Title:     Timber
Author:    nevdull <nevdull@mailcity.com>
Posted:    December 11, 2000
Category:  X (mytharc)
Rating:    R (violence, language)
Spoilers:  Takes place soon after "En Ami" and derails off
           canon from there.
Archive:   Yes, please link to http://nevdull.tripod.com/timber.txt
Notes:     At end.
Summary:   The stars are projectors.



___________________________________________

                   I                       
                                               
   "The extremely cold winds 
    chap the timber
    and kill the cattle."
    -- J. Reynolds _View of Death_ (1725)


___________________________________________



The air was still and smelled of dung.  If it were summer, the stench
would be overwhelming -- all those leathery hides baking in the 
heat -- but the spring air remained tinged with frost.  It tasted 
sterile and metallic.

"Sir?" the too-young technician asked him.  The boy's pleading tone
suggested he was repeating himself.  It happened.

"Yes?" the man replied.  He remembered the technician's name but it
amused him to pretend that he hadn't.  "Which one are you?"

"I'm Jenkins, sir.  I need your signature here."  The boy's obsequious
voice irritated him.  Every one of them who'd had an ounce of dignity
was gone and he couldn't say much for the succeeding generation,
except perhaps that they needed him.  Judging from the way this
project was going, even that was in doubt.

He scribbled some initials and a name and held the clipboard out to
the technician.  When the boy reached, the man dropped it onto the
soft grass.  He'd learned to take the small pleasures life offered
him.

This new biotech consultant was not one of those small pleasures.  She
jostled in front of the embarrassed technician, huffing and posturing.
The woman stood, as she always did, too closely.

"I don't know how many times we need to run this test, sir."  Her
tightly bound hair had sprung loose in several places but she still
looked officious and pent-up.  "We've varied every possible parameter
and the results are consistent.  Nothing -- the vaccine has no
effect."

"No effect on the cattle.  It had an effect on Dana Scully."  Who
would, he mused, eat this twit alive as soon as arrest her.

The consultant rolled her eyes.  "We had similar results with the
human subjects.  We've been over this a thousand times.  The factors
with the earlier groups...  We don't know what strain they used, what
the environmental parameters were, what interactions occurred with the
chips.  My opinion is that it was inconclusive..."

"Your opinion, Doctor, is whatever I say it is."  He lit a cigarette.
"Keep that in mind."

Her jaw clenched with the first note of appropriate fear, but she
continued.  "I was hired for a purpose, Mr. Spender.  Now if I am to
understand the urgency of this situation, it is in the interest of
everyone involved that the work continue as quickly as possible."  She
paused.  "Of course, this would all be unnecessary if the item we were
promised had been what it should have been.  How unfortunate to find
only a blank disk."

He looked back at her steadily.  "Yes, very unfortunate."

They remained silent for some time.  In the distance, grim-faced
soldiers set fire to a hundred carcasses and the unearthly progeny
which incubated within them.


--

Mulder pushed back against the hospital bed in an ill-fated attempt to
sit upright.  He couldn't quite see what she was doing to his cast,
but she didn't appear to be writing on it.  Unless she was writing
quite a bit.  "Never figured you for a budding novelist," he said
loudly, craning his neck.

At the foot of the bed, Scully stood.  She was shaking her pen and
frowning at his leg.  "How are you supposed to sign an inflatable
cast?  Anyway, I think this pen ran out of ink."

"Well, hurry up and get another one."

She looked up.  "Anxious to know what I'm going to say?"

"No, get a pen so you can sign me out of here."

She leaned on the bedframe.  "Mulder, you're scheduled to be released
in two hours.  You have an engagement more pressing than that?"

"I wanna get back down to the court to catch the end of the game."  He
reached forward, scratching under the cast.  It itched like hell,
predictably enough.

She swatted his hand away.  "You're going to show your face on the
court after you broke your ass?"

"I have a minor fracture in my leg."

"Equally undignified in this case.  How does one manage to break one's
leg on level ground?"

"I wasn't on the ground.  I was mid-air.  And I didn't break it,
Dr. Scully--"

"Mulder, white men can't jump."

"Joke too obvious.  No points."

"That's true for both of us, unless you actually made that
death-defying basket."

He scratched beneath the cast again and asked for the time.




