore think that the practice which appears... to have obtained, of refusing them homestead entry is in accordance with the law, and that no amendment of the law in the direction indicated is necessary.\"\n\nYet there were rare instances when single women did manage to homestead. Isadore Harkness, a dressmaker at Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, filed on land as a single woman in 1882 and built a home there in February 1883. A document explaining her case over ten years later stated that the Agent of Dominion Lands at Prince Albert \"through inadvertence, and apparently under the impression that she was the sole head of a family, granted a homestead entry... to a spinster.\" Harkness lived on her land for several months each year (May to November) and in 1885 applied for her patent, having ten acres under cultivation. Her case was delayed, however, for over ten years after her initial application for patent, as the issue of her eligibility was debated at the highest levels of government and of the bureaucracy. In 1895, Minister of the Interior T.M. Daly (who had helped to divest Mrs. Willis of her land) was sympathetic. He thought there was evidence that Harkness was the sole support of her widowed mother and sisters. But Deputy Minister A.M. Burgess looked into the case and found that in fact the mother and a blind brother both had their own homesteads, and the mother was residing with her son. Although Burgess too was sympathetic, he concluded that \"we cannot say that she is the sole support or even chief support of the family.\" Minister Daly referred the matter to the Privy Council, recommending that letters patent be granted, that \"it would be a hardship now to deprive Miss Harkness of her homestead on the ground of her ineligibility to obtain a homestead entry, inasmuch as she secured her entry and complied with all the requirements of the law in good faith.\" Harkness finally was granted ownership of her land in May 1895.\n\nBut the majority of single women who inquired about their right to homestead were informed that they were not eligible. Ellen Margaret Cameron wrote to the Department of the Interior from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1886, asking whether a head of family in the legislation could be interpreted to mean \"a young unmarried lady over 21 years of age who wished to have a homestead of her own independent of other members of the family (as is now quite customary in the United States).\" Her deceased mother, she noted, was a Canadian. Cameron was curtly informed in 1887 that \"a young unmarried woman does not come under the term 'sole head of a family' existing in the Dominion Lands Act.\"\n\nThe eligibility of women in other categories was debated by officials, including the case in 1893 of Margaret Spence, a M\u00e9tis woman and mother of \"illegitimate children.\" The evidence before the Departments of the Interior and Justice was that she was not legally married to Thomas Young, but had children with him, and had lived with him on land that \"Young squatted upon... and lived thereon until the year 1891, when he left the country.\" \"He had during all that time residing with him a Half-breed woman,\" was how an official of the Department of the Interior put it. In 1893 Margaret Spence wanted to be allowed to make homestead entry; she and her children were still living on the land, keeping up improvements, and paying taxes. The secretary of the Department of the Interior sought the opinion of the Department of Justice, noting that \"the practice of the Department of the Interior has been to interpret the expression 'sole head of family'... to be restricted to a widow with children some of whom at least are minor, and the Department has refused to recognise the mother of illegitimate children as entitled to make homestead entry.\" The two departments rummaged about for \"the proper definition of the term 'sole head of a family' but did not succeed in finding any record of such an opinion.\" The Minister of Justice decided that \"under the peculiar circumstances of this case... your Department may properly recognize Margaret Spence as a sole head of family, and permit her to make entry for the land in question.\" The minister would not, however, \"lay down any general rule on the subject.\" (There is no register of a land patent for Margaret Spence.) Documents pertaining to the scrip application of Margaret and Thomas's daughter Sarah suggest that her parents were in fact married, that her mother was Margaret Young and the widow of Thomas Young, who had died in Alaska in 1889.\n\nThe Margaret Spence case led to an intensive effort to create a \"general and final ruling\" on which women could homestead, and how terms such as \"sole\" and \"head\" were to be interpreted. In an 1894 memorandum, a Department of Justice clerk collected definitions of the meaning of the term \"head,\" including \"a person to whom others are subordinate\" and \"the most prominent or important member of any organized body.\" _Bovier's Law Dictionary_ defined \"Head of a Family\" as follows: \"Householder; one who provides for a family... There must be the relation of parent and child, or husband and wife.\" Because the term \"head of family\" could not be said to be a \"word of art\" (meaning a term that has a precise or specific meaning within a discipline or field), the clerk urged that \"the only safe general rules we can lay down must be founded upon a strict construction of the Statute, leaving doubtful cases to be decided according to their special circumstances.\" It was further noted that \"sole was not used in the U.S. legislation.\" In Canada the designation \"sole\" head of family was used to exclude a great variety of women, for example someone whose husband might still be alive, although ill or incapacitated. A woman who had adopted or was an older sister of siblings, or was caring for a sibling's children had to have the _sole_ legal right to custody or control of children in order to qualify.\n\nAn 1895 Department of Justice ruling set out the rights of women to make homestead entries. The most uncomplicated eligible category was that of widow, but the widow had to have a minor child or children\u2014if they were grown the applicant was not eligible. A person was considered a minor in the eyes of the law until age twenty-one. However, if the widow's only child (or only minor child) was a son who had reached the age of eighteen, the widow was no longer eligible, as the son could apply for his own homestead. If her child was a daughter the widow was eligible until the daughter was twenty-one.\n\nThe widowed applicant generally had to sign a statutory declaration that she indeed was a widow (although it is not clear just when this became a requirement), and provide the names and ages of her children. If it was later discovered that she was not a widow then she might be disqualified altogether, or she might be permitted to purchase her homestead, generally at a price between three dollars to one dollar per acre, or she could be sent to jail, as discussed in one case below.\n\nAccording to the 1895 ruling, a married woman deserted or separated with a minor child or children could \"sometimes\" be the sole head of a family, if the husband was presumed dead, for example, or \"where by a _binding agreement_ or by the Courts she has been given the custody or control of the children.\" In this and many other categories, when doubts arose, the cases were to be submitted to the Department of Justice. A married woman separated or deserted and having no children depending on her \"cannot be held to be the sole head of a family.\" Even with children, it was unlikely that a deserted woman would be permitted to homestead. A Mrs. Doig of Regina applied for permission to homestead nine years after her husband deserted her, went to the United States, acquired a divorce, and remarried. The reply to her request was that if she had minor children and had already performed settlement duties on a homestead acquired by her husband she was eligible to apply for title to that land, but if she was applying \"with a view to taking out land I should think that it ought not to be granted.\" Since Mrs. Doig had no children she was therefore not regarded as a sole head of a family, and her application was not granted. Even though her husband had deserted her and remarried, the decision still applied that \"a married woman who does not live with her husband, though not divorced under Canadian law, is not so entitled.\"\n\nDocuments had to be produced for the land office, and the files of some women homesteaders or would-be homesteaders include deeds of separation. In August 1913 Amanda Giller, widow and milliner of Grouard, Alberta, wrote directly to the secretary of the Department of the Interior, explaining that she was legally separated from her husband, Dr. Jean Louis Giller, that she was left with three children, and was \"absolutely obliged to see to their education, not knowing even where there [ _sic_ ] father is living.\" She wrote that she was twenty-nine years old and her husband seventy, and the children were two, three, and four. The local land agent had urged her to write directly to Ottawa for permission. She had a legal separation and produced the document, dated 9 June 1913. The document stated that they were from then on to live \"separate and apart,\" that \"Amanda Giller shall be as if she were feme sole, and shall henceforth be free from the control and authority of the said J.L. Giller.\" She was granted custody, but if she failed to provide for \"the necessaries of life, or to give them a proper education,\" she had to deliver the children to her husband. A further provision was that \"the said Amanda Giller shall conduct herself as a chaste and good woman and does not endanger at any time the moral welfare of the said children.\" It is not clear from the file whether she was permitted to enter on a homestead. No patent for land was ever issued to her. An Ottawa memo of 1914 in her file noted that her Agreement of Separation was not \"legally sealed,\" although in the margins an official wrote, \"She appears to be entitled under present practice.\" Perhaps during the many months when she heard nothing back from the Department of the Interior, she decided to pursue other survival strategies.\n\nA major concern about separated women was, as future prime minister R.L. Borden explained in the House of Commons in 1907, that to permit them to file for homesteads would encourage separation, because then both husband and wife could obtain homesteads. (This same reasoning was not applied to separated men.) Rulings with regard to deserted and separated wives were eventually relaxed, but in all cases women had to have minor children. Initially, women who could prove desertion for five years were permitted homestead entry, and in 1920 this was changed to two years, although the Department of the Interior would \"order an investigation by a Homestead Inspector regarding the BONA FIDES of the application,\" and when the report was received, there was no guarantee\u2014the case would be decided on its own merits. In 1914 separated women who could produce a proper agreement of separation could also be considered, and an investigation would be held. The homestead inspector's report had to \"clearly show that there is no danger of collusion\"\u2014of the husband and wife plotting to both acquire land. Throughout the correspondence of the government officials there was an evident lurking suspicion that deceptive and evasive tactics were being employed to acquire land.\n\nThe 1895 ruling on which women were eligible to make homestead entries also stated that a married woman \"validly divorced\" in Canada and having control or custody of minor children was entitled to be treated as a sole head of a family. A valid decree of divorce had to be submitted with an application. (There were very few such validly divorced women, as divorces were very rare at that time in Western Canada. There were no divorce courts in the Prairie provinces, and divorce was obtained by a special Act of Parliament, an expensive and public procedure. Alberta, for example, had one divorce case in 1906 and one in 1909, these being the only divorces to 1909 since Alberta became a province in 1905.) A foreign decree of divorce would have to be carefully scrutinized for its validity\u2014including American divorces, which were generally not recognized in Canada.\n\nThe 1895 ruling declared that \"spinsters without any one related or otherwise dependent upon them\" were not eligible to file for a homestead, nor were spinsters with servants or employees dependent upon them. Nor was a spinster with dependent brothers or sisters eligible, unless she had been given custody or control through a will or legal instrument or a competent court. There were exceptions, but these were carefully scrutinized. In 1904 Miss Matilda Bucknam requested permission to file on a homestead. Lawyer James MacLean of Yorkton wrote to J.G. Turriff, Commissioner of Dominion Lands in Ottawa, on her behalf and explained that \"Miss Bucknam is, and has been the support of her Mother, a widow and an invalid, and her brothers and sisters for many years. One boy, a minor of about 15 years now with her sick helpless mother is entirely dependent on Miss Bucknam for support... Miss Bucknam is desirous of having the privilege of taking up a Homestead in her own name. Her mother could not, owing to ill health, fulfil the homestead duties.\" The commissioner consented to this, and Bucknam filed on a quarter section near Edmonton, although she later had to abandon the claim, declaring in 1905 that \"I am unable to go to live upon it at the present time as the salary I am now earning is necessary to the support of myself and my mother who is a widow.\"\n\nAn unmarried woman with \"illegitimate\" children depending upon her \"may sometimes be eligible as it has been held that a mother has a natural right to the custody of her young children,\" but every such case was to be decided on its own merits. Generally the Department of Justice refused to recognize the mothers of illegitimate children as entitled to homestead entry, although a few cases were permitted. Initially grandmothers having custody of minor grandchildren were not considered eligible, but this ruling was reversed in 1896. However, in 1916 a widow named Mary Blackstock filed on a homestead, claiming she had a minor child dependent upon her for support, but when it was later shown that this was not her own but her daughter's child, cancellation proceedings were instituted on the ground of fraud.\n\nAn unmarried woman with adopted children was not eligible, unless, once again, this was \"by virtue of a will or other instrument, or the judgement or order or decree of a competent court.\" In 1888 Miss Bertha Livingston, who had some of her sister's children depending on her for support, was informed that she was not eligible. In the 1895 case of Eliza McFadden, who adopted the two children of Thomas Hare, it was not sufficient to produce a letter from Hare in which he agreed to relinquish and resign all his legal claims to these children as their parent. McFadden was found not eligible because she could not be considered the _sole_ head of a family, as \"a father cannot divest himself of his authority over or responsibility for his children by such an agreement.\"\n\nReplies to enquiries were terse. In 1904 Susan Walper of Yarrow, Alberta, wrote to the secretary of the Department of the Interior asking if she could enter on a homestead. She was thirty-two and single, and had a nephew in her care whose parents had died. She wrote that her \"sister's last wish was for me to provide for and bring up the child.\" She found it hard to make a living, and was ready to move onto the land and \"make it a future home for myself and my boy.\" The answer from P.G. Keyes was simply that \"you are not entitled to a homestead entry, as this privilege is restricted to women only who are widows with minor children dependent upon them.\" This was not what the legislation stated, but this was how it was consistently interpreted.\n\nProof of legal adoption was required. In 1911, when Miss Marion T. Thompson applied for entry on an Alberta homestead, she had to submit her \"Agreement as to Custody of a Child,\" dated 1908, at Newcastle upon Tyne. Through this agreement, widow Elizabeth Hopwood Thompson of Durham gave \"possession and custody of her son James\" to her sister Marion Thompson, who agreed to maintain, clothe, and educate him. At the time of the adoption agreement, Marion Thompson was a \"spinster\" living at the Pioneer Club, Grafton Street, London, which was a women's club devoted to the suffrage campaign and other feminist issues of the day. The club hosted lectures and discussions of a great variety of topics, and the potential for women to farm in the colonies may have been raised by speakers. James was seventeen years old when his adoptive mother filed on a homestead\u2014if she had waited one more year she would not have been eligible. Marion Thompson established a ranch at Swallowhurst, and she was often mentioned in the social columns of the Edmonton and area newspapers (although an adopted son was not mentioned). In a May 1912 issue of the _Edmonton Bulletin_ , it was noted that \"Miss Marion Thompson leaves next Monday with her maid for her ranch in Swallowhurst.\" She received her patent to the land in 1915.\n\nWhile older children could be of assistance to women homesteaders, the presence of young children must have impeded the progress of the farm. Imagine for a moment just how efficiently and quickly the prairies would have been settled if male homesteaders had been restricted to the category of widowers with young children they were solely responsible for. While children were not strictly required to reside on the land with the woman homesteader, the children might have to be produced for the homestead inspector, especially in the case of a widow coming from another country, as \"there would be some opening for misrepresentation if a widow... were granted entry merely upon her statement that she has a minor child or her own dependent on her for support, such child not being a resident of Canada.\"\n\nWives whose husbands were incapacitated by disease or injury could sometimes be granted the right to homestead, but these appear to have been exceedingly rare. Each case was individually examined, and in each case the applicants had to have minor children. In 1895 Mrs. Catherine Godkin wrote to the Department of the Interior for permission to homestead. She was the mother of four young children, and her husband had been confined in an insane asylum for seven years, with little hope for recovery. The decision was that Mrs. Godkin was not a sole head of her family within the meaning of the statute (presumably because her husband was still alive and thus she was not the _sole_ head). In the 1920s this was relaxed to some extent but not automatically; each case was still individually examined. The insane or incapacitated husband could not have previously filed on a homestead, and there had to be no chance of recovery. Decisions were not always as draconian as with the Godkin case. In 1887 a homestead entry near Yorkton was granted to Mrs. Jane Ferguson when evidence was filed that her husband John was \"hopelessly insane.\"\n\nTHE DEVIOUS WOMAN HOMESTEADER\n\nDespite having tried to clearly identify which women could qualify as a \"sole\" head of household, Dominion lands officials remained concerned about the potential for women to resort to devious means to obtain land. A new clause was added to the \"Eligibility for Homestead Entry\" section of the Dominion Lands Act in 1897: \"If in the case of any woman who, claiming to be the sole head of a family, makes application for a homestead entry, any doubt arises as to the right of such woman to be recognized as the sole head of a family, the Minister may decide from the special circumstances of the case whether such application shall be granted or refused.\"\n\nStories of these devious means were many, some true and others embellished. There were women who acquired or tried to acquire homestead land through falsely representing themselves as widows. Some were caught and prevented, while others managed to slip through the cracks of the bureaucracy, possibly because a local land agent and inspector relaxed the rigid rules. Hannah Surrey (n\u00e9e Osborne), from Essex, England, homesteaded in the Maple Creek district of the Cypress Hills. She settled in 1887 with three children. In the entry on Surrey in the local history, the author comments, \"Just what prompted a widow with 3 children to choose a four year old prairie town (so far from her native home) to rear her family is question not answered.\" But the same entry hints at an answer: \"She was accompanied by her brother-in-law John Harvey, who also had a young family.\" A Harvey family genealogist in recent years has (re)discovered that Hannah and John ran away together to Maple Creek. Hannah was the sister of John's wife (Charity Osborne Harvey). The scandal this must have generated would have motivated the couple to seek this distant location so remote from their home. In the 1906 census Hannah Surrey is listed as a \"widow\" and \"sister\" of the head of household, John Harvey, who is listed as \"married.\" They had become prosperous ranchers with 200 horses and 700 head of cattle. Hannah remained on the Maple Creek ranch until 1912, when she moved with daughter Jane to Victoria.\n\nElise Vane was a Manitoba homesteader, filing on her land in 1886. She arrived in Canada in 1882 from England (although she was originally from Germany) with her five children, along with Percy and Alice Criddle and their four children. Both Alice and Elise were Percy's wives and the mothers of his children. Elise Harrer, who changed her last name to Vane when they immigrated to Canada, was the first wife of Percy Criddle (although the term \"common law\" may be most apt for this marriage, as no marriage certificate has been found). She was German, and they had met in Heidelberg where they were both students. Later she moved to London, where Percy had a wine shop. Criddle then married Alice Nicol in 1874. They all shipped off together and settled north of Treesbank, where the family eventually acquired 6,000 acres.\n\nIn Elise Vane's quest for a homestead, both she and Percy Criddle declared that she was a widow. When she applied for her patent to her land in 1889 and was asked to clarify her status as a head of family, she wrote, \"I beg to tell you that I have been a widow since Sept. 1874 and that I am a head of a family having five living sons and one daughter. I thought I had already given this information.\" Further complications arose in obtaining her patent because she had been living with the Criddles and not on her homestead, except for three months of one year, and the land office initially insisted that she had to fully comply with the residency requirements. Vane objected, stating that she was a \"widow with scanty means\" and would lose her employment as housekeeper. She added that she considered her homestead her \"clear and undoubted right.\" But officials maintained that it seemed she had abandoned her homestead and changed her vocation. Then another complication arose. In January 1890, an anonymous letter arrived at the land office in Winnipeg, stating, \"If you take the trouble to look into the record of Mrs. (Miss) Vane... you will find that she is an unmarried woman living as a servant in the house of P. Criddle.\"\n\nThe homestead inspector was sent to investigate. From his interview with Vane, he reported that she was born in Germany of German parents and had married an Englishman in 1864; they lived in England and had five children. Vane stated that her husband had died in England in 1874, but that his death certificate and their marriage certificate were lost in Winnipeg in 1882. The inspector also spoke to Percy Criddle, whom he found to be a \"thoroughly reliable man.\" Criddle stated that Mrs. Vane had been their housekeeper since 1874 or 1875, that \"he has known her family for the past thirty years, and that he believes her to have been married and that she has always had a good character.\" Criddle was one of Vane's witnesses to her application for her patent, swearing that all her information was true. (In a letter to the Dominion Lands Commissioner in Winnipeg, Criddle wrote that he knew the real name of the author of the \"scurrilous\" letter, suggesting that the writer had reason to profit if Vane's application was rejected and that he wanted the letter so that he could have the handwriting analyzed.) The homestead inspector further reported that other male settlers in the neighbourhood stated that Vane was \"a respectable woman and that she is a bona fide settler.\"\n\nVane and Criddle persuaded officials that she was a sole head of a family, as letters patent were issued to her in March 1890. In the census for 1891, Elise Vane is identified as a widow, aged fifty; it appears she was living on her own land beside the Criddles, with sons Edwy, nineteen; Harry, eighteen; and Cecil, seventeen. In 1901 she is listed as a \"lodger\" in the Criddle home and a widow, but she identifies herself as a \"farmer.\"\n\nThe experiences of Elise Vane illustrate how women homesteaders were policed and monitored in a way that men were not. Inspectors were sent to see if male claimants were attending to their homestead duties of cultivation and residency but did not inquire into their marital status, their status as a sole head of family, or their morality. A man could have two wives and families and not have his affairs investigated and be declared \"thoroughly reliable.\" Widowed women homesteaders were often assumed to be the opposite\u2014trying to obtain land for devious purposes and through devious means.\n\n\"Collusion\" was the term often used to describe how a devious woman might conspire with a male partner or fianc\u00e9 to obtain two homesteads. At an Edmonton land rush on 31 August 1908, there was one woman among the several hundred men waiting to file on homesteads outside the land titles office. She was Margaret Conklin, who told the _Edmonton Bulletin_ she was a widow from Michigan. The paper reported that she did not have to stand in line all night, as a \"young man saw her intention and offered to hold her place. She had a good night's rest and resumed her stand this morning.\" She successfully filed on a quarter section. Journalist Gertrude Balmer Watt later wrote of her interview with Conklin as she stood in line. The widow said she was looking for a homestead for herself and her son, who was fifteen: \"She knew all about farming; could plough with the best of them; had studied gardening and chicken raising, and loved both occupations. She and her boy would work the farm themselves; she had her eye on a likely spot, which friends had looked over for her.\"\n\nJust days after the land rush it was reported that Conklin had married Fred Reed, also from Michigan, at Grace Methodist church in Edmonton. Reed had located a homestead on the adjoining quarter section and had been just ahead of her in the line. The _Bulletin_ commended this \"unique inauguration of a 320 acre farm and wished Mr. and Mrs. Reed their full share of health and happiness,\" but added that \"the subject of a very interesting inquiry would be whether the pair had the matter all arranged before coming to the city, or whether the gallant Reed sort of 'sprung it on her' as they stood in line.\" No such evidence was ever forthcoming. The couple, however, did not retain both homesteads. Fred proved up upon his and got a patent to his land, but Margaret abandoned her homestead in 1910, for reasons that the file does not reveal. Their story lived on and was retold as the \"romance at the land office... of the bachelor and young widow who filed on neighbouring quarter sections at the same time, compared notes on leaving the office, and in due course were married.\"\n\nMINISTER OF THE INTERIOR FRANK OLIVER AND FURTHER NARROWING OF OPPORTUNITIES\n\nUnder the administration of Frank Oliver, minister of the interior for the Wilfrid Laurier Liberals from 1905 to 1911, the applications of women for homesteads were subject to increasingly intense scrutiny, and many were rejected. Oliver was the member of Parliament for Edmonton and a newspaper publisher, politician, and land speculator who was implicated in many improper land transactions that enriched his friends and supporters, and lined his own pockets. In 1910 Oliver became particularly intransigent, perhaps in response to the growing campaign for homesteads-for-women. In January of that year Oliver \"dug his heels in\" and declared to employees of the department that the rules were to be rigidly interpreted and applied. In a memorandum to employees, Oliver warned them to guard against fraudulent applications by women. He told them that the homestead privilege was \"not to be granted to a widow who is the legal guardian of a minor child, nor to a widow who has an adopted minor child dependent on her for support except in cases where the adoption was made a sufficiently long time prior to the application for entry to satisfy the Department that such adoption was not made for the mere purpose of making her eligible for homestead entry.\" A few months later he told employees of the Department of the Interior: \"No woman should be granted permission to enter for a homestead unless she is clearly eligible to do so under the regulations, that is to say, a widow with minor children dependent upon her for support. This means that a woman who has been abandoned by her husband, or has in some other way become separated from him, is not to be granted homestead entry until her case has been passed upon by the Minister.\"\n\n_Figure 15._ A land rush was the prairie equivalent of a gold rush. As surveys were completed and new townships opened for entry, hundreds rushed to claim homesteads. Hopeful homesteaders might camp out for days outside the land office. While some land rushes were orderly, others were not, requiring police assistance. There were sometimes stampedes as people rushed to be at the front of the line once the office opened. Rush for Free Homesteads at the Dominion Land Office, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 1908. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Postcard 18198.\n\n_Figure 16._ At the Edmonton land rush on 1 September 1908, Margaret Conklin, a widow from Michigan, was the only woman among several hundred men lined up. She successfully filed on a homestead, and a day later, married Fred Reed, also from Michigan, who had been just ahead of her in the line. Had they \"colluded\" to obtain two homesteads, it was wondered? While she did not \"prove up,\" her husband did. Homestead rush at Edmonton, Alberta, 1 September 1908. Peel's Prairie Provinces, University of Alberta Libraries, Postcard 6839.\n\nOliver instructed his staff that cases of women applicants \"in which there is no merit are to be turned down promptly,\" and that any case with \"some merit\" was to be brought to his attention. It was in 1910 that a woman (Elizabeth Edmundson, further discussed below) claiming falsely to be a widow in order to file on a homestead was sent to jail when her husband was brought all the way from Buffalo, New York, to appear at her trial in Medicine Hat, Alberta. This courtroom drama was likely staged with the knowledge and approval of Minister Oliver. And in July 1910 Oliver personally ruled on the homestead application of Mrs. Louisa Pearkes, of Droitwich, England, who was reported to be on her way to join her two sons at Stauffer, Alberta. She had submitted an \"uncertified copy of a Deed of separation between herself and George Pearkes\" from 1907. Louisa Pearkes had one minor child, a daughter who was nineteen. Oliver denied permission: \"The separation is uncertified and too recent. In cases of separation any of less than five years will not be considered.\" If Oliver was concerned that the mother and sons were of dubious character because of her separation from her husband, he was to be proven wrong. Louisa Pearkes joined her sons with her daughter in Alberta in 1910 and found them living in impoverished circumstances. The sons had not wanted to \"add to their mother's problems,\" as she was separated from their father, and they were clearly receiving no assistance from him. Louisa Pearkes remained separated from her husband, later moving to British Columbia. Her homesteader son George was awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the First World War, and he later became a major general in the Canadian Army, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Pacific Command, a member of Parliament, the minister of National Defence, and Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia.\n\nIn June 1910 Oliver once again proved rigid and intransigent when he decided that Mrs. Oxilla Grant was not eligible for a homestead. Although her daughter was over the age of twenty-one, Grant had provided a statutory declaration and a medical certificate to the effect that her daughter \"Anna Grant, is an invalid and incapable of earning her living by her work.\" Oliver wrote tersely, \"Not eligible daughter is not a minor.\"\n\nTHE PROBLEM OF THE LIVING BUT ABSENT HUSBAND\n\nThere were cases when authorities decided that a woman homesteader was not entitled to have entered on a homestead after all because a husband was found to be alive, in the vicinity, or providing support. In some of these instances the woman homesteader was permitted to purchase her land. This was generally a humiliatingly public process, as the matter was referred to the Privy Council, an order-in-council had to be passed, and the result published in the _Canada Gazette_ four times. In January 1895, Maria Bell Heath from Ontario was permitted to enter on a homestead near Leduc, having claimed the right to make an entry as she had a deed of separation between herself and her husband. The deed of separation was dated 1880. The matter was referred, however, to the Department of Justice, and there it was decided that \"the said deed of separation does not make Mrs. Heath the sole head of a family within the meaning of the Dominion Lands Act to qualify her to obtain a homestead.\" Presumably because her husband was still alive, Mrs. Heath, whether separated or not, was not considered the sole head of her family. The matter was discussed at the level of the Privy Council, where evidence was presented that Mrs. Heath was \"to all intents and purposes a widow and has the care of a family, is desirous of obtaining the said land for the purpose of residing on and cultivating the same.\" While the council decided that she could not be allowed to homestead, even under the \"exceptional circumstances\" of the case, it was decided that she be allowed to purchase the land at one dollar per acre. This decision was approved in July 1895, but it still took years for the matter to be settled; she was not granted her patent until 1901.\n\nWomen homesteaders who were found to be separated from their husbands rather than widows, as they had claimed, were permitted to purchase their land. In 1907 Margaret Heffernan secured entry to an Alberta homestead, claiming to be a widow with minor children. However, a homestead inspector reported that Heffernan's husband was alive, that they had been separated for about twelve years, and that he still paid her twenty-five dollars per month. The clerk of the Privy Council reported in 1912 that \"as Mrs. Heffernan has been receiving support from her husband she is not properly entitled to a homestead entry in her own name.\" Yet she was permitted \"some consideration,\" as she had completed all of the homestead duties. It was decided that she would be allowed to purchase her land at one dollar per acre.\n\nA woman homesteader who falsely claimed to be a widow, however, could be sent to jail. This was the case with Elizabeth Edmundson, who filed on a homestead near Medicine Hat in 1910. She claimed not only that she was a widow, but that she had the care of a number of small children (also false). In the article on her trial for perjury in the _Medicine Hat Times_ , the reporter wrote that she claimed her husband had \"been under the sod since May 1, 1906... What must have been her joy then to see her deceased husband in the courtroom on Saturday afternoon. In fact she seemed so overwhelmed by emotion that she thought it better to make no defence at all to the charge of perjury.\" Husband William H. Edmundson was brought all the way from Buffalo, New York, to testify that Elizabeth had left him three years earlier with another man who had been boarding with them, taking their son with her. Mr. Edmundson followed his wife to Medicine Hat some time later, \"hearing that the son was being badly treated,\" and placed the son with his sister in Buffalo. Because the husband had been in Medicine Hat in 1907 to collect his son, the police knew that Mrs. Edmundson was not a widow as she claimed. While Elizabeth did not testify, there were hints in the questions of her lawyer that her husband had threatened her with a knife and was a drinker. In giving his decision the magistrate said that he was sorry that the accused had not been examined, as he believed that she had \"acted on the instigation of some man... who ought certainly to be brought to justice.\" While the punishment for perjury was two years in the penitentiary, magistrate O.W. Kealy stated that there were several circumstances that made this case \"peculiar.\" The first was that \"he was well aware of the fact that laxity as to the truth in obtaining homesteads was too prevalent altogether. Mrs. Edmundson happened to be the one caught.\" He was also \"sorry that she was a woman, because otherwise he would have imposed the full sentence. He said her offence had been deliberate and was without excuse. He hoped that it would be a warning to others who might be tempted to try similar methods.\" Elizabeth Edmundson was sentenced to nine months of imprisonment in the Calgary jail.\n\nDelia Bell presented herself as a widow when she first filed on a homestead at Grandview, Manitoba, in 1903. She wrote in June of that year to the land agent that \"I am a widow and have never had a homestead. I have 7 children.\" In the 1881 census, Delia was a Mrs. Wheeler, aged twenty-six, living with her farmer husband George Wheeler and four children in the Lisgar district of Manitoba. In the 1891 census, she was Mrs. Bell, living with her husband W.G. Bell (ten years younger than her), born in Scotland, who was a \"stable man\"; she had five children with the last names Wheeler and two younger children with the last name Bell. In the 1901 census, she was a \"widow\" operating a boarding house, with three of her children still with her; their last names were first recorded as \"Bell\" but then were crossed out and the last name \"Whaler\" recorded. In 1906 she was back with William Bell and no longer a widow; they were living on a farm in Grandview. In 1911 she was still living with William Bell and two children. These changing identifiers were to cause her problems as a homesteader.\n\nBell wanted to file on land abandoned by her son who had left for the United States. She was granted entry in 1903, but very soon there were reports from nearby settlers that she was not living on her land and making no improvements. The land agent at Dauphin supported Bell, writing in 1904 that he knew her well as she had \"lived in this town for some time where she kept boarders, she is a hard working and industrious woman, who advanced considerable money to her son T.H. Wheeler, who was the former holder of this land and is reported to have disposed of the cattle and equipment, purchased with her money, and left the country. I would ask the Commissioner to grant any protection possible in this case.\" Cancellation proceedings were abandoned, but there was persistent interest in the land from others who continued to insist that she did not live on or improve her homestead.\n\nIn May 1909, however, Delia Bell still did not have patent to her land when the Dauphin land agent reported that although she had made entry as a widow, \"I am given to understand that she is not a widow.\" Months later, in February 1910, the homestead inspector reported that \"Mrs. Bell claims that she and her husband were parted for seven years; she worked and was supporting her family and not getting any money from her husband so she considered herself a widow. Her husband came back in 1907.\" That fall her homestead entry was cancelled. This required an order-in-council (signed by Prime Minister Laurier) stating that Delia Bell had represented herself as a widow when she entered on her land and that \"it has since been shown that her husband is alive, and it has been decided to cancel her entry, as she was not eligible to take up a homestead in her own name.\" It was also found that she had made improvements on the land to the value of six hundred dollars. The order-in-council recommended that she be permitted to purchase her quarter section at the rate of three dollars per acre. Bell never did come up with the funds to complete this purchase, although she (illegally) sold it in 1920 to a cattle dealer, despite being warned in 1916 that the land was not hers to sell.\n\nWhile a woman separated from her husband might be granted the right to a homestead, the entry could be cancelled if he materialized. This was the case for Margaret Little, of Roblin, Manitoba (originally from Fergus, Ontario), who had been permitted, after \"careful consideration\" by the Commissioner of Dominion Lands, to enter on a homestead in 1909 after she signed a statutory declaration that she had been deserted and that she had been the sole support of minor children for ten years. A few months after she filed on her homestead, however, questions were raised about her eligibility. In February 1910 her husband, Lemuel Little, filed on a homestead not far from hers and stated to the clerk at the land office that he would live with his wife while he proved up. Immediately the couple was suspected of collusion to obtain two homesteads. The homestead inspector was dispatched to report \"very carefully\" upon whether Mr. Little had in fact abandoned his wife. The inspector reported that he was a \"constant visitor,\" that there was a bed for him in the house, that he was a horse dentist who was away frequently because of his occupation, and that the neighbours knew nothing of family trouble.\n\nMargaret Little fought back in many letters, arguing that there was no collusion to obtain two homesteads, as she had known nothing of her husband's plans until the homestead inspector told her. She signed another statutory declaration, dated 7 June 1910, that she was the sole support of herself and family, that she had not lived \"as wife\" with her husband for over eight years, and he had not supported them for over twelve. She admitted he occasionally called at her house to see their sons but that they never had \"any business with each other.\" She further swore that \"the neighbours are well aware we are not living together and never will.\" A few weeks later a neighbour who coveted her land wrote the land office in Dauphin that she was not entitled, as Mr. Little was at home and able to work.\n\nIn early December 1910, Margaret Little was informed that her entry was to be cancelled because \"the return of your husband removes the reason by which you were granted a homestead. You have no claim whatever to this land which is being re-opened for entry.\" She continued her letters, writing on 7 December 1910 that \"I am only a woman but please give me a hearing.\" She asked why the land office did not cancel her husband's homestead entry instead, arguing that he would sell his land as soon as he got the patent while she would pass her land to her family after her death. She also announced that she would stay on her land until these false accounts that her husband supported her could be proven. She asked how the government could take from \"me what they allowed me to have to help support my family when my husband would not.\" Then she came up with a brilliant strategy: when her land was thrown open for entry at the land office in Dauphin on 13 December 1910, Margaret Little and her son were at the head of the line, and she entered on the same land in the name of her son Roscoe. Although her son was still only seventeen, the rules permitted her to enter her son on a homestead and reserve the land for him until he would be old enough the following year. Roscoe did eventually receive patent to this land, although it took until 1919 due to various bureaucratic hurdles. Margaret continued to argue with Department of the Interior authorities that she deserved to enter on a homestead, but was told that she did not qualify and that only a widow with a minor child or children dependent upon her for support was eligible. Her husband, Lemuel, proved up on his homestead, and her son Roscoe proved up on the land that she had homesteaded. Of the three Littles, Margaret was the only one never permitted a homestead in her own name.\n\nMargaret Little's quest for a homestead was admired in the _Minnedosa Tribune_. Under the headline \"An Enterprising Lady,\" the article described how she successfully retained \"the homestead and also the improvements which she has put upon the place, and to which all will admit she is justly entitled.\" The tenor and sincerity of her letters suggest that she was indeed the sole support of her family and that her husband, though an occasional visitor to his children, had deserted them. One document in the land file corroborates Margaret Little's claims: her cousin William Hughes, a Manitoba homesteader, wrote to the Department of the Interior in 1903 asking if Little could make a homestead entry, writing that \"she has had to support herself and five of a family for the last three years. Her husband has left her and the family to support themselves.\" Hughes, who died in 1905, left his land to Margaret Little. It is curious, however, that one of the witnesses to his will was Margaret's husband, Lemuel Little.\n\nClara Lynch (from Iowa) waged an epic battle to secure her Alberta homestead and to prove that she was \"worse than widowed\" after her husband deserted her. She faced difficulties because of her status as a deserted wife, and because although she claimed to have a son dependent upon her, he was nowhere to be seen. Yet Lynch remained determined, resolute, and tenacious. She wrote to the highest Ottawa officials, consulted a lawyer, and trudged through deep snow to get the signatures of neighbours on a petition supporting her right to homestead. She confronted overwhelming legal and other obstacles, including a neighbour who coveted her land. Her perseverance eventually paid off, but not until 1909, four years after her death. Officials had insisted that she could not be considered a head of household, since \"her husband is alive, and is liable to come back any day.\" In one of many eloquent letters pleading her case, Lynch asked how an official of the Department of the Interior could dare \"to assert under the sacred Motto on Canada's shield 'God and my Right,' that I am not the head of a family; if he only knew the man that was my husband, but is such no longer, he would know, that I was _forced_ to be the head of the family whether I would or no. I can point you to at least a dozen creatures of the species, male bipeds, in my own immediate neighborhood, who have homestead entry, who are not, and in all human probability, never will be heads of families; I think his lexicon must be an obsolete one.\"\n\nStill fighting her battle, Lynch died on 5 May 1905 in Edmonton, at age thirty-nine, of \"abcess and tuberculosis.\" Yet the battle for her land was not over; it continued for four years after her death. After a mountain of correspondence, in which officials disagreed about and debated the case, Lynch's estate was finally granted patent to her land in April 1909, but her estate had to pay for it! She never was granted the right to homestead. A sad irony is that if Lynch had remained in the United States or returned there, she would have had no trouble securing a homestead. As a deserted woman, she would have been considered a head of household regardless of whether she had children or not.\n\nSOUTH AFRICAN SCRIP WOMEN HOMESTEADERS\n\nWhether single, married, divorced, or widowed, women could obtain homestead land in Western Canada if they could afford to purchase South African scrip (SAS). These women belong in the chapter on homesteaders because they did not purchase land, they purchased scrip that permitted them to homestead 320 acres. They did not own the land after purchasing scrip; they had to comply with all the rules and regulations involved in proving up and were under the watchful eye of the land agents and inspectors.\n\nIn July 1900, Harold Lothrop Borden, a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Dragoons serving in the South African War (1899\u20131902), was killed at Witpoort, South Africa. He was just twenty-four, and a promising medical student in his third year at McGill. He was also the only son of Canada's minister of the militia Sir Frederick William Borden. Under the Volunteer Bounty Act (VBA) of 1908, volunteers domiciled in Canada who had served in the South African war, deceased or living (7,300 Canadians), were offered money scrip (sixty dollars) or land scrip that permitted the recipient to enter on 320 acres (two adjoining quarter sections) of homestead land in Western Canada. Recipients of land scrip had to fulfill all of the regular homestead duties of cultivation and residence over three years and could then receive patent to the land. The recipient or purchaser of scrip had to commence residence within twelve months of entry being made. Borden's father was his legal representative, and like many recipients of SAS he opted to sell the scrip, likely through an agent, rather than spending three years fulfilling homestead duties. The purchaser of Harold Borden's scrip, in 1911, was Anna Utech, a married woman with three children, and she successfully proved up on her homestead in Saskatchewan in 1914, earning her patent or outright ownership. Without the option of SAS, Anna Utech would never have qualified for homestead land in Western Canada because she was a married woman. Utech was among about 540 women of all marital and non-marital statuses who took advantage of the rare opportunity offered by SAS to homestead land in Saskatchewan, and some purchased more than one SAS, becoming the owners of not just 320 but 640 acres. These women, and the press attention some of them received, played a vital role in demonstrating that women were interested in obtaining homestead land and that they could successfully prove up on that land. They had to have some capital, as SAS sold for about $800, or more.\n\nThe VBA was passed after much discussion and debate in the House of Commons about the value of land grants to the military, but a majority of parliamentarians were eventually persuaded that the scheme could help to build a white, British, masculine West. The grant of land in return for military service was an ancient practice that was incorporated into Canada's Dominion Lands Act in several instances, including after the 1869\u201370 Red River Resistance and the 1885 North-West Rebellion. The idea was to encourage enlistment, reward service, and foster settlement of loyal, disciplined, men of British ancestry. SAS was intended to reward those who had served but also to attract the right kind of settler. As one member of Parliament stated, \"a young man who is sufficiently loyal to risk his life in South Africa is a pretty good kind of man to mix with certain elements that will go into that country.\" To ensure actual settlement and cultivation the homestead provisions of the Dominion Lands Act had to be complied with. Grantees had to live on the land for six months every year for three years, build a house and not a temporary shack, and cultivate the land. The idea of being able to appoint a substitute, if the grantee decided he did not want to homestead, was a point of considerable debate. The main concern was land speculation\u2014that SAS would be \"sold for a song to the scrip shark who has been the curse of the west.\" But substitutes were ultimately permitted and SAS could be sold to anyone, including women, regardless of marital status, in a twist that parliamentarians never anticipated.\n\nThe VBA included one category of women. The definition of volunteers was for the first time extended to female nurses who had served in South Africa, becoming the first exception to the general rule in Canada that women (except sole heads of households with dependent children) were ineligible for homestead entry. There were only twelve nurses from Canada in South Africa, however\u2014not enough to concern Canadian parliamentarians or to constitute a threat to the masculine West. One nurse who sold her scrip was Deborah Jane Hurcomb, who was with the Second Canadian contingent and who died in 1907. Her scrip was purchased by Mary Matalski of Verndale, Saskatchewan, a married mother of sixteen who successfully proved up in 1914.\n\n_Figure 17._ Homesteaders near Square Deal, Alberta, c. 1912. Both women acquired their homesteads through purchasing South African scrip. Johanna Solberg (right) was a stenographer in Bassano, Alberta, and Sebina Jacobsen a dressmaker, also in Bassano, when they filed on their homesteads of 320 acres each. Both were single. Purchasing South African scrip was virtually the only way a single woman could acquire homestead land in Western Canada. Glenbow Archives, NA-206-27.\n\nThere was also a high degree of interest in obtaining SAS among Canadian women teachers who volunteered in South Africa, but they were denied this reward. At least forty women teachers from Canada taught in the Boer concentration camps. An appeal was made in the House of Commons to have them included in the land grant. Teacher volunteer Winifred Johnston Plowden, whose letter of appeal was read in the House, argued, among other things, that for their loyalty to the British Empire and for all of the hardships they endured, teachers should have land rights over male volunteers who saw no action, or over foreign widows who could claim homesteads the teachers were denied. \"From my point of view many of the girls that went out suffered much more hardship than the last military contingent, who only landed at Cape Town and never went up country at all, and got a good grant for that.\" The teachers were as deserving of government recognition as \"some United States or Galician widows who may settle on western lands.\" \"I hope,\" Plowden wrote, \"that the government which has treated outsiders with the greatest generosity will see its way clear to a recognition of the first forty Canadian women who went half way round the world to impress upon a country shortly after its second birth into the British Empire, something of the acknowledged excellence of the Canadian public school system.\" The reward of SAS was not however extended to the teachers.\n\nYet teachers were among the women who purchased SAS and homesteaded land in Western Canada. The most celebrated of these was Mildred Williams, who made headlines across North America in May 1910 for her stamina and determination. She was from Lintonville, Minnesota, and had arrived in Canada eight months earlier. Williams was the sole supporter of her widowed mother, and perhaps she had hoped to qualify for a free homestead, but the rules did not permit her because she had no minor child or children dependent upon her for support. Single, in her early twenties, and working as a teacher in Saskatoon, Williams waited for twelve days and nights at the top of the stairs outside of the land office in Saskatoon in order to be able to file on a half section (320 acres) of land near Kindersley valued at eighteen to twenty dollars per acre. Williams purchased the SAS of Frederick Charles Snell, a storekeeper at Pilgrim's Rest, Transvaal, but previously of the Lord Strathcona Horse. He was a North-West Mounted Policeman who had risen in the ranks and served in the Yukon, where he got a grant of land for his service. He was just the sort the legislators hoped to entice to the West, but he decided to stay in South Africa, living out his days there. Instead, Mildred Williams got his 320 acres.\n\nWilliams carefully planned her vigil. She employed a woman to bring her meals and soft drinks, and another as a \"kind of scout and messenger.\" She sat in a reclining chair and made a kind of tent over this in the nights. She put up with a great deal of inconvenience during the twelve-day vigil. On her second day, she was challenged by a man who wanted the same property. He allegedly tried to push her off her chair at one point, but Williams's numerous supporters came to her aid, shoving him down the stairs, and he gave up. She successfully filed on the property, and when she emerged from the land office a large number of friends greeted her, cheering and applauding. Williams successfully proved up on this land and became the owner of 320 acres of valuable land. She may have later sold this land, for in 1917 the _Star Phoenix_ reported that she had resigned her position as teacher and gone to the Pacific coast.\n\nIn May 1910, columnists praised Williams's \"energy, determination and patience.\" Writing in the _Edmonton Bulletin_ (ironically, the paper owned by Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver, who opposed homestead rights for most women), Gertrude Seton Thompson predicted that \"in three years she will have property worth at the least $10,000.00, and this sum, properly invested, should give her an income of $1,000.00 per year\u2014Bravo!\"\n\nMildred Williams was far from alone. Of the 4,730 SAS entries in the Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB) database, approximately 11 percent are women. Many of the files contain detailed and rich correspondence, documenting the challenges and difficulties the SAS women faced regardless of their marital status. Among the single women, some had the assistance of brothers or fathers, and the purchase of SAS involved family strategies to expand farms, while others appear to have been totally on their own. Marie Westphal, from Milwaukee, purchased SAS at Kindersley in 1910. She was single and had arrived in the Eatonia area of Saskatchewan to keep house for her homesteading brother Herman. She filed on land previously abandoned by another brother who was unable to take up residence. Marie was single when she proved up, but later married and settled in the district. Together the Westphals amassed considerable acreage in the Kindersley area, as their father also homesteaded nearby at age seventy-one.\n\nMarried women could add to family land holdings through purchasing SAS. In the Buffalo Lakes district of Peace River, Alberta, Emma Bradford of Manitoba was the largest single landholder, having proved up on a full section of land after purchasing two SASs. She was married, and along with her husband Andrew \"had the largest family holding with seven quarters compiled from three scrips and a homestead, all of which were proven up.\"\n\nLottie Kennedy of Winnipeg clearly had little idea of what she was signing up for when her fianc\u00e9 Edward Baird (a railway mail clerk also of Winnipeg) entered on a homestead in the Maple Creek district of Saskatchewan, and she entered on adjoining land in 1913 through SAS that had been purchased for her by her father as a wedding present. While Kennedy and Baird may have been planning to increase their land base through SAS, neither seemed to be aware that Kennedy would be required to perform actual residence on the land. The couple married and continued to live in Winnipeg. In 1915, Baird's uncle and a member of Parliament for Ontario, E. Guss Porter, wrote Minister of the Interior W.J. Roche to ask if breaking land on Mrs. Baird's homestead could \"count as a year's duty without actually going out there to live. They are living in Winnipeg now where he holds a position in the mail service and he does not like to give up his position and go out there to live on the land if it can be avoided.\" Porter was informed that nothing could be done, that Mrs. Baird had to perform her residence duties, and that \"it is only in the case of deceased, insane or physically incapacitated homesteaders that residence is dispensed with.\" The Bairds began residence duties in 1915, and Lottie Baird was granted her patent in 1918.\n\nOther single women SAS homesteaders were without a family network or strategy. Originally from Norway, Carrie Sveum was a cook for threshers at Olson, North Dakota, and then a cook at a hotel in Swift Current in 1910, when at age thirty-eight she purchased SAS, filing on land at Waldville, Saskatchewan, and successfully proving up in 1914. In 1914 she \"travelled to Norway and brought back a husband a Mr. Sagen. Together she and her new husband ran a successful restaurant and \"stopping place.\" When her husband died, she sold her land and moved back to Norway.\n\nThe single women who were SAS homesteaders ranged in age, but most were in their thirties or forties, and some were older. Sarah Birtles of Alexander, Manitoba, was sixty-two when in 1913 she applied for patent on her SAS at Colonsay, Saskatchewan. From Yorkshire, Birtles was a nurse who had immigrated with her family to Manitoba in the 1880s. She had some difficulty fulfilling her residency requirement but not because of her age\u2014rather, it was because when she was absent she was proving up on another SAS near Provost, Alberta, securing 640 acres for herself in two provinces. She was short in the residency requirement on her Saskatchewan claim by five days, so that the case was examined by a homestead inspector, who wrote, \"The applicant is a spinster 62 years of age having nearly completed her residence duties for this Scrip and at the same time having performed residence duties on another Scrip near Provost Alta. The difficulty appears to be loss of time consumed in moving from one place to the other.\" The shortages were overlooked, although officials were annoyed, because \"it is hardly the intention to allow the same person to locate more than once, although there is no legal objection of course to one person locating as many Volunteer Bounty Warrants as he can provided the ordinary duties can be completed.\" The same official wrote, \"I suppose we should be very careful about establishing a precedent in a case of this sort.\"\n\nThere were other older women who acquired land through SAS. Eliza Birmingham, from Meaford, Ontario, was sixty years old in 1910 (although she may have been trimming a few years) when she received patent to her homestead in the Battleford district of Saskatchewan. Her family then consisted of herself and two grandchildren. A year later she purchased the SAS of Alfred Arthur Lyndon of Toronto, and in 1914 (when she stated she was sixty-seven) successfully proved up on land in the vicinity of her first homestead.\n\nThere is no doubt that unlike Sarah Birtles, some single women found it challenging to prove up on one SAS. Like Lottie (Kennedy) Baird, Sophia Brauer, age thirty-four, seemed unaware when she purchased her scrip that she would be required to live on the land and perform homestead duties. Brauer was from the United States and was working as a dressmaker in Swift Current when she purchased SAS and filed on land at Lemsford in 1911. By early October of that year she was wondering if she could take a leave of absence until May, writing to the land office that \"I want to stay longer if the weather allows it. But I do not see how I could stay all winter as it is so far from town and such a new country with few conveniences, cold winters and blizzards. I am afraid of perishing out here.\" She offered to live in Swift Current for the winters. She was told that she had to meet the residency requirements and live for six months of each year on her land except in the case of \"serious accident, illness or calamity to the entrant, or to the wife or child of an entrant.\" Brauer did successfully meet her residency obligations and had sixty acres under cultivation in 1914 when she proved up.\n\nDespite the fact that some of the married women SAS homesteaders had husbands and older children to assist them in proving up, their lives were often more complicated than those of single women SAS homesteaders. Many married women could not (officially) live in their homes with their husbands for six months of each year for three years, because they had to live on their own land to perform their residence duties. Matters become even more complicated when young children were involved. Nellie Jane Sorsdahl filed on land at Macoun, Saskatchewan, in 1910 but did not prove up until 1917. By that time she was the mother of eleven children. She was threatened with cancellation proceedings on several occasions. In her correspondence with the Department of the Interior, Sorsdahl never mentioned the continual arrival of her children as the reason why she had difficulty meeting her residency requirements. In 1911, for example, she asked land officials if she could live with her husband on his SAS and perform her residence duties there, as her \"health has been failing.\" The reply was that \"it is regretted you cannot be permitted to live with your husband and thus satisfy the requirements of the Act as to residence... the regulations require that you shall live upon your own half section for at least six months in each of three years.\"\n\nJennie Cochrane, formerly Doyle, of San Francisco (but born in Canada), was the legal representative of her deceased son, George Doyle, a volunteer in the South African War who was granted SAS. Cochrane is the only woman so far located who took up land as a mother of a deceased volunteer. She was fifty years old in 1913 when granted patent to her land at Biggar, Saskatchewan, although the process was not without complications. Early in 1913 she wrote to the Department of the Interior from San Francisco (spelling mistakes in the original):\n\nI don more than was required of me in Building and also in Breaking paid for every thing out of the way taxes included I wish I never saw the old land at all, for I suffered hardship and privitations enough to kill a dog a yellow dog. of course you are aware that I came by that Government Grant through the Death of my only Son. who was out in South Africa. 23 Rigement Mounted Cavlery. Now I do hope thair will be no more draw backs with regard to getting my patent. I am pretty sick of this and some times I woner if the dear Honourable Government is not trying to grind our lives out. as you know I don everything to the best of my knolledge in getting things fixed properly before I left Biggar in a Leagel way and con do no more.\n\nJane Gentles was a teacher from England who was married with three sons in 1908 when she purchased SAS. She did not file on land until 1911, when she entered on 320 acres near Saskatoon that had been abandoned by one of her sons. In 1915 the government wanted to cancel her homestead entry, as she had not satisfied the inspector that the necessary homestead duties had been completed; she was ten weeks short of the time required. A neighbour had his eye on her land and had brought out the homestead inspector. But Gentles was teaching in Islington in London, England, at this time. All three of her sons served overseas in the First World War. Her husband stayed behind in Saskatchewan, taking care of her 320-acre homestead as well as one of their sons. Gentles was told by land officials, however, that she needed to be back in Saskatchewan completing her residency requirement. She wrote very vigorously in her own defence, asking that her war work count as residence duties on her land. Gentles was teaching at Drayton Park Boys School, taking the place of a male teacher who had enlisted, and she was in charge of fifty-one boys. \"And in that way,\" she declared, \"I am serving my country to the best of my ability.\" She added as a postscript: \"By Royal Proclamation in England any woman who undertakes work and by so doing liberates a man for the service of war is considered to be serving her country as truly as those serving in the trenches. I have given two sons out of three and the 3rd son is anxious to join the colours too but as he is all I have to help me he must stay behind unless it is absolutely necessary then he will join too.\" Gentles was sent a form to fill out, and in it she stated that \"my time [residency on land] is not quite completed but I have given myself and my sons to my country's cause and we are all serving her here at very great sacrifice and ask the department to allow war work time to count as residence duties.\"\" id=\"endref-rd son is anxious to join the colours too but as he is all I have to help me he must stay behind unless it is absolutely necessary then he will join too.\" Gentles was sent a form to fill out, and in it she stated that \"my time [residency on land] is not quite completed but I have given myself and my sons to my country's cause and we are all serving her here at very great sacrifice and ask the department to allow war work time to count as residence duties.\"\">rd son is anxious to join the colours too but as he is all I have to help me he must stay behind unless it is absolutely necessary then he will join too.\" Gentles was sent a form to fill out, and in it she stated that \"my time [residency on land] is not quite completed but I have given myself and my sons to my country's cause and we are all serving her here at very great sacrifice and ask the department to allow war work time to count as residence duties.\"\n\nJane Gentles's land was protected from cancellation until 1 May 1916, but at that time she had still not returned to complete her residence duties. She wrote once again to officials of the Department of the Interior to say that she was she was planning to return in time for seeding, but that \"the danger from torpedoes was very great at that time and my boys advised me to stay.\" Two of her sons were at Ypres; her oldest son should never have been accepted for duty as his sight was only 25 percent normal; and \"these are all the children I have and I have given them up to fight the Germans.\" She concluded, \"I think I was entitled to ask you to give me those few weeks time in face of the great sacrifices I had made.\" Gentles was fifty years old in 1919 when her patent to her land was finally approved.\n\nOf the hundreds of women in Western Canada who acquired homesteads through purchasing South African scrip, few made the headlines, but those who did, such as Saskatoon teacher Mildred Williams, became important to the homesteads-for-women campaign that was gathering momentum just at that time. The SAS women homesteaders demonstrated that women, whether single, married, divorced, or widowed, and regardless of whether they had children, were interested in obtaining homestead land and could successfully prove up on that land. The fact that women had to _purchase_ expensive scrip in order to homestead land also highlighted the discrimination at the foundation of the Dominion lands legislation. As columnist Gertrude Seton Thompson wrote in the _Edmonton Bulletin_ after describing the vigil of Mildred Williams: \"I hope the Dominion government will make a note of this, and give consideration to the question of women being allowed to homestead. That only by buying scrip can they homestead seems unfair. If allowed to take up land at all it should be on the same terms as men\u2014not under almost prohibitive conditions.\"\n\nHOMESTEADS FOR WOMEN IN THE U.S. WEST\n\nMigrant women could obtain homesteads by heading to the U.S. West, and many thousands of solo women did so. It is important to understand this context and opportunity in order to appreciate the dimensions of the homesteads-for-women debates, to be covered in Chapter 6. Both supporters and critics of the homesteads-for-women movement drew on the example of the \"entrywomen\" of the American West. It is also vital to understand the dramatic differences between the United States and Canada when it came to the gender of homesteading.\n\nThe U.S. rules permitted a much wider diversity of women to acquire homestead land, and overall there was a greater flexibility in how officials of land offices interpreted the regulations, and more acceptance of and assistance to women who would be stigmatized in Canada, such as unwed mothers and divorced women. Widows applying for homesteads did not need to have minor children dependent on them for support as they did in Canada. Single women with adopted children were eligible. Single, unwed mothers were permitted to make entry, even if they were not yet twenty-one years of age. Mormon women who were plural wives were permitted to enter on homesteads because their marriages were not recognized as legal. Deserted and divorced women could homestead without having to have minor children dependent on them. In the United States an abandoned wife or \"one whose husband is a confirmed drunkard\" was considered the head of a family. A married woman could make homestead entry if she had been \"actually deserted\" by her husband, or if her husband was in the penitentiary or \"incapacitated by disease or otherwise from earning a support for his family and the wife is really the head and main support of the family.\" Most of this was clearly itemized in U.S. legislation and available in the published guides to prospective homesteaders.\n\nBefore 1900 women homesteaders constituted less than 10 percent of all entries in the U.S. West, but their numbers grew dramatically thereafter. Numbers vary; one study of forty-three townships in North Dakota reveals that proportion of women homesteaders varied from 1 percent to 22 percent, with an average of 10 percent. In two counties in Colorado, women entrants were at 11 percent before 1900 while after that date, nearly 18 percent. In the peak years of the homestead rush in Cochise County, Arizona, from 1900 to 1918, 14 to 21 percent of the homesteaders were women. The majority of women homesteaders were single: in North Dakota, for example, 83 percent were single, 15 percent were widows, and 1 percent were divorced. Women homesteaders were as successful at proving up as their male counterparts. Felice Cohn, whose work as a federal assistant superintendent of public sales of Indian lands took her to the land offices of Montana, wrote in 1919 that \"the woman homesteader always lives up to the land regulations of the government. The homestead inspectors seldom have occasion to make an adverse report on a woman who is proving up on her land. Every regulation is always faithfully complied with.\"\n\nRecent studies that focus on counties in the U.S. West demonstrate that women homesteaders were everywhere. In the Yellowstone River Valley between 1909 and 1934, the federal government issued 4,066 land patents in Yellowstone County, and of these 18 percent, or 746, were issued to women who together claimed over 150,000 acres. In Valley County, Montana, which borders on Saskatchewan, there was a similar percentage of women homesteaders. There were over 900 women homesteaders who proved up on homesteads in Valley County. There were likely many more, as the names were taken from 104 plats of townships and ranges, and nearly half of these are missing. Women homesteaders comprised approximately 17 percent, or one-sixth, of the homesteaders in that county.\n\nLike male homesteaders, women often homesteaded in clusters\u2014sisters, cousins, and friends filed together and near each other. Three Chmelik sisters\u2014Anna, Mary, and Emily\u2014from Minnesota, took up adjoining homesteads in Chouteau County, Montana, in 1910. Anna was a teacher and Mary a seamstress. Their brother helped them build their cabins and break sod for their first crops. In 1912 Lena J. Michels and her two cousins, Mary Lambert and Frances Lambert, left South Dakota and filed on adjoining homesteads near Stanford, Montana, by the Genou post office. One settlement in the Hawarden district was called \"Ladyville\" because of its preponderance of women homesteaders. Daughters arrived with mothers, and all took out homesteads. Homesteaders sometimes built cabins close together but on their own claims, divided by the survey line. For example, Sophia Jefferson and Mildred Hunt filed on adjoining homesteads on the North Bench near Fort Benton in 1910, and their cabins were known in the area as \"twin shacks.\" Often filing on land was part of a family strategy. Daughters could help expand the family land base by taking out homesteads, filing alongside brothers, sisters, fathers, uncles, aunts, or other relatives. Ann Yoctorowic Obie filed on land near the homesteads of her father, sister, and three brothers near Joplin in Liberty County.