Daryl James

This account is compiled from the interviews Daryl James gave between 2021 and 2025. His website is www.daryldjames.com.

1.

Daryl James is born on the sixth of June, 1977, in St. Petersburg, Florida. His father came down to St. Petersburg in the mid-fifties, a mechanic who raced cars, wore thick glasses, kept a pack of Camels rolled into his shirt sleeve, and already had a wife and children behind him. By the time Daryl arrives he is doing county work and driving a garbage truck. Daryl's mother is a computer operator. The family is blue-collar; there is a sister, and half-brothers and half-sisters from the first marriage whom Daryl barely knows.

His earliest memory is the couch. He is three, maybe four, watching Sesame Street, and his father is sitting next to him talking to him without opening his mouth. "Do you think you'll be able to do this when you get older?" his father asks. Daryl's sister could do it when she was his age and forgot. The half-brothers and half-sisters could do it too and forgot, all but the eldest, Larry. "Yeah, Dad," Daryl says. "I'll remember." His father gets up to go to the kitchen and turns around in the doorway. "If you can remember how to do this, you'll be able to see your future, and the future of others."

He is four when two Jehovah's Witness ladies find him playing in the rain-filled ditch in the front yard and ask whether he wants to be thrown into the lake of fire. The family does not go to church; he has never heard of hell. That night, or the next, he dreams of a man with long blond hair and blue eyes standing in front of him, and he is crying and asking whether he is going to hell. The man smiles. "No. You're not going to hell." "Am I going to heaven?" "Yes."

In elementary school the teachers decide he is a daydreamer and send him for testing. The test is puzzles assembled in his head. Afterward he hears the woman tell his mother that his IQ is very high, that they would rather not say the number because it puts barriers on children, and that it is the level of a college graduate. That is the only time anyone ever tests him.

When he is six or seven the DARE anti-drug program brings a trailer to the school. Inside it is a gas chamber chair with straps and holes in the seat and a bucket underneath, and a police officer telling the children that yes, lots of people died in it. It scares him badly. He will see the chair again.

At seven he is sexually molested. He will not remember it for forty years.

He speaks out loud most of his childhood, to himself, because saying a thing aloud is how he keeps it. He reads comics until middle school. He is also, quietly, good at something else his father showed him: if he is in someone's presence, a swirl appears at the top right of his vision, and if he looks at it the swirl opens into a tunnel, and he can go down that person's life, fast through the dull years and slow through the ones that matter, seeing it through their eyes.

He is eleven when his sister's friend Jen invites them to a Halloween party at her house in Pinellas Park. It is his sister's birthday. Jen is fourteen or fifteen and can do what Daryl and his father do; she likes him for it and treats him as the mascot of her friends. Her father is a high-ranking New York mobster living quietly in Florida. Her mother, Daryl will learn, is a Kabbalist, an occultist.

Jen grabs his arm the moment they arrive and pulls him into her mother's bedroom, where the woman is at the dresser mirror putting on a costume that makes her look like a TV vampire, something between Elvira and Vampira. "Mom, this is him." The conversation is telepathic. "You say the father can do it?" "Yes." "And the mother?" "Not as much." "The sister?" "No." The woman takes Daryl by the chin, lifts his head and locks eyes with him, and the room goes orange and red with spots of blue, and all he can see are her eyes, and somewhere behind her, tall blond people standing and watching. Out in the living room the girls begin to scream. The woman shakes his chin and he snaps out of it. "You're a powerful little boy. You know that, don't you?" "Yes." "Good. Now go play." In the living room the girls are saying the house looked like it was on fire. His sister saw nothing.

The next day the mother sends the girls outside and sits Daryl down. Does he like Jen? He does. She lets him hold the model car on the shelf, a '69 Corvette, and he tells her that her husband used to own one and wants another, and that her husband hurts people. "He does it for his family," she says. She wants him to marry Jen when he is older. She says she did something to him last night by accident, and that she can help him, make him stronger. Whatever she wants, it is in his bloodline.

So he looks down the tunnel. He sees himself marry Jen at fifteen and drop out of high school and leave Florida; a daughter and two boys; the mother making him stronger; sitting beside the father at warehouse meetings, reading the other men, telling Jen's mother in the next room whether they were armed or lying while she fed it into the father's earpiece. He sees the day someone works it out and sends a man with a pistol above his right ankle, and the man going for it before Daryl can finish the warning. He sees his own funeral, his father's heart attack, his mother's overdose, his sister alone and drinking. He comes back up the tunnel and says no. She promises to stop it, and he looks again, and nothing she promises stops it. He never marries Jen, though he knows her for years afterward.

Whatever happened in that bedroom does not fade. For years afterward the world looks wrong at the edges, colors too high, shadows moving, something like a permanent low hallucination. He never quite gets rid of it. He gets used to it.

Sometime in those years he sees a gray-haired army colonel with eyebrows that curl up at the ends on Oprah, and then on Geraldo, the talk shows, talking his way out of accusations from a daycare on a military base. The name is Michael Aquino. Daryl remembers the eyebrows.

In high school he plays classical guitar and it becomes his main hobby. He makes Eagle Scout, the top rank in the Boy Scouts. He gets good at leaving his body: a hum starts in his head, he learns to push it down to his feet and back up, faster and faster, until the whole body vibrates and he comes loose and weightless. Out there the grass pulses with light and trees carry something like blood through them. One night he keeps going, farther and farther out, meaning to leave the world, and something that is not him says you're not ready yet and pulls him back.

Freshman year, 1991 or 1992, a friend, a heavy-metal fan, gets hold of a mail-order VHS of the Montauk interviews, and they watch it together in a bedroom. It is the deepest thing either of them has ever seen.

At nineteen his father drops dead of what the doctors call a widowmaker: a piece of plaque on an artery wall of the heart breaks loose and that is all, no warning, no cholesterol to speak of. The same year Daryl picks up a marijuana paraphernalia charge. He stops playing guitar.

2.

He joins the Navy in January 1999. The charge limits him to construction or the kitchen, so he goes to the Seabees: Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 7, Gulfport, Mississippi. He deploys for nearly five years. Klaipėda, Lithuania, where a woman tells him her mother was born in Siberia after the Soviets put whole towns on trains. Honduras, where a guide at the Copán pyramids explains that the reptile heads carved into every wall are because the Maya were fond of iguanas. Bahrain. Iraq, where he coaches the rifle range and sees war and what it does to people, and comes home not quite the same.

He re-enlists, and in early spring 2003, a few weeks back from Iraq, he is posted for two years to JMF RAF St Mawgan, a joint maritime force at a Royal Air Force station outside Newquay in Cornwall, out at the far tip of England where the exports are tin and wool. A first class petty officer, a Navy sergeant of sorts and a fellow Seabee, picks him up at the bus station and takes him to McDonald's. "This is a weird base, man," the man says, and will not say more.

Daryl is assigned to the garage on the far side of the base from the mound of earth that is the entrance to the underground section. He has a secret clearance, enough to handle the code keys for the radio packs; he does not have top secret. On his first Monday someone tells him to escort three civilian contractors from Siemens into the underground base to fix an air pump, and a man with top secret has to escort Daryl so that Daryl can escort them, which makes no sense to him. Past the quarterdeck, the lobby of the base, a sliding glass door opens onto a metal detector with a little ramp taped in black and yellow. The first Siemens man says, "I'm not walking through that bloody thing," and walks around it, and Daryl starts to follow him, and an English guard with a green beret and a rifle on his shoulder, sitting behind a stainless steel table, says, "No. You walk through." Daryl shrugs. It is a metal detector. He walks through it, sees a flash of blue, watches the men fix a pump, and leaves.

That Friday he draws the midnight-to-four watch on the quarterdeck, the one nobody wants. When he walks in, an old man in Army dress uniform is standing at the desk going through a file. Gray hair, and the eyebrows. He asks Daryl where he is from. St. Petersburg. "I've been there," the colonel says, and asks how he likes England. His eyes are so dark they look like doll's eyes. Daryl says he is going to take another round and walks the base until the man is gone.