His entrance into his apartment would certainly have been comical if
it had happened to someone else.  He dropped the right crutch when
reaching for his keys and dropped the left crutch when he reached for
his right crutch.  Scully entirely failed to catch him.

"Couch," Mulder croaked.  She obligingly dragged him across the room,
cast bumping along the floor.

"Up," he gasped.  Scully gently lifted the cast onto the coffee table,
first sliding a pillow under it before letting go.

"Water," he concluded, and collapsed into the cushions.

When she returned a moment later with a pair of drinking glasses, he
was flailing aimlessly at his answering machine.  He'd managed to
knock it off the desk and onto the floor.  It blinked at them.

"Messages," she guessed, putting down the water and righting the
machine.  She pressed "play" and started to place it back on the desk,
then froze.

"Long time no see."  Krycek's recorded voice was smarmy yet buzzing
with nerves.  "I've been in the neighborhood a few times but haven't
had the opportunity to stop by.  A lot of traveling, but I've managed
to keep my ear to the ground.

"You've had a busy year.  I almost can't believe some of the things
I've heard.  Especially Scully.  She's been very busy.  Does that
bother you, Mulder?"

A moment of dead air, on the tape and in the room.

"Anyway, I've left a little something at the office you might want to
check out.  Perhaps sooner rather than later, so don't take your coat
off.  Not that you would.  You're probably halfway out the door
already, chasing intrigue.  I know, it's what you do.

"A few words of advice before you leave.  Don't think that the game's
over just because a few of the players checked out.  Don't think that
you're not still their pawn.  Don't think that I'm not still watching.

"Speaking of which, Happy New Year's.  Sorry I missed your little
party."


--

Scully pushed the door open with one hand and wielded her gun with the
other.  She'd heard the grunting noises and sounds of a struggle as
soon as she had reached the hallway outside the office.  Inside, the
room was lit only by Mulder's desk lamp.  It was bright enough to see
that there was a man tied up and on the floor near the desk.  He
turned his head to look at her, and she saw that it was Skinner.  His
face and hands were covered in sickly-familiar discolored blotches.
He opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by a kick in
the chest.

Krycek slid out from a darkened corner.  He regarded her with
undisguised curiosity.

"You're just full of surprises lately, Agent Scully."

She ignored him and bent down to her boss, feeling his pulse.
Skinner's heart was racing -- he was wild-eyed with fear and his skin
was icy cold.

"Where's your partner?" Krycek asked breezily.

Scully kept the gun pointed squarely at him as she felt the sides of
Skinner's face with the back of her other hand.  She reached up for
the phone on the desk.

Krycek ripped it out of her grasp and threw it across the room.
"Where is Mulder?!"

Finally, she looked up at him.  "What do you want?"

"Your attention.  And now that I've got it, I want to talk."  He
caught her eyes flickering downwards and produced a small electronic
device from his jacket.  "Don't worry about him, I'll tune him to a
happier channel."  Skinner gasped, as if coming up for air, and then
slowly closed his eyes.  His breathing became even and deliberate; the
discoloration lessened.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," Scully said evenly.  She stood up.
"Certainly not until I've looked after him."

"This isn't another Smoking Man get-away.  I wasn't even expecting to
find you here.  This little show was just to convince Mulder I was
serious."

Scully couldn't help laughing. Merely knowing Krycek was in the
country was enough to get their attention.  "You did this to Skinner
just to get to Mulder?"

Krycek leaned back against the wall.  "Well, I wasn't going to do it
to you -- that's hardly an imaginative strategy at this point."  He
considered the figure on the floor.  "Besides, I'd had other plans in
mind for him, but the balance of power has shifted.  He doesn't have
the influence he once did.  No one does."

"What are you saying?"

"You've seen it for yourself.  We're all back to the Mulder family
drama, where everything started.  Small men and their petty tantrums."

"Something you'd know about."  He laughed more than the comment
deserved.  Scully felt a flush of embarrassment.  "Krycek, what do you
want?"

His laughter increased.  It sounded a bit manic.

Scully had never put her weapon away, but the moment she raised it,
Krycek's hand was on the device.  "I can wake these nanites as fast as
you can fire, and I don't have to aim."  His expression flattened and
she wondered if this was his serious face.  "I'd expect better from
the woman who outsmarted the world's most powerful man."

