Our mother was called to claim her husband's bodiless head. She picked out a handsome stone of speckled gray Vermont granite for the resting place of what was left of her late husband. "Lost in Willipaq," read the stone. Willipaq was the name of the small Maine town where David, our father, died. There was a mix up and our father's body had been cremated by mistake. They still had the head however, neatly tagged and in a box. ?Klein, the Clone from Lost in Willipaq

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Lechery, debauchery, total annihilation, blood and mud?the usual stuff as two prime movers contend for power. Not power to do anything in particular?threaten, coerce, destroy: illuminate a city, tighten the skeins of a siege engine, or wind up the bowels of a child's clockwork toy?just power to have around. Just in case. Just the familiar, reassuring bulge of potential, there to quiet unease was not much to ask. But who to ask? ?The Return of the Orange Virgin from Platterland

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Sleepless, Simon stared through the dark at the ceiling he knew was there. He used his cane to reach the stairs, then his walker to reach the car. It was ten degrees below zero, but the car started on the first crank.

It had been, by the saint?s count, a thousand years or more since the last tour passed through?Attila and his Hunnic Horde, their hardy ponies pulling an endless cavalcade of Airstream trailers that stretched to the sunrise. "I?m a martyr," said the saint. "Martyrs don?t shoot back."

In death as in life Pansy Graham was preceded by the clinging aura Dicey Pease identified as the yellow bar soap provided by the Daughters of Milo. As the neighborhood women?wives, mothers?undid the corpse?s nightshirt, the smell issued forth: an aroma of heathery dawns on a highland moor with industrial bass notes of citronella and carbolic acid.

The closed library smells of cluster flies, old books, hardly strange in a library, and an indefinable something?funerary linen from some millennial boneyard, perhaps. Elizabeth Profitt Pease strains to open the window. Shut. Tight. "What have I done for myself lately?" Libby Pease asks no one in particular. "Not much," she answers, "have I?" Libby regards the pottery jar that contains her father's ashes.

The heart-breaking beauty?the original of the flesh and blood face with the moondrop eyes?resided, a carved and painted sandstone effigy, in the Bureau of Antiquities, the face of an ancient queen. The Sender of Dreams had sent him either a true dream or a false dream. It was for him to find out which.

On Chalifoux the consolations of religion offered no hope of an afterlife below the rank of Adjutant, Hdqtrs Attached. Tech Spec 5 and up might hope, but the paperwork required to hold a place in line for Paradise was considerable and most gave up on it. Poachers, mopers, gawkers, evaders of the excise?the common lot, enlisted personnel included?were encouraged to take their pleasure in the here and now.

There had been a summons to the carpeted office at the end of the file-drome. Miss Queazing flashed him a melting smile, exposing a dazzling six-inch length of polished incisor. One of her fangs had been drilled and inlaid with an intaglio Tree-of-Life design. It sparkled with diamond chips.

A Queen Empress is dependent on handouts from a thousand squabbling feudal overlords. The feudal lords are at the mercy of their clan chiefs. The chiefs can't make a move without approval by their clans, and the clans their septs. In late feudal times, a new ruler appeared?the Tetrarch, thus named because he holds administrative authority at the pleasure of the Four Houses: The lords, the chiefs, the clans, and the septs. The Queen, in theory, stands above the Tetrarch, while in practice she is ceremonially seated?higher by an inch or so, and slightly to the rear.

What are we doing here in this place dedicated to capturing the gasses and fluids of expired citizens, determining what and who caused the cessation of a productive, taxpaying unit? Does a corpse really care if it was happy before it came here? Alas, the song is gone and we are celebrating the phonograph.

Capt. Futvoye Halfnight, D.D.S, popped his dropped eye into its socket. "Ahh." What he saw ahead was not reassuring. "Ohh..." A great gnarly man was leaning against a tree and staring at him. He was naked but for the skin of a tiger which he wore nonchalantly over one shoulder. "You pilgrims should carry rearview mirrors. You leave an inventory of lost lesions and dropped appendages all over the landscape," said the man.

"I am Joseph Force Crater; I am a judge of the New York State Supreme Court. I am not the Adversary. Your chastity is safe with me; I am a Democrat."

Suspended in mid-ceiling, yellow work lights cast fitful shadows every hundred feet; a half foot of water in a concrete channelway reflected oily rainbow ripples. There was a distant vibration of machinery. If I had gone to Hell at least they kept up with the electric bill.

A woman popped out of thin air beside me. She was swinging a serious looking cavalry saber. She gave me the once-over and attacked. I ducked. Her pale gray eyes grew huge. "Oh, terribly sorry, old chap. I thought you were someone else," she said. "Are you still alive?" I said yes. "I say, good fun, what?" she remarked. A bullet zinged past and we dived under the desk.

"We have been called here by a power greater than ourselves?" asked Sam Clemens. "The New York City Transit Authority," I said. Another invisible express rumbled by on the Lexington Avenue line. The noise mounted to a crescendo.

Calumet City, Illinois is the fallen sister of Hammond, Indiana. That the Calumet River had once caught fire was legend among the guys at the Antlers bar. The two towns straddled the state line. Calumet City was blue neon beer joints with electric country bands; all the bars had strippers. This particular bar was called the Calypso. The same woman as last time twitched above the bar, partaking of a private epiphany two feet from the end of her nose.

Appearances count for a lot in rural Maine; every soul is a member of some church, high, low, Pentecostal or other. Check one please. It was not thought overly strange when Harry Profitt Pease took to wearing an aluminum foil hat to confuse space aliens, nor when he was observed in conversation with the black and white spotted pig that followed him around. He had been, after all, the star center on that state championship team.

A tall insect with feathery antennae and a nervous tic paused before the mirror of a machine plastered with multicolored blurbs announcing it as a dispenser of a popular brand of chewing gum. The walking nightmare spoke to his human companion. "Harry, you wait with the bags, there's a good fellow." Evenly modulated tones carried the force of a command.

There was a thump, more felt than heard. The sunflowers bobbed on their stalks and kilometers distant concentric rings of geothermal steam billowed as a cargo hoist sprang from its catapult and flew glittering toward the horizon. Heads turned to the spacedrome. This was the daily big event on Chalifoux. As the winged container skimmed a ridge of hills its motors cut in. Spiraling magentas and greens surrounded it with a scrambling palette.

"Ahh..." From the bottom of the bag Titania came up with a very old-fashioned and lethal-looking large-caliber pistol. "Hit the floor, I'm going to make some noise." She thumbed the hammer back and closed her eyes. "This is only slick if it works, otherwise it's monumentally stupid." The commission cop let fly a thundering volley from her huge, and by now unauthorized, gun.