The next Friday he has the watch again, which does not happen unless you are being punished. The petty officer of the watch is a heavy, blond man with a blond mustache. He points at the computer monitor. "What do you think about that?" It is a black-and-white image of a small gray figure with black eyes looking up at a camera. "Did you get that off the internet?" "No. Look." Beside the sliding door is a window that runs almost floor to ceiling, and behind the glass, in a side room with a table and chairs, the thing from the picture is standing.

"Do you mind if it comes in here?" "Does it mind if I stare at it?" Daryl does not know if it is an animal, whether it will go for him if he looks too long. "No, it doesn't mind," the petty officer says, and a flat little voice in Daryl's own head says the same words. The door slides open. The thing walks in with the English guard behind it, rifle off the shoulder now and held ready, and it has something silver in its hand. Daryl is up out of the chair yelling gun, gun, gun, and all three of them, the guard, the petty officer and the thing inside his head, tell him it is not a gun. The guard's rifle, he realizes, is for him. He sits down.

It is a demonstration. There is an old government Dell computer on the floor, and the thing takes it apart like a machine, no guiding the tool, every screw first time, catching them in its other hand, slides the cover off, pops out two chips of RAM, reaches up to a table for two waiting chips, slams them in, slides the cover back and flicks each screw between its fingers and drives it in. Eight seconds each way. Then it stands in front of him and lets him look. It is under three feet tall, less than a meter, light khaki-brown with a hue of pink, big black eyes that never blink, a fold of skin from the inner corner of each eye down over the cheek, no ears, no belly button, no genitals, skin like plastic. Its palms are as long as his hand and the fingers longer, so that it holds its hands in C-shapes to keep them off the floor. When he looks left it turns its head for him; when he looks at its hands it turns them over. He asks it, in his head, whether he can touch it, and reaches out, and the petty officer says, "Don't touch it." After a minute Daryl is, absurdly, bored. It walks back into the base.

The whole time he has been pinching his thigh with his thumbnail as hard as he can. "Do you think you're dreaming?" the petty officer asks. "No. I want a mark, in case you wipe my mind." "We're not going to wipe your mind. Not yet."

"Do you think you could work around something like that?" "I don't see why not." The man types. "You're smart." "Really?" "Really smart." "What, like 140, 150?" "More like 190, 195." The screen shows a row of colored lines like an old arcade game: two lines at the top close together, then a gap, then everybody else, and at the very bottom the guys Daryl works with. He is the second line from the top. The scanner he walked through told them that, and everything else: that he smokes, that he drinks, that his arteries are clear because he drinks, that he is Rh positive, which they can fix. The man asks why a mind like his is in a construction battalion, and Daryl tells him about the charge at nineteen, and the man says that will not matter here. Was he homeschooled? No. "Guess you just slipped through the cracks." Hobbies? Classical guitar, in high school. "Oh, they'll like that." Who? "There's Germans up there." Up where? "The moon, and beyond. Mostly from the thirties and forties." Tattoos? No. "Good. The Germans don't like tattoos." Then, looking at the screen: "It looks like you've got somebody else living in there with you. Were you molested as a kid?" Yes. "That explains it. Don't worry, we'll get that out for you."

Everyone on base knows the young sailor who wins the physical readiness test every year, most push-ups, most sit-ups, fastest run. "That's me," the petty officer says. "I'm thirty-five. I joined the secret space program. That's what the mustache is for." Daryl starts to pace. This may be everyday talk to you, he says, but I feel like I'm losing my mind. "Go for a round," the man says.

He wakes on Saturday with a blood blister on his thigh and no memory of why, and it is not until a Mexican-American sailor everyone calls Lando, for the Star Wars models all over his room, catches him in the hall and says, "So what did you think? Big black eyes, long thin fingers, kind of creepy," that it comes back. "How did I forget that?" "Some people do." Lando is the base gossip. He tells Daryl the smartest man on the base, the only line above his, is the executive officer.

3.

On Monday the executive officer, the XO, comes to the garage in person, which never happens, and asks Petty Officer James to walk with him. His first name is Robert. He looks about sixty, white-haired, with the sort of pale, stern face Daryl will one day compare to a vice president. They make small talk down the sidewalk until the buildings are behind them. "How does it feel to have a 195 IQ, Mr. James?" Mister is what officers call each other. "This close to two hundred, sir. But you'd know how that feels." "Who told you?"

"Have you ever heard of Project Solar Warden?" No. "The United States Navy secret space program?" No, sir, but I think I could figure that one out. He asks whether Daryl heard about the Scottish hacker who broke into NASA and the Pentagon a year or two ago and found lists of off-world officers with ranks and social security numbers, and photographs of cigar-shaped craft over the moon. Daryl was in Bahrain and did not read the papers. "It's all true," Robert says. They did not extradite the man because in court he could have called witnesses.

"We have a program. It's called the 20 year and back. You volunteer, we put you in, you do twenty years, we send you back in time twenty years, age-regress you twenty years, wipe your memory, and you wake up in bed like nothing happened." Daryl can believe time travel and a wiped mind; something about age regression sticks. "After what you just saw, you find that hard to believe?" "Touché, sir. But yes." "Well, it's true." He is not interested in convincing anyone. "With your scores I guarantee you make commander. You'll make pilot." Pilot of what? "A four-kilometer-long starship." Did Daryl ever watch Battlestar Galactica? They look something like that.

Daryl thinks about the future. Are there women up there? "Yes." Could he have children? "With your scores you'll be expected to." What happens to them? "They'll be taken care of." Would he see them again? "No." That sounds sad. "Mr. James, I promise you. You won't remember a thing."

He decides that if he does it, it will be for something. The scanner, he says, could see a blockage in a man's heart. My father died of a widowmaker when I was nineteen. A machine like that would have saved him. Why isn't it out there? Robert talks about population control. There has to be a side, Daryl says, that wants to bring this to people. "You mean, like a traitor?" "No, sir. Just a side." "There is." "If you can get me on that side, I'll do it." They shake hands. Daryl salutes. Robert walks a few steps and turns. "One more thing, Mr. James. You'll be escorted by a reptile. And he's big."

The barracks spend the week, without seeming to, getting him ready. Between games of Halo one of the guys says, "Did you see that reptile today?" "Yeah, he's big." "And he talks funny." Daryl pictures a monitor lizard in a cave. They laugh at him: the reptiles walk upright, like us, they have hands, you'll see them. Another night a loud kid who says yo dog every other sentence is telling the room how he did the program and worked the mines of the moon with a shock collar on, and how they worked you in groups and shocked all of you if one slowed down, and how there were brothels and it was great, and how when they put you back in the chair afterward you just fight it and you keep your memories, that's how he kept his. Daryl asks whether the XO came to him personally and promised him a starship. "Nah, man. I just volunteered. You're going to be up there. They're going to take good care of you." Then a feedback howl fills the room and a voice announces that they are in violation of named articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and face ten years and a hundred thousand dollars if they do not stop, and that will be all. Daryl looks for the speaker. There is no speaker. "They don't need speakers." The next day Lando points at the rectangular boxes on the radio tower above the underground base: experimental 5G, a microwave beam they can put into a room to see, hear, and talk.

On Thursday night the door across the hall from the TV room is open and a sailor is telling someone, loud enough to carry, what happens next: a chair, a density chamber, third density pushed up to fifth because the beings they work with are too fast and too smart to work with otherwise, stronger, faster, two hundred points of IQ, and you become more of a collective. Daryl half listens.

Friday he has the balls-to-four again, the midnight watch, three in a row, in his black working blues. The blond petty officer has a stack of papers the thickness of a mortgage, every place to sign already marked. Daryl tries to read it. The consciousness of the first party now belongs to the second party. "If you read all this we'll be here all night." He gets cold feet. "Look," the man says. "You're already back there. So sign the damn papers." Age regression takes weeks; they bring you back early to do it; somewhere under his feet he has already finished. It goes through him like a chill. He says, half to himself, this is for Dad, and signs everything. The man picks up the phone. "Send him in."