\n\n_Figure 18._ Englishwoman, teacher, and mother Jane Gentles purchased South African scrip and filed on 320 acres of land near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1911. In 1915, when Gentles was in London teaching so that a male teacher could enlist, Canadian land officials wanted to cancel her entry. Gentles fought back, arguing that she was \"serving her country as truly as those serving in the trenches.\" She included this photograph of herself and two sons who were at the front. Officials relented and Gentles was granted a patent to her land in 1919. Saskatchewan Archives Board, homestead file 2092263.\n\n_Figure 19._ Eva Iddings of Indiana in front of her claim shack near Fort Benton, Montana. Eva filed on her homestead in 1910 and proved up in 1912. Three brothers and two aunts also filed on homesteads. Solo women homesteaders, rare in Western Canada, were abundant in the American West. Barrows Collection, Overholser Historical Research Center, Fort Benton, Montana, 1910, BC11, 244.\n\n_Figure 20._ Canadian women, ineligible to file on homesteads on the Canadian prairies, homesteaded in the American West. Sisters from Ontario Caroline (Carrie) Louise MacGregor and Mary Frances MacGregor homesteaded in Sheridan County, Montana. Carrie earned her patent to just over 156 acres in 1912, and Mary became the owner of 312 acres in 1914. According to an October 1909 description in the local paper, \"The Macgregor sisters have a large ranch about five miles down the valley from Redstone.... These girls have a fine dwelling and a good barn and granary, a great deal of the carpenter work being done by themselves. They have a fine bunch of horses, cows, pigs and chickens. They are both college graduates and musicians. It was a great pleasure to visit such well informed people so far out on the frontier.\" These photographs show the nature and range of their work on their land. Courtesy Judy Archer (Carrie's granddaughter), Orillia, Ontario.\n\nThe opportunity to cross the border and homestead in the United States was well known to women living in Canada, as discussion of the homesteads-for-women campaign will show. Caroline (Carrie) Louise MacGregor and her sister Mary Frances MacGregor, from Ontario, homesteaded in Sheridan County in Montana. Carrie earned her patent to 156 acres in 1912, and Mary earned her patent to 312 acres in 1914. They pooled resources and established a ranch together, which was described in the 1 October 1909 newspaper _The Searchlight_ (Culbertson, Montana): \"The Macgregor sisters have a large ranch about five miles down the valley from Redstone... These girls have a fine dwelling and a good barn and granary, a great deal of the carpenter work being done by themselves. They have a fine bunch of horses, cows, pigs and chickens. They are both college graduates and musicians. It was a great pleasure to visit such well informed people so far out on the frontier.\" Carrie was a graduate of the University of Toronto. She married Rev. William Archer in 1912 and moved to Quebec. Mary married a fellow homesteader Hans Madsen and was the mother of two young daughters when she died in the flu epidemic of 1919. According to her granddaughter Judy Archer, Carrie settled in Montana because the Canadian government would not grant homesteads to single women. Judy Archer writes that \"Carrie rode a horse bare back, with a long skirt on. She kept a pistol because the local Indians would ride past the knoll where the house was.\" As the photographs indicate, the sisters did the work required themselves, in long dresses.\n\nIn 1910 Alberta teacher Etta Smalley crossed the border to take up a homestead. Her movements back and forth across the forty-ninth parallel indicate how fluid the border then was. Smalley was originally from Ohio and settled in Alberta in 1904 with her family when her father filed on a homestead at Soda Lake. She completed her Alberta departmental exams in 1906 and attended the Provincial Normal School at Calgary. In 1910 she was teaching at the Bolan Marea School in the Soda Lake district of Alberta, where her students were Ukrainian and Romanian. Smalley boarded with the Woods family, where there were two daughters, and when Mr. Woods and one of the daughters filed on homesteads in Hill County, Montana, Etta decided she would join them. She claimed 320 acres, as she was able to take advantage of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, and proved up while continuing to teach, at first in Alberta and then at Inverness, Montana. She earned her patent to her land in 1914 and that same year married a neighbouring homesteader, Will Bangs. They had four children. They lived at first on Will's homestead and persisted through drought, grasshoppers, and war, even as Inverness and nearby Joplin were \"all but abandoned.\" Will Bangs lost his homestead to the banks in 1926, but Etta retained hers. The family moved into her original homestead shack, and as described in her memoir, they bought a larger house in 1943 and had it moved to her land. The Bangs were still living on her homestead in 1954 when they retired and moved to Havre. Etta Bangs died in 1973 at the age of eighty-seven. In 1980 her homestead was turned over to her grandson Tom.\n\nBritish women also went to the U.S. West to obtain homesteads, ignoring calls to do their duty to the Empire and settle under the British flag. An example is Jessie de Prado MacMillan from Scotland who acquired 540 acres in New Mexico, and she was not alone; other Scottish women homesteaded nearby, one of whom served as her inspiration in leading her to homestead on Agua Chiquita Creek.\n\nWhile British women such as MacMillan opted to go to the American West, where homestead land could be obtained by a single female, a great number and variety of women overcame the considerable challenges and obstacles to obtaining homestead land in the Canadian West. Their numbers are difficult to ascertain because of the scattered and fragmentary records they left, but the evidence indicates that women were determined to acquire land and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. For its part, the Canadian government went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that women had very limited access to land, circumscribing the eligible categories of women and scrutinizing and rejecting their applications.\n\nThis scrutiny was intense. A weary and jaded Department of the Interior law clerk, T.G. Rothwell, expressed exasperation in 1914 correspondence that his job allowed no common sense leniency or discretion in interpreting the exact wording of the Dominion Lands Act. Rothwell was dealing with the case of Mary Briggs, a widow of Wood Mountain, and her right to a pre-emption or purchased homestead. She had obtained a homestead through the death of a son, and she was his legal representative. Hers was a complex and unique case in which officials were reluctant to depart one inch from the legislation because that might set a precedent, and Briggs was not strictly entitled to a homestead, although clearly a bona fide settler. Reviewing the case, Rothwell expressed his dismay with the intransigent bureaucrats who were so reluctant to call on the discretionary powers of the minister. He wrote that he himself had \"followed a practice that has been incorrectly followed ever since I have been an officer of this Department, over thirty years, a practice to which so many other members of its staff, some of them most capable and hard working officials, are glued\u2014soldered\u2014so closely, that it is not possible to detach them from it. That practice is to construe the provisions of the Dominion Lands Act literally\u2014to give the settler his pound of flesh only, and oftentimes not quite that.\" Bureaucrats did not care, Rothwell thought, about the central purpose of the act, which was to place agricultural settlers on the land and to afford the subject benefits and privileges. They feared \"leaving the well beaten track and establishing a precedent that may bring responsibility, as much as travellers in South Africa fear an approaching South African lion.\" In an earlier memo he had himself recommended that Mrs. Briggs be turned down in her request, but his assistant, a \"Miss Barber,\" had saved him from \"doing a great injustice to Mrs. Briggs.\" Rothwell felt it was ridiculous to be concerned about setting a precedent. He believed that another case such as hers would arise \"not in a hundred years, and so the granting of a purchased homestead or of a pre-emption to Mrs. Briggs will not form the dangerous precedent I have been warned it is certain to establish if this privilege is given to her.\"\n\nMigrant women faced vicissitudes, intense scrutiny, and hardships, but they did succeed in acquiring homestead land on the prairies. They enjoyed homestead privileges denied to Indigenous women and men, and participated in land acquisition that dispossessed Indigenous people. But none of these women homesteaders shared in the full range of privileges offered to male homesteaders. Reflecting the larger settlement patterns of the West, women homesteaders were diverse; from the earliest arrivals to the late nineteenth century they were British and British-Ontarian, and after 1900 they came from a variety of European nations and the United States. This diversity would be seized upon and criticized by advocates of homesteads for British-born women, who concluded that the strongest rationale for including British women in the homestead privilege was that it would help to exclude \"foreigners\" and assist in crafting a British West.\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\nWOMEN WHO BOUGHT LAND\n\nTHE \"BACHELOR GIRL\" SETTLER, \"JACK\" MAY, AND OTHER CELEBRITY FARMERS AND RANCHERS\n\nWhile migrant women who wished to homestead faced many restrictions, they were free to purchase land in Western Canada if they had the money. They could be single, married, separated, or divorced, young or old, with children or on their own, or in partnership with a female companion. Questions were not asked about their marital or parental status if they had the funds to buy land. As they were not homesteaders, they did not come under the intense oversight of the land office and the homestead inspectors who insisted they be widows with children. Yet women who bought land were still scrutinized, particularly in the press, because they were rare, and they were often cast as aberrant, abnormal, or eccentric, although some of the coverage was celebratory, hoping to widen and sanction such vocational opportunities. This chapter features Isobel \"Jack\" May, an English farmer who settled (briefly) in Alberta in 1911. She garnered particular attention throughout the British Empire and in the United States because she wore men's clothing and because she most clearly challenged the accepted norms of femininity and the spotlight on the white male pioneer figure. While May was English, this chapter does not focus exclusively on British women, since they were not alone in purchasing land. Purchasers of land, however, were less diverse than women homesteaders because they had to have capital.\n\nINDIAN RESERVE LAND AND M\u00c9TIS SCRIP\n\nLand that was for sale on the prairies included large areas that First Nations were induced to \"surrender,\" severely reducing the size of their reserves. In 1909, for example, a controversial sale of land on the Piikani (Peigan) reserve took place in southern Alberta. Although the majority of male band members (the eligible voters) had opposed the surrender of thirty-six sections, or 23,500 of their 116,000 acres of reserve land, the Department of Indian Affairs declared (fraudulently) that a fair vote was taken. This was part of a pattern of dispossession and diminishment of reserve land throughout prairie Canada. The Piikani applied for an injunction against the advertised sale of their land by public auction at Pincher Creek in November 1909, but this request was denied and the sale took place.\n\nTwo quarter sections were purchased by Jean Laidlaw of Ontario and her female partner. Laidlaw was originally from England and was working in Ontario as a kindergarten supervisor when she purchased this land. A 1920 article on Laidlaw is typical of the sort of scrutiny the reasonably rare woman rancher or farmer was placed under. In the Toronto _Globe and Mail_ under the headline \"Woman Rancher Tells of Life: Miss Jean Laidlaw Runs 320 Acres near Pincher Creek, Alberta: Shows Great Pluck,\" readers learned that together with a nephew, Laidlaw raised cattle, horses, pigs, and poultry on her land. She was described as \"nothing if not feminine. Petite, gentle-voiced, and with dimples that look as if the wearer must have been play-acting when the camera snapped her, arrayed in a pair of overalls, struggling with one or other of the 'chores' that punctuate farm life.\" Her crop had failed in 1919, but she still had \"hope and grit in her heart, ready to take her chances with next summer's weather.\" The article also noted that Laidlaw's land was on the Piikani reserve, and she had \"many amusing stories to tell of farm hands drawn from this tribe,\" including one \"who wound a pink ribbon around his Stetson, \"this gay garniture forming the frame of a picture of his girl, which adorned as a buckle might, the upturned brim of his headgear.\" The message was that both Laidlaw and her hired Indigenous helpers were odd and eccentric presences on an Alberta ranch.\n\nWomen purchased Indigenous reserve land after it was \"surrendered\" for sale for the purpose of speculation. In 1891 the Passpasschase reserve near Edmonton was sold at auction, and purchasers included Nancy Miquelon of Calgary and Belle Thomson of Quebec. In 1902, when the Enoch\/Stony Plain reserve was sold, Ellen Carruthers, the wife of the Indian agency clerk, acquired one quarter section. Some of the women purchasers may have been \"fronts\" for insiders who wanted to try to cover their tracks. For example, in 1903 Maria Allison of Ottawa bought land surrendered on the Michel reserve in Alberta, paying much less than its value. According to historian Peggy Martin-McGuire, Allison was \"guided in these purchases by Herbert N. Awrey, a clerk in the Department of Indian Affairs for whom she worked as a janitor. Her bids had been forwarded in a departmental envelope, and included clippings from typed copies of the surveyor's reports.\" At an auction of reserve land in the Battleford agency in 1905, M.J. Day, the wife of the Indian agent, bought two quarter sections. The auctioneer's wife also bought land. In 1907 Alice Tye, secretary to the Indian agent, bought land surrendered on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan.\n\nMigrant women also acquired land on the prairies through purchasing M\u00e9tis scrip. As described in Chapter 2, the original M\u00e9tis recipient of land scrip was required to sign a form that identified the section of land on which he or she desired to locate their scrip. The land was then assigned to the purchaser of the scrip, and the patent issued in his or her name. Susan Jones Willoughby, the wife of prominent Moose Jaw barrister and senator W.B. Willoughby, K.C., acquired a lot of land in this way. She died in 1907, and when her husband died in 1932 it was noted that he \"was a heavy landholder in southern Saskatchewan.\" In 1900, for example, Mrs. Willoughby received patent to 320 acres through \"four assignments from Peter Dumont, Francois Gosselin, Emmanuel Gosselin and Norbert McGillis.\" There are many other examples, including Matilda Bucknam (mentioned in Chapter 3). She was permitted to \"scrip\" eighty acres of her quarter section and to purchase the rest. Her Edmonton lawyers wrote to Minister of the Interior Oliver, asking that if permission was granted for her to do this, \"we will be notified in order that we may hunt up the half-breed for whose scrip Miss Buckman has paid, in order to complete the transaction.\" Sarah J. Milligan acquired land in the Fort Qu'Appelle region by purchasing the scrip for 240 acres of Samuel George McNab of the Touchwood Hills.\n\nAlberta teacher Victoria Lepage used a variety of tactics including the purchase of M\u00e9tis scrip to acquire land near Lamoureux. In 1895 she bought a military bounty scrip and located a nephew on a half section of land, assigning him the homestead duties, although he soon abandoned the tasks. She planned to pay cash for eighty acres and \"apply a Half-breed land scrip upon 240 acres of the land in question.\" Lepage purchased the M\u00e9tis scrip, but for a variety of reasons she was not successful in this complicated venture, and her claim was cancelled. Among the causes was a neighbour (and likely a relative) Charles Lepage, who wanted her land for his son and who complained that no improvements had been made and believed that a single woman teacher was not a suitable owner of land. He wrote the land office that \"there are lots of hands who would be too glad to improve [this land] and put them in a shape [ _sic_ ] so that they would be a benefit to the country. The lady I refer to is a school teacher earning $600 a year, and a sure thing she does not need any land to speculate on.\" The Lepages were originally from Rimouski, Quebec. They came in a large family group to Lamoureux and amassed many sections of land in the district. Victoria Lepage, the youngest of thirteen children, was a celebrated pioneer teacher of Lamoureux but never able to acquire land of her own.\n\nBRITISH WOMEN PURCHASERS OF LAND\n\nWomen who could afford to purchase land could be single, married, separated, divorced, or widowed in contrast to homesteading women who had to be widows and mothers. There were no homestead inspectors reporting on whether they conformed to these categories. Local histories provide brief glimpses of some of the women who purchased land. In 1880, Fanny McClure became one of the earliest settlers in the Rapid City district of Manitoba. According to the local history, \"she was a wealthy English lady and bought the NW1\/4 34-13-19 sight unseen.\" Her brother, Colonel Thomas Martin, bought an adjoining quarter section. The brother and sister built two houses, and she lived in one with her son and his wife, but she disappeared from the district in the early 1890s. In 1898 Margaret Hunter and three sons, from Callander, Scotland, came to the Tremaine district of Manitoba, where she bought a farm.\n\n\"Madame\" Simpson (first name not recorded) settled in Grosse-Isle, Manitoba, in 1889 with four sons and one daughter. Originally from Ireland, this Quaker family had allegedly \"made farming experiments in many lands... the south of Ireland, Belgium and France were all tried and found wanting. On this continent they looked through California before winding up their grand tour in this district where they became large land owners.\" The Simpsons accumulated \"some 1600 acres of land.\"\n\nIn 1903 Isabella Wilson, from Wigan in Lancashire, England, arrived in Saskatchewan with two brothers. The two men filed on their free homesteads. As Isabella was not eligible to homestead, she bought a quarter section from a departing farmer and named her farm Broadlands. Neighbours helped her to build her log cabin, and it was to this home in 1905 that she welcomed the remainder of her family members from England, including her mother.\n\nMarried women purchased land, and in some cases they were the farmers rather than their husbands, who might still be present but not active on the land. It is a mistake to always assume that the husband was the farmer. The married woman farmer and purchaser of land could, however, encounter legal puzzles and impediments. This was case with Maggie Lindsay, who farmed with her husband near Yorkton. He had bought land from funds that Maggie received from her family in Scotland. When he was unable to meet his payments she offered to make them if he would assign the land to her, and he did. Maggie made all subsequent payments with money from her relatives. The husband owned the adjoining quarter section. Under executions against her husband, the sheriff seized a quantity of wheat grown on her land. The question before the court in 1907 in _Lindsay v. Morrow_ was, who owned the grain grown on her land? The creditors claimed that the crops were Mr. Lindsay's, as he did the work and that if otherwise, the onus was on her to establish that the husband was her servant and the farming business really hers. Maggie Lindsay as claimant called her husband as the only witness, and they both testified that \"the farming operations were carried on by Mrs. Lindsay with the help of two hired men; that she hired the men and that they took their orders from her... The husband worked on her land part of the time, but in return received help on his quarter from her hired men.\" Evidence also showed that she had her own implements, and that she purchased her own seed grain from the government. When the seed arrived she personally took delivery of it. It was found that the proceeds from her farm could not be held liable for her husband's debts.\n\nThere are several prominent examples of married British women who were the farmers in the family. Annie E. Williams, from Beaufort, Wales, was an enterprising and accomplished farmer north of Gleichen, Alberta. She and her husband, Frederick C. Williams, first came to Alberta in 1908. She purchased over 500 acres from the Canadian Pacific Railway, establishing Primrose Farm. She became well-known as a \"lady farmer.\" Annie Williams experimented with different kinds of wheat and flax seed. In 1912 she stopped by the office of the local newspaper, the _Gleichen Call_ , to report on the excellent results of the Alberta Government Laboratory test of the \"Stanley\" wheat grown on her farm. In 1913 she had a bumper crop of flax that yielded nearly thirty bushels to the acre, and she had other crops that yielded well, including her oats and spring wheat. Across Alberta she was featured in headlines such as \"Mrs. A.E. Williams Receives Big Price for Her Seed Flax,\" \"Mrs. Williams Grows Excellent Flax,\" and \"Lady Farmer Raises Record Crop.\" (The contribution, if any, of her husband to the farm work was never mentioned.) In 1916 Mrs. Williams purchased, for $12,500 in cash, two other farms that were \"some of the very best farm property in the Gleichen district.\" The Williamses stayed on the farm until 1923, but according to their son, crops were poor in the later years because of hail, frost, drought, grasshoppers, and caterpillars or cutworms.\n\nAlice (Alix) Westhead was another married Englishwoman who was the farmer and rancher in the family. The town of Alix, Alberta, is named for her, and she was featured in the 1906 Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) pamphlet as a successful farmer, as mentioned in Chapter 2. Westhead was born Alice Charlotte Hall in 1863 in India and in 1881 at Rawalpindi, Pakistan she married her first husband, who died in 1887. As a widow in London in 1891 she married Charles George Westhead. They moved to Alberta in the mid-1890s and established their ranch together, but they drifted apart and she managed the enterprise. She purchased 1,440 acres from the Canadian Pacific Railway, and her husband purchased 480 acres (although it seems that he defaulted on his payments while she paid in full for her land).\n\n_Figure 21._ Alice (Alix) Westhead, c. 1906. She was born in Lahore, India, in 1863 and was living in Ireland with her second husband, C.G. Westhead, when they immigrated to Alberta in the mid-1890s. While they established the Quarter-Circle-One Ranch together near the town of Alix (named after Westhead), she was the owner and operator of the enterprise of over 2,000 acres. She returned to England around 1912 and the ranch was sold. Glenbow Archives, NA-2925-2.\n\nShe was well-known as a stock-raiser and agriculturalist in her district. Alix Westhead was honorary president of the Alix Agricultural Society in 1910, and the annual ploughing competition took place at her ranch. She was a friend of another famous Alix resident and fellow Englishwoman with family ties to India, Irene Parlby, who became well-known as an Alberta politician and cabinet minister in the United Farmers of Alberta government.\n\nIn 1911 an article titled \"A Woman Rancher in Alberta: A Visit to the Quarter-Circle-One Ranch,\" by Gertrude E. Seton Thompson, appeared in the _Canadian Home Journal_. Thompson wrote that Mrs. Westhead had arrived in 1895 \"from the Old Land with the idea of becoming a rancher, and had acquired over 2,000 acres.\" According to Thompson, Mrs. Westhead had \"expert knowledge on all matters relating to farming, and t[ook] a keen interest in the agricultural interests of the country.\" Her expertise in matters agricultural, readers learned, had begun on her husband's estate in Ireland, where she had started a creamery. The article made no mention of the presence of her husband.\n\nThe point of Thompson's article was that it was Mrs. Westhead who was the rancher. It was Mrs. Westhead who \"gives orders to her men and otherwise superintends the running of the ranch.\" She had sixty beautiful horses. The journalist traced a typical day on the ranch for Mrs. Westhead, which began with breakfast served and cleaned up by her domestic helper \"Scotch Jane.\" Then off to the garden to gather lettuce, peas, beans, and strawberries, followed by butter churning. After lunch and a siesta, Mrs. Westhead drove for tea to a neighbouring ranch. The article concluded, \"Mrs. Westhead's success as a rancher should prove encouraging to other women who, having some capital to invest and loving the outdoor life, feel a desire to launch into the wide sphere of farming or ranching.\" The same year as the article appeared, however, the ranch was sold, and Mrs. Westhead moved first to Edmonton and then to England. The last mention of her in Alberta was in a 1912 publication that stated she \"still owns and manages a ranch of some 3,500 acres.\" There was a hint in this publication that her land had become valuable as it was announced that the town of Alix was to have three transcontinental railways passing through it. After returning to England, Westhead lived in a farmhouse near Exbury and acted as a companion to Mrs. Marie-Louise de Rothschild, when she and her husband Lionel, who created his famous garden there, were in residence.\n\nJournalist Celesta Hamer Jackson (also known as Celesta Grivot de Grandcourt), who first arrived in Alberta on assignment with the London _Daily Mail_ in 1911, decided she would take up farming and ranching. She relocated her husband, George, and six children to the prairies, where she acquired 640 acres near Red Deer. The Hamer Jacksons had been experiencing some difficulties and challenges in England. In 1903 George, a London bookmaker, lost all of his money through his speculation on the stock exchange. He had started the business \"with a capital of 800 pound, lent to him by his wife.\" By 1910 George and Celesta were in business together as journalists under the name Hamer-Jackson and Co., when they were accused of copyright infringement for publishing some illustrations without permission. They proposed to make a payment to the plaintiff, who offered to stay the proceedings.\n\nNone of this was mentioned in Celesta Hamer Jackson's 1913 account of \"How I Made a New Home in Canada,\" published in the _Daily Mail_. There, she described how she had been attracted by \"the wonderful boundless prairies... its freedom from the trammels of civilization.\" Her husband was \"ready to give up everything\" (and perhaps he already had). She did not specify how they acquired their ranch of 640 acres, but in 1911 Celesta was one of three purchasers of 160 acres of CPR land that was assigned to her alone in June 1913. Hamer Jackson describes her family arriving with a party of others who were accustomed to \"all the comforts that European homes can possibly realise.\" They lived in tents for three months but then had barns and houses ready. They bought implements and horses, and thoroughbred cattle, pigs, and fowls. The men of the party soon constructed \"model\" piggeries and poultry houses. In her 1913 article she describes this as a \"profit-sharing farm\" where no one got a salary, but it seems they all worked for her as the owner-manager. She intended to build a model dairy and a cheese-making factory. Hamer Jackson confessed that \"not one of us had real working farm experience... But we all had pluck and perseverance. We all went with a resolve to succeed at all costs.\"\n\nIn newspapers as far away as Australia, Hamer Jackson was described as \"the most remarkable woman farmer in the Dominion of Canada.\" According to one account she had brought thirty people from England to help her, but she was \"her own managing director.\" She was described as a \"Canadian rancher\" who raised \"nothing but thoroughbred stock on her farm.\" This was achieved despite the fact that \"she had no previous knowledge of farming methods,\" had \"capital too trivial to mention,\" and was a \"slip of a woman.\" None of the press coverage mentioned her husband, other than to note that her family consisted of him and their children; all of the success was attributed to her. In 1914 the press declared that this \"Canadian rancher\" had \"struck the keynote of successful settlement in Western Canada.\" Hamer Jackson lectured in England on farming in Canada under the auspices of the CPR, and also published articles with the promotion of Canada to potential British settlers as her main theme.\n\nIt is not always possible to determine from the fragmentary evidence whether Englishwomen who farmed the prairies felt they were contributing to the \"spade work of Empire,\" but it seems likely in the case of Hamer Jackson. Her articles indicate she was an imperial enthusiast. She was concerned about the education of the \"foreigners\" in Western Canada, and about their proclivity to bring with them \"racial vices.\" Imperial views of the savage and civilized and the virtues of the British Empire were expressed in her 1931 book written for children, _Discoverers and Explorers of North America._ It is not clear how long Hamer Jackson farmed. She had moved by 1919 to Edmonton, where she was active in social circles, continued to publish articles, and was secretary of the Edmonton Women's Institute.\n\nAs the examples of Annie Williams, Alix Westhead, and Celesta Hamer Jackson demonstrate, women purchased CPR land intending to farm that land themselves. They also purchased CPR land as investors and as speculators. The CPR records for most of them include their marital status, describing them, for example, with terms like \"spinster,\" \"wife of...,\" or \"widow.\" There are seventy-nine records of land purchased by spinsters. Some were resident in the Canadian West. Maggie Dunn, spinster, was a resident of Ellisboro, Assiniboia, when she purchased her land in 1900, and when she paid in full in 1908, she was a Mrs. Merrifield, still of Ellisboro. Others were from distant U.S. locations, including Iowa, Illinois, the Dakotas, New York, and California. Frances Mabel Green, spinster, living in Los Angeles, California, paid for her 160 acres in full at the time of purchase. There were also buyers from England, including Alice Caton, spinster, who was among three purchasers from Blackpool. There are 1,849 records of married women purchasing CPR land, such as \"Margaret Ducklow, wife of James Ducklow, Osprey, Ont.\" who purchased CPR land in Manitoba in 1882. There are 320 records of widows purchasing CPR land.\n\nCELEBRATED WOMEN FARMERS AND RANCHERS\n\n_Mary Gilroy, \"Bachelor Girl\" Farmer of Regina \u2013_ While farmers and ranchers Annie Williams, Alix Westhead, and Celesta Hamer Jackson received considerable attention from journalists, there were others who were even more celebrated. Regina's Mary Gilroy was one. In her 1907 article \"Openings for Women in Canada,\" author Agnes C. Laut advocated \"fruit farming, chicken farming, ranching, even wheat growing\" for women and wrote that \"the number of women who have done this successfully is legion. I recall a girl who went to the Territories to teach painting. Now the West is not old enough for art. The paints were laid aside, and, as the head of her family of brothers and sisters, she bought land near Regina. On that land the banks advanced money for building and implements. Today the girl drives her own span, and is educating the other members of her family\u2014which she could never have accomplished from art.\" While the \"legion\" of women who successfully farmed is a challenge to locate, Laut's Regina farmer was Mary (Marie) Gilroy, \"one of the most famous woman settlers of the west.\" Yet when she died in Regina in 1949, there was little recollection of her achievements. It was noted in the _Leader-Post_ (Regina) that \"Miss Mary Victoria Gilroy,\" who died at age eighty-two, had arrived from Barrie, Ontario, in 1882, and that \"she was believed to have been one of the first women farmers in Saskatchewan.\" Little is known about Gilroy aside from the press coverage she received. She was born Mary Gilroy in 1867 in the Niagara district of Ontario. Her parents were from Ireland and her father was a farm labourer.\n\nGilroy was celebrated by the CPR in their 1903 publication _Words from the Women of Western Canada_ under the subtitle \"A Bachelor Girl Speaks.\" She was an important example in the pamphlet because as a single woman she could not acquire a homestead, but she could purchase land, preferably CPR land. According to the pamphlet, Gilroy was not a \"'toil-worn farm woman' [but] on the contrary, she appeared a well-to-do business woman, clad in a handsome seal jacket, a neat toque, completely up-to-date driving attire.\" She described herself as a \"genuine farmer... my art is merely a winter's amusement, for I was obliged to give it up as a means of livelihood some years ago.\" Her health was not good in her home province of Ontario, and she had consulted a physician who \"ordered me at once to the North-West, told me to burn my paint brushes and give myself a chance for life by imbibing the pure prairie air.\" He advised her to work on a farm, but instead Gilroy bought a half section of land. She told the author of the pamphlet that she ran the farm all alone, with one hired man and up to three others during seeding and harvest. Her brother, a student, lived with her, but she managed the work of the farm herself. Gilroy began as a grain farmer only but was considering mixed farming. She had at that time (1903) farmed for seven years, and she operated the plough and the binder and cleaned the stables. The pamphlet stressed her scientific knowledge of agriculture, including the chemical composition of the soil, but this was all acquired through experience. She described herself as\n\nan enthusiast on prairie farming: why not? From a semi-invalid, existing on a bare living brought in by my paintings, I've grown to be the healthiest of women! Well, no not exactly the \"wealthiest\" as well, but I've no reason to complain of my financial standing. I don't owe a dollar, I've a clear title to my 320 acres; 240 acres are broken and 210 acres ready for crop another season.... Life on a prairie farm is an ideal existence; that is if you don't get into a \"rut.\" I believe no life is so elevating as farm life; there's no \"drudgery\" about it unless you let it become drudgery. Yes it means close application: I am up at four every summer morning, but when my day's work is done, I have my books, music and my brush. I've made money from the start: any one can do the same, and if you run over the list of farmers in this district you won't find one failure\n\nIn 1906 Gilroy was visited by the Canadian Women's Press Club when representatives toured Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. They were looking for \"evidence of the success of women in the West\" and found it \"beyond our ken\" that \"women entirely ignorant of farming or ranching could make a success in that line of life.\" Gilroy was cast as fiercely independent and as having great authority over the men she employed. Described once again as \"the bachelor girl farmer of Regina,\" Gilroy \"turned the first furrow of our disbelief and planted facts where fancies had grown rampant.\" She had known nothing of farming when she bought her land eleven years earlier for $2,000. She told the touring press women that \"if any men didn't do what I thought was right I discharged them and got others... Ask anybody for miles around if I can be imposed upon... I've a 'firing' reputation.\" The press women also reported, however, that Gilroy had sold her farm and stock for $13,750, a small fortune.\n\nGilroy was also featured in an article about women farmers in Western Canada in the _Minneapolis Journal_ of July 1906, called \"How Four Plucky Women Won Out in the Canadian Northwest.\" It began with \"'The bachelor girl farmer' is a personage of whom one hears fifteen minutes after arriving in Regina. 'She's a corkerjack, as you Americans say,' was how one enthusiastic man expressed it.\"\n\nSelling her farm in 1906 did not mean that Gilroy was excised from further promotion of women farmers. In the 1907 CPR pamphlet _Home Life of Women in Western Canada_ she appeared again, although it was noted that she had sold her \"country holding for the round sum of $15,000.00.\" The pamphlet described Gilroy as \"one of the big grain growers of the district\" and as \"one of the most written about business women in the West; her plucky venture, putting her last shilling in a prairie farm, her indomitable energy, spent in a hand-to-hand tussle with fortune.\" It was reported that she was touring Europe, \"taking pleasure from the result of her $2,000.00 investment on the prairie plains!\" Gilroy then faded into obscurity and has been forgotten. According to her obituary, she became an insurance \"saleswoman\" for Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada. In 1911 she was a \"lodger\" in a rooming house on Retallack Street in Regina.\n\n_Lady Ernestine Hunt: Alberta Horse Rancher \u2013_ By 1906 \"the most adventurous Englishwoman of the day,\" Lady Ernestine Hunt, a daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Ailesbury, had a horse ranch near Calgary of (allegedly) between 30,000 and 40,000 acres. Her ranching activities were widely reported in Canada, the United States, and Britain in part because she was well-known for her exploits long before establishing her Canadian ranch. She was described as \"a modern feminine Don Quixote\" and as having \"crowded into her life more adventures than one usually comes across in the pages of a sensational novel.\" As Lady Ernestine Brudenell-Bruce, she established a reputation for \"handling a yacht... almost equal to the most experienced 'old salt.'\" As she told a reporter in 1906, \"As long as I can remember I have had a roving disposition, and have been fond of two things\u2014horses and the sea. By the time I was 24 I had been around the Horn, and I was a night staff nurse at Krugersdorp [South Africa] at the time of Jameson raid. A few months later I went to Australia in a sailing boat, returning in another sailer [ _sic_ ].\" In order to take command of her own yacht she required a yacht master's certificate, and she attended nautical school in Liverpool but was refused permission to write the final exam because she was a woman. While there she met Harry Brady Hunt from Ireland, and they eloped. He was a mate in the merchant service, and she sailed with him to Japan and many other locations. She also trained steeplechasers in Ireland.\n\nUnder headlines such as \"Titled Lady Has Ranch in the West\" and \"Canadian Woman Rancher: The Daughter of a Marquess Ships Horses to England,\" it was widely reported in 1906 that Lady Hunt was the \"only woman that has ever brought livestock across the ocean by herself,\" from her ranch near Calgary through the port of Montreal. She arrived at the port \"dressed in real cowboy fashion. She is a dark complexioned young woman about 28 years of age: wore a sombrero hat, black waist, khaki colored skirt reaching to the knees, leather leggings and shoes. Her hair was cut short.\" She shipped seventeen horses and personally supervised their conveyance, although they were yet to be broken and were still in a \"half wild state.\" She intended to ship them to her Irish estates at Ballylean, County Clare, and Kilcurly Adare, County Limerick. Several nights on board she had to give up her sleep to calm them. Hunt could \"handle them just about as she pleased, although the deck hands found it necessary to keep at a safe and respectful distance.\" Despite sleepless nights she was \"a picture of beauty and health.\"\n\nHunt was apparently dividing her time between Ireland and her ranch in Alberta in 1910 when she founded a colonial training school for girls at Cosham Park near Portsmouth. Situated on seven acres of meadow and orchard, the school was intended to train women to be independent once they arrived in the colonies. Hunt had found that \"girls who have left boarding school have a great deal to learn before they are fitted to seek a career of independence in the colonies of the empire.\" She appointed herself the principal of the school, and her aim was to give girls of eighteen or older training in subjects that would be useful to them in \"fending for themselves and their homes, whether in the colonies or in England.\" Graduates who did not wish to go to the colonies were qualified to become matrons, or housekeepers in large households. Horsemanship was the foremost subject. The students were taught to ride sidesaddle and astride, and single and pair driving. Other subjects included cooking, home nursing, first aid, darning, stable work, and gardening. There were to be no servants at the school, as the students were to do all the required work themselves. In summer the students were to sleep in tents.\n\nWhether the school was a success and just how long Hunt ranched in Western Canada are difficult questions to answer, since both ranch and school disappear from view. By 1908 she was busy in England with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps (FANY). A small organization made up of elite women who owned horses, FANY combined nursing skills with the sense of valour and patriotism of military service. In 1909 it was announced that Hunt was the first woman to receive a commission as lieutenant in the territorial division of the British Army. Reports at the time claimed that she still operated her horse ranch, that it was lucrative, and that \"she has a wonderful influence over the wildest horses, so much so that she astonished the cattlemen on her ranch, who declare that she is able to accomplish by mere gentle suasion what ranchmen can only attain by the hardest rough riding.\"\n\n_Grain on a \"Stupendous Scale\": Ruth Hillman and Fairview Heights Farm, Keeler, Saskatchewan \u2013_ Ruth N. Hillman, a farmer at Keeler, Saskatchewan, was featured in newspapers as far away as New Zealand and Australia. She purchased her land about 1906, and by 1911 she was operating a \"profitable farm of nearly 2,000 acres,\" despite having no previous farming experience. Hillman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and had been a \"stenographic reporter\" before she \"took what capital she had... and staked her savings in Canadian land.\" There were two years, however, between her purchase and her move, and during that time she allegedly studied and read all she could and made herself aware of the conditions of farming on the northern plains. She learned she needed to avoid \"any attempt to transplant the small farming methods of Minnesota to the broad acres of Saskatchewan.\" Hers was another version of \"rags to riches\": she declared that \"what she has done can be done by any girl working on a small salary. From small beginnings her land grew.\" The 1911 census shows that Hillman had a large workforce on her farm with a foreman and six labourers, plus her brother, aged fifteen. Her mother, too, was resident on the farm and listed as the head of household.\n\nAlso in 1911 it was reported that Ruth Hillman was in St. Paul to secure the cooperation of the Twin Cities \"jobbers and manufacturers... in the fight for free trade or reciprocal trade relations.\" She was quoted as saying, \"It would make your heart sick to see how some women and children almost starve themselves in their homestead shacks so that their husbands can raise the money to pay the exorbitant prices charged for American farm machinery.\" In this account Hillman was a \"writer of romances,\" as well as a manager of a farm \"aggregating 20,000 acres.\"\n\nDuring the First World War, Hillman was described as breeding Percheron horses and having a wheat crop of 40,000 bushels. In this report her femininity was stressed: she was a \"slim little person\" with \"dainty hands.\" Hillman allegedly declared that she did not do any of the \"actual manual labor\": \"You see I believe farming is just like any other big business and business systems should be introduced into it. I study for all I am worth, reading up what others have done, noting my mistakes and finding out why they are mistakes... then when my foreman comes for consultation I know what I want done.\" She had thoughts about farming as a profession for women: \"Women can be successful at it if they make up their minds to work, work, and then work. I can see where they would do splendidly near a big market, but as to away out on the prairie, they must be sure of their physical, moral and mental strength before they attempt it. It is a big test.\"\n\nHillman's enormous new house and barn were described in \"Who Said Women Can't Farm?,\" a lengthy feature article by Mary P. McCallum that appeared in a 1918 _Grain Growers' Guide_. At that time she had \"one of the finest herds of Percherons in Saskatchewan.\" Hillman was continuing to study agriculture and to experiment on her own with wheat varieties.\n\nThe author of this article concluded that Hillman was \"one of a long line of women who are forging for women new links in the chain of world industrialism and professionalism,\" and that the prairies could now boast many women farmers. Some were small-scale producers with little or no capital who faced \"unspeakable adversities,\" while others, like Hillman, were farming grain on a \"stupendous scale.\" Like Lady Hunt, Hillman also faded from the public eye. The local history reports only that she married Bob Lowe and left her farm, which she called Fairview Heights, during the Depression. At that time she likely got little or nothing for her farm, as it was in the centre of Saskatchewan's Dust Bowl.\n\n_Isobel \"Jack\" May and Her \"Ready-Made\" Farm at Sedgewick, Alberta \u2013_ The woman farmer of Western Canada to receive the most acclaim and notoriety was Isobel \"Jack\" May. Before she left for Alberta in 1911 she was known in England as \"Lady Jack,\" or the \"Lady Farmer.\" She had attracted attention from as far away as New Zealand for her work as a farm labourer and for her attire. Despite all of the press coverage she received, it is difficult to know for certain very much about her background or her own thoughts. There are no sources left by her, just vast press coverage, far from reliable. Most articles about her written after her arrival in Canada claimed that she was a daughter of Admiral Sir William Henry May, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet, and accustomed to mingling with elite society, including royalty, at dinners, balls, and receptions. It is unlikely, however, that she was his daughter, unless she was \"illegitimate.\" Press coverage contrasted her (alleged) former life as the daughter of an admiral with the solitude and demands of life on her Alberta farm. According to one description in a 1912 article entitled \"World's Happiest Girl Who Declares She Would Rather Plow Than Go to the Opera,\" she had been a \"frilly, frothy society belle, to whom the theatre, balls and card parties represented all that was worth living for.\"\n\nAccording to the press, Jack May, like Lady Hunt, served as a nurse in the South African War. Upon her return to England she enrolled at the Horticultural College at Swanley. After graduation she worked at two farms in Kent. There she attracted attention because of her work on the land and with animals, but also because of her clothing, which was described as \"male attire.\" One of the earliest descriptions of May is from her 1906 appearance as a witness in police court in Bromley, Kent, where her garb attracted much more attention than the details of the case at hand. It was reported that the witness was \"a young woman dressed in boys' clothing... Her name is Isabel May. Her hair is cut short and she wears leggings and a cap. The only exception to the male costume is a sort of smock reaching almost to the knees. Miss May, or, as she prefers to be called \"Jack\" is a most interesting young woman. Her ambition is to be a farmer and with this end in view has taken service with Mrs. Smith at St. Mary Cray. She is handsome and stalwart, and in the farming garb presents quite a picture of strength.\" The report further noted that May was \"certain that women can succeed on a farm if they try,\" and that no one \"doubts her ability as a mower, reaper, or plougher.\"\n\nAccording to other reports, May insisted that her garb was feminine and that she was \"hurt by the imputation that she wears male attire.\" She also contended that she \"does not work on the land but is engaged upon ordinary women's tasks, such as milking and butter making. In a later statement however, she said that at the farms in Kent she did every kind of farm work, including mowing, reaping and ploughing.\" In 1907 she left Kent and operated a flower and vegetable farm of several acres in Norfolk, and it was here that she began to wear trousers. Her goal, once she had enough experience, was to go to Canada and \"turn some capital that she has to account in farming on a large scale.\"\n\n_Figure 22._ Isobel \"Jack\" May, often referred to as the \"bachelor girl settler,\" was briefly a farmer at Sedgewick, Alberta in 1911\u201312. Her occupation and her \"male attire\" attracted press attention from around the globe. This photograph was used widely in the press to illustrate her farm work in Alberta, but it pre-dates her arrival in Canada. She was already a celebrity \"lady farmer\" before she left England with press attention from at least 1905. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 23._ Louisa Wittrick farmed with \"Jack\" May, but her responsibilities focused on the domestic realm. Both women purchased \"ready-made\" Canadian Pacific Railway farms, and together they had 320 acres. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\n_Figure 24._ May (seated) and Wittrick in front of their \"ready-made\" farm home at Sedgewick. Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911)\n\n_Figure 25._ A widely published photograph of the \"bachelor girl settler.\" Currie Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ 31, 181 (1911).\n\nMay's arrival in Saint John, New Brunswick, in April 1911 caused a sensation. When the CPR liner arrived with a group of fifty farmers from England headed for the CPR \"ready-made\" farms in the Canadian West, it was found that one was a female dressed as a male. This became big news, broadcast with headlines such as \"Miss Jack May in Male Attire: An Eccentric Young Woman Passenger on the Empress of Britain.\" According to one description, \"A female second cabin passenger who gave her name as 'Miss Jack May,' was detained by the Canadian immigration officials, she being attired in male costume. According to one report she 'shocked the... immigration agents, who had heard of no such thing in this part of the world, where there are no suffragettes or anything of that kind.'\" In the record of her arrival she is entered as a male, age 35, then this is crossed out and she is entered into the female column. May readily admitted that \"she was one of the opposite sex and said that she and her male companion had worked on a farm in England. She had her hair cropped short, wore leggings and tan boots and a short skirt that was not visible below a man's overcoat. Her age was about 30 and she was rather good looking.\"\n\nMay's \"male attire\" was regarded not only as odd or perverse but as suspicious, shady, even treacherous. She was \"masquerading\" as a man. In Canada and the United States, this was a crime. In 1914 at Fort William, Ontario, a woman was sentenced to six months in the penitentiary for \"masquerading as a man\" and working as a hotel porter. Her defence was she needed to \"keep from starving\" and that \"being in the guise of a girl she was under too great a handicap to make her way in the world.\" Four years later a woman was sentenced to two years in the Kingston women's prison because she had \"posed as a man, had her hair cut in military style, and went so far as donning a man's attire in order to do her bit in a log-driving bee.\" (This prison sentence, however, raised a \"storm of indignation.\") In the United States in 1911 a woman musician who dressed in trousers and waistcoats was given sixty days in jail in Portland, Oregon. In passing the sentence, the judge said that \"I hope that by the time your sentence has expired your friends will have provided you with clothing suitable to your sex.\" In 1913 a New York woman was arrested and jailed for \"masquerading\" as a man; she worked at a bookbindery and dressed as a man to earn better wages.\n\nThere was considerable debate about, and mixed reactions to, May's arrival in Canada in \"male attire.\" One rural Alberta newspaper, the _Gleichen Call_ , welcomed her: \"A woman with energy to study the science of farming and to work it as Miss May has done, would be a decided acquisition to any country, and the fact that she adapted her attire to her work shows her good sense. The sight of a woman in men's attire and doing man's work may be novel, but it does not make her any the less a lady.\" The _Daily Colonist_ of Victoria, British Columbia, was much more critical:\n\nMost women would rather not have read that this handsome and enterprising young lady considered it expedient to travel in men's costume. If at her work Miss May found it necessary to dress as a man she was certainly under no such compulsion while travelling. Few people find it necessary to wear the uniform of the workshop on the street. \"Jack\" May... may be a picturesque figure on a railway platform and make a good story for a reporter, but most women would prefer to see their daughters dressed less conspicuously. Conventions are not without meaning and no woman would lightly disregard them.\n\nMay stood out and was seen as odd, or worse, not only because of her attire but because of her occupation. She was reported to be \"the first woman to undertake farming on an extensive scale in the west.\" She had successfully applied for one of the CPR's ready-made farms at Sedgewick, Alberta, stating in her application that she had \"done every kind of farm work, from that of an ordinary farm hand to bailiff or manager.\" The ready-made farms were a scheme to help attract the \"sons of Britain,\" instead of peasants from Europe, to settle in Western Canada. Prospective farmers signed up for a plan that was intended to avoid many of the pitfalls of the free homestead system while making money for the CPR, as the farmers had to purchase their land. The settler had to pay a 10 percent down payment plus the cost of the improvements. In the contract the CPR agreed to provide each farmer with a four-room cottage, a barn with hayloft, and to have fifty acres on each farm broken, planted with crops, and fenced before the settlers left the old country. The farms were to be close to a railway, to market, churches, and schools\u2014unlike homesteads, which were often very isolated.\n\nMay was fortunate to be accepted into the scheme, as the conditions were that the applicants were to be married men actually engaged in agriculture. May qualified only for the latter. She purchased Farm No. 2 at the Sedgewick colony, consisting of 160 acres, at the price of sixteen dollars per acre. Her land was valued at $2,560 and the improvements at $2,227, for a total of $4,787.\n\nWhile May was reported to be with a \"male companion\" when she was detained by immigration officials at Saint John, when she arrived in Alberta her companion was identified as Miss Wittrick of Norfolk. From Wetaskiwin, Alberta, it was reported on 29 April that the two were on their way to Sedgewick: \"Miss May is a large property owner in the Old Country, and some six years ago adopted the male attire as a convenience in her duties of managing her large holdings. When they reach their new home Miss Wittrick will do the house-keeping and Miss May will do the farming. It is said that she is thoroughly proficient and can ride a horse or handle a plow like an expert. She also knows livestock and she has plenty of grit and ambition.\"\n\nIn the CPR records of the colony, Louisa May Wittrick had Farm No. 3 on the northwest quarter of the same section (NW 7-43-12-W4) as May's plot. Together they had 320 acres. May purchased her farm on 16 May 1911 and Wittrick, on 24 April 1911. Aside from Wittrick and May there was only one other woman among the Sedgewick ready-made farmers, Caroline Ann Potts (who received no press attention, and there is no record of the results of her farming adventure). In the extensive press coverage of Wittrick and May, Wittrick was always presented as looking after the domestic realm; she did not dress in male clothing. According to one description, the \"two young ladies are working in partnership. They find no difficulty in the arrangement, though the average farmer out there assures you that partnerships are unworkable in such a business. Each member is responsible for her own department but is always ready to help the other. Miss Wittrick looks after the dairy and the house... and she is a beautiful butter maker and an excellent cook, but she takes a hand in the field work whenever there's need of extra help.\" May did the ploughing, discing, harrowing, reaping, and binding, and she also marketed the grain.\n\nLouisa Wittrick wrote a letter to the _Canadian Gazette_ in January 1912, describing how the two were coping with their first winter on their farm and, despite noting that it had been as cold as 56 below (Fahrenheit), she was very positive: \"Somehow Jack and I have never found one day long enough. We are up at 6:30 and we are at it till past eight at night.\" It was very dry; the snow covered the ground but was not deep. Their cows and pigs were doing well; Jack had made a shed of saplings and straw. The CPR had dug a second well for them because their first was no good. They had spent a quiet but happy Christmas, enjoying the rest as they had to normally work every day of the week.\n\nThe Sedgewick colony farmers had faced some surprises upon their arrival They were angry to learn that the CPR was charging them three dollars an acre more than the price quoted them in England by the company agent. This resulted in a delay in the colonists' taking possession of their land. Edwin and Felicia Snowsell and their two children, from Gloucestershire, who arrived in 1911, were dismayed to find Sedgewick to be a tiny village with one street and \"all around bare prairie. Our spirits fell to zero.\" They also found that the well was not ready on the farm they had purchased. The CPR had done a poor job of ploughing the land. According to Frank Snowsell, the CPR contractors \"tried to squeeze the 50 acres out of areas without trees to avoid the added cost of clearing. Since many quarters had over 100 acres of poplar and willow brush with many sloughs, this required some tricky dodging around the wooded areas. Also, cultivating was practically non-existent.\" No one in the Snowsell family had any farming experience. Son Frank wrote years later, \"Dad had never done any farming, nor handled horses or any other animals until he came to Canada. Mother had never cooked a meal, washed clothes, nor done any of the usual prairie housewife's tasks until she arrived in Alberta.\" They had a poor first harvest due to rain that delayed the harvest, and then frost.\n\nCompared to the Snowsells, Jack May and Louisa Wittrick were well prepared and seemed to thrive, at least according to press reports. An April 1912 report observed that May and Wittrick were \"not among the old country people [of the CPR ready-made farms] who because their wheat was frozen left their valuable crop of potatoes to rot in the ground.\" Their successes were emphasized, and their contentment. They were in Sedgewick for only a few weeks when an article appeared in the _Canadian Courier_ called \"The Woman Who Never Looks Back.\" The author of the article, Norman S. Rankin, took his title from a poem by Mary I.S. Schaeffer, a choice that was not apt as the poem was about the farm wife who was \"comrade\" to her husband:\n\nWe speak of the man who has opened the door\n\nOf the great teeming West, that has brought to the fore\n\nThe wealth of the prairies\u2014so vast and so wide\n\nBut how many think of the one at his side\n\nThe one who has made him a home in the shack\n\nHis comrade\u2014the woman who never looks back.\n\nRankin's article exemplifies the intense scrutiny May received. He provided a detailed description of Jack May's appearance, noting that this was the first \"out-and-out professional woman-farmer\" he had ever heard of: \"Her face was pleasant, deeply bronzed, inclined to be square with a broad mouth and forehead over which a thick mass of auburn hair struggled from beneath her tweed cap. Brown eyes twinkled at you. Probably five foot three or four inches in height, she gave the impression of strength and endurance. Her costume\u2014about which so much publicity has ensued\u2014was certainly unique. A cloth jumper over a shirt waist, a cloth skirt, knee length, brown leather leggings and a three-quarter overcoat completed it. And as she strode across the platform with a grip in each hand and her cap set jauntily on the back of her head, one certainly would have thought 'A jolly good-looking fellow.' I did.\"\n\nRankin's article included two photographs: one with May on horseback with the caption \"Smart and well proportioned, she might have been taken for a college youth\"; and the other of her behind a horse and rake with two men with the caption \"She finds farming congenial and male costume much more fitted to the work she does than woman's.\" Rankin clearly struggled with May's attire, writing, \"She wears masculine garb because she wants to. One might wonder why she wants to, but it wouldn't do him any good, or bring him any nearer a solution. There's no argument open. She finds farming congenial, and male costume much more fitted to the work she does than woman's. And that's enough.\"\n\nMay was also featured as early as 1911 to help promote the ready-made farms and the CPR. In an article by Currie Love in a pamphlet about the \"phenomenal progress\" of Calgary and region, the Sedgewick women colonists were highlighted. Love was a Canadian journalist who spent some years as a special writer for the CPR, and she was quite likely working in that capacity when she wrote the article, as it promoted the ready-made farm scheme for British settlers. Love wrote that \"women will be interested to know that one of the most successful 'ready-made' farmers is Miss Jack May, daughter of Admiral May, of England, who with her friend Miss Louise Wittrick, has taken 320 acres.\" Although Love included much of the same detail as others had, she did not mention anything about May's male attire. Love was also interested in promoting the scheme for other women, writing that \"a woman needs to be pretty strong to do farm work in a new country but given sufficient capital and common sense any woman can succeed.\" She urged women to purchase the forty-acre ready-made farms. (The large acreages, grain crops, and equipment such as steam engines were for male farmers, according to Love.) On their smaller holdings, women could grow food for their cows, pigs, and hens. They could also grow various berries and vegetables. Money was required. Advocating poultry farming in particular, Love wrote that \"any young woman starting a poultry farm in Alberta should possess capital of from $2,500 to $3,000, ambition, a practical turn of mind, and a goodly amount of determination.\" She continued: \"In these twentieth century days when women are emulating men in almost every department of life, it is not surprising that they should follow masculine example and emigrate to a new country where opportunities are more plentiful than in the Old Land, and where the women who work for a living are neither regarded with suspicion nor ostracised from society.\"\n\nCurrie Love published much of the same material in a 1911 article entitled \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack'\" in the _Lady's Realm_ (London). A story of how \"two Englishwomen have solved the problem of work for women,\" the article began thus: \"Though not a suffragette, Miss Jack May, an Englishwoman who has come to Canada to farm her own lands, is an example of what the twentieth century woman can accomplish alone and unassisted.\" Love emphasized in this article how \"all their neighbours thoroughly respect them, and do all in their power to be of service to them.\" The farm hosted a steady stream of visitors, \"anxious to see the two women who have come thousands of miles from home to make a success of farming in Canada.\"\n\n\"The World's Happiest Girl\" was how May was described in an article featured in many newspapers in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand in late 1912 and early 1913. May stated (allegedly): \"I wouldn't go back to society again for worlds. I would rather plow than go to the opera. I would rather plant corn than attend a pink tea. I much prefer currying my horse to arraying myself in an evening gown. What's a butterfly life in damp and foggy England compared to real life in bright sunshine and bracing cold?\" She claimed to \"love the freedom of the life here and the highness of things here on the western prairies... In England one is bound by conventions, as one's fields are girt with hedges. Here I can do as I choose, I would not go back under any circumstances.\" When May \"dressed up\" she still refused to be corseted and constricted; rather, she wore \"a soft collar and tie, and a peasant smock of navy blue denim, which comes to her knees and is loosely belted around her waist.\"\n\nThe most detailed account of May and her farm is a 1914 article, \"Haymaking with Jack May: A Woman's Life on a Canadian Farm\" by Currie Love, published in _Quiver_ , a London illustrated magazine. Love reported that May did not even own a skirt: \"Can't be bothered with the things. Besides, women's fashions change every minute, and I can't afford to keep pace with them. My first reason for adopting men's clothes is that they are comfortable and sensible, and the only safe costume for farm work. Imagine me on a plough in a hobble skirt! Wouldn't I be a fine sight? You're liable to be thrown off a plough every twenty minutes or so, and a skirt would be absolutely dangerous under those circumstances. From wearing men's clothes to work, I gradually adopted them for everyday wear, and now I should be most uncomfortable in conventional feminine garb.\" According to Love, May was assisted not only by Louise Wittrick but by Miss Grace Hanson, also from England, aged eighteen. Hanson too opted for the comfort and safety of masculine dress: \"The very idea of corsets makes her shudder with disgust. 'Nasty stiff things,' she says: 'I wouldn't wear them for anything.'\" They had six cows, six horses, seventeen pigs, two dogs, and some hens. There were 150 acres sown of barley, wheat, and oats, and it was reported that May did all her own work with the grain\u2014ploughing, seeding, reaping, and binding. She also did her own carpentry work, building a barn and pigsty as well as shelves for the living room. The women had found their first Canadian winter \"delightful.\" The \"long days of bright sunshine and clear, bracing cold [were] so different from the damp fog of England.\" \"We had expected,\" [May] laughed, \"to find an Alberta winter a terrible experience, but we liked it even better than the summer.\" May declared she would not go back to England except to visit:\n\nTo see my people at home, but not to stay. I like the freedom of life here\u2014the bigness of things. No, I wouldn't go back to stay. I don't believe that Canada is a wonderland. I know you can't pick up gold off the streets, as some of the old-country people believe. I don't think the climate is the best in the world, or that anyone who comes here is bound to become wealthy in a year... But I do believe that Canada offers the greatest opportunity I know of to a man or woman with a little capital who is not afraid to work... If you want to work hard, have beautiful soil, own your farm and house, be your own landlord, and have a free, independent life, Canada is the place.\n\nSadly, Canada was not the place for Jack May. She lasted only a little over a year. Just why she left for good is not clear. When Currie Love's article in _Quiver_ was published in September 1914, May had already been gone for nearly two years. In December 1912 the _Sedgewick Sentinel_ reported that \"Miss Jack May left last week to spend the winter in England.\" She did not return. The 1 May 1913 issue of the _Sentinel_ noted that \"Miss Jack May, who went on a visit to the old country last fall, is not returning, she having taken a farm in the county of Shropshire, England.\" It was further noted in the same issue that \"Miss Hanson [the young assistant mentioned in the 1914 Love article] is entering into partnership with Miss Wittrick, in place of Miss Jack May.\" Finally, this same issue of the _Sentinel_ boasted that Sedgewick, particularly Jack May, was featured in a lengthy article in the _Calcutta Statesman_ of 2 February 1913.\n\nBut Jack May was gone for good. The local history of Sedgewick, published in 1982, provides clues. In her entry on \"Miss May Jack and Miss Louise Whittrick [ _sic_ ],\" Mary Weber wrote that \"Miss May left the farm for Australia in 1913 and Miss Whittrick took over the farm. At this time Mr. David Moore, the recently appointed supervisor of the CPR ready-made farms, bought the west half of section 17 in 1913\u201315. Mr. Moore and Miss Whittrick were married in Sedgewick in 1914, a most posh ceremony. Two sons were born to them on the farm but the eldest died as an infant. In 1922 Mr. and Mrs. Moore sold the farm, had a sale of their effects and, with their son Jack, about four years old, returned to Ireland.\"\n\nJack May disappears from view. Whether she in fact went to Australia or to a farm in Shropshire is unknown. Articles about her as a farmer in Canada, however, continued to be published, such as Love's 1914 piece in _Quiver_. A popular 1913 article about May was entitled \"Society Lady Who Prefers the Plow to the Pink Tea,\" although it was a re-hash of earlier articles. When speaking before the Royal Colonial Institute in London in 1913, Saskatchewan farmer Georgina Binnie-Clark referred to the injustices of Canada's land laws and the contribution women could make in the \"spade work of British expansion in this, the supreme place of prosperity among British lands.\" She used Jack May as her best example of this potential: \"And of the Sedgwick colony in 1911, the verdict from officials, dealers, tradesmen and neighbours concerning the work of Mrs. Jack May and her partner, Miss Louisa Wittrick, on their ready-made farm was, 'The women are the best men of the lot.'\" In 1914 an article published in the _Irish Homestead_ , and reprinted as \"Lady Farmers\" as far away as New Zealand, focused on May and Wittrick, and the author had allegedly recently visited them. As late as 1924, May was still being celebrated as one of the \"pioneer women of the West\" who, along with Miss Wittrick, was \"happy and flourishing\" on her farm at Sedgewick, that she had in fact long since left. She may have left for personal or economic\/agricultural reasons, or a combination of both.\n\nOne visitor to the May-Wittrick farm perhaps provides a clue. In his book _Canadian Trails: Hither and Thither in the Great Dominion_ , English writer Eldred G.F. Walker described his visit to Sedgewick in the summer of 1912, writing that he had resolved to \"go and see the lady settler, Miss Jack May.\" Walker was welcomed by May and her \"lady friend,\" and he found their home \"natty.\" He described May as liking her farm very much, as having the best dairy cows he had seen in that part of the country, and as having cut plenty of hay. But \"a tragedy had nearly occurred the day before, as during the storm the electric fluid had struck the windmill, and running down had found a metallic clothes-line, from which it had flashed into the hen-coop, killing twenty-two chickens and blinding the old hen.\" Altogether Walker seemed impressed with what they had done, writing that \"I had heard of the life of the Wild West, but it did not look as though life was so very wild when these two girls could have a home of their own all alone out on the open prairie.\"\n\nWalker also reported some discontent among the Sedgewick colony farmers. One complained that he could not get the CPR steam plough to do the promised breaking of the land. Many of the Sedgewick and other CPR colony farmers and homesteaders in Western Canada were soon or eventually discouraged, and sold up or abandoned their land. Their crop of 1911 was very poor, and they had to be provided with seed wheat for their crop of 1912. This seed was full of weeds. They found winters difficult with not enough fuel; their water would be frozen in the morning and their vegetables in the root cellar also froze. The houses that were built for the settlers had no insulation for the winter weather and were built of inferior materials. Elizabeth Snowsell taught school from 1913 to bring necessary income to the farm, as the grain crops could not be relied on. The Snowsells found it essential to hire casual labour, particularly at harvest time. After fourteen years, including several years of crop failures, the Snowsells abandoned their farm, leaving it in the hands of the CPR. Like that of May and Wittrick, the CPR record of Snowsell's contract reads \"Status of Purchase: Uncertain.\" Many other records read \"contract cancelled,\" or \"contract surrendered and cancelled.\" According to an account in the local history of Sedgewick, a great many of the colonists were from cities and had no experience in farming: \"Some of them didn't last out the year, and by the time ten years had rolled around, there were very few of those with no farming experience left here.\"\n\nCPR Sedgewick settler Jim Hallum, who arrived as a boy with his parents, wrote that the colonists were disappointed for many reasons, including the tiny houses, and the fifty acres on each farm that was supposed to be seeded to wheat upon their arrival, but was not. The wells were particularly disappointing, as they were so deep and equipped with steel rods that \"in order to pump water from a well like that, it really took some muscle and strength.\" But there were colonists who persisted under adverse circumstances. Bessie and David Black and their young son came from Essex to Sedgewick in 1912. David died that August,and another son was born two weeks after his death. Yet Bessie Black persisted, with the help of her parents who came out from England in 1913.\n\nThere was at least one other woman farmer in the district who appears to have persisted longer than Jack May, although she received very little press coverage by contrast; she must not have donned male attire. Miss Helena Hill of Seattle purchased CPR land near Sedgewick and in the spring of 1911 it was reported that she was sowing 100 acres to flax. Under the headline \"Another Woman Farmer,\" it was reported that Jack May \"is to have a rival in her fascinating occupation in Alberta.\" A Miss Hilliard, also of Seattle, would supervise the house, while Hill developed the farm, and it was further reported that she intended to go into farming on a large scale and bring 640 acres under cultivation. It seems Hill was much more successful than May at farming the prairies. The 7 November 1912 issue of the _Sedgewick Sentinel_ noted that \"Miss Hill shipped the first car of grain through the Farmers Elevator on Monday.\" (It was one month later that the same newspaper reported that \"Miss Jack May left last week to spend the winter in England\"\u2014and never returned.)\n\nDISRUPTING AND TRANSGRESSING: CROSS-DRESSING FARMERS\n\nJust how Jack May understood her own gender and sexual identity cannot be gleaned from the evidence available. Nor can it be known whether she and Wittrick were partners in more than just their farm. The name Jack, however, may have been adopted as a masculine nickname when she was developing a visible lesbian identity, as in the example of her contemporary Vera \"Jack\" Holme, actress, suffragette, and chauffeur (to the Pankhursts). According to historian Anna Kisby in an article on Holme, \"A recurrent theme among Jack's friends is their use of male pseudonyms. Making her identity as a lesbian apparent according to the conventions of the time, Jack's nickname and her masculine dress act as key signals of her sexual identity.