She felt it wise not to admit she wasn't following him, but she did
lower her gun.  Slowly.

"What I want should be obvious.  I want what the world wants, which
you and Mulder are in possessive of but have no idea of its real
importance."

Something clicked.  "You mean the disk?  The one C.G.B. Spender
arranged for me to have?"  There was no good reason to lie to him --
he'd find out soon enough.  "I don't have it."

"I'm sure you don't.  That's why you're going to tell me where it is
before Mulder does something heroic and stupid."

"Like what?"

He snorted.  "Like give it to Ted Koppel.  Like upload it to the
Internet.  Like try to save the world, when that's the last thing it
would do."

"And what would it do, Krycek?"
 
He shook his head in snide disbelief.  "Releasing it now would only
give them time to adapt.  It took us 20 years to come up with that
ridiculous vaccine, but it would take them 20 days to overcome our
resistance.  Unless we strike at the right time, which we can do if
you give me the disk."

"I told you, I don't have it."

"You really are his partner, aren't you?  Neither of you know when to
trust."

"I mean," she said patiently, "I've never had it.  The disk
C.G.B. Spender gave me was blank."

Now it was Krycek's turn to lower his weapon.  "Blank?"

"Blank.  He must have switched it with the real disk before giving it
to me."

He was no longer looking at her but at a space on the floor between
them.  "But they don't have it either."

Scully experienced brief disorientation, a shock of recognition.  She
couldn't quite place the feeling, but Krycek reminded her of someone.
"Who doesn't have it?"

He met her gaze.  "You don't have the disk, and they don't have the
disk.  The man who gave it to you is dead?"

Scully nodded.  This was surreal.

"Then it's over," he said.  He tossed the device to her feet.
"Consider that my parting gift."

She finally placed the feeling: Krycek reminded her of that green and
eager replacement partner for Mulder from so many years ago.  She'd
thought the entirety of that person had been another one of his lies,
but maybe there was as much of the real Krycek behind the wide-eyed
young agent as there was behind the renegade's sneer.  Unexpectedly,
he put his hand on her shoulder.  "I'll be in touch," he said, and
walked away.

He left behind a profound numbness in her arm, as if she'd slept on it
for a very long time.




"How is he?" Mulder asked.  Scully turned and was surprised to see her
partner limping towards her down the hospital hallway.  She sighed.
Even practicing doctors had a patient limit, and her patients were
especially detrimental to her patience.  Or something.

"Didn't they just send you home?"

Either he still hadn't gotten the hang of the crutches or he was
deliberately trying to look helpless.  She stood her ground outside
Skinner's room.  Mulder clumped to a halt and tried to look around
her.  "The admittance staff asked me if I wanted my usual room."  She
followed his gaze; he could see only the pair of bruise-blue feet
protruding over the edge of the bed.  "How is he?" he repeated.

Scully consulted the clipboard in her hand, mostly to avoid looking
up.  "He'll be okay.  Not because of anything we did, of course."

"Where did you put it?"  The device, he meant.  The magic box.

"It's with me."

"Right now?  You realize it's not safe with you."

She didn't much care for the condescension, but it was hard to fight
with a man in a cast.  "I know.  I haven't had time to think of much
besides Skinner."

"Of course," he said, in a tone suggesting exactly the opposite.
"When you're finished here, we can take it over to the Gunmen and have
them check it out."

Scully frowned and held up the clipboard.  "Mulder, I don't know when
I'm going to be finished here.  His life could still be in danger.  We
don't know what the relationship is between this object," she tugged
on the pocket of her jacket, "and Skinner's condition.  We don't know
anything right now, and you're in no position to decide to go anywhere
but home."  Something suddenly occurred to her.  "How did you get
here?"

"Hi, Agent Scully."

"Hello, Langly." She glanced at the other two who were still standing
further down the hall.  They looked sheepish.  "Mulder, remind me next
time to take away your phone."

He shifted his weight onto the other crutch.

"He said you had something for us to take a look at," Byers prompted.

"So I hear.  We don't know what it is, and most of what I could tell
you shouldn't be told in a public place.  What I can say is that it
seems to be some kind of--"

"It's a controller for micro-robots."  Langly was grabbing it from her
hand before she'd barely produced it.  "A remote brain for nanites."