Behind the tall window is a reptile nine and a half feet tall, nearly three meters, brown, with ridges running back over its skull like mohawk haircuts, gold alligator eyes with slit pupils in a flat face, a mouth that runs straight across and up at the ends, shoulders like basketballs, wearing a skin-tight blue suit. Daryl is on his feet. "Jesus Christ. He's not going to eat me, is he?" "If he wanted to, he's stronger and faster than you. He'd have done it by now." Through the glass the reptile lets out a three-second sigh. "Can he read my mind?" "Yes, he can read your mind." Sorry about that, Daryl thinks at it. It comes out into the quarterdeck and there is a second guard now, a skinny kid with a rifle. "Go with him." Daryl tucks his cover, his cap, into his belt and goes.

The floors of the underground base are striped: white for secret, blue for top secret, red for whatever is above that. Red goes everywhere, and some corridors are red only and have no lights. The reptile turns straight down one of those. Daryl stays close so as not to lose it in the dark. The kid behind him starts hitting him between the shoulder blades with the butt of the rifle, every thirty seconds, harder each time. "I'm not looking around. I'm not going to run. Please stop hitting me." The next blow sends tingling to his feet. He has just come back from the Middle East and a rifle does not mean much to him. He turns, grabs the weapon, sweeps the kid's legs and drops him flat on the concrete with the breath knocked out of him, and stands over him holding it by the barrel. "If you hit me with this one more time, I'm going to shove it up your ass sideways." Behind him a voice deeper than any man's, the last syllable pushed out higher, says, "Leave us." The kid crawls backward, stands, looks at the rifle, looks at Daryl. Daryl holds it out. He takes it and runs.

When Daryl turns, the reptile is right in his face, every muscle flexed, looking down at him over its own chest. Its eyes have gone small. Reptiles have no muscles in the face; the eyes are the only way to tell. "I'm sorry for what I said before," Daryl says. "You're much more civilized than him." The eyes open. "Follow me."

They walk downhill for a long time. The corridors widen; there are bicycles leaned against the walls and golf carts for going deeper. Then three steps up a metal walkway to a round watertight door with a wheel, and beyond it a chair, oversized, black, with holes in the seat and straps, and a sealed room around it. It is the chair from the trailer. Daryl runs. The reptile takes him by the neck and throws him into it as if he weighs nothing, and pins his right arm with a hand that covers the whole forearm. Its nails are black and roll in on themselves into needle points. Daryl gets its thumb up off his arm and something hits him in the forehead and he is out. When he comes to, his right side is strapped, his left is free, and he is half off the chair working the buckle when the reptile puts its palm on his chest, fingers over his shoulder, and shoves him back, and from inside it comes a rumble like an alligator's mating call, felt before it is heard. "Don't make me hit you again." Its face is right there. Daryl jams his thumb into its eye.

It leans back and a tear runs down. At least I hurt it. Then it leans forward into his chest with its weight until his ribs cave in against his heart and he blacks out. When he comes to he is strapped in completely. "I'm sorry I have to do this to you," it says. It does something at a panel on the wall by the door where he cannot see, walks out, and spins the wheel shut. He hyperventilates to make himself pass out before the gas. What comes instead is pressure, then cold, then weightlessness, then something like his soul being pulled out of his body, then peace.

He comes to with the straps off. To his right three young men in club clothes, one in a motorcycle jacket, lie unconscious shoulder to shoulder on a king-size mattress on the floor, as if they had been picked up drunk outside a pub and delivered. In front of him the reptile stands with its back to him, and facing it is a man in a black leather trench coat and knee boots, blond hair oiled back over shaved sides, moving his hands as if talking and saying nothing. Daryl knows him: a first class petty officer from the base. Daryl slides off the chair, catches a footrest in the back, sways. "Can I go to bed now?" He goes down on hands and knees. The boots come into his vision. "I should have you executed for what you did to my man. Do you hear me?" The reptile says, "It doesn't matter. He doesn't remember." Daryl falls on his side.

He wakes under the reptile's arm, carried like a sports bag, head to the back, all his weight on his bladder. "I have to pee. Put me down. I'm going to pee on you." It does not answer. There is a bright light.

He has gone through a portal. He is inside the moon.

4.

He is on a wide hospital bed with rails, under a surgical lamp made of small LEDs, and someone is tearing open sterile packets and sticking heart-monitor pads to his chest. "He has to urinate," the reptile says, and there is one long rip, and a woman puts a catheter in him. He looks up at her and she is pretty. "Can I hold your hand?" She lets him. He passes out.

The next day the woman comes back with a bag and gives him a physical: reflexes, grip, fingers between hers and squeeze. She has a clear rectangular pad; she sets her palms on its corners and a figure of a body rises out of it, and she puts her finger into the image and spins it and opens the heart and then the brain. A sphere of colored lights hangs over the bed. He is not himself. He can still count and read and reason, but who he is has gone, and everything is new: colors are higher, sounds sharper, he can almost see in the dark, and every so often he slides a few years down his own life and comes back. She taps a front tooth: she was missing it and they grew it back here; they can fix anything here. When she picks up her bag to leave he takes her hand. "I don't know what to do or say. All I know is I don't want you to leave me." She likes that.

Outside it is a courtyard like the inside of an apartment block, five stories of walkways on three sides, women with babies waving from the balconies, men in gray overalls filing onto trains through openings on either side: a shift change. Four lifts rise from the floor with no rails at all. Theirs takes them straight up to her door. A woman with a baby is standing at the edge of the top walkway and Daryl asks if she isn't afraid of falling, and she says you can't fall and steps off into nothing and stands there on a field that runs to the far wall; the children play on it, though they are not supposed to. The room is Spartan: couch, coffee table, a bar with four stools, a desk by the door, a bedroom. They are kissing when she stops. "Wait. What's your name?" "I don't remember." "Come on. Everybody remembers their name." He thinks. "Daryl." They have sex and he dozes with his back against the headboard and her head on his chest.

That is the memory he will keep: the first day or two, which the petty officer told him is about all anyone keeps. The rest comes back later, in order, one piece at a time, over the next twenty years.

He is on the moon three months, and it is punishment. For a human to put a thumb in a reptile's eye is a death offense, and they have sentenced him to hard labor in the mines, forty years if they can manage it, the sentence they give a man who rapes an admiral's daughter, and for those men the memory is not wiped afterward so that they carry it home, and almost all of them kill themselves inside six months.

The mines are cold and underground and everything is covered in white dust. They guide long drill bits like the workers on an oil rig, adding lengths as the hole deepens. They work in groups of five or six with shock collars on, and when one man will not work they all get shocked. The kid from the barracks is in his group, the one who said it was great, and one day he takes a rock to a man who will not work and kills him with it. The only wage is sex. The women live in an open brothel, tiers of rooms without walls where they wave down at the men like something out of the Wild West, run by a heavy older woman, the madam. The Germans who run the place call the women honeypots and the men meat sacks. Daryl mostly stays with April. Her scores let her be a nurse instead. When he asks if she is afraid of getting pregnant she says the moon does that to women, and they are inside the moon, so it does not affect her; she regulates it through the pad. The women who do get pregnant breastfeed their babies, and then the babies are taken, and the women cry.

He keeps telling April he does not understand why they are punishing him; he does not remember doing what they say he did. Keep your head down, she says, do the work, get through it. The first month brings density sickness: without warning the world goes to blurs and high whines, and he comes to with someone holding him by the shoulders asking if he is all right. When it happens to another man the man turns to a statue, and Daryl lifts the man's arm and lets it drop until someone snaps at him to stop, Daryl is moving far too fast for him. The blond petty officer from the base is here in his Gestapo coat and never misses a chance to make things worse. Once he glares at Daryl across a room for no reason Daryl can see. Daryl will find out later that the man, like many of the Germans, was raised by reptiles, and is close to the one he blinded.

Then one day Robert is in the mine, in uniform, talking to a German. The German comes over with a box and waves it in front of Daryl, and turns on the blond petty officer and scolds him in German for wasting a man with these scores in a hole in the moon. The German asks his name. Daryl still remembers it, and gives it. "Come with me," the German says.