\" As historian Peter Boag has shown in his book _Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past_ , \"cross-dressers\" included a wide spectrum of people. At one end were those for whom \"such an act was not crossing at all but was something that came naturally to them, as they really felt themselves to be other than the sex their bodies suggested them to be.\" At the other end were those \"who took on the garb of the opposite sex for purposes unrelated to either sexuality or gender identity.\" Boag also contends that when cross-dressers are remembered in Western history, a \"progress narrative\" is invoked that \"normalizes the cross-dresser by maintaining that 'she' changed her clothing for some purpose related to securing personal advancement in a world with a deck that was otherwise stacked against her. For example, she might have dressed in male attire to pass herself off as a man so that she could obtain better-paying employment.\" While Boag admits that there were \"logical and practical\" reasons why a woman might dress as a man in the nineteenth-century West\u2014for safety, for opportunities, or adventure\u2014digging deeper can reveal a \"bonanza\" of evidence that \"female-to-male cross dressers undertook a change of wardrobe to help them better express feelings of sexual and gender difference.\" In the case of Jack May, however, it is impossible to \"dig deeper\"; the sources are not there. Similarly, it cannot be determined from the press reports whether May had aspirations of political equality or economic independence for herself, her partner, and other women.\n\nDid May's male attire make her an oddity, an outcast in the Sedgewick colony and in Western Canada more broadly? Cross-dressers are disruptive figures \"invested with potent and subversive powers,\" as they throw into question the binary categories of \"male\" and \"female.\" As historian Ann McClintock writes, clothing became \"central to the policing of social boundaries.\" May's transgression of gender, the spectacle of boundaries crossed, clearly fascinated a reading public, but how did her neighbours feel? It is possible that Jack May did not receive a warm welcome from her neighbours in Sedgewick. In all the accounts of women performing farm work in the West, it is extremely rare to learn that they did so in men's clothing. One other example is Patricia Carlisle, an English writer (pen name David Lyle) who purchased the Sunnyslope Ranch of 800 acres near Priddis in 1924. There she was known as \"Miss Peter Webber,\" and the land was jointly worked with \"her companion Miss Goppel.\" They were known in the district as the \"farmerettes,\" as they were \"the first women locally to run a farm and operate machinery along with the men.\" It was explained in the local history that Carlisle did not use her real name in the district because \"she was the daughter of a well to do London, England, member of Parliament.\" These and other stories about her may or may not have been true. It was stressed that she had other abilities normally associated with men, that she was \"an expert driver\" and a \"good shot.\" She was \"extremely venturesome,\" had \"worked for the British Government in Turkey and India,\" and \"during the War she is supposed to have driven an ambulance in Serbia.\"\n\nCarlisle wore trousers and a cowboy hat. She did all the farm work, including driving a tractor, ploughing, and harvesting. She had a crop of 7,000 bushels in 1925. Yet the local history stressed the somewhat eccentric ways of the \"farmerettes.\" Carlisle and Goppel bought a tractor and grain separator in downtown Calgary and drove them all the way back to their ranch (thirty-seven kilometres), despite the fact that it was forbidden to drive the machines on the pavement in that city.\n\nLike Lady Hunt and the farmer to be discussed in Chapter 5, Georgina Binnie-Clark, Carlisle announced her intention to train English women to farm in Western Canada. (This was one way to solve the need for farm labourers\u2014by using unpaid help who were supposedly in training. As mentioned above, Jack May also had \"apprentices.\") Carlisle reported that after an interview with her was published in London, she received 500 letters from English women who wanted to emigrate to ranches in Canada immediately. Carlisle was quoted saying that \"farming is a profession as suitable for a woman as for a man for mechanical labour saving devices are every year entering more intimately into its operation. Actually it returns more for brains than for the muscle applied to it.\" In 1925 in London she (allegedly) interviewed 100 women as possible students, and it was announced that Carlisle would return from England to Alberta with a well-known London woman surgeon, three school teachers, and three business women. They were all to receive a \"thorough agricultural education and to engage in practical farm work.\" They would then set up farms of their own near Carlisle's. The plan was that each year several more women would join them.\n\nIn 1925 modest press attention was devoted to Carlisle under captions such as \"She Writes and Ranches,\" detailing her first successful crop and the plans for the future\u2014and then no more. The local history entry on the \"farmerettes\" indicates that this was a brief experiment. The entry on the couple ends with the marriage of Miss Goppel in the fall of 1924 to B.F. Rhodes of Cochrane, Alberta, and \"Miss Webber took off for England in November. Returning in 1925 she was on the Walker Ranch, Pine Creek, for awhile.\"\n\nThere are few other examples of women who farmed in \"male attire.\" Mrs. Chamberlain, a widow who established the Chamberlain Ranch at Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, was one. Many stories were told about her, living without a husband in what was described as a wild and desolate region, where shots could be heard as \"rival bands fought on the ranges.\" This young widow with a daughter reportedly decided it was \"no place for an unprotected woman.\" The only thing she could think of was to \"give the appearance of there being a 'man in charge.' One morning she donned her husband's clothes\u2014and for ten years never wore her women's garments again.\" To the cowboys with whom she had little contact, she was known as the \"Yankee chap,\" and not one \"dreamed that the quiet, almost taciturn, slender little fellow who curtly repulsed all offers of help, was other than a man rancher who preferred to be left alone.\" As her herd grew the \"Yankee chap\" dealt with the traders and buyers, making shrewd bargains. It was not until the region was settled by families that she revealed the \"masquerade.\"\n\nA \"woman who made it alone\" in the Millicent district of Alberta, near Brooks, also \"put on men's clothing and did all the farm work\" after her husband left the farm. She was described in the local history as an odd, eccentric, cantankerous, and amusing diversion from the overwhelming norms of behaviour. Allegedly Jeanette Fleming had decided that her husband had to go back to the United States, as \"there can only be one boss on a place.\" She \"led an independent life,\" and \"her main ambition seemed to be to show the world that anything a man could do she could do better.\" She was recalled as a shrewd bargainer, and her sows raised more piglets per sow than those of her neighbours. She spent hours tutoring the children of the district in mathematics. But overall she was viewed as incompetent: \"Being a woman rancher and farmer, she had her own ways of doing things. At one time she kept 500 sheep and they were being killed by coyotes in the night. To combat this, she got 200 lanterns and hung them on the fence posts to keep the coyotes away.\" She flooded her and a neighbour's land when she attempted to irrigate her own fields. Insisting on never asking for help from her neighbours backfired on one occasion. Fleming was hammering shingles on her roof when her ladder blew down and she was stranded: \"She waved to cars that passed by and people waved back thinking that Jeanette was uncommonly friendly that day. Evening came and she was still up on the roof. Finally someone stopped to investigate and helped her down.\"\n\nPeter Boag concludes in his study of cross-dressing in the U.S. West that it was \"clearly a place and process where gender and sexuality were unstable, contentious and transgressive. It was a place where a wide variety of people who did not conform to gender and sexual expectations lived, loved and died.\" But was this the same north of the forty-ninth parallel? In 1917 at a Liberal convention in Winnipeg, a male farmer delegate objected to a resolution proposing homestead rights for women because \"if a woman settled alone in the midst of men who were homesteading rightly or wrongly her name would be tarnished.\" A single woman farmer would be morally suspect. One who dressed as a man would be even more suspect.\n\nThe 1923 novel _Cattle_ by Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) provides a hint of the way in which May and Carlisle might have been received by their neighbours. The central character, Angela Loring, is a cross-dressing farmer who broke her own land, put in her own crop, hayed, and fenced. An author and screenwriter born in Montreal of Chinese-British ancestry, Eaton lived on a ranch in the Alberta foothills for some years. Her novel _Cattle_ is a sharp critique of the treatment of and attitudes toward women in an Alberta ranching community Eaton called \"Yankee Valley.\" The woman farmer in _Cattle_ was known as \"Mr.\" Loring in her district: \"Her name, it appeared, was Angela Loring, but some wag had named her 'Mr.' Loring, because of her clipped hair and her working-man's attire, and this name stuck.\" Loring is regarded as a \"strange woman\" because of her occupation and dress and cropped hair, but also because she wants no contact with her neighbours:\n\nThe woman was a \"bug\" pronounced the farm people of Yankee Valley. At all events she was the kind of 'bug' they found it prudent to keep at a safe distance. She had met all overtures of friendship with hostility and contempt. She was on her own land. She desired no commerce with her neighbours. She needed no help. It was nobody's business but her own why she chose to dress and live in this way... Thus she became a sort of bugaboo in the popular imagination, but as time passed the country became used to the woman-hermit and gave her the desired wide berth.\n\nIn the novel the local doctor, a beloved figure in the community, takes a great interest in Loring, seeing feminine potential. He lectures her repeatedly about how her dress and occupation were unacceptable: \"Her cut hair he denounced unsparingly. No lass, he declared angrily, had a right to cut the hair from her head. Her man's clothes were unqualifiedly disgraceful. Her working the field was against Nature.\" Loring takes on a young woman assistant, Nettie Day, a single mother who was raped by Bull Langdon, the owner of the biggest ranch in the district. She too cuts her hair, adopts masculine garb, and works the land. Although there is more than a hint that Loring and Day are devoted to each other, by the end of the novel they have reverted to suitably feminine roles: Loring marries the doctor, and Day marries a neighbouring homesteader.\n\nThat it was not acceptable for women to dress in male attire, even while performing farm labour, was made clear to the British women who were part of the Princess Patricia Ranch experiment in British Columbia. When in 1913 they wore men's clothing while at work on the farm, they were instructed by their sponsors, the Colonial Intelligence League, to desist for fear that they were creating a poor impression in the community. A new rule was passed that residents \"must always wear skirts when working. The wearing of men's clothing is not permitted.\"\n\nIt will remain a mystery why Jack May left her Alberta farm so soon. She had more agricultural experience than the Snowsells, but faced the same challenges. She and Wittrick, like the Snowsells, had to be provided with seed wheat for the crop of 1912. Perhaps she found the press attention and constant visitors overwhelming, although in her own district\u2014at least if the _Sedgewick Sentinel_ is any indication\u2014little attention was paid to May. Did the community welcome or ostracize Jack May? Was she excluded from both the masculine and feminine realms of life in the community of Sedgewick? She may have thought she was travelling to a new setting where gender was more flexible, but she was surrounded in Sedgewick by other British settlers. As mentioned in Chapter 2, in England attitudes were being challenged and were slowly changing, but single women farmers were still viewed with suspicion, as \"unnatural\" women. They were \"not seen as real farmers by men but as inferior others who try to be like men and cannot therefore be taken seriously.\" Jack May was suspect if she demonstrated masculine qualities of \"physical strength, sturdiness, aggressiveness, competitiveness, speaking one's mind and dominance.\" She refused to appear \"slim, fragile, submissive, nurturing, quiet and withdrawn.\" A single woman farmer was not a potential wife, as she did not embody and perform feminine attributes. Louisa Wittrick was a potential wife and could find a place in Sedgewick society, while May could not as long as she farmed and worked in men's attire. Recall the \"girl farmer\" of Surrey, Estelle Long (introduced in Chapter 2), described as living all alone in a two-room hut with a ferocious mottled mongrel dog in a \"dreary and desolate\" spot with a \"double-barrelled gun by her bed and strong bolts and bars to the windows and strong locks to the door.\" In her neighbourhood she was regarded as \"having 'turned witch' or something of that sort.\"\n\nWHY THE ATTENTION?\n\nWomen farmers and ranchers of the Canadian West received a great deal of attention in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, through CPR promotional pamphlets and in the press. Often the coverage drew heavily on the information provided in the CPR publications, suggesting that the articles were engineered by that corporation. A 1907 article entitled \"Women as Farmers: Success of Some Who Have Taken Claims in the Northwest\" appears to have been based on a CPR pamphlet. The article featured Mary Gilroy and others, and was placed in newspapers as distant as New York, Michigan, and South Carolina, as well as in the Western Canadian press. \"How Four Plucky Women Won Out in the Canadian Northwest,\" which appeared in the _Minneapolis Journal_ in 1906, also drew a great deal on the CPR promotional publications.\n\nA 1910 article by Cynthia Westover Alden in the U.S. _Farmer's Review_ drew on some new examples under the headline \"Prosperous Women Farmers.\" Alden reported that she met half a dozen women farmers on her recent trip through Western Canada who were \"typical of what a woman can do.\" There was the \"clever widow\" of Saskatoon who was originally from Iowa, had invested in land, and made $50,000 in the last year. A woman known only as \"Mother\" in her district had a blind husband, and she had \"carved her fortune from the soil,\" creating a farm worth $20,000. A farmer still in her twenties \"intended to retire in the fall after her wheat was threshed and sold, having made a sufficient fortune to live on the rest of her days.\" Alden wrote that everywhere she went she \"talked with sun-browned and sturdy women who had as keen an eye for good soil and good crops as any man.\" She concluded that \"if a woman has enough capital to tide her through the first year, and wishes to be independent, she should go back to the land and use her brains and muscle as these Canadian women I met and as hundreds of them are doing every day.\"\n\nDespite the happy impression left by authors such as Alden that there were numerous \"prosperous\" women farmers in Western Canada, agriculture and farm ownership on the prairies was overwhelmingly a masculine domain and enterprise. These women illustrated what women could do, and created an impression of a welcoming, even liberating, environment, but they were fairly exceptional cases, and most of the women had been obliged to purchase their land rather than obtain it through homesteading. Why the concerted efforts to present this positive impression and to make relatively rare cases appear typical or representative? This was not unusual or unique to Western Canada; Australia too had celebrated women agriculturalists. Articles such as \"Lady Settlers in Australia\" featured Geelong sheep farmer Anne Drysdale, \"an elderly maiden lady from Scotland,\" who had rented a farm in Scotland before settling in Australia in 1840 for her health. The sheep farm was run in partnership with Englishwoman Caroline Newcomb, and together they lived in comfort and prosperity in a fine stone mansion overlooking Port Phillip Bay. Other examples of successful women agriculturalists in Australia included Eliza Forlonge (\"Mother of the Australian Wool Industry\"), Janet Templeton, Elizabeth Macarthur, and Mary Penfold, and unlike in Canada, many are still remembered and even celebrated today. (The Penfolds are still in the wine, port, and sherry business.) Some of these women were married, but with husbands absent from the colony. Women who owned or leased land and farmed independently however, were the smallest group of rural women, according to an economic history of women in Australia from 1788 to 1850, and very few were recorded as farmers or landholders in documents such as censuses of the period.\n\nThe CPR had an obvious interest in promoting the idea that Western Canada was a welcoming environment for women who wanted to farm, in order to compete with the United States, where single women could obtain homestead land, and to promote the sale of railway land. Some of the attention paid to women farmers came from journalists interested in encouraging women to pursue occupations that could provide them with independence outside of marriage. Most of the women farmers, however, were carefully depicted as maintaining femininity even while they undertook labour seen as masculine. The attention paid to Isobel \"Jack\" May, however, is of a different nature and scale. She traversed boundaries of proper femininity in her male attire, challenging and conflicting with norms of white British femininity. Her exploration of an alternative femininity, her behaviour, and her appearance served to confirm these norms, helping to define and articulate what was going to be considered acceptable and unacceptable in this society in the making. And there was to be little space and scope for the woman farmer.\n\nEven without male attire, the \"bachelor girl\" was suspect and unwanted. In 1912 the Alberta newspaper the _Redcliffe Review_ warned that the \"gay, careless life of the bachelor girl is apt to make her self centred and self absorbed. She grows selfish... and before she knows it life will not be full of bloom and fragrance. There will be barren spots. It will begin to take on the hue of the desert. And unless she heeds these signs of the times she will come to a rather desolate old age.\" While women who could afford to purchase land avoided the scrutiny of the homestead inspector concerned about their marital and parental status, they were still subject to intense pressure to conform to the norms of acceptable feminine behaviour and attire. \nCHAPTER FIVE\n\nANSWERING THE CALL OF EMPIRE\n\nGEORGINA BINNIE-CLARK, FARMER, AUTHOR, LECTURER\n\nIn August 1905, Georgina Binnie-Clark was a thirty-three-year-old writer with no farming experience when she impetuously bought an \"improved\" farm of 320 acres in Saskatchewan, despite having been in Canada for only a few weeks and despite the advice of family members who told her it was the \"maddest thing which you have ever done.\" Just a few years later she had become the most vocal advocate of \"Canadian Farms for English Spinsters\" and was well-known for this cause in Canada, Britain, and beyond. Through her writing and lectures, her farming and training of young Englishwomen agriculturalists, Binnie-Clark expressed her allegiance to the British Empire and asserted the superiority of the British, who she assumed should have a privileged status in the colonies. She was part of and a product of the female imperialist network who contributed to the journal the _Imperial Colonist_ and who believed that the British Empire was a force for great good in the world. Binnie-Clark also exemplified the new type of woman farmer that began to emerge in England at the turn of the century: not the daughter or widow of a farmer carrying on the family business, but \"the unmarried, middle-class educated townswoman, drawn to farming as a profession in which she could potentially secure health, happiness and an independent income.\" For Binnie-Clark this was to be accomplished in prairie Canada, and she made it her business to encourage others to follow her lead. While the celebrated farmers of the last chapter, many of them British, may have shared Binnie-Clark's enthusiasm for the cause of the British Empire, no records of them remain aside from the press coverage, and their degree of devotion is not clear. But for Binnie-Clark the cause of the Empire was paramount.\n\nBinnie-Clark was more radical than other \"genteel\" women pursuing a life on the land in that she was not content with the \"lighter,\" feminine branches of dairying, poultry raising, and horticulture; she was a wheat farmer who required a large acreage, and she advised others that this was the wisest and most profitable approach. She was determined not only to farm herself, but to publicize and promote opportunities for interesting and rewarding work for educated women in the colonies, particularly agriculture. Binnie-Clark detested housework and appeared to have no interest in marriage. She contended that women were capable of all categories of farm work. She pursued a demanding sphere of farming that was identified as male. Yet unlike farmer \"Jack\" May, Binnie-Clark performed her femininity in her lectures by wearing fashionable gowns, and in her writing she adopted a modest and self-deprecating tone. As she wrote in one of the final passages of her book _Wheat and Woman_ (1914),\n\nThe faithful chronicle of one's own difficulties may at first thought appear but a poor foundation for one's hope and firm belief that agriculture will prove to be the high-road and foundation of wealth and independence for Woman, but the strength of a chain is its weakest link... I had no training, inadequate capital, and my commercial instinct, though strong in theory, is weak in practice\u2014I fail to hold my own in buying or selling... but in spite of this I am still behind my conviction that three hundred and twenty acres of good land in Canada can be working to produce a net profit of \u00a3500 per annum to its owner, [and] my weak link is very much stronger.\n\nIMPERIAL DREAMS\n\nA devoted imperialist, Binnie-Clark counted herself among those who were \"fighting out the battle of our Empire with the pick and spade on unbroken soil.\" She was charmed by Quebec City, as it was \"stamped with associations which bear the glorious seal of dauntless, deathless, effectual moments in our imperial history, when we English knew how to fight for causes.\" She was devoted to the \"Mother Country\" and saw herself as helping to rear the \"daughter nation\" of Canada, \"our most important colony.\" Western Canada was \"unbroken soil,\" a mutable environment, a tabula rasa. In eloquent passages Binnie-Clark described the beauty of the prairie in all seasons\u2014its vastness and emptiness. This was a blank slate, a white sheet, where educated women from England \"would use their inherent personal advantages to carve out strong roles and identities for themselves in the mutable environment of the colonial frontier, to civilise and extend the boundaries of the British world.\"\n\nBinnie-Clark shared the view that the British Empire would uplift the \"darker\" races, but this was not her main concern or issue. She devoted only passing attention to Indigenous people in her writing and appeared to know little about them, even though her farm was located on Treaty Four land of the Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux, who were relegated to reserves not far from her property. The non-treaty Dakota (Sioux) were also close neighbours. Her message was similar to that of Lally Bernard\/Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon: that Canada was a \"white man's land from end to end,\" and the solitary woman farmer had nothing to fear. Her first book, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ (1910), conveyed a typical settler mentality that much was being done to \"graft civilization on the aborigines of our colonies with generosity and excellent intention,\" but that they refused to live in the good houses or till the good farms they were given. A photo in that book of \"An Indian's Home on the Prairie\" illustrated this point; they were content to live the way they always had, refusing to take advice and farm. An unstated message of the photo was that the land was now in much better hands, for settlers such as Binnie-Clark and other British and Ontarian colonists would cultivate, transform, and altogether improve the acres that until then were dormant. The Treaty Four First Nations had in fact been attempting to farm their reserves since 1874, but faced overwhelming obstacles, including government policies that limited their enterprise to farming tiny holdings using only rudimentary implements, drastically reducing their acres under cultivation and discouraging interest in agriculture. Just at the time Binnie-Clark arrived, Indigenous people were coping with a federal government determined to divest them of most of the best land on their reserves through dubious, and often illegal, land \"surrenders.\"\n\nIn _Wheat and Woman_ (1914), Binnie-Clark praised the work of missionaries, both Catholic and Anglican, for their \"brave, unselfish, dauntless\" work. She was particularly keen on the Roman Catholic industrial school for Indigenous children at Lebret in the Qu'Appelle Valley. She approved of the boys being taught useful trades, working in the farm and gardens of the school, so that they would be able to \"take possession of the opportunities civilization brought to the wonderful treasure-land of their fathers.\" All were acquiring \"good manners,\" and the priests and nuns had \"most truly bestowed on the children of the darker race the consolation of religion.\" Yet she admitted a tinge of regret that they had been robbed of their liberty. During a visit to the school \"one glorious summer afternoon,\" she was present when the children were let out to swim and saw how they clearly loved the freedom and release from the confinement of the school: \"Suddenly there was the impression of the opening of a great big door and a sense of wide liberty, followed by the crescendoing chorus of joy\u2014then the patter of many bare feet treading the path of pleasure.\" She wrote that when she left after a visit to the school and was back on the trail by the lake, enjoying the scents and scenes of an evening on the prairie, breathing the \"air of liberty,\" the \"fascination of life in the open tugs at the heart-strings [and] you know that the children of Hiawatha pay the price for those opportunities of civilization.\"\n\n_Figure 26._ From Georgina Binnie-Clark's _Wheat and Woman_ , this is a carefully staged photograph of students at the Qu'Appelle Industrial School, allegedly with their parents. It was intended to illustrate the dramatic contrast between the old and young generations. The caption is the original from her book and refers to Rev. Joseph Hugonnard, the principal of the school. Her farm was located not far from the school, on the Treaty Four land of the Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine. A reserve of non-treaty Dakota was also located near Fort Qu'Appelle. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman,_ 70.\n\nYet a photograph included in _Wheat and Woman_ of four industrial school children with two elders was one of the propaganda images that the Department of Indian Affairs used to demonstrate the contrasts between the old and new generations, conveying the message that being robbed of their freedom was in the children's best interests. They too were the children of Mother Britannia, but they were in need of a stern but kindly guardian. The Indigenous people of Binnie-Clark's district, in her account, were tame, contained, and unable to travel freely as they had, but they were the beneficiaries of colonization. Although this photo emphasized several generations of women, there was almost no mention of Indigenous women in Binnie-Clark's books or articles, and her concerns for women's rights to homestead and farm did not extend to them. In _Wheat and Women_ she mentioned an Indigenous woman once. She was \"Soo\" (Sioux) and had walked from her \"village\" (presumably the Standing Buffalo reserve) to the Catholic mission at Lebret on Easter morning. Her name was \"Tosh,\" and she was deeply religious. Easter day was, according to Binnie-Clark, \"a beautiful oasis in her life.\"\n\nSome M\u00e9tis men of the Fort Qu'Appelle district were her only Indigenous acquaintances, according to her books, and she hired them to fence her land. (She praised their work, as they did the job thoroughly, and she could pay them by the mile, whereas she had to \"feed white men and pay them by day or week for the same job.\") Overall, however, Binnie-Clark's writing was not characterized by the same degree of pejorative, negative descriptions of Indigenous people that were to be found in the publications of many of her contemporaries, and she may have been trying to challenge misconceptions and assumptions. When her suspicion that two \"half breeds\" had stolen her bag of oats proved untrue, and they actually helped her find the oats and hoist them onto her buggy, she \"vowed to scorn suspicion and colour prejudice for evermore.\"\n\n_Figure 27._ The caption \"Victoria Day (Now Empire Day) at Fort Qu'Appelle, 1912,\" conveys the message that the Indigenous people of the West are loyal and grateful to the British Empire. A devoted imperialist, Binnie-Clark believed that the Empire would uplift what she called the \"darker\" races. Photographs of wheat fields, threshing, and other scenes of the prosperous future of the region constituted sharp contrasts to those of Indigenous people, representing the past. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 178.\n\nQUESTION MARKS: FAMILY HISTORY AND FICTION\n\nBinnie-Clark seemed an unlikely candidate for the calling and cause of agriculture for Englishwomen in Western Canada. She was born in 1872 in Sherborne, Dorset, the third child of Arthur Walter Binnie Clark, the son of a labourer. Clark was a valet to George Winfield Digby at Sherborne Castle when in 1866 he married Georgina's mother, Maria Setheby, the daughter of a gamekeeper. The Binnie-Clarks were proprietors of the Digby Arms Hotel in Sherborne. Georgina's father had prize-winning horses, and she once said to a journalist that her \"only previous farm experience had been as a girl on her father's farm in Dorsetshire, England where thorough-bred horses were bred and reared.\" In the 1891 census, \"Georgina B. Clark\" was a music student, aged nineteen. Other clues of her life before arriving in Saskatchewan are few, but they include a passage in _Wheat and Woman_ where she wrote that she had \"an intimate knowledge of the life of the educated working woman in Germany, Paris and in England,\" and that she had \"lived with and amongst women-workers.\" In one of her 1909 articles, Binnie-Clark wrote that before she farmed she \"lived for art alone, studied music on the Continent, and latterly became a writer. I visited Canada in 1905 for the purpose of securing 'copy'\u2014and stayed to farm.\" Georgina may have been the first (and possibly only) member of the family to hyphenate her last name. Her brother Louis, for example, signed his name \"Louis B. Clark.\"\n\nThere remain significant gaps in understanding important aspects of Binnie-Clark's life, such as where she was educated, how (or indeed whether) she established a reputation as a journalist, and exactly what she did and where she lived before her arrival in Canada in 1905. It is important to emphasize, as historian Susan Jackel points out in her 1979 introduction to a reprint of _Wheat and Woman_ , that it is not clear whether the information provided in Binnie-Clark's own books about herself, her family, and her farming is entirely reliable. But according to her first book, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , she ventured to the Canadian West to visit her brother (Louis, who is \"Lal\" in the book), who was a homesteader near Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan. Perhaps she was influenced by Flora Shaw's call for sisters to join homesteading brothers. But as stated above, she wrote that she was a writer in search of \"copy.\" She purchased a farm of 320 acres just a few months later near Fort Qu'Appelle, complete with a house, outbuildings, fencing, and crops. It is not completely clear what she paid for it, but in a 1908 article, \"A Woman's Way on the Prairie,\" Binnie-Clark described how she had to pay for her farm in five instalments each of \u00a3200 ($1,500.00). (In _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ she wrote that the farmer who sold her the farm demanded $5,000, with $1,000 down, another $1,000 when she sold the wheat of the 1905 crop, and the balance at 6 percent.) Also, according to _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , she required from her father \"sufficient funds to cover the greater part of the first instalment,\" although she signed the papers without securing her father's permission, claiming she had sufficient income (presumably from her writing) to guarantee the payments. The book also indicates that she purchased the farm initially thinking it would be in partnership with her brother and possibly sister, as she uses the pronoun \"we.\" When there finally was communication from their father, he had included only \u00a3100 and stated that \"on no condition whatever were we to buy land.\" Georgina then, according to _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie,_ declared she would borrow from her father on the security of the income her work in England would bring her, and run the farm herself. In one of the final passages of the book her homesteading brother tells her, \"Ha, ha! A woman work a Canadian farm! Why you would be the laughing-stock of the country, if you could do it, which you can't.\" She set out to prove them wrong. She also had to prove that she could finance the farm through her writing.\n\n_Figure 28._ Georgina Binnie-Clark, writer, lecturer, and Saskatchewan farmer. She purchased 320 acres near Fort Qu'Appelle in 1905 and became devoted to the cause of English women farming wheat on the prairies. Courtesy Mr. Dennis Jenks.\n\nAs mentioned, Binnie-Clark's own accounts are not entirely reliable if searching for the facts. She changed the names of her family members, her neighbours, and hired men. \"Lal,\" for example, in _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , was her brother Louis. His homestead records indicate that he was married and that his wife lived with him on his homestead from March 1906. Yet Lal is presented as a lazy bachelor who wants to abandon his homestead, and Georgina is the one to insist that he stay and prove up. (Louis filed on his homestead of 160 acres in 1904 and proved up in 1907, which meant that he must have been acceptably industrious, as many homesteaders took much longer.) Binnie-Clark's sister, called \"Hilaria,\" must have been Ethel, but if so, it is likely not the case that she hated the rural prairies and farming in the way Binnie-Clark described, as Ethel became a much more permanent resident of the farm than her sister, staying on after Georgina's death in 1947. But for her narrative, it is important to develop Hilaria's distaste for farm life on the prairies, which forms a contrast to Georgina's growing fascination with the West and wheat. And through Hilaria's efforts to find a job as a nurse and domestic servant, readers learn about the limited options for single women in Canada.\n\nTHE CANADIAN WEST IN 1905: PROFITS AND PREJUDICE\n\nArriving in Canada in 1905, Binnie-Clark absorbed the heady atmosphere of optimism about the future that prevailed at that time. The new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were created that year. That season there was a \"bumper\" crop. An editorial in the _Progress_ (Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan) of 20 July 1905 entitled \"A Halo O'er the Grain\" began, \"Still, the grain keeps growing. Night and day the farmer's profits are swelling, silently, surely. Everywhere is seen the bright and hopeful light of joyous anticipation of the largest crop in the history of the West.\" Binnie-Clark quite likely read this newspaper and was inspired by this editorial as she visited her brother nearby. It concluded by noting the \"stimulus in the air, a spirit of hope in every heart, that causes the prophetic imagination to look into the future when the vast prairie will be teeming with a population of untold millions, when the rich soil shall be made to yield a harvest sufficient to feed the world and when the riches wrested from Mother Nature shall be utilized in revitalizing the afflicted, civilizing the boor, and bettering mankind generally.\" Binnie-Clark became mesmerized and infatuated with wheat, a \"tall mass of living loveliness.\"\n\nThat same year\u20141905\u2014Frank Oliver was appointed Canada's minister of the interior, in charge of the administration of Dominion (homestead) land. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Oliver was a Liberal member of Parliament from Edmonton, he was devoted to the cause of the development of the West, and he was sceptical that women landowners and farmers had any role to play in that development. He was also made superintendent general of Indian Affairs and doggedly pursued the diminution of First Nations reserves, particularly when they occupied superior agricultural land that was close to a railway. Oliver believed that Indigenous people had no role to play in the development of the West either, and that they retarded and undermined the process and progress of settlement. Intense pressure was placed on the people who occupied reserves in the Fort Qu'Appelle area to surrender their land, particularly where it bordered the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). In many cases this pressure succeeded. In 1907, for example, after relentless pressure from Department of Indian Affairs officials, almost 54,000 acres of reserve land on the Crooked Lake Indian agency was alienated.\n\nIn 1905 Binnie-Clark would have quickly learned of another obsession of the time in Western Canada. The \"immigration peril\" was a concern shared by many of the British and Ontarian settlers, who were the first homesteaders in her district. Icelanders were tolerated, according to a 1905 editorial in the _Vidette_ of Indian Head, Saskatchewan, as they were \"superior and intelligent, and are closely allied with the Anglo-Saxon element of our own country.\" But people such as the Doukhobors from Russia and the Galicians (Ukrainians) were another matter. The editorial concluded, \"Canada wants no new race and language difficulties; she wants no elements that she cannot assimilate readily.\" A Presbyterian reverend was quoted in a column in the same paper a few months later, asking, \"How are we going to maintain in this new land, which we proudly call 'the Great Britain Beyond the Seas,' those principles and usages and ideals that have made Great Britain so strong and prosperous and influential? We have inherited the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, a genius that is the product of the thought and toil of a thousand years.\"\n\nWanted were Ontarians (of British ancestry) and settlers from Britain, as another Presbyterian reverend, James Farquharson of Winnipeg, wrote in 1910: \"The multitudes moving from the Eastern provinces of Canada to the West come to us with ideals much like our own. They are of the same race, they glory in their allegiance to the same government, they acknowledge the same moral standards, they worship God in the same manner. There is rejoicing also in the arrivals from the British Isles, for they, like ourselves, are Celt or Saxon; their literature is ours... they and we are one in claiming as our own the past, the present and the future of the British Empire.\" By contrast the Ukrainians, according to Farquharson, had many \"defects of character,\" including their \"carousals, their drunkenness and brutal fights,\" as well as \"the readiness with which the lie comes to their lips.\"\n\nThe Doukhobors were singled out for particularly harsh condemnation because the women of these communities hitched themselves to ploughs in teams and performed other outdoor labour. Photographs of these women workers were widely published with the clear message that these women were little more than beasts of burden. A description by journalist Jean Blewett was typical, and began with the statement, \"The Doukhobor woman is no Venus... hard, incessant work does not tend toward beauty of face or form.\" Doing men's work out of doors made them masculine. Blewett continued: \"Taking her place at the plow while the first furrow is turned in the spring, planting, hoeing, making hay, harvesting the grain, threshing and grinding the same, doing the whole year round a man's work, had given her the figure of a man. She has muscles instead of curves; there is no roundness or softness visible. The sun has burned her face brown and her eyelashes white. Her hands and arms are the hands and arms of a working man.\" An 1899 article entitled \"Women Harnessed to Plows in Manitoba\" in the _Woman's Journal_ (Boston) admonished the Canadian government for not having taken steps to eradicate this practice, and predicted that \"sooner or later some official action will be demanded by the daughters of civilization in neighbouring communities regarding the subjection of their Russian sisters to slavery and drudgery in the harvest field.\" Binnie-Clark had to confront and contend with these attitudes, as she maintained that British women ought to take up land and perform farm labour. The example of the Doukhobors, however, became useful to supporters of homesteads-for-British-born-women, who argued that the West would then be rid of the \"foreigners\" who treated women in this manner.\n\n_Figure 29._ Doukhobor women pulling a plough in Saskatchewan, 1902. There was widespread condemnation of the \"slavery and drudgery\" Doukhobor women were \"subjected\" to, although this was not how these women saw their own contribution to the establishment of their farms. Women working in the fields was an aberration to be expunged in the course of establishing the West as a corner of the British Empire. Binnie-Clark had to contend with these views as she called on Englishwomen to farm the prairies. Glenbow Archives, NA-670-45.\n\nCHAMPION OF THE CAUSE IN ENGLAND\n\nAlthough Binnie-Clark spent stretches of time on her Saskatchewan farm, she also frequently returned to England. According to a 1912 newspaper interview, she spent every winter in England (aside from the winter of 1906\u20137 that she often lectured about.) Her sister Ethel was the more permanent resident of the farm, and brother Arthur Cameron Binnie Clark also helped out. (He died in Fort Qu'Appelle in 1921.) As Susan Jackel admitted, it is also not clear for how many years, and precisely when she was resident on her Saskatchewan farm.\n\nBinnie-Clark never entirely switched her allegiance or her abode to her Saskatchewan farm and to Canada. She had a flat in London's Chelsea district on Cheyne Walk, on the Embankment with a view of the Thames, from at least the First World War to the late 1930s, although there were times when the flat was rented out. Chelsea, and in particular Cheyne Walk, is a district that has long been associated with writers, artists, and activists, and Binnie-Clark was part of a literary and artistic circle that included a very good friend and neighbour of hers, Dame Ethel Walker, a leading British painter of her day. Walker also lived at the south end of Cheyne Walk on the Thames. Walker, best known for her portraits of women, is today recognized as one of a \"large number of significant twentieth-century European artists [who] focused on gay, lesbian and transgender themes.\" Another close neighbour on Cheyne Walk was prominent feminist Sylvia Pankhurst. Although in a \"posh\" area today, Binnie-Clark's accommodation was modest; she described hers as the \"vagabond end\" of Cheyne Walk.\n\nAccording to her own accounts and from evidence found in family papers, Binnie-Clark's financial situation was always precarious. She had to write, lecture, and take in students to sustain herself and her farm and to purchase the labour she required. She had to learn to milk, make bread, clean out the stables, pickle seed, stook, and to do numerous other chores that she could not afford to have done for her. Binnie-Clark described herself as \"desperately short of money\" in the winter of 1906\u20137, and in later correspondence wrote that she was \"always more or less hard up.\" It does not appear that her financial situation ever dramatically improved. (In 1936, for example, she wrote from England to a Fort Qu'Appelle acquaintance asking for the twelve dollars she had loaned her five years earlier.) She did not enjoy the power and privilege bestowed upon men, as she did not qualify for a homestead because of her gender. She was genteel but not well-to-do, and she had to support herself. She would not have been recognized as superior or elite in the Saskatchewan community she adopted; she was keenly aware of her status as an eccentric \"green\" Englishwoman. She cast herself, however, as well above the people of London's East End, whom she encountered (for the first time, it seems) in an immigrant shed in Quebec in their \"grotesque attire\" and \"squalid degradation.\" Yet she was critical of what she described as \"the creed of every Englishman to dislike or at best tolerate foreigners.\" She described the Hungarians who settled near her brother, for example, as generous and industrious; they commanded her \"unqualified admiration.\" She cast herself as much more tolerant than her brother, who, she wrote, \"imagines he detests them.\" Her admiration did not extend to \"Chinamen,\" as she called them, providing in _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ her version of the familiar \"no ticky no washy\" story.\n\nBinnie-Clark began to attract public attention during a visit to England in 1908 (leaving her farm in the charge of a couple from England), when she started to write articles for the _Canadian Gazette_ , published in London, which was a weekly journal aimed at a British readership but consisted of information concerning Canadian commerce, investments, emigration, and Canadians in the metropole. Initially, Binnie-Clark's cause was not the homestead grant for women, but to encourage others among \"the class of English gentlewomen from whom she sprang,\" as well as those of a \"lower social grade,\" to \"follow her pathway to the Canadian West,\" which would be of \"infinite benefit to themselves, to the country the relief of their superfluous presence, and to Canada which stands in need of their help in the upbuilding of a vigorous nationality.\" The message was that an Englishwoman who was \"frittering away her life in trivialities may find new life and a career of independence in prairie farming.\" According to a February 1908 editorial on \"The Woman Problem\" in the _Canadian Gazette_ , Binnie-Clark demonstrated \"the satisfaction a cultured Englishwoman may find in the life of a prairie homestead which she herself manages, rearing live stock, growing wheat, and thereby bringing to herself both money and a healthy, satisfying independence.\" In her columns she mentioned other opportunities for \"gentlewomen\" in Canada such as nursing, teaching, and housekeeping, but argued that \"land-work is far higher than housework, certainly more interesting, and there is no reason at all why women should not adopt it as a healthy, practicable and highly remunerative occupation.\"\n\nBinnie-Clark's first series of articles in the _Canadian Gazette_ , \"A Woman, Two Boys and \u00a3140,\" was in the form of letters to a prospective woman homesteader, a widow with two sons. She advised \"Mrs. Huntingdon\" to head to the prairies, despite the fact she had such limited capital, because she could claim her own homestead, and once her sons reached the age of eighteen they too could claim 160 acres each. Binnie-Clark provided details on a myriad of topics relating to emigrating and establishing a farm on the prairies. A subsequent series, \"A Woman's Way on the Prairie,\" was the story of her own farm, to be told in greater detail in _Wheat and Woman_ in 1914. As in her book, she did not try to conceal her mistakes, misfortunes, and calamities. Her point was that \"what I struggled through uncomfortably the woman of average intelligence and domestic habit can do at her ease.\" Nor did she disguise the horrors of the cold and \"sea of snow\" of her first winter, although she wrote that she \"never knew a dull or unhappy moment.\"\n\nThe story Binnie-Clark told in her articles, on the lecture circuit, and finally in _Wheat and Woman_ was that her first year's harvest realized \u00a3200, but that this was followed by a harvest of wheat that was infested with wild oats and a third harvest damaged by frost. She learned that she had to be very economical with her money, that the farm had to entirely supply the household, that effort had to be put into butter that could be sold, and that there was always a market for pigs. Her message was that it was still possible to make a living out of farming even if grain crops failed.\n\n\"A POWERFUL FACTOR IN THE STRENGTHENING OF THE EMPIRE\": ORIGIN OF THE HOMESTEADS-FOR-BRITISH-WOMEN CAMPAIGN\n\nBinnie-Clark's 1908 articles in the _Canadian Gazette_ led to many inquiries addressed to her concerning women's immigration and settlement in Western Canada. She reported that \"women of small capital earnestly seeking a means of self-support\" were \"constantly applying to me.\" One letter was from \"a little band of six who contemplate coming out with a capital of \u00a3500.\" Another was from \"a single woman with a capital of \u00a3100 only... [who] wrote to Mr. Obed Smith asking if I could obtain a Government grant of 160 acres, and was most surprised to find that the Canadian Government does not consider the claims of a mere spinster; as for getting land here [in England]\u2014well, the more progressive dailies have fought the battle for years of 'back to the land' in the interests of _the men_ only.\" Binnie-Clark's own rising debts and poor crops had demonstrated that women who had to purchase their land, rather than being able to take advantage of the homestead grant, were at a decided disadvantage from the start.\n\nIn a November 1908 article entitled \"A Woman's Plea from the West,\" Binnie-Clark first wrote of the inequities of Canada's Dominion lands legislation, that land was granted to a woman only if the sole head of a family, and not to single women. And it was here she first proposed her \"trial scheme\" for Englishwomen. She called on the Canadian government to grant \"say, twelve quarter-sections annually for three years to women selected and approved by the English agent and at the end of the time allow the result to determine further arrangement.\" She was brimming with enthusiasm and optimism for the idea, and offered to promote and organize the scheme in England, writing: \"The idea is original and full of interest to the world at large; it means advertisement and later it will mean an inestimable investment of English capital in Canadian land. Surely it is worth a little further consideration. As against all the male immigrants you have known to turn out failures, have you ever heard of an Englishwoman immigrant failure?\" An editorial in the _Canadian Gazette_ supported Binnie-Clark's pleas on behalf of homesteads for women, and called on the Canadian minister of the interior Frank Oliver and the other cabinet ministers to grant land annually for three years to carefully selected and approved Englishwomen. The editors wrote that \"the West stands greatly in need of women, and we believe it would be an act of wisdom to give the encouragement of free homesteads to women who have the capital, the independent spirit and proven capacity.\"\n\nIn November 1908 Binnie-Clark wrote from her farm (which she had named \"Binning\") to the Department of the Interior in Ottawa to ask that officials \"give personal consideration to the idea of 'Free Homesteads for Women,'\" articulating many of the rationales and arguments she had begun to present in her articles and that she would later develop. She stated her articles had generated a lot of correspondence from Englishwomen eager to follow her lead, and she reported that \"as a rule they have agricultural experience. I was a writer.\" These women had \"slender\" capital and for them the purchase of land was out of the question, but \"given a free homestead, two or three women farming together in a combined capital would be certain to do well.\" Here she first penned a sentiment she would use in the future, that \"if they [Englishwomen] do not get through as much work as a man in a day, they will get through considerably more in a season.\" Women, she argued, would not have the inclination or opportunity to \"roam around during the off season\"; they would instead pursue stock raising and dairy produce on their homesteads. \"The woman's homestead,\" she wrote, \"will be Home, the centre of life and interest. Schools, Churches, other agents in the process of civilized settlement of the country, can only gain in the woman settler.\" The \"class\" of women she had in mind were \"chiefly those who, in England, come under the category of working-gentlewomen, women of education\" who had capital and had attended an agricultural college or worked on a dairy farm. Binnie-Clark proposed that the government offer a limited number of homesteads to Englishwomen of capability and capital. She was certain that \"the experiment would succeed beyond imagination,\" and that in time it would become law. She was also certain that the offer would be received in the Old Country with the \"greatest enthusiasm on the part of all.\" She saw the only barrier to be \"the law\" and wrote that \"the laws of a Liberal government are always awaiting expansion, and the ear of the true law-giver is always alert for this whispering of Reason.\"\n\nSuperintendent of Immigration W.D. Scott replied swiftly, politely, but firmly and curtly that Binnie-Clark's letter was received and that \"I have noted your arguments in favour of giving homesteads to unmarried women, but unfortunately the law does not allow this and the Department does not make a law and has no power to alter it in this particular.\" Yet this reply did not deter Binnie-Clark, and on her way to England late in 1908 she visited Winnipeg, where she learned that the cause of homestead rights was being pursued by women there. She also stopped in Ottawa, where she had an appointment with Frank Oliver, although he did not keep that appointment. According to her account in _Wheat and_ Woman, she met with a deputy minister who simply said: \"She can't.\"\n\nThat year a similarly intransigent man was appointed to an influential position in London, and he would become Binnie-Clark's nemesis. In 1908 J. Obed Smith was appointed assistant superintendent of immigration at Canada's London office. He had served as commissioner of immigration in Winnipeg for the previous ten years. Smith was born in England, had homesteaded in Manitoba, and was a lawyer. From the London office, Smith was in charge of emigration to Canada from Europe, and he occupied this position until his retirement in 1924. He was a loyal Liberal. He promoted migration within the Empire, calling on \"the great colonizers of the British race to give up the comfort of an English home and put on the glorious armour of courage and of hope, in order to carry forward British civilization and push back the fringe of the wilderness a few feet each year.\" Yet, as will be discussed later in this chapter, he was utterly opposed to the idea of women farming on their own in Western Canada, whether they were from England or elsewhere. He remained adamant that women migrants could perform only the \"humbler duties of domestic work,\" and worked to ensure that domestic servants were secured for Canada.\n\nIt is interesting that like Frank Oliver, J. Obed Smith was implicated in land speculation. In 1907 there was a case heard at Winnipeg in which it was found that Smith was engaged in land deals, admitting that he had used knowledge of land values learned through his position to \"make a little money on the side,\" despite having taken an oath as a civil servant that he would not \"disclose without due authority any knowledge which came to him by reason of his office.\" Smith had been named in a lawsuit by parties to whom he had sold land. In 1907 the opposition in the House of Commons demanded to know \"whether an official receiving a salary of $3000.00 a year was to be permitted to engage in land speculation to the detriment of his attention to his public duties, using official information for the purpose.\" Smith's acts were, it was claimed, \"unconstitutional.\" The Liberal government, however, contended that this was not a violation of his office, that it was an isolated transaction, and that Smith was attentive to his duties. But perhaps this scandal was why Smith was sent overseas.\n\nBinnie-Clark kept up the pressure in her articles, beginning with \"Homesteads for Bachelor Women\" in February 1909, which started with the argument that the advent of single women homesteaders on the prairies would lead to the quick establishment of schools and churches and other markers of civilization. Through marriage they would bring an end to the preponderance of bachelor men, and rear the next generation: \"free homesteads to women will be a powerful factor in the strengthening of the Empire.\" Binnie-Clark asserted that \"there are many ladies in England who, from their knowledge of agriculture, would prove very successful farmers on the prairie, and to others the granting of free homesteads would open the way to relief from a life of genteel drudgery.\" Answering the question of whether she truly believed women were physically capable of working a homestead, Binnie-Clark wrote that the most progressive farm in her district was, to a large extent, run by a woman whose father was growing wealthy through her efforts. This woman \"breaks the land, discs and harrows, and thinks nothing of milking from five to ten cows daily, in addition to her other labours.\" (This may have been the family she referred to as the \"Mazeys\" in _Wheat and Woman._ ) She drew on this example in subsequent talks and articles, pointing out that this Canadian woman had no claim to the 160 acres \"which her Government grants to a male of any nation.\" Here is the beginning of the argument that was to take centre stage in the homesteads-for-women campaign in the West that Binnie-Clark helped to galvanize: that British and British-Canadian women were more deserving of homesteads than were \"foreign\" men.\n\nOther of her articles appeared in English journals such as the _Quiver_. In \"How Canada Welcomes the Emigrant Girl,\" Binnie-Clark wrote about staying at the YWCA in Winnipeg and visiting the \"Girls' Home of Welcome,\" and how she met other women immigrants from the \"Old Country.\" She encouraged one young woman from Ireland, who was working at the YWCA but had \"done all sorts and conditions of farm work,\" including ploughing, harrowing, and stoking, to consider farming on a cooperative plan with two or three other women. There were high wages paid for women's labour, and women who pooled their resources could afford to purchase land that was \"a safe and sure investment.\" Once the government realized this would help to benefit the country, \"it would extend to women the free grant of 160 acres of land, now limited to men and widows.\"\n\n_Figure 30._ Press coverage from 1910 of Georgina Binnie-Clark's activities in England and Canada to promote farming for Englishwomen on the Canadian prairies. Both are from the _Gleichen Call_ (Alberta): \"Are Booming Canada,\" 9 June 1910, 7; \"Making Girl Farmers,\" 21 April 1910, 7.\n\nBinnie-Clark's articles emphasized that women could perform tasks that were not normally included in the repertoire of feminine behaviour. In \"A Fight with Fire,\" published in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ in 1909, Binnie-Clark wrote of how she had fought a prairie fire, beating back flames threatening to destroy her home, barn, granaries, and seed, \"until my hands and eyes were as red-hot cinders caught in a whirlwind.\" The story of the fire was illustrated by a drawing of Binnie-Clark fighting the flames that had almost reached her buildings, and by photographs, including (oddly) one of the \"Soo [sic Sioux] village by the western lake of Fort Qu'Appelle,\" one of a tipi and cart and a man and women with the caption \"The way the Indians live,\" along with one of \"homestead quarters\" and \"the shooting-box of an English settler in the hills by Fort Qu'Appelle.\" Clearly the message was that perils and dangers such as prairie fires were worth battling in order to bring civilization to this corner of the British Empire.\n\nIn 1909 Binnie-Clark began to be featured in the Canadian press under headlines such as \"Western Suffragette: Miss Binnie-Clark Wants Free Homesteads for Women Who Can Farm,\" \"British Women on Canadian Homesteads,\" and \"Canadian Farms for English Spinsters.\" It was frequently noted that she always presented a very feminine appearance when she gave her public lectures and talked about an endeavour regarded as distinctly masculine. She was described as \"tall, slender and good looking, gracefully dressed in black and white... [she] scarcely looked as if she had combined the duties of farmer and housewife, had plowed her own land and tended without help of any kind 14 horses and cattle and any number of pigs through a whole winter.\"\n\nAt the National Union of Woman Workers in October 1909, Binnie-Clark's talk was on \"Conditions of Life for Women in Canada,\" and her main message was that \"the immigration of English women is a matter of vital importance to the Canadian race.\" She began by speaking about the opportunity for domestic service and argued that women \"of refinement\" should not fear accepting such positions, but she also spoke of the demand for teachers, stenographers, nurses, landscape gardeners, and vegetable and fruit gardeners. She spoke of the lives of married women and mothers on homesteads and farms and painted a positive picture of the conditions of social and economic life. But she paid the greatest attention to \"the finest investment in Canada... my own battleground, the land\" and to the cause of homesteads for women. Binnie-Clark read from a letter she had sent to Frank Oliver, in which she had written that \"the extension of the free land grant to women should have the same effect on new settlement that deep-ploughing has on the prosperity of the grain-grower: it should work towards Unity, the first condition of prosperity and content.\" The single women homesteader would be \"untrammeled by the special care of husband and children\" and would be able to devote energy to the establishment of schools and churches.\" She concluded her letter:\n\nEnglish women may not have so direct a claim on Canadian land as the women of Canada, but any country would be the richer for the coming of such Englishwomen as would be prompted to avail themselves of an offer of free land in Canada. Women of trained intelligence, nerve, energy, patience, good-will, foresight, perseverance, courage, power of endurance\u2014limited capital\u2014good comrades, not easily driven back from their purpose\u2014Englishwomen, not drawn from any particular class but forming a class of themselves summoned together from all classes by the bugle call of the decree, or desire to labour for a living\u2014or for life.\n\nShe ended her talk by mentioning that she had received many letters from women in support of her cause, indicating that women \"really want this free land grant,\" that \"it is in the nature of Englishwomen to love outdoor pursuits,\" and that many needed to support themselves.\n\nBinnie-Clark was developing a position that was radical in several ways. She advocated grain farming on large acreages as the most profitable, rejecting arguments for small holdings and the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture. She often criticized the home help concept and instead called for the \"advent of the hired woman on the land.\" She wrote that \"should I be offered the post of general help on a Canadian farm at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month, or land work at twenty dollars, I should not hesitate to decide on the outdoor occupation, in spite of the lesser remuneration.\"\n\nBinnie-Clark had many critics in both Canada and England, and one replied to her talk at Portsmouth in 1909. A Miss Beevor, who had visited Canada in the summer of 1909, believed that women should not be involved in the purchase of land, that it was risky and that it amounted to land speculation. She stated that \"it is only the exceptional woman who will succeed in this matter of land cultivation.\" Beevor pointed out that Binnie-Clark had purchased an improved farm and had not done the \"pioneer work\" herself. She hinted that the government of Canada was wise in not extending the homestead privilege to single women, as they could not obtain agricultural education there except in poultry farming and dairying. She also believed that Binnie-Clark had touched too lightly on the question of solitude, and that she had heard \"some sad stories about the break-down of women through excessive work and solitude.\" She concluded that the \"best advertisement for the scheme of getting free land granted to women would be for a few exceptional women to go out, buy land and farm it successfully. Meanwhile, I am afraid that one swallow does not make a summer and one Miss Binnie-Clark won't exactly carry this scheme.\" Beevor concluded by saying that she loved Canada, however, and that \"if I were younger I would be off tomorrow.\"\n\nBut Binnie-Clark's lectures and articles soon garnered considerable attention, interest, and approval. In a series of articles on \"How Can I Earn a Living\" in the _Woman Worker_ (London) in 1909 and 1910, Esther Longhurst wrote about openings for women in the colonies, including farming, and described the experiences and advice of Binnie-Clark under the title \"Farming and Freedom.\" Others could follow her lead if they were \"strong and sensible,\" liked \"an outdoor life and did not mind plenty of hard work.\"\n\nNew audiences were reached in 1909 and 1910 when Binnie-Clark published articles in the London _Daily Mail._ Her first, appearing in January 1909, was \"A Woman's Farm in Canada,\" in which she told the story of the purchase of her farm. This first column ended with a plea for homesteads for women that would help her countrywomen to \"adopt the same health-giving, somewhat exacting, but in many ways delightful means of self-support\" instead of \"the ghostly footfall of unemployment, which always lurks alongside the trail from which they view before them the beckoning hand that points with mocking gibe to the hour of superannuation.\" She expected the right would be granted by the Canadian government \"first experimentally, then conditionally, then _gratefully_.\" Other columns included \"Women Farmers,\" in which Binnie-Clark wrote that \"farm work for a woman is not looked upon as impossible in Canada.\" She described in greater detail than in previous articles her \"Canadian neighbor\" who farmed over a thousand acres and never hired labour except at threshing time, and had \"for many years entrusted his land work to his eldest daughter. She would plough, drive or harrow day in day out, frequently milking half a dozen cows before and after her field labour.\" Yet the eldest son had inherited the farm and the daughter, who was \"more competent to work a hundred and sixty acres of land than many homesteaders,\" had no right to the land grant.\n\nWith the 1910 publication of _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , Binnie-Clark's profile was enhanced. The editors of the _Canadian Gazette_ were delighted: \"We have read more books on Canadian conditions than we care to recall; in none of them is the touch more sure, more sensitive to realities, and yet more sympathetic.\" An anonymous reviewer for the _United Empire: The Royal Colonial Institute Journal_ was not as glowing, comparing Binnie-Clark's book to Marion Cran's _A Woman in Canada_ and Mrs. Humphrey (Mary A.) Ward's _Canadian Born_ and finding it to be \"inferior to the other two in every respect but that of a convincing realism.\" Both Cran's and Ward's books, discussed in Chapter 2, conveyed more conservative messages about opportunities for women in Western Canada, with Ward emphasizing marriage as the ultimate destiny. The reviewer was disappointed that _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ ended abruptly \"when the heroine has just gathered in the first sheaves of her first Canadian harvest... and if the tale is as true as it sounds we should like to hear the sequel.\" Yet there were \"scattered among its pages words of wisdom and guidance for the intending settler.\"\n\nIn February 1910 Binnie-Clark was a guest at a London dinner of \"lady farmers and gardeners,\" organized by the Women's Agricultural and Horticultural International Union, and it was noted that she easily held the record for the largest farm. She was asked to reply to the toast of the colonial members of the union, and she spoke in glowing terms of the prospects offered to women by farming in Canada. As usual she appeared in very feminine attire and was described as a \"tall, dark-haired, slim young women, with pink malmasons [ _sic_ ] clustering in her black evening gown.\" In March she spoke at Caxton Hall, Westminster, London, a location that played a central role in the suffrage movement. Her talk \"attracted considerable attention.\" Here she elaborated on why she thought women should farm wheat, saying that \"it gives the quickest return.\" Growing fruit in British Columbia could mean no return for three or four years, while \"in the wheat belts, in Saskatchewan and Manitoba your returns are seen in the second year, and you also have immediate profits from poultry and dairy.\" She reiterated her belief that English women should farm cooperatively, and she stressed that she was \"not interested myself in any but educated women at the moment.\" Although she complimented the \"splendid\" work of the associations who sent out home helps, she reiterated, \"I would like to establish a channel between the educated women of England and Canada.\"\n\nSpeaking to a \"select audience at a woman's club in London,\" also in March 1910, Binnie-Clark \"disposed convincingly of the fallacious notion that women, to be successful farmers, must have men to do the rough work.\" Binding, for example, was \"jealously guarded by man,\" but \"this is part of the work excellently suited to women.\" As reported in the journal _Votes for Women_ , there was \"something wonderfully alluring in the picture conjured up\" by Binnie-Clark's talk of \"the large open spaces, the healthy out-of-door life.\" After quoting Mrs. Pethick Lawrence as stating that \"down through the vista of long eras we see the mothers of the human race not only the first builders of the home but... the first tillers of the soil,\" the author of the article concluded that it was \"only natural that women should turn to farming... and that they should be among the most enthusiastic exponents of the modern 'back to the land' movement.\"\n\nInfluential people were present at Binnie-Clark's lectures on many occasions. One of her papers was read at an \"at home\" at the Colonial Training School for Ladies in May 1910, and chaired by Lady Frances Balfour. Also in attendance were Marion Cran, along with G. Bethune-Gray, manager of the Irrigated Lands Department of the CPR, who \"told the audience about the land, and what could be done with it and on it by capable and young women.\"\n\nIn 1910 Binnie-Clark published a series of articles in the _Imperial Colonist_ entitled \"Are Educated Women Wanted in Canada?,\" in which she went into detail about opportunities such as nursing, dressmaking, and teaching, with little emphasis on her cause of farming for women and reforming the land laws of Canada. Perhaps she was asked to mute what had become her central message. After that she ceased to be a contributor to the _Imperial Colonist_ , and the journal gave no coverage to her lectures or publications. Her cause and her critique were likely becoming too radical for the women behind the British Women's Emigration Association.\n\nIn January 1910 Binnie-Clark attended a meeting in London concerning the CPR's \"ready-made\" farm scheme in Alberta. Held at the large Whitehall Room, the meeting was presided over by CPR president Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, who predicted that the plan would create the most densely populated and most highly productive large body of agricultural land in Canada, which would strengthen and foster imperial sentiment in Canada. Binnie-Clark asked Shaughnessy if the scheme would apply to women, and he replied to the effect that \"lady farmers\" were welcome, and that there were opportunities for women to raise poultry and eggs for the CPR hotels and dining cars. In subsequent lectures Binnie-Clark complimented the scheme. She hoped that some women would be among the applicants. Perhaps \"Jack\" May heard this plea. In October 1910 Binnie-Clark visited the colonists at Strathmore, Alberta, writing about her observations in the _Overseas Daily Mail_ of London. She found the colonists were \"proving themselves Britons of that type which cannot be beaten throughout the length and breadth of the universe,\" although, alas, drought had ruined the crops and the promised irrigation had arrived too late. She optimistically forecast, however, what would have happened if the land had been irrigated.\n\nBinnie-Clark's popularity reached new heights in 1910, with favourable coverage of her initiatives in Canadian, British, and colonial papers. Reports of her activities were often accompanied by a portrait. She was celebrated as a \"living, zealous, charming example of what an Englishwoman can do as a farmer.\"\n\nTRAINING PUPILS AT BINNING FARM, FORT QU'APPELLE\n\nWhile on the lecture circuit in England in 1910, Binnie-Clark announced a new initiative to be established on her land in Saskatchewan: a training farm for English girls. The intention was to \"build a 'bridge' from England to Canada for girls who may desire to become farmers.\" She hoped to raise \u00a320,000 collected from \"duchesses to factory girls,\" and the money would be invested in \"cottage training farms,\" with each being built on a section of land that would employ twelve tenants. The plan was that each of these cottage farms would make a net profit annually of \u00a31,000. As a start she was taking four English pupils back with her to Saskatchewan that spring, where she intended to teach them to farm, and each was paying her \u00a352. She hoped that her scheme would have the encouragement of Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, who had said that he would welcome women settlers, and that her pupils could supply the CPR with eggs and poultry. Binnie-Clark also hoped that bringing out pupils from England would be a way of \"clearly demonstrating the power of women to work the land, and whether my pupils personally need the Government grant or not, I expect them to fit themselves for the homestead test.\"\n\nBinnie-Clark's pupils, however, would serve another purpose: providing her with unpaid farm labour. (The Indian residential schools that she admired so much operated on much the same principal.) In her talks, Binnie-Clark advised the woman farmer to take pupils \"so as to be provided with free labour and a matron to look after the house\u2014to take, in fact, the part in domestic affairs a man farmer relegates to his wife.\" Student fees could also help to sustain the farm.