The others were silent.

"You've seen something like it before?" Scully asked, unsure which
would be the preferred answer.

"No.  I mean, yes."  He was turning the device over and over in his
hand.  "I mean, I've seen this actual one before."  He looked up at
her.  "I built this."


--

Mulder was only pretending to sleep.  Even under the best conditions,
the cast would be too uncomfortable, and he doubted he'd had best
conditions since 1983.

He was probably exaggerating.  Unstoppable itching tended to make him
a bit irritable.  His partner haring off without him tended to make
him borderline psychotic.

He was probably exaggerating there, too.  Thoughts going in circles,
circles.  He opened his eyes a bit more and watched Scully dash
through her apartment.  She was packing.

Here was a woman who was no stranger to black, but this was downright
excessive.  She was already wearing the black turtleneck and black
pants.  She'd somehow found one of their big old black flashlights.
The flashlight and her lockpick set were getting stuffed into a ratty
black knapsack she'd probably been stashing in successive closets
since college.  He didn't like the looks of any of it.  He sighed
loudly and pretended to shift his position.

She didn't turn around.  Scully had become suddenly preoccupied with
her weapon, which had no concealable place in her jacketless ensemble.
Watching her twist around trying to look at the small of her own back
was vaguely amusing, but he worried she'd decide to do without or
place it, unreachable, into the knapsack.

"Do you want my ankle holster?"

She wasn't noticeably startled; she'd probably known he was awake.
"Yeah, I think so.  It's not under that cast, is it?"

"You mock a defenseless man."

"You wanted me to take you home anyway," she said.  "I'll get it
there."

Mulder nodded accommodatingly.  "Where are you meeting the Gunmen?"

"Right here.  You didn't think I was carrying you into that car again,
did you?"

He laughed, then sat up a bit, propping his head with one hand.  "Are
you sure you want to do this?" he asked softly.

"I'm sure I don't."  She stuffed a pair of black leather gloves into
the bag.  "But this contracting company is all we have to go on."

"If they're still even there.  Langly worked for them, what, two years
ago?"

"Three."  She stared down at him.  "But it's a place to start."

He broke her gaze.  His eyes traveled around the furnishings in her
room, Pottery Barn-generic and easily replaced.  He paused at her
door; after all these years, no police lock, no alarm.  Finally, he
looked back at her.  She was holding her gun naturally, arm relaxed
and at her side like she was doing nothing more than carrying in the
mail.  She looked composed and ready.

It was a big, practiced lie, but he chose to believe it over and over
again.

"Okay," he said.


--

Scully had been afraid her outfit too clearly suggested "breaking and
entering."  That might have been true, but her companions had her far,
far outclassed.

"Is the headset video camera really necessary, Langly?"

He swiveled to look back at her, with the one unaugmented eye.  The
other was hidden behind a drop-down gadget which was projecting tiny
images of scrolling text onto a postage stamp of a lens.  Next to
that, the red LED of a camera lens glowed brightly.  Both were
hurriedly duct-taped to his glasses.  "Sure," he said.

"Do you think it could be a little less... obvious?"

Byers turned around from the front of the van.  "We just picked up a
state-of- the-art retinal projector.  No bigger than a pencil eraser,
and fantastic heads- up resolution.  But it doesn't work through
Langly's glasses."

She frowned.  "So why don't you wear it?"

Byers bit his lip.  "I don't really like it.  It's kind of freaky."

"What about contact lenses?"

"They just don't feel natural," Langly answered.  He readjusted his
camera with no apparent sense of irony.

"Right."  She double-checked the ankle holster and tightened the
straps on her knapsack.  "Let's go."

The van was parked on the far side of an artificial hill bordering the
industrial park.  From that vantage point Frohike indicated their
path: a narrow strip of dark-shrouded grass where a neglected
spotlight had gone out.  The strip ran directly from the hill to the
office complex, which was as nondescript as secret government labs
tended to be.

Scully pressed herself lower into the grass.  "We're sure there are no
alarms to trip?"

"We're sure," Frohike whispered back.  He told her again what they'd
already reported: that they'd walked up the night before, without
stealth, armed with a six-pack and prepared to act as clueless townies
looking to hang out.  No one had stopped them.