Two of the little drones take him by the arms and strap him naked to a table, forehead, chest and all. A man in a surgical cap and mask shows him a needle as thick as a big kitchen syringe. "I'm going to use this to put your implant in." It goes through his skull with a crack and he feels the blood run. In the corner a seven-foot chalk-white gray with insect eyes watches and does nothing. The table flips and something goes into his spine at the neck, cold, spreading. They leave him in a room for a day or two to let it take. Then they hose him down, hand him a white powder to rub into his hair and armpits and between his legs that cleans without rinsing and smells pleasant, throw uniforms and boots into a bag, and put him on a ship.

5.

The ship belongs to the Nacht Waffen, the Dark Fleet, the off-world Germans who work for the reptiles, and it hangs over Mars. They tell him a nuclear war has ended the Earth and that he is cloned from leftover DNA, and later they tell him something else, and later something else again, so that he never knows what is true, which he comes to understand is the point. They take his name and give him another. He is a conscript, the lowest thing on the ship, below the bloodline people who were taken as children and educated in German schools. The conscripts are not taught German. The Germans want to speak it in front of them.

A woman pilot begins training him, and in his room he finds a classical guitar and sheet music already waiting, because he told a petty officer on a quarterdeck in Cornwall that he used to play.

The first officer notices the long nails on his picking hand at the pilot's panel. Daryl knows him: the S3 from St Mawgan, the lieutenant who does the base's legal work, an off-world German who wears glasses on Earth and has no need of them here. They adjust men like him, Daryl will learn, a little weight on one, a little less on another, so that a base in Cornwall is not staffed entirely by supermen. "Why are your nails so long? You need to cut them." "I play classical guitar, sir. I'd like to keep playing." "How long before you could play in front of an audience?" He has been at it again for about a month. Three more, he says. "You have two. Start practicing every day."

The Germans keep their own bar aboard, shaped like a horseshoe, the women on stools along the counter and the men at round tables with big stone beer mugs. In two months he is playing in it. He teaches the lieutenant guitar, and they become something like friends, and the lieutenant buys him an electric to go with the acoustic. Later he takes up the piano. The conscripts stop being invisible to the Germans when one of them can play.

Early on, the lieutenant takes him to the back of the ship, where the reptiles live and the light is low, to a room with a naked man sitting on a table, head down, long hair over his face. "Take him." Daryl takes the man by the arm and he does not move, so Daryl pushes the hair back to make eye contact, to be civil about it—and it is his own face. The clone hops down off the table and trusts him at once, the way a long-lost twin might. They cross the hall into the reptiles' dining room. The ceiling is one long arched window, and through it Daryl sees space with his naked eye for the first time, and it is not black with white dots but clouds of pink and blue and yellow. The master of the ship sits at a long table with two others. It is bent and long-nosed, somewhere between an alligator and a vulture. "Give me that." It takes the clone by the back of the neck. "Look at him." The clone looks, and the reptile leans down and bites the arm off and eats it, lifting its head and letting the meat slide back the way an alligator does. Daryl goes forward and the German locks his head under one arm, and the German is stronger than any man can be, and murmurs into his ear, don't fight it, don't fight it. When the clone starts to fade the reptile slaps it awake. "Look at him." The clone looks at Daryl and Daryl looks at the clone, and the reptile tears its throat out, and all the while it is watching Daryl, not the body. It is feeding on him. It throws the body over its head onto the table behind, and the others fall on it, and after a minute it says, "Get him out of here." Back in his room Daryl sits on the bed with his head in his hands. I was better off in the mines.

His paperwork shows a tour in Iraq, and the Germans find that romantic, the desert, the tank campaigns, Rommel. They take him off the pilot's panel and put him through a crash course with two others, three men made sergeants, and send him down to Mars as infantry. The air there is thin, like a mountaintop: you can sit and talk without a supply, but run and you black out. The suits make you strong and let you jump far, and they cloak, go invisible, better than anything in the movies. The old hands' joke is to cloak in front of a new man and tap him on the shoulder, so he turns around to nobody.

The work is mantises, the insect people. They are masters of DNA and the Germans want what they know. The first man Daryl goes out with kicks the door in and beats them. Daryl does it the other way. He knocks, and says if you make me wait out here I will take you the hard way, and if you come now nobody gets hurt, and most of them come. The mantises like that about him. There are spiders in the caves three meters across that the mantises can steer. A new recruit chases a mantis into a cave after Daryl tells him not to, and a spider cuts him in half. When one comes for Daryl he is cloaked, and he shoots it, and it screams like a wounded rabbit.

He does not like the policy. If a village will not hand over what they want, the village goes. He fights it, and for fighting it they tie him to a rack and take pieces off him until he stops fighting it. Before each trip to Mars the lieutenant checks the seals on his suit himself. "You might not want to come back, you know. When you go home they'll tear you apart for what you did to that reptile." So Daryl takes risks. It seems better to die out here.

On his third day on Mars he does. Native reptiles overrun the position, a mouth comes down over his face, and everything goes black. He wakes in a healing tank on the ship and goes back to work. He does not understand what happened until years later, in an office, when Robert tells him. "The body your mother gave birth to. Its bones are rotting on Mars." Then what am I, Daryl asks. A piece of meat with his memories? "They salvaged your consciousness. Your soul, if that makes you feel any better. They put it in an exact copy of you. It's you, Daryl. In every way, it's you."

The reptiles, it turns out, know he can hear them. A reptilian guest is at the master's table one night and says, in the jerky, hissing way they speak mind to mind, I think he can hear us. Out loud their voices are a bark, almost a quack. Yes. I believe he can. The master comes to him. Can you hear me? "Yes, master." They do not like it. A thing that low is not to speak to them that way. The room goes dark, which they can do, and they seem to grow, and something like spit runs from their mouths. "You know what I can do to you." "Yes, master." And then they let it drop.

He brings back every mantis they send him for. One day a very senior German, an admiral or a general, is aboard, and the master has Daryl brought back into the dining room with the German, the captain and the first officer, which never happens. "You've done well. I'll ask them to go easy on you when you go back to Earth." "Thank you, master." Outside, the German takes him into a side room. "He's lying to you. They'll tear you apart when you get back. We'd like you to join the Dark Fleet full time." "Permission to speak freely, sir." "Granted." "Are there horses on your world?" "I own two." "I think horses are beautiful. I want what you have, sir." "You want to be an officer?" "If I earn it. But I want to be a German. I want to own land like you. I want a German wife and German children." "You could be punished for saying that." "You asked me, sir." There is a German nurse aboard who likes him. He has already been in trouble once for singing to her in the bar while her friends laughed, and the captain, who kisses the reptiles' feet, dressed them both down. "I'll see what I can do," the German says. A few days later they give him something like a visa.

Robert will ask him about it in the office years later. They don't do that, he says. They're very private. What was it like? Daryl thinks, and the memory comes as he thinks. "It was like the forties." Men in suits and fedoras, women in dresses and small round hats, children in tweed caps and knee-length trousers, like the Little Rascals of the old film comedies. The buildings look like old Berlin. The transit does not. Slow side walkways feed into a main one, and once you step onto it you lean back and are carried off at fifty miles an hour inside a tube where you feel no wind, and holograms come up to tell you the stops, and the branches slow you down again so you don't fall forward getting off. The men ride that. The women with children take a fast tram. They call the place New Berlin.

He asks the lieutenant for money. What for? Clothes. A swimsuit. He wants to go to the beach, he keeps thinking how good it would be to be in the water. And if he meets a woman, he'd like to take her out. Do they arrange marriages? "No. We just meet women." The lieutenant lends him five hundred francs. A tailor fits him for two suits, and he buys shoes and a hat and a bathing suit and a towel and still has three hundred left.

On the beach there are cafés and people lying on towels, the way it would be at home. There is a woman sitting by herself. He tries his broken German on her, asking if he can buy her lunch, and then gives up. "Do you speak English?" "Yes." "Oh, thank God. Could you order me a Danish pastry and a coffee, and whatever you'd like?" "Where are you from?" "Earth." "What are you doing here? They don't allow anybody here." "The States." "You're American?" He tells her he is in the Dark Fleet and trying for citizenship, and that he thinks he is the first. She is impressed. They go out again the next day. It is all very old-fashioned: she will not hold his hand in daylight and pushes him off if he tries, but she keeps saying yes to the next date. Her name, he thinks, is Helen.