\n\nThe grand scheme of raising money and establishing cottage training farms never materialized, but Binnie-Clark did train some pupils on her Saskatchewan farm. After her first season she reported success; the students had raised the cleanest crop of Number 1 Northern wheat in the neighbourhood. They had all learned to control a team of four horses pulling several implements, despite the fact that none of them had previous experience with horses. Her pupils had demonstrated \"an innate love of animals\" that assisted them in all of their farm work. While they were slower at ploughing than male labourers, they were much more thorough at working the land with disc harrows. All of the pupils had hauled water, milked, cleaned stables, shovelled manure, and performed other chores with \"good temper and excellent results.\" This demonstrated, according to Binnie-Clark, that the prejudice against women working out of doors and on the land was \"founded on an imperfect knowledge of the facts.\" She believed that while gardening was a strain on physical endurance, work with implements \"not only entails no physical fatigue but is positive physical refreshment.\" Challenging the division of farm work into men's and women's spheres, she continued: \"A conscientious intelligence is necessary in ploughing, but on the disc and harrow cart one sits at ease in the most exhilarating and nourishing air in the world. The work is entirely mechanical, and it is the only one place in the busy world, outside the rest-cure section of a nursing home, where one is free to indulge in day-dreams.\" The obstacles to women farming were a lack of capital and official encouragement, according to Binnie-Clark, not the physical incapacity of women to perform farm work.\n\nBinnie-Clark's students included some from the prestigious Roedean School near Brighton. One pupil was Kathleen Laughrin, who came out with six others in 1910, having seen an advertisement in the _Times._ An entry in the Fort Qu'Appelle local history written by Derek Harrison, Laughrin's son, provides insight into the sort of adventurous person who was willing to learn about farming in Saskatchewan with Binnie-Clark as instructor. Educated in France and an accomplished musician, Laughrin had travelled extensively. In Paris, she studied with the organist at Notre Dame Cathedral, and in 1903 she was in Russia, where she worked for a year as governess to Count Leo Tolstoy and family. Laughrin had worked as a journalist in London and lived in South America. In 1910, when she arrived in mid-May at Qu'Appelle station there was raging blizzard. This pupil's main memory of her experience with Binnie-Clark was that her bed at Binning was a block of ice; the bed could not be made as the bedding stuck to the frozen wall. In 1914 Laughrin married Roland Harrison, a neighbour of Binnie-Clark's.\n\n_Figure 31._ In 1910 Georgina Binnie-Clark established a training farm for English girls on her land at Fort Qu'Appelle that she called \"Binning.\" These included pupils from Roedean School, Brighton, as illustrated here. Pupils provided free labour and student fees could help sustain the farm. This student is \"stooking,\" or setting sheaves upright in stooks. Georgina Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 402.\n\n_Figure 32._ \"Land and The Woman,\" by Georgina Binnie-Clark, begins, \"In Britain outdoor occupation for women is the word of the hour, but the obstacle placed in the way by the Canadian government in refusing women the right to take up homestead land, at present impedes the progress of women towards the place of independence, prosperity or wealth at which they would undoubtedly arrive in working their own land on the Canadian prairies.\" Yes, they could go to the U.S. West and obtain 160 acres for free, but \"the strength of the imperial and home tie is very strong, and British women, as a rule, refuse to take the severing step.\" Two of the photographs feature the English students she was training at \"Binning.\" Binnie-Clark appears in the bottom photograph with her horse \"Nancy.\" _Canadian Courier_ 12, no. 12, 16 November 1912, 16.\n\nE. Violet Bertram, who in 1913 published a series of articles in the _Canadian Gazette_ with the title \"Wanderings of a Single Woman,\" spent some time at an unnamed Fort Qu'Appelle \"ranch, demonstrating the feasibility of farming for women in Canada,\" that was clearly Binnie-Clark's, and had contradictory observations to report. On the one hand, she believed that the experience was of value, as the students had learned about the practical and hard conditions of life on the prairie, and the \"ranch owner is always ready to show, explain, expound: ploughing, disking, harrowing... harnessing, feeding and cleaning the horses.\" But on the other hand, their teacher was not always adept or competent. Clearly describing Binnie-Clark, Bertram wrote:\n\nWinter is vacation time here. Miss ___ was therefore immersed in her literary work, and was, in consequence, as absent-minded and unpractical as our old German professor, and this led to hilarious situations. \"Thinking of angels,\" she let the rope of our precious water bucket slip through her fingers to the bottom of the well, but with Bohemian resource and cleverness recovered it with the cunningly bent stove cleaner tied to a slim young tree! Interested in our conversation whilst driving the bobsleigh... home from Fort Qu'Appelle, the reins would slip through her fingers, and there we would sit helpless, till by fortuitous hills and cajoling cries of \"Whoa, Fanny,\" \"Gently, Emma!\" the two spirited mares could be persuaded to a standstill. Did we seek the dishcloth, it was found in some position of unmerited honour such as the mantelpiece, the back of the armchair, or handkerchiefwise on her writing bureau!\n\nBertram left in the spring and concluded that \"so large a ranch as this was an impossible undertaking for single women of small means.\" Yet her training at Binning may have been of some use. In 1915 Miss Violet Bertram, a \"co-operative small holder,\" was present at a conference on Women's Work in Agriculture and Horticulture held at the Royal Horticultural Hall, Westminster (along with Binnie-Clark). Bertram \"spoke at length on training applied in Canada, and gave instances of the work women are doing. She laid stress on the urgent necessity for a student to... study such important subjects as wages, the handling of people, auction rooms and buying and selling generally. She urged co-operation and advised women to work in couples, settle in groups and be ready to take advantage of any change that might come.\" In 1919 Bertram was running Vanguard Farm in Kent for severely disabled soldiers and sailors. It was a cooperative farm where men and their families settled on small plots. Bertram may have had learned some valuable lessons about farming from Binnie-Clark afterall.\n\nTHE FAMOUS FARMER, HER CRITICS, AND SUPPORTERS\n\nDespite her lectures and publications, Binnie-Clark made little headway converting influential men in England to her causes. In January 1912, Binnie-Clark was once again in England, where she attended a talk given by Arthur Hawkes, the special commissioner for immigration for the Dominion of Canada, at the Royal Colonial Institute (RCI), London. She and several other women in the audience, including journalists Currie Love and Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon, were disappointed that nothing was said about opportunities for women in Canada. Binnie-Clark introduced herself as a woman farmer, and she \"complained that women could not obtain free land, although any man from any nation could get 160 acres for nothing.\" She also said that so far only two women had been accepted into the ready-made farm scheme (presumably \"Jack\" May and Louisa Wittrick, as discussed in the last chapter), even though Sir Thomas Shaughnessy had promised they could enter on the same terms as men. Hawkes addressed much of his reply to Binnie-Clark's critique, providing what he believed would be the \"official view\" of her request. It was not fair, he said, for a man with a wife and children to be granted a homestead for each. One hundred and sixty acres was adequate for a head of a family. With tongue in cheek, and making a mockery of her cause, Hawkes said: \"I will be prepared to make this promise\u2014that I will presently recommend that homesteads shall be granted to single women all through Western Canada on their signing a hard-and-fast undertaking that they will not enter the state of matrimony in the next five years. However, whether the demand for homesteads for\u2014if you will pardon the word\u2014spinsters would be largely increased by facilities being granted I do not know.\"\n\nThis intransigence and mockery did not deter Binnie-Clark. Back in Western Canada that summer, she toured the prairies on a \"commission\" from the _Canadian Gazette_. Interviewed in Edmonton in August 1912, she was presented as an \"ardent suffragette,\" which was a cause she had not advanced publicly before, although she may well have long been a supporter. It was reported that she was opposed, however, to the militancy and \"frantic measures\" of the British suffragettes. Binnie-Clark was described as a \"charming woman, with very keen perception and the greatest amount of faith in her work as well as in the country she has chosen as her field. A woman of gentle, persuasive personality, convincing in the extreme, who fears not hard work, and who shows great perseverance.\"\n\nIn early 1913, Binnie-Clark gave a series of lectures in England. In March she spoke to the students at the Arlesey Colonial Training School, urging them to start farming in groups in Canada on smaller acreages near cities of the prairies or British Columbia. She assured them that what they were cultivating at Arlesey was exactly what they could grow in Canada. \"Beautiful limelight slides\" complemented her talk with images of the fruit and flowers of British Columbia as well as of her own farm in Saskatchewan. She also spoke to the Suffrage Club of London in April 1913, which indicates her growing involvement in this cause.\n\nBinnie-Clark's most sustained and fulsome lecture, and given to her most distinguished audience to that date, was her April 1913 paper entitled \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" presented to the RCI in London. Although other women such as Flora Shaw had spoken before the RCI, they were not permitted to be members. In her paper, which was published in the RCI's journal, _United Empire_ , Binnie-Clark's main message was that women, with very little training, were able to plough, cultivate, seed, harrow, harvest, and market crops of wheat. She argued that the woman agriculturalist should aspire to commercial farming and an independent income. Binnie-Clark further asserted that women such as herself, educated and from England, should be eligible for the homestead grant. It was in this lecture that Binnie-Clark clearly articulated the argument that had been hinted at in some of her previous lectures and publications, that it was unjust to reward \"foreign\" men with land and deny this right to British women who were playing critical roles in the \"spade-work of British expansion in this, the supreme place of prosperity among British lands.\"\n\nThese were the themes at the core of her lecture, but Binnie-Clark ranged widely, beginning with the foundations of change in \"the once silent plains of the Prairie Provinces,\" with the settlement at Red River of the Earl of Selkirk and the first harvest of wheat, pointing out that women had played a role in this history and that \"history occasionally throws over the past a search-light which discovers the claim of the woman to her share in the land which, over a hundred and thirty years ago, woman helped to win by spirit and to hold by toil.\" Her message was radical in many ways, as she stressed that the woman contemplating agriculture in Canada should aspire to be a commercial farmer not just for her livelihood, but for her independence. She admitted, however, that smaller acreages could be successful depending on the climate, location, and the market. She described in detail how women could establish various kinds of farm operations in different regions of the West, including British Columbia (starting on five, fifty, or a hundred acres of land on a capital of \u00a3100, \u00a3500, or \u00a31,000), and how they could emerge after twenty years with \u00a35,000, which was her \"symbol of independence.\" She claimed that near Victoria was \"the most exquisite environment [and]... the most perfect conditions for any business that the heart of a woman can desire.\" Five acres could be acquired for a \u00a3100 down payment, and a young woman settler could grow \"bulbs by the seashore, fruit of varied and perfect kind, [and] vegetables for which there is always a demand.\"\n\nAdvice for the woman farmer with \u00a31,000 was to farm in the Qu'Appelle Valley like herself, and she made it clear that wheat would always be the main crop of prairie Canada. Binnie-Clark had many economic and demographic statistics and stressed how the dramatic increase in the populations of the prairie cities provided a ready market for the produce of grain, dairy, and market garden farmers. The details might have been somewhat tedious for her audience, as Binnie-Clark itemized how much land to seed to wheat, oats, and barley; how much capital to set aside for land, horses, cows, sows, and poultry; and how much should be spent on the shack, outbuildings, labour, and implements. She concluded that \"patience, endurance and energy\" was required of the woman farmer, and her audience might have agreed that these were also required to be alert for the entire lecture.\n\nBinnie-Clark complimented the efforts of \"Jack\" May and her partner, describing them as \"the best men of the lot\" of the Sedgewick farmers (not realizing that May had already left Alberta) and stating that they were \"helping to make Empire through the medium of the Canadian farm.\" She also declared, when describing how a Canadian government official had warned that the homestead grant would make women \"more independent of marriage than ever,\" that \"the woman of today will not have the commercial marriage, or marriage of convenience. She has arrived at the place where, if she cannot have marriage as an inspiration in her life, she refuses it as a mere resource; and to refuse dependence is half-way to independence.\" Canada, she concluded with indignation, \"has not yet outgrown the idea that women are needed for one purpose only.\"\n\nLively discussion and debate followed the 1913 lecture at the RCI. Sir Charles P. Lucas was in the chair. He was head of the Dominion Department of the Colonial Office and the author of books on the history of Canada and the British colonies. Other powerful men were in the audience, and they included both critics and admirers of Binnie-Clark. Richard Reid, government agent of Ontario, had no objection to extending homesteading to \"the fairer but not inferior sex,\" and he hoped other Englishwomen would follow Binnie-Clark's lead. Ellis T. Powell (prominent barrister, journalist, imperialist, and spiritualist, and friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) was also in favour, and he too stressed that women who farmed could still be feminine. He was impressed with Binnie-Clark's sound economic knowledge, and he believed that she combined \"feminine charm and enterprising resolution which go to make the very best type of the Imperialist woman of the future.\" He was pleased, however, that ultimately the scheme would lead some of these women to marriage: \"If you have women who have pluck and capital to go out to Canada and commence colonising and working there on these lands and building up the Empire, do you not think that these women, either if they remain single and go towards a cheerful independence, or if they become mothers of Imperialists, are doing a work which is of immense moment... towards the ultimate strengthening and consolidation of the Empire which is the centre of all our affections?\" These capable women would be \"the germ of the very best and grandest Imperialism, which will secure the foundations of the Empire, not only for our generation but for all time to come.\" Other supporters included Stewart Gray, who was impressed with the farm work done by women in Scotland. Dr. T. Miller Maguire chimed in that in times of war in Germany and Bulgaria, women did a great deal of agricultural work, and he thought it would be much more preferable for the women in England to engage in pastoral pursuits than in factories \"working soul-destroying machinery.\"\n\nJ. Obed Smith, however, spoke at the greatest length and was utterly opposed to the idea of women farmers in \"this, that, or any other land.\" He said women were physically incapable of carrying on farming operations, and that he could count on two hands the number of women farming in Canada without the assistance of men. He \"dissociated himself entirely from the idea that woman alone could pursue general farming in Canada.\" Smith was prepared to admit that under special circumstances, women could succeed at poultry and dairy farms, but he insisted that they could not excel at grain farming. That they were not physically capable, he argued, was supported by the curricula of the agricultural colleges of Canada. He asked: \"How was it that these excellent institutions did not teach women ploughing, sowing, reaping and various other things that went to make up the life of the farmer? Instead of these they taught [women] sewing cookery, home management, keeping of account, dairying and laundry.\" He further argued that Canada had deliberately departed from the U.S. legislation that permitted single women to homestead, because it led to the \"pernicious practice of procuring two homesteads instead of one\" in the case of men and women homesteaders who then married. This legislation, in Smith's view, had led to \"disastrous results in the United States,\" and immigration officials did not desire the same results in Canada.\n\nThe next discussant, Jeffrey Bull of Toronto, spoke briefly and agreed with Smith, stating that \"it would be most disastrous not only for the woman, but for the reputation of Canada, for any woman to start grain farming in the West.\" \"Disastrous\" seems to have been the word of the day.\n\nThe sole woman discussant that evening was Miss J.S. Turner of the Arlesey House Colonial Training School, and she directly challenged J. Obed Smith, saying that the Canadian colleges only taught women to cook and sew \"because men did not like to do that sort of work themselves.\" She thought that \"any woman who had stamina and common sense had very much better go back to the land than sit about or run after mothers' meetings, or act as sort of junior curate, as so many of our daughters did now.\" Turner pointed out that Scottish women did half the labour on farms in Scotland, and that \"when she was a girl in Lincolnshire women worked on the land and were much better and healthier for it.\" She had trained many women who had gone to Canada, two to South Africa, and two to Australia, and those who went to Canada had done the best. Many had started out as domestic helps but were now \"following Miss Binnie-Clark's example.\"\n\nOne distinguished discussant commented that working in the fields was labour performed by Indigenous women of the colonies, and thus was not considered suitable work for British women. After listening to Binnie-Clark's talk, the former governor of the Bahamas Sir William Grey-Wilson said that in many areas of the world in which he had been posted it was the custom for the women to do all the agricultural work, adding that he was not prepared to admit it was the best of customs. Here was the objection at the heart of the matter: British women farming in the colonies would not be demonstrating a superior domesticity, but sinking to the level of Indigenous people.\n\nClearly Binnie-Clark still had some distance to go to persuade the influential men of the RCI, the Colonial Office, and Canada's immigration authorities overseas that the homestead grant should be available to unattached English women. The _Canadian Gazette_ , however, sprang to Binnie-Clark's defence in an editorial, declaring that her series of lectures was timely and useful and that the theme and text of her address to the RCI \"might well have the prophetic words of the great French agricultural statesman, Jules M\u00e9line, who says in his book 'The Return to the Land' (1906): 'When shall we make up our mind to provide real agricultural training for women, evoking in them appreciation of the life of the country, and making them realize the dignity and utility of farm work? Of all reforms undertaken in the interests of agriculture, there is none more important or more pressing than this.'\" The editors noted that this truth had not yet \"come home to any English statesman or agriculturalist.\"\n\nCritics in Canada were becoming more vocal. The Victoria _Daily Colonist_ led the charge in a May 1913 editorial under the headline \"Misleading Emigrants.\" The editorial writer took issue with many of Binnie-Clark's cost estimates for land, livestock, and equipment, and her projections of a comfortable living from five acres if young women of twenty-five followed her advice and settled on Vancouver Island or the mainland close to \"industrial populations.\" Particularly at issue was her estimate of land prices near cities such as Victoria. These were \"startling statements,\" according to the _Colonist_ , that were \"utterly out of keeping with the facts, and if accepted as true and acted upon by any young woman, would lead to such disastrous results that we can only characterize it as wicked in fact if not in intention.\" Binnie-Clark was doing \"incalculable harm\" with her \"astonishing statements.\" The editorial concluded by reminding readers of the acceptable vocations for women, and criticizing schemes to send young Englishwomen to Canada: \"There seems to be something very like a conspiracy to get a certain class of young Englishwomen to come to this country. While we are on this subject we may add that the only women of 25 who ought to think of coming here alone to make a living, are those qualified to become schoolteachers, competent stenographers, trained nurses... domestic servants who intend to be servants in fact as well as in name, and women of experience in gardening and farm work generally.\"\n\nWhen the text of Binnie-Clark's address to the RCI appeared in the _United Empire_ , other objections were raised. Canadian journalist Mrs. Donald Shaw, who was originally from England, wrote to that journal with great disapproval and revilement. Shaw was opposed to women's suffrage, and she wrote articles that lamented the changing world about her. One of her articles began with \"What is the world coming to? There seems to be a mad desire just now on the part of a large number of people to tear down and cast aside all the creeds, rules and laws that have in the past built up moral and stable nations.\" Women farmers, to Shaw, were part of this mad destructive desire. Shaw wrote, \"We don't want women farmers in Canada.\" She believed that \"not one woman in a thousand is physically fit\" for farm work, and \"certainly not one Englishwoman in a thousand.\" Even if they were capable, Shaw argued, the vocation would not produce a desirable type of woman. Echoing the _Daily Colonist_ , she wrote: \"Canada does not want women in the fields, but she badly wants women in their own sphere, that is as wives, mothers, cooks, servants, stenographers, teachers and nurses. Surely there is sufficient opening here for women without turning themselves into farm labourers. The idea seems more curious because in Canada women do not work in the fields (that is Canadian women), though they do an enormous amount of work in their houses, and Canadian men have a great aversion to seeing women engaged in outdoor occupations.\" Shaw recalled that her \"own countrywomen\" from Britain regarded doing housework as derogatory and asked, \"Is it less derogatory or more pleasurable to clear out cowhouses and feed pigs?\"\n\nShaw's letter was quoted at length in the _Daily Colonist,_ and the editor of the column \"In Women's Realm,\" Maria Lawson, disagreed with some of her opinions, particularly Shaw's refusal to believe that \"the average woman can farm.\" Lawson wrote that farming on the prairies or in Eastern Canada might be \"beyond the strength of most women, but there are many who contend that it is neither impossible nor unsuitable for women to cultivate large gardens or to engage in poultry keeping on small holdings. Englishwomen are engaged in such work in this Province both on the Island and the Mainland, but their success remains to be proven.\"\n\nIn 1913 another critic of Binnie-Clark, Elizabeth Keith Morris, published her book _An Englishwoman in the Canadian West_. Her references were oblique, but there was no doubt whom her remarks were aimed at. At the start of her chapter on \"Farming and Fruit Growing,\" Morris wrote:\n\nThrilling and picturesque stories of the lady farmer had assailed our ears, and through these we came to the conclusion that a woman had at last found an Utopian way of earning her own living... We heard of... wonderful machinery which turned work into play; and of the golden harvest which awaited those playful efforts at work; and then we came face to face with the facts, which differed in every respect from the fantastic, romantic tales which had been poured into our ears... for we discovered that only the strong, hardy, eminently practical and really hard-working woman could even hope to reap a good living from that wonderful black loam of the prairies... after many a heart-breaking experience and the absence of all luxuries and other comforts.\n\nMorris was opposed to Canada's granting the right to homestead to women; the \"hard and heavy\" work required was unsuitable for them.\n\nWHEAT AND WOMAN\n\nBinnie-Clark's book _Wheat and Woman_ (1914) drew together and added much rich detail to the lectures and articles that she had already published. It is a self-deprecating, often humorous account of her first three years of farming, detailing her ignorance of agriculture and the customs of Canada, her mistakes, misfortunes, financial woes, and her adventures\u2014which included being lost on the prairies in a summer deluge and being tossed head first into a snow bank when her beloved horse, Nancy, came to an unexpected and abrupt stop and then bolted, deserting Binnie-Clark. It includes an account of the long and viciously cold winter of 1906\u20137, perhaps the worst in prairie history. But _Wheat and Woman_ is also the story of the courtesy and kindness of Binnie-Clark's neighbours, her love for the prairies and for her animals, her fascination with wheat (a \"tall mass of living loveliness\"), and her own remarkable persistence and determination. It is a sobering tale of \"years of arduous toil and seasons of bitter disappointment,\" but ultimately the message was that women could succeed if they had capital, fortitude, tenacity, and good humour. It is also a sharp critique of Canadian land laws. The book challenged accepted norms of middle-class femininity; Binnie-Clark never mentioned marriage as the final destination for her or sister, and she did not take kindly to domestic duties such as having to prepare meals for her hired men. \"From the beginning,\" she wrote, \"I was perfectly happy working on the land, only I wished it was someone else's turn to get those tiresome three meals a day.\" And it was radical. The title _Wheat and Woman_ was a bold, concise, and deliberate choice; this was not about small holdings and fruit farming or bee keeping.\n\n_Wheat and Woman_ received positive reviews in England and Canada. In the _Times Literary Supplement_ , it was praised as a \"graphic and clear account of the difficulties encountered... winning her way to practical success through sheer pluck, persistence and... the indispensable equipment of a tough constitution capable of enduring an astonishing amount of hardship and fatigue.\" The review noted many details, including the \"bewildering succession\" of inept hired men who were \"with few exceptions unsatisfactory and addicted to leaving their employer in the lurch at the most inconvenient moments.\" Few of the reviewers appeared to agree with or to emphasize Binnie-Clark's central theme that the homestead laws discriminated against women. It was read as the story of one woman's amazing pluck and endurance, and as an eloquent description of life on the prairies. In the _Athenaeum_ , _Wheat and Woman_ was described as the story of a \"singularly brave, cheery and plucky woman of admirable self-control and steadfastness of purpose.\" The reviewer was pleased that there was only a \"hint of something like bitterness in her view of woman's position in the world.\"\n\nThe suffragist journal _Votes for Women_ praised the book and Binnie-Clark, and criticized the Canadian government: \"Of such stuff are the best pioneers. One would think that Canada or any colony would welcome such a settler with open arms as a valuable asset. Such a settler forms a centre, radiating wholesome energy, intelligence, sympathy, the best the old world has to offer. But the official mind, even in a new country, does not approve of the independent woman, however capable she may be. Man must be the landowner.\"\n\nOpinions varied. Writing in the _Globe_ , Mary MacLeod Moore concluded that _Wheat and Woman_ would discourage, rather than encourage, women to take up farming unless they were \"as exceptional a woman as Binnie-Clark herself.\" Moore wrote that \"otherwise disaster is fairly sure to overtake her efforts to farm alone, hampered as she is, in the first place, by the Homestead Law, and later by circumstances, climate, loneliness; the difficulties which surround the obtaining of reliable 'hired men' no matter at what price, and many others which develop as time goes on.\"\n\nBinnie-Clark may have inadvertently placed Canada in the public eye as a less-than-inviting destination for the British gentlewoman. In 1914 in the English newspaper the _Sunday Referee_ , a discussion took place about the position of women emigrants to Canada. There were two main objections raised about Canada as a destination. The first was that Canada refused the free grant of land to women available to men, and the second was that there was no dower law. The conclusion was that \"Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia are at present far more suitable for women emigrants than Canada.\"\n\nIn his review in _Westminster Hall and Farthest West Review_ , Dan Munday also thought that _Wheat and Woman_ might discourage homesteaders from Britain, although he thought it was more honest than the \"land-of-promise\" literature used to lure them that led to so many abandoned homesteads. He wrote that because of the \"close regard for accuracy... the book can be of real value to one contemplating farming on the prairie.\" Munday noted that while a purpose of the book was to help secure homestead rights for women, this was not mentioned until the last chapter. In his conclusion he wrote that the author \"has no intention of settling permanently in Canada.\" That was, in fact, even more true when the First World War began in August 1914.\n\n_Wheat and Woman_ could not have appeared at a less opportune moment. Almost no one had time or energy for the homesteads-for-women cause in Britain or Canada, and that included Binnie-Clark, but her long-term promotion of women and farming had become timely and vital. Her agricultural skills were now of value at home. She was one of seven agriculturalists appointed by the Ministry of Labour to organize the work of women on the land and assigned the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire districts. One of the last events she attended as \"the pioneer woman farmer in Canada\" was a 1915 conference in Westminster that she chaired on Women's Work in Agriculture and Horticulture, mentioned above, which was also attended by her former student Violet Bertram. Binnie-Clark declared that \"no profession under the sun is so excellent for nervous diseases. In view of the changes which the war is bringing, the cry of 'back to the land' is one which vitally affects women and is of great importance to their economic status.\"\n\nFrom the First World War into the 1930s, Binnie-Clark also had a business at 14 Woodstock Street, a small street off Oxford Street, London's main shopping district, called \"The Fashion Journals Guild,\" where she sold patterns for dresses and hats. As a young boy of nine or ten in the 1930s, her great-nephew Dennis Jenks recalls visiting this small, cluttered office that she managed with the assistance of one employee. Just how she juggled her war work on the land, her business, and her farm in Saskatchewan is one of many puzzles about Georgina Binnie-Clark. Her sister Ethel ran the farm while she was gone; in her 1947 will, Georgina left land to Ethel \"as a mark of appreciation for the care she bestowed on the whole property during my absence by reason of my illness and the Great War.\" Georgina returned to her farm in 1926 and 1928, and again in the 1930s, in a final initiative of hers called the Union Jack Farm Settlement, to be dealt with briefly in the conclusion. She continued to promote the British Empire and the settlement of British people in Canada, but her emphasis on women famers was gone. Her writing career slowed and the direction of it changed during the war. She self-published a book for children called _Tippy: The Autobiography of a Pekingese Puppy_ , the proceeds of which were to \"buy comfort for the wounded soldiers & horses fighting in the Great War for Liberty.\"\n\nWhile the number of Binnie-Clark's critics mounted in Canada and overseas by 1914, she had helped to motivate a great number of women and their supporters to organize a homesteads-for-women campaign that followed the same trajectory\u2014gaining strength from 1910 to 1914 but losing momentum in the war years, although it did not disappear altogether. Campaigners in prairie Canada, however, faced formidable and intransigent opponents, and they weakened their own cause considerably by adopting a central strategy of denouncing \"foreigners\" as unsuitable homesteaders, and requesting the homestead privilege for \"British-born\" women only, alienating potential supporters. \nCHAPTER SIX\n\n\"DAUGHTERS OF BRITISH BLOOD\" OR \"HORDES OF MEN OF ALIEN RACE\"?\n\nTHE HOMESTEADS-FOR-BRITISH-WOMEN CAMPAIGN\n\nWhile Georgina Binnie-Clark focused her energies on publishing and lecturing in England about the opportunities for British women farmers in Western Canada and the injustices of Canada's Dominion Lands Act, a similar campaign was gaining steam on the prairies, which the woman wheat farmer of Fort Qu'Appelle helped to motivate and inspire. While supporters of homesteads for women devised many arguments for the entitlement of women to the land grant, they increasingly stressed the rights of British and Canadian-born women, in contrast to the dubious claims of \"foreigners,\" both male and female. The campaigners called for justice and equality, but only for a privileged few. A petition, submitted to the Canadian House of Commons in 1913, asked that the privilege of homesteading be granted to \"all women of British birth who have resided in Canada for six months.\" Faced with a climate that was inhospitable to women farmers, landowners, and voters, and ultimately facing a completely intransigent federal government, supporters articulated an imperialist vision to gain acceptance, to show that they could provide a solution to the problem of the \"foreign element\" and to demonstrate their fitness for the privileges of citizenship that were denied to them yet available to \"foreign\" men. Disparaging the suitability of settlers of \"foreign\" origin justified their own claims for inclusion. Promoters of homesteads for women manipulated ideas about racial and ethnic \"others\" in an effort to win elite support, while at the same time appealing to an egalitarian code of fundamental justice.\n\nAs Pamela Scully has observed about the rhetoric of race in the women's suffrage movement in South Africa, \"liberal campaigns for civic rights and equality can in fact depend upon invocations of its supposed antimonies\u2014prejudice and exclusion.\" Similarly, in the U.S. West, racist and nativist rationales surfaced in the rhetoric of some Anglo-American suffrage activists who were hostile toward the \"foreign\" men \"from the slums of the Old World [who] walk out of the steerage of the ships to become enfranchised citizens and ultimately to vote against giving the suffrage to American-born women.\" This elitist strategy failed, however, in the case of homesteads for women. The federal government remained intransigent as long as it was in control of Crown or public lands (to 1930), at which point there was little homestead land left. The imperial logic and elitist strategy alienated key constituencies, such as settlers from the United States, who were accustomed to single women having homestead rights and who expected the same privilege in Canada. No matter what the strategy, however, there was little hope for success in confronting deeply embedded views of women as unsuitable and incapable farmers and landowners.\n\nThose who organized for homesteads for women supported other causes that challenged the deliberate crafting of Western Canada as \"manly space,\" where the building block and organizing principle was the authority of the white, property-holding, male head of household. Control of land and therefore wealth was not to be shared with other groups, nor were there to be any hindrances for landowners who wanted to sell or buy. This shaping of \"manly space\" is illustrated not only in the homestead laws but in the abolition of women's dower rights in 1885 in Manitoba and 1886 in the North-West Territories, which meant that a husband could now sell the family home without his wife's consent or entirely cut her out of his will. Shaping \"manly space\" also involved a concerted campaign to impose the monogamous model of marriage on the diverse inhabitants of Western Canada. A national identity was to be forged that was distinct from that of the Indigenous people and was distinct, also, from that of the United States. It would be based on an idealized view of a traditional British gender order, of the obedient, submissive wife and the provider, head-of-family husband. All of this was fuelled by an image of the United States as a place of disrupted and dangerous alternatives to the \"natural\" gender order, and by a determination that pristine and pure Canada would be kept free of the immoral and corrupting influences from the south. Permitting women alternatives to marriage, such as acquiring homestead land for farming, was an indicator of a society run amok.\n\nGALVANIZING THE CAMPAIGN AND A FIRST PETITION\n\nThe homesteads-for-women campaign intersected and combined with the call for the reinstatement of dower rights on the prairies and for women's suffrage. Of these campaigns, homesteads for women was the greatest failure. Legislators never wavered on the issue\u2014women never received the right to homestead in Western Canada, except in Alberta after 1930. When the Prairie provinces assumed control of public lands from the federal government in 1930, the right to homestead was abrogated entirely in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while in Alberta, where there was a little homestead land left, the provincial government drew up regulations that permitted every \"person\" to apply who was over seventeen, had resided in the province for three years, and was or declared the intention to become a British subject.\n\nAmong the early calls for homestead rights for women was one from a 1907 correspondent of the _Farmer's Advocate_ writing from Moose Jaw. Like Binnie-Clark, this supporter believed women homesteaders could be a means of strengthening the British fabric of the West. He proposed that all single women over twenty be given the right to enter on a homestead, and he was not at all perturbed that they might marry before they proved up, as \"this is exactly what is wanted in giving them homesteads, and I would go further and allow any such homesteader to at once receive patent to her 160 acres as soon as she is married.\" Echoing Flora Shaw's \"sister\" scheme, the writer proposed that if young men from Great Britain brought their sisters and each secured 160 acres, \"a new immigration movement would take place... We hear much of the 'all-red line of commerce.' This might well be called the 'all-white line of immigration.'\" \"The benefit,\" he wrote, \"to the whole Northwest, morally, socially, educationally, and spiritually, would be enormous.\"\n\nWhen Binnie-Clark visited Winnipeg in late 1908, she met with women who had \"already taken up the matter of Homesteads for Women with a deep sense of the injustice of a law which, whilst seeking to secure the prosperity of the country in enriching the stranger, ignores the claim of the sex which bore the brunt of the battle in those early and difficult days.\" She wrote her own letter to the Department of the Interior at that time (described in the previous chapter), proposing a settlement of English gentlewomen as an initial experiment, and she met with officials in Ottawa.\n\nIn 1910 the concept of homesteads for women was still seen as a \"novelty\" but was gaining traction. The _Toronto Telegram_ in January of that year declared support for the idea, noting that the present situation was \"both unfair and disadvantageous,\" and concluding that \"if women shrink from the hardships of pioneer life the fact has not been noticed in the history of the west. Then why should they be deprived of participation in its rewards?\" Other early voices included that of Louise Langton of Wetaskiwin, who wrote letters to the _Grain Growers' Guide_ on a wide range of issues, including suffrage, dower rights, and birth control. She asked, \"Must we go on giving birth to daughters whose fate will be the same as ours has been?\" Langton proposed that \"farm women of the west organize and help in this question of 'homesteads for women'... She made the argument that would eventually become the focus of the campaign, that they had more right to land than \"foreign\" men, that \"women of this great Dominion... [should] join forces, concentrate their powers... so that the same opportunities be given them that are given to the hordes of men with less ability than theirs, and who are pouring into this country every year.\" Langton's call to action was enthusiastically endorsed in the _Guide_ in April 1910. \"Onward\" wrote, \"Here's an emphatic vote in favour of Mrs. Langston's motion... [and] if we cannot organize... we can agitate, discuss, educate, and your page is just the place to begin.\"\n\nBut as Binnie-Clark found, there were formidable opponents. Frank Oliver articulated why he did not support homesteads for women in the House of Commons in April 1910, just a few weeks before Mildred Williams's twelve-day vigil (described in Chapter 3). Oliver was asked by member of Parliament W.J. Roche from Manitoba (later also minister of the interior) if his attention had ever been called to the idea of allowing women to homestead, and the letter of a reverend gentleman in Saskatchewan, published in a Winnipeg newspaper, was read into the record. Reverend W.W. Beveridge recommended allowing women over the age of eighteen to homestead as a means of addressing \"a great dearth of marriageable ladies\" in the province. He claimed to know of parents of daughters who refused to move west and asked \"why that man had not just as much right to homestead and get a quarter section for each of those girls as the man who happened to have four grown-up boys?\" Beveridge also knew of men with large families of strong, healthy girls in the Dakotas and Minnesota who would come to Canada if their girls could homestead, but because they could not, they were moving to Montana instead.\n\nOliver replied that the matter had been brought to his attention frequently, and his answer was that women homesteaders were \"not in the interest of the settlement of our country.\" He was aware of the different land law in the United States but was \"not aware that it is an advantageous law.\" Oliver explained that the purpose of giving free land to homesteaders was to make the land productive, and that \"in order that a homestead may be made fully productive, there should be not a single woman upon it, nor even a single man, but there should be both the man and woman in order that the homestead may be fully advantageous to the country. The idea of giving homesteads to single women would tend directly again that idea.\" He said that it was the job of the single man \"to get the woman, and for the woman who wants to settle on land in the Northwest to get the man, rather than that she shall have land of her own... Our experience is entirely against the idea of women homesteading.\" It was sufficient to permit land to widows with children old enough to help cultivate the land, according to Oliver.\n\nIn the _Manitoba Free Press_ , women's page editor Lillian Beynon Thomas (Lillian Laurie) mocked Oliver's reply and pointed out contradictions. Her column began, \"Were you ever at a meeting where the men, being in power, were discussing the advisability of giving women something they were asking for? If you have and the men referred to the women as the 'fair sex' then you know that they did not grant the request.\" Thomas wrote that \"nothing was said in the act about having children to cultivate the land and if women are not considered competent to bring the land to a condition of productiveness then the clause permitting women as sole heads of families to homestead is merely a humanitarian provision for the women, and the land has not been considered. To be consistent Mr. Oliver should have the law granting homesteads to women only if there were boys dependent on them for support and old enough to cultivate the land.\"\n\nOliver's response in the House of Commons helped galvanize the homesteads-for-women campaign in Western Canada. In late May 1910, a petition to Minister of the Interior Oliver, originating from Edmonton, was published in the _Bulletin_ , Oliver's own newspaper, under the headline \"Spinsters Want Homesteads.\" It asked that homestead lands be available to any unmarried woman in Canada over the age of thirty. The central argument advanced in the petition was that unmarried women settlers were as desirable as widows were. It was an injustice to favour widows only, as they often had an inheritance, while a \"noble class of women\" was just as deserving of land: women who found themselves \"at middle age thrown out upon their own resources, the majority of them having had to sacrifice opportunities of marriage and competence for the sake of remaining at home with one or more aged parents to provide and care for them in their old age.\" The minor children of widows permitted to homestead would become financial assets to their mother, whereas those women who cared for parents had no one to provide for them. Signatures were to be collected from \"the undersigned, unmarried women of Canada.\" A Miss Helen N. Weir of Edmonton was identified as the leader of the \"agitation.\"\n\nThe context for the petition was explained in a letter to the _Manitoba_ _Free Press_ , where the petition was also published in mid-June 1910. \"M.S.T.\" wrote that a number of women in the Edmonton district had asked her to organize a petition. She was from the United States and had moved to Alberta because of the advertisements she had read about \"free land.\" When she applied for a homestead, however, she was told she was ineligible. \"Well, I was surprised, just having refused to join another single woman, who with her father was filing on 160 acres of choice land in Arkansas.\" She believed there were hundreds of unmarried women who could homestead as successfully as men. She argued that unmarried women who had cared for aged parents \"should be rewarded, not looked down upon and called 'old maids' on the bargain counter.\" She understood that because of the \"scarcity of white women... good decent men are degenerating and marrying squaws,\" and further argued that women were far more capable of homesteading than the many \"foreigners who come to this country, men who have never pursued agriculture in their home country and know practically nothing about it.\" It was later reported in the _Free Press_ that the author of this petition had returned to the United States.\n\nMARSHALLING THE ARGUMENTS FOR WOMEN HOMESTEADERS\n\nIt is not clear how many signatures this first, Edmonton-based petition received, or whether it was ever submitted to Parliament. There was a fundamental strategic flaw, however, embedded in the petition, as it was organized by an American woman, and the petitioners were women and, of course, non-voters. Canadian legislators could easily dismiss it. Women reformers were divided about the value of petitions but there was agreement that \"petitions signed by women are usually treated as a joke by the electors,\" as prominent activist Nellie McClung told a suffrage rally in 1912. Although petitions were to become the main tactic of the homesteads-for-women campaign, strategies changed considerably after this initial petition that stressed that single women should have the same rights as widows.\n\nThe _Grain Growers' Guide_ became a focus for the campaign, and women's page editor Isabelle Beaton Graham (\"Isobel\" in her column \"Around the Fireside\") was the main voice of the campaign. Born in Ontario, Graham had attended the Alma Ladies College, where, as mentioned in Chapter 2, principal Benjamin F. Austin was an advocate of farming for women. She homesteaded in Manitoba with her husband, Francis Graham, also from Ontario. They had three daughters and one son, and Graham used the example of her own family to point out the inequities of the homestead system, as families with daughters did not have the same option to expand their holdings as families with sons. The Grahams moved to St. Boniface in 1906, where he was a founder of the Grain Growers Grain Company, and she wrote for the _Guide_ , founded in 1908. The _Guide_ had a cooperative reform agenda, and it supported women's suffrage from its first issue in 1908. Readers of the _Guide_ were asked to organize, agitate, and educate on the issues of homesteads for women and dower rights. Isabelle Beaton Graham was involved in the women's suffrage campaign in Manitoba, and was one of the participants in the Mock Parliament in Winnipeg in January 1914. Graham was the speaker of the house, while Nellie McClung was the premier and a delegation of men waited upon the government with a bill for \"Votes for Men.\"\n\nThe women's page editors of other major Western publications, including Mary S. Mantle, or Margaret Freeston, of the _Nor'West Farmer_ , and Lillian Laurie, or Lillian Beynon Thomas, of the _Manitoba Free Press_ , also supported homesteads for women. There were lively debates in many of these publications, including letters to \"Prim Rose\" of the Western edition of the Montreal-based _Family Herald._\n\nBinnie-Clark was not particularly active in the campaign in Western Canada (the focus of her lecturing and publishing was England), but she was used as evidence by organizers on the prairies of the interest in and ability of women to farm. Graham had some angles of her story incorrect, believing that Binnie-Clark had arrived in Canada hoping to homestead and had purchased land only after she \"was unable to persuade the Dominion government to grant her a free homestead.\" But Graham applauded her example, writing that she was \"a woman of pluck and determination. She came to Canada to farm, to experiment not only for her own benefit but also for the benefit of single women of her own social level left behind in England.\" Graham wrote that Binnie-Clark would \"make a great immigration agent to the old land among women like herself, women of culture and some means, when the Canadian government grants free homesteads to women.\"\n\nMany arguments were advanced in favour of homesteads for women. A central rationale was evidence that a large number of women wanted to homestead. Supporters pointed to the success of the widows, and to women's interest in obtaining homesteads through purchasing South African scrip (SAS); they had \"quietly and promptly availed themselves of the homestead privilege made possible by buying... scrip. This proves conclusively that it is only necessary to give women the opportunity and they are anxiously willing to be self-supporting, and no longer a drag upon the pension list of their masculine relatives.\" It was pointed out that it was not fair that only women with sufficient money could qualify for homestead land. It also seemed \"rather illogical that women can do duty on a scrip, for which they must pay, but cannot on a homestead.\" Women's ability to purchase and to prove up on homesteads through SAS also made a mockery of the assertion that only men had the strength and stamina to withstand the difficulties of homesteading.\n\nWomen wrote to farm journals and to officials of the Department of the Interior stating that they wanted to homestead. In 1910 an Englishwoman, resident in the West for three years who worked as hired help and living with her brother, wrote to the _Nor'West Farmer_ that she had read of Binnie-Clark's farming and \"would like to see the free land grant for women. I like to see women independent. I don't like the idea of an almshouse at the end of life.\" An \"English Violet\" from London wrote to \"Prim Rose\" of the _Family Herald_ in 1913 to say that she would take a homestead if offered to single women. She had worked for two years on a dairy farm on Vancouver Island, and for her farm life was ideal: \"The greatest fascination which farm life possesses is that it is so creative, so constructive and so vitally alive.\" \"Farmer's Daughter\" wrote that she had spent her life on farms in Ontario and the West and could see no reason why she should not be allowed to homestead, as she was \"very ambitious in every line of farm work, thoroughly enjoying it, as I find it ennobling to both mind and soul.\" \"Irish Jill of All Trades\" also wrote that she was a farmer's daughter, that she could \"drive horses, cut grain, disk, harrow, plough and even drive nails as well as most men. I don't see why women have not as much right to land as men. The average woman works as hard as a man and sometimes harder.\"\n\nIt was not just single and young women who sought homesteads. Married and older women expressed an interest in homesteading due to their family circumstances. A \"British born\" woman wrote to the _Nor'West Farmer_ in 1911 to say that she had lived in Canada for over forty years, that she had married a Canadian and had a family of girls, had worked very hard to raise and educate them, but \"now at fifty-eight, I find myself, through no fault of my own, without a home. My husband is old and broken in health, and he has exhausted his homestead rights. I also am not very strong but still could do homestead duties. No doubt there are hundreds in the same position that we are in.\" Another married woman, who had worked with her husband to prove up on a homestead, wrote to the _Guide_ in 1911 that she would soon have no home as her husband had mortgaged their farm and she had no say: \"It was my husband who had the rights to the homestead.\" If she had the right to take a homestead of her own, she would have a home.\n\nThe success of the widows who qualified to homestead was also evidence of women's capacity. As \"Lochinvar\" wrote to the _Guide_ in 1911, he \"could never see the right or reason of women being unable to make entry for land.\" His own mother, a widow, \"had two homesteads in the West, and I may say this just put her in first class circumstances.\"\n\nThe situation in the Canadian West was often compared to that of the U.S. West, where single women could homestead. A related argument for women's right to homestead was that Canada was losing girls and women to opportunities south of the border. Accounts by U.S. women homesteaders and farmers were published in the _Guide_ , such as \"Woman on Forty Acres,\" written by a woman farmer in Montana who grew wheat, oats, and sugar beets, raised poultry, and had a comfortable home of six rooms.\n\nAs a reader wrote to the _Nor'West Farmer_ , \"If American girls can do this, are we Canadian girls so far behind our American cousins that we can't?\" Editor Margaret Freeston replied that she knew two girls who went to the Dakotas because they could not secure homesteads in Canada and were \"now the proud possessors of deeds to the land. What a pity that 'good stuff' like these girls were made of should be lost to us!\" Will Channon, who wrote to Ottawa from Cordova, Manitoba, in support of homesteads for women in 1910, said this was necessary to \"stop many of them going over to the United States where they are privileged of homesteading.\" A.H. Cunningham from Ravine Bank, Saskatchewan, wrote to the _Guide_ that \"I have often thought it a shame that in the United States women could take land and here in Canada where there is so much more land they are not allowed the privilege. I have seen women in the States that did their duties far better than the average bachelor.\" \"Canada has never shown any kindness to her women that I ever could see,\" wrote a woman from Claresholm, Alberta, to the _Guide_ in 1912. \"Her girls are just as bright and intelligent as those in the United States. The latter were allowed to homestead while Canadian girls were pushed behind the door.\" She knew of women who had homesteaded in the States, sold out, and bought land in Canada, and she also knew Canadian women going to Montana to homestead and asked, \"Why could they not stay at home, as our land is just as good if not better?\" \"Long Bob,\" a widower, wrote to the _Family Herald_ in 1913 that the women homesteaders of \"Uncle Sam's domain... have invariably made a success of it. I cannot see why the women of Canada cannot do as well, or better, as invariably they are of a more rugged character than their southern sisters.\"\n\nNellie McClung was acquainted with women homesteaders in the United States, and she used their example to show that they were willing and capable, writing that four girls together were each homesteading a quarter of the same section after having worked in offices and stores, and saving a little money to make a start. They had cleared land of bush with only axes and hoes. McClung knew of one woman who went from Canada to Minnesota to homestead and was the owner of 160 acres. She was careful to stress that this woman had not lost her femininity or \"womanly charm,\" as she was to be married to a neighbouring homesteader. McClung wrote, \"I believe free grants would develop a splendid type of resourceful women for Canada. What a pity the government can't see it.\"\n\nMany supporters in the initial phase of the campaign were either from the United States or had lived and homesteaded there, or had been neighbours of women homesteaders. \"Another Farmer's Wife\" from Alberta wrote in 1912 to the _Family Herald_ to say that she had had many women homesteaders as neighbours in the United States and that they were \"college bred women who made a great difference to their districts to the bachelors especially.\" She argued that during the \"hard times... between 1893 and 1896,\" the men abandoned their homesteads but the women \"were not so ready to jump from the frying-pan into the fire. They hung on to the homesteads and today they are well-fixed and have their own fine homes. But the men\u2014not so with them; somebody else owns their homes today.\" She also believed that Alberta \"would be far more settled and a better country today, if women had their rights here as they should have.\" Many women, she believed, including her own daughters who had remained in the United States, would come to Alberta if they had homesteading rights. One woman homesteader in the United States took part in the debate. A \"Montana School-Ma'Am\" wrote to the _Family Herald_ to say that she was living on her 320-acre homestead and was \"as happy as a clam in the land of Uncle Sam.\"\n\nReaders of the women's columns in the farm journals and newspapers of the West were kept up-to-date on the success of women farmers in the United States and elsewhere. In early 1910, Margaret Freeston of the _Nor'West Farmer_ wrote about the great scope and variety of agricultural pursuits of women in California, including poultry, fruit, cattle, and horses, and described how they had formed a Women's Agricultural and Horticultural Union. She concluded, \"Thus it would seem a 'prosperous farmer' is not necessarily of the masculine gender.\" The _Nor'-West Farmer_ also published articles such as \"Women Prize Winners at Scottish Plowing Match.\" Developments elsewhere reported on in Western Canada included the organization in 1909 of a farm for \"spinsters\" in Boston, and in 1912 of a colony for women only in Australia, organized by the English Woman's Householders' League. In 1913 the _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ ran a story of five sisters who operated a farm of 200 acres in Buckinghamshire, England. There was also coverage of agricultural education elsewhere that was available to women. In a 1910 article, \"Girl Graduates in Agriculture,\" readers of the _Grain Growers' Guide_ learned about two sisters who graduated from the agricultural college at Cornell and operated the New York farm they inherited from their father. The author countered the argument that it was a waste to educate women as all would be lost if they married and left the farm, writing that \"the work of life goes on just the same after marriage.\"\n\nSupporters of homesteads for women argued that women had the physical strength and capability to homestead, which they were proving throughout the West by performing homestead duties on the farms of spouses, brothers, and fathers. In a letter to the Department of the Interior, a man from Saskatchewan wrote in 1913 that women worked very hard for years on homesteads, building sod barns and shacks, haying, ploughing, raising poultry and eggs, growing vegetables, planting flowers, \"& everything,\" and that men who had \"made good here do it by the help of the wife,\" as \"there is nothing too hard for them to work at it seems.\" Yet \"the wife for all her labour has not an inch of land her own.\" As \"X.Y.Z.\" wrote to the _Guide_ in 1913, \"A wife who can rise at four and five o'clock in the morning and wait on a lot of hired men, with the husband in bed, is quite capable of homesteading.\" In a 1912 letter, \"Bronco Buster\" wrote that she was alone on a Montana ranch with her father from the age of five, that she went on the round-up every year, that she could \"ride any kind of horse, throw a steer and tie him in four minutes, brand a colt and handle the rope in all its forms. I have two belts given me by Teddy Roosevelt and Governor [E.L.] Norris of Montana for expert horsemanship. I can do anything that can be done outside.\"\n\nThroughout the West on homesteads, farms, and ranches, women and girls worked in the fields and with livestock. This sight could surprise some observers. A government surveyor wrote in 1899 of his first encounter with women at work on a ranch in Alberta:\n\nThis is where I first saw young women on horseback, herding and rounding up cattle. These young women would ride at break neck speed, turning and twisting rapidly in all directions and as fearlessly as experienced cowboys. They mounted and dismounted as gracefully and easily as experienced men. I saw one young woman mount into her side saddle on a fair sized bronco from the level ground. I asked her to dismount and mount again, in order that I might see how it was done, and in an instant, she was off and on again from the same level as the horse.\n\nSupporters were also careful to emphasize that women could be feminine and still perform labour out of doors on their homesteads. \"Bronco Buster\" wrote that she was \"just as much of lady as I would have been had it been ten years in a convent\" rather than ten years on a ranch, and that \"a lady will be a lady no matter where she is or what she has to do.\" She could do \"fancy work,\" having learned it while taking care of 500 ewes, and she had cooked for a crew of seventeen men.\n\nHomesteading would keep women on the land and away from the evils of the city, offering them a healthy and invigorating environment. Graham argued that it was unfortunate that a daughter raised on a farm had to turn to teaching, dressmaking, or stenography when she had all the necessary skills to work on the land, that \"all her soul [would] call aloud for the prairie, for the grating of the plow, for the swish of the binder, and the hum of the threshing machine, never to mention old Brindle or Bess, or the little colt she had raised by hand... in the name of common sense and common humanity give them a chance to farm and live the life they love and are suited for.\" Arguments for the strength and stamina women would build on their homesteads dovetailed with beliefs in eugenics. Homesteads for women would develop a \"nobler race.\"\n\nAnother widely shared rationale was that homesteads for women would provide a source of wives for bachelors of the West. They would not have to marry women who were \"beneath\" them in refinement and education. The result would be \"contented, prosperous homes, instead of a region of vacant farms, with only the ruins of bachelors' shacks (monuments to a short-sighted policy), to break the monotony of the view.\"\n\nA central argument advanced by many supporters was that it was an injustice to award free land to families of boys, while those who had girls were penalized. A family with four boys could have five homesteads altogether while a family with all girls could only have one; the family of boys became wealthy while the family of girls became poorer, as pointed out in an editorial in the _Guide_ that concluded, \"Until the government of our land is entrusted with the power of ordaining the sex of children it does not seem fair that such discrimination should be made as is done in the case of our homestead laws.\"59 The homestead issue was linked to that of dower rights in many ways. As explained in a 1913 _Star Phoenix_ article, for a woman to obtain a homestead she had to marry a man and either keep him alive (and they both work to prove it up, although ultimately it would be his property when the patent was granted), or \"let him die\" (and as a widow, if she had young offspring, she could file on her own land). Valance Patriarche wrote that\n\nto an independent and wary spinster... the necessity of a husband brings not only a pause but a full stop. Unlike the Ontario benedict, the married man in the Prairie Provinces may sell, give away, or will away the home without so much as acquainting his wife with his intentions. Just as she has completed three years at hard labor on a farm and is wheezing out hymns of thanksgiving on the melodeon because they own their own land, he may saunter in and tell her he has given it all to the pretty summer visitor on Jones' farm, a proceeding quite within his legal rights. It is not to be wondered at that the hardy perennial spinster desires to bloom alone in prairie soil.\n\nIssues around homestead or farm inheritance were also part of the general critique of the injustices of land ownership and distribution on the prairies. In a 1910 column in the _Grain Growers' Guide_ , Graham wrote that \"in no country under the sun has woman been more directly responsible for increased land values than in Western Canada\" and yet sons, not daughters, inherited farms, based on the rationale that a son \"earns or helps to earn the land, therefore the land is sacredly reserved for him.\" The son might feed the cattle, while a daughter feeds the household; his work was valued, while hers was not. Graham called for daughters to inherit equal shares of farms and estates as a \"birthright.\" In many of Graham's pleas for \"equality,\" however, she also mentioned the entitlement of women, meaning British and\/or British-Ontarian women, over the rights of \"foreigners.\" In this column she continued: \"Parents who do not dower their daughters equally with their sons are worse than the Dominion government, that will not give homesteads to Canadian women, but prefers rather to dower the unspeakable foreigner.\"\n\nIn letters to the farm journals or to the Department of the Interior, the issues of dower and homestead rights were often intertwined. Mrs. Thomas McNeil wrote to the minister of the interior in 1913 to say that she had come from Ontario with her husband and eleven children, that they had entered on a homestead in 1909, but that\n\nafter he got his Patent for his Homestead sold it for $2800 and then hit away to Maple Creek with an excuse to buy Horses and to take a purchased Homestead, I have found out that he has drank the most of it by this time and has not took a purchased Homestead yet and about all the satisfaction I can get is that a man in the Saskatchewan can do as he likes with his own property but if he ever does take a purchased Homestead I would never go to live on it. I got hunger enough on this one. I would often have starved only for what my children had sent me.\n\nMrs. McNeil concluded her letter by saying that \"if it is ever in your Power to Help Women to get Homesteads I do hope that God Almighty will reward you for it all.\"\n\nA fundamental criticism of the homestead legislation was that women were just as deserving of the grant of land as men were. The land grant was cast as a birthright, inheritance, or reward that was owed to women as well as men. As one supporter of the campaign wrote in the _Guide_ : \"God put both Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden. Evidently Eve had as much right there and on the land as her husband.\" As will be discussed later in detail, this rationale was usually bolstered by noting that land that (British or Canadian) women deserved was going to \"strangers\" or \"foreigners.\"\n\nWomen\u2014including married or deserted women\u2014had also earned this birthright, it was contended, as they were directly responsible for increased land values. Mrs. J.R. Long took this position in her letter to the _Nor'West Farmer_ :\n\nThere are millions of acres of land lying here waiting to be taken up\u2014any male subject over eighteen years can come and have a half section for the asking and the small entry fee, but a woman who is forced into the world to earn a living for herself and little family cannot have an acre unless her husband is deceased. Is a deserted wife with a family dependent upon her not more worthy of a homestead than perhaps her unworthy husband who may be in some other part of the country experiencing no difficulty in securing a homestead? And is a widow who either has no family or a family all married not worthy of some consideration?\n\nWriting the Department of the Interior from Stalwart, Saskatchewan, in 1913, Mrs. Fanny Elizabeth Shepherd asked this very question; she was not eligible for a homestead because her two sons were not minors. She kept house for one of her sons, but when he married she \"wanted a roof of my own over my head.\" She could not afford to purchase land. Shepherd stated she could complete the homestead duties satisfactorily, and she too argued she could \"do better than several half-witted fellows about here who have got [homesteads], or ignorant foreigners who cannot speak a word of English.\"\n\nWhile \"foreign\" men were singled out for criticism, some supporters of the campaign extended this to a larger group of males. W.F. Graham wrote from Pettapiece, Manitoba, that there were women in every Canadian city, including teachers, stenographers, and clerks, who were \"surely more valuable citizens than the drinking, carousing, cigarette smoking young fellows who loaf about bar rooms, and yet the latter have votes and homesteads and the former have neither.\"\n\nAlthough this facet of the argument was muted, perhaps in order to appear non-threatening, supporters of homesteads for women linked homestead and property rights to suffrage, arguing that with homestead rights, women would be landowners and would therefore have to become voters. In a letter to the _Free Press_ , \"Business Woman\" wrote, \"Why the Dominion government does not grant a homestead to each and all of our Canadian women who want one bad enough to do all the homestead duties the same as a man, instead of importing foreigners from all over Europe mostly factory and labouring hands, I cannot see, unless they are afraid that with women landowners we would the sooner get the vote.\" In the _Voice_ (Winnipeg), the newspaper of the western trade unions, it was noted that supporters of homesteads for women \"probably have in mind the anomalous position the woman will be in who homesteads, if the government will amend the law and grant her that right. She will be a freeholder of the fertile lands of the west... but will still be in the position of a minor or dependent, denied the right of the franchise. If women should have the right of homestead they should have the right to vote.\"\n\nThe issue of the franchise was also linked to that of the \"foreigner\" male, as \"Business Woman\" wrote above. The \"foreign\" man could not only obtain a homestead but could also vote. As \"School Teacher\" wrote to the _Manitoba Free Press_ in 1910, women's right to homesteads \"should go hand in hand with women suffrage. When foreigners receive 160 acres of Dominion land apiece with the franchise thrown in, surely a Canadian woman should receive much more. We have the right of common claim and assuredly deserve this act of common justice from our native land.\"\n\nThe rationale that began as muted but increasingly took centre stage was that homesteads for (some) women would address the \"foreign menace.\" \"A Saskatchewan Farmeress\" wrote in April 1910 to the _Guide_ that \"I know of no less than a score of good, honest, respectable girls of proper age, who would be a credit to any neighbourhood or province, and who will do more to improve not only the homesteads but the country, than all the Doukhobors in the province.\" The corollary of this was that the right sort of woman had to be encouraged to populate the West, and homesteading could entice that kind of woman while domestic service would not. \"Jemima\" argued in 1912 to the _Nor'West Farmer_ that the West needed to attract British and Canadian-born women who might establish dairy and poultry farms, or raise sheep and goats. She ventured to say that if domestic service had been the only thing offered to young men, then few would have settled in Western Canada.\n\nOPPONENTS\n\nOpponents of homesteads for women included powerful men such as Frank Oliver, who drew on a variety of counter-arguments, including that women would not be inclined to marry if they had the right to homestead on their own, and that married couples were required to establish homesteads and family farms on the prairies. Calgary Conservative politician, and later prime minister R.B. Bennett maintained that if separated women were allowed the right to homestead it would encourage couples to part ways. (Opponents did not seem to realize that the homestead laws caused people to postpone or even avoid marriage. As one observer noted, \"A certain widow and a certain man are living side by side, and, while they ought to marry, they cannot do so for a period of three years, until the widow has proved up on her homestead.\")\n\nFor opponents, the American West was not a source of inspiration. As discussed in the last chapter, J. Obed Smith told Binnie-Clark following her 1913 presentation to the Royal Colonial Institute that Canada did not want to pursue the same \"disastrous\" course as the United States had. He elaborated on this some months later in a \"despatch,\" explaining that in the United States, \"in nearly every case there was a distinct evasion of the spirit of the law... the American girls took up their homesteads, so did their fianc\u00e9s. Then they married and had two homesteads, contrary to the spirit of the law.\" In a 1904 article in the _Globe_ (Toronto), a special correspondent commented on differences between the Canadian and U.S. West, noting that the United States \"appears to be more liberal in its treatment of the fair sex.\" He had learned this at his hotel, where he could not get a cooked breakfast and discovered that the dining room waitress was \"out on her homestead.