She couldn't imagine them pulling off that kind of espionage, but she
supposed it was a little like Dungeons and Dragons.

"That's right," she remembered.  Really, she'd just been looking for
reassurance.

Their approach across the grass went smoothly, as did the slow creep
along the back side of the building.  The service door had an
electronic alarm, which was no match for Langly's talents, and a
traditional lock, which was no match for Scully's lockpick set.

Something about the atmosphere inside felt off to her.  When she
turned on her flashlight and shone it down the hall, she illuminated
an office door with Christmas decorations still hanging from it.
"They don't spend a lot of time on maintenance, do they?"

Byers' voice was just behind her.  "I guess taking over the world
obviates the need for extensive decor."

"Yeah."

"The people I met worked down here," Langly said.  He gestured towards
the hall to their left.

It was agreed that they would split up.  Langly and Frohike took the
familiar path, and Byers and Scully followed the road less traveled.
They would meet up in fifteen minutes at the entrance, no matter what.

Her instincts continued to nag at her as they moved past door after
door.  There was a consistent theme of disuse and abandonment:
yellowing "Dilbert" cartoons, Post-It notes which had lost their
adhesive and floated to the linoleum floor, an inspirational calendar
last flipped over in November.  "Perseverance!" it admonished.

The hall ended in another fork, with similar offices in both
directions.  "Should we split up?" she asked.

Byers held up one finger and whispered into his collar.  "Status?"
Scully couldn't hear the response; it came through the earpiece he
wore.  She crept to the nearest office and tried the door, and was
thoroughly unsurprised to find it locked.

"Nothing yet," Byers said.  "But they might be on to something.  They
found an open space and they're circling the perimeter now."

"Why don't you head down this hall -- it might link up with them."
Scully swiveled her flashlight down the other unpromising corridor.
"I'll take that one for a bit and double back if nothing turns up."

Byers scratched his beard.  "Okay.  Agent Scully, be careful."

"Oh sure," she said flatly.  "Always."

He looked more worried than annoyed.  It was touching, in a way, but
then he patted her arm where Krycek had and she visibly shivered.
Byers slunk away, embarrassed, and she made a mental note to explain
later.

The corridor ended, disappointingly enough, in a fire stairwell.
Scully swept her flashlight around, just out of habit, and turned to
follow Byers when something occurred to her.  The treads on the stairs
coming down from above were shiny and new.  The treads on the stairs
which went further down into the complex were heavily worn.  When she
cocked her head to one side, she could hear distant noises like heavy
objects being moved.

Scully put one hand against the cool concrete wall, turned off her
flashlight, and proceeded down in total darkness.  She paused only
once, to shut off her cell phone.




She felt the outline of the fire door when she reached the bottom of
the stairwell, and then stopped.  She realized she could see, and not
just because her eyes had adjusted.  Turning slowly, she was able to
make out the outline of a small service door beneath the stairs,
through which shined dim light.  She might not have noticed it at all
with that industrial-strength flashlight on.  Her co-burglars would've
called this arrangement "security through obscurity."

Getting down on hands and knees under the stairwell was not among the
more dignified things she'd done lately, but it was hardly the worst.
At least she'd be able to fit through the door, which was more than
Mulder could've said in the same situation.  It opened inwards and
easily with a twist on the miniature handle.  The door was ajar only
for an instant before the handle was yanked out of her grasp and she
was pulled bodily through the opening.

She tumbled, paradoxically blind as she moved from dark to light, and
felt strong hands on her shirt, dragging her.  Her back was thrust
against a wall and the whiplash-crack of her head against the concrete
was almost enough to knock her out.  When the fuzziness retreated, a
woman's face was only inches from her own.  "Be quiet or you'll be
killed."

Scully didn't register anything about the woman, other than knowing it
was someone who'd hurt her.  She kicked her assailant viciously in the
sternum.  The woman had been squatting down on her heels; the blow
drove her backward and onto her ass.  She looked winded and angry.
"That was stupid," she said.

"Where am I?"

"Out of your depth."

Scully scrambled to her feet, leaning on the wall for support.  She
was in a short corridor, which bent sharply to her right and
disappeared.  "Where am I?"