On the second or third date the lieutenant has them to dinner. His two boys eat at a children's table in the kitchen, and a red vinyl door with a round window swings between the kitchen and the dining room. His wife says something about the reptiles, I can't stand those dreadful creatures, and Daryl says nothing, because it might be a test. "It's all right," the lieutenant says. "We don't like them either. What do you think of them?" "I hate them because they hate themselves. You can feel it." After that dinner he asks Helen to marry him, and she says yes. They have known each other about a week. He gets a uniform like theirs, in place of the separate black top and trousers of a conscript, and permission for a thirty-day honeymoon after the wedding so she can teach him German. First the ship deploys again.

"We're going to see the people we've been fighting," the lieutenant says. "They won't try anything against the master. But just in case, be ready." They dock at a station that stands in space like a skyscraper, four or five floors, two tall windows angled at the front and a ceiling that is one great window. It is a trading floor and a United Nations at once: anything you can think of for sale, and warring parties come to talk. Daryl has thought, as far as he has thought about it at all, that there are humans and reptiles and grays. He sees people with the heads of dogs, of cats, of birds. Most of them are small, a foot or two tall, in robes, hurrying, and the tall ones walk slowly by some unspoken rule so the small ones can weave around them. One looks like a little Chewbacca with fangs and enormous eyes. A deep blue being with eyes like swirling galaxies looks straight at him and smiles. He keeps telling himself, over and over, you have to remember this. The Germans are always telling him he will not remember any of it.

A man and a woman in blue suits come up to the master, both blond. This is how they negotiate: the woman speaks first, and pleasantly. "The cargo belongs to us. You took it without permission." "We invested so much time in the cargo," the master says. "It belongs to us now." Then the man steps forward with a clear glass pad and reads out the laws they have broken, and says that if the cargo is not returned at once it will be considered an act of war. The master takes the pad and reads it with his hands clasped behind his back, for a long time. Then he throws his hands in the air and walks away. The woman turns to Daryl. "You're coming with us now."

He looks at the lieutenant. The lieutenant nods. "Can I get my things?" "Yes. Hurry." He runs back to the ship and finds he owns nothing but a guitar and some sheet music. At the door he tells the lieutenant to tell Helen he is sorry, that the electric guitar is his now, and shakes his hand.

6.

Their ship is a polished saucer, and the metal inside has no seams, no rivets or welds, as if it were poured into a mould. He sits alone for a long time on a round bench in the back. Then the two of them come out from the front and sit across from him, the woman on the bench and the man kneeling beside her, looking at each other and not quite at him. He looks disturbed, the woman says, without speaking. Wouldn't you be, if you had to live with them? Daryl looks up. They turn to him at the same moment and tilt their heads, eyes wide, and something bright white comes off them until all he can see is their eyes. He looks at the floor. The man kneels in front of him. Can you hear what I'm saying to you? "Yes." Can you hear what I'm saying to you? This time he nods. The man goes back to the woman and they close their conversation off. "We're going to take you somewhere to be healed," she says. Daryl looks at his arms. There is nothing wrong with him that he can see.

After the healing there is a four-kilometer ship. A man of the warrior caste, huge, looks at a glass pad and then at Daryl. "You're not going to be any trouble, are you?" "No, sir." "Good." They call him Leader. His wife is the other Leader. Daryl is housed with two of them, a man who is the navigator and a woman who is the science officer, because living close builds the link between telepaths. On the first day he asks the navigator how he is supposed to tell the man's voice from the voice in his own head. Don't second-guess yourself. Whatever you hear is me. On the second day the navigator links him with the ship, and it is shapes: cubes in his mind that he flattens and turns inside out and folds back. On the third day he is flying her.

There are two black rectangles on the console. He lays his hands on them, closes his eyes, clears his head, and a woman's voice says, Good morning, Daryl. Good morning, Mama Bear. That is how they both know they are ready. She is a living consciousness, a Pleiadian soul who volunteered to be the ship; a thing that big cannot be run by anything less. Her name is the USS Nimitz, which Daryl will point out to Robert is already the name of a carrier, and Robert will tell him the pilot gets to give the ship its nickname, and Mama Bear was his. For docking there is a big glass pad on a swing arm that he pulls to him and pushes away again. The ship is their technology and our materials, our titanium, forged their way. Part of the deal is that they can take her over whenever they like, no questions asked. It happens once. For a long time the work is customs, guarding the Earth, letting nothing in or out. It is mostly boring.

A third of the ship is a hydroponic farm, and the food goes from the vine to the plate in half an hour; they think freshness is part of why they live so long. What they would get from fish on their home world comes in a blue drink. Once a week everyone does service on the farm, the captain too, so that nobody gets above anyone else. At a meal early on, the woman, Swaru, mentions the reptiles. "That's why we had you on the reptilian ship. We wanted you to learn from them." "You knew I was there the whole time. And you didn't do anything." "Yes."

He gets up and picks up his guitar for the first time since he came aboard and plays, he will not remember what. When he stops and looks up, they have pulled their chairs up in front of him and are staring, eyes huge, mouths open, heads tilting back and forth. "How did you do that?" They have nothing like it. They live three thousand years and are not trusted to work alone until they are eighty; maybe, he thinks, you only make music like this when your life is short. "That wasn't for you. That was for me." He throws the guitar on the bed and walks out. It is a rough start. You cannot keep a grudge hidden from telepaths, and in the end he forgives them. They are always eight steps ahead, and it only looks cruel from where he stands.

They are not ashamed of their bodies. They sleep naked and walk to the shower naked, and there are no secrets among them, so Swaru knows he likes her. He tells her plainly, the way you do among telepaths, that he thinks she is beautiful and wants to have children with her. For a week she only listens. Then one day she says yes, and her uniform, which looks like one piece, simply opens, and she lies down on the science table. The man lies under the woman, among them. She lifts her head, looks down, locks eyes with him, and he is in her body and she is in his. He panics. How long does this last? Am I stuck like this? And he is back. She does it again, and this time the two of them are out of their bodies altogether, out in the universe, one thing, for what could be minutes or days. Then she hops off the table and he sits up on his elbows. "Did I finish?" "Yes. You finished."

When a woman aboard gives birth, the other women stand up from their stations without a word. Where are you going? I'm going to witness. A man steps into each empty post and knows the job, because they all know every job. Before the birth Swaru tells him, "When I have the baby, I'm going to change." He thinks she means a little, emotionally. It is a boy. He names him David, after his father.

She stops working. She eats with the baby, sleeps with the baby, gazes into its eyes, and says a word or two to Daryl if he asks her something. This goes on for months, and he cannot hold his own son. One day he puts his arms around the baby's head to take him, and she hits him, very fast, and he is on the floor. When he gets up and walks toward her to ask what is wrong with her, she screams at the top of her lungs, holding the baby, and they never raise their voices. He walks out.

He takes up hand-to-hand with the navigator after work, and the navigator throws him hard; they do not go easy. Daryl starts hitting him for real, open-handed, and the navigator throws him harder, and one throw snags a picking nail on the man's uniform and tears it down to the quick. Daryl is up cursing. The navigator takes him by the shoulder and turns him and looks into his eyes, and you cannot lie to that look. "What's wrong with you?" He tells him. "You need to talk to Elder."

Elder is waiting in his great chair. "You didn't hurt the baby, did you?" "No. Of course not. But there's something wrong with her." Elder explains the bonding: ten months in which a mother cannot be approached. He was lucky, Elder says, she could have bitten his face off. "Why didn't anybody tell me?" "You're right. Somebody should have." And there is a woman who has just come aboard, Elder says, who is available. Daryl doesn't want that. He loves Swaru. "That's just the way it is." There are about thirty women to every man, by design; the men go into a kind of rut, a mating heat, every six months; the women bond; and so the men take more than one wife. He has a daughter with the second woman. Months later Mother calls him to a room. Swaru is done bonding. He can go back. He says he is with the other woman now and will be faithful to her. Mother leans in close, her hands clasped on her knee, and something comes off her like a gust of warm air, love with no conditions on it, and his anger simply goes. "You're right. I'll go back." Swaru is herself again. "Would you like to hold the baby?"