\" He reported that in the United States virtually no improvements were required before patent to a homestead was issued, and included a story of the mayhem that resulted from the lenient divorce laws of the United States and the laws that permitted women to homestead:\n\nThis holding of land by women is responsible for the story about the South Dakota married couple, a farmer and his wife, who held a quarter section, but wanted another one. They determined to take advantage of the lax divorce laws of the State, get divorced, after which, as a single woman, the lady could take up the adjoining quarter section after which they would be remarried. The idea worked out well at first. The divorce and the quarter section were both secured, and the farmer built a house half upon his own and half upon the lady's quarter section. But it was another case of the course of true love. Once divorced the lady fell in love with another man, married him and husband No. 2 secured the coveted quarter section. The story does not tell how the house was divided.\n\nIn his 1907 publication, _The Land Laws of Canada and the Land Experience of the United States_ , Ditlew M. Frederiksen was critical of the \"school marms\" who had been permitted to homestead in the U.S. West. Like Smith, Frederiksen found their claims a fraudulent abuse of the homestead laws. He quoted the findings of the 1905 U.S. report of the Public Lands Commission about entries made by \"female school teachers, who spend their vacations on their claims, commute the entries, and leave the country as soon as a better paying position can be found elsewhere.\" (Frederiksen found, however, that there was even more widespread abuse of the homestead laws by men in both the United States and Canada. Referring to Saskatchewan, he wrote that \"what greets the eye frequently is one shack after another without any signs of real fields, stables ... clothes hanging out to dry on the line, or other evidences of progress, family life and civilization.\")\n\n\"Rural legends\" of frozen young women homesteaders of the American West helped to point out their unsuitability and ineptitude. In 1906 it was rumoured that \"two girl homesteaders were frozen to death on their claims\" in northeast Montana, but it was also reported that \"no particulars are obtainable.\" In 1916 it was widely reported that two teacher homesteaders had been found frozen to death near Havre, in northern Montana close to the Canadian border. The tale had many touching details, including that they were sisters who penned notes saying goodbye to their mother. The story was found to be a hoax.\n\nJ. Obed Smith was convinced that women were incapable of the physical labour required on a farm, and other opponents agreed. \"Homo\" wrote to the _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ in 1910, \"Show me the woman who will handle horses, plough, pitch hay, stook grain etc. Oh, no. The very first thing she must do after securing her homestead is to hire, marry, or to otherwise obtain a man.\" He continued: \"Every woman in her heart knows full well that she is vastly inferior to man physically. If there are any who do not, they are to say the least, very foolish.\" (Such letters generally generated many more by women who were performing all of the tasks necessary on a homestead.) Opponents to homesteads for women also claimed that women could not hire and supervise men. The problem would then be idle and vacant land, and \"those who live in the west fully realize the great necessity of rapid development of the country.\"\n\nFor context, it is instructive to remember that there was a time in Western Canada when there was debate about whether it was proper for women to learn a host of skills or habits defined as masculine, such as smoking or driving machinery such as an automobile. In 1915 one critic of women's abilities wrote to the _Calgary Daily Herald_ that driving a car was \"the most severe test one can possibly have on the nerves.\" He doubted that women would be able to act decisively and without warning to avoid accidents, or that they were strong enough to steer and use the brakes. A Calgary alderman was in favour of a by-law prohibiting women from driving cars, saying, \"Women may be and doubtless are perfectly capable of driving an automobile but when they meet a sudden emergency in driving they are apt to lose their heads.\"\n\nIssues of femininity and propriety were raised by critics of women labouring outdoors. One woman wrote that any farmer husband would be \"ashamed to see [his] wife ploughing in the fields.\" Many commented that woman's place was as wife and mother, and that young women should be striving to marry the bachelors of the prairies who had homes established already. \"Homo\" wrote, \"I am of the opinion that if those few women of today, who are clamouring, shrieking, and wasting their time in a futile attempt to attain that which would be of little, if any, use to them, would devote their time to their children, and other duties for which they were created, they would be rendering a far greater service to their sex.\" Many insisted (despite the huge volume of letters to the contrary) that \"I have yet to meet any single woman who is anxious to go homesteading.\" \"Pencilitus\" continued: \"What young woman with any intelligence would want to cast her lot on the prairie without any protection and perhaps as far as twenty to forty miles from kith and kin.\" \"Pencilitus\" asked what would become of the country if \"women were given to grasping after the material things of this universe? What would become of our schools and colleges, our hospitals and kindergartens, and last, but not least, the home?\" Young women striving to get ahead of young men in material things would destroy the \"law of attraction.\"\n\n\"Silver Knight\" agreed that he knew of few Canadian girls who would \"forfeit their modesty and 'rough' it for three years at least, even for the sake of getting 160 acres of land for free.\" He added that Canadian mothers would not want to see their daughters live on a quarter section for three years. \"It oftentimes becomes a woman to relinquish her 'rights' and uphold her dignity,\" he wrote. \"Silver Knight\" had travelled extensively and knew of no other place where women were \"more respected, appreciated and rewarded than in western Canada.\" The \"sons of Canada\" treated the women of the region with \"chivalry, courtesy, respect.\" Women had to milk cows morning and night in Ontario, but \"it is a very unusual thing for a woman to be seen milking in Western Canada.\"\n\nReluctant supporters of land for women advocated that if women were to have homesteads, they should have much smaller acreages. \"Eureka\" wrote in 1912 from Saskatchewan to propose that 160-acre homesteads be broken up into twenty-acre plots for women to share. They could also share accommodation and save costs, and in this way \"make an independent living at poultry raising, dairying, gardening, or raising small fruits.\"\n\nEnglish travel writer Bessie Pullen-Burry gave some coverage to the homestead campaign in her 1912 book _From Halifax to Vancouver_ , but she was decidedly lukewarm toward the idea of encouraging women to emigrate for that purpose. In Winnipeg she met with journalist Ethel Osborne, who was a supporter of the cause, and Pullen-Burry provided a synopsis of the main arguments, but in her opinion, \"Canadian women in the West are the worst off of any of their sex among civilised peoples.\" She learned from a Scottish woman settler that \"to say that the conditions of life for educated gentlewomen in Canada were not a daily round of toil and monotony... would be to obscure and to pervert truth.\" Dangers lurked everywhere for the women settlers in solitary districts, and the Scottish woman believed it \"absolutely indispensable\" that women \"become practised shots.\" A young schoolteacher had allegedly recently been \"dragged to the woods by a ruffian.\" Pullen-Burry wrote that \"women living on these isolated farms, I assure you, go through periods of mental torture from sheer terror which men never realise until some horrid tragedy within a stone's throw of their own farms makes them uneasy as to the risks run by their womenfolk.\"\n\nElizabeth Keith Morris, author of _An Englishwoman in the Canadian West_ (1913), opposed homestead rights for women. She was a critic of the \"lady farmer,\" as she referred to Binnie-Clark (as mentioned in the previous chapter), and wrote that the Canadian government wisely limited the homestead right to men, realizing the difficulties and hardships women would confront. She agreed with the \"existing opinion amongst farmers in Canada\u2014that the hard and heavy work is unsuitable for women. We heard of odd cases where modern Amazons had many acres under cultivation, but these were exceptional and should not point the way to others.\" Only a very few would have the physical stamina: \"The gently-nurtured, sheltered and irresponsible type of English girl would be mad to dream of following such an occupation, for she is unsuited to any kind of life in the Dominion.\"\n\nThough their voices were few in the letters columns, \"foreigners\" objected to what was becoming a central element of the campaign, which was to question the entitlement of \"outsiders\" to land when British and British-Canadian women were denied homesteads. A \"foreigner\" wrote to the _Manitoba Free Press_ in 1910 to say that the majority of farmers on the prairies were \"foreigners of different nationalities,\" and that they were doing their share to improve the land and that surely they deserved homesteads. (He also believed it was not \"a woman's place\" to homestead, since women could \"get married and let the husband do the work\" while having plenty to do with home and offspring.)\n\nIt is interesting that in the debates that took place in the farm journals and newspapers of the West, none of the opponents argued that by farming, British or British-Ontarian women would sink to the level of \"foreign\" women or the Indigenous women of North America or other colonies. Yet this was implied through the widespread coverage of the Doukhobor women who hitched themselves to the plough. A 1911 article that was published in numerous newspapers of the West pronounced that Doukhobor women \"have been reclaimed from the plow. No longer do they sweat in the fields of Canada instead of horses... the new world's environments have drawn the women back from the brute level, to which they have been degraded, to the home, with its cooking, its spinning, and its weaving... The melting pot of the western world has recast even the Doukhobors.\"\n\nHOMESTEADS FOR SOME WOMEN BUT NOT OTHERS\n\nIncreasingly, the central rationale in the homesteads-for-women campaign was that land grants should be available to \"daughters of British blood\" rather than \"hordes of men of alien race.\" Similar arguments were being made by some supporters of women's suffrage. E.A. Partridge, founder of the _Grain Growers' Guide_ and a supporter of women's suffrage, argued in a 1909 editorial that it was an \"outrage to deny to the highest minded, most cultured native-born lady what is cheerfully granted to the lowest browed, most imbruted foreign hobo that chooses to visit our shores.\" At the _Guide_ , Isabelle Beaton Graham increasingly emphasized this argument for (some) women's homestead rights. In her 1909 column that helped launch the campaign, under the subheading \"Consider the Douks,\" she protested the gift of homestead land to the Doukhobors who \"so scandalize civilization.\" \"It is painful to realize that our own Canadian men,\" Graham wrote, \"our fathers and our brothers\u2014deliberately set us aside as undeserving of a share in our country... to bring in ignorant, uncouth, lawless foreigners to occupy lands that we desire, that we have labored for yet cannot have.\" In her next, most sustained column on the issue, \"Unearned Increments and Woman's Dower,\" Graham wrote that the federal government preferred to dower the \"unspeakable foreigner,\" while denying to women the proceeds of their own toil.\n\nThis argument found many supporters in the pages of the _Guide_ and other publications. \"Mother Scot,\" from Alberta, complained that their farm was surrounded by a \"colony of aliens whose habits and ways of looking at things make them hopeless as neighbors,\" and \"I often think how unfair it is to give these outlanders the privilege of homesteads and deny that privilege to their own race and blood, when it happens to be of the other sex. Is not the mother\u2014actual or prospective\u2014of sons and daughters of British blood at least as worthy of a share of God's free gift as the hordes of men of alien race who are given free homesteads without a condition?\" From Wapella, Saskatchewan, \"Lochinvar\" mocked the law that permitted any male to homestead while British and Canadian women were denied: \"He may be the greatest imbecile in the world, but, if he wears pants and keeps cool he can get the farm. He may come from the ill-fed, ill-bred and illiterate peoples of parts of Europe. He may come from the darkest jungles of darkest Africa. He may be the greatest villain the universe produced, he can get the land, but women, cultured, refined, able to make and keep home happy\u2014not on your life.\" This writer concluded that it was folly to provide land to \"semi-savages,\" who would take \"centuries to mould into a British subject, in preference to a British woman with British pluck, endurance and everything that makes for an enlightened Canadian citizenship.\"\n\nGraham and other supporters of homesteads for women manipulated fears of the \"foreign\" or \"alien\" element that prevailed among the British-Ontarian settlers. Intolerant attitudes toward immigrants seen as undesirable, including Mormons, Ukrainians, Jews, Doukhobors, and Asians, were stridently and widely broadcast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Western Canada. Many of the most prominent newspapermen in the West, such as Frank Oliver and P.G. Laurie, editor of the _Saskatchewan Herald_ , Battleford, took the lead in propagating these views. How could \"the Greater Britain Beyond the Seas\" be forged from the peasantry of Europe? A further \"outrage\" was that these \"aliens\" could vote, \"men who have just emerged from serfdom... who are ignorant of they very alphabet of the public life of Canada.\"\n\nProponents of homesteads for women capitalized on fears of the \"foreigner\" to connect themselves to issues of national and imperial importance to which they could offer solutions. They were asking for equal treatment, but only for those British and Canadian-born women who qualified for inclusion. Like suffragists in the U.S. West and in other colonial settings, they \"manipulated ideas about racial and ethnic 'Others,' usually reinforcing contemporary racialist and racist attitudes, particularly those linking race, sex and 'civilization.'\" In Western Canada, however, supporters of homesteads for women could not claim superiority by virtue of their \"whiteness,\" since the \"foreign\" women they wanted to exclude from the privilege of homesteading were phenotypically similar. It was not particularly clear just who was \"white\" in Western Canada. As Catherine Hall has observed, the question of \"who was white\" was seldom straightforward in the colonies of the British Empire. Instead of whiteness, Britishness became the marker of privilege in Western Canada, and a British-Canadian elite dominated business, politics, the law, and education. Leaders of the homesteads-for-women campaign decided to align themselves and identify with this elite, arguing that British-Canadian women settlers would help maintain the hegemony of the group.\n\nThe manipulation of fears of racial and ethnic \"others\" among some supporters of homesteads for women reached a new level in 1911, when the likelihood loomed of a sizeable migration of African Americans from Oklahoma to Alberta and Saskatchewan. They had begun to appear in small numbers in 1905, increasing after 1907 when Oklahoma became a state and the first state legislature passed \"Jim Crow\" legislation, and again in 1910 when Oklahoma Democrats moved to disenfranchise African Americans. There was a strong reaction against this migration in Western Canada. Graham's columns in the _Guide_ were among the most racist, strident, and alarmist, containing utterly fabricated allegations. Her column \"The Negro\" of 3 May 1911 began,\n\nFireside would like well to know what the people, especially the country women of the west think about the negro invasion that is now pouring into the Canadian west and receiving free land grants from the Dominion government, and farming large settlements contiguous to and among the whites. There can scarcely be anyone who is not aware of the atrocities committed by members of these terrible communities, the only corresponding punishment for which is the lawless lynching, and even burning at the stake. Already it is reported that three white women in the Edmonton and Peace River districts have been victims of these outrages accomplished in peculiarly fiendish abandon. Where will the end be? ... How many of these industrious, courageous, unprotected, country women must be sacrificed to the horrors of negro attack before the slow and rusty machinery that drives the engine of state can be induced to erect a barricade against so dreadful an evil?\n\nAlthough it seems like an odd leap after pointing out the vulnerability of women alone on homesteads, the main point of Graham's column on \"The Negro\" was that women should be given the right to homestead. She concluded that \"it should be possible for Canadian women to secure from the government of their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons at least an equal share with the foreign negro, in the rich heritage of the Dominion's homestead lands.\" This was also Graham's first column to clearly articulate that homesteaders should not be \"foreign\" women who did not know the \"rigors of the country, and who are bound to fail through the discouragements of unexpected hardships. In their interest it is wise to hinder them at the start until fully assured that they understand the undertaking.\"\n\nIn the _Saskatoon_ _Star Phoenix_ , Valance Patriarche warned of the \"Foreign Menace\" that was a \"grave concern\" and a \"hazard that threatens the unity of Canada.\" She feared that the \"native population,\" by which she meant Canadian and British settlers, would soon be \"overwhelmed, lost amid the foreign invasion.\" Granting single women free homesteads would help to Canadianize this \"cosmopolitan element.\" She explained: \"Many wise thinkers are advocating a slower, finer growth for the West, and it is indisputable that the encouragement of Canadian and British women would be a step in the right direction. There is a crying need all through the West for teachers and church workers. On the other hand there is a longing in the heart of many a courageous moral and educated single woman for a home of her own, a chance to labor in the open air, as her own mistress, and to escape that most pitiable end\u2014a worked out woman dependent upon others for her help or support in her old age.\" Patriarche concluded that \"it is not surprising that the unmarried British woman of sound health considers that, providing she is capable of cultivating the land, she is as valuable an asset to her country as the male unmarried foreigner. Indeed, if she has thought at all she realizes she would be a help to the community where the foreigner is often a detriment.\"\n\nTHE SECOND PETITION: HOMESTEADS FOR \"ALL WOMEN OF BRITISH BIRTH\"\n\nA second homesteads-for-women petition, prepared by Isabelle Beaton Graham, was announced in the 24 May 1911 issue of the _Guide_. The arguments set forth in the petition were that widows had made successful and desirable settlers; that many others, including unmarried women and widows without young children, desired to homestead; that these women would foster education and health and encourage a \"better class of male settlers\"; that the homestead laws discriminated against families with daughters; that women contributed their share to the growth and prosperity of the nation and had helped to make Dominion lands valuable; and that the privilege of homesteading would afford women a healthy and economic method of securing an independent livelihood, easing congestion in towns and cities and drawing the population back to the land. The petition then asked that the Parliament of Canada grant the privilege of homesteading to \"all women of British birth who have resided in Canada for six months, and if residing with their father or mother or a near relative, are of the age of eighteen years, or if otherwise, are of the age of twenty-one years.\"\n\nThe wording of the petition was deliberately vague on the marital status of the would-be woman homesteader. It could be understood to include both single and married women. In answer to a reader who wrote that she would support the petition if it meant married women as well as single, Graham wrote that \"it is certainly intended that any woman, married or single, of British birth shall be eligible to homestead,\" but that it was \"not thought advisable to flaunt the married woman's claim before 'the powers that be.'\" She explained that married women were not specifically mentioned in the petition \"in the hope that thereby she might pass in unobserved, as it were, but she is certainly there, and who has a better right? It is the married woman, NOT the single man.\"\n\nThere was some debate and uncertainty about whose signatures should be obtained for the petition. In June 1911, Graham thought there should be separate petitions\u2014one for men and one for women\u2014\"so that it could easily be ascertained which are the voters and how many, and which are the non-voters.\" Only women over the age of twenty-one were to sign. But this strategy was shelved when it was later decided that only the signatures of voters (men) should be obtained. Graham explained that \"it will be taken for granted that all women desire the homestead privilege for their sisters even though they do not intend to take advantage of it themselves.\"\n\nMany letters requesting copies of the petition soon appeared in the _Guide._ Supporters sought signatures at summer agricultural fairs and events such as Dominion Day and Orangemen's picnics. Other tactics included postcards and letters sent directly to officials in Ottawa. In 1913 J.H. Perra of Winnipeg wrote to the minister of the interior that \"on the strength of the success that the women of the States have made in homesteading and that which the Canadian women are making on scrip which they have bought, can you not see your way to introduce a bill to give the women of Canada the right to homestead. We women of the west feel that our rightful inheritance is wrested away from us and given to strangers and all because we have committed the sin of belonging to the 'female species.'\"\n\n_Figure 33._ Homesteads-for-British-Women Petition that was presented to the Parliament of Canada in February 1913 with over 11,000 signatures. It was completely ignored. The petition, which asked that the privilege of homesteading be granted to \"all women of British birth,\" was criticized in the Winnipeg trade union newspaper the _Voice_ as a \"bald piece of discrimination.\" Library and Archives Canada, Record Group 15, Department of the Interior, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2.\n\n_Figure 34._ Supporters of the homesteads-for-women campaign were asked to send postcards directly to the Department of the Interior in Ottawa. These are two examples from Mrs. John Robbins of Morse, Saskatchewan, and Mrs. Frances Williams, Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta. Library and Archives Canada, Record Group 15, Department of the Interior, D-Ii-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2.\n\nThe Women's Labour League of Winnipeg endorsed the campaign in August 1911 after a \"lengthy discussion upon a point of technicality.\" They favoured this cause at the time over women's suffrage, as the League had not taken action on a request to circulate petitions for suffrage. The League used Labour Day in September 1911 to get signatures on the homestead petition at an event at River Park, where their display contrasted the ability of \"halfbreed\" and \"foreign\" men to get land with the lack of opportunities for British women. Their display created \"considerable interest,\" with cartoons that illustrated the following slogans: \"We help men to fight for liberty, need we pray for them to grant it to us?; Is the British woman less capable of ruling a homestead than the halfbreed?; Give the daughters increasing independence that they may be prepared to avoid the tragedy of a misspent life; When God gives me a sister shall I withhold the land from her feet? etc.\"\n\nBefore long, fissures appeared that weakened and undermined the campaign. Readers repeatedly asked Graham why American women were excluded under the wording of the petition. As E.L. Stow, born in the United States but resident in Saskatchewan, wrote, \"I do not see why I have not as much right to homestead as a woman of British birth. I am sure I know more about the work of a farm than a Britisher just out a year could do at first.\" She had \"run the binder, stooked, cut, raked, and stacked hay; plowed, disked and harrowed; in fact I think I have done everything necessary on a farm.\" \"Ex-American\" wrote, \"When I read your petition in Fireside all my fondest hopes were crushed for the petition reads that women of British and Canadian birth be allowed the privilege of homesteading and I first beheld the light of day under the Stars and Stripes.\" A Mrs. Paterson from Plateau, Saskatchewan, argued that women from the United States should be included, writing that \"a great number of the best and pluckiest settlers we have in Western Canada are American women.\"\n\nOn many occasions Graham was obliged to explain her reasoning for excluding all but women of British birth. She wrote on 16 August 1911 that she was \"not opposed to the American woman as a homesteader. She is akin to us in every attribute... with the exception of fealty to the British flag. But if we admit any nationality other than British, where shall we, or where can we, draw the line? Instantly the question will be raised, 'Is it in the interest of Canada to admit a heterogeneous mass of foreign femininity to the homestead privilege in Canada? Can we absorb them as fast as they will come? Even as it is the foreign men are a menace and hindrance.'\" Graham feared the petition would be unsuccessful if it asked for homestead rights for \"women who have no culture whatever, no education, and women who are unlikely to be anything but a drawback to the progress of Canadian institutions for years to come.\" No one could object, however, to \"an influx of law-abiding, industrious, refined and patriotic gentlewomen with some means into the bleak and bare stretches of the West.\" Graham also insisted that \"the American woman has least to complain of inasmuch as she has had the homestead privilege for years and years in her own country.\"\n\nThere was support for Graham's position that American and \"foreign\" women should be excluded. James Allan, of Cordova, Manitoba, declared he would not have signed the petition if it had not stated \"women of British birth.\" American women, he argued, could not \"just step across the line and expect to have the same rights as a Canadian born.\" Canadian women were entitled because \"they should have some birthright in their own country, and British next, because this is part of the British Empire and all the British born subjects should have equal rights.\" He wrote that he would \"oppose to the bitter end any act that would give to the Galician or German girl... the same rights as to our Canadian and British women.\"\n\nSpeaking up for the rights of \"foreign\" and immigrant women, \"Wilhelmina\" wrote from Alberta in 1913 to the _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ to say that \"Canada cannot afford to turn away women of foreign birth.\" She described her experiences as a homesteader in North Dakota, where she had filed her own claim in a community of other homesteaders. \"We built sod houses and sod barns and used flax straw and dry manure for fuel. All this we learned from foreigners, the stout Russians. I have learned many a good lesson from foreigners and hope that they will be carefully protected.\" She was in favour of homesteads for all males and all females over the age of eighteen, regardless of ethnicity. Some prominent people in the women's movement in Western Canada did not agree with the tactic of excluding \"foreign\" women. Francis Marion Beynon, who played a critical role in the suffrage campaign in Manitoba along with her sister Lillian Beynon Thomas, was a consistent defender of the rights of the \"foreigner,\" believing that all ethnic groups deserved equal treatment.\n\nSoon there were many voices objecting to the words \"of British birth\" in the petition. \"Is a woman of British birth any more entitled to homestead privileges than one of any other birth who comes here to live, and by so doing, helps build up the country, by helping her husband and neighbors transform a barren prairie to a garden spot of grain?\" asked H.G. Ahern, from Claresholm, Alberta. \"The women of British birth should not be so selfish and shortsighted as to try to put through a law of this kind... for if they succeed it will be a blot on the degree of their intelligence, and a factor of their lack of Christianity as practiced by them, which our historians will be sorry to relate.\" M.E. Graham, who acquired signatures at the Kitscoty Dominion Day celebration, reported that a great number of potential supporters of both sexes were not in favour of the clause \"of British birth.\" She added that she personally saw it as a mistake, as there were so many excellent women from the States, and she saw no reason why the homestead law for women should differ from that for men. In a letter sent directly to Ottawa, V.C. Bedier wrote from Chauvin, Alberta, to say that the measures Graham was trying to introduce through the petition ought to fail, \"because of it being so narrow let it be for all women... It certainly would be hard to find women less suitable to help build a country than some of these very ones she so very narrowly tries to favour.\"\n\nThe Winnipeg trade union newspaper the _Voice_ criticized the petition in an editorial in September 1911. (The _Voice_ 's editor was Arthur Puttee, whose wife, Gertrude, hosted meetings of the Women's Labor League that supported the petition.) The _Voice_ expressed some sympathy for the cause, as \"it strikes anyone as being a grave discrimination against the sex that the government should be offering to all and sundry men throughout the world the right to enter for free lands in Canada... and at the same time refuse that privilege to a Canadian woman who may see this means the road to economic freedom.\" The editorial disagreed with the petition, however, finding it was\n\nnot conceived on any broadminded lines, and does not provide any incitement for progressive women to enthuse. While the preamble of it may be satisfactory, it will be noticed by those who take the time to read it observingly... that it asks for the right to homestead for \"women of British birth\" only. How very restrictive this is can only be appreciated here in the west. For a dozen of years people have been pouring in from all the nations of the earth; invited, almost recruited by the government. Although they may have been naturalized in the interim their women folk are still to be debarred from homestead rights if the prayer of the petitioners is granted: indeed, the petition has been specially drawn to debar them. These are the women who would be most likely to want to homestead; and in the large proportion of cases they would be the women most suitable to undertake the hardships attendant theron. It is not often that a public petition includes such a bald piece of discrimination as this and we think the women would be well advised to alter the prayer of the petition or drop it.\n\nThe issue of continued support for the campaign was discussed at an October meeting of the Women's Labor League, which decided that while their organization could not discriminate against all nationalities having equal opportunities, the present petition had a chance to pass, being endorsed by prominent men, whereas one with a wider scope might not. The League was prepared to continue to support the petition, although there was regret that \"the measure shuts out several nationalities which might be beneficial to the country.\" They decided that the words \"British birth\" were\n\ninserted mainly to prevent the influx of those European women who are used as beasts of burden by men who cannot afford oxen, and while it has been reported that women may be seen in the prairie provinces hitched to the plow, the league would discountenance any scheme which tended to so degrade women, and it is thought that a bill which granted free homesteads to that class would introduce into this country too many who were willing to continue their old country habits and do the \"donkey work\" while the men smoked and drank the results of their toil, thus tending to lower the social and moral tone of the country.\n\nSupporters were optimistic in 1911 that a change in the federal government might usher in a new regime more sympathetic to their cause. Frank Oliver and the Liberals were defeated in the September election that year. The Conservative government of Robert Borden appointed Robert Rogers of Winnipeg as minister of the interior in 1911, and when he became minister of public works the next year, Dr. W.J. Roche, member of Parliament for Marquette, Manitoba, was appointed minister of the interior. In 1910 it was Roche who had introduced the issue of homesteads for women in the House of Commons, and he had seemed in favour, arguing that \"if this privilege were granted to the fair sex many would go into the west. As there was a surplus of men on the prairies such a movement would assist them in getting helpmates.\" Once in power, however, Roche's sympathy for the cause disappeared, but that was not immediately apparent. The petition remained the central strategy, and Graham remained steadfast in her insistence on the \"British birth\" clause as a route to the creation of a \"pure\" and \"moral\" colony. She wrote in October 1911: \"People are beginning to wake up to the vast conception and imperialistic importance of tendering free homesteads, as an inducement to women of strong moral force and high intellectual ability, to come to our beautiful West and lend their aid in establishing a Canadian colony, a new and clean colony that may, that will in no far-distant future, hold a shining lamp to shed a gleaming light of justice, of honor, of idealistic national purity, of all home comfort, of brotherly love, to all the wide world.\"\n\nIn the fall of 1911 a letter-writing contest on the topic of homesteads for women was featured in the _Guide._ The idea was to explain to the new minister of the interior Robert Rogers the need for and justice of the claim. Five prizes were to be awarded on the topic of \"Why women should be granted homestead privileges.\" The best letters were published in December 1911, and readers were asked to vote on which they felt deserved the prizes. The letters included eloquent pleas that echoed the rationales that have already been outlined here, although either the letter writers themselves or the editor did not include critiques of the \"foreigner\" being granted access to land. The writers contended that a land of contented, prosperous homes would replace the vacant farms and bachelor shacks; that women could enjoy a healthy open air life rather than factory work and unsanitary surroundings; that women could have property of their own in the event of financial calamity; that families with daughters would not be at a disadvantage; women would be induced to emigrate to the West; and that there would be wives for homesteaders.\n\nMrs. J.W. Moore in Ernfold, Saskatchewan, put the matter most succinctly in her essay, arguing that women had \"as much right to be independent as men,\" that they had done as much as men to advance the country, that they had endured as many hardships as men and had equally shared the homestead duties only to find that their husbands had mortgaged or sold their land, that girls needed to be encouraged to stay on the farms, and that if allowed to vote, women would use sound judgement.\n\nBy late 1911, Graham was replaced as the women's page editor of the _Guide_ , apparently in order to pursue the campaign full time, but it may also have been that her views were considered too controversial and extreme, after her racist condemnation of African-American settlers. She was replaced first, and briefly, by Mary Ford, and then by Francis Marion Beynon, who played a critical role in the suffrage campaign in Manitoba along with her sister Lillian Beynon Thomas and Nellie McClung. Beynon had been a consistent defender of the rights of the \"foreigner,\" believing that all ethnic groups deserved equal treatment. She once commented in response to a slur against people of colour, \"Because we of the Anglo-Saxon race have been able to bully less militant and aggressive peoples into handing over their territory to us is a poor basis for the assumption that we as a race are the anointed of God and the one and only righteous and virtuous people.\" Nellie McClung also endorsed ethnic diversity and promoted a vision of Canada as a place where \"every race, color or creed will be given exactly the same chance.\" In 1915 McClung spoke \"passionately in defence of the foreign women\" on the question of suffrage. At the same time her writing and speeches expressed deep pride in and admiration for the British Empire, and in 1917, she briefly redacted her defence of the rights of \"foreign\" women when she called for voting rights for Canadian and British-born women only as a war measure. McClung soon withdrew her support for this, however, and acknowledged her error when Beynon criticized her in the _Guide._ There were, however, other suffragists who used the same arguments advanced by Graham, asking how they could be disenfranchised when \"untutored\" \"foreigners\" could vote and determine their laws and future. They argued that the female franchise could offset the votes of illiterate immigrants, and that \"Canadian women had the well-being of the country more at heart than the average foreign immigrant.\"\n\nAfter Graham left the _Guide_ , the petition continued to circulate, although under Beynon's editorship there was much less emphasis and far fewer letters published on the issue. The petition was not submitted to Parliament until 1913, when it attracted little attention; the campaign was ultimately an utter failure. The elitist strategy of Graham and other proponents of homesteads for women that excluded rights for \"foreign\" women weakened rather than consolidated their base of support. Key potential constituencies were alienated, including settlers from the United States. But even without these fissures in the campaign, it seems unlikely that it would have succeeded. The reasons against granting homestead rights to women in Western Canada were clearly articulated in an editorial in the _Nor'West Farmer_ of 5 September 1912, explaining why the editors of that journal could not support the cause and wanted nothing to do with the issue of which women should be granted homestead rights. Homesteads for women were opposed \"on the simple ground that women are not naturally fitted to become independent, permanent, capable agriculturalists.\" To bestow 160 acres on every woman who should apply for it was \"an unwarranted dissipation of our public domain and a menace to our agriculture.\" As it was, there were enough \"agricultural scaliwags\" breaking the spirit of the homestead contract by making the smallest possible amounts of improvements. Capable, lifelong farmers were wanted. Some women might be able to farm on their own, but \"the average woman is lacking in the physical strength and natural independence and resource so necessary in a homesteading undertaking.\"\n\nAs historian Bradford Rennie has written, there was considerable support from male farmers in the West for the homesteads-for-women movement, but opinions were divided and there were limitations to this support. Rennie writes that men signed the petition, but \"many men opposed the campaign, including delegates to the 1912 Saskatchewan Grain Growers convention, and those in favour in Alberta were not sufficiently concerned to see a resolution on the subject brought before a UFA [United Farmers of Alberta] convention.\" According to Rennie, it was the homesteads-for-women campaign that helped to build a women's section of the UFA, mobilizing and training women to work for a cause, and encouraging them to join the agrarian movement. But as will be discussed in the next chapter, the demands of organized agrarian women for domestic servants were a priority and this was at odds with, or sat uncomfortably beside, the campaign for homestead rights.\n\nThe petition, bearing over 11,000 signatures as well as support from organizations such as the Winnipeg Board of Trade, the three provincial Grain Growers' Associations, the National Council of Women, and Women's Press Clubs across Canada was submitted to Parliament in February 1913. There was no debate on or interest in the issue. Minister of the Interior W.J. Roche simply said \"this matter is under consideration\" when asked if the petition had been received and what action the government proposed to take. The petition received nothing more than a polite written response from Roche to Isabelle Graham, who was informed that \"any matter pertaining to the welfare of the Canadian people will always receive my close and favorable consideration.\"\n\nLAST GASPS OF THE CAMPAIGN: THE \"NATURAL\" GENDER ORDER PRESERVED\n\nThat was not the end of interest in homesteads for women, but from here on the campaign lost steam. Disappointed in this as well as the dower campaign, organized women focused attention on the vote as a means of achieving their goals. In 1916 voting rights were granted to women, with the exception of Indigenous women, in the three Prairie provinces after years of intense campaigning. The petition remained a main strategy, and the one presented to the premier of Manitoba in 1915 had 39,584 signatures (indicating how comparatively few supporters there had been for homesteads for British women). The First World War also diverted attention away from issues such as homesteads for women. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Binnie-Clark's 1914 book, _Wheat and Woman_ , in which she stressed the obstacles faced by the woman farmer in Western Canada, could not have been published at a less ideal time. Even Binnie-Clark herself deserted the cause, returning to England for many years and devoting her attention to other, war-related issues.\n\nYet supporters had been won through the campaign. A 1915 editorial in the Toronto _Globe_ supported the homesteads-for-women cause (minus the preference for \"British-born\" women only). The homestead laws were a \"serious injustice\" that \"worked injuriously in many ways.\" The main argument advanced was that as the law stood, the male homesteader \"performs settlement duties as if in an obstacle race, without the intention of actual settlement, but with an outlook for speculative development. Were the discrimination against women removed there would be far less of this class of homesteading.\" The editorial concluded: \"The entrance of women into many occupations formerly reserved for men has not caused the social and economic derangements predicted, but has been almost invariably advantageous from the standpoint of progress and development. The change requested in the homesteading law rests on a basis of equity that is unassailable. Neither on grounds of justice nor expediency can it longer be refused.\"\n\nThat women did not have homestead rights in Western Canada to 1930 reflects the goals of the architects of the Canadian West, who imagined and fashioned the region as an extension of the British Empire, distinct from their neighbours to the south. Here the \"traditional\" and \"natural\" gender order was to be preserved. White women, preferably of British ancestry, were viewed as the key to order and civilization and to the agrarian ideal, but only if they were firmly tied to the home and domestic sphere. Importing young women as domestic servants rather than holding out the hope of land ownership and possible independence from marriage best served these goals. Promoters of agriculture as a suitable occupation for women in the pages of the _Imperial Colonist_ made little impact, nor did the example of the women homesteaders of the American West. Ownership of land (although not working on the land of their spouses, fathers, or brothers) disrupted cherished ideals of British femininity. As Kathryn M. Hunter has written about Australia, \"to accept the possibility of women involved in cultivation would have meant a subversion of heterosexuality, particularly when the women involved were single and childless. This would constitute a most inappropriate possession of land.\" These views were so deeply embedded that even the tactic of allying the cause with that of bolstering the British fabric of the West did not advance the right of women to their own homesteads. But there was more at work than a challenge to cherished ideals of femininity. Architects of the West knew that women were capable of the hard work and deprivation required of homesteaders, but it was useful to insist that they were not, just as the skills of Indigenous farmers were deprecated. Extending homesteading rights to women would mean having to share legal claims to the most valuable resource of the West\u2014land. Improvement of the land and profits from the land were to remain a white male preserve. Nellie McClung wrote in _Maclean's magazine_ in 1916, \"Women are doing homestead duties wherever homestead duties are being done.\"\n\nThe homesteads-for-women campaign failed for many reasons. It faced formidable opposition from those in authority who wished to keep land, property, and real estate a male preserve. McClung's article in _Maclean's,_ for example, was dismissed as \"unmitigated piffle\" and \"gross misrepresentation,\" and described as full of \"wild baseless assertions... and utter disregard for facts.\" She had gratuitously slandered the homesteaders of Western Canada through her suggestion that women had to perform tasks such as breaking scrub land. Intransigence prevailed at the top level of government. In Canada, women were to marry and to have no options outside of marriage. In 1910 Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier replied to a single Canadian woman inquiring about a homestead that \"I would advise that you take a husband, to whom we will be happy to give the homestead.\"\n\nThe fissures created by the central strategy of the main organizers additionally undermined the cause. Women \"of British birth\" argued that they were superior to the \"heterogeneous mass of foreign femininity\" in their midst who should not be entitled to homestead land. They presented themselves as exemplars of a desirable, refined, and respectable British-Canadian femininity, who would introduce all of these qualities to homestead communities. Yet they were asking that they have the land that would permit them to farm and to work outdoors, the very activities for which \"foreign\" women were condemned. British-Canadian women were threatening to join them, not rise above them, becoming coarse, indecent, and a \"remnant of a darker time.\" The homesteads-for-women campaign gained steam just when it was being proudly proclaimed in the western press that \"the melting pot of the western world has recast even the Doukhobors.\" The melting pot was not, however, supposed to recast British-Canadian women as farmers, sweating in their fields and sinking to the \"brute level.\" \nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\nTHE PERSISTENCE OF A \"CURIOUSLY STRONG PREJUDICE\"\n\nFROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION\n\nThe First World War brought an end to the organized homesteads-for-(some)-women campaign, although the cause did not die out entirely until 1930. The war also suspended the work of organizations like the Colonial Intelligence League (CIL), dedicated to training and placing British gentlewomen emigrants in Canada in vocations that included farming. Women were needed for farm work at home, and it was dangerous to emigrate by sea. Women in both Britain and Canada devoted themselves to war work, but while a women's land army was created in England and in the United States, and the Ontario government mobilized \"farmerettes,\" there was no such formal organization of women for farm labour on the prairies. Having informed women for years that they were not capable of working the land, it would have been difficult for authorities to suddenly reverse this stand. Yet women on the prairies did perform all varieties of farm work during the war, and it was hoped that the war had proven their capacity to farm. Some women's and men's farm organizations on the prairies continued to request homestead rights for women, adding that this would promote greater production. Even before the war was over there was optimism that British women farmers could find positions and land of their own in Canada, particularly those demobilized from the women's land army or the auxiliary services. This was not to be, however, as authorities remained as intransigent as before, and new rationales emerged to even further limit the homestead right to males, as any available homestead land was to be made available to returned soldiers. Domestic service, along with a few other suitably feminine vocations, remained the only openings for British women in Western Canada. The \"curiously strong prejudice\" against women farmers and farm labourers persisted and became even more entrenched by the 1930s.\n\nTHE FIRST WORLD WAR AND WOMEN'S FARM LABOUR IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES\n\nThe Colonial Training School at Stoke Prior (originally the Leaton Colonial Training Home founded in 1890) closed in 1915. The school had graduated over 700 students, and of these 200 had gone to the colonies, mostly Canada. But after August 1914 there were so few applicants that it was not possible to remain open. The women who had once trained to serve in the colonies were now needed for work on farms at home. But other institutions that trained women for agriculture and horticulture at home, rather than in the colonies, remained open and gained new relevance, vitality, and credibility. The Horticultural College for Women at Swanley introduced short courses in various aspects of agriculture as a war emergency. It was hoped that after the emergency and temporary work required of women on the land that there would be opportunities for a \"permanent open-air life\" in farms and gardens. Writing in the _Englishwoman_ , Alice Martineau stated, \"At last the opportunity has come to English women to show the stuff they are made of.\" And they did.\n\nDuring the First World War, Britain's food supply was threatened by submarine warfare and factors such as the harsh winter of 1915\u201316. The Women's Land Army (WLA) in Britain began to take shape in 1915 through the Board of Agriculture, the Board of Trade, and the War Agricultural Committees, although it did not formally begin to recruit until 1917. The purpose of the WLA was for women volunteers to work on the land, taking the place of men serving in the military. Before the formal creation of the WLA there were many smaller, local volunteer groups of women working on the land throughout Britain, such as the mobile hoeing force of girls from the University College of Wales, who attended to the turnip and other root crops. Women who played a prominent role in the creation of the mobile force of women farm workers that became the WLA included Louisa Jebb Wilkins, Meriel Talbot, and Lady Gertrude Denman. Before the war they had been involved in the promotion of agriculture for women, with causes such as small holdings for women and the settlement of British women in the colonies. There were also many women workers on the land during the war who were not members of the WLA. These were rural or village women already in the countryside well before the formation of the WLA; this was work they were accustomed to doing.\n\nDespite the increasing acceptability of agriculture as a suitable vocation for women from about 1900, there remained widespread scepticism and deep-seated prejudice against women engaging in farm labour that was perceived as male. There were many obstacles to overcome, including the attitude of male farmers that women could not take a man's place on the land, and some thought it preferable to recruit old-age pensioners. Demonstrations of women's work on the land, including ploughing, milking, tending cattle, and harnessing draught horses, were staged in 1916, and these were an \"outstanding success\" in altering the views of farmers and in recruiting women. But there were other challenges. Male farm workers were not happy to have their jobs done by unskilled volunteers, and there was also the fear that if women were employed on farms then the men would become liable for military service. Farm women were not happy to have to feed volunteer women. As the war situation and labour shortage became critical, however, farmers and farm workers reluctantly accustomed themselves to female farm labour. There was an alarming shortage of food by the fall of 1916, and with a crop failure in 1917, famine loomed.\n\nThe first appeal for recruits to the WLA was issued in March 1917, and 30,000 women applied. They were to sign up for one of three sections: agriculture, forage, or forestry. A recruit could sign on for six months or a year, had to be prepared to work wherever she was sent, and had to undergo rigorous training. Initially they were offered a small wage and no training, but this did not last long, as higher wages were needed to entice women to take on agricultural work, and training was necessary to convince farmers to hire them. The Selection Committee carefully selected the most suitable women \"of good temperament.\" It is estimated that by the end of 1917 there were 29,000 women employed on farms.\n\nThe WLA \"land girls\" were issued a free uniform. They wore overalls and breeches, but were cautioned to remain feminine. An image was carefully crafted of the land girl as \"hard-working, yet feminine, patriotic yet willing to return to the home once the war ended.\" The WLA _Handbook_ given to each recruit stated: \"You are doing a man's work and you are dressed rather like a man; but remember that just because you wear a smock and breeches you should take care to behave like an English girl... Noisy or ugly behavior brings discredit, not only upon yourself but upon the uniform, and the whole Women's Land Army.\"\n\nThere was criticism of the uniform, however. A \"woman farmer\" who wrote to the _Times_ of London in 1916 objected that \"harm is being done by the ridiculous and vulgar photographs which appear in the Press. I am perfectly ready to employ the right sort of woman. French women and North country girls have found it possible to work in a short petticoat, and they have not required the theatrical attractions of uniform and armlet to induce them to do their duty.\"\n\nTo keep an eye on morals and morale, eighty welfare officers were appointed in 1918 to visit the WLA workers, to make sure they were respecting their curfews and not visiting public houses or communicating with German prisoners of war. To keep their morale up and provide a sense of identity, the journal the _Landswoman_ , sponsored by the WLA and the Women's Institutes, started publication in 1918.\n\nIn the United States, the American Woman's Land Army (also known as the WLA) was organized in 1918, joining together a number of women's farm and garden committees. These women were also given a wage and basic training, and by the summer of 1918 about 15,000 women in twenty states were working on dairy, livestock, poultry, and grain farms. They too had a journal, the _Farmerette_ , that linked them and provided information on jobs, hours, wages, and training camps. Thirty-four women's colleges in the United States offered training for the American WLA recruits. The WLA of the United States also confronted prejudice from men who were unreceptive to female coworkers. The overwhelmingly white, Christian, and middle-class women of the WLA faced criticism that they would develop into a \"peasant type of woman.\" One land worker countered this with her conviction that \"women of intelligence will not degenerate mentally or physically through being farm laborers. Rather they will raise labor to their own level, will give it greater dignity.\"\n\nONTARIO'S \"FARMERETTES\"\n\nAlthough women performed agricultural labour during the First World War all over Canada, there was no comparable concerted program of mobilizing their work, except in Ontario. As part of the campaign for \"Greater Production,\" the Ontario government (Women's Farm Bureau, Trades and Labour Branch of the Department of Public Works) established the Farm Service Corps, calling on women to work on fruit, vegetable, mixed, and dairy farms, to cook for other rural workers, to work in the canneries preserving fruit and vegetables, and to take charge of milk routes. Single women were sought; those with children would be placed only in domestic work on farms. Free transportation was offered for farm workers, who were to make a \"solemn declaration\" that they would work for not less than three weeks. The Young Women's Christian Association helped with the work by running the camps that housed the workers. Wages varied, depending on the work. For example, on mixed and dairy farms the minimum wage was fifteen dollars per month.\n\nIn 1917 the Ontario Government Employment Bureau sent over 800 young women from Toronto to farms, and about 250 were sent from Hamilton and London. They \"assisted in all the various operations incidental to truck and fruit farming, some of them driving harrows and rollers, and some even operated 'dust' spraying outfits.\"\n\nMembers of the Farm Service Corps were dubbed the \"farmerettes.\" The term was explained as given \"half in playfulness, half in good-natured derision; there have been the suffragettes, and now you see the chauferette... no such word was known among the students of poultry farming, dairying and gardening ten years ago... 'Ette' is in the nature of a diminutive per ex. 'Mignonette,' or 'little darling.' You couldn't call the ladies who go out to help in the farm problem farmers, could you? But farmerette solves the difficulty.\" Their outfit was \"useful and ornamental.\" They wore \"sensible, durable\" costumes of khaki smocks and bloomers, cowboy hats, tan shoes, and puttees. Their femininity was still observable, however; they were equipped for hard work but were also \"an ornament in the landscape,\" with their \"bewitching curls that insisted on stealing out from under their cowboy hats.\"\n\n_Figures 35_ _and 36._ \"Farmerettes\" of Ontario c. 1917\u201318. During the First World War Ontario women were mobilized for work on the land to replace male farmers and labourers who were serving in the forces. Members of the Farm Service Corps were dubbed the \"farmerettes.\" There was no similar formal mobilization of women farm workers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. City of Toronto Archives, William James Family Fonds 1244, items 640 and 640A.\n\nIn 1918 a three-week course for farmerettes was offered at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph \"to assist women to more intelligently cope with the work of a farm and to reduce in this way the amount of time which must necessarily be spent by a farmer in educating his assistant.\" That fall, however, there was another important breakthrough: for the first time \"farmer's daughters and farmerettes\" who possessed \"equal qualifications with the young men\" were to be admitted to the college's regular program. There were several young women in the freshman class that fall. The first two Canadian women to graduate with bachelor of science in agriculture degrees were Margaret Newton of Senneville, Quebec, and Pearl Clayton Stanford of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.\n\nIn July 1918 there was great praise for the farmerettes from district agricultural representatives. That June, for example, ninety-five women at Drayton, Ontario, had pulled flax, \"applying themselves to the work with wonderful energy and determination.\" Doubts remained, however, about their capacity to perform certain tasks such as picking apples, as they \"can't handle the heavy ladders and baskets,\" but it was reasoned that as their wage per week was much lower than what was paid to men, less should be expected of them. Ontario Commissioner of Agriculture Dr. G.C. Creelman declared in 1918 that he was now convinced that \"women have a place in agriculture,\" although he admitted that he had been a sceptic when the plan was first proposed by Premier Sir William Hearst in 1917. Creelman had also been opposed to giving women a special course on agriculture at the Guelph Ontario Agricultural College.\n\nAlong with the high school boys of the Soldiers of the Soil, the farmerettes paraded in downtown Toronto in April 1918. It was the farmerettes who were seen as a \"new species.\" They were \"far more picturesque and useful than the peacetime suffragettes. The farmerettes are a new kind of girl, a pleasing combination of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue and Jack and Jill all in one.\" Their clothing, including bloomers, was described in detail, and the article concluded with approval: \"If this brand of rural maiden is to come into vogue, there will be no need of a 'back-to-the-land' campaign, the difficulty will be to stop the ebb tide.\"\n\n_Figure 37._ In May 1918 Canada's Eaton's Department Store offered \"Costumes for the Farmerette Who's Off to Do her Bit.\" \"Smocks, Breeches, Bloomers, and Middies in Styles Approved for Work in the Barn, field, Orchard and Vegetable Garden\" were available. _The Globe_ (Toronto), 25 May 1918, 24 (see also 7 May 1918, 16).\n\nNot all was rosy, and there were sceptics and critics. In the _Globe_ of 24 March 1916, a letter from a \"Patriot Farmer\" of Ontario was quoted with approval. The farmer did not believe women of Canada had the capacity for farm work, writing that \"women are working on the land in the old country, but people must remember Britain has a class of women who have been trained to work on the land since childhood. We have no such women in Canada, and I would like to see the women here who could do a long, hard day's work pitching hay or sheaves, or pitch manure or such heavy work as that.\" In his view only \"young able-bodied men\" were needed, who did not have to be assisted and instructed. A year later an Ontario farmer complained about the young women sent to help on his farm, the \"sweet things done up in khaki middy blouses and dark bloomers.\" He found their \"tender hands and soft muscles [were] completely unequal to anything like labor with either fork or hoe, and who would think of sending them afield with a spirited team of horses to tread all day the dusty clods or perhaps the miry ground?\" A \"young lady from the city\" sent to help them was scared of their pet cow and shouted at him to \"keep the brute away. She verily thought she was in danger of being impaled on the horns of the harmless cow.\" Farmers, he wrote, could not \"afford time to train and superintend the novices, and no half dozen of them could in any way take a skilled man's place.\"\n\nThere was criticism of the housing and treatment of the women land workers from their relatives. One mother of a farmerette complained that their camps were made up of tents discarded by the militia, that there was no protection for them from the \"elements or ruffians,\" and that her daughter's camp was in fact robbed. Following the robbery the girls went to the nearby hotel for breakfast but were turned away, as they \"were not gowned in proper style, and their farmerette costume might shock those who staying there.\" They were forced to go to work without breakfast. The mother further complained that they were treated as \"the lowest notch of humanity,\" and got a pittance in pay that scarcely covered their camp fees.\n\nWomen's work on the farms in Ontario was part of a wider campaign to have women free men for the trenches by doing their jobs at home. During the war, for example, about 35,000 women worked in munitions production in Canada. Yet it is striking that photographs of women at work in factories or farms were rarely featured in Canadian First World War propaganda, while these were popular images in British propaganda. When such images were used in Canada, they were accompanied by clear messages that the women had not strayed far from their roles as nurturing mothers; the \"unfeminine\" behaviour was excused due to the war. Their work was also cast as temporary, as a sacrifice for the emergency and for patriotism. Karen Ann Reyburn found that images of women in agricultural work \"contained some elements of domesticity or 'traditional' womanhood.\" Women were called upon to conserve rather than produce food, and to take charge of vegetable gardens and allotments.\n\n_Figure 38._ Reminiscent of the postcard of Doukhobor women pulling the plough, this poster conveyed the message that Canadian women were not to be asked to stoop to this behaviour, rather they could purchase and promote the purchase of victory bonds. In Western Canada women were asked to volunteer to help farmers' wives, rather than working in the fields or with livestock. Library of Congress, 2003652830.\n\nWOMEN AND FARM LABOUR IN PRAIRIE CANADA DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR\n\nIn prairie Canada there was no mobilization of women agricultural workers. Paid farm labour remained essentially a male preserve. Labour shortages did become acute, but the farm workers pressed their advantage to demand higher wages. Farmers desired a \"cheap and docile\" labour force, and preferred to pay \"foreign\" workers or \"aliens\" from Europe a lower wage. The government assisted the farmers in finding new sources of labour, including soldiers in training, who were granted leaves to help with the harvest. \"City slackers,\" those who lounged about the billiard halls and theatres, were called upon to enlist so that the trained agriculturalists, the sons of farmers, could remain on the land. As in Ontario, teenage boys were recruited as \"Soldiers of the Soil\" and awarded a bronze badge. Others who contributed volunteer labour included professional and business men, civil servants, merchants, clerks, and artisans.\n\nThere were occasional calls for women to be mobilized for farm work on the prairies. The Saskatchewan Bureau of Labour asked local committees to obtain \"kinds of labour not heretofore fully or regularly employed in farming operations such as boys, girls, women, retired farmers, elevator and implement men etc.\" An editorial in the _Gleichen Call_ (Alberta) in January 1916, entitled \"Women Should Be Ready to Till the Soil,\" quoted a patriotic address by the English Earl of Selborne, President of the Board of Agriculture, appealing to \"women of every class... the squire's wife and the farmer's, and the parson's wife and the daughter of the labourer.\" Selborne had seen for the first time ever \"a woman ploughing.\" The editor of the _Call_ noted that the situation was not as grim in Canada, but that women could be seen ploughing in the West and even pulling the ploughs, \"although this was done among the foreigners.\" He called on Canada to \"make it fashionable for the ladies to work on the farm,\" reinforcing the idea that it was decidedly not fashionable, or acceptable, labour.\n\nWomen farm labourers were not desired for a variety of reasons, including that they might provide a rationale for conscripting farmers, farmers' sons, and farm workers. These categories were exempted from conscription until the spring of 1918, and in that year in Saskatchewan a report of the Special Committee on Farm Labour recommended that \"unlikely or reluctant sources of labour, including women and children,\" be pressed into service. But this did not happen. Farmers instead reduced labour-intensive farming practices and invested in machinery. In 1918 an \"anti-loafing\" law threatened every man between sixteen and sixty who was not gainfully employed with a jail sentence.\n\nThroughout the prairies women worked on farms, as they had always done, and they stepped in to do tasks normally done by missing husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. Women from the cities and towns also pitched in. In 1917 women were reported to be \"doing their bit\" in the Alberta harvest fields. Alberta's Deputy Minister of Agriculture H.A. Craig reported that he had seen \"women wearing overalls, pitching hay, handling rakes and forks with a spirit and efficiency that makes the average harvest hand look like a slacker.\" The women helping with the 1917 harvest in Minnedosa, Manitoba, were similarly adept: \"One was driving a binder. She handled the long-lashed whip and lines of the four-horse team with the dexterity of a man, while the twine-bound sheaves dropped regularly off the carriage as she tripped the lever.\" When \"foreign\" farm workers brought in to work on a threshing outfit at Mather, Manitoba, left after one day on the job, women of the district stepped in, and \"on most outfits three or four women will be found driving teams.\"\n\nIn Manitoba in August 1917, Brandon's \"Telephone Girls\" went stooking. The \"hello\" girls of Manitoba Government Telephones had \"caught the fever and had formed a stooking gang,\" vowing to \"not return home until they have stooked one acre each.\" This was the first time in the Brandon district that \"men were supplemented by women workers.\" There were also thirteen young women among a gang of fifty stookers drawn from a laundry and creamery in Brandon at work that fall.\n\n_Figure 39._ Although never mobilized for work on the land during the First World War as they were in Britain, the United States, and Ontario, women on the prairies contributed to work on the land and to food production. Calgary teachers and office workers formed their own \"land army\" in 1917, working in the long summer evenings on three acres provided by the City of Calgary. Their official name was the \"Calgary Business Women's National Service Corps.\" Grain Growers' Guide, 10 April 1918, 32.\n\nCalgary organized a small \"land army\" of its own in 1917, called the Calgary Business Women's National Service Corps. They were \"patriotic business girls\" who worked in stores, offices, or schools by day, and \"instead of going to the golf links and tennis courts during the summer evenings, they were exercising with the hoe, and growing potatoes to increase production.\" They claimed to \"hate Wilhelm, and intend to do everything they can to defeat his object.\" The city loaned them three acres of raw prairie land and had it ploughed for them. The public was \"rather skeptical at first, but eventually they took it seriously, and folk would often drive out in their cars to 'see the girls working.'\" For 1918 the plan was to grow a wider range of vegetables on vacant lots in the city. They wore overalls, as skirts impeded their work, and \"at first many were reluctant to be seen on the streets in overalls, so they would hurry along on fine evenings wearing rain coats, but towards the end they got over this and did not mind being seen in man's attire.\" According to the _Grain Growers' Guide_ they all \"had lots of fun on the land, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience in spite of the fact that it was hard work.\"\n\nWomen's volunteer \"reserve corps\" were organized in other urban centres of the prairies during the First World War, but without any attention to farm work. The object was to \"be able to defend themselves in case of danger\" and to \"prepare so that in an emergency the women of the city could undertake the performance of all the duties of an army back of the firing line.\" There were first aid, telegraph, and telephone sections, and the women were trained in the use of rifles and riding. They also raised funds through events such as dances.\n\nWomen from other regions offered to help on prairie farms. In August 1917 there were 2,000 women from British Columbia available and willing to help with the prairie harvest. They had just finished the fruit harvest in that province, and the B.C. Consumers League which had organized them was prepared to take immediate steps to send them once given the green light from the National Service Commission. Perhaps permission was never received, as there is no record of an influx of women harvesters from British Columbia.\n\nThere were women from eastern Canada in the wartime harvest excursions who travelled west by train. Most were from Quebec and the Maritimes. This was not an entirely new departure, as women and children had come from the east to help with the harvest prior to the war. During the war, however, eastern women were recruited not to help in the fields but to assist the \"farmer's wife who finds herself at harvest time with a bunch of hungry men to cook for and no help available.\" The Canadian Northern Railway announced in August 1917 that for the first time women would be coming west in numbers that were large enough to warrant special cars, and that policemen would travel on every train to protect them. While the majority of the women were going to do household work in farm homes, particularly cooking, some had declared they were willing to work in the fields if needed.\n\nAs in the example of women harvest excursioners, women's war work remained restricted to the domestic realm, limiting their work in the fields, even in the last months of the war. Scepticism remained about the ability of women to farm. A 1916 article, \"Women and the Farm: A Mistake to Think That Women Are Capable of Hard Work,\" that appeared in the western press (reprinted from the Victoria _Daily Colonist_ ) presented the view that \"it is a mistake to think that women can bear as heavy burdens and lift as great weights as men can. The plow and the axe are not implements which women should be asked to use.\" Yet there was some room for compromise, as the (familiar) argument was made that young women were suited to the \"lighter branches\" of agriculture. The article concluded, however, that this activity was temporary, that while some women after the war might claim the right to high wages, \"the majority of women will be only too glad to return to their household duties.\"\n\nIn 1918 there were calls in Alberta for women volunteers, not to work in the fields but to take the place of men who would. As Edmonton journalist Miriam Green Ellis wrote in February of that year, urban women would be of little use on the farm, except to help the farm wife in the house and to liberate her to do work in the fields. Ellis was acquainted with a few women who farmed on their own, and one woman who knew far more about their prize shorthorn cattle than her husband, but these, in her view, were exceptions. Women could, however, work in offices, garages, freight sheds, hotels, restaurants, libraries, as janitors, chauffeurs, and mail carriers, freeing up ex-farmers who could return to the land. In March of that year a meeting was held in Edmonton of women volunteers who were ready to \"help out farm women at the cook stove\" and replace men in stores and offices.\n\nJournalists, editors, and women's organizations endorsed the idea that women were wanted on the prairies to help with domestic work. Zoa Haight, vice-president of the Women Grain Growers of Saskatchewan, met with the Saskatchewan minister of agriculture in 1918 to say that the question of domestic help for the farms should be put \"on a patriotic basis,\" meaning volunteer labour, as it was in the direct interest of greater production. The _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ set out the classes of women who could pitch in: single women who could work in stores and offices; married women with older children or without children to work in farm homes; married women with domestics who could give them leave for three weeks or more to help in farm homes. Women were admonished for not seeing this work as an obligation. A Toronto _Globe_ editorial criticized Canadian women, commenting that \"very few have responded to the need of the country in the way in which thousands in France, Belgium and Great Britain have done. The need has not been so acute in the West until now, but by the time the crop is ready to harvest, there will be a need for women to help the farmer's wife, which, if it is not met, means a serious loss to the Allies.\"\n\nPrairie women, including First Nations women, were encouraged to undertake Red Cross work, to make bandages, and to knit. For some these tasks were added to work in the fields. At a January 1918 meeting of the Women Grain Growers of Saskatchewan, it was noted that it was difficult to find the time for the Red Cross Work. Zoa Haight, \"drove a binder for 10 days last fall, and kept up her Red Cross work at night.