Mother is the midwife, and the headmistress of the school, seven feet tall, over two meters, with long silver hair and a white-and-gray robe. After two thousand years they begin to grow again, and the bones keep growing while the skin does not, so that her cheekbones are huge and her skin looks stretched, like someone who has had one too many facelifts. They stop at their peak, twenty for a woman and twenty-seven for a man, for about a thousand years; at three thousand, the growing kills them. Her husband, Elder, is fourteen and a half feet tall, over four meters, with a long white beard, and too big for the ship; he rarely leaves his room, and when he does he walks like a man on stilts. He settles disputes. In Mother's school the children are taught to remember their past lives, so that whatever they once did, piloting, farming, medicine, they already know how to do. Once a week there is a family day.

The adults cannot understand the little ones. Until about five they speak a sort of babble, mostly feeling with a word here and there, and the grown-ups lose the feel for it. Daryl can understand it. Robert will explain why: Daryl is an empathic telepath, one of a handful in the universe, and his consciousness is mixed, Lyran and reptilian, which almost never happens in someone who can also father their children. They are old and honest and a little naive, easily fooled by beings who do things only for power or for cruelty. They wanted some of his street sense in their line. "They were using you," Robert says, and smiles. "But you didn't mind."

One night the ship wakes him. We're being attacked. No alarm is sounding; someone has seen to that. Leader's son, a boy when Daryl met him and a teenager now, meets him in the corridor, and they run to wake Leader. The boy runs in first and freezes the way any kid would: his parents are making love, motionless, the woman on top staring straight ahead and the man staring up. Daryl pushes the boy aside and shakes the man, shouting, and then takes the woman by the shoulders and shakes her until her eyes focus. "We're under attack." "Go get the others," Leader says. "And the children," says his wife. Daryl sends the son for the others and goes for the nursery himself, and gets the children into an escape craft.

In the craft his son and his daughter both turn to him with the same look on their faces. Dad. You have to get Mother. It is not their look. It is hers, calling through them. "Don't leave us," he tells the navigator, and runs. The ship is calling out the breaches as he goes, hull three, sections fifty-six, fifty-eight, right by Mother's quarters. The hulls are a foot of titanium with a gap between and they are cutting through. Mother and Elder are sitting in their room looking straight ahead. She looks frightened. "Can you run?" "No." "Take her," Elder says, out loud. Daryl gets her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Elder kneels all the way down to get through his own doorway and stands up in the corridor, and Daryl looks around the frame and sees who it is: mantises, pirates, hired. He hears Elder shout and hears them shoot him down.

He runs Mother back to the craft and hands her to the navigator. There is a flash and the door shuts. Something touches his shin, and he thinks it is one of the children, and looks down—and it is his own forearm, burned off at the elbow and swinging by the sleeve. The whole upper right side of him is gone. His ribs look like cooked pork chop bones; he can see the bottom of his lung, and where his breastbone was, something shining and moving, and he understands it is his heart. He goes down on his knees and is gone before his face reaches the floor. In the dark he can hear the navigator telling Swaru to talk to him or they will lose him. All he can say back is, It's dark and I'm cold.

He wakes floating, reaches with his right arm and has none, feels smooth rounded walls with his left, and lifts his head into a pain like nothing else: there is a cable in his spine. A healing tank. The cable is there to keep the current in his brain so his consciousness does not leave. Sleep, the navigator says, somewhere close, and he does. When he wakes again he is in a bed in something like a hospital gown, whole. He finds his children and holds them. Mother is sitting and staring at nothing. "Go help Mother," he tells them. How? "When you were weak she was strong. Now she's weak and you're strong." They climb into her lap and play with her hair.

He asks the navigator for one of their blue uniforms. It goes on loose, like footed pajamas, and when he closes the front it draws tight to his body and cushions his feet and lifts his arches, and it is like wearing nothing at all. Another commander from Earth passes him in the corridor and asks why he is dressed like one of them. "It had to be someone on the inside," Daryl tells the navigator. The ship reads everyone's DNA; the shields are hacked, not beaten. They find the man. It is the blond first class petty officer from the base, the one in the leather coat who hated him from the first day. He is sentenced to be beheaded by the warrior caste with one of their swords. Daryl tries to speak to him mind to mind. "Don't talk to me that way," the man says aloud. "You and I could have been friends." "I would never be friends with someone like you." "Then as that blade passes through your neck, remember you're a Judas to your own species." Daryl walks out.

The reptiles are offering peace, and Leader calls the warrior caste together and asks Daryl what he thinks, since he has lived with them. "If we take this peace we'll have it for a while. When they're strong enough they'll attack us and kill all of us and enslave our women and children. They only want peace because they're weak right now. We should hit them with everything we have. If we can't beat them, break their legs." "I think you're right," Leader says. Afterward he takes Daryl aside. Would Daryl like to command some of his own people, Earth humans?

The Moon is free by now, but the miners are living as they did, the brothels, the groups, except that their babies are no longer taken. Daryl goes back and makes a speech: it is a choice, it always has to be a choice, but if you come with us we can be rid of all this. About a tenth want to keep things as they are, orgies and all. About a fifth want to stay and raise families, and he feels that is worth something, men taking care of their own children. The rest come with him, and he starts something like boot camp, basic training.

They board a reptilian ship during what the reptiles think are peace talks, with the shields already down. It is not how the Taygeteans usually fight and Daryl talks them into it. His men go in front in armor built to stop plasma and railgun and laser, like chess rooks, and the warrior caste comes behind like knights, weaving, in armor made only for the close work. "Advance." "Advance." A step, a step, a step, down corridors packed with reptiles. Leader has asked him what the word should be when it is time for hand-to-hand, and Daryl has told him. "Fix bayonets!" Their rifles swing away on slings and blades come out of their fists, and the warrior caste leaps over their shoulders and lands in front; Daryl feels Leader's feet touch his. Leader's son rides his father's back like a spider monkey. A warrior-caste man may not take a woman until after his first kill, so the fathers wound a reptile and lean down and say now, and the son finishes it. They win. Daryl has already told Leader and his wife that he wants his first daughter to marry their son.

7.

They come home to the Taygeteans' own world with something like a parade, down a road between low grass banks with children running along the tops. The city rises in stepped triangular wedges, the biggest in the middle, like the pointed flags on a World Series trophy. The King sits at the top of long steps; to his right are his advisors, mostly men, in robes of earth colors, and to his left are his princesses, more than two hundred of them. Daryl plays classical guitar for him and bows and gives him the guitar. The King gives him a princess to be one of his wives. He has half a dozen by now.

He lives on their world for nearly ten years. He is bored. He was a pilot and now there is nothing to fly, so he teaches: music, and fishing, finding worms with the children, smoking the fish and wrapping it in leaves so nothing is left behind. He has a bow made on their printers. He teaches baseball, and football, which only the warrior caste will play, and loves. He builds bonfires and tells stories. He dips carved candles in layers of colored wax. He is trying to show them that we are worth saving.

He gives the Queen one of his candles, and she comes to his house. The King is very old, she says, and does not want to do it anymore. Would Daryl be King? They know he will never leave the wives he has unless they play to his ego, so they play to it, and he agrees. He is King for about four months. There are two hundred princesses. Why so many, he asks the Queen. "To ensure the survival of your lineage." It also keeps him alive: to kill a king is an act of war, and there are people on Earth, in the caverns, who would like to kill him. One night she tells him that tomorrow he will not be King. He thinks she is teasing. The next day he has to go. He grows a long red beard and lives like a hermit.

Robert comes to see him, age-regressed, his white hair black again. Daryl says how young he looks. "You haven't aged a bit," Robert says. "You age like them now."

For a time he is married to Mother, who has become obsessed with him. She has been age-regressed so many times that it has worn her out in the head. Then the female Leader becomes his queen, saying she is every bit as strong as Mother, and one day, in front of the King and the whole court, Mother comes at Daryl with a knife and has to be dragged off, and nobody moves. Afterward he stands before the King. "When I was being attacked, none of you helped me. You just stood there with your eyes wide." They have never seen anything like it. "If you saw two men walk past a woman being raped, and they stood and watched, wouldn't you call them guilty? Just as guilty?" "Yes." "That's my world. My world is being raped and you're all standing there watching." The King thinks about it and says he is right. "Then now that you know it, you have to do something. Or it will come back on you, and your children, and theirs." They call it the balance.

The female Leader will not wear armor. "It will scare the children." She goes in her blue suit. The Moon is theirs now, and the reptiles have left their portals open behind them. "They've been winning so long," she says, "they don't know how to fall back." Daryl, Leader and two of the warrior caste go through the Moon's portal and come out in the caverns under St Mawgan.

There are children in cages. A man and a woman are coming down the passage, talking about which of the children they did last week and which they will take next. Daryl's concussion grenade can kill or can only knock the wind out; he sets it to stun and rolls it down the hall, and it puts them both down. He kicks the man over onto his back, and the man looks up at him laughing. Daryl wants to be sure before he does it. "You'd do this to my children, wouldn't you?" "I would." He points back at the cages. "And their children?" "I would." He shoots him. The woman tries to get up and cannot. Her last words are no, please don't, and he shoots her.

He wants to find a way to carry the cages out. "No," Leader says. "Just let them out." They open the doors, and she opens her arms, and the children come to her. They have never been touched or held, and they should have bitten her; Robert will say so. Instead they hold her legs and hold each other to get to her and stand there staring. Men in hoods come, and warrior-caste reptiles, and there is a firefight, and they fall back, and there are more cages, and those children follow her too. They take them back through the portal to be healed on the home world. Their minds will be wiped and they will start over.

He walks his first daughter down the aisle to Leader's son, in the warrior caste's ceremony; the ordinary men do not bother with weddings. She has a baby, and for a long time she keeps it from him. When at last she lets him hold his grandchild, he looks at her, hurt, and she says only, Remember. He thinks that may be why he remembers so much.

He asks the King for one thing in return for his music. "I want to see my children have children. I want to hold my grandchildren. I want to grow old here and die here." The King says they can do that. Then he says Daryl has to go back. It is a contract. Their word is their bond.

At the end of the first football game Robert comes up to him. "Daryl. Time to go home." Daryl has been given a two-year extension, which Robert will tell him they never do. He keeps saying he still has another year. "No. We have to go now." Before he leaves, a woman tells him something he will hold onto: The first time, you won't have a choice about the chair. The second time you will. Don't go in. Why not? It'll be harder to find you.

8.

On the ship back, with Robert and the commanding officer of St Mawgan aboard, he punches the wall and keeps punching it. Please don't take my babies from me. They go back in time, to the base as it was, and through the portal on the Moon, and he is under Cornwall again. The heavy petty officer with the blond mustache, the one who put the papers in front of him on the quarterdeck, shaves his head and his long red beard with electric clippers. He looks at Daryl's hand. "Oh, look at that. You broke your hand." "Leave him alone," Robert says. "If I had ten men like him, this war would be over by now."

"Why would I ever have done this?" Daryl asks him. "Knowing I'd leave everyone I love behind." "Your father died of a heart attack when you were young. You wanted this technology brought to people." It gives him a kind of peace.

They put him back in the chair and bring him down to third density, and it leaves him in a fog. A man and a woman drag him naked through the caverns, one on each arm. The woman gets tired and lets go, and he hangs from one side with the tops of his feet dragging in the clay, and looks around, and there are the cages. Dog cages stacked five high. A little girl with pure white skin and tangled hair and pupils gone wide rushes up and slams her hands against the bars, and the woman shouts, "Get the fuck back." Beside the cages, behind bars set into the rock, stands a chimera: the lower half of a spider, the body of a man, black stiff hair from the elbows down and two black spikes for hands, fangs, eyes that run up the sides of a bald head, smaller as they go. "Let's just feed him to Max," one of the hooded men says. "No. We'll wait for Aquino."

They strap him to a rack. A figure in a red hood leans in, and under the hood is a black head, shiny as onyx, like a snake's. "Don't you remember me, Daryl?" He doesn't. It steps back into the shadows and the colonel with the eyebrows steps forward, and for a moment the two of them blur into each other, as if the man's body and the reptile were one image shifting. Daryl looks past the man, into the shadows. "Nice trick." The reptile steps out. "Yes. It works on most." After that the colonel sits down to watch, with the face of a child waiting for ice cream.

It goes on for two days. They tear out his eyes and put him in a healing tank to bring them back so they can start again. The shaved-headed Englishman he will come to call the goon, the hired thug, crushes his toes with a hammer. The commanding officer, a thin man Daryl privately calls Stick, is handed a dagger with a skull on the handle, a thing that once belonged to an SS man, and cuts him open. "Not so high and mighty now, are you?" Robert is handed the same dagger. "Cut him from here to here." Robert does not move. "Cut him from here to here." Robert does it. "Nice cut," the thing says. "Let's see what he had to eat." It reaches into his stomach with needle-pointed nails and scratches the lining, and his whole body convulses on the rack like a knee under a doctor's hammer. They pull out his intestines and strangle him with them, and afterward a drone has to push them back in as the skin closes.

The thing goes down his timeline while he hangs there, eight hours of it, as far back as it wants. It stops at seven. That is where it went in. Why did you poke the reptile in the eye? He doesn't know what it is talking about. And then he does. "I remember." What do you remember? He looks at the man and the woman from the cages. "I killed you. And I killed you." He looks at the big reptile. "I blinded someone who looked like you. I don't know if it was you." He looks at the colonel. "I've never seen one like you before." There are hooded people at the back and he cannot see their faces. "I can't tell. There are too many of you." Then: "I am the King of the Taygeteans." The thing looks up and down his line to see whether he is lying.

Out of desperation, from the rack, he says, "What in the name of Christ do you want?" Stop saying that. He puts it together. "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to undo my straps and take me out of here." And the thing starts to undo the straps, talking sideways to the goon as it does. "In the name of Yeshua, I command you to stop talking to him." It stops. But the goon has caught on, and he is only a man, and he pulls back his fist and hits Daryl on the chin and knocks him out. Before it lets him go, the thing says, I've lost control of you. But I'm going to leave my mark. It touches the middle of his hairline.

He wakes on Sunday in the barracks. He has lost the Saturday. His uniform is laid out on the chair in front of him as he has never laid anything out in his life, the trousers first, then the top, then the tie, the shoes underneath. He is in his socks and boxer shorts. His hair and chest hair are burnt, there is clay on the tops of his feet, the nails of his picking hand are long, and his body is toned in a way it was not on Friday, and strange to him. He walks out into the hall, and one of the guys, the one who thinks he runs the barracks, is waiting. "You made it." "What?" "Twenty years is a long time. A lot of people don't make it back."

9.

He has almost two years left at St Mawgan. The British men in the base bar know things about him that he does not. The shaved-headed goon calls out, "Hey, it's the king of the Taygeteans. That's what you said you were. Aquino really messed you up, man." The others at the bar tell him to shut up, you're not supposed to say that. The goon says Daryl once claimed to have hit him with a concussion grenade and killed him. What's a concussion grenade? "I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me. Aquino believes you. I don't." He tells Daryl that Aquino made him crush Daryl's toes with a hammer. A goth woman who used to like him takes one look at him, grabs her drink, and leaves. The blond petty officer with the mustache is laughing in a booth. "Aquino screwed you up. He shouldn't have done that to you. You shouldn't have poked the reptile in the eye, but he shouldn't have done that. I felt sorry for you, so I made you stronger." Daryl keeps going back, drinking, waiting for them to get drunk enough to hand him back another piece of a life he does not remember living. It is the goon who tells him to look up Billy Meier. The Pleiadians, he says. We call them Nordics. They call themselves Taygeteans.

About a year into it the goon comes up behind him outside the bar and gets his hands around his throat. If you're going to kill me, I'll kill you first, the goon says. The English guard from the metal detector, who has been shadowing Daryl the whole time as Robert's protection, handcuffs the goon and carries Daryl to bed.