\"\n\nIn his 1916 book _Canada and the War: The Promise of the West,_ which looked forward into the postwar future of the West, J.H. Menzies saw the soldiers as fighting to preserve a gender order that was central to the British Empire. He noted that there would be many more single women after the war, but their place would be primarily in the home and associated domestic vocations. He wrote that men liked qualities and dispositions in women that were \"contrary to their own. They think best of the delicacy of form and amiable softness of the other sex, deeming the milder virtues\u2014gentleness, patience, compassion, tenderness, to sit with peculiar grace upon women, who are expected to excel too in piety, faith, hope and resignation.\" Delicate womanhood was a central component of the \"civilization\" that the soldiers were fighting to preserve. There were warnings of the masculinization of females in jobs that were normally male. Readers of the Alberta _Empress Express_ in 1918 were told that this was happening to women in munitions factories, that \"sociologists speak of this as the virility produced by heavy work\u2014forerunner of the Amazon women who are coming.\"\n\nThere were, however, signs of preparations for women to potentially work more visibly and in larger numbers on prairie farms. Beginning in 1916 some women attended the agricultural course at the Alberta Provincial School of Agriculture at Olds. According to the school, this was simply due to the fact that so many young men had been called to the colours, and \"under ordinary circumstances it is not necessary for young ladies to take the heavier class of work.\" In 1918 it was reported that \"one young lady, Miss Erma Poedler took the complete course.\" At the Manitoba Agricultural College in 1918, many of the students in the home economics class were also taking the regular course on operating gas engines and tractors. Yet the work of young women university students on farms on the prairies was rare enough to attract attention. The _Grain Growers' Guide_ noted that in 1917 Miss Annie Norrington, a science student at the University of Manitoba, had worked for the summer as a \"hired man\" on a farm in that province, and returned for the 1918 season. She ploughed, seeded, hayed, and mended fences.\n\nAt the _Grain Growers' Guide,_ women's page editor Mary P. McCallum wanted women to have a place in the production and not just conservation of food, and she urged they be employed to feed stock and care for poultry and vegetable gardens. She hoped the government would enlist the \"vast army of women workers in Canada today. We have one half of the population of Canada today absolutely overlooked and unorganized for war service on a national basis. Why can women not be given a definite and positive place in the production campaign?\" But there was debate in the _Guide_ about how women could contribute to the world's food supply and about the suitability of women for farm labour. Agreeing with Miriam Green Ellis, quoted above, in a February 1918 letter to the _Guide_ , Mrs. M.E. Graham of Alberta claimed that much of the work on a farm was \"beyond the strength of the average Canadian city girl.\" Graham contended it would take considerable training to equip the city woman to handle a four-horse team and plough. It required strength to stook and pitch hay or sheaves and load manure.\n\nMcCallum did not agree with Graham, and she wrote columns that challenged this view, including a feature article in March 1918 on Ruth Hillman of Keeler (discussed in Chapter 4) under the title \"Who Said Women Can't Farm: Miss R.M. Hillman... Disproves Any Such Fallacy.\" There was a lengthy article on \"Feminizing the Farm: How Ontario is Promoting Agriculture among Women\" by Laura E. Nixon, in a 1918 issue of the _Guide,_ that described the skill, energy, and enthusiasm of the farmerettes, who even included former \"society butterflies\" and who had learned to milk, feed livestock, care for poultry, run machinery, and take on numerous other tasks at the three-week course offered at the Ontario Agricultural College. An article by McCallum, in the fall of 1918, on \"Women and Their Gas Wagons\" was about how women on farms in the West were able to assist so much more once they learned to drive, making trips to town for marketing and repairs that would have previously been the job of the male farmer, who could instead stay at work on the land. Western women also had learned to drive tractors and enjoyed it, according to McCallum.\n\nHeadlines such as \"Woman Farmer, Husband in the Trenches, Meets Awful Accident While Preparing Land for Crop\" likely did not help the cause. The article described how in May 1917, Mrs. E.P. Arnott, of Elk Point, Alberta, lost an arm and an eye while running the disc behind a three-horse team. Thrown in a runaway when the team suddenly took fright, she was found by the hired man under the disc. Mrs. Arnott survived with the aid of the Canadian Patriotic Fund that paid for her doctor and nurse, and her neighbours rallied to put in the crop on the Arnott farm.\n\nIn the final months of the war there was a desperate call for the labour of \"every woman and every teenage girl\" to assist with the harvest of 1918. In the article \"War's Call to Farms: Men Must Fight and Women Must Reap\" that was printed in several western papers, it was noted that in Russia, Italy, France, Belgium, and Britain, women were engaged in all varieties of farm work and that \"what the women of Canada have done in this line is negligible yet, although there has been some brave pioneering in Eastern Ontario.\" Accompanied by photographs of women at work in England and Ontario, the article stated that Canada \"needed her daughters to rally now,\" before the grain rotted:\n\nThe time to act is now! It does not matter a scrap what is or ever will be: what her social status, her occupation, her share of this world's goods. There is a new democracy abroad\u2014a wonderful levelling of grades. Usefulness and service are the things that count. Every woman must search her soul and ask herself how she can best help in taking care of the harvest of 1918... In short every woman and every teenage girl can do something... It is one of the biggest things ever asked of a woman. It is for the sake of our allies. But most of all for our men\u2014\"over there.\"\n\nBut the West survived the war without ever forming a women's land army. Why were women of prairie Canada not mobilized for farm work in the same way as they were in Ontario? In fact there was almost an opposite reaction: women were deliberately steered away from field work and toward domestic work in farm homes. Reasons likely included organizational challenges, many of which were overcome in Ontario, but in the West the scale of the work was much more vast and the harvest season shorter. There were the prevailing attitudes discussed above, that women were physically incapable of farm work, but why were beliefs ignored, at least for the duration of the war, in the case of the farmerettes in Ontario? Did the absence of organized farm labour for women on the prairies also have something to do with the fact that for years before the war, federal government officials and politicians had declared, particularly in answer to calls for homestead rights, that women were not capable of the work required on farms? They could not suddenly seem to reverse this long-standing position.\n\nNEW RATIONALES AND RENEWED EFFORTS: HOMESTEADS FOR WOMEN AND BRITISH WOMEN SETTLERS\n\nWhile there was no longer a concerted campaign, pressure to permit women the homestead privilege continued during the war years, with the added rationale that women on their own homesteads would address the need for greater production. Another rationale was that if there was to be free land for returned soldiers, women too should be granted this right. Nellie McClung wrote her most sustained article on the topic in 1915, in \"Free Land for the Soldier,\" which had little to say about land for soldiers except for a brief introduction, and a conclusion that asked if nurses would be given land grants. Most of the article reviewed the rationales for the agitation that began years before the war. The emphasis on granting homesteads to women of \"British birth\" only had been dropped, although McClung anticipated that the land grant would attract \"a great many women from the old countries, fine, cultured, educated women, the type we need so badly to settle up our prairies.\" She mocked the responses of government officials: \"They cannot bear to contemplate [a] lovely woman engaged in the menial task of planting potatoes! They say it is not a woman's place. Of course women may plant potatoes for other people, and have been known to do quite as heavy work as that of proving up a homestead so long as she does not do it for herself, it is all right.\" McClung addressed the concern that there would not be enough land for everyone if returned soldiers were awarded by claiming that only 2.3 percent of land in Canada was under cultivation. Other wartime conditions provided McClung with additional arguments. She knew an English girl, a \"brave daughter of the Empire,\" who was maintaining her brother's Alberta homestead while he was at the front, minding his stock and travelling seventy-five miles to Edmonton to market pigs and fowl. \"Yet if this brave girl, this splendid citizen, wished to own an acre of land she must pay for it,\" McClung wrote. \"She may work like a man. She may endure all the hardships and discomfort and loneliness (against which there is no law). But there is no free land for such as she!\"\n\nIn 1915 the Toronto _Globe_ came out in support of an end to discrimination in the homestead law, arguing that extending the right to women would induce rural girls to stay away from cities. Supporters cited the war work of women on the land in Great Britain, where they were encouraged to cultivate the land, which led \"naturally to the wish to own land in their own right.\" Refusal to grant homestead rights was \"caused by the survival of the old spirit which refused to allow women to attend university and still in some places, closes the doors of certain professions against them.\" At a Liberal convention in Winnipeg in 1917, a resolution was adopted asking that women be allowed to homestead on the same terms as men. The overwhelming majority of the delegates supported the resolution, although opponents \"voiced the old arguments that women on account of their physical weakness could not possibly stand the rigorous homesteading life.\"\n\nIn 1918 the Local Councils of Women in Saskatchewan began to seriously agitate for homesteads on the same terms as men. According to the Regina _Leader_ , \"With the need of greater production being emphasized so strongly, there are many women endlessly thinking of what their duty is; and forever wishing they could become producers, by any other means than just becoming servants of some farmer's wife.\" That year the Alberta Women's Institutes convention called on Canada \"to make homesteads as easily available for women as for men.\" The rationales articulated in the resolution drew on wartime conditions, referring to a conference of representative women of Canada with the war committee of the Dominion cabinet that recommended \"wider participation of women in agricultural pursuits\" and short courses for women to fit them for agricultural labour. Nearly two dozen women at the Alberta convention spoke in favour of the resolution, describing the outdoor work they did on farms. Some had homesteads, and several spoke of how they operated farm machinery. Cecilia Dahl of Standard, Alberta, \"capped the climax when she stated she had run the mower with a baby in her lap.\" President Isabel Noble said that it had been demonstrated beyond doubt that \"homesteads were no trick for women to manage.\" It was also pointed out at the convention that in the summer of 1918 women expected to show that they were capable of working on a farm \"in a way they have never before attempted.\"\n\nLetters inquiring about women's homestead rights continued to arrive in Ottawa during the war years, and by 1918 there was a new element in the government's response. Estella B. Carter wrote from Maryland in June 1918 to ask if she and three other young women, three teachers and one with a business education, could obtain homesteads in \"a good wheat section of Canada.\" If they got located and liked it, they would be followed by a party of four others. They had taken a course in school gardening at the Normal School. She received the standard answer, and one new addition: \"While the Dominion Government offers to settlers in Western Canada free homesteads of 160 acres, a woman is not privileged to make homestead entry unless she is the sole head of a family having minor children dependent on her. Moreover, all the available free land within approximately fifteen miles of any existing railway line has been reserved for purposes of soldier settlement.\"\n\nThe war helped to further masculinize the prairie West in several ways. Beginning in 1917 it became easier for farm labourers to file on homesteads of their own through a War Measures Act that relaxed the residency requirements, allowing them to count farm employment (on the farms of others) \"as a like period of residence in connection with their respective entries.\" They had to submit sworn evidence of farm employment. The cultivation required to earn patent could be performed in two years instead of three. More than 89,000 homesteads were filed on during the war years. Plans for the settlement of returned soldiers in Western Canada began well before the war ended. A Soldier Settlement Act was first passed in 1917 and was confirmed in 1919. Under a March 1917 order-in-council, returned soldiers who had served overseas and who had been honourably discharged were given the prior right of one day to enter on a homestead in the event of land becoming available for settlement. A year later, to facilitate the acquisition of homestead land for returned soldiers, an order-in-council withdrew the privilege of pre-emption and purchased homesteads.\n\nBeginning in 1918, extensive sections of Dominion lands on the prairies were reserved for soldier settlers. There also began a concerted and successful attempt to acquire Indigenous reserve land from the occupants and make it available for returning non\u2013First Nations soldiers. As explained in the House of Commons by the minister of the interior, the idea was to assist and compensate \"those brave lads of ours who have gone from our country and who have been subjected to such terrible hardships. They have acquitted themselves in a manner that has won the admiration of the world. They have gone to the front and done their duty like men, and this offer is meant as some recognition on the part of a grateful country... If by offering this assistance we can place the soldiers upon the soil and increase our production we shall have accomplished what we have in view.\" The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 also favoured male agriculturalists; veterans and their families.\n\nThe issue of whether nurses who served overseas should be granted the right to homestead land under the Soldier Settlement Act was debated in the House of Commons in 1919. Isaac Pedlow, member of Parliament for South Renfrew said that \"settler\" in the act was defined as \"a person who at any time during the war 'has been therein engaged on active service in a military force.' Does not that definition include nursing sisters?\" Minister of the Interior Arthur Meighen replied that the act would not apply to nurses, that \"the policy of the board was definitely not to include women,\" and that \"the purpose of the Bill is settlement and the only women who come within its provisions are widows of fallen soldiers. They are included because it was felt, first, that they had a special claim, and secondly, because very frequently widows of soldiers have boys growing up who can render material assistance and make the proposition one of actual settlement. The ordinary nurse, I am afraid, could not come within that promising class, and I do not think that returned nurses should, in their own interests, be encouraged to make settlement on land their occupation in life.\" Pedlow stated that he had already had an application from a nurse who wanted a homestead and asked if the matter would be considered by the department, but the answer from Meighen was again no, that \"I do not propose to include women.\"\n\nHistorian Veronica Strong-Boag describes how the First World War nurse Mary Alice Blackwell Turner enlisted others who had served overseas in fighting to acquire the right to homestead, and Turner claimed a Peace River homestead. To clarify the issue, an amendment was made to the legislation in 1920 that formally excluded nursing sisters from the Soldier Settlement Act. This restriction varied throughout the British colonies. The First World War nurses could apply for land in their own right as veterans in Australia and New Zealand, for example. But in Canada, ex-soldiers received homestead land, loans, and in some cases training in farming, none of which was available to the nurses who had served overseas.\n\nThere was to be no postwar relaxation of the homestead laws; in fact, new rationales were added for excluding women. Nothing that women did during the war either overseas or at home persuaded federal government officials that women (other than widows with children) should be permitted to homestead. Nor did the fact that most non\u2013First Nations women in Canada (with the exception of Quebec) could vote. A resolution asking that homestead privileges be extended to women on the same basis as men was passed at the 1919 conventions of the United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta. It read: \"Whereas women are taxed for the support of the Government the same as men, therefore we feel that any natural resources that the Government has to put at the disposal of its citizens should be free to all, irrespective of sex, and we most respectfully ask that Homesteading privileges be extended to women on an equality with men.\" The resolution was sent to the Department of the Interior, which replied that there was no reason why the policy that had been pursued in the past should be changed \"in view of the fact that homestead land is getting scarce, and all Dominion Lands within fifteen miles of a railroad are reserved for Soldier Settlement purposes.\" A departmental memorandum outlined further rationales for not acting upon any such resolution: \"Dealing with the question from the standpoint of the welfare of the women, it would not seem good policy to extend the privilege asked for as it would mean the homesteader would be practically isolated from easy access to the market or medical attention, and the position of the homesteader would be made harder in the Provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan where the winter climate is more severe than in the Province of Alberta.\"\n\n\"THEY ARE LONGING TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC\": BRITISH WOMEN FARMERS FOR CANADA\n\nInterest in placing British women on homesteads and farms in Western Canada did not entirely abate during the war, and there was optimistic anticipation for a new era after the war. In a series of articles on \"The Land of Hope\" by American-born English journalist Elizabeth Banks, published in the _Lady's Pictorial_ in 1917, the cause of British women farmers for Canada was presented once again. Banks believed that the agricultural training many were receiving during the war helped to suit them for the task. She wrote, \"To become a farmer, to stake out a claim, is not certainly a job for every woman. It needs strength, excellent health, great determination. But these are qualities in which many women of the Old Country are not lacking as witness the work they are now doing to release the men at the front.\" Banks called on Canada to give women the same privileges as men with regard to land.\n\nDuring the war, the perceived problem of \"surplus women\" emerged once again as a rationale for sending British women to the colonies. It was predicted that there would be an acute imbalance of men and women in the \"motherland,\" that marriage would be impossible for many women, and that they should, \"with the faith to venture and the courage to dare, move to those parts of the Empire where they are wanted.\" Journalist Amy B. Barnard wrote in 1916 that \"the Empire is making at this crisis a clear call to the strong, capable daughters of the Motherland to spread British civilization, language, just rule and righteous living in the overseas dominions.\" She singled out Saskatchewan and Alberta as most in need because \"we are in a minority\" there, and \"our wonderful Empire should be peopled by the British race.\" The war, according to Barnard, had strengthened the ties between the motherland and the overseas dominion. Barnard emphasized that teachers, nurses, stenographers, and bookkeepers were needed, but she stressed the need for \"home helps.\" In urging the prospective emigrant to think of the prairies, she comforted them that \"it is unnecessary for a woman to learn ploughing and rough farming, as some imagine.\" Yet farm skills were needed for work in the homes of others. Barnard urged that they take a course at the Hoebridge Overseas Training School at Woking, where a \"Canadian lady\" was introducing students to fruit and vegetable culture, and dairy and poultry work. With the article's emphasis throughout on women's mission to help build a \"sturdy race\" in the colonies, it was not surprising that it ended with the prediction that \"love and a happy marriage\" awaited many of the emigrants.\n\nThere is no doubt that wartime activities on the land made some women consider agriculture as a vocation, including the \"farmerettes\" of Ontario, some of whom wanted to continue to farm after the war and to have land of their own. In \"Farmerettes Want Farms\" (1918), Violet Dickens asked, \"Why should land fit for cultivation lie idle while there are women and girls willing to use it and increase production?\" Dickens favoured the idea of the government controlling \"idle\" land in Ontario (as in the West), and she advocated that the government assist women war workers to acquire small farms after the war.\n\nNurses who had served in the war declared a desire to go \"back to the land.\" In 1920 \"Polly Peele,\" writing for the Toronto _Globe_ , said that women as well as men sought peace and calm in the countryside for their \"overworked nerves and weary spirits,\" for which there was \"no balm like that of the blue sky overhead and the brown earth underfoot.\" She described the Ontario six-acre farm called \"Cornerways,\" occupied by two demobilized nurses who preferred the out-of-doors to their former profession. They had poultry and grew apple and cherry trees. Alice Watkins, a graduate of Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, had been stationed in Egypt and France. Her partner, Mary Spence, was from Scotland but had been nursing on the prairies before the war. Peele reported that another nurse from England had a position on a nearby farm, where she was doing \"the sort of service that, in ante-bellum days, would have been the work of a 'hired man.'\"\n\nThere had been optimism that the war would usher in a \"new day\" of opportunity for non-Indigenous women and the vocation of agriculture on the prairies. At the _Grain Growers' Guide_ , women's page editor Mary P. McCallum wrote in 1918 that the \"war is having the effect of bringing women in our own country to a realization that there is a place in agricultural operations for women. And women are needed in agriculture.\"\n\nReflecting this new optimism, Ellen M. Knox, principal of Havergal College, Toronto, included farming in her book _The Girl of the New Day_ , which detailed the opportunities that now beckoned. After the war women as well as men, Knox wrote, \"are longing for a road lying out of doors, a road lying in and 'about the feet of God.'\" She called on girls to take their place \"among the world's adventurers and explorers,\" becoming hewers and blazers of trails. There was a chapter on \"The Joy of Farming\" and one on \"The Call of the West.\" The war had demonstrated that women were capable farmers, although Knox emphasized the suitability of \"lighter branches.\" Knox wrote that it was \"somewhat late in the day\" to ask if small farming was \"physically within the reach of women\"... when \"during war time, countless women have tackled that hardest of all farming\u2014Western farming\u2014and 'kept the pot a-boiling' whilst their husbands were away.\"\n\nKnox urged young women to go to British Columbia, and she echoed the claims Binnie-Clark made in 1913 that a small farm on Vancouver Island could grow from modest beginnings into a \"large and profitable venture.\" She also endorsed the idea of a \"colony of capable women, enamoured of farming who are thrilled at new discoveries and new adventures.\" The best candidates, in her view, were \"out-of-door women\" \"of good stock, Canadian, Scotch and English ... exactly what will bring fresh vitality into places run down and discouraged by unscientific farming and intermarriage.\" (Intermarriage with \"foreigners\" or \"aliens\" was the implied meaning.) They should be \"cultured women\" who have been \"and always will be the true backbone of country as well as town life.\"\n\nBut even Knox herself did not anticipate an entirely \"new day.\" Despite the emphasis on vocations for women, including farming, throughout the book, and contradicting herself in many ways, Knox emphasized the need for suitable women as wives, particularly in her chapter \"The Call of the West.\" (Her final chapter, \"The Queen of Them All,\" was about the most honourable profession\u2014motherhood.) Women were not required on the prairies as cultivators, Knox argued, but as household helps and domestic servants. The \"chief mission of women in the West,\" Knox wrote, was \"the converting of shacks into homes.\" Women of \"gentle birth\" were needed to partner with the men who had \"'bached' in more or less discomfort or married half-breeds as a simple expedient for obtaining a housekeeper.\" She called on Canadian and English girls to head to the West as their duty: \"Surely women who have helped the men out so nobly in their fight against a foreign foe will play their part in the conquering of their own country. It is in these outposts that women are most needed. It is their privilege to lend a hand in the work at which men have far too long struggled single-handed, and it is their duty as well as privilege to help to lay the foundation of the social life of that glorious West that is the true Canada.\"\n\nOptimism for a \"new day\" for women was challenged and disputed, however. In \"Must We Rely on Girl Labor?,\" a _Globe_ columnist of May 1919 complimented women for \"stepping into the breach\" and tilling the fields, harvesting, picking fruit, handling stock, and other tasks. They were as hardworking and efficient as men, and their help was of \"vital importance.\" But \"women, to say nothing of growing girls, were not meant for farm labor in normal times any more than they were made for freight-handling or coalmining. It was an abnormality of circumstance that put them in agricultural life in actual outdoor work these past two years, and it is a false economic tenet that promises their continued employment.\" It was \"unworthy\" to suppose that required food \"is to be forthcoming from girl labor.\"\n\nLand Army workers in England wondered how they might be able to use their experience to make a living after the war, although there were warnings that openings would be limited, as men were returning to farm and garden work, and the \"lighter\" tasks would be suitable for the wounded ex-servicemen. Given that prospects for positions as farm or garden labourers were dismal, there was interest in how the former land girl could \"make good on [her] own land.\" Emigration to the colonies was one solution. Knox wrote, \"Women must emigrate. They see no prospect of betterment in England, and will not go back to the humdrum of pre-war days. They are longing to cross the Atlantic.\" While Knox thought that there were openings in domestic service for them, she believed it \"cheaper and wiser to provide outlets for them on farms.\"\n\nAnxious to get back into the business of sending \"gentlewomen\" as settlers to Western Canada, and convinced that a new era had dawned due to women's work on the land during the war, in 1918 Caroline Grosvenor, founder of the Colonial Intelligence League, wrote a \"private and confidential memorandum on emigration after the war.\" The CIL was in its last months of existence, as a process of amalgamation with the British Women's Emigration Association and the South African Colonisation Society was already begun. But Grosvenor, still wanting to address the need for openings for the \"educated\" woman, mounted arguments for the continuation of the CIL, working in cooperation with other emigration societies. She proposed that the CIL form a \"sort of women's overseas corps\" divided into two sections: domestic workers and land workers. She was concerned with the great number of women who were to be \"thrown out of work,\" including land workers, and she thought many would want to go to the overseas dominions. These women had learned to work hard and they would \"dislike going back to a rather objectless existence. There are already signs that a considerable number will want to go overseas.\" Grosvenor was convinced that the war had changed attitudes and opened new doors. Canada and Australia desperately needed workers on the land, and \"the number of men engaged in this work is alas! bound to be much smaller,\" while \"the old argument that women have neither the physique nor the experience of land work can be met by showing them what women land workers have done in this country during the last three or four years.\" She proposed that recruits be taken from upper-crust organizations such as the Women's National Land Service Corps and the Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses, as these were women of \"the educated class.\"\n\nGrosvenor's private memo appears to have been sent to her colleagues in the other organizations, soon to be amalgamated into the Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women (SOSBW). The CIL, determined to aid only the \"educated gentlewoman,\" was joining with associations that were concerned with working-class girls and women. Only one response to the private memorandum is included in the CIL papers, that of a polite Miss A.L. Vernon, who thought the corps idea to be excellent, but believed that all social classes had to be included in emigration schemes. Vernon wrote that there were many \"rough farms where the girl of the Land Army type would get on better than a WNLSC girl.\"\n\nWhen the war ended, there were more strident calls for the single women of England to emigrate as that \"cruel old phrase, 'superfluous woman'\" came back into use. Canada was seen as the most likely destination, but other colonies and dominions of the Empire were included _._ But little aside from domestic service awaited single women. Not much had changed as a result of women's participation in occupations previously the preserve of men in factories, farms, and forests. The dominions were clear that women were wanted as domestic servants, and as wives and mothers. In 1919 a Canadian official with External Affairs wrote that \"no encouragement should be given to skilled women workers to come to Canada.\" They were urged to emigrate primarily for the men of the dominions who \"want to marry but cannot find wives.\" The highest officials in immigration, both in Canada and England, continued to have a dim view of women farmers and no interest in encouraging them. Superintendent of Immigration W.D. Scott wrote to J. Obed Smith in February 1919: \"Personally I am of the opinion that patriotism had much to do with the energy displayed by women in agriculture and the cessation of the war will find very few who will continue.\" Scott believed that conditions were too difficult for women farmers in Canada and that few took up the career as a matter of choice.\n\nDemobilized or other British women contemplating Canada were warned: \"If you want to go to the colonies because you like the man's work you did during the War, and hope to get something of the same kind in the untrammeled new country more easily than you could in England, you are under an illusion. You are far more likely to be forced back into a traditionally feminine occupation in the colonies.\" Domestic work, nursing, and teaching were the only posts women could possibly obtain in the colonies. Even those with capital who wanted to eventually establish a business, including a fruit or poultry farm, in Canada were urged to go there first as a home help. Once again, as in the pre-war propaganda of emigration advocates, potential colonists were assured that they would find work among families \"of gentle breeding, of English or Scotch origin who would treat the girl from the Home Country as a younger sister.\"\n\nThe idea of emigration did appeal, however, to many women in Britain after the war, because of the contraction of employment opportunities there and the backlash they experienced if they wanted to continue in their new vocations. Approval of their work in wartime had been replaced by \"often vicious condemnation.\" They went from being \"saviours of the nation\" to \"ruthless self seekers, depriving men and their dependents of a livelihood.\" As historian Lucy Noakes has argued, the \"new\" women of the war, the ex-servicewomen and members of the Land Army, were \"troublesome and potentially disruptive.\" They had been tolerated as a \"rather regrettable necessity\" during the war, but were \"resented by the men they displaced, and criticized for both their allegedly masculine activities and appearance, and, conversely, for their supposed sexual promiscuity.\"\n\nThose who had served in the three auxiliary services\u2014the Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps, the Women's Royal Navy Corps, and the Women's Auxiliary Air Force\u2014were seen as particularly problematic, \"bold,\" and masculine as a result of their military work. The land girls were reported to be \"inured to labour and have learned to love the soil, but now they want a change of scene, many hoping to find it in Canada.\" The British government was interested in sending these and other women to the colonies in order to help address the problem of unemployment due to demobilization after the war; they were not to be allowed to threaten the employment of ex-soldiers.\n\nA Free Passage Scheme was made available to ex-servicewomen (who had completed a minimum of six months service) as well as to men, to send \"trained defenders of the Empires' borders\" to the colonies, help strengthen bonds within the Empire, address the issue of \"falling numbers of white settlers,\" and help to balance the numbers of British men and women in the Empire. There was no mistaking the \"science\" of eugenics sentiments behind support for the emigration of women. An official involved with emigration to South Africa expressed concern about \"the danger to the Race both at home and in the Dominions if an active Post-War migration left large numbers of the best strains of Womanhood here unmated while it condemned the best strains of Manhood in the Dominions to Celibacy or to marriage with lower types.\"\n\nSingle women, orphans, and ex-servicewomen appeared to British government officials to be the likeliest candidates for emigration. An Overseas Settlement Committee (OSC) was formed in 1919, and it worked with the organizations that joined together to become the SOSBW. The British government members on the OSC (Lord Alfred Milner, Leo Amery) saw ex-servicemen as settlers and farmers in the colonies, while ex-servicewomen were understood to be future wives and mothers. Representatives from the pre-war emigration societies continued to contend, however, that more than marriage had to be offered to educated women. (The domestic class of emigrant women would be content with domestic work and marriage.) And they insisted that ex-servicewomen deserved recognition for their wartime service and should have opportunities for incomes of their own.\n\nBut little had changed; Canada was interested in women as home helps and in men as farmers. OSC delegates to the colonies found the same situation prevailed in all, that there was an urgent demand for domestic servants. Authorities in the colonies seemed to be unwilling to regard ex-servicewomen any differently from other female migrants. Yet the ex-servicewomen interested in emigrating were not willing to undertake domestic work at home. This was \"deeply unattractive\" employment for ex-servicewomen and other women, and the Free Passage Scheme failed to attract anything like the numbers initially predicted. In 1920 the home economics department of the Macdonald Institute of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph established a twelve-month program to provide British ex-servicewomen and ex\u2013Land Army women with training for Canada. The emphasis was mainly on housework and cooking, in order to \"re-domesticate\" them. (It is not clear how successful this was, but as few took up the offer for free passage, it seems likely that few enrolled in this program.)\n\nOSC commissioners Gladys S. Pott and F.M. Girdler were assigned to visit Canada in April 1919, meeting in Ottawa with ministers and deputy ministers of immigration, labour, and agriculture. They also visited some of the provinces, including Alberta, and consulted with various associations and institutions concerned with women's work. They found an \"urgent demand\" for cooks and domestic servants, nurses, teachers, and dressmakers. Federal authorities told them that ex-servicewomen were not able \"to avail themselves of the special facilities for Land Settlement allowed to demobilized soldiers.\" The report of the commissioners discouraged women from considering farming, pointing out the hardships of agriculture in Canada for women settlers, including the isolation \"which would not make such a life a pleasant one for women.\" Potts declared in 1920 that \"Canada is calling for strong, capable, well-educated women who are willing to take posts as home helps.\"\n\nIn response to a July 1919 enquiry to the federal Department of Agriculture from a woman in Liverpool as to whether there were \"prospects in Canada for young women who wish for open air work, whether on fruit or poultry farms, and who have during the war, been working on a farm,\" a letter was sent to each of the provincial agriculture departments. The replies from the West were the most discouraging. T.M. Molloy of the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture seemed irritated; they had had\n\n\"inquiries of this nature from the Dominion Department of Immigration, the Repatriation Committee, the Dominion Council of the Y.W.C.A., the Y.W.C.A. of Great Britain, the Overseas Settlement Office in London.\" He added:\n\nI would state that there is practically no demand for women to do farm work in Saskatchewan, and as a matter of fact, we have discouraged the engagement of women for outside farm work preferring to place men in such situations as are available. There is, on the other hand, a very great demand for women for domestic or housework on our Saskatchewan farms, and if your Department knows of any way in which we can secure these women for farms you may direct at least five hundred to this province and we will guarantee situations for all of them. This is provided of course that they are competent and willing to accept domestic service in our farm homes.\n\nThe reply from Alberta was similarly negative: there was no work on the land for young English women, but \"there is now and doubtless will continue to be a demand for help for farm housework... If you feel that any of these women could be induced to undertake this line of work, we would be pleased to give every assistance possible.\"\n\nCompiling the results, federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture J.H. Grisdale concluded that \"there is very little demand for female labour on the farms in this country, except, of course, as help in farm homes.\" New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were the only provinces where there was a small but very seasonal demand. Grisdale found that \"the openings for this class of labour anywhere in this country are so limited that a woman would be ill-advised to emigrate to this country unless she had some other means of earning her livelihood should she fail to find employment at agricultural work.\"\n\nThere was some emigration of British ex-servicewomen after the war; one party of seventy-five arrived in Canada in November 1919, destined for the \"farming\" areas of Canada. \"All profess a willingness for household work,\" but \"the tarnished word 'domestic' is never breathed in the Canadian Emigration Office.\" All had \"worn uniform,\" and \"a hardier, healthier seventy-five lot of girls never left this land before,\" according to one report. In _The Girl of the New Day_ , Ellen Knox was enthusiastic about these \"seventy-five farm workers, women fully trained and hardened by war service, forerunners of the many to follow ... at this moment taking flight for their first essay in Western Farming. They cannot... settle down to the tedium of indoor or society life; they ask adventure, hard work and independence.\" More were anticipated. In June of 1919 the Salvation Army declared that it intended to bring \"many hundreds of farm girls to Canada\" who had served in the Land Army. That year headlines such as \"What Will Canada Do With These Girls?\" appeared, with reports noting the \"news from England that thousands of women contemplate emigration to Canada next spring, although they have no assured employment.\" Yet the seventy-five ex-servicewomen proved to not be \"forerunners of the many to follow,\" although there were a few others. In April 1920, eighty-three \"demobilized women\" who were \"deprived of employment in the old country\" arrived in Halifax. They had all agreed to \"abandon the work of war for the more peaceful pursuits of domestic service.\" But they did not arrive in the thousands as threatened.\n\nThere was an effort in 1919 to deliberately discourage women of the British Land Army from considering Canada as a postwar destination. J. Obed Smith, still the London-based Dominion immigration commissioner, had long been opposed to women farmers in Canada, but he now claimed that Canada's organized women were also opposed. He stated in October 1919 that while British land girls wanted to become \"Canadian farmerettes,\" \"the women of the Dominion will not let them in.\" Smith sent a cable claiming that \"opposition of women's associations in Canada to female farming is so determined that this class of immigration will not be allowed.\" This statement \"aroused considerable questioning\" in Canada. Mrs. L.A. Hamilton of the Committee on Agriculture for Women of the Canadian National Council of Women demanded to know the names of these associations. She said that to the contrary, her organization hoped that Land Army women might come to Canada, and would help them in every way if they did. Hamilton stated that \"their work in England kept us from many deprivations. Moreover, our Government asks for more production, and these are the women trained to put the request into effect.\" M. Catherine Straith of Toronto, and formerly principal of the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, wrote to the _Globe_ to say that she was not able to discover which women's associations had made these statements and asked, \"What justification can there be for discouraging the immigration of a desirable class of citizens who stand ready to solve one of our greatest problems?\" She noted the success of women farmers in the United States and Canada, and pointed out that schools of agriculture in Canada recently had admitted women. Straith concluded that \"personal prejudice should have no place in a policy for the general welfare of our country. A general survey of conditions should be taken before any pronouncement is made on a subject so vital to national progress as that of immigration of women farmers.\"\n\nYet there is no doubt that some women's organizations in Canada were calling for domestic workers; to provide single women with an opportunity to acquire homestead land would have worked directly against this supply of labourers. A Canadian Council of Immigration of Women for Household Service was formed in 1919 that was comprised of representatives from many organizations, including the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Girl's Friendly Society, the Council of Women, and International Order Daughters of the Empire. This council worked to assure proper accommodation for British domestics, and members agreed to meet all boats and trains. As Mariana Valverde has written, this network of hostels and matrons was established ostensibly to protect and to assist the new arrivals, but it also functioned to \"ensure that once in Canada the prospective domestic servants did not escape their fate and seek other kinds of work or relationships with men.\"\n\nFarm women's organizations on the prairies also called for domestic help, and not for women farmers or farm labourers. In 1920 the Saskatchewan government inaugurated a plan to acquire domestic help from England. Miss Frances A. Biden was sent to Great Britain to \"select and arrange for the transportation of a number of British women and girls.\"\n\nThe CPR also recruited domestic workers in Western Canada. Organizations such as the Calgary Central Women's Colonization Board worked closely with the CPR to secure household workers. While workers from Britain were preferred, \"they would not refuse to handle women of other nationalities, particularly from northern European countries.\" Difficulties included, however, that British girls demanded more money than \"immigrant\" girls who could not speak English. They preferred to work in Eastern Canada where they got higher wages.\n\nWomen as farmers and farm labourers need not apply\u2014that was the prevailing message. Echoing J. Obed Smith's view, Premier of Quebec Sir Lomer Gouin told the Cross-Atlantic Service in May 1920 that Canada did not want British land girls as immigrants, that \"work on Canadian farms is too arduous for women. Moreover Canada is not employing women to usurp men's jobs. We need women in women's jobs, especially domestic servants and wives.\"\n\nDespite deliberate efforts at discouragement, interest remained in agricultural work in Canada for British women. The cover of Florence B. Low's _Openings for British Women in Canada_ (1920) featured a woman holding the reins of two horses harnessed for farm work, which illustrated her optimism for women's work as agriculturalists, and for the \"freedom, and independence and vitality\" of Canada in general, with its \"invigorating and exhilarating climate.\" The book was based on her trip to Canada in 1919\u201320. Low, too, emphasized that women were needed as domestic workers, teachers, and nurses, and to help solve \"the excess of men over women in Canada,\" but held out other enticing opportunities, including farming. She claimed that Canada would welcome educated women who would, \"as wives and mothers... play a great _role_ in the evolution of Canada's great destiny.\" Low devoted an entire chapter to \"Agriculture: A New Occupation for Women.\" She believed that the work women did on the land during the war had dispelled prejudice and objections. Low did, however, part ways with Binnie-Clark and the idea that women could farm grain on large acreages on the prairies, and she was silent on the subject of homestead rights for women. She wrote: \"Agricultural authorities and practical farmers are of opinion that large farming such as wheat farming and stock-raising as practiced in the Prairie Provinces, and in some parts of British Columbia, is quite unsuited to women. Farming that may involve the clearing of virgin forests, the ploughing up of virgin lands, the use of heavy machinery, and the handling of heavy loads, demands very great physical strength and endurance such as few women possess or should be called upon to exercise.\"\n\nBecause of the severity of the winters, feeding stock, Low found, was a \"man's job,\" and when hired men were required this posed \"obvious difficulties for women farmers.\" She advocated the less threatening small holdings and lighter forms of agriculture: \"'intensive farming' on a few acres\u2014fruit-farming, poultry-farming, bee-keeping, is suited to women, and although so few farmers have become farmers on their own account, experts are of opinion that there is no reason whatsoever why in this branch of agriculture women should not be just as successful as men.\" Low spoke to many experts who supported \"small farms\" for \"competent women,\" \"for there was nothing in such work that required the peculiarly masculine qualities.\" She also advocated women working in pairs or groups, arguing that \"two competent women together should be able to manage a 5\u201310 acre farm (and home) satisfactorily and profitably.\" She hoped that a \"wealthy imperialist\" would step up and fund a women's settlement in British Columbia. While she found interest in the scheme from government and academic authorities, she was cautioned that soldier settlement was the priority.\n\nThere was a mild and fleeting expression of interest in hiring former British Land Army members in British Columbia, although their potential as wives was once again highlighted. In 1920 British Columbia took the lead in advocating their emigration and work as labourers, mainly to harvest fruit. A 1920 headline announced that \"Women's Land Army to Invade Canada: English Farmerettes Expected to Solve Farm Labor Problem in British Columbia.\" The women were to take the place of \"Orientals,\" who \"can never be relied upon\" and who \"do not like to be bossed in the fields.\" The women would work for \"one quarter of what the men are asking in this part of the country for the same kind of work.\" Minister of Agriculture for British Columbia Edward D. Barrow favoured the scheme and announced that a representative group would visit to assess the conditions. Barrow approved because most were \"well-born and educated. During the war, for patriotic motives, they went into the fields. Now a majority of them are homeless. Their male relatives perished for humanity, and the women are left to make a living as best they can... They want to come somewhere where they will have a chance for the future. This country could absorb quite a large number of satisfactory farmerettes.\" He added, however, that \"taken from another standpoint they would make excellent wives for pioneer bachelors.\"\n\nHeadlines such as \"English Farm Girls for Canada: Thousands Will Seek Opportunities in the Western Provinces\" anticipated an influx of former Land Army soldiers, but this did not occur. Brigadier General R. Manley Sims, agent general of Ontario and a critic, did not mince his words. As quoted in the introduction, Sims stated in 1921 that while there might be a few openings for the \"demobbed land girls,\" \"it must be remembered that the Anglo-Saxon never willingly accepts the idea of women for out door labor. It is considered, and I think rightly, too rough and too heavy for them. It was a war emergency measure and we don't want it continued.\"\n\nAt the end of the war a plan to bring Britain's war widows to homesteads in Western Canada was proposed but did not materialize. In his 1920 book _Breaking Prairie Sod_ , Reverend (Captain) Wellington Bridgeman of Winnipeg, who lost both his sons in the war, was anxious to rid the West of \"aliens\" and replace them with British settlers, including \"fallen heroes' wives and children from England, Ireland and Scotland, and from the Island of Lewis... In this way we would be encouraging community life with our own flesh and blood, who have suffered far more than we, and at the same time would be building up a pure, clean, white British-Canadian commonwealth.\" Bridgeman assumed the widows would have sons, and that each of these would eventually have a farm and be \"a British-Canadian in a British country.\" In order to facilitate this, Bridgeman argued that \"we must let the enemy aliens go. They are still holding thousands of homesteads in all the provinces which our own should be occupying to-day.\"\n\nOptimism for a new land of opportunity for British women farmers and landowners on the prairies faded. A 1920 article on \"The Lure of the Land\" in the popular periodical _The Graphic_ (London) noted that \"work on the land has proved one of the most permanently popular of the war occupations undertaken by women,\" and that \"the farmer has overcome his prejudices so far as to admit that women had proved the equal, and in some classes of work, the superior of men on the farms.\" The author lamented, however, that while \"at home or in our Empire overseas... innumerable women are longing to make good in some form or another of farming activity ... the prospects for the educated land-worker in the Colonies are not at the moment very roseate.\" Columns in the _Imperial Colonist_ were increasingly pessimistic. It reported in 1921 that the \"land girls were beginning to wonder if there really is anywhere for women who want outdoor work.\" They were warned that in Canada, without capital they would have to \"combine housework with farm work and they will have to work for all they are worth.\" Letters and articles in the postwar _Imperial Colonist_ emphasized emigration for domestic service and little more. There was much less emphasis on opportunities for single women in the colonies and more on their roles within emigrating families, as wives of soldiers, for example.\n\nUnlike Caroline Grosvenor's now-defunct CIL, the SOSBW discouraged British women from thinking of agriculture as a vocation in Canada. Their 1923 \"Handbook for Women Who Are Thinking of Settling Overseas\" stated that \"there is no demand for women land workers in Canada. The work of the big wheat-growing farms in the prairie districts is not suitable to women, and the rigorous winter, during which little or no cultivation can be carried on in most parts of Canada, results in the engagement of as few permanent labourers as possible, and in all necessary agricultural processes being performed at a very high pressure during the summer months.\" Women would need to find alternative employment during the coldest months of the year and that difficulty was \"almost insuperable.\" This approach was echoed in Frances B. Low's _Women Out West: Life and Work in Canada_ (1924). Almost all mention of women as farmers was dropped, and there was greater emphasis on how the \"British housewife\" could succeed in Canada.\n\nThe annual reports of the SOSBW throughout the 1920s demonstrate that opportunities involving farm work for women were few. In 1925, five women were \"placed in agricultural posts in Canada,\" but all had to have capital. It was the same dismal story throughout the colonies. In 1926 the report on agriculture was brief: \"We do not show an encouraging record in regard to this profession. Only seven girls have been placed on farms during 1926 as compared with 22 the previous year.\" Of these, two young women had gone to New Zealand to raise poultry and fruit, and there was one placement each in Kenya and South Africa. There were no agricultural postings to Canada that year. Throughout the 1920s there were a few reports from women farmers in the colonies, but none from Canada. In 1928, for example, a British woman in Kenya had acquired 367 acres of forest land and she was trying to learn Swahili. As noted in the report for 1925: \"Although there are excellent schemes under which people can be absorbed into the Dominions, these are almost entirely restricted to single men for agriculture and to women with knowledge of domestic work.\"\n\nThe 1920s saw occasional resurrections of the idea that British women might one day farm the prairies. A series of articles by a \"Woman Farmer in Canada\" was published in the London _Daily Mail_ in the early 1920s. Though the farm was in Saskatchewan, the author was not Binnie-Clark (who did not return to her farm after the war until 1924). Articles with titles such as \"Saving the Crop\" and \"Getting in the Wheat\" chronicled this woman's efforts to cope with treacherous trails that still had huge snowbanks while preparing to sow her wheat in spring, and to save her crop from infestations of grasshoppers. She persevered through these difficulties, but the descriptions may have inspired few to follow her example.\n\nIn 1923 Sir Henry Thornton, president of the Canadian National Railway, offered scholarships to four young Englishwomen from the Federation of Young Farmers' Clubs of Great Britain, who were \"experts in farming,\" to tour Canada for four months and to study Canadian agriculture. Two of them attended courses at the Ontario Agricultural College, and two at the Manitoba Agricultural College. But they were not going to be able to stay, even though it was reported that they liked the West and \"very much regretted that they could not remain.\"\n\nIn 1925 Emily Pinder, a graduate of Leeds University experimental farm, studied Canadian agricultural methods in Winnipeg \"with a view to creating a movement to Western Canada of English farm girls.\" Pinder was certain that girls on farms in England were \"intensely interested in Canada. They are seeking an outlet for their energies and would migrate to the Dominion in large numbers if properly encouraged.\" She believed that many had sufficient funds to start farms of their own, and would \"prove a valuable asset to the development of the western country.\" No movement of English farm girls to Western Canada occurred.\n\nRachel Ard of the Kent Committee of the British Overseas Settlement Committee proposed a scheme in 1925 of \"training in agricultural schools for daughters of British settlers,\" but while the headlines describing her \"novel scheme\" hinted at more than housework for these girls, Ard emphasized the domestic training they required and argued that with this training they would \"make admirable wives for the Western farmer.\" She had spent that summer in the West and had lived in Saskatchewan from 1902 to 1909. Ard proposed that older daughters spend a winter in Canada studying domestic science to put them in the position to train their own mothers when they arrived the next spring. The older daughters so trained could then work as home helps for neighbours.\n\nThe cause of British women farmers was hopeless; domestic service beckoned and little else. In \"The Girl Emigrant: Her Chances in the Colonies,\" published in the _Manchester Guardian_ , author Muriel Harris declared that there was \"little to no room for the university woman in such countries as Canada and Australia. She has already been trained on lines which make her wholly unsuitable for colonial life. At the best her life would be one long, uncomfortable adaptation.\" Only young women were wanted, those willing to work as domestics and whose ideas and expectations had yet to be formed.\n\nIt was difficult for a woman to come to Canada under any other category than domestic servant, unless she was part of a family unit. A special category of \"Unaccompanied Women\" required an Emigration Permit. In Mabel Durham's _Canada's Welcome to Women_ (1929), women were cautioned that \"no woman, unaccompanied by husband, father or mother, may go to Canada with the intention of settling there without the sanction of the Superintendent of Emigration, who acts as the representative of the Canadian government in the British Isles.\" This policy had been adopted to ensure that \"none may go to that country seeking employment under any misconception as to the conditions there and the class of workers that is wanted. It will not allow any woman to go to Canada who might be in danger of becoming stranded there, or suffering disappointment.\" A woman on her own had to demonstrate that she had secured employment or had sufficient funds to provide for her needs while finding employment. British women receiving passage assistance (for domestic workers) had to submit to a medical examination before leaving home. In 1927 the British Women's Emigration League of Saskatchewan protested these requirements, arguing that they were humiliating.\n\nBritish Columbia became the focus of any lingering hopes for the \"educated\" British woman after the war, including agriculturalists and farm labourers. The Vancouver Queen Mary Coronation Hostel established by Mary Agnes Fitzgibbon (discussed in Chapter 2) closed in 1917 but reopened from 1922 to 1933, and it continued to concentrate on a narrowly defined category of \"gentlewomen by birth,\" despite being urged to take women who were not necessarily of this description but were educated. Most of those who emigrated and found work through this hostel in the decade it was open obtained positions as home helps, or in related work in poultry, dairy, sheep, or seed farms. But if the women worked out of doors they still had to combine that with housework. Lois Evans, who worked at a goat ranch on Vancouver Island, wrote: \"I am fond of all animals and have worked in England with cows, goats, pigs and poultry but I am keenest on goats. I have been with Miss Payne for 6 months... I did not realize until I arrived that I had all the indoor work including the cooking to do as well as the goats. I have had 5 years with goats and here I do the work that any lad of 14 could do.\"\n\nAlso in British Columbia, the Princess Patricia Ranch near Vernon, the project initiated by Caroline Grosvenor and the CIL, was rented during the war years and moribund by 1920. The Society for Overseas Settlement for British Women that inherited the experiment decided in 1920 to close the ranch, but the resources were transferred to a new location for training women in poultry and dairy farming at Merritt in the Nicola Valley. There were many, mostly financial reasons, for the demise of the Princess Patricia Ranch, but one was that orchard work was seen as less suitable for women than poultry and dairy work. There was the issue of labouring beside Chinese and Indian workers, and ploughing and spraying orchards was thought to be too demanding for women. Other factors, according to historian Andrew Yarmie, were \"problems of scale, poor soil conditions, and location and, at times, a weak market undermined the women's determined efforts to succeed.\"\n\nThroughout the West, there were some advances in the numbers of women farmers, as indicated in the 1931 census and discussed in Chapter 3 (see Table 2). By 1931 there were 6,786 women farmers on the prairies (as compared to 3,575 in 1921). There were 1,493 in Manitoba, 2,952 in Saskatchewan, and 2,341 in Alberta.\n\nIndividual success stories continued to be trumpeted. There was May Hazlett, an \"English girl\" who farmed in the Touchwood Hills of Saskatchewan. Her brother had been killed at Vimy Ridge and left his homestead to her. She was then working as a stenographer in Regina, and even though neighbours of her deceased brother urged her to sell, she decided to become a \"farmerette.\" It was reported in 1921 that she had over one hundred acres under cultivation and a fine herd of cattle. She was going to England to marry her fianc\u00e9 and return with him to her farm. Hazlett was an \"ardent advocate of homesteads for women.\"\n\nTwo Forward sisters (there were four altogether and it is not clear which were the farmers: Maud, Mable, Beatrice, and Clara) of Oak Lake, Manitoba, continued to be celebrated far into the 1920s. (They had appeared in the CPR pamphlets of the early years of the century.) The sisters were \"the most amazing examples of woman's heroic pioneer effort crowned with brilliant success.\" Their parents were from England and they migrated first to Quebec and then to Manitoba. After their father died in 1904, the daughters continued to operate the farm of 1,120 acres. According to a 1925 article in the _Imperial Colonist_ , two of the daughters, \"unaided, have wrought miracles in transforming the bald, uncultivated prairie into one of the fairest and most prolific farms of the countryside.\" They did all the work themselves: \"Since the father died a man's hand has never guided a plough or seized a fork on the place. Ploughing, seeding, haying, stooking, harvesting, feeding and the other 'chores' of farm life have been carried out solely by the two girls.\" In a 1922 article readers were reassured that the Forward sisters had \"all the feminine charm of womanhood. Their manlike occupation has not given them a masculine character or appearance as some of the older generations might imagine.\" In 1929 the \"Misses Forward\" were reported to be specializing in shorthorn cattle, sheep, swine, and poultry. Each year they had a herd of sixty or seventy cattle.\n\nMary Anderson, who came to Saskatchewan with her family in 1912, personally managed \"one of the most successful dairy herds in the province.\" She inherited the farm from her father in the early 1920s but had long had an interest in the business. The press coverage of her achievements indicates that successful women farmers were still tagged as rare and unusual. A 1923 article concluded, \"Though farming in western Canada must be considered in the main a man-sized job and general conditions are such as to discourage the entry of women into the pursuit on any large scale there are continually to be encountered cases of women making undoubted success against great odds all over the country.\"\n\nMiss Ellen Foss, of Stonewall, Manitoba, was a wheat farmer, and her 1925 crop of Number One Northern was the first carload sent to the Manitoba Wheat Board. She also had a herd of dairy cows. Foss believed \"women can succeed on the land as well as men. I myself do much of the practical farm work. I don overalls, drive a team, plough and help with the harvest. Others can do the same if they will.\"\n\nIsabelle Rogers Bryce, of Arcola, Saskatchewan, and originally from Scotland, won acclaim for her Clydesdale horses in local, national, and international shows. When her husband died in 1915 she took over the management of their Doune Lodge Farm. Her Clydesdale mare won the Reserve Grand Championship in Chicago in 1924. This was first time in the history of the show that the prize went to a woman. In 1928 she was the only woman exhibitor at the Chicago International Livestock Exposition.\n\nVarious English women were reported in the 1920s to be so enamoured following visits to the prairies that they decided to take up farming there. These included writer Patricia Carlisle, who purchased an Alberta ranch in 1925 (as discussed in Chapter 4). In 1921 English writer \"Mrs. Harold Bayley\" declared that she intended to settle on a farm of her own in Saskatchewan after a visit to a farm at Luseland that was owned and managed by a women. Edith Jones, of Leeds, Yorkshire, owned a farm near Plato, Saskatchewan, and had no previous experience with farming when she acquired it in 1924. After two years on her farm she could ride a horse for twenty miles and milk cows. Her crop of wheat was worth $12,000. She claimed her farm \"gave me a new lease of life, provided me with work I love, gave me splendid health and now furnishes me with the wherewithal for a long Christmas and New Year's holiday.\"\n\nLady Marjorie (Lowther) Rodney, with her husband Lord George Rodney, came to Alberta in 1919, and together they farmed and ranched 1,000 acres near Fort Saskatchewan. Lady Rodney took an active part in the enterprise, particularly the dairy and swine herds. Her pigs were famous and won many prizes. Before purchasing their own land, they had (allegedly) \"hired out\" as farm hands on a neighbouring ranch to become acquainted with conditions on the prairies. In the 1920s they trained other young British aristocrats (males) on their farm.\n\nSigns of change included the graduation in 1923 of Sheila Marryat with a bachelor of science in Agriculture from the University of Alberta. Marryat was the first woman with this degree at the University of Alberta. Born in London, Marryat moved with her parents to Alix, Alberta, in 1905, settling near her sister Irene Marryat Parlby (rancher, agrarian reformer, and Alberta legislator). Sheila and her sister were true \"daughters of the Empire.\" Their father, Colonel E.L. Marryat, had built and managed British railways in India; brothers of theirs were in Egypt, India, and Shanghai. In Alberta, Sheila Marryat and her partner, Jean Reed, raised poultry and eggs that were sold to the transcontinental dining cars. She then took a short course in agriculture at Guelph, followed by two years at the Provincial Agricultural School at Olds, Alberta, before enrolling in agriculture at the University of Alberta. Beneath her photograph in the 1923 yearbook Marryat was called \"One of the 'boys.'\" She said that she preferred the \"natural, simple beauty of the farm to the monotonous, superficial, superfluous, superimposed life of the city.\"\n\nIn Saskatchewan, Miss Ethel May Bradford made headlines in 1923 when she was hired to teach the newly established course in bee husbandry at the University of Saskatchewan. It was a great novelty that the course would be \"presided over by a lady.\" Bradford, who raised bees at Wawota, had attracted considerable attention as a lecturer on bee culture with the Saskatchewan Better Farming Train.\n\nYet there were also signs that little to nothing had changed over many decades. There was only one woman farmer, Miss Nora Fyffe of Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan, among a party of sixty-eight Canadian farmers who visited England in 1928 under the auspices of the Canadian National Railways and White Star Line, to inspect facilities for handling and marketing Canadian farm produce. And there remained the ever-present emphasis on the need for women as wives and little else. An article that appeared in a 1928 issue of the _Aberdeen Press and Journal_ had the headline \"Jills for Jacks: Training Girls as Wives for Settlers.\" \"Jills for Jacks,\" it claimed, was the \"new slogan for Colonial immigration. Canada is crying for out for wifely comforts. From the homesteads and even from the prosperous mushroom cities comes the cry, 'We want wives.' The cry is being answered.\" A training institute to qualify young women for domestic duties on Canadian homesteads was to be established in Glasgow. The \"new slogan\" was far from new.\n\nLAST GASPS OF HOMESTEADS FOR WOMEN: NEW AND OLD RATIONALES FOR DENIAL\n\nHopes that homestead rights might be granted to women on the same basis as men continued until 1930. Journalist E.L. Chicanot thought that the renewed interest in the issue of equality with men in the right to file on homesteads was \"acutely stimulated by the movement from England of many girls who, having worked on the land or engaged in some other outdoor occupation during the war, were reluctant to resume their humdrum existences and sought a way to continue an out-of-door existence. They came to Canada because it offered them the opportunity denied at home. They are essentially Canadian women now.\" The journalist had to admit, however, that the right to homestead on the same basis as men had never been granted to women, and did not make it clear just what opportunities the English women immigrants had taken advantage of.\n\nIn the 1920s resolutions calling for homestead rights for women continued to be passed by various organizations and sent along to federal authorities. In 1921 the convention of the Federated Women's Institute, meeting at Edmonton, passed such a resolution. The following year a similar resolution was passed at the convention of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers. It was noted in the Didsbury, Alberta, newspaper in 1925 that a \"noticeable feature\" of the mail received at the local Dominion Lands Office was the \"number of women directing inquiries as to available homestead land.\"\n\nIn 1925 a Miss Nicholson, national secretary of the Imperial Order Daughters of Empire (IODE), wrote to the prime minister on the subject and the reply was: \"The question of granting homesteads to women on the same terms as men is not a new suggestion and the Dominion Lands Act enables the Department to grant a homestead entry to a woman who is the head of a family on the same terms as a homestead entry is granted to a man.\" (This was not correct; the woman had to have a minor child or children.) Nicholson was told that the \"free homestead policy was established to attract to Canada settlers who plan to engage in farming and it has never been the policy to grant homesteads to other than heads or potential heads of families.\" New reasons were added by government officials as available homestead land dwindled. By the mid-1920s the reply was no longer that any available homestead land was reserved for soldier settlers, but that extending homesteads to women was \"highly problematical owing to the majority of available Dominion lands now open for entry being more or less remote from settlement, and requiring, in part at least, to be cleared before the land can be broken.\" Queries from the United States continued. In 1924, for example, a \"girl orphan, Canadian by birth\" wrote from Niagara Falls, New York, to ask the Department of the Interior if she could take up a homestead and was told no.\n\nIn a 1928 memo contained in the Dominion Land Rulings, a Department of the Interior official summed up the \"practice of the Department\" on the issue of homesteads for women and added that while he did not know what prompted the government to refuse the right to homestead to single women, he could\n\nimagine one of the main reasons would be that a single woman is unfitted for a great many reasons for the lonely and isolated life led by the majority of homesteaders on prairie farms. Even if this concession were granted I think that very few women would be willing to face the loneliness and hard work entailed by taking up a free homestead. There is also the financial end of the matter, which I think would prove a considerable handicap as unlike men they would be unable to go out and work in the bush during the winter, or in the lumber mills, or work out during the threshing season, in order to earn additional money to develop their homesteads. The matter appears to be purely one of policy.\n\nThe same memo had another addition, possibly by the same author, that outlined why the policy should not be changed and noting (as had decades of previous administrators) that women were free to purchase land, and therefore nothing stood in their way of taking up farming as an occupation: \"While the past years have brought a tremendous change in the 'sphere' of women, I do not believe that the Department would be warranted in changing its present policy. Land of good quality can be purchased in the West for a moderate price, and land so obtainable is more advantageously situated, as a rule, with regard to churches, markets, etc. A woman who is fully qualified as a farmer need not be debarred from that occupation because she cannot get a homestead. The capital required for homesteading is not very much less than what would buy a farm.\"\n\nIn 1929 resolutions were passed at the United Farmers of Alberta convention and by the Canadian Council of Agriculture at Winnipeg, asking that homesteads be granted to women on the same terms as men. M.L. Burbank, of Carman, Manitoba, wrote to the _Western Producer_ in February 1929 that she held out little hope for the resolution, as she had recently written to the Department of the Interior and had received the standard reply that departure from the present practice was not deemed advisable. She wrote, \"As I see it, this reply simply means that, in the opinion of the government, land is much too valuable to be giving it away to women, and that securing homesteads for women in Canada looks rather hopeless as long as there are any homesteads worth having.\" \"It is truly amazing,\" she commented, \"that any one can claim that women are not quite as valuable 'heads of families' as men are, or that a new country does not need women quite as much as it does men.\" Burbank pointed out the fallacy in the argument that few women would be interested, writing that if that were correct, then little homestead land would be \"wasted,\" and that on the other hand, if \"free homesteads attracted any considerable number of women surely the country would not suffer from settlers of this type. In any event it would not seem that the privilege of homesteading, with its hard work and deprivations, is an unreasonable 'favor' to ask.