He is a wreck for those two years. He has never been depressed before and now he is, for months at a time. He drinks until he passes out and gets into trouble and has nightmares and is put on antidepressants for the first time in his life, and at one point on suicide watch. He can suddenly sing, and play better than he ever did, and he wants cigarettes less. At the Fourth of July fundraiser he is working the barbecue table when the executive officer walks up with his daughter, Amy, and introduces her, plainly trying to set them up. "Do you still play guitar?" He goes to Nottingham with April and some others, and a tall man in glasses stares at him the whole trip as if he were famous. On the ship, Robert will tell him, he was. Other pieces come back later. Landing the ship in his old high school music teacher's backyard and gently recruiting him as a civilian contractor. A Japanese breakaway world of neon and holograms, where the men are covered in tattoos.

When a man leaves the Navy for good he sees the top three in the command and can say more or less what he likes. Around late December 2005 Daryl sees the master chief, the senior enlisted man, a heavy man with a mustache and glasses, and then goes into the executive officer's office. Robert stands up very slowly behind the mahogany desk, looking sad, and then he is at the end of the desk, and Daryl thinks he has had a stroke, three seconds of his own life gone, and then Robert is right in front of him. Daryl steps back. Robert steps forward. Can you hear what I'm saying to you? "Yes." Can you hear what I'm saying to you? Daryl nods. Why won't he talk out loud? Robert points at the phone. It is on speaker. The master chief and the commanding officer are listening. They want to know what he remembers.

What do you remember? As Robert talks, things surface in the back of Daryl's head that he did not know were there. "A woman. Tall, sitting down. Long silver hair, big cheekbones, big blue eyes. She had a boy on her lap. I kissed the boy on the head, and then I kissed her." That was Mother. You had a son with her. "I have a son?" You have dozens of sons and hundreds of daughters. Daryl feels around the desk for a pen and a pad of Post-its and writes the names down as Robert gives them. Swaru, the one he loved most. Mother, Shara-ye; he remembers it by word association, like Shira?, and Robert shrugs, I guess. The King, Pachacha. The ship, the Nimitz, that he called Mama Bear.

Robert tells him things for an hour. That the master chief is an off-world German, and the senior chief, and the S3, and the base doctor, and that the petty officer who was beheaded was one too. Three months in the mines of the Moon, he says, two years in the Dark Fleet, and the rest with them. That Robert was like a father to him out there, and that he took the dagger in the caverns because they would have hurt Amy. That something went wrong with the chair: Daryl did not come all the way down, he is still partly in fifth density, which is why he remembers, and he has to go back in and be wiped. That nine out of ten men who keep the memories kill themselves inside six months.

"Do you still have all your memories?" Daryl asks him. "Yes." "What makes you so special? Don't you ever think about suicide?" "Every night." "How would you do it?" "A .45 pistol in the mouth." He has been age-regressed seventeen or eighteen times, he says; it starts doing damage after two. "So what are you, three hundred?" "Closer to it than not." He gets a psych evaluation every payday. He was born, he says, in 2580, bred and sent back to repair a line of history in which everyone ended up with a face like his. He tells Daryl a great many things about the years to come, about famous people and about the world, more than Daryl can hold and more than he will ever want to repeat.

Then Robert says something that frightens him. Daryl, this is bad. The thing in the caverns is still in him. It went in when he was seven, and he will not be rid of it until he is forty-seven. Get in the chair and I can take it out. Daryl picks up a pen from the desk. "Did he make me do this?" No. He puts it down. "Then I can handle it." He remembers the woman: the second time, you'll have a choice. He will not go back in the chair.

The commanding officer signs his papers and looks at first as white as a ghost, and then, when Daryl thanks him and seems to remember nothing, smiles. At the door Daryl lifts his head so his voice will carry off the wood, turns, looks straight at him, and says, "Not so high and mighty now, are you?" He walks out.

That Friday night the voice comes into his room one last time, through no speaker. Robert, good cop and bad cop, begs him to come back to the chair; they will fix everything in a med bed. "I remember what you did to me now. You gutted me. If I could take away all your troubles, but you'd forget your own daughter, would you do it?" "I don't know." "You've taken everything from me. Now you want to take my memories of them too." He lies with the pillow over his face while the voice gets louder, and then sits up in the dark and shouts at it. "May God let you die with blood in your mouth." "Please don't say that." He says it again, and after a while the voice fades away.

He flies out of London and is discharged at Norfolk, Virginia, over about two months. He is twenty-seven. Every morning and every night he reads the Post-it of names, until he understands that if he keeps reading it, it will kill him, and he throws it away.

10.

He forces himself to forget. He tells himself it was a dream, and he has always been good at telling himself a thing did not happen. For a short while he watches Tony Rodrigues on the internet, and then he stops. He thinks the way he shuts himself away from people is the Middle East.

His twenties are hard. Odd jobs on and off, homeless for a while, sleeping on friends' couches, drinking out of hand. He does not want to kill himself, exactly, but he walks the bad neighborhoods of the south side of St. Petersburg drunk at night, the old death-metal streets, as if he were waiting for something to do it for him. One night a woman on a porch waves him in. Inside there is another woman, and neither of them wants anything from him but to stare at him. Only the kitchen light is on. He asks if he can lie down a second. He hears a small voice, high, as if it has breathed helium, and one of the women says, "It's all right, it's all right," and something cold touches his face, and then the feeling of having rubbed his eye too hard. He gets his fingers on something cold and wet and pulls, and it feels as though his eye is coming with it. A man's voice in his head says, Pull it out. "I'm going to pull my eye out." Then pull your eye out. You have to get it out. The women jump on him and hold him down. He squeezes his eyes shut and pulls with both hands, and it comes free, slapping in his fist, a wet wriggling thing with a little horn at the end, and he throws it down the hall and stands up yelling. The women jump back onto the couch. On the coffee table is a small rust-colored lizard, and the women say, one and then the other, he knows, he knows. He runs out shouting lizard, and the neighbors come out of their houses. The mailbox out front is white, covered in colored polka dots.

The voice was the navigator's. Far away, on the ship, still linked to him, he was standing with his head down, staring at the floor, and when the Daryl up there asked him what was wrong he said, Be quiet. You're in trouble. There have been other close calls, and there has been help.

He works construction. He becomes a disabled veteran, knee and back, and post-traumatic stress from Iraq, and gets all his care through the VA, the veterans' health system. Then, when he finally owns a home and is established and safe, the memories come back, in order. First the things from his childhood, one after another. Then, slowly, the rest, until one day he is standing at his bedroom window looking out at the backyard and he is in the office with Robert again. On visits home, old friends tell him things that happened to him that he had forgotten. A VA therapist, ex-Army, listens to all of it. "A part of me thinks this is how you're dealing with your trauma. But a larger part of me believes you." That is when he decides to come forward.

He begins telling it in 2021. He calls it a confession. He never agreed to be part of a base that did what it did to those children, or to be tortured by men in his own uniform, and whatever he signed does not matter to him anymore. He meets Anne Marie when he is in bad shape, and she helps him, and helps with the book. In May 2022, at a conference in Grafton, Illinois, he meets Rebecca Rose and Tony Rodrigues, others who remember, and for the first time he is somewhere he is not crazy and not alone. His mother dies of cancer in the summer of 2023; his sister has power of attorney. He listens to the music his parents loved, the sixties and seventies, to remember them, and to remember himself. In 2024 a hurricane drops a tree on his power lines and his friend Tyler stays a month to help.

On the full moon of the fifteenth of December, 2024, a tingle starts in the middle of his hairline, right where the thing touched him, and does not stop for five days. The rack comes back, and the red hood, and the name the thing went by in Egypt five thousand years ago, when men worshipped it: Sobek. Daryl is forty-seven.

He lives in Florida. He walks his dog, he fishes, he rides his bike. He is still writing the book. He believes that part of him is still up there on their world, near the end of his twenty years and the two they added, and will be finished soon, maybe in June. One of these mornings, he thinks, he will be making his coffee, and the rest will come back.