\"\n\nNew rationales for excluding women were mingled with the old, including the persistent refrain that \"the Anglo-Saxon never willingly accepts the idea of women for out door labour.\" \"Foreign\" women immigrants might do so, but this marked them as boorish, coarse, and vulgar. And as quoted in the introduction, Cora Hind, the commercial, financial, and agricultural editor of the _Manitoba Free Press_ and women's rights activist, stated in the late 1920s that she did not recommend farming for women in Canada\u2014meaning white women of British ancestry\u2014explaining that: \"You see, a woman can't go on the land as she would in England, for so many of the population of the prairies are low type Central Europeans, who, as a matter of course, make their womenfolk work outside. The result of this is that the Canadian farmer\u2014by that I mean a man of British stock\u2014says, 'I will have no \"white\" women working on my farm,' for he thinks if he does this he is sinking to the level of the 'bohunk.'\" Women's choices according to Hind were two: domestic work, and \"more domestic work\u2014marriage to a prairie farmer.\"\n\nAs journalist E.L. Chicanot summarized the situation in the _Imperial Colonist_ in 1925: \"Broadly speaking, Canada does not encourage women to take up alone the pursuit of agriculture on her domain. There are, in any case, far too many men leading solitary lives and vainly hoping for helpmates. The magnitude on which general Canadian farming operations are carried on, with the arduous toil involved... largely precludes the engagement of women individually in these enterprises, no matter how much they love the work nor how much inclination leads them in that direction.\" Florence B. Low, too, had long since given up mentioning any opportunities for women to farm on their own. In \"The Empire's Call to Women\" (1928) Low continued to stress the need for migration and mentioned a few opportunities for wage work, but came right to the point: \"Unless British girls become the wives of British settlers in the Dominions, their population will be inspired by foreign ideals and a large part of the British Empire overseas will no longer be dominated by British character and British principles.\"\n\nA 1928 tour of twenty-five English schoolgirls to Canada was organized by the IODE, the SOSBW, and the Canadian and British governments. The tour was intended to strengthen Empire unity and encourage the migration of women, and the schoolgirls represented \"highly desirable 'British stock,' of the respectable classes.\" And they were to convey back to Britain an image of Canada as a thriving British-based society that was modern and technologically advanced. While Canada's agricultural wealth and other resources were displayed to the girls at many locations, there was no mention that they could take any part in developing these resources. The girls were \"displayed and naturalized as the most suitable 'stock' to populate Canada.\" The dream of sending British women to the prairie Canada as farmers was a London cause.\n\n_Figure 40._ This poster from 1923 illustrates the suitably domestic roles for women on the farms of prairie Canada. She is modern in many ways, as she is distant from the floor-length gowns, corsets, and long hair that restricted previous generations, but she was still to conform to the same expected gender roles of wife and mother. She was not the owner-operator of a farm. Canadian Pacific Archives, Image no. BR 194.\nCONCLUSION\n\nStarting in 1930, drought and dust settled over the Canadian prairies for nearly ten years. Very few \"imperial plots\" had been successfully carved out of the prairie soil by British women farmers. Overwhelming forces combined to ensure that women migrating to the prairies had to perform domestic work. This imperative seems to have grown even stronger over the decades. Women of British birth in Canada, and proponents of their emigration in the metropole, believed they had a strong claim, stronger than women of other ethnicities or countries of origin, to vocations and opportunities other than domestic work in this corner of what they saw as their Empire, including owning and working on the land.\n\nBut throughout the period of this study, Canada maintained its \"curiously strong\" prejudice against any such initiative. A 1930 Canadian Pacific Railway pamphlet _Household Work in Canada for Girls_ , published in London, is a stark indicator of how opportunities for the emigrant British woman had shrunk and shrivelled. It was quite distinct from the CPR pamphlets of the earliest years of the twentieth century that featured British women as farmers and landowners. In 1930 domestic service was the only vocation on offer, and this was made clear from the pamphlet's first sentences. \"Capable young women from Great Britain\" were wanted but were warned they \"must be ready to accept Canadian conditions and do domestic work.\" They had to \"pocket their pride\" and go \"smilingly into Canadian kitchens to cook and serve, and wash up the dishes, to scour pans and polish metal, to scrub and sweep, make beds, shake rugs, and lend generally with a genuine goodwill.\" A \"scheme\" had been started in Britain for training those who did not have household experience, with centres in Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, and London.\n\nIt was nearly impossible for a girl or woman to emigrate for any other purpose than domestic work. To pursue the \"big future\" that awaited her and obtain the reduced rate of passage under the Empire Settlement Act, a girl could be nominated by friends or relatives, if they were prepared to employ her in domestic work. She could be nominated by a fianc\u00e9, if she came to Canada to marry him, but only if the man was \"actually doing farm work.\" A widow with her children could get the reduced rate if nominated by a farmer who would employ her, but if the children lived with her she would be paid a lower wage. The woman who paid full fare and emigrated to join friends or relatives in Canada had to be examined by a doctor of the Department of Health, who would sign her Identification Card. She also had to \"produce a letter, in the original envelope, from the friends, as proof that there is a home in Canada\" that had to be shown at the time of the medical examination.\n\nThis narrow range of opportunities was worlds away from the vision Georgina Binnie-Clark had of British women colonists raising grain on their valuable imperial plots that would help to make the prairies British by displacing Indigenous people and eradicating the need to bring in \"foreign\" settlers. Yet she and the other advocates of this vision had faced insurmountable obstacles. The homestead laws discriminated against single women. Powerful administrators of the laws in Canada over the decades were utterly opposed to the idea of women farmers. They drew on deeply entrenched and tenacious views of women as either physically incapable of the work required, or if they were able to do the work it would make them masculine. They did not want women to be independent of marriage. British migrant women were central to the plot of carving into the very landscape what was seen as the timeless, natural gender order of females for the hearth and men for the field. It was vital to recreate this order as the foundation of society in this outpost of the British Empire to demonstrate that it was modern, appealing to settlers of the right sort, and superior to the Indigenous societies of the previous centuries and the chaotic nation to the south. A key marker of civilization was this gender order, particularly important to uphold and buttress in a colony. A symbol of a darker and more primitive age was women at work in the fields; an activity that was allowable (and even necessary) out of public sight, but would never have official or visible sanction or encouragement. Women from Russia or Indigenous women might be more accustomed to this work, but they too had to conform to the gender order that was at the heart of the colonial order.\n\nBritish women in the metropole and in Canada who wanted to broaden opportunities in the colonies beyond the roles of wives, mothers, and domestic labourers stressed that they were enthusiastic, devoted imperialists, patriotic building blocks of a British West, superior to both Indigenous men and women and those of \"foreign\" lands, including Americans. They drew on a \"gendered ruralism\" to claim the right to participate in the \"Great Game.\" They would help to consolidate the Empire, plant British culture and civilization and crowd out the \"foreigner.\" But they would remain wholesome, nurturing, and feminine. For women to own and work on the land was potentially threatening and dangerous; advocates tried to raise the profile and acceptance of these endeavours by presenting this as an imperialist undertaking that would nurture and nourish a British race in this outpost of Empire. But authorities in Canada worked consistently over decades to ensure that very few women would be able to take up the challenge of owning and farming land.\n\nWhile this study is largely a history of dashed hopes and plans for imperial plots, it has uncovered a great many women, not just British women, who farmed or ranched on the prairies, some quite successfully. Many more would have liked to do so but were discouraged or prevented, through the land laws and through the intransigence of politicians and officials in various departments, including the Department of the Interior and Department of Immigration. Expressions of the deep and profound opposition at all levels of government in Canada to British women migrants as anything but domestic servants remained pronounced and strident in the 1920s. This was well after women (except those of First Nations) could vote in most of Canada (except in Quebec). The world had not been turned upside down, as some had predicted. Why the continued opposition? The woman farmer was still regarded as a disruptive and troublesome deviation from a \"true\" and \"normal\" feminine identity. Land and farming on the prairies remained overwhelmingly a masculine enterprise, and the war had helped to further this aim.\n\nThe same attitudes prevailed with respect to First Nations reserves far into the twentieth century. While women worked on the small farms and gardens of these communities, they were given no official encouragement or sanction or assistance. In the twentieth century the various Department of Indian Affairs initiatives on reserves, such as community farms, band farms, cooperative farms, and corporate farms, involved males only. Indigenous women were encouraged to participate in \"Indian Homemakers Clubs\" from the late 1930s, and these stressed suitably feminine activities such as sewing, canning, and handicrafts (although the clubs did become settings where women organized to address social, economic, and educational needs of their communities).\n\nGeorgina Binnie-Clark's final initiative at her Saskatchewan farm is a bellwether of the changing times. She had totally given up her campaign to attract British women as farmers to the prairies, but she continued to work for the cause of the British Empire with the establishment of the Union Jack Farm Settlement (UJFS) in 1930 for British immigrant families. She persisted with this until at least 1937. Unfortunately the inauguration of the project coincided with the start of the ten-year Depression that hit rural Saskatchewan more severely than all other regions of Canada. Evaporating with the crops and water of the West was any enthusiasm for British or any other settlers. The purpose of the UJFS was to assist British immigrant families to adapt to the conditions of the West by teaching them farming and assisting them to find work. Binnie-Clark believed that \"such families are the most eligible type for the 'army of occupation' we need for the guardianship of the King's Dominions Overseas.\" \"In the Union Jack Farm Settlement,\" Binnie-Clark wrote, \"we try to accomplish for human beings what the Experimental Farms, established throughout Canada by the Canadian government, have accomplished for the care and development of all that is most valuable in the life of seeds and plants and birds and stock.\"\n\nThere was little enthusiasm for Empire settlement schemes in Canada through much of the 1920s, and they were a hopeless, lost cause as the Depression deepened. Binnie-Clark's plan was also frustrated because the homestead privilege was no more in Saskatchewan; there were new \"purchase provisions\" for vacant land, but these were available only to those who had resided in the province for five years. Binnie-Clark also unsuccessfully sought royal sponsorship for the project, which she hoped to attract by setting aside, as a mark of allegiance, an acre in each farm to be known as the \"King's Acre,\" a promise she kept on her own land. A \"Birthday Book for the Farm Settlement of the Canadian Prairies,\" compiled by Binnie-Clark and published in 1935, was also a fund-raising strategy. It seems unlikely to have been successful in raising funds. The UJFS project received no significant financial backing and it limped along, remaining in operation until 1937.\n\nAlthough fondly remembered in the Fort Qu'Appelle community, Binnie-Clark was also seen as eccentric. And she was considered \"no farmer.\" Her sister Ethel did more to keep the farm going. How otherwise could Georgina have sustained her lecturing and writing career in England? In the local history of Fort Qu'Appelle, there is a special section on Binnie-Clark. She \"caused a sensation... because she was a woman farmer,\" and she \"lives on in local legend.\" One story told by a hired hand who worked for her in the early 1930s was that she had \"ended a discussion over who was going to clean a seeder\" by telling him, \"Paton, if I'd wanted to be dictated to by a man, I would've married one and let him keep me.\" She was remembered as kind and generous with children. But the overwhelming lasting impression was of \"benign eccentricity: of britches and leggings and a large floppy hat, worn seven days a week on the farm and off... of the cats that slept on the flour bag in the kitchen and the horses that were kept as pets long after they were of no use on the farm.\" When I visited Georgina's farm (still owned by great-nephews in England) on a warm August day one hundred years after she bought her land, it was fitting that there were horses grazing there, by the dilapidated shack that her sister Ethel had lived in up until her death in 1955. Georgina died in London in 1947, just short of her seventy-seventh birthday, and Ethel scattered her ashes over her Fort Qu'Appelle fields.\n\nIt is ironic that Binnie-Clark's goal of homesteads for women had a measure of success (in Alberta only) just at the time when she had deserted the cause. In 1930 Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta took control of their natural resources, including land, from the federal government. Alberta was the only province to enact homestead legislation similar to the former federal model, but it granted women the same rights as men. The Alberta Lands Act permitted homestead entry to \"persons of the full age of 17 years, British subjects or with the intention of becoming British subjects who had resided in the province for a period of at least three years.\" The homesteader had to have been resident in the province for at least three years. It was a way of trying to keep the West British through a method that Binnie-Clark would have approved. In Alberta there was immediate interest from women: in August 1931 there were a total of 863 homestead entries, and of these 327 were women. By early 1933, more than 2,000 women had answered the \"call of the land.\" They would have faced many challenges, including that the best land in the province had long been occupied, and that their homestead careers were beginning just as the Great Depression gripped the West. This movement of women onto the land in Alberta also gripped the public imagination, making headlines in newspapers as far away as the _New York Times_.\n\nWhile Binnie-Clark may have been \"no farmer,\" there were many women on the prairies who were, but they faced obstacles, including \"restraining myths\" that persist to this day. Females are seen as \"not farmers.\" They are still regarded as not the natural or likely inheritors of a farm. A 2015 article in the _Globe and Mail_ about the end of an era in the operation of a prairie family farm since 1925, written by daughter Carrie Tait, began, \"One day, when my sister and I were little, our dad walked into the kitchen and said something that has haunted us our whole lives. 'I am glad I had girls,' he said, 'so they don't have to grow up to be farmers.'\" Perhaps with the present perilous state of the family farm it is welcome that daughters are understood to have other choices and priorities, and do not have to face the pressure and expectation that they will carry on with the farm. But this also indicates the persistence of the belief that farms are masculine.\n\nIn a recent collection of memoirs from rural Canada, farmer Marianne Stamm wrote of how she falters when asked to identify her occupation despite having farmed in Switzerland, British Columbia, and Alberta since she was a \"six year old steering a tractor on a pioneer farm.\" Stamm continued, \"Some might say I wasn't really a farmer\u2014I was just a farmer's daughter. They don't understand.\" She was the mechanic and machinery operator in the family and chief tractor driver as a girl, and later with her husband established a successful grain farm. People then said she was \"a farmer's wife,\" Stamm wrote and continued, \"I was that\u2014I was married to a farmer. Being married to a farmer didn't automatically make me a farmer, though, anymore than being married to a teacher or doctor would make me one myself. Not just the farmer's wife. I was a farmer too.\" Women still battle to be able to identify themselves as farmers, to be seen as legitimate farmers, even if they have farmed all their lives. This battle is no longer required for other vocations that were exclusively masculine in the past such as being a doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, welder, or a host of others. Farming has uniquely retained its masculine association.\n\nA study of female farmers in Canada in the late twentieth century found that they continued to face constraints and issues of legitimacy that made many of them feel that they were not \"real\" farmers. They confronted \"restraining myths\" that limited what women could do or know, and these myths \"maintained and reinforced the traditional gender relations of farming by controlling the definition of who real farmers are.\" The three central restraining myths were (1) the \"myth of male technological know-how,\" the idea that men knew more about and were more adept with machinery and technology; (2) the \"myth of farming alone,\" which cast men as capable of farming on their own even if they hired labour, while if women hired labour they were not regarded as capable of farming \"alone\" and were thus not legitimate farmers; (3) the \"myth of physical strength\" that does not recognize that some women are as strong as some men, and that women have always done heavy work on farms.\n\nOpposition remained strong in England as well. An \"undercover academic\" who lived in a picturesque English village and published her findings in 2007 found that various categories of persons, including single women, were stigmatized and excluded. The childless single woman transgressed the norms of the rural idyll. She was seen as a moral threat to the family unit, particularly by other women. If women were not wives and mothers, \"thus transgressing traditional rural stereotypes about women's place, their experiences were constructed as inferior or even as threatening, because (married) motherhood was presumed to be the primary identity for adult women.\" Authors Frances Watkins and Ann Jacoby drew on sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of stigma as an \" _undesired_ differentness.\" Those who are stigmatized, according to Goffman, \"are seen by others as 'not quite human' and so the legitimate target for discrimination.\" The end result of stigmatization is social exclusion, with \"individuals being denied access to the benefits of belonging to the dominant group.\" It is interesting that Goffman was born in small-town Alberta (Mannville) and grew up in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba. His understandings of stigmatization must have drawn on his experiences in rural Western Canada.\n\nIn 1949 Elsie Hart of the United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan Section) and a farmer expressed anger at the absence of any progress. A \"brilliant\" young woman graduate of the University of Saskatchewan with a degree in agriculture, specializing in horticulture, had applied for a position with the Horticulture Division of the Experimental Farms Service of the Canadian government. She had been told that her application would not be considered because only males would be \"acceptable for the present and future vacancies.\" Hart wrote: \"Which means: It was very fine of you young woman to spend four years of your time to scientifically educate yourself in an important branch of agriculture but you must now get yourself some apple seeds and cherry seeds and grow nice apple trees and cherry trees or go to the U.S.A. or some other country where your knowledge and talent will be recognized and appreciated. Equality of opportunity regardless of sex!\u2014Bah.\"\n\nThat obstacles in Canada remained insurmountable is testament to the success of the project of crafting the prairies as a colony of the British Empire where a \"natural\" or \"normal\" gender order would be preserved, despite the challenges and criticisms, including by British-born women who wanted a corner of the colony to call their own. The presence of an array of other models of femininity, of Doukhobor women, for example, served to strengthen and justify resolve to eliminate women from work on the land. The profits to be gained from land and crops by men such as Frank Oliver and J. Obed Smith also strengthened resolve. It is interesting, however, to \"think back\" in time and realize that for farmers like Maxi'diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman), eliminating women from work on the land would have been a perversion of an acceptable gender order. Asked if young men worked in the fields, Maxi'diwiac laughed heartily and replied, \"Certainly not.\" She owned and cultivated her own land, provided for her family, and she processed, marketed and sold her products. Women of the Plains villages were totally in charge of the agronomy that was the main economic activity of their region. The farming methods and crops that Maxi'diwiac and other Hidatsa and Mandan women developed over centuries endure to this day. Corn is today the number one cereal crop worldwide, and it plays a major role in the economies of Canada and the United States. It is the major agricultural crop of the United States, with over 84 million acres under cultivation on some 400,000 farms, and the third most valuable crop of Canada.\nNOTES\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n1. Provincial Archives of Manitoba (PAM), homestead file 74916 W\u00bd 21-12-15-W1. Thanks to Eric Hallatt, archivist. Elizabeth Cameron, who signed her name with an X, was from Nova Scotia. She became the owner of this land in 1883.\n\n2. Clipping, Isabelle Beaton Graham, \"Homesteads for Women: A Western Woman's View of Man's Duty to Women,\" n.d., n.p. (1910), Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Record Group 15 (RG 15), Records of the Department of the Interior, vol. 1062, file 2029532.\n\n3. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming.\"\n\n4. Saxby, _West-Nor'-West_ , 31\u201332.\n\n5. The literature on settler colonialism is vast and growing. See, for example, Veracini, \"'Settler Colonialism': Career of a Concept\"; and Jacobs, \"Parallel or Intersecting Tracks? The History of the U.S. West and Comparative Settler Colonialism.\"\n\n6. Wolfe, \"Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,\" 387.\n\n7. Anon., _The New West_ , preface, n.p.\n\n8. Jones, \"Gentlemen Farmers in Canada,\" _Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury_ , 25 April 1885, 1.\n\n9. Ibid.\n\n10. Carter, _Lost Harvests_.\n\n11. Anon., _The New West_ , preface, n.p.\n\n12. Ibid.\n\n13. Levine, \"Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?,\" 6; Tosh, _Manliness and Masculinities_ , 183\u201385.\n\n14. \"A Greeting 1910,\" _African Standard_ , 29 Jan. 1910, 8.\n\n15. Damusey, \"The Prairie,\" _Canadian Magazine_ 56, no. 6 (April 1921): 486.\n\n16. Wilson, \"Manly Art.\"\n\n17. Casid, _Sowing Empire_ , xxii.\n\n18. Spence, _The Prairie Lands of Canada_ , 6.\n\n19. Osborn, \"Our Western Chivalry,\" _Morning Post_ , 14 July 1900, 5. See also Henderson, \"'No Money, but Muscle and Pluck': Cultivating Trans-Imperial Manliness for the Fields of Empire, 1870\u20131901.\"\n\n20. Levine, \"Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?,\" 7.\n\n21. Losurdo, _Liberalism_ ; McKay, \"The Liberal Order Framework.\"\n\n22. Perry, \"Women, Racialized People, and the Making of the Liberal Order,\" 275.\n\n23. Ibid., 276.\n\n24. \"How to Use Our Newest Colony,\" an interview with Mr. Arnold White, _Pall Mall Gazette_ , 4 July 1885, 15.\n\n25. Jacobs, \"Parallel or Intersecting Tracks?,\" 158.\n\n26. Carey, \"'Wanted! A Real White Australia,'\" 136.\n\n27. Carter, \"Britishness, 'Foreignness,' Woman and Land.\"\n\n28. Carter, _Capturing Women_.\n\n29. \"The Doukhobors: Queer Russian Sect Which Has Become Canadianized,\" _Reflector_ , 8 Aug. 1911, 2.\n\n30. Levine, \"Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?,\" 7.\n\n31. Lawrence, _Genteel Women._\n\n32. McClintock, _Imperial Leather_ , 6.\n\n33. Ganley, \"What's All This Talk about Whiteness?,\" 13.\n\n34. Carter, \"Britishness, 'Foreignness,' Women and Land.\"\n\n35. \"Woman Changing to Masculinity?,\" _Saturday News_ , 17 Dec. 1910, 11.\n\n36. Ibid.\n\n37. \"Tiller,\" \"The Female Farmer,\" _Sunday Times_ , 27 May 1906, 3.\n\n38. Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA), homestead file 1724101, reel 2843.\n\n39. James, _Hanna North_ , 606.\n\n40. Ibid., 607.\n\n41. West, _Homesteading_ , 201.\n\n42. Kluth, \"Mr. and Mrs. Reinhart Kluth,\" 75\u201377.\n\n43. Mrs. Ed Watson, \"Pioneering in Saskatchewan,\" Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB), R-176, BP W44Z 1924.\n\n44. McClung, \"Speaking of Women,\" _Maclean's_ , 10 May 1916.\n\n45. Gleadle, _Borderline Citizens,_ 77.\n\n46. Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 498.\n\n47. Ibid., 506.\n\n48. Ibid.\n\n49. Anon., _Our Western Lands._\n\n50. For example, one group of friends of Oliver received an irrigation grant in Alberta of over 380,000 acres in 1906 which they soon sold for an enormous profit. Gilpin, _Prairie Promises_ , 5\u20136; Schmidt, _Growing Up in the Oil Patch_ , 65.\n\n51. Young, _On Female Body Experience,_ 21.\n\n52. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ 1979, 308. Binnie-Clark is quoting the response that Cora Hind received from Frank Oliver when Hind met with Oliver about homesteads for women.\n\n53. Carter, _The Importance of Being Monogamous._\n\n54. McClung, \"Free Land for the Soldiers,\" _Edmonton Bulletin,_ 18 Sept. 1915, 3.\n\n55. Commander, \"Opportunities for Educated Englishwomen in Canada Are Not Recognized,\" _Carbon News_ , 13 April 1921, 7.\n\n56. Fripp, _The Outcasts of Canada,_ 174.\n\n57. Harrison, _Go West\u2014Go Wise!_ , 72.\n\n58. Ibid., 72\u201373.\n\n59. Weaver, _The Great Land Rush_ ; Belich, _Replenishing the Earth_.\n\n60. Roe, _\"Getting the Know-How_. _\"_\n\n61. Lacombe Rural History Club, _Wagon Trails to Hard Top_ , 164; PAA, homestead file 524559, reel 2055.\n\n62. _Wagon Trails to Hard Top_ , 164.\n\n63. Roe, _\"Getting the Know-How_ , _\"_ 16.\n\n64. Ibid., 16\u201317.\n\n65. _Vote_ , 27 Aug. 1927, 3.\n\n66. McClintock, _Imperial Leather_ , 6.\n\n67. Wildenthal, \"'She Is the Victor': Bourgeois Women, Nationalist Identities and the Ideal of the Independent Woman Farmer in German Southwest Africa,\" 80\u201385.\n\n68. Dinesen, _Out of Africa_ , 1.\n\n69. I explore dimensions of this in Carter, _The Importance of Being Monogamous_.\n\n70. Hurt, _The Big Empty_ , 5\u20136. See also Carter, ed., _Montana Women Homesteaders_.\n\n71. Hurt, _The Big Empty_ , 8.\n\n72. Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 506. The commentary and discussion by J. Obed Smith and others in the audience was published together with Binnie-Clark's address.\n\n73. Ballantyne, \"Race and the Webs of Empire\"; Ballantyne, \"Colonial Knowledge.\"\n\n74. \"Where Women Are Farmers,\" _Globe_ , 19 July 1910, 5.\n\n75. \"Women for Canada,\" _Daily Mail_ , 4 April 1921, 6.\n\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n1. Quoted in Hanson, introduction to Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ , xxii. This book was originally published in 1917 by Wilson as _Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians._\n\n2. See, for example, Trigger, _The Huron._\n\n3. See Kub, \"Buffalo Bird Woman's Farming Methods Still in Evidence Today,\" _Agfax_ , 7 Aug. 2013, available at http:\/\/agfax.com\/2013\/08\/07\/buffalo-bird-womans-farming-methods-still-in-evidence-today\/.\n\n4. The best book on Great Plains Indigenous agriculture is Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden._\n\n5. Bradbury, _Travels in the Interior of America_ , 175.\n\n6. Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Recreation, Historic Resources Branch, _The Prehistory of the Lockport Site_ , 11.\n\n7. Denig, _Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri_ , 109\u201310.\n\n8. Hanson, introduction to Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ , xxi.\n\n9. Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ , 13.\n\n10. Ibid., 114.\n\n11. Ibid., 15.\n\n12. Quoted in Will and Hyde, _Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri_ , 78.\n\n13. Hurt, _American Agriculture_ , 61.\n\n14. Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ , 27.\n\n15. Quoted in Will and Hyde, _Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri_ , 54.\n\n16. Quoted in ibid., 136\u201337.\n\n17. Quoted in ibid., 190.\n\n18. Quoted in ibid., 192\u201323.\n\n19. Quoted in ibid., 193.\n\n20. Quoted in ibid., 196.\n\n21. Peters, _Women of the Earth Lodges_ , 114.\n\n22. Bowers, _Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization_ , 203.\n\n23. Peters, _Women of the Earth Lodges_ , 120.\n\n24. Catlin, _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians,_ 189.\n\n25. Matthews, _Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians_ , 11\u201312.\n\n26. Wilson, _Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden_ , 120.\n\n27. Smithsonian, _Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz_ , 289.\n\n28. Quoted in Peters, _Women of the Earth Lodges_ , 120\u201321. See also Fritze, \"Growing Identity, Growing a Home: Contrasting Functions of Two Nineteenth-Century Gardens.\"\n\n29. Turner, _Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge_ , 1.\n\n30. Lethbridge and District Horticultural Society et al., _Ethnobotany of the Plants in the Garden of Native Prairie Plants_ , 1; http:\/\/www.galtmuseum.com\/pdf\/NativePrairiePlantsGarden-Ethnobotany.pdf.\n\n31. Linklater, _Measuring America_ , 223.\n\n32. I have borrowed the term \"immaculate grid\" from Linklater, _Measuring America_ , where it is used as the title of Chapter 12.\n\n33. McKay, \"The Liberal Order Framework,\" 641.\n\n34. Frederick, \"John Stoughton Dennis,\" _Dictionary of Canadian Biography_ ; http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/EN\/ShowBio.asp?BioId=39594&query=dennis.\n\n35. Martin, _\"Dominion Lands\" Policy_ , 356.\n\n36. Ibid., 70.\n\n37. Weaver, _The Great Land Rush_ , 232.\n\n38. Linklater, _Measuring America_ , 84, 166.\n\n39. Conlogue, \"Managing the Farm, Educating the Farmer,\" 4.\n\n40. Quoted in ibid., 3.\n\n41. Boag, \"Thinking Like Mount Rushmore,\" 44.\n\n42. Ibid., 46.\n\n43. Compton, \"Proper Woman\/Propertied Women,\" 81.\n\n44. Ibid., 83.\n\n45. Ibid., 86.\n\n46. Ibid., 89.\n\n47. Ibid., 88.\n\n48. Ibid., 3. See also Compton, \"Uncle Sam's Farm\"; http:\/\/digitalcommons.unl.edu\/historyrawleyconference\/15\/. See also LAC, Record Group 17 (RG 17) Records of the Department of Agriculture, vol. 26, f. 2351\u20132375, and RG 17, vol. 27, file 2382.\n\n49. Compton, \"Proper Woman\/Propertied Women,\" 79.\n\n50. Ibid., 80.\n\n51. Ibid., 86.\n\n52. Compton, \"Challenging Imperial Expectations: Black and White Female Homesteaders in Kansas.\"\n\n53. Ibid., 87.\n\n54. Ibid., 94.\n\n55. Chused, \"The Oregon Donation Act of 1850 and Nineteenth Century Federal Married Women's Property Law.\"\n\n56. Gould and Pando, _Claiming Their Land_ , iii, 15.\n\n57. Weaver, _The Great Land Rush_ , 237.\n\n58. Home, \"Scientific Survey and Land Settlement in British Colonialism,\" 2.\n\n59. Quoted in ibid., 7.\n\n60. Hunter, _Father's Right-Hand Man_ , 26\u201327.\n\n61. Quoted in ibid., 31.\n\n62. Ibid.\n\n63. Spender, ed., _Writing a New World_ , 12.\n\n64. Alford, _Production or Reproduction?_ , 75.\n\n65. Hunter, _Father's Right-Hand Man_ , 24.\n\n66. Ibid., 32.\n\n67. Ibid., 34.\n\n68. Ibid.\n\n69. Ibid., 32.\n\n70. Ibid., 31\u201332.\n\n71. _Border Watch_ , 2 Aug. 1884, 2.\n\n72. Wanhalla, _Matters of the Heart_ , 52\u201353.\n\n73. Paul and Foster, \"Married to the Land.\"\n\n74. Quoted in ibid., 54.\n\n75. Ibid., 68.\n\n76. Wanhalla, _Matters of the Heart_ , 52\u201356.\n\n77. See Harris and Warkentin, _Canada before Confederation_ , 123\u201325.\n\n78. Dennis was a military man who first saw active service during the 1866 Fenian invasion, which did little to enhance his reputation as he was later charged, although acquitted, of endangering his men and deserting them in the face of enemy fire. Dennis escaped the action disguised as a woman, while thirty-four of the men under his command did not. He returned to his surveying career after these embarrassments.\n\n79. Tyman, \"Patterns of Western Settlement.\"\n\n80. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 2nd session, 1st Parliament, 32\u201333 Victoria, v. 2 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975), 492.\n\n81. Ibid., 498.\n\n82. Dennis, Jr., \"A Short History of the Surveys Made under the Dominion Lands System 1869\u20131889,\" Canada, _Sessional Papers_ 25, no. 9 (1892): 2.\n\n83. Order-in-council, 1869-0699, \"Survey of townships in the [Northwest Territories]-[Minister of Public] works submits system proposed by Lieut. Col. J.S. Dennis,\" in LAC, Record Group 2 (RG 2), Privy Council Office, Series A-1-a, vol. 270; http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/orders\/001022-110.01-e.php?PHPSESSIC=vv9ugshn9vqt330oo509ncne978&q1=0699&q2=&13=1869&intererval=20.\n\n84. E.A. Meredith to A. Archibald, 4 Aug. 1870, in LAC, RG 15, vol. 229, file 1 (1871).\n\n85. This section is all from A. Archibald to the Secretary of State for the Provinces, 20 Dec. 1870, in LAC, RG 15, vol. 229, file 1 (1871).\n\n86. Order-in-council, 1871-0708, \"Public lands in the Province of Manitoba\u2014Memo, 1871\/03\/01, from Hon. A. Campbell on subject of [Recommending] rules for survey allotment of woods and [etc]\u2014And that all Crown lands be transferred to the control of the Secretary of State,\" in LAC, RG 2, Series A-1-a, vol. 285 and 5115; http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/order\/001022-110.01-e.php?PHPSESSID=hfvknfu2n8abikmq264fioq9i7&q2=public+lands+&q3=1871&interval=20.\n\n87. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 6 April 1871, 968.\n\n88. Order-in-council, 1871-0874, \"Lands in Manitoba\u2014Hon. A. Campbell submits revised regulations for dealing with\u2014And [recommends] same be approved,\" 20 April 1871, in LAC, RG 2, Series A-1-a, vol. 286; http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/orders\/001022-119.01-e.php?&sisn_id_nbr=9032&page_sequence_nbr=1&interval=20&&PHPSESSID=0pv48r468mg1rmuvk2tv8l2f60.\n\n89. Martin, _\"Dominion Lands\" Policy_ , 140.\n\n90. Richtik, \"The Policy Framework for Settling the Canadian West,\" 617.\n\n91. Morris, _The Treaties of Canada_ , 282.\n\n92. Ibid., 315.\n\n93. Carter, \"Erasing and Replacing.\"\n\n94. Morris, _The Treaties of Canada_ , 322.\n\n95. Venne, ed., _Indian Acts and Amendments_ , 94.\n\n96. Canada, _Sessional Papers_ , Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended 30 June 1895, 117.\n\n97. Canada, _Sessional Papers_ , Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended 30 June 1896, 273.\n\n98. LAC, Record Group 10 (RG 10), Records of the Department of Indian Affairs, vol. 4082, file 486, 315.\n\n99. Canada, _Sessional Papers,_ Annual report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended 31 March 1917, 27.\n\n100. Galloway, _I Lived in Paradise_ , 48.\n\n101. Goldfrank, _Changing Configuration in Social Organization of a Blackfoot Tribe During the Reserve Period_ , 68.\n\n102. Lux, \"We Demand 'Unconditional Surrender,'\" 667\u201369.\n\n103. Daschuk, _Clearing the Plains_ , 164.\n\n104. Ibid., 185.\n\n105. Turner, _Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge_ , 192.\n\n106. Burnett, _Taking Medicine_.\n\n107. _Cypress Hills Country_ , 297.\n\n108. Carter, _Lost Harvests_. See Chapter 6, \"Prelude to Surrender: Severalty and 'Peasant' Farming,\" 193\u2013236.\n\n109. The source of the section by and about Adams Archibald is LAC, RG 15, vol. 227, file, 1, A. Archibald to Secretary of State for the Provinces, 20 Dec. 1870.\n\n110. Ibid.\n\n111. Tough and Dimmer, \"'Great Frauds and Abuses.'\"\n\n112. Ibid., 206.\n\n113. Quoted in Augustus, \"'Half-Breed' Homestead,\" 57.\n\n114. Dick, _Farmers \"Making Good_ , _\"_ 27.\n\n115. Ibid., 25.\n\n116. Stead, \"The Story of Halfbreed Scrip,\" _Raymond Rustler_ , 20 January 1911, 11.\n\n117. Historical Buildings Committee, \"67 Main Street: Alloway & Champion Building,\" 28 Feb. 1986; http:\/\/www.winnipeg.ca\/ppd\/historic\/pdf-consv\/Main667-long.pdf.\n\n118. Ibid., 2.\n\n119. SAB, homestead file 123419A.\n\n120. LAC, Western Land Grants, search term \"Benjamin E. Chaffey\"; see, for example, http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/western-land-grants\/001007-110.01-e.php?q1=&q2=&q3=&q4=&q5=chaffey&q6=&interval=20&sk=21&&PHPSESSID=r21gt83n4nfah59abrj8lhfr10.\n\n121. Eatonia History Book Committee, _A Past to Cherish_ , 33.\n\n122. Stead, \"Fifty Years in Western Canada: A Sketch of the Career of John Sanderson, the First Homesteader in Western Canada,\" _Better Farming_ , May 1923, 4\u20135.\n\n123. Carter, \"Erasing and Replacing.\"\n\n124. Venne, _Indian Acts and Amendments_ , 43. S.C. 1876 c. 18-70 reads: \"No Indian or non-treaty Indian, resident in the province of Manitoba, the North-West Territories or the territory of Keewatin, shall be held capable of having acquired or acquiring a homestead or pre-emption right to a quarter section, or any portion of land in any surveyed or unsurveyed lands in the said province of Manitoba, the North-West Territories, or the territory of Keewatin, or the right to share in the distribution of any lands allotted to the half-breeds.\"\n\n125. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 106.\n\n126. See the Dominion Lands Act 1872 on the Library Archives Canada website, at https:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/immigrants\/021017-119.01-e.php?&document_code=021017-26&page=1&referer=021017-2210.01-e.html&section_code=np-land&page_nbr=174&&&&&&&&&&&&PHPSESSID=if7k8pd6tjh43vjqd52vnjnne4.\n\n127. Canada, _Prosperity follows Settlement_ , 111.\n\n128. Quoted in Shannon, \"Brokers, Land Bankers, and 'Birds of Evil Omen,'\" 3.\n\n129. Ibid., 4\n\n130. Ibid., 5.\n\n131. Robertson, _The History of the County of Bruce_ , 530.\n\n132. _Journals of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada_ from 6 Nov. 1867 to 22 May 1869, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Hunter, Rose and Co., 1868): appendix 8, pp. 16\u201317.\n\n133. Moodie, _Roughing It in the Bush._\n\n134. \"Emigrant Lady,\" _Letters from Muskoka_.\n\n135. Ibid., 42.\n\n136. Ibid., 137.\n\n137. Ibid., 131.\n\n138. Ibid., 23.\n\n139. Ibid., 64.\n\n140. Ibid., 150.\n\n141. Ibid., 156.\n\n142. Ibid., 181.\n\n143. Ibid., 186.\n\n144. _Regulations under the Free Grants and Homesteads Act_ (Canada: s.n., 189?); http:\/\/eco.canadiana.ca\/view\/oocihm.93761\/2?r=0&s=1.\n\n145. Ibid., 1.\n\n146. Ibid., 5.\n\n147. \"Proclamation by His Excellency James Douglas,\" no. 15 (151) A.D. 1860, in _Appendix to the Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1871_ (Victoria: Richard Wolfenden, 1871), 61\u201362. Thanks to Pernille Jakobsen, University of Calgary, for her research on BC legislation.\n\n148. \"An Ordinance to amend and consolidate the Laws affecting Crown Lands in British Columbia,\" no. 144, 1 June 1870, in _Appendix to the Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1871_ , 492\u201394.\n\n149. \"An Act Respecting the Land of the Crown,\" 1908, c. 30, s. 1. _Revised Statutes of British Columbia_ 1911, 1518. Victoria: R. Wolfenden.\n\n150. Ibid., 1518\u201319.\n\n151. Martin, _\"Dominion Lands\" Policy_ , 393.\n\n152. Allen, \"Homesteading and Property Rights,\" 2.\n\n153. Quoted in Muhn, \"Women and the Homestead Act,\" 287.\n\n154. Ibid., 289.\n\n155. Ibid., 294.\n\n156. LAC, RG 15, Homestead Land Registers from 1872, reel T-2. Thanks to Leslie Hall for her research and analysis of the homestead land registers.\n\n157. Metcalfe, _The Tread of the Pioneers_ , entry on Peter Walker, 263\u201364.\n\n158. PAM, homestead file NE 20-2-3E, reel 2043.\n\n159. Waddell, _Dominion City,_ 18.\n\n160. Ibid., 30.\n\n161. LAC, RG 15, Homestead Land Registers from 1872, Reel T-2, 14.\n\n162. LAC, Census of 1881 for Manitoba, district 186 Marquette, Woodlands no. 24, 10.\n\n163. PAM, homestead file SW 24-20-6E, reel 2088.\n\n164. Ibid., homestead file SE 4-16-2-E1, reel 2025.\n\n165. Ibid., homestead file SW 9-14-11-W1, reel 2454.\n\n166. Ibid., homestead file NW 30-9-7 E1, reel 2098.\n\n167. Ibid., homestead file SE 32-12-5-W, reel 2258; Metcalfe, _The Tread of the Pioneers_ , 57, 270.\n\n168. PAM, homestead file SW 30-12-8-W, reel 2331.\n\n169. Ibid., homestead file SE 24-12-8-W1, reel 2207.\n\n170. LAC, RG 15, Homestead Land Register, Reel T-2, 80.\n\n171. Ibid., 65.\n\n172. PAM, homestead file NE 15-15-9W, reel 2372.\n\n173. Ibid., Secretary F.R.B. [?] to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 20 March 1897.\n\n174. PAM, homestead file NE 19-12-7-W1, reel 2295.\n\n175. Ibid., homestead file NW 36-12-10-W, reel 2415.\n\n176. Ibid., homestead file NE 33-10-6-E, reel 2088.\n\n177. LAC, RG 15, Homestead Land Register, Reel T-2, 33.\n\n178. Morton, _Manitoba_ , 174.\n\n179. Ibid., 177.\n\n180. Friesen, _The Canadian Prairies_ , 309.\n\n181. Stead, \"Fifty Years in Western Canada,\" 5.\n\n182. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 7 July 1875.\n\n183. Ibid., 26 April 1875, 2.\n\n184. Ibid., 18 June 1875, 2.\n\n185. Ibid., 1 June 1875, 2.\n\n186. Ibid., 9 June 1875, 2.\n\n187. Order-in-council, 1875-0670, \"Manitoba Grasshoppers\u2014Acting [Minister of] Interior 17 June\u2014[Recommends] authority to give leave of absence to occupants of Homestead\u2014During prevalence of the plague,\" in LAC, RG 2, Series A-1-a, vol. 335; http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/orders\/001022-119.01-e.php?&sisn_id_nbr=6873&page_sequence_nbr=1&interval=20&&PHPSESSID=aqma40uu4ko0tlal1ocoe6v1h4.\n\n188. Order-in-council, 1875-0901, \"Relief of settlers in Manitoba rendered destitute by grasshopper ravages\u2014[Minister of Agriculture] 8 September, respecting expenditure of $60,000 authorized by [order in council] 27 August '75 and [employment] of Mr. J.Y. Shantz to purchase supplies,\" in LAC, RG 2, Series A-1-a, vol. 337; http:\/\/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/databases\/orders\/001022-119.01-e.php?&sisn_id_nbr=11998&page_sequence_nbr=1&interval=20&&PHPSESSID=aqma40uu4ko0tlal1ocoe6v1h4.\n\n189. Canada, _Sessional Papers_ , Annual Report of the Department of the Interior for the year ended 30 June 1875, no. 9, part III; no. 7, vol. 9, 1876.\n\n190. _Manitoba Free Press,_ 5 May 1876.\n\n191. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 106.\n\n192. Currie, _The Letters of Rusticus._\n\n193. Ibid., 38.\n\n194. Ibid.\n\n195. Ibid.\n\n196. Ibid.\n\n197. \"How Two Girls Tried Farming\" was serialized in the _Manitoba Free Press_ in the issues of 22, 23, 24, and 27 March 1875.\n\n198. Ibid., 27 March 1875.\n\n199. Sprague, \"Donald Codd,\" _Dictionary of Canadian Biography_ ; http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/009004-119.01-ephp?BioId=40161.\n\n200. James Cunningham, n.d. (1870s), \"Sketch of scheme of construction of portion of Pacific Railway through the fertile regions and settlement of lands along the railway,\" in LAC, Alexander Mackenzie Papers, MG 26, Reel M-197, 694.\n\n201. See, for example, \"Government Aids Homesteaders,\" _Enterprise_ , 23 July 1914, 3.\n\n202. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads Are Wanted in the West,\" _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 17 April 1913; and Thorne, \"Woman and the Land,\" _Globe_ , 21 May 1913.\n\n203. Hall, _A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba_ , 24.\n\n204. \"Shocking Fatality in Manitoba,\" _New Zealand Herald_ 19, issue 6410 (3 June 1882): 7.\n\n205. Anon., \"A Study in Homestead Laws: Some Comparison of Canadian and American Practice,\" _Saturday News_ , 31 October 1908, 6.\n\n206. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads Are Wanted in the West,\" _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 17 April 1913.\n\n207. Ibid.\n\n208. \"Manitoba,\" _Toronto Star_ , 21 Feb. 1874, 7.\n\n209. Currie, _The Letters of Rusticus_ , 18.\n\n210. \"Vox,\" \"The Indian Question,\" _Globe_ , 17 Aug. 1881, 7.\n\n211. _Prairie Illustrated_ 1, no. 15 (14 March 1891): 11.\n\n212. Levine, \"Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?,\" 7.\n\n213. Ibid.\n\n214. \"Where Women Are Farmers,\" _Globe_ , 19 July 1910, 5.\n\n215. Mason, _Woman's Share in Primitive Culture_ , 6.\n\n216. \"Minutes of Evidence Taken: Immigration to Canada: Mr. Lowe's Evidence,\" _Journals of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada_ (from the 7th February to the 10th May, 1878 being the 5th session of the 3rd Parliament of Canada, session 1878), A2-16.\n\n217. Ibid.\n\n218. J. Obed Smith, response to G. Binnie-Clark, in Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 509.\n\n219. Lawrence, _Genteel Women_ , 180.\n\n220. Canada, _Sessional Papers_ , Annual report of the Department of the Interior for the year ended 30 June 1875, xvi.\n\n221. Ibid.\n\n222. Quoted in Emmons, \"American Myth, Desert to Eden,\" 6.\n\n223. _St. Cloud Democrat_ , 7 June 1866, 2.\n\n224. Canada, _Sessional Papers_ , Annual report of the Department of the Interior for the year ended 39 June 1875, 9.\n\n225. Emmons, \"American Myth, Desert to Eden,\" 6.\n\n226. Ibid., 8.\n\n227. Quoted in ibid., 11.\n\n228. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 25 March 1876, 4.\n\n229. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 131.\n\n230. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 30 June 1877, 5.\n\n231. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 132.\n\n232. Currie, _The Letters of Rusticus_ , 39.\n\n233. Emmons, \"American Myth, Desert to Eden,\" 14.\n\n234. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 34.\n\n235. Richtik, \"Manitoba Settlement 1870\u201386,\" 182.\n\n236. \"Homesteads for Women Asked for,\" N.d. n.p., in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596.\n\n237. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads.\"\n\n238. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 106.\n\n239. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads.\"\n\n240. _Bow Island Review_ , 26 Dec. 1913, 7.\n\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n1. Sykes, \"Openings for Educated Women in Canada,\" 433, 435.\n\n2. Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 500, 498, 497.\n\n3. Cran, _A Woman in Canada_ , 266.\n\n4. Verdon, _Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England_. Recent publications are confirming this regional variation; see Richardson, \"Women Farmers of Snowdonia\"; and Mark Riley, \"Bringing the 'Invisible Farmer' into Sharper Focus.\"\n\n5. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming in England.\"\n\n6. \"Ladies as Farmers,\" _Daily News_ , 28 Dec. 1898, 3.\n\n7. Crawford, \"Englishwomen and Agriculture,\" 435.\n\n8. Ibid.\n\n9. Sayer, _Women of the Fields_ , 36.\n\n10. Ibid., 52\u201353.\n\n11. For Western Canada, for example, see Carter, _Capturing Women_.\n\n12. _Mirror_ 25, no. 714 (11 April 1835): 233.\n\n13. Sayer, _Women of the Fields_ , 41.\n\n14. Ibid., 178.\n\n15. Quoted in Bradley, _Men's Work, Women's Work_ , 89.\n\n16. Ibid., 84.\n\n17. Ibid., 82.\n\n18. Ibid., 87.\n\n19. Sayer, _Women of the Fields_ , 120.\n\n20. Bradley, _Men's Work, Women's Work_ , 87.\n\n21. Davidoff and Hall, _Family Fortunes_ , 275.\n\n22. Sayer, _Women of the Fields_ , 151.\n\n23. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming in England,\" 402.\n\n24. Bone, \"Legislation to Revive Small Farming in England.\"\n\n25. Smith, _Land for the Small Man_ , 2. See also Allen, _Colonies at Home_.\n\n26. \"Gardening for Women,\" _Examiner_ , 30 Aug. 1879, 1119.\n\n27. Chesney, \"A New Vocation for Women,\" 341.\n\n28. Ibid.\n\n29. King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 7\u201310.\n\n30. Warwick, introduction to Bradley and La Mothe, _The Lighter Branches of Agriculture_ , xv.\n\n31. Ibid., xx.\n\n32. Wolseley, _In a College Garden_ , 112.\n\n33. Cresswell [\"The Lady Farmer\"], _Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate_. Verdon, \"The Lady Farmer.\"\n\n34. Cresswell [\"Mrs. Gerard Cresswell\"], How the Farming in Great Britain Can Be Made to Pay, 25.\n\n35. Ibid., 24.\n\n36. Ibid.\n\n37. Burton, _My Home Farm_.\n\n38. Ibid., 3.\n\n39. Ibid., 105.\n\n40. King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 108.\n\n41. Levitan, \"Redundancy, the 'Surplus Women' Problem, and the British Census.\" See also Kranidis, _The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration_ ; Vicinus, _Independent Women_.\n\n42. Vicinus, _Independent Women_ , 3.\n\n43. Ibid., 5.\n\n44. \"The Field as a Profession for Women: Lady Warwick's Scheme,\" _Review of Reviews_ (June 1898): 578.\n\n45. Ibid.\n\n46. Crawford, \"Englishwomen and Agriculture,\" 428.\n\n47. \"Gardening for Women,\" _Examiner_ , 30 Aug. 1879, 1119.\n\n48. Ibid., 1118.\n\n49. Bradley, \"The Agricultural Brigade of the Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" _Fortnightly Review_ 63, no. 374 (February 1898): 334. This is in the form of a letter to the editor in response to Janet E. Hogarth, \"The Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" in _Fortnightly Review_ 62, no. 372 (December 1897): 926\u201336.\n\n50. Wolseley, _In a College Garden_ , 104.\n\n51. Ibid., 105.\n\n52. Wolseley, _Women and the Land_ , 206.\n\n53. Ibid., 208\u20139.\n\n54. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming in England,\" 398.\n\n55. Bradley, \"The Agricultural Brigade of the Monstrous Regiment of Women,\" 334.\n\n56. Ibid., 337.\n\n57. Worsnop, \"A Reevaluation of 'The Problem of Surplus Women' in 19th-Century England,\" 23.\n\n58. Sayer, _Women of the Fields_ , 5, 133\u201334.\n\n59. Boucherett, _Hints on Self-Help_ , vi.\n\n60. Logan, _The Hour and the Woman_ , 36\u201377 (chapter 2).\n\n61. Bodichon, \"Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women\" (1866), in Lacey, _Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group_ , 107.\n\n62. _Women's Suffrage Journal_ , (1 Sept. 1883): 164.\n\n63. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 12 June 1884, 96.\n\n64. Darby, \"Current Agricultural Topics,\" _Jackson's Oxford Journal_ , 12 Dec., 1891.\n\n65. These statistics were quoted in _Otago Witness_ , 8 Feb. 1900, 55.\n\n66. Betham-Edwards, _Reminiscences_ , 60.\n\n67. I am using the terms \"radical\" and \"conservative\" as described by Worsnop in \"A Reevaluation of 'The Problem of Surplus Women' in 19th-Century England,\" 23.\n\n68. Anonymous, \"A Woof for Women,\" _Agricultural Economist_ , 1905, clipping in scrapbook 184, \"Common Place Book 1901\u20136,\" Papers of Viscountess Frances Wolseley, Hove Central Library.\n\n69. Freer, \"Horticulture as a Profession for the Educated,\" _Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review_ (Nov. 1899): 775.\n\n70. \"Gardening for Women,\" _Examiner_ , 30 Aug. 1879, 1118.\n\n71. Anonymous, \"Horticulture as a Career for Women,\" _Times_ , 26 Dec., 1907.\n\n72. \"Gardening for Women,\" _Examiner_ , 30 Aug. 1879, 1119.\n\n73. Ibid., 1119.\n\n74. Wolseley, _Gardening for Women_ , xii.\n\n75. \"Ladies Gossip,\" _Otago Witness_ 2397, 8 Feb. 1900, 55; quoted from an article in _Leeds Mercury_.\n\n76. Chesney, \"A New Vocation for Women.\"\n\n77. Opitz, \"A Triumph of Brains over Brute.\"\n\n78. King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 31.\n\n79. Ibid.\n\n80. Ibid.\n\n81. \"Lady Farmers: Work at Warwick College,\" _Tamworth Herald_ , 5 Nov. 1904, 8.\n\n82. \"Lady Farmers at Studley,\" _Western Times_ , 22 Aug. 1905, 7.\n\n83. Meredith, \"Horticultural Education in England, 1900\u20131940.\"\n\n84. Ibid., 70.\n\n85. Weston, \"Spinster Problem Solved,\" _Omaha Daily Bee_ , 15 March 1908, 5.\n\n86. \"Ladies at the Plough,\" _Essex County Chronicle_ , 28 Oct. 1910.\n\n87. \"From the Mountain\"; \"An Industrial Chance for Gentlewomen,\" _Once a Week_ 9, no. 219 (5 Sept. 1863): 291.\n\n88. Postcard, Commonplace Book 185, 1906\u20138, Papers of Viscountess Frances Wolseley, Hove Central Library.\n\n89. Ibid.\n\n90. Graham, _The Revival of English Agriculture_ , 177.\n\n91. Ibid., 177\u201378.\n\n92. Darby, \"Current Agricultural Topics,\" _Jackson's Oxford Journal_ , 12 Dec. 1891.\n\n93. Astor, \"Lady Farmers: Women as Agriculturalists,\" _Harmsworth Magazine_ 5 (Aug. 1900\u2013Jan. 1901): 221\u201327.\n\n94. Ibid., 224.\n\n95. Dale, \"Lady-Gardeners,\" _London Society_ , (Aug. 1898): 149\u201351.\n\n96. Strange, _Toronto's Girl Problem;_ Stansell _, City of Women_ ; Walkowitz, _City of Dreadful Delight_.\n\n97. Strange, _Toronto's Girl Problem_ , 5.\n\n98. Jusova, _The New Woman and the Empire_.\n\n99. Young, \"Throwing Like a Girl.\"\n\n100. Bartky, \" _Sympathy and Solidarity\" and Other Essays_ , 17.\n\n101. Green, _The Light of the Home_ , 130.\n\n102. Ibid.\n\n103. T.P.W., \"The Redundancy of Spinster Gentlewomen,\" _Scottish Review_ (July 1900): 95.\n\n104. Saugeres, \"She's Not Really a Woman, She's Half a Man,\" 642.\n\n105. Ibid., 646.\n\n106. Ibid., 648.\n\n107. Anonymous, \"Female Farmers,\" _Penny Magazine_ (16 July 1842): 11.\n\n108. \"A Girl Farmer,\" _Queenslander_ , 19 Oct. 1907, 4; \"A Professor's Daughter as a Farmer,\" _Western Gazette_ , 15 Nov. 1907, 11.\n\n109. Ibid.\n\n110. Darby, \"Current Agricultural Topics,\" _Jackson's Oxford Journal_ , 12 Dec. 1891.\n\n111. \"Queen Victoria's Cows,\" _Qu'Appelle Progress_ , 17 Nov. 1892, 3.\n\n112. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming in England,\" 414.\n\n113. \"The Successful Woman Farmer,\" _Daily Mail_ , 1 April 1910; \"The Woman Poultry Farmer,\" _Daily Mail_ , 15 April, 1910.\n\n114. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming in England,\"414.\n\n115. \"The Empty Lands,\" _United Empire_ 2 (1911): 778.\n\n116. Ibid.\n\n117. Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 79.\n\n118. Brice, \"Emigration for Gentlewomen,\" _Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review_ (April 1901): 603.\n\n119. Ibid.\n\n120. Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 90.\n\n121. Barber, \"The Servant Problem in Manitoba.\"\n\n122. Brice, \"Emigration for Gentlewomen,\" _Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review_ (April 1901): 603.\n\n123. Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 81.\n\n124. Ibid., 95.\n\n125. Levitan, \"Redundancy, the 'Surplus Women' Problem, and the British Census\" 367.\n\n126. Worsnop, \"A Reevaluation of 'The Problem of Surplus Women' in 19th-Century England,\" 23.\n\n127. Boucherett, \"How to Provide for Superfluous Women,\" 46.\n\n128. Ibid., 45.\n\n129. Ibid., 41\u201342.\n\n130. This historiography is reviewed in Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 93\u201394.\n\n131. Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 95.\n\n132. Quoted in Gordon, _Politics and Society_ , 35.\n\n133. Weston, \"Hints for the Single Women of the United Kingdom,\" _National Review_ 17, no. 98 (April 1891): 279.\n\n134. \"Tea and Silk Farming in New Zealand,\" _Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts_ , no. 917 (23 July 1881): 469.\n\n135. Weston, \"Hints for the Single Women of the United Kingdom,\" 280.\n\n136. Ibid., 283.\n\n137. Ibid., 284.\n\n138. \"Civis Britannicus,\" \"The Need of Women Colonists in South Africa,\" _Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art_ , 20 Sept. 1902, 365.\n\n139. M. F-G. (Anonymous), \"Should Women Emigrate,\" _Monthly Review_ 27, no. 80 (May 1907): 99\u2013105.\n\n140. \"Colonial Training for Gentlemen's Sons,\" _Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts_ 2, no. 95 (Oct. 1995): 684.\n\n141. _Imperial Colonist_ 3, no. 25 (Jan. 1904): 11.\n\n142. Vernon, _Leaton Colonial Training Home_ , 4\u20135.\n\n143. Ibid., 12.\n\n144. Ibid., 5.\n\n145. Ibid., 8.\n\n146. _Imperial Colonist_ 6, no. 61 (Jan. 1907): 8.\n\n147. \"A Farming Hostel for Girls: An Appeal by Lady Warwick,\" _Review of Reviews_ 26, no. 152 (August 1902): 156.\n\n148. Ibid.\n\n149. Ibid.\n\n150. Ibid.\n\n151. Opitz, \"A Triumph of Brains over Brute,\" 51.\n\n152. Ibid., 52.\n\n153. Ibid., 53.\n\n154. _Imperial Colonist_ 3, no. 26 (Feb. 1904): 23\u201324.\n\n155. Ibid., 3, no. 27 (March 1904): 33.\n\n156. \"The Woman at Home,\" _The Review of Reviews_ 40, no. 239 (Nov. 1909): 47.\n\n157. Tooley, \"Training Girls for Life in the Colonies,\" _Globe_ , 9 July 1910, A4. See Doughty, \"Representing the Professional Woman.\"\n\n158. _Imperial Colonist_ 10, no. 121 (Jan. 1912): 17\u201318.\n\n159. Ibid., 12, no. 148 (May 1914): 79\u201380.\n\n160. Delahey, \"Emma Ducie Active at 100,\" _Western Producer_ , 12 May 1983, n.p., Glenbow Archives Clipping File, \"Agriculture-Women.\"\n\n161. Ibid.\n\n162. Oxendale, \"What Should They Know of England Who Only England Know?\" See Chapter 4.\n\n163. Gordon, _Politics and Society_ , 32.\n\n164. Blakeley, \"Women and Imperialism,\"136.\n\n165. _Imperial Colonist_ 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1902): 4.\n\n166. Ibid., 1, no. 12 (Dec. 1912): 114.\n\n167. Ibid., 2 no. 5 (June 1903): 69.\n\n168. Ibid., 2, no. 5 (May 1903): 59.\n\n169. Ibid., 112.\n\n170. Ibid., 2 no. 2 (Feb. 1903): 21\n\n171. Ibid., 3, no. 25 (Jan. 1904): 3.\n\n172. Ibid., 3, no. 27 (March 1904): 27.\n\n173. Ibid., 28.\n\n174. Ibid., 5, no. 50 (Feb. 1906): 39.\n\n175. Ibid., 5, no. 50 (Feb. 1906): 40.\n\n176. Ibid., 6, no. 65 (May 1907): 6.\n\n177. Ibid., 6, no. 69 (Sept. 1907): 3.\n\n178. Ibid., 6, no. 67 (July 1907): 2.\n\n179. Ibid., 8.\n\n180. Ibid., 10, no. 130 (Oct. 1912): 168.\n\n181. Ibid.\n\n182. Ibid., 10, no. 122 (Feb. 1912): 24.\n\n183. Quoted in Opitz, \"A Triumph of Brains over Brute,\" 52.\n\n184. \"Our Special Commissioner,\" \"Empire Migration: What are the Prospects for Educated Women,\" _Quiver_ , Jan. 1919, 611.\n\n185. Taylor, \"Conditions of Life for Women in South Africa,\" 122.\n\n186. Bush, _Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power_ , 151.\n\n187. \"South African Women Farmers,\" _Vote,_ 19 July 1927, 237.\n\n188. \"The Review of Reviews,\" _Nineteenth Century_ 25, no. 148 (April 1902): 394.\n\n189. _Imperial Colonist_ 5, no. 6 (Dec. 1906): 177.\n\n190. Ibid., 6, no. 77 (May 1908): 8.\n\n191. Ibid., 8, no. 104 (Aug. 1910): 127\u201328.\n\n192. Ibid., 1, no. 12 (Dec. 1902): 112.\n\n193. Ibid., 9, no. 112 (April 1911): 282.\n\n194. Ibid., 9, no. 118 (Oct. 1911): 377.\n\n195. Helly, \"Flora Shaw and the Times.\"\n\n196. Anonymous (Flora Shaw), \"Letters from Canada VII, Prairie Settlement\u2014Part 1,\" Times, 22 Nov. 1898, 6.\n\n197. Helly, \"Flora Shaw and the Times,\" 122.\n\n198. Brice, \"Emigration for Gentlewomen,\" _Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review_ (April 1901): 609.\n\n199. Bernard, \"A Training School for Lady Colonists in the Canadian North-West,\" Times, 5 April 1899, 5.\n\n200. Ibid.\n\n201. Barber, \"The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary's Coronation Hostel,\" 144.\n\n202. Lang, _Women Who Made the News_ , 49.\n\n203. Stoddard, \"Lally Bernard: An Imperial Daughter,\" _Canadian Magazine_ 46, no. 6 (1916): 513\u201315.\n\n204. Anonymous (Flora Shaw), \"Women and Colonial Settlement,\" _Times_ , 11 April 1899, 8.\n\n205. Quoted in _Leeds Mercury_ editorial, 12 April 1899.\n\n206. Ibid.\n\n207. See, for example, _Montreal Gazette_ , 22 April 1899, 11; _Leader_ , 22 June 1899; _Daily Mail and Empire_ (Toronto), 29 April 1899, 15 and 24.\n\n208. Fitzgibbon (Lally Bernard), \"Training Schools for Lady Colonists in the Canadian North-West,\" _Times_ , 23 May 1899, 10.\n\n209. _Weekend Herald_ (Calgary), 5 Oct. 1899, 4.\n\n210. \"M. F-G,\" \"Should Women Emigrate?,\" _Monthly Review_ 27, no. 80 (1907): 99\u2013105.\n\n211. Ibid., 103.\n\n212. _Times_ , 26 April 1899, 4.\n\n213. \"Women and the West,\" _Globe_ , 16 June 1899, 6.\n\n214. Fitzgibbon, _Times_ , 23 May 1889, 10.\n\n215. \"Women and the Colonies,\" _Times_ , 1 June 1904, 10.\n\n216. Bernard, \"Driftwood,\" _Globe_ , 5 Sept. 1903, 14.\n\n217. Ibid., \"Driftwood,\" _Globe_ , 1 June 190, 18.\n\n218. Ibid., \"Glimpses of the West,\" _Globe_ , 14 April 1900, 9.\n\n219. London School of Economics (LSE), Women's Library, Records of the Colonial Intelligence League (CIL); King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 51\u201376; Oxendale, \"What Should They Know of England Who Only England Know?,\" 138\u2013155.\n\n220. Annual Reports CIL, no. 1 (1910), 10, Box 37, CIL Papers.\n\n221. \"Unmarried Daughters,\" _Times_ , 7 Dec. 1909, 10.\n\n222. Ibid.\n\n223. Annual Reports CIL, no. 1 (1910), 1, in LSE, Records of the CIL, Box 37.\n\n224. \"Women's Emigration,\" _Times_ , 16 April 1910.\n\n225. _Daily Colonist_ , 9 April 1911, 8; 14 June 1912, 5; 20 March 1913, 8; 20 June 1914, 2.\n\n226. Grosvenor, \"Women Farmers in Canada: British Farm Settlement,\" _Times_ , 27 Feb. 1913, 5.\n\n227. Ibid.\n\n228. Yarmie, \"I Had Always Wanted to Farm,\" 105.\n\n229. Ibid.\n\n230. \"Lady Sybil Grey Miner,\" _Globe_ , 18 Sept. 1909, 8.\n\n231. Yarmie, \"'I Had Always Wanted to Farm,'\" 106.\n\n232. Sykes, _A Home-Help in Canada_ , 304.\n\n233. \"Ranch for Women,\" _Ashburton Guardian_ vol. 33, no. 8799 (20 Feb. 1914): 6.\n\n234. Ibid.\n\n235. CIL Reference Book: Canada, in LSE, Records of the CIL.\n\n236. Barber, \"The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary's Coronation Hostel.\"\n\n237. Stoddard, \"Lally Bernard: An Imperial Daughter,\" _Canadian Magazine_ 46, no. 6 (91916): 514.\n\n238. Barber, \"The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary's Coronation Hostel,\" 150.\n\n239. The _Daily Colonist_ editorial is quoted in the _Globe_ , 19 July 1913, 6.\n\n240. Yarmie, \"'I Had Always Wanted to Farm,'\" 113.\n\n241. CIL Minute Book, meeting 16 Oct. 1913, 3, in LSE, Records of the CIL, Box 38.\n\n242. \"Mischievous Benevolence,\" editorial, _Daily Colonist,_ 11 July 1913, 4.\n\n243. Seaton, \"The Garden Autobiography,\" 110\u201311.\n\n244. Cran, _A Woman in Canada_. The book was published in England, Canada and the United States in 1911, and when it first appeared is not clear; it may have been as early as 1909.\n\n245. Cran, _A Woman in Canada_ , 14\u201315.\n\n246. Ibid., 22.\n\n247. Ibid., 39.\n\n248. Ibid., 38.\n\n249. Ibid., 153.\n\n250. Ibid.\n\n251. Ibid., 154.\n\n252. Ibid., 155.\n\n253. \"Women Farmers in Canada: A Great Future,\" _Warwick Examiner and Time_ s 21 June, 1909, 3.\n\n254. Cran, _A Woman in Canada_ , 162.\n\n255. Ibid., 266.\n\n256. Ibid.\n\n257. Smith, \"Adventurous Girls of the British Empire.\"\n\n258. Ibid., 12, 13.\n\n259. Ibid., 4.\n\n260. Ibid., 16.\n\n261. Ibid.\n\n262. Ward, _Canadian Born_. This book was published in the United States with the title _Lady Mereton, Colonist_.\n\n263. Harris, \"Hobart and 'Home' in Tasma and Mrs. Humphry Ward.\"\n\n264. Swan, \"Prairie Fires,\" _Quiver_ 48, no. 11 (Sept. 1913): 1044.\n\n265. Ibid., 1053.\n\n266. Ibid., 48, no. 12 (October 1913): 1130.\n\n267. Austin, _Woman_ , 35.\n\n268. Ibid.\n\n269. Ibid., 35\u201336.\n\n270. Hoodless, \"Trades and Industries: The Industrial Possibilities of Canada,\" in _Women of Canada: Their Life and Work_ , 92.\n\n271. Ibid., 95.\n\n272. Ibid.\n\n273. Crowley, \"Adelaide Sophia Hunger (Hoodless),\" _Dictionary of Canadian Biography_ , http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/hunter_adelaide_sophia_13E.html.\n\n274. _Women of Canada: Their Life and Work_ , 86.\n\n275. Strong, \"Horticulture as a Profession for Women,\" in _Report on the International Congress of Women_ , 319.\n\n276. Yates, \"Women in Agriculture,\" in _Report on the International Congress of Women_ , 308.\n\n277. _Women of Canada: Their Life and Work_ , 86\u201387.\n\n278. Ibid.\n\n279. Crerar, \"Educated Women for Canada,\" _Times_ , 30 May 1910, 6. On the International Order of the Daughters of the Empire, see Pickles, _Female Imperialism and National Identity_.\n\n280. Rees, _New and Naked Land_ , 8.\n\n281. Ibid.\n\n282. Ibid.\n\n283. Ibid., 10.\n\n284. Canadian Pacific Railway Company, _Words from the Women of Western Canada_.\n\n285. Ibid., 4.\n\n286. Ibid., 38.\n\n287. Canadian Pacific Railway Company, _Women's Work in Western Canada: A Sequel to \"Words from the Women of Western Canada.\"_\n\n288. Ibid., 26.\n\n289. Ibid., 38\u201339.\n\n290. Ibid., 45\u201346.\n\n291. Ibid., 13\u201314.\n\n292. Ibid., 13.\n\n293. \"Canada for Women,\" _Daily Mail_ 2 March, 1910: n.p.\n\n294. Chapman, \"The Argument of the Broken Pane: Suffragette Consumerism and Newspapers,\" _Media History_ 21:3 (2015): 247.\n\n295. Ibid.\n\n296. \"Canada for Women,\" _Woman's Leader and the Common Cause_ v. 210 (1913): 28.\n\n297. \"A Welcome to Women in British Columbia,\" _Suffragette_ , 7 March 1913, 339.\n\nCHAPTER THREE\n\n1. \"Western Farmers Exhibit Brightest Crop Prospects,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 3 Aug. 1909, 1.\n\n2. Brada-Easthill-Roecliffe Historical Society, _Rural Roots_ , 82.\n\n3. 1906 Census of the Northwest Provinces, Library Archives Canada; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.ca\/e\/e049\/e001210880.jpg.\n\n4. _Bow Island Review,_ 26 Dec. 1913, 7.\n\n5. \"Free\" is often within quotation marks to indicate that while the Canadian government advertised the grant of 160 acres as free, this was far from the case, as the successful homestead involved considerable cost and labour. See the summary of debates about homestead costs in Russell, _How Agriculture Made Canada_ , 238\u201342.\n\n6. Canada, Dominion Lands Branch, _Homestead Regulations of North-Western Canada with an Abridgement of the Dominion Lands Act_ (Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1903), 3.\n\n7. Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, General Passenger Department, _Land Seekers' Guide_ , 22.\n\n8. Dick, _Farmers \"Making Good_. _\"_\n\n9. This section is taken from Col. G.C. Porter, \"Homesteading Widow Raises 10 Children on Crusoe Cuisine,\" _Winnipeg Evening Tribune_ , 13 Feb. 1943, 22; and \"Jessie Margaret McGavin, Physician,\" Memorable Manitobans; http:\/\/www.mhs.mb.ca\/docs\/people\/mcgavin_jm.shtml.\n\n10. Richards, \"The Story of Beautiful Plains.\"\n\n11. Schofield, _The Story of Manitoba_ , 69\u201370.\n\n12. 1891 Census, Northwest Territories, Library and Archives Canada; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/1891\/jpg\/30953_148228-00466.jpg. See also _Moose Jaw Herald,_ 11 Sept. 1896, 5; 1 Sept. 1899, 1.\n\n13. Oak Lake Historical Committee, _Ox Trails to Blacktop_ , 162\u201363.\n\n14. Alberta Historical Society, _Cypress Hills Country_ , 275\u201376.\n\n15. Biographical information is taken from the marriage notice of Agnes Katherine Cobb and Francis William Bedingfeld, in _Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review_ , Nov. 1862, 627; information on Agnes Katherine Cobb, later Agnes Katherine Bedingfeld, and her son Francis is also from the U.K. census online from 1861, 1871, and 1881; see, for example, the 1881 census available at http:\/\/www.ukcensusonline.com\/search\/index.php?fn=agnes&sn=Bedingfeld&phonetic_mode=1&event=1881&token=5azQWxpqQ8pu77yZu0Y8-IdxpiGha8ER9SchU-hb_MM. Notice of the death of Lt. Francis W. Bedingfeld is from the _United Service Magazine_ 119 (1869): 453.\n\n16. PAA, homestead file 513196, reel 2053.\n\n17. Evans, _Prince Charming Goes West_ , 51.\n\n18. PAA homestead file 1208837, reel 2752.\n\n19. Lehr, \"The Making of the Prairie Landscape,\" 11\u201312; Evans, _The Bar U: Canadian Ranching History_ , 76, 78.\n\n20. \"The Prince of Wales as Rancher,\" _Red Deer News,_ 19 May, 1920, 9.\n\n21. History Book Society, _Fencelines and Furrows_ , 276\u201378.\n\n22. PAA, homestead file, file 819163, reel 2714.\n\n23. History Book Society, _Fencelines and Furrows_ , 277.\n\n24. Pleasantdale and District History Book Committee, _Memories of the Past_ , 496\u201397.\n\n25. Ibid., 497.\n\n26. SAB, homestead file 1591363: SE 28-9-3-W3; and 1774242: NE 21-9-3-W3. See also Mehain and Limerick Historical Society, _Prairie Trails and Pioneer Tales_ , 188\u201392.\n\n27. Coyote Flats Historical Society, _Coyote Flats Historical Review 1905\u20131965_ , 1:63.\n\n28. \"Another Oldtimer Passes from the District,\" _Crossfield Chronicle_ , 1 Sept. 1938; Anon., _Prairie Sod and Goldenrod: History of Crossfield and District_ , 96.\n\n29. Ghost Pine Community Group, _Memoirs of the Ghost Pine Homesteaders_ , 68.\n\n30. Ibid.\n\n31. \"Lyster\/Sommerville Clan Gather for A Reunion,\" _Three Hills Capital_ , 13 Aug. 2014.\n\n32. Parkbeg History Book Group, _Parkbeg Reflections_ , 234\u201335.\n\n33. Aberdeen Historical Society, _Aberdeen, 1907\u20131981_ , 117.\n\n34. Lacombe Rural History Club, _Wagon Trails to Hard Top_ , 568.\n\n35. Webb History Book Committee, _Prairie Memories_ , 595.\n\n36. Ibid., 652\u201353.\n\n37. Yellow Lake History Group, _Treasured Memories_ , 531.\n\n38. Parkbeg History Book Group, _Parkbeg Reflections_ , 236.\n\n39. Webb History Book Committee, _Prairie Memories_ , 1143\u201344.\n\n40. Notukeu History Book Club, _Next Year Country_ , 381.\n\n41. Kenyon, _Lone Rock to Marshall_ , 359.\n\n42. Rita Mary Cleveley, \"1796 through 1999... and All the Years Between,\" unpublished history of the Cleveley family. Thanks to Matthew Ostapchuk, MA, University of Alberta Department of History, for sharing his family history with me.\n\n43. SAB, homestead file 1863456: NE 20-5-1-W3.\n\n44. Ibid., statutory declaration by Mrs. O. Thompson, 14 Sept. 1912.\n\n45. McPherson, \"Was the 'Frontier' Good for Women?,\" 80.\n\n46. This data is from The Last Best West: The Alberta Land Settlement Infrastructure Project at the University of Alberta, with principal investigator Peter Baskerville and co-investigators Sarah Carter and Sean Gouglas. This preliminary data was provided by Peter Baskerville in an email of 14 April 2014.\n\n47. Blaine Lake and District Historical Book Committee, _Bridging the Years_ , 476.\n\n48. Ibid.\n\n49. Leonard, _The Last Great West_ , 565\u201366.\n\n50. Thanks to Doris J. MacKinnon, Red Deer, author of _The Identities of Marie Rose Delorme Smith: Portrait of a M\u00e9tis Woman, 1861\u20131960_ , for providing me with the homestead file of Marie Rose Smith.\n\n51. PAA, homestead file 1390105, reel 2077; LAC, RG 15, Metis Scrip Records, scrip application of Julia Rowland for her deceased son Angus Rowland, form D. no. 2770; Morrow, \"The Deville Story,\" 16.\n\n52. The debates about the cost of homesteading are summarized in Russell, _How Agriculture Made Canada_ , 238\u201342.\n\n53. Church-Staudt, \"Agnes (Martin) Balfour: Descendants Uphold Her Heritage,\" 21. Thanks to Douglas Ramsay for sharing information on Agnes Balfour and family.\n\n54. PAA, homestead file 3268427, reel 2462.\n\n55. Ibid., homestead file 1465905, reel 2789.\n\n56. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 9 Jan. 1906, 3.\n\n57. Advertisement, _Edmonton Capital_ , 16 April 1910, 6.\n\n58. \"Death of Madame de Tro,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 17 May 1913, 13.\n\n59. Wood Mountain Historical Society, _They Came to Wood Mountain_ , 194.\n\n60. LAC, Census of Canada 1911, Saskatchewan, district and subdistrict: Regina, item no. 7690602, 44.\n\n61. Wood Mountain Histortical Society, _They Came to Wood Mountain_ , 195.\n\n62. SAB, homestead file 2133402: SW 6-3-5-W3, Marion Pearce to Dominion Lands Office, 11 Dec. 1911.\n\n63. Ibid., F. Nelson to Pearce, 24 Jan. 1912.\n\n64. Ibid., homestead inspector's report, Sept. 1919.\n\n65. Potyondi, _In Palliser's Triangle_ , 96\u201399.\n\n66. SAB, homestead file 2133402, Acting Commissioner of Dominion Lands to Mrs. Frazer, 1928.\n\n67. See Hryrniuk and Korvemaker, _Legacy of Stone_ , 11\u201313.\n\n68. Ibid.\n\n69. John Geddes to the Secretary, Department of the Interior, 23 Oct. 1890, SAB homestead file 425772, SW2-9-5-W2.\n\n70. LAC, Western Land Grants, Mary Ann McNab, SW 2-9-5-W2.\n\n71. Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 116.\n\n72. SAB, homestead file 500684: SE 14-14-10-W2.\n\n73. Canada, _Prosperity Follows Settlement_ , 111.\n\n74. \"Cupid Championed by Miss Rankin in Talk to Congress,\" _Washington Times_ , 8 Dec. 1917, 5.\n\n75. LAC, Census of Canada 1891 for the Province of Manitoba, Selkirk District, Virden Village.\n\n76. _Manitoba Free Press,_ 28 Dec. 1882.\n\n77. _Winnipeg Daily Times_ , 2 Oct. 1882.\n\n78. Ibid., 30 Sept. 1882, and _Manitoba Free Press_ , 28 Dec. 1882.\n\n79. See Kendle, \"Thomas Mayne Daly,\" _Dictionary of Canadian Biography_ ; http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/daly_thomas_mayne_1852_1911_14E.html.\n\n80. \"Money Flew Fast in the Good Old Tory Days,\" _Globe_ , 5 Jan. 1901, 5.\n\n81. These letters are quoted in \"Mr. Daly Had Strong Pull,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 1 Oct. 1908, 1.\n\n82. \"Mr. Daly's Homestead,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 16 Oct. 1908, 4.\n\n83. LAC, Census of Canada 1901, Province of Manitoba, District 6 Brandon, Village of Virden, p. 1.\n\n84. _Thomas Mayne Daly_ , Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Recreation.\n\n85. Letter, ____ Hall to E.L. Newcombe, 2 April 1896 in Circumstances under which married woman or widow may obtain a homestead entry, LAC, Record Group 13 (RG 13) Records of the Department of Justice, vol. 2247, file int. 25 74\/1896.\n\n86. Letter, William Wilson to A.M. Burgess, 28 April 1886, in LAC, RG 13, vol. 2247, file int. 25 74\/1896.\n\n87. SAB, homestead file 317719: NW 16-47-26-W2.\n\n88. Ibid., Clerk of the Privy Council to the Minister of the Interior, 18 Feb. 1895.\n\n89. Ellen Margaret Cameron to Department of the Interior, January 1887, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 477, file 130492.\n\n90. Secretary, Department of the Interior to E.M. Cameron, 19 Jan. 1887, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 477, file 130492.\n\n91. Letter, ____ Hall to E.L. Newcombe, 28 Sept. 1893. \"Homestead entry of Margaret Spence\u2014half-breed woman with illegitimate children,\" in LAC, RG 13, vol. 2271, file 150-1893.\n\n92. Letter, Deputy Minister of Justice to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 19 Oct. 1893, in LAC, RG 13, vol. 2271, file 150-1893.\n\n93. Scrip application. Young, Sarah. Address: Stonewall; born 8 Sept. 1885 at Rabbit Point: father: Thomas Young (Whiteman); mother Margaret Spence (Metis); scrip cert.: form E, no. 3492; claim no. 588. vol 1371, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-8-c.\n\n94. Memorandum, Department of Justice, 8 Nov. 1894, in LAC, RG 13, vol. 2247, file int. 25 74\/1896.\n\n95. LAC, RG 15, vol. 2108, ruling no. 167, 53\u201354.\n\n96. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Land Rulings, no. 1504, Memorandum, 27 Aug. 1914.\n\n97. See, for example, SAB, homestead file 2178290: NE 10-3-16 W3 (Mrs. Nettie Blackmer).\n\n98. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, no. 496-1894, Deputy Minister of Justice to the Secretary, Department of the Interior, 8 Aug. 1894.\n\n99. PAA, homestead file, reel 2434, file 3006361.\n\n100. Canada, _Debates of the House of Commons_ , 3rd session, 10th Parliament, vol. 80 (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1906\u20137), 4813\u201314.\n\n101. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, no. 4171, vol. 1971, Department of the Interior circular letter, 21 July 1920.\n\n102. Thwaite, _Alberta: An Account of Its Wealth and Progress_ , 306\u20137.\n\n103. SAB, homestead file 861961: SW 28-25-24-W2.\n\n104. Ibid., James F. MacLean to J.G. Turriff, 30 Jan. 1904.\n\n105. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Land Rulings, no. 4369, Memorandum, 10 Feb. 1921.\n\n106. LAC, RG 15, vol. 2277, file 1895-242, Deputy Minister of Justice to the Secretary, Department of the Interior, 5 March 1895.\n\n107. PAA, homestead file 641486, reel 2074, images 1612\u20131614: SE 30-4-28-W4.\n\n108. Doughan, \"Pioneer Club,\" _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ ; http:\/\/www.oxforddnb.com\/templates\/theme.jsp?articleid=96079.\n\n109. _Edmonton Bulletin,_ 29 May 1912, 3.\n\n110. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Land Rulings, no. 2544, Memorandum, 27 Jan. 1917.\n\n111. LAC, RG 13, vol. 2377, file 105\/1895, E. Newcombe to L. Pereira, 31 May 1895.\n\n112. SAB, homestead file 467578: NE 26-26-5-W2.\n\n113. S.C. 1897 60\u201361 Victoria c. 29 s. 12; Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 106.\n\n114. Pollock, _Our Pioneers_ , 92.\n\n115. See http:\/\/boards.ancestry.com\/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=2835&p=surnames.harvey.\n\n116. LAC, Census of the Western Provinces, 1906; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.ca\/e\/e049\/e001207780.jpg.\n\n117. Pollock, _Our Pioneers_ , 92.\n\n118. Veldhuis, _For Elise: Unveiling the Forgotten Woman on the Criddle Homestead._\n\n119. PAM, 2255 #375, homestead file NW 28-8-26-W1, Elise Vane to Dominion Lands Agent, Brandon, 19 Aug. 1889.\n\n120. Ibid., Vane to A.H. Smith, Commissioner of Dominion Lands, Winnipeg, 30 Sept. 1889 and Vane to the Minister of the Interior 2 Oct. 1889.\n\n121. Ibid., Anonymous letter to the Commissioner of Dominion Lands, 31 Jan. 1890 from Aweme, Manitoba.\n\n122. Ibid., R.O. Cook to Commissioner of Dominion Lands, Winnipeg, 22 Feb. 1890.\n\n123. Ibid., Percy Criddle to Smith, 26 Feb. 1890.\n\n124. LAC, 1891 Census, district 7 Marquette, subdistrict South Cypress, Manitoba; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/1891\/jpg\/30953_148095-00496.jpg.\n\n125. Ibid., for 1901; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.ca\/1901\/z\/z001\/jpg\/z000016439.jpg.\n\n126. \"Through Silent Night Watches,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 1 Sept. 1908, 1.\n\n127. Watt, _Town and Trail_ , 67.\n\n128. \"Congratulations,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 3 Sept. 1908, 8.\n\n129. PAA, homestead files, file 1681610, reel 2827; file 1238377, reel 2756.\n\n130. Fullerton, \"Our Homesteaders,\" _Canadian Magazine_ 16, no. 3 (January 1916): 253.\n\n131. Anon., \"Our Western Lands.\"\n\n132. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, vol. 1957, p. 417, Memorandum Oliver to Greenway, 24 Jan. 1910.\n\n133. Ibid., 422, W.W. Cory to T. Greenway, 30 May 1910.\n\n134. Ibid., Memorandum, 23 May 1910.\n\n135. Ibid., Memorandum 16 July 1910, 479.\n\n136. Roy, \"A Berkhamstead Boy in the Foothills,\" 24.\n\n137. Ibid., 17, 29.\n\n138. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, vol. 1957, 484, Memorandum, A.J. Fraser to F.F. Dixon, 16 June 1910.\n\n139. See, for example, the case of Margrit Hefferman, in PAA, homestead file 119536, reel 2750.\n\n140. LAC, RG2, orders-in-council, no. 2055, \"Sale lands Mrs. Marion [ _sic_ ] B. Heath of Leduc...\" 1895\/07\/02.\n\n141. Ibid.\n\n142. LAC, Maria Ann Bell-Heath land patent; http:\/\/www.bac-lac.gc.ca\/eng\/discover\/land\/land-grants-western-canada-1870-1930\/pages\/image.aspx?URLjpg=http%3a%2f%2fcentral.bac-lac.gc.ca%2f.item%2f%3fid%3de002979350%26op%3dimg%3dwesternlandgrants&Ecopy=e002979350.\n\n143. PAA, homestead file 1195365, reel 2750.\n\n144. \"Took Up Homesteading Illegally,\" _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 8 Sept. 1910, 2.\n\n145. This section is taken from \"Got Nine Months: Guilty of Perjury,\" _Medicine Hat Times_ , 25 August 1910, 7.\n\n146. PAM, homestead file SE 12-24-25-W.\n\n147. LAC, 1881 Census, Manitoba, Rockwood Division, Lisgar.\n\n148. LAC, 1891 Census, Manitoba, Marquette, Cypress South.\n\n149. LAC, 1901 Census, Manitoba, Marquette, Dauphin.\n\n150. LAC, 1906 Census, Manitoba, village of Grandview.\n\n151. LAC, RG2, order-in-council, number 1850, \"Dominion lands homestead sold Mrs. Delia Bell, homesteader at $3 p. acre,\" Minister of the Interior, 1910\/09\/15.\n\n152. PAM, homestead file SE 23-26-27-W of the Principal Meridian, Secretary of the Department of the Interior to Margaret Little, 26 Feb. 1909.\n\n153. Ibid., F. Herchmer to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 24 Feb. 1910.\n\n154. Ibid., Herchmer to F.E. McGregor, 18 April 1910, and McGregor to Herchmer, 7 May 1910.\n\n155. Ibid., Margaret Little to Secretary Department of the Interior, 9 May 1910.\n\n156. Ibid., statutory declaration of Margaret Little, 9 June 1910.\n\n157. Ibid., John A. Watson to Herchmer, August 1910.\n\n158. Ibid., Herchmer to M. Little, 2 Dec. 1910.\n\n159. Ibid., M. Little to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 7 Dec. 1910.\n\n160. Ibid., Herchmer to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 21 Jan. 1911.\n\n161. Ibid., letters patent to Ross Little.\n\n162. \"An Enterprising Lady,\" _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 19 Jan. 1911, 2.\n\n163. PAM, homestead file SE 23-26-27-W of the Principal Meridian, William Hughes to Commissioner of Dominion Lands, 12 Jan. 1903.\n\n164. Ibid., homestead file NW 10-26-28-W of the Principal Meridian, Last Will and Testament of William Hughes.\n\n165. Carter, \"My Vocabulary Contains No Such Word as Defeat.\"\n\n166. PAA, homestead file 570088, reel 2062, Clara A. Lynch to W.H. Cottingham, 2 June 1900. All of the rest of the correspondence in this section is from this file. Her land was Section 12, Township 40, Range 1, West of the 5th Meridian. For the history of Bentley, see Bentley and District Historical Society, _Bentley and District Early History._\n\n167. Turriff to Oliver, 3 April 1901.\n\n168. Lynch to Oliver, 15 May 1901.\n\n169. SAB, homestead file 2487207.\n\n170. SAB, Homestead Index and homestead files.\n\n171. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 1907\u201308, 10 July 1908, 12607.\n\n172. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 1907\u201308, vol. 88, 10 July 1908, 12617.\n\n173. SAB, homestead file 1780808.\n\n174. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 1907\u201308, vol. 83, 25 Feb. 1908, 3782\u201383; Graham, _A Canadian Girl in South Africa: A Teacher's Experiences in the South African War, 1899_ _\u2013_ _1902_.\n\n175. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 17 May 1910; _Daily Phoenix_ , 16 May 1910; _Morning Leader_ , 17 May 1910.\n\n176. _Toledo Blade_ , 23 June 1910.\n\n177. SAB, homestead file 1915194.\n\n178. _Secret Service_ 611 (7 Oct. 1910): 29.\n\n179. _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 20 Dec. 1917, 3.\n\n180. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 21 May 1910.\n\n181. Ibid.\n\n182. SAB, homestead file 1513986.\n\n183. Eatonia History Book Committee, _A Past to Cherish_ , 463.\n\n184. Leonard, _The Last Great West_ , 563.\n\n185. SAB, homestead file 2125459.\n\n186. SAB, homestead file 1691732.\n\n187. Stone Diggers History Book Committee, _Prairie Wool_ , 181.\n\n188. SAB, homestead file 108200A.\n\n189. Birtles, \"A Pioneer Nurse,\" 2.\n\n190. SAB, homestead file 1773681.\n\n191. SAB, homestead file 1406319.\n\n192. SAB, homestead file 1884227.\n\n193. SAB, homestead file 2138434.\n\n194. SAB, homestead file 2138434.\n\n195. SAB, homestead file 1733160.\n\n196. SAB, homestead file 2092263.\n\n197. Ibid., Jane Gentles to Minister of the Interior, 1 April 1915.\n\n198. Ibid., statement of Jane Gentles, 21 July 1915.\n\n199. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 21 May 1910.\n\n200. See, for, example Bauman, \"Single Women Homesteaders in Wyoming\"; Garceau, _The Important Things of Life_ ; Gould and Pando, _Claiming Their Land_ ; Lindgren, _Land in Her Own Name_ ; Patterson-Black, \"Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier.\"\n\n201. Muhn, \"Women and the Homestead Act,\" 286.\n\n202. James Muhn indicates that Mormon women involved in plural marriages were able to file on homesteads until 1878, when the General Land Office ruled that they would no longer be permitted to do so (\"Women and the Homestead Act,\" 290\u201391). Katherine Benton-Cohen, however, found that Mormon women \"finessed homesteading law to accommodate plural marriage or to help children born in Mormon colonies in Mexico to obtain land in the United States.\" Benton-Cohen, \"Common Purposes, Worlds Apart,\" 431.\n\n203. Memorandum, 8 Nov. 1894, LAC, RG 13, vol. 2247, file int. 25: 74\/1896.\n\n204. Anon., _Montana 1909_ , 48.\n\n205. Muhn, \"Women and the Homestead Act,\" 283. Many thanks to James Muhn, Land Law Historian for the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management, for his assistance with my research and for sending me an offprint of this article.\n\n206. Smith, \"Single Women Homesteaders,\" 164.\n\n207. Benton-Cohen, \"Common Purposes, Worlds Apart,\" 435.\n\n208. Lindgren, _Land in Her Own Name_ , 20.\n\n209. Ibid., 224.\n\n210. _Hinsdale Tribune_ , 21 Dec. 1917.\n\n211. Walker-Kuntz, \"Land, Life and _Feme Sole_ ,\" 46.\n\n212. Egly Country Club, _Trails, Trials and Tributes_ , 40.\n\n213. Geraldine History Committee, _Spokes, Spurs and Cockleburs_ , 205.\n\n214. Liberty County Museum, _Our Heritage in Liberty_ , 184.\n\n215. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Mangment, General Land Office Records, Sheridan County, Montana; http:\/\/www.glorecords.blm.gov\/results\/default.aspx?searchcriteria=type=patent\/st=MT\/cty=091\/ln=macgregor\/sp=true\/sw=true\/sady=false.\n\n216. Many thanks to Judy Archer, Orillia, Ontario for the photographs and information on her grandmother and aunt.\n\n217. Etta Smalley Bangs, Reminiscence, Small Collections 116, Montana Historical Society Research Center. See also Carter, ed., _Montana Women Homesteaders._\n\n218. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 27 July 1906, 5; 27 August 1906.\n\n219. Baergen, _Pioneering with a Piece of Chalk_ , 88.\n\n220. Cohen, \"Women's History Month: Out of Canada: Etta Smalley Homesteaded a New Life,\" _Missoulian_ , 23 July 2007; http:\/\/www.missoulian.com\/articles\/2007\/03\/16\/new\/local\/news04.txt.\n\n221. MacMahon, \"'Fine Hands for Sowing': The Homesteading Experiences of Remittance Woman Jessie de Prado MacMillan,\" 277\u201378.\n\n222. SAB, homestead file 3159536: SE 27-4-2-W3.\n\n223. Ibid., T. Rothwell, memorandum to the Minister of the Interior, 21 Feb. 1914.\n\nCHAPTER FOUR\n\n1. Martin-McGuire, \"First Nations Land Surrenders.\"\n\n2. Smith, _Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance_ , 210\u201311.\n\n3. Martin-McGuire, \"First Nations Land Surrenders,\" 410.\n\n4. LAC, Census of Canada 1911, item 4991575, subdistrict London, Ontario. Jean C. Laidlaw was forty-five years old, of Scottish ancestry, and born in England.\n\n5. \"Woman Rancher Tells of Life: Miss Jean Laidlaw Runs 360 Acres near Pincher Creek, Alberta: Shows Great Pluck,\" _Globe and Mail_ , 6 Feb. 1920, 10.\n\n6. Martin-McGuire, \"First Nations Land Surrenders,\" 329.\n\n7. Ibid., 343.\n\n8. Ibid., 348.\n\n9. Ibid., 354.\n\n10. Ibid., 372.\n\n11. \"Famed Prairie Barrister Dies,\" _Leader-Post_ , 2 Aug. 1932.\n\n12. SAB, homestead file 572137: W \u00bd 4 and all of 6-16-23-W2.\n\n13. SAB, homestead file 861961: SW 28-25-24-W2, letter from Short, Cross, Biggar and Ewing to Frank Oliver, 4 Oct. 1905. Her name is spelled both Buckman and Bucknam in the documents.\n\n14. SAB, homestead file 349942: SW 34-32-13-W2.\n\n15. PAA, homestead file, reel 2033, file 416715.\n\n16. Ibid., ____ to J.G. Turiff, 7 Dec., 1899.\n\n17. Fortier, _Lamoureux_ , 27\u201328.\n\n18. \"Un de nos pionni\u00e8res qui dispara\u00eet,\" _La Survivance_ , 4 March 1942, 5.\n\n19. McKenzie, _It's Time to Remember_ , 327\u201328.\n\n20. Ibid., 311\u201312.\n\n21. Rockwood-Woodlands Historical Society, _Rockwood Echoes_ , 78\u201379.\n\n22. Sonningdale Recreation Board, _Sonningdale Memories_ , 406\u20138.\n\n23. Lindsay v. Morrow, _Reports of Cases Heart in the Supreme Court of Saskatchewan,_ vol. 1 (Toronto: Canada Law Co. Ltd., 1909), 516\u201317.\n\n24. Gleichen United Church Women, _The Gleichen Call:_ _A History_ , 207.\n\n25. Glenbow Archives (GA) Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales. Annie E. Williams purchased four tracts of land in 1908 See http:\/\/ww2.glenbow.org\/search\/archivesCPRResults.aspx.\n\n26. _Gleichen Call_ , 28 March 1912, 8.\n\n27. \"Mrs. Williams Grew Excellent Flax,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 1 Jan. 1913, 1; \"Mrs. A.E. Williams Receives Big Price for Her Seed Flax,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 5 June 1913, 5; \"Lady Farmer Raises Record Crop,\" _Wainwright Star_ , 13 Aug. 1913, 2.\n\n28. _Gleichen Call_ , 31 Aug. 1916, 1.\n\n29. Gleichen United Church Women, _The Gleichen Call: A History,_ 207.\n\n30. See \"Alix, Alberta,\" http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alix,_Alberta.\n\n31. Thanks to Juliet Gayton, Winchester, England, for this genealogical research on Alice Westhead.\n\n32. GA, Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales, Alice C. Westhead. See http:\/\/ww2.glenbow.org\/search\/archivesCPRResults.aspx.\n\n33. _Calgary Herald_ , 7 Sept. 1910.\n\n34. Cavanaugh, \"Irene Marryat Parlby.\"\n\n35. Thompson, \"A Woman Rancher in Alberta: A Visit to Quarter-Circle-One Ranch,\" _Canadian Home Journal_ , August 1911; https:\/\/archive.org\/stream\/canadawest0708westuoft\/canadawest0708westuoft_djvu.txt.\n\n36. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 Sept. 1911, 3.\n\n37. Thwaite, _Alberta: An Account of its Wealth and Progress_ , 182.\n\n38. Alix Clive Historical Club, _Gleanings after Pioneers and Progress_ , 230\u201331.\n\n39. See \"An English Woman Farmer in Alberta,\" _Globe_ , 7 March 1914, 11; \"A Successful Lady Farmer,\" _Maitland Weekly Mercury,_ 20 Dec. 1913, 10.\n\n40. \"Law Report High Court of Justice, King's Bench,\" _Times_ 10 Jan. 1903, 12.\n\n41. \"Alleged Infringement of Copyright,\" _Times_ 7 Feb. 1910, 3.\n\n42. Hamer Jackson, \"How I Made a New Home in Canada,\" _Daily Mail_ , 17 Sept. 1913, 4 _._\n\n43. GA, Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales, Mrs. Celesta Hamer Jackson. See http:\/\/ww2.glenbow.org\/search\/archivesCPRResults.aspx\n\n44. \"A Successful Lady Farmer,\" _Maitland Weekly Mercury_ , 20 Dec. 1913.\n\n45. \"An English Woman Farmer in Alberta,\" _Globe_ , 7 March 1914.\n\n46. On Hamer Jackson lecturing in England, see _Western Gazette_ , 16 Jan. 1914, 2; articles on education include C. Hamer Jackson, \"Prevention of Pauperism,\" _Daily Colonist_ , 31 May 1914, 4; and \"Education in New Country,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 23 August 1923, 6.\n\n47. Ibid. (articles on education).\n\n48. GA, Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales Database at http:\/\/ww2.glenbow.org\/search\/archivesCPRSearch.aspx.\n\n49. GA, Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales Database, M 2272, vol. 122, contract number 13081.\n\n50. Ibid., vol. 2272, contract number 25990.\n\n51. Ibid., vol. 99, contract number 29695.\n\n52. Ibid., vol. 78, contract number 1515.\n\n53. Ibid., Canadian Pacific Railway Database.\n\n54. Laut, \"Openings for Women in Canada,\" _Pall Mall Magazine_ 40, no. 175 (Nov. 1907), 594\u201395.\n\n55. \"Women as Farmers in Western Canada,\" _Spokesman-Review_ , 14 July 1907, 27.\n\n56. \"Monday Interment for Pioneer Resident,\" _Leader-Post_ , 7 March 1949, 16. It is noted that her farm was near the RCMP barracks on Dewdney Avenue in present-day Regina. In the 1901 census Mary V. Gilroy is aged thirty-three, born in May 1867 in Ontario. Her occupation is \"Farmer,\" and she is the head of the household. The only other household member was John Archibald, aged twenty-one. Thanks to Sharon Maier, Regina Public Library Prairie History Room.\n\n57. LAC, 1871 Census; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.ca\/1871\/jpg\/4396332_00128.jpg.\n\n58. Canadian Pacific Railway Company, _Words from the Women of Western Canada_ , 31\u201333.\n\n59. Ibid., 32.\n\n60. \"Canadian Women's Press Club Tour: Girl Farmers and Ranchers in the West Have Made a Success of Their Work...\" _Quebec Saturday Budget_ , 7 July 1906, 1.\n\n61. \"M.H.A.,\" \"How Four Plucky Women Won Out in the Canadian Northwest,\" _Minneapolis Journal_ , 25 July 1906, part 6.\n\n62. Canadian Pacific Railway Company, _Home Life of Women in Western Canada_ , 21\u201322.\n\n63. _Leader-Post_ , 7 March 1949, 16.\n\n64. Census research by Sharon Maier, Regina Public Library, Prairie History Room.\n\n65. _Age_ , 3 Nov. 1906, 4.\n\n66. _St. John Sun,_ 6 Oct. 1906, 10; _Otago Witness_ , 30 Oct. 1907.\n\n67. \"The Woman Who Would Be a Sailor,\" _Bay of Plenty Times_ 24, no. 3676 (23 March 1898): 2.\n\n68. _Brantford Opinion_ , 7 Dec. 1906, 7.\n\n69. \"Titled Lady Has Ranch in the West,\" _St. John Sun_ , 6 Oct. 1906, 10; \"Canadian Woman Rancher,\" _Brantford Opinion_ , 7 Dec. 1906, 7.\n\n70. \"Titled Lady Has Ranch in the West,\" _St. John Sun_ , 6 Oct. 1906, 7.\n\n71. \"The Adventures of Lady Ernestine Hunt,\" _Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser_ , 26 Nov. 1906, 5\n\n72. \"Titled Lady Has Ranch in the West,\" _St. John Sun_ , 6 Oct. 1906, 7.\n\n73. Ibid.\n\n74. _L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orl_ \u00e9 _ans_ , 15 May 1910, 6. See also \"Handy and Helpful Girls,\" _Brisbane Courier_ , 11 May 1910, 17.\n\n75. \"Nurses on Horseback: Picturesque Parade in the West End,\" _Wairarapa Daily Times_ , 17 July 1909, 6.\n\n76. Noakes, _Women in the British Army_ , 30\u201331.\n\n77. \"Lady Hunt is a Lieutenant,\" _Spokane Daily Chronicle_ , 28 April 1910.\n\n78. _Star_ , 19 June 1909, 3.\n\n79. \"A Woman Farmer's Success,\" _New Zealand Herald_ 48, no. 14667 (29 April 1911); _Brisbane Courier_ , 19 April 1911, 14.\n\n80. \"This Woman Owns Big Farm,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 17 Jan. 1911, 4.\n\n81. LAC, Census of Canada 1911, item number 7745054; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.gc.ca\/1911\/jpg\/e002098158.jpg.\n\n82. \"This Woman Owns Big Farm,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 17 Jan. 1911, 4.\n\n83. \"Woman Runs a Big Farm Successfully,\" _Claresholm Review-Advertiser_ , 28 April 1916, 3.\n\n84. McCallum, \"Who Said Women Can't Farm? Miss R.M. Hillman of Keeler, Saskatchewan, Disproves Any Such Fallacy,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 27 March 1918, 8.\n\n85. Keeler History Book Committee, _Our Heritage: A History of the Keeler Community_ , 345.\n\n86. \"A Lady Farmer,\" _Clarence and Richmond Examiner_ , 5 May 1906, 7.\n\n87. \"A Lady Farm Laborer,\" _Wairarapa Daily Times_ , 25 May 1906, 6.\n\n88. Admiral William May had one daughter and three sons. The daughter's name was Kinbarra (also his wife's name). In 1881, William and Kinbarra are shown to be in Plymouth, a large naval base. Daughter Kinbarra Swene was born 1882, West Derby District; she died in Edinburgh in 1921 and the death certificate shows that she had suffered from ill health for some time. There are no other births during the period 1878\u201382 of a girl child called Isobel May born in any of the locations in which the May family was known to have been. Kinbarra Swene Marrow, the daughter born in 1882, is recorded in the England census for 1911 (which took place on 31st March) at the home of her parents in Kensington, London. She is of no occupation and aged 29 years. In none of the post-1911 press reports about \"Jack\" May is her first name, Isobel mentioned, but this is how her name is recorded in the land ledger of the Canadian Pacific Railway.\n\nMany thanks to Joan Heggie, Research Fellow, School of Social Sciences, Teesside University Middlesbrough, U.K. for her amazingly thorough research on \"Jack\" May and the Admiral May family.\n\n89. \"World's Happiest Girl,\" _Redcliff Review_ , 13 Dec. 1912, 4.\n\n90. \"A Woman Farmer,\" _Border Watch_ , 23 May 1906, 4.\n\n91. Ibid.\n\n92. Ibid.\n\n93. \"Mrs. 'Jack' May in Alberta,\" _Saturday News_ , 23 Sept. 1911, 8.\n\n94. Ibid.\n\n95. \"A Lady Farm Laborer,\" _Wairarapa Daily Times_ , 25 May 1906, 6.\n\n96. \"Miss Jack May in Male Attire,\" _Globe_ 15 April 1911, 4.\n\n97. \"Provincial Notes: Noted Lady Farmer Settles in Alberta,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 4 May 1911, 5.\n\n98. Thanks again to Joan Heggie, whose research indicates that May arrived on the _Empress of Ireland_. The entry in the passenger list on that ship includes Jack May, destined for Sedgewick, and her age of thirty-five, is first entered in the male column and then is crossed out and written across the female column.\n\n99. _Western Globe_ , 19 April 1911, 3.\n\n100. \"Girl Posed as a Man to Keep from Starving,\" _Globe and Mail_ , 1 Jan. 1914, 15.\n\n101. \"Young Girl Posed as Man,\" in _Globe and Mail_ , 8 June 1918, 13.\n\n102. _Spokane Daily Chronicle_ , 1 Dec. 1910, 8.\n\n103. _Gazette Times_ , 31 Aug. 1913.\n\n104. \"Provincial Notes: Noted Lady Farmer Settles in Alberta,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 4 May 1911, 5.\n\n105. _Daily Colonist_ , 14 Aug. 1911, 8.\n\n106. _Kindersley Clarion_ , 3 May 1911.\n\n107. \"Mrs. 'Jack' May in Alberta,\" _Saturday News_ , 23 Sept. 1911, 8.\n\n108. \"Canada's Golden West,\" _Hawera and Normanby Star_ 30 (1912): 2.\n\n109. _Wairarapa Daily Times_ , 5 June 1913, 4.\n\n110. GA, Canadian Pacific Railway Land Sales Catalogue; http:\/\/ww2.glenbow.org\/search\/archivesCPRResults.aspx.\n\n111. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 April 1911, 5.\n\n112. \"Lady Farmers,\" _Kaipara and Waitemata Echo_ , 4 March 1914, 4.\n\n113. \"An English Girl's Experience of a Winter in Alberta,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 25 March 1912, 973.\n\n114. Sedgewick Historical Society, _Sedgewick Sentinel: A History of Sedgewick_ , 24.\n\n115. Edwin Snowsell and Frank Snowsell, \"Starting Over on a 'Ready-Made' Farm, 1911\u201316,\" _Western People_ , 4 March 1982, 14\u201315.\n\n116. Ibid.\n\n117. _Daily Colonist_ , 14 April 1912, 8.\n\n118. Rankin, \"The Woman Who Never Looks Back,\" _Canadian Courier_ 10, no. 9 (29 July 1911): 16.\n\n119. Love, \"Where Opportunity Knocks,\" 6\u201312.\n\n120. _Morning Leader_ , 1 Oct. 1912, 12.\n\n121. Love, \"Where Opportunity Knocks,\" 7.\n\n122. Ibid., 10.\n\n123. Love, \"Farmer-Boy 'Jack,'\" _The Lady's Realm_ , Nov. 1911, 101\u20133.\n\n124. \"World's Happiest Girl,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , 1 Oct. 1912; \"Girl Wears Trousers and Works Big Farm,\" _Carroll Herald_ , 8 Jan. 1913; \"World's Happiest Girl,\" _Redcliff Review_ , 12 Dec. 1912.\n\n125. _Tensas Gazette_ , 13 Dec. 1912.\n\n126. _Carroll Herald_ , 8 Jan. 1913.\n\n127. Love, \"Haymaking with Jack May: A Woman's Life on a Canadian Farm,\" _Quiver_ 49, no. 11 (Sept. 1914): 1075\u20131078.\n\n128. _Sedgewick Sentinel_ , 12 Dec. 1912, 4.\n\n129. Ibid., 1 May 1913, 5.\n\n130. Sedgewick Historical Society, _Sedgewick Sentinel: A History of Sedgewick_ , 379.\n\n131. \"Society Lady Who Prefers the Plow to the Pink Tea,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 21 June 1913, 14.\n\n132. \"Women and Land in Canada: Their Disabilities and the Reason,\" _Globe_ , 18 April 1913, 6.\n\n133. Kennedy, \"Lady Farmers,\" _Kaipara and Waitemata Echo_ , 4 March 1914, 4.\n\n134. \"Jills without Jacks: Bachelor Girls at Spirit River: Pioneer Women of the West,\" _Nottingham Evening Post_ , 24 Jan. 1924, 4.\n\n135. Walker, _Canadian Trails_ , 85.\n\n136. Ibid., 84.\n\n137. Sedgewick Historical Society, _Sedgewick Sentinel: A History of Sedgewick_ , 15.\n\n138. Ibid., 17.\n\n139. Ibid., 16.\n\n140. Ibid., 197\u201398.\n\n141. \"Another Woman Farmer,\" _Claresholm Review_ , 8 June 1911, 7.\n\n142. _Sedgewick Sentinel_ , 7 Nov. 1912, 4.\n\n143. Ibid., 12 Dec. 1912, 4.\n\n144. Kisby, \"Vera 'Jack' Holme.\"\n\n145. Ibid., 122.\n\n146. Boag, _Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past_ , 18.\n\n147. Ibid., 19.\n\n148. Ibid., 40.\n\n149. McClintock, _Imperial Leather_ , 67.\n\n150. Ibid., 174.\n\n151. Millarville, Kew, Priddis and Bragg Creek Historical Society, _Our Foothills_ , 286\u201387.\n\n152. \"She Writes and Ranches,\" _Oyen News_ , 6 May 1925, 5.\n\n153. Ibid.\n\n154. \"Woman Author as Rancher: Calgary Experiment,\" _Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette_ , 28 May 1925, 2.\n\n155. Ibid. See also \"A Woman Pioneer,\" _Imperial Colonist_ 23, no. 5 (May 1925): 86\u201387.\n\n156. \"She Writes and Ranches,\" _Oyen News_ , 6 May 1925, 5.\n\n157. Millarville, Kew, Priddis and Bragg Creek Historical Society, _Our Foothills_ , 287.\n\n158. M.H.A., \"How Four Plucky Women Won Out in the Canadian Northwest,\" _Minneapolis Journal_ , 29 July 1906.\n\n159. Delday, _Brooks: Beautiful-Bountiful_ , 197.\n\n160. Ibid., 199.\n\n161. Boag, _Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past_ , 196.\n\n162. _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 8 August 1917, 4.\n\n163. Watanna, _Cattle_ , 33.\n\n164. Ibid., 34.\n\n165. Ibid., 144.\n\n166. Yarmie, \"'I Had Always Wanted to Farm,'\" 112.\n\n167. Saugeres, \"She's Not Really a Woman, She's Half a Man,\" 642.\n\n168. Ibid., 646.\n\n169. Ibid., 648.\n\n170. \"A Girl Farmer,\" _Queenslander_ (Brisbane) 19 Oct. 1907, 4.\n\n171. See, for example, \"Women as Farmers,\" taken from the _New York Tribune_ , in the _Herald and News_ , 19 July 1907; \"Women Farmers of the Great North-West,\" _Detroit Free Press_ , 4 August 1907; \"Women as Farmers,\" _Sun_ , 6 July 1907; \"Women Homesteading,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 7 August 1907.\n\n172. M.H.A., \"How Four Plucky Women Won Out in the Canadian Northwest,\" _Minneapolis Journal_ , 29 July 1906.\n\n173. Alden, \"Prosperous Women Farmers,\" _Farmer's Review_ , 19 Nov. 1910, 4.\n\n174. \"Lady Settlers in Australia,\" _Chambers Edinburgh Journal_ , 24 Nov. 1849, 334.\n\n175. On this partnership, see also Brown and Martin, \"Drysdale, Anne (1792\u20131853)\" in _Australian Dictionary of Biography_ , National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (first published in hardcopy by Melbourne University Publishing, 1966); http:\/\/adb.anu.edu.au\/biography\/drysdale-anne-2000. See also Roberts, _Miss D and Miss N An Extraordinary Partnership._\n\n176. See, for example, Kingston, _Elizabeth Macarthur_ ; Wymark, \"Pioneer Women,\" _Country Woman_ (May 1969): 10\u201311.\n\n177. See \"Penfolds\" http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Penfolds.\n\n178. Alford, _Production or Reproduction_ , 193.\n\n179. \"Canadian Women's Press Club Tour: Girl Farmers and Ranchers,\" _Quebec Saturday Budget_ , 7 July 1906.\n\n180. I use this argument in the case of Calgary's Irish settler Caroline \"Mother\" Fulham, who kept pigs and collected garbage, in Carter, \"Britishness, 'Foreignness,' Women and Land,\" 57.\n\n181. \"To the Bachelor Girl,\" _Redcliff Review,_ 19 April 1912, 6.\n\nCHAPTER FIVE\n\n1. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 303. Unless otherwise specified, all citations to _Wheat and Woman_ are to the 2007 edition.\n\n2. _Victoria Daily Colonist_ , 22 Oct. 1909, 12.\n\n3. Verdon, \"Middle-Class Women's Work and the Professionalization of Farming,\" 396.\n\n4. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ (rpr. 1979), 7.\n\n5. Ibid., 60.\n\n6. Binnie-Clark, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , 27.\n\n7. Ibid., 230, and _Wheat and Woman_ , 60.\n\n8. Chilton, _Agents of Empire_ , 53.\n\n9. Ibid., 245.\n\n10. The Indigenous people of the reserves surrounding Binnie-Clark's farm had made concerted efforts to farm from the time of the 1874 Treaty Four, and their efforts were met with a measure of success by the early 1880s. Government policies intervened to atrophy this development, however. In particular, the \"peasant\" farming policy, introduced in the late 1880s, demanded that reserve farmers limit their acreage and grow root, and not grain crops. Indigenous people were prohibited from using labour-saving machinery. A concerted government and settler-supported effort to reduce the size of the reserves gained momentum after the turn of the twentieth century, just at the time of the establishment of Binnie-Clark's farm, and this severely limited the amount of arable land on most Treaty Four reserves. See Carter, _Lost Harvests._\n\n11. Ibid.\n\n12. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 58.\n\n13. Ibid., 56.\n\n14. Ibid.\n\n15. Ibid., 57.\n\n16. Ibid., 224\u201325.\n\n17. Binnie-Clark, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , 218.\n\n18. Thanks to Richard Jenks and Dennis Jenks for sharing \"The Family History of Clark.\" Georgina's father was sometimes listed in the census returns as \"Binnie-Clark\" and sometimes as plain \"Clark.\" For example, in the 1901 census he was listed as \"Arthur W.B. Clark.\" There were seven children born to Arthur and Maria: Maria Elizabeth (b. 1868), Walter Douglas (b. 1869), Georgina (b. 1872), Louis (b. 1873), Arthur Cameron (b. 1874), Mabel (b. 1874), and Ethel (b. 1880). Georgina's brother Louis signed his name Louis B. Clark. See SAB, homestead file 1328338: SW 6-26-14-W2.\n\n19. \"British Women on Canadian Homesteads,\" _Taber Free Press_ , 22 April 1909, 1.\n\n20. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman,_ 304.\n\n21. Binnie-Clark, \"Homesteads for Bachelor Women,\" the _Canadian Gazette_ , 4 Feb. 1909, 447\u201348.\n\n22. SAB, homestead file 1328338: SW 6-26-14-W2.\n\n23. Binnie-Clark, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , 297.\n\n24. Ibid., 299.\n\n25. Ibid., 305.\n\n26. Ibid.\n\n27. SAB, homestead file 1328338: SW 6-26-14-W2.\n\n28. _Progress_ , 20 July 1905.\n\n29. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 236.\n\n30. Carter, _Lost Harvests_ , 185\u201386.\n\n31. Ibid., 186.\n\n32. _Vidette_ , 13 Dec. 1905. For the history of the settlement of this district by British-Ontarians, see Dick, _Farmers \"Making Good_. _\"_\n\n33. _Vidette_ , 13 Dec. 1905.\n\n34. Ibid., 14 Feb. 1906.\n\n35. Farquharson, \"The Problem of Immigration,\" 38.\n\n36. Ibid., 43.\n\n37. Jean Blewett, \"The Doukhobor Woman,\" published in _Collier's Weekly_ (n.d., n.p.) and in Carrel, _Canada's West and Farther West_ , 227.\n\n38. Ibid.\n\n39. \"Women Harnessed to Plows in Manitoba,\" _Women's Journal_ , 9 Sept. 1899, 282.\n\n40. \"Woman Farmer Visiting the City,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 1 Aug. 1912, 3.\n\n41. Arthur Cameron Binnie Clark (1875\u20131921) and Ethel Binnie Clark (1886\u20131955) are both buried in the Lakeview Cemetery, Fort Qu'Appelle.\n\n42. Susan Jackel, introduction, _Wheat and Woman_ (rpr. 1979), xiii. In an undated seven-page typed manuscript in the Jenks Papers, Binnie-Clark wrote that she was at her farm in 1926 and 1928, and at that time \"I was just pulling out from the embarrassment that awaited me on my return to Canada after my absence during the war and following years.\" She also noted that \"Binning House had been destroyed by fire during the war and never replaced\" (2).\n\n43. Binnie-Clark may have had two different homes on Cheyne Walk. On 6 Nov. 1932 she wrote to Dorothy Cooper-Abbs, \"Our old house in Cheyne Walk was demolished.\" She had been renting the flat out for 100 pounds a year and this was an important source of income for her (Derek Harrison Papers). By February 1936, she was living at 125 Cheyne Walk and she lived there until her death in 1947. _Times_ , 11 Feb. 1936, 10.\n\n44. Dennis Jenks, conversation, 5 Oct. 2005, London, England. Binnie-Clark was known to family and friends as \"Avril.\"\n\n45. Devas, _Two Flamboyant Fathers_ , 213; Holme, _Chelsea._\n\n46. Youmans, \"Walker, Ethel (1861\u20131951),\" _GLBTQ Encyclopedia_ ; http:\/\/eds.a.ebscohost.com\/eds\/detail\/detail?vid=4&sid=5ebbdf3c-7c04-458c-8081-bc12d52e96a7%40sessionmgr4002&hid=4103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=40920590&db=qth.\n\n47. Binnie-Clark, _Tippy: The Autobiography of a Pekingese Puppy._ This was a book for children that was \"for six pennies or one shilling to buy comfort for the wounded soldiers and horses fighting in the Great War for Liberty.\" Much of the action takes place on Cheyne Walk.\n\n48. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 190; Jenks Papers, typed untitled document by Georgina Binnie-Clark, n.d. (c. 1932), beginning on p. 2.\n\n49. Georgina Binnie-Clark to Dorothy Harrison, 21 Feb. 1936, Derek Harrison Papers.\n\n50. Binnie-Clark, _A Summer on the Canadian Prairie_ , 30.\n\n51. Ibid., 124.\n\n52. Ibid., 240.\n\n53. \"The Woman Problem\" (editorial), _Canadian Gazette_ , 20 Feb. 1908, 501.\n\n54. Ibid.\n\n55. Binnie-Clark, \"Women's Chances in the West,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 3 Oct. 1908, 28.\n\n56. Binnie-Clark, \"A Woman, Two Boys and \u00a3140,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 27 Feb., 28 Feb., and 12 March 1908, 42.\n\n57. Binnie-Clark, \"A Woman's Way on the Prairie,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 7 May 1908, 8.\n\n58. Binnie-Clark, \"A Woman's Plea from the West,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 19 Nov. 1908, 179.\n\n59. Ibid.\n\n60. Ibid.\n\n61. Editorial, _Canadian_ Gazette, 19 Nov. 1908, 177.\n\n62. G. Binnie-Clark to the Department of the Interior, 17 Nov. 1908, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1039, file 1713679.\n\n63. W.D. Scott to Binnie-Clark, 12 Nov. 1908, in in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1039, file 1713679. (Not clear why the response seems to be dated before Binnie-Clark's letter of 17 Nov.)\n\n64. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 307.\n\n65. John Obed Smith (1864\u20131937), \"Memorable Manitobans,\" Manitoba Historical Society, http:\/\/www.mhs.mb.ca\/docs\/people\/smith_jo.shtml.\n\n66. Smith, \"Migration within the Empire,\" _English Review_ (Feb. 1925): 248.\n\n67. Ibid., 247\u201348.\n\n68. \"J. Obed Smith's Land Speculation,\" _Globe,_ 7 March 1907, 1.\n\n69. Binnie-Clark, \"Homesteads for Bachelor Women,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 4 Feb. 1909, 447.\n\n70. Binnie-Clark, \"Women Farmers\" (from the _Daily Mail_ ), _Wainwright Star_ , 24 March 1910, 2.\n\n71. Binnie-Clark, \"How Canada Welcomes the Emigrant Girl,\" _Quiver_ 44, no. 4 (March 1909): 399\u2013403.\n\n72. Binnie-Clark, \"A Fight with Fire: A Settler's Experience on the Canadian Prairie,\" _Pall Mall Magazine_ 44, no. 198 (Oct. 1909): 620.\n\n73. _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 28 Oct. 1909, 2; _Crossfield Chronicle_ , 30 Oct., 1909, 5; _Taber Free Press_ , 22 April 1909, 1; _Advertiser and Central Alberta News_ , 4 Feb. 1909, 2; _Victoria Daily Colonist_ , 22 Oct. 1909, 12.\n\n74. _L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orl_ \u00e9 _ans_ , 14 Dec. 1909, 6.\n\n75. Binnie-Clark, \"Conditions of Life for Women in Canada,\" 110.\n\n76. Ibid., 119.\n\n77. Ibid., 118.\n\n78. Ibid., 120.\n\n79. Longhurst, \"How Can I Earn a Living: Canada for the Woman Worker,\" _Woman Worker_ , 23 March 1910, 822.\n\n80. Binnie-Clark, \"A Woman's Farm in Canada,\" _Daily Mail_ , 23 Jan. 1909, 4.\n\n81. Binnie-Clark, \"Women Farmers,\" _Daily Mail_ , 25 Feb. 1910.\n\n82. Editorial, _Canadian Gazette,_ 24 March 1910, 687.\n\n83. \"Three Women in Canada,\" _United Empire_ 1 (1910): 413\u201315.\n\n84. _Western Times_ , 11 Feb. 1910, 7.\n\n85. \"Girl Farmers,\" _Colonist_ 42, issue 12759 (4 April 1910): 4.\n\n86. \"Women Farmers in Canada,\" _Globe_ , 5 March 1910, 6.\n\n87. _Votes for Women_ , 18 March 1910, 9.\n\n88. _Canadian Gazette_ , 5 May 1910, 132\u201333.\n\n89. Binnie-Clark, \"Are Educated Women Wanted in Canada?,\" part 1, _Imperial Colonist_ 8, no. 98 (Feb. 1910): 22\u201324; part 2, vol. 8, no. 99 (March 1910): 39\u201342.\n\n90. _Imperial Colonist_ , 13 Jan. 1910, 397\u201399.\n\n91. \"Women Farmers in Canada,\" _Globe_ , 5 March 1910, 6.\n\n92. Binnie-Clark, \"Ready-Made Homes: Why the Settlers Are Content\" ( _Overseas Daily Mail_ ), _Strathmore Standard_ , 22 Oct. 1910, 5.\n\n93. See, for example, Binnie-Clark, \"Women Farmers: Experiments in Canada,\" in _Tamworth Daily Observer_ , 9 March 1912, 3; and in _West Gippsland Gazette_ , 7 May 1912, 6.\n\n94. \"Are Booming Canada\u2014Englishwomen Are Training Girls to Come out Here,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 9 June 1910, 7.\n\n95. Ibid.\n\n96. _Canadian Gazette_ , 3 March 1910, 598.\n\n97. \"Women Farmers in Canada,\" _Globe_ , 5 March 1910, 6.\n\n98. \"Making Girl Farmers,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 21 April 1910, 7.\n\n99. _Glasgow Herald_ , 4 March 1910, 5.\n\n100. \"Woman Farmers,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 21 March 1912, 6.\n\n101. Thanks to Derek Harrison, Fort Qu'Appelle, for this information about his mother, Kathleen Laughrin Harrison.\n\n102. Fort Qu'Appelle and District History Book Committee, _Fort Qu'Appelle and Area: A History_ , 367\u201368.\n\n103. Bertram, \"Wanderings of a Single Woman: Fort Qu'Appelle,\" 2nd letter, _Canadian Gazette,_ 5 March 1913, 795.\n\n104. _Globe_ , 14 May 1915, 2.\n\n105. _Gentlewoman and Modern Life_ , 19 July 1919, 125.\n\n106. Hawkes, \"The Imperial Emigrant,\" _United Empire_ 3 (1912): 207\u201321.\n\n107. Ibid., 220.\n\n108. \"Woman Farmer Visiting the City,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 1 August 1912, 3.\n\n109. \"Canada's New Phase,\" _Canadian Gazette_ , 15 April 1913, 39.\n\n110. Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 498.\n\n111. Ibid., 501.\n\n112. \"Women and Land in Canada: Their Disabilities and the Reason,\" _Globe_ , 18 April 1913, 6.\n\n113. The discussion that followed Binnie-Clark's presentation to the Royal Colonial Institute was published along with her paper \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 505\u20138.\n\n114. Binnie-Clark, \"Land and the Woman in Canada,\" 506.\n\n115. Ibid.\n\n116. Ibid., 507.\n\n117. Ibid., 506\u20137.\n\n118. _Canadian Gazette_ , 12 April 1913, 38.\n\n119. _Daily Colonist_ , 8 May 1913, 4.\n\n120. Shaw's letter is quoted in _Daily Colonist_ , 19 Oct. 1913, 8.\n\n121. Mrs. Donald Shaw was so \"traditional\" that I have been unable to find out what her own first name was. See McKay, \"Debating Sexuality in Halifax, 1920: Mrs. Donald Shaw and Others,\" 336. See also Mrs. Donald Shaw, \"Where Canada Fails Us,\" _Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature_ 43 (191): 464\u201365.\n\n122. Quoted in _Daily Colonist,_ 19 Oct. 1913, 8.\n\n123. Ibid.\n\n124. Morris, _An Englishwoman in the Canadian West_ , 174.\n\n125. Evans, _The Bar U_ , 134\u201341.\n\n126. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman,_ 236.\n\n127. Ibid., 119.\n\n128. Ibid., 151.\n\n129. \"Wheat and Woman,\" _Times Literary Supplement_ , 30 April 1914, 207.\n\n130. \"Women and Economics,\" _Athenaeum_ , no. 4527 (August 1914): 148\u201349.\n\n131. \"A Woman Farmer,\" _Votes for Women_ , 14 Aug. 1914, 693.\n\n132. Moore, review of _Wheat and Woman_ , _Globe_ , 14 Aug. 1914, 3.\n\n133. \"No Dower Rights Law and No Free Land Grant for Women,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 5 March 1914, 2.\n\n134. Munday, \"A Woman Wheat Grower,\" _Westminster Hall Magazine and Farthest West Review_ 7, no. 4 (May 1915): 15\u201317.\n\n135. Jenks Papers, handwritten document, \"The Union Jack Farm Settlement,\" p. 113.\n\n136. _Globe_ , 30 April 1915, 5; and 14 May 1915, 2.\n\n137. Dennis Jenks to Sarah Carter, email correspondence, 14 Dec. 2005.\n\n138. Last Will and Testament of Georgina Binnie-Clark of 123 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London 4 April, 1947, Jenks Papers.\n\n139. In an undated seven-page typed manuscript in the Jenks Papers, Binnie-Clark wrote that she was at her farm in 1926 and 1928, and at that time \"I was just pulling out from the embarrassment that awaited me on my return to Canada after my absence during the war and following years.\" She also noted that \"Binning House had been destroyed by fire during the war and never replaced.\"\n\n140. Binnie-Clark, _Tippy: The Autobiography of a Pekingese Puppy_ , dedication page.\n\nCHAPTER SIX\n\n1. Jackel, introduction to _Wheat and Woman_ by Georgina Binnie-Clark (rpr. 1979), xx\u2013xxxii.\n\n2. LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876595, pt. 1.\n\n3. Scully, \"White Maternity and Black Infancy,\" 70. See also Mehta, \"Liberal Strategies of Exclusion.\"\n\n4. Quoted in Grimshaw, \"Suffragists Representing Race and Gender in the American West,\" 88.\n\n5. On American immigration to Western Canada, see Troper, _Only Farmers Need Apply._\n\n6. Cavanaugh, \"No Place for a Woman.\"\n\n7. Cavanaugh, \"The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership\"; Hawkins, \"Lillian Beynon Thomas, Woman's Suffrage and the Return of Dower to Manitoba\"; McCallum, \"Prairie Women and the Struggle for a Dower Law.\"\n\n8. Carter, _The Importance of Being Monogamous._\n\n9. Ibid., 56\u201357.\n\n10. \"Canada's Greatest Need,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 13 Sept. 1907. The column quotes a Moose Jaw correspondent to the _Farmer's Advocate._\n\n11. Binnie-Clark, _Wheat and Woman_ , 307.\n\n12. \"What Others Say: Why Not Women Homesteaders?,\" _Edmonton Capital_ , 25 Jan. 1910, 2. This article is reprinted from the _Toronto Telegram._\n\n13. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 9 March 1910.\n\n14. Ibid., 16 March 1910.\n\n15. Ibid.\n\n16. \"Let Us Organize,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 27 April 1910.\n\n17. Canada, _House of Commons Debates_ , 30 April 1910, 8488\u20138490.\n\n18. Laurie, \"No Homesteads for Women,\" _Manitoba Free Pres_ , 9 May, 1910, 9.\n\n19. _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 21 May 1910.\n\n20. _Manitoba Free Press,_ 24 May 1910.\n\n21. Ibid., 18 June 1910.\n\n22. Quoted in Hawkins, \"Lillian Beynon Thomas, Woman's Suffrage and the Return of Dower to Manitoba,\" 76.\n\n23. _Toronto Sunday World_ , 22 Feb. 1915, 4.\n\n24. LAC, 1901 Census, item no. 253324, Brandon district, subdistrict Arthur.\n\n25. See \"Grain Growers' Guide,\" _Canadian Encyclopedia_ , http:\/\/www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com\/en\/article\/grain-growers-guide\/.\n\n26. McClung, _The Stream Runs Fast_ , 119\u201321.\n\n27. Ibid.\n\n28. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 23 Feb. 1910, 29.\n\n29. Laurie, \"About Women and Men, Especially Women,\" _Manitoba Free Press,_ 9 May 1910.\n\n30. \"What about the Future?,\" _Nor'West Farmer_ 29, no. 17 (5 Sept. 1910): 72.\n\n31. \"Wishes to Homestead,\" _Family Herald_ , 30 May 1913, 6.\n\n32. \"Homesteads for Women,\" _Family Herald_ , 1 Oct. 1913, 6.\n\n33. \"Girls Want Homesteads,\" _Family Herald_ , 3 Dec. 1913, 8.\n\n34. \"Homesteads,\" _Nor'West Farmer,_ 21 Aug. 1911, 1027.\n\n35. \"Speaks from Experience,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 13 Dec. 1911, 9.\n\n36. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 20 Dec. 1911, 24.\n\n37. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1911, 24.\n\n38. _Nor'West Farmer_ , 21 Feb. 1910, 230.\n\n39. Ibid.\n\n40. Will Channon to Minister of the Interior, 4 January 1910, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1062, file 2029532.\n\n41. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 5 July 1911, 17.\n\n42. Ibid., 27 March 1912, 24.\n\n43. \"The Homesteading Woman a Success,\" _Family Herald_ , 24 Sept. 1913, 6.\n\n44. McClung, \"Free Land for the Soldiers,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 18 Sept. 1915, 3.\n\n45. \"The Wife's Share,\" _Family Herald_ , 22 May 1912, 9.\n\n46. \"Montana School Ma'Am,\" _Family Herald_ , 7 May 1913, 6.\n\n47. _Nor'West Farmer_ 29, no. 2 (20 Jan. 1910): 93.\n\n48. \"Women Prize Winners at Scottish Plowing Match,\" _Nor'West Farmer_ , 20 March 1912, 385.\n\n49. \"Boston Women Want Farm for Spinsters,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 8 April 1909, 1; \"Women Organize Farm Settlement: Great Colony to be Established in West Australia Exclusively for Females,\" _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ , 19 Jan. 1912, 25.\n\n50. \"Five Girls Run a 200 Acre Farm,\" _Family Herald_ , 5 March 1913, 6.\n\n51. G. Abrook to Department of the Interior, 24 March 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596 pt. 1.\n\n52. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 27 August 1913, 9.\n\n53. \"A Daughter of the Plains,\" _Family Herald_ , 14 Feb. 1912, 11.\n\n54. SAB, Department of the Interior, Surveyors Notes, C.F. Aylesworth to C. Douville, 28 June 1899, R-183, no. 9.\n\n55. \"A Daughter of the Plains,\" _Family Herald_ , 14 Feb. 1912, 11.\n\n56. _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ , 13 Dec. 1911, 10.\n\n57. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 1 June 1910.\n\n58. Ibid., 9.\n\n59. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 8 June 1910, 24.\n\n60. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads Are Wanted in the West,\" _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 17 April 1913.\n\n61. Graham, \"Unearned Increments and Woman's Dower,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 6 July 1910, 23.\n\n62. Mrs. Thomas McNeil to Dr. Roche, Minister of the Interior, 6 March 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596.\n\n63. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 13 Dec. 1911, 9.\n\n64. J. M. Perra to Hon. J.M. Crothers or Dr. Roche, Department of the Interior, 29 April 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596.\n\n65. Mrs. J.R. Long, _Nor'West Farmer,_ 5 May 1910.\n\n66. Fanny Elizabeth Shepherd to the Department of the Interior, 27 Feb. 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2.\n\n67. \"Homesteads for Women,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 19 April 1911, 14.\n\n68. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 2 June 1910.\n\n69. _Voice_ , 15 Sept. 1911, 6.\n\n70. _Manitoba Free Press,_ 1 June 1910.\n\n71. \"Here Is Progress,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 6 April 1910.\n\n72. \"A Plea for the Daughters,\" _Nor'West Farmer_ , 5 Sept. 1912, 1170.\n\n73. Frederiksen, _The Land Laws of Canada and the Land Experience of the United States_ , 11.\n\n74. \"About Women Homesteading,\" _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 2 April 1914, 4.\n\n75. \"Where the Door Stands Open,\" _Globe_ , 22 June 1904, 8.\n\n76. Frederiksen, _The Land Laws of Canada and the Land Experience of the United States_ , 6.\n\n77. Ibid., 10.\n\n78. _Bismarck Daily Tribune,_ 24 Dec. 1906, 2.\n\n79. _Glasgow Democrat_ , 11 Feb., 1916.\n\n80. _Enterprise_ , 10 Feb. 1916, 4.\n\n81. \"Still Unconvinced,\" _Family Herald,_ 1 June 1910, 11.\n\n82. _Family Herald_ , 20 July 1910, 11.\n\n83. _Calgary Daily Herald_ , 24 April 1915, 6.\n\n84. Ibid., 21 April 1915, 1.\n\n85. _Family Herald_ , 11 May 1910, 11.\n\n86. Ibid., 1 June, 1911, 11.\n\n87. Ibid., 15 Nov. 1911, 11.\n\n88. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 16 May 1910.\n\n89. Ibid., 1 Feb. 1912, 9.\n\n90. Pullen-Burry, _From Halifax to Vancouver_ , 231.\n\n91. Ibid., 218.\n\n92. Ibid., 219.\n\n93. Morris, _An Englishwoman in the Canadian West_ , 175.\n\n94. Ibid.\n\n95. _Manitoba Free Press_ , 27 May 1910.\n\n96. The article \"The Doukhobors: Queer Russian Sect Which Has Become Canadianized,\" appeared in July and August 1911 in many western newspapers including the _Reflector_ (8 August 1911, 2), _Crossfield Chronicle_ , _Didsbury Pioneer, Claresholm Review, Gleichen Call,_ and in November in the _Bow Island Review_ (11 Nov. 1911, 6).\n\n97. Quoted in Kulba and Lamont, \"The Periodical Press and Western Woman's Suffrage Movements,\" 274.\n\n98. Graham, \"Homesteads for Women: A Western Woman's View of Man's Duty,\" clipping in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1062, file 2029532, n.d., n.p.\n\n99. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 6 July 1910, 23.\n\n100. Ibid., 15 May 1912, 13.\n\n101. Ibid., 20 Dec. 1911 , 24.\n\n102. Palmer, _Patterns of Prejudice._\n\n103. Hildebrandt, \"The Aspirations of a Western Enthusiast.\"\n\n104. _Vidette_ , 14 Feb. 1906.\n\n105. Ibid.\n\n106. Mead, _How the Vote Was Won,_ 7.\n\n107. Hall, \"Of Gender and Empire,\" 49.\n\n108. Carter, \"Britishness, 'Foreignness,\" Women and Land in Western Canada.\" See also Pickles, _Female Imperialism and National Identity._\n\n109. Shepard, _Deemed Unsuitable._\n\n110. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 3 May 1911, 4.\n\n111. Patriarche, \"Husbandless Homesteads Are Wanted in the West,\" _Saskatoon Star Phoenix_ , 17 April 1913.\n\n112. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 24 May 1911, 25.\n\n113. Ibid., 14 June, 1911, 21.\n\n114. Ibid.\n\n115. Ibid., 24 May 1911, 25.\n\n116. Ibid., 16 August 1911, 20.\n\n117. Letter, J.H. Perra to J.M. Crother, 29 April 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 287659, pt. 2.\n\n118. \"Right of Women to Homestead,\" _Voice_ , 4 Aug. 1911, 1.\n\n119. \"Woman's Labor League,\" _Voice_ , 8 Sept. 1911, 3.\n\n120. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 11 Oct. 1911, 18.\n\n121. Ibid., 21 June 1911, 21.\n\n122. \"Homesteads for American Women,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 19 July 1911, 18.\n\n123. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 16 August 1911, 20.\n\n124. Ibid., 19 July 1911, 18.\n\n125. Ibid., 16 August 1911, 20.\n\n126. Ibid.\n\n127. \"Should Be Restrictions,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 20 Sept. 1911, 23.\n\n128. _Family Herald and Weekly Star_ , 1 Oct. 1913, 6.\n\n129. Cook, \"Francis Marion Beynon and the Crisis of Christian Reformism.\"\n\n130. _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 26 July 1911, 17.\n\n131. Ibid., 6 July 1911.\n\n132. Letter, V.C. Bedier to the Department of the Interior, 25 March 1913, in LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596.\n\n133. \"Homestead Rights for Women,\" _Voice_ , 15 Sept. 1911, 6.\n\n134. _Voice_ , 20 Oct. 1911, 3.\n\n135. \"Roche Wants Free Land for Women,\" _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 5 May 1910, 2.\n\n136. \"Homesteads for Women\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 25 Oct. 1911, 18.\n\n137. \"Homesteads for Women,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 8 Nov. 1911, 4.\n\n138. Ibid., 13 Dec. 1911, 9\u201311.\n\n139. Cook, \"Francis Marion Beynon and the Crisis of Christian Reformism.\"\n\n140. Fiamengo, \"Rediscovering Our Foremothers Again,\" 155.\n\n141. Ibid.\n\n142. Quoted in Bacchi, _Liberation Deferred_ , 53\u201354.\n\n143. _Nor'West Farmer_ , 5 Sept. 1912, 1142.\n\n144. Rennie, _The Rise of Agrarian Democracy_ , 59.\n\n145. Jackel, introduction to _Wheat and Woman_ by Georgina Binnie-Clark (rpt. 1979), xxviii.\n\n146. Ibid.\n\n147. Hawkins, \"Lillian Beynon Thomas, Woman's Suffrage and the Return of Dower to Manitoba,\" 97.\n\n148. \"Discrimination in Homestead Law,\" _Globe_ , 17 July 1915, 6.\n\n149. Ibid.\n\n150. Hunter, \"The Big Picture Problem,\" 60.\n\n151. Carter, _Lost Harvests._\n\n152. McClung, \"Speaking of Women,\" _Maclean's_ , 10 May 1916.\n\n153. \"Speaking of Nellie McClung,\" editorial clipping, scrapbook 1916\u201317, Nellie McClung fonds, British Columbia Archives. The clipping is not dated and the newspaper is not identified.\n\n154. The letter from Sir Wilfrid Laurier is quoted in the column \"Society in the Capital,\" by Gertrude Seton Thompson, _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 April 1910, 3.\n\n155. \"The Doukhobors: Queer Russian Sect Which Has Become Canadianized\" (see n. 97 above).\n\nCHAPTER SEVEN\n\n1. Grosvenor, \"Women Farmers in Canada,\" _Times_ , 27 Feb. 1913, 5.\n\n2. _Imperial Colonist_ 13, no. 167 (Dec. 1915): 198\u201389.\n\n3. \"Women on the Land,\" _Review of Reviews_ 52, no. 308 (Aug. 1915): 146.\n\n4. Martineau's article from _Englishwoman_ was summarized in \"Women on the Land,\" ibid.\n\n5. White, \"Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women's Land Army in World War I Britain,\" 165.\n\n6. Twinch, _Women on the Land_ , 1\u201318.\n\n7. Ibid., 20.\n\n8. See King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , Chapter 4, \"Highly Trained Women of Good Birth.\"\n\n9. Verdon, \"'The work is grand and the life is just what I have always longed for': British Women's Experiences of Working on the Land in the Great War,\" paper presented at \"Women, Land and the Making of the British Landscape,\" University of Hull, 30 June 2015.\n\n10. Rowbotham, _A Century of Women_ , 74.\n\n11. Twinch, _Women on the Land_ , 8\u20139.\n\n12. White, \"Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women's Land Army in World War I Britain,\" 166.\n\n13. King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 85.\n\n14. White, \"Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women's Land Army in World War I Britain,\" 165.\n\n15. Quoted in King, _Women Rule the Plot_ , 93.\n\n16. \"Women on the Land,\" _Times_ , 13 March 1916, 9.\n\n17. Twinch, _Women on the Land_ , 33.\n\n18. Riley, _Inventing the American Woman_ , 220\u201321.\n\n19. Gowdy-Wygant, _Cultivating Victory_ , 56.\n\n20. Ibid.\n\n21. _Women's Work on the Land: How You May Assist in Food Production This Summer_.\n\n22. \"Girls Work on Fruit Farms Last Season,\" _Globe_ , 31 Oct. 1917, 17.\n\n23. _Globe_ , 11 July 1918, 2, letter from \"M.Y.\"\n\n24. \"Farmerettes Taking Course,\" _Globe_ , 13 May 1918, 8.\n\n25. Ibid.\n\n26. \"Guelph Agricultural College to Open 20th,\" _Globe_ , 12 Sept. 1918, 14.\n\n27. \"Girls Receive BSA Degree,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 5 June 1918, 1253.\n\n28. _Globe_ , 18 July 1918, 8\n\n29. \"Girls Start at Flax Pulling,\" _Globe,_ 30 July 1918, 8.\n\n30. _Globe_ , 18 July 1918, 8.\n\n31. _Globe_ , 25 April 1918, 7.\n\n32. \"Organize Ontario's Farm Labour,\" _Globe_ , 24 March 1916, 4.\n\n33. \"Farming and Farm Help,\" _Globe_ , 7 March 1917, 15.\n\n34. _Globe_ , 30 Nov. 1918, 16.\n\n35. Reyburn, \"Blurring the Boundaries,\" 132.\n\n36. Ibid., 133\u201334.\n\n37. Ibid., 34.\n\n38. Danysk, _Hired Hands_ , 101\u20133.\n\n39. \"Labor Shortage in West,\" _Claresholm Review_ , 13 April 1917, 2.\n\n40. Ibid., 106.\n\n41. \"Women Should Be Ready to Till the Soil,\" editorial, _Gleichen Call_ , 13 Jan. 1916, 4.\n\n42. Danysk, _Hired Hands_ , 108.\n\n43. \"Anti-Loafing Law,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 14 Sept. 1918, 1.\n\n44. \"Sufficient Harvest Help in Alberta,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 25 Aug. 1917, 3.\n\n45. \"Women in the Fields,\" _Minnedosa Tribune_ , 30 Aug. 1917, 2.\n\n46. \"Farm Women to Help with Threshing,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 5 Sept. 1917, 7.\n\n47. \"Telephone Girls Will Go Stooking,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 27 Aug. 1917, 2.\n\n48. \"General Exodus of Brandonites to Help Garner Grain,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 29 Aug. 1917, 1.\n\n49. Lindsay, \"Calgary's Land Army: Which Helps Win the War by Raising Food Ammunition,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 10 April 1918, 32.\n\n50. \"Winnipeg Women Still Recruiting Their 'Army,'\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 17 Sept. 1915, 2; \"Women Volunteers Are Inspected,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 29 Sept. 1915, 6.\n\n51. \"Enlist B.C. Women as Prairie Harvesters,\" _Daily Colonist_ , 22 August 1917, 8.\n\n52. \"About Eight Thousand Ontario Harvesters Now on Way to West,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 14 Aug. 1908, 1. It was reported that there were 300 women and children among the 8,000.\n\n53. \"Women Harvest Hands,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 22 August 1916, 4.\n\n54. \"Women Coming West for Harvest,\" _Brandon Daily Sun_ , 16 April 1917, 8.\n\n55. \"Women and the Farm,\" _Empress Express_ , 28 Sept. 1916, 7.\n\n56. Ellis, \"Women Volunteers are Needed,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 2 Feb. 1918, 5.\n\n57. \"Women Volunteers to Replace Men in Stores and Offices Who Can Help Harvest Work on Farms,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 20 March 1918, 1.\n\n58. \"Women for the Farms,\" editorial, _Globe_ , 25 June 1918, 6. This editorial quotes from an editorial in the _Saskatoon Star Phoenix._\n\n59. \"Women G.G. Doing Their Bit,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 9 Jan. 1918, 12.\n\n60. Menzies, _Canada and the War_ , 55.\n\n61. Ibid., 40\u201343.\n\n62. \"The Really New Woman,\" _Empress Express_ , 17 Oct. 1918, 7.\n\n63. \"Farmerettes Take Ag. Course at Olds,\" _Coleman Bulletin_ , 11 Oct. 1918, 4.\n\n64. Ibid.\n\n65. \"Women Learning to Run Tractors,\" _Empress Express_ , 21 March 1918, 3.\n\n66. \"College Graduate Farmerette,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 28 Aug. 1918, 1857.\n\n67. \"Women for Farm Labor,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 20 Feb. 1918, 386.\n\n68. Ibid.\n\n69. McCallum, \"Who Said Women Can't Farm,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 27 March 1918, 618.\n\n70. Nixon, \"Feminizing the Farm: How Ontario is Promoting Agriculture among Women,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 4 Sept. 1918, 1876.\n\n71. McCallum, \"Women and Their Gas Wagons: Some Experiences of Women Who Drive Their Own Cars,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 25 Sept. 1918, 9.\n\n72. \"Woman Farmer, Husband in the Trenches...\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 2 May 1917, 5; \"Aid Being Sent by Patriotic Fund to Elk Pt. Woman,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 9 May 1917, 5.\n\n73. \"War's Call to Farms: Men Must Fight and Women Must Reap,\" _Bow Island Review_ , 2 August 1918, 3.\n\n74. McClung, \"Free Land for the Soldiers,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 18 Sept. 1915, 3.\n\n75. \"Discrimination in Homestead Law,\" _Globe_ , 17 July 1915, 6.\n\n76. \"The Homestead Law,\" _Grand Forks Sun_ , 29 Oct. 1915, 5.\n\n77. \"Homesteads for Women,\" _Voice_ , 10 Aug. 1917, 5.\n\n78. _Morning Leader_ , 14 Jan. 1918, 5.\n\n79. \"Many Farm Women of Alberta Are Already Engaged in Outside Work Testimony at Convention,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 9 March 1918, 3.\n\n80. \"Homesteads for Women in Great Favor,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 11 March 1918, 4.\n\n81. LAC, Record Group 76 (RG 76) Records of the Department of Immigration, vol. 198, file 90212, pt. 5, Estella B. Carter to Deputy Minister, Department of the Interior, 1 June 1918.\n\n82. Ibid., W.D. Scott to Estella B. Carter, 8 June 1918.\n\n83. Danysk, _Hired Hands_ , 103.\n\n84. Ibid., 102.\n\n85. LAC, RG 76, vol. 198, file 80212, pt. 5 \"Notice to Homesteaders,\" from J. Bruce Walker, Commissioner of Immigration, 13 March 1917, 5.\n\n86. Ibid., W.D. Scott to M.V. MacInnes, 21 March 1918.\n\n87. Carter, \"An Infamous Proposal.\"\n\n88. Quoted in Lambrecht, _The Administration of Dominion Lands_ , 29\u201330.\n\n89. Pickles, _Female Imperialism and National Identity,_ 56.\n\n90. Canada, _Debates of the House of Commons_ , Session 1919, vol. 4, 23 June, 3864.\n\n91. Ibid.\n\n92. Strong-Boag, \"Making a Difference,\" 244.\n\n93. Roche, \"World War One British Empire Discharged Soldier Settlement in Comparative Focus,\" 9.\n\n94. Ibid.\n\n95. LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 1105, file 2876596, pt. 2, Homesteads for Women resolution passed by the Annual Conventions United Farmers of Alberta and United Farm Women of Alberta 1919.\n\n96. Ibid., Memorandum C. Harris to ___ Hume, 25 March 1919.\n\n97. Ibid.\n\n98. An article by Elizabeth Banks is quoted from in _Daily Colonist_ , 7 April 1917, 8.\n\n99. Barnard, \"Women's Emigration after the War,\" _Quiver_ 51, no. 6 (April 1916): 565.\n\n100. Ibid.\n\n101. Ibid., 566.\n\n102. Ibid., 567.\n\n103. Dickens, \"Farmerettes Want Farms,\" _Globe_ , 29 May 1918, 15.\n\n104. Peele, \"War Nurses Back to Land: Demobilized Women Prefer Out-of-Doors to Former Profession,\" _Globe_ , 5 June 1920, 10.\n\n105. McCallum, \"Girls Receive BSA Degree,\" _Grain Growers' Guide_ , 5 June 1918, 1253.\n\n106. Knox, _The Girl of the New Day_ , 200.\n\n107. Ibid., 70.\n\n108. Ibid., 57.\n\n109. Ibid., 52.\n\n110. Ibid., 67.\n\n111. Ibid., 201.\n\n112. Ibid., 211.\n\n113. \"Must We Rely on Girl Labor?,\" _Globe_ , 14 May 1919, 13.\n\n114. Our Special Commissioner, \"Can an Educated Woman Make Good on the Land?,\" _Quiver_ , May 1919, 534.\n\n115. Ibid.\n\n116. Knox, _The Girl of the New Day_ , 66.\n\n117. \"Private and Confidential Memorandum on Emigration after the War,\" 1918, in LSE, Records of the CIL, box 38, minute book, 233.\n\n118. A.L. Vernon to Caroline Grosvenor, 12 Nov., 1918, in LSE, Records of the CIL, box 38.\n\n119. Our Special Commissioner, \"Empire Migration,\" _Quiver_ , June 1919, 609.\n\n120. Noakes, \"From War Service to Domestic Service,\" 11.\n\n121. Quoted in ibid., 8.\n\n122. \"Empire Migration,\" _Quiver_ , June 1919, 609.\n\n123. Quoted in Yarmie, \"I Had Always Wanted to Farm,\" 113.\n\n124. \"Empire Migration,\" _Quiver_ , June 1919, 609\u201310.\n\n125. Ibid., 611.\n\n126. Quoted in Noakes, \"From War Service to Domestic Service,\" 6.\n\n127. Ibid., 5.\n\n128. \"British Women for Dominion,\" _Globe_ , 30 June 1919, 5.\n\n129. Quoted in Noakes, \"From War Service to Domestic Service,\" 10.\n\n130. Ibid., 15.\n\n131. Ibid., 24.\n\n132. _Imperial Colonist_ 18, no. 217 (April 1920): 58.\n\n133. \"Canadian Openings for Women,\" _Times_ , 12 Nov. 1919, 13.\n\n134. _Gleichen Call_ , 27 Oct. 1920, 3.\n\n135. LAC, RG 17, vol. 1351, file 268636, J.H. Grisdale to provincial departments of agriculture, 17 July 1919.\n\n136. Ibid., T.M. Molloy to J.H. Grisdale, 13 Aug. 1919.\n\n137. Ibid., Deputy Minister of Agriculture Alberta to J.H. Grisdale, 2 July 1919.\n\n138. Ibid., J.H. Grisdale to F.C. Blair, 26 Sept. 1919.\n\n139. \"British Women Sail for Canada,\" _Globe_ , 17 Oct. 1919, 1.\n\n140. \"Is First Party of Women Settlers,\" _Globe,_ 20 Nov. 1919, 1.\n\n141. Knox, _The Girl of the New Day_ , 200.\n\n142. \"British Women for Dominion,\" _Globe_ , 30 June 1919, 5.\n\n143. \"What Will Canada Do with These Girls?,\" _Wainwright Star_ , 27 Aug. 1919, 3.\n\n144. \"Demobilized Women to Settle in Canada,\" _Monitor News_ , 16 April 1920, 6.\n\n145. \"Women Objectors Not Known Here,\" _Globe_ , 28 Oct. 1919, 10.\n\n146. Ibid.\n\n147. \"Farm Women Are Wanted,\" _Globe_ , 3 Nov. 1919, 6.\n\n148. Roberts, \"A Work of Empire,\" 198\u201399.\n\n149. Valverde, _The Age of Light, Soap and Water_ , 127.\n\n150. SAB, Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association Minutes, 31 Jan. 1920, 72. S-B2, F. III-1.\n\n151. _Western Times_ , 8 Feb. 1921, 6.\n\n152. Memorandum for Mr. Van Scoy, 15 Nov. 1926, Glenbow Archives, Canadian Pacific Railway Fonds, M 2269, file 732.\n\n153. _Globe_ , 10 May 1920, 2.\n\n154. Low, _Openings for British Women in Canada_ , 13.\n\n155. Ibid., 10.\n\n156. Ibid., 11.\n\n157. Ibid., 53.\n\n158. Ibid., 54.\n\n159. Ibid.\n\n160. Ibid., 60.\n\n161. Vanderbilt Jr., \"Women's Land Army to Invade Canada,\" _New York Times_ , 1 Aug. 1920.\n\n162. Ibid.\n\n163. Ibid.\n\n164. \"English Farm Girls for Canada,\" _Daily Colonist_ , 9 Oct. 1920, 1, 6.\n\n165. Kingsmill Commander, \"Opportunities for Educated Women in Canada Are Not Recognized,\" _Carbon News_ , 13 April 1921, 7.\n\n166. Bridgeman, _Breaking Prairie Sod_ , 244.\n\n167. Ibid., 246.\n\n168. \"The Lure of the Land,\" _Graphic_ , 21 Feb. 1920, 275.\n\n169. _Imperial Colonist_ 18, no. 227 (July 1921): 94.\n\n170. \"Handbook for Women Who Are Thinking of Settling Overseas\" (London: Oversea Settlement Department, 1923), 15\u201316 in LSE, Women's Library, Papers of the Society for the Oversea Settlement of Women, IS0S\/12, box FL021.\n\n171. Low, _Women Out West: Life and Work in Canada_ , 13.\n\n172. _Annual Reports of the Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women_ , no. 6 (1925): 9.\n\n173. Ibid., no. 7 (1926): 15.\n\n174. Ibid., no. 9 (1928): 57.\n\n175. Ibid., no. 6 (1925): 7.\n\n176. \"Saving the Crop,\" _Daily Mail_ , 23 Aug. 1921,4; \"A Prairie 'Social,'\" 27 Aug. 1921, 4; \"The Medicine Man,\" 22 Feb. 1923, 6; \"Getting in the Wheat,\" 10 May 1923, 8.\n\n177. \"English Girls Investigate Canadian Farm Methods,\" _Blairmore Enterprise_ , 7 June 1923, 2.\n\n178. \"English Girls Like West,\" _Irma Times_ , 14 Sept. 1923, 2.\n\n179. \"British Women Farmers,\" _Claresholm Review_ , 3 July 1925, 3.\n\n180. \"Greater Britain: Training Girls for Work in Canada,\" _Aberdeen Press and Journal_ , 3 Nov. 1926, 9; \"Canada... Novel Scheme,\" _Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette_ , 1 Nov. 1926, 7.\n\n181. Harris, \"The Girl Emigrant: Her Chances in the Colonies,\" _Manchester Guardian_ , 28 Oct. 1926, 6.\n\n182. Durham, _Canada's Welcome to Women_ , 5.\n\n183. \"Denials Are Issued about Allegations from Saskatchewan,\" _Globe_ , 1 Nov. 1927, 2.\n\n184. Barber, \"The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary's Coronation Hostel,\" 151.\n\n185. Quoted in ibid., 155.\n\n186. Yarmie, \"I Had Always Wanted to Farm,\" 110.\n\n187. Ibid., 109\u201311.\n\n188. \"A Woman Homesteader,\" _Didsbury Pioneer_ , 31 August 1921, 7; \"On Easy Street: Women 'Farmerettes' Make Money in Western Canada,\" _New Oxford Item_ , 8 June 1922, 6.\n\n189. Library Archives Canada, Census 1901, Brandon, Manitoba; http:\/\/data2.collectionscanada.ca\/1901\/z\/z001\/jpg\/z000014608.jpg.\n\n190. Chicanot, \"Some Canadian Women Pioneers,\" _Imperial Colonist_ , Oct. 1925, 198.\n\n191. \"On Easy Street: Women 'Farmerettes' Make Money in Western Canada,\" _New Oxford Item_ , 8 June 1922, 6.\n\n192. \"Successful Women Farmers in Canada,\" _Globe_ , 26 March 1929, 11.\n\n193. \"Makes Success of Dairying,\" _Irma Times_ , 7 March 1924, 2; \"Woman Farmer Makes Success of What Is Now Reckoned Man Size Job,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 23 June 1923, 14.\n\n194. Ibid., _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 14.\n\n195. \"Women Farmers Raise Wheat in Canada,\" _Queensland Times_ , 13 April 1925, 10.\n\n196. Ibid.\n\n197. Champ, \"Heavy Horses at Saskatchewan's Fairs during the 1920s,\" prepared for the Western Development Museum, Winning the Prairie Gamble, 2005 Exhibit, 10 January 2002, 9.\n\n198. _Imperial Colonist_ 23, no. 2 (Feb. 1925): 23.\n\n199. \"English Writer Has Yearning for Farm in Western Canada,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 6 Oct. 1921, 7.\n\n200. \"Woman Farmer's Success,\" _Mirror Mail_ , 19 Aug. 1926, 3.\n\n201. See PAA, oral interview with Hon. Diana Rodnay, 71.248, 11 July 1971; \"Titled Famers Till Canadian Prairies,\" _Wetaskiwin Times_ , 13 Oct. 1927, 2; Lady Rodney, \"Where Women Must Be Capable,\" _Wetaskiwin Times_ , 8 March 1928, 3.\n\n202. Chicanot, \"Canadian Women's New World,\" _Woman's Journal,_ 18 Oct. 1924, 12.\n\n203. Cavanaugh, \"Irene Marryat Parlby,\" 105.\n\n204. _Evergreen and Gold: The Annual Publication of the Students of the University of Alberta_ (1923), 75.\n\n205. \"Production of Honey in the Three Prairie Provinces Assuming Large Proportions,\" _Irma Times_ , 2 Feb. 1923.\n\n206. \"Canadian Farmers' Tour,\" _Times_ , 9 Jan. 1928, 13.\n\n207. \"Jills for Jacks: Training Girls as Wives for Settlers,\" _Aberdeen Press and Journal_ , 12 Nov. 1928, 7.\n\n208. Chicanot, \"Canadian Women's New World,\" _Woman's Journal_ , 18 Oct. 1924, 12.\n\n209. \"Fair Sex as Farmers,\" _Carbon News_ , 14 July 1921, 6; \"Full Discussion of Women's Right to File on Land,\" _Edmonton Bulletin_ , 23 June 1921, 2.\n\n210. \"Want Homesteads for Women,\" _Gleichen Call_ , 15 March 1922, 2.\n\n211. \"Women Want Homesteads,\" _Didsbury Pioneer_ , 10 Sept. 1925, 7.\n\n212. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, 6602-6800, vol. 1984, p. 6750, Memorandum, 7 Feb. 1928.\n\n213. Ibid., vol. 1980, p. 5866, Deputy Minister to J. Pope, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, 5 Feb. 1925.\n\n214. LAC, RG 76, file 80212 pt. 6, vol. 198, B. Browne to Commissioner of Immigration, 22 March 1924.\n\n215. LAC, RG15, Dominion Lands Rulings, 6602-6800, vol. 1984, p. 6730, Memorandum, 7 Feb., 1928\n\n216. Ibid.\n\n217. LAC, RG 15, Dominion Lands Rulings, 7201-7400, vol. 1987, p. 7261, Memorandum, to Mr. Perrin, 17 April, 1929.\n\n218. _Western Producer_ , 14 Feb. 1929, 10.\n\n219. Kingsmill Commander, \"Opportunities for Educated Englishwomen in Canada Are Not Recognized,\" _Carbon News_ , 13 April 1921, 7.\n\n220. Quoted in Harrison, _Go West\u2014Go Wise!_ , 72.\n\n221. Ibid., 72\u201373.\n\n222. Chicanot, \"Some Canadian Women Pioneers,\" _Imperial Colonist_ 23, no. 9 (Sept. 1925): 177.\n\n223. Low, \"The Empire's Call to Women,\" _Britannia and Eve_ 1, no. 2 (5 Oct. 1928): 156.\n\n224. Pickles, _Female Imperialism and National Identity_ , 78.\n\n225. Ibid., 88.\n\nCONCLUSION\n\n1. Canadian Pacific Railway, _Household Work in Canada for Girls_ , 1.\n\n2. Ibid., 10.\n\n3. Oxendale, \"'What Should They Know of England Who Only England Know?,'\" 109. Oxendale created the term \"gendered ruralism.\" While she does not provide a concise definition she develops the concept as emerging from the recognition that the time of \"muscular\" imperialism was over, and there was new concern for racial purity, health and hygiene, and to nurturing these in the colonies. Oxendale writes that \"'Ruralism,' with its emphasis on traditional values, allowed for a robustness of character, indeed certain independence in a woman. In all, it provided a metaphor and a reality that allowed an active female role in shaping the meaning and the future of the empire\" (109).\n\n4. This is the topic of a forthcoming study by Sarah Carter, with Winona Wheeler, E. Leigh Syms, Robert Coutts, and Bret Nickels, \"Growing Pains: The Dynamics of Aboriginal Agriculture in Manitoba.\"\n\n5. Magee, \"'For Home and Country.'\"\n\n6. Binnie-Clark, foreword to _A Birthday Book for the Farm Settlement on the Canadian Prairie_ , 5. This \"birthday book\" was compiled by Binnie-Clark as a means of raising funds for the Union Jack Farm Settlement at Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan. She chose 365 messages from the Bible for each day of the year. Beside each day was a space for the book owner to pledge an amount to the Union Jack Farm Settlement.\n\n7. Schultz, \"Leaven for the Lump.\"\n\n8. Jenks Papers, John Barnett to G. Binnie-Clark, 8 Jan. 1931.\n\n9. Ibid., hand-written document, \"The Home Farm Settlement,\" 1933.\n\n10. Binnie-Clark, _A Birthday Book_.\n\n11. Fort Qu'Appelle and District History Book Committee, _Fort Qu'Appelle and Area: A History_ , 18.\n\n12. \"Alberta Homestead Regulations Contained in Act,\" _Wetaskiwin Times_ , 2 April 1931, 8.\n\n13. \"Alberta Homestead Entries in August,\" _Wetaskiwin Times_ , 17 Sept. 1931, 7.\n\n14. \"Women Homesteaders,\" _New York Times_ , 29 Jan. 1933.\n\n15. Ibid.\n\n16. Tait, \"Farming: All in the Family,\" _Globe and Mail_ , 4 July, 2015, Section F, 1.\n\n17. Stamm, \"I Am... a Farmer,\" 173.\n\n18. Ibid., 183.\n\n19. Leckie, \"Female Farmers in Canada and the Gender Relations of a Restructuring Agricultural System,\" 227.\n\n20. Watkins and Jacoby, \"Is the Rural Idyll Bad for Your Health?\"\n\n21. Ibid., 861.\n\n22. Ibid., 853.\n\n23. \"Bah! Indeed. Mrs. Elsie Hart in U.F.C. Information, August,\" _People's Weekly_ , 27 Aug., 1949, 4.\n\n24. Wilson, _Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians_ , 115.\n\n25. 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Saskatchewan)\n\n_Daily Star_ (Fredericksburg, Virginia)\n\n_Daily Telegraph_ (Tasmania)\n\n_Detroit Free Press_ (Detroit, Michigan)\n\n_Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette_ (Exeter, United Kingdom)\n\n_Didsbury Pioneer_ (Didsbury, Alberta)\n\n_Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser_ (Singapore)\n\n_Edmonton Bulletin_ (Edmonton, Alberta)\n\n_Edmonton Capital_ (Edmonton, Alberta)\n\n_Empire Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Empress Express_ (Empress, Alberta)\n\n_English Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Enterprise_ (Harlem, Montana)\n\n_Essex County Chronicle_ (Essex, United Kingdom)\n\n_Examiner_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Family Herald_ (Montreal, Quebec)\n\n_Family Herald and Weekly Star_ (Montreal, Quebec)\n\n_Farmer's Review_ (Chicago, Illinois)\n\n_Fortnightly Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Gazette Times_ (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)\n\n_Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Gentlewoman and Modern Life_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Glasgow Democrat_ (Glasgow, Montana)\n\n_Gleichen Call_ (Gleichen, Alberta)\n\n_Globe_ (Toronto, Ontario)\n\n_Globe and Mail_ (Toronto, Ontario)\n\n_Grain Growers' Guide_ (Winnipeg, Manitoba)\n\n_Grand Forks Sun_ (Grand Forks, North Dakota)\n\n_Graphic_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Harmsworth Magazine_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Hawera and Normanby Star_ (Hawera, New Zealand)\n\n_Herald_ (Glasgow, Scotland)\n\n_Herald and News_ (Newberry, South Carolina)\n\n_Hinsdale Tribune_ (Hinsdale, Illinois)\n\n_Imperial Colonist_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Irma Times_ (Irma, Alberta)\n\n_Jackson's Oxford Journal_ (Oxford, United Kingdom)\n\n_Kaipara and Waitemata Echo_ (Helensville, New Zealand)\n\n_Kindersley Clarion_ (Kindersley, Saskatchewan)\n\n_L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orl_ \u00e9 _ans_ (New Orleans, Louisiana)\n\n_La Survivance_ (Edmonton, Alberta)\n\n_Lady's Realm_ (London, United Kingdom))\n\n_Leader_ (Regina, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Leader-Post_ (Regina, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Leeds Mercury_ (Leeds, United Kingdom)\n\n_Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury_ (Leicester, United Kingdom)\n\n_London Society_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Maclean's_ (Toronto, Ontario)\n\n_Macmillan's Magazine_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Maitland Weekly Mercury_ (Maitland, Australia)\n\n_Manchester Guardian_ (Manchester, United Kingdom)\n\n_Manitoba Daily Free Press_ (Winnipeg, Manitoba)\n\n_Manitoba Free Press_ (Winnipeg, Manitoba)\n\n_Medicine Hat Times_ (Medicine Hat, Alberta)\n\n_Minneapolis Journal_ (Minneapolis, Minnesota)\n\n_Minnedosa Tribune_ (Minnedosa, Manitoba)\n\n_Mirror_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Mirror Mail_ (Mirror, Alberta)\n\n_Missoulian_ (Missoula, Montana)\n\n_Monitor News_ (Monitor, Alberta)\n\n_Monthly Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Montreal Gazette_ (Montreal, Quebec)\n\n_Moose Jaw Herald_ (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Morning Leader_ (Regina, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Morning Post_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_National Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_New Oxford Item_ (New Oxford, Pennsylvania)\n\n_New York Times_ (New York, New York)\n\n_New Zealand Herald_ (Auckland, New Zealand)\n\n_Newcastle Courant_ (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom)\n\n_Nineteenth Century_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Nor'West Farmer_ (Winnipeg, Manitoba)\n\n_Nottingham Evening Post_ (Nottingham, United Kingdom)\n\n_Omaha Daily Bee_ (Omaha, Nebraska)\n\n_Once a Week_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Otago Witness_ (Dunedin, New Zealand)\n\n_Overseas Daily Mail_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Oyen News_ (Oyen, Alberta)\n\n_Pall Mall Gazette_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Pall Mall Magazine_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Penny Magazine_ (Gloucestershire, United Kingdom)\n\n_People's Weekly_ (Edmonton, Alberta)\n\n_Prairie Illustrated_ (Calgary, Alberta)\n\n_Qu'Appelle Progress_ (Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Quebec Saturday Budget_ (Quebec City, 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(London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Sun_ (New York, New York)\n\n_Sunday Times_ (Sydney, Australia)\n\n_Sydney Mail_ (Sydney, Australia)\n\n_Taber Free Press_ (Taber, Alberta)\n\n_Tamworth Daily Observer_ (Tamworth, Australia)\n\n_Tamworth Herald_ (Tamworth, Australia)\n\n_Tensas Gazette_ (St. Joseph, Louisiana)\n\n_Three Hills Capital_ (Three Hills, Alberta)\n\n_Times_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Times Literary Supplement_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Toledo Blade_ (Toledo, Ohio)\n\n_Toronto Sunday World_ (Toronto, Ontario)\n\n_United Empire_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_United Service Magazine_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Victoria Daily Colonist_ (Victoria, British Columbia)\n\n_Vidette_ (Indian Head, Saskatchewan)\n\n_Voice_ (Winnipeg, Manitoba)\n\n_Vote_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Votes for Women_ (London, United Kingdom)\n\n_Wainwright Star_ (Wainwright, Alberta)\n\n_Wairarapa Daily Times_ (Greytown, New Zealand)\n\n_Warwick Examiner and Times_ (Warwick, Australia)\n\n_Washington 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