The woman, a blonde with severe angles, noticeable scars and
close-cropped hair, remained on the ground and gazed up sullenly.
"Relax," she said through clenched teeth.  "The door you came in is
right next to you."

Scully turned to look, saw that it was there, and realized her mistake
an instant too late.  Her opponent was quick and smart and had
snatched her gun from the ankle holster.  The barrel aimed at her head
did not waver.

"If you come with me, you'll walk out of here instead of being carried
out.  Which would you prefer?"

Scully said nothing.

"That's what I thought."


--

"She'll probably be back any minute."

"She insisted we meet back here if we got separated."

"And besides, no one else was there.  You know Langly -- he can't keep
his mouth shut.  If anyone was around, they would've heard him the
first second we walked in."

"It's not like it's the first time she's done this."

Byers' comment earned him a frozen stare.  Mulder ran a hand through
his hair and wished desperately for a shower.  Instead, he asked them
to show him the tape.

Frohike stared at the TV while Langly hooked up the 8mm.  "I'm worried
you won't be able to see much.  The optics on these micro lenses
pretty much suck."

"I'll rely on your florid prose."  Mulder began scratching under the
cast again.

"Got it."  Langly stepped away from the TV and pointed the remote.

The image was color, but just barely so in the low light of the office
complex.  The picture jostled nauseatingly for a moment as the camera
was duly adjusted; from then on, they had a fairly steady Langly-eye
view of the events.  They fast-forwarded for several minutes, past
jerky, distorted frames of the team as they suited up and dashed into
the building.  Scully looked much as she did when had left his
apartment, only smaller and more vulnerable on the tiny video image.
Mulder looked down and realized he'd scratched a bloody gash just
above his knee.

On the tape, the group stalked down a dark corridor and stopped at a
fork.  Lots of arm movements indicated a short debate.  Then only
Frohike was visible as the pair moved off on their own.

Langly suspended time just after they reached a metal door and passed
through.  "There," he pointed at the left side of the screen.  "That's
the room we found, the hangar."  It was the length and width, but not
height, of an airplane hanger.  The floor wasn't puddled with oil and
anti-freeze but instead was filled by racks of metal lab tables, all
empty.

"This was the only room that presented us with any kind of advanced
security," Byers said as the tape resumed real-time.  "But it was
off."

"Off?" Mulder asked.  His eyes tried to follow the intersecting paths
of their flashlights, which occasionally glittered back as they were
reflected in the tables.

"Disabled, or abandoned," Langly answered.  "Just turned off."

Byers added, "Scully remarked that the complex felt disused when she
first walked in."  He looked away with a guilty start when Mulder
twisted around.

Sounds of footsteps on the tape caused the image to go still as
Langly, presumably, stopped moving to avoid detection.  Then Byers'
voice, explaining that he and Scully had split up and he was there to
join them.

"It was her idea," he said now, quietly.

The three made their way across the massive room to another steel
door.  "This one had the same disabled security system," Langly
explained, fast-forwarding again through another trip down a corridor.

Mulder thought there was something wrong with the tape when he
eventually stopped.  The frame was filled with white.  "It takes a
second for the camera's CCD to compensate," Frohike explained.  The
image gradually gained contrast until they could be seen to be
standing in a brightly-lit room.  The ceiling and floor were made of
identical corrugated-white squares.  From the ceiling hung dozens of
small sprinkler nozzles.

"It's a server room," Langly muttered on the tape.

His real-life counterpart added, "A computer facility.  Raised and
tiled floor, so you can run cables across the room without tripping
over them.  Those aren't water sprinklers, that's halon gas.  In case
of a fire, you don't want to ruin your equipment, just smother the
flames."

"The problem," Byers said, "is that other than being deserted, there's
nothing remarkable here.  After this we doubled back, to find
Scully..."

Mulder waved him quiet and reached forward to point.  "What was that?"

"What?"

"A person.  I saw them.  A man, in the background, leaving through
that door."  He snatched the remote from Langly and hit pause.
"There," he pointed at a blur visible just at the edge of a narrow
doorway in the far corner of the room.

The three Gunmen began talking all at once.

"No one was in the building!"

"We would've seen them."

"We checked that way," Frohike said loudly.  "It just ended in the
fire stairs."

Mulder was trying to get the tape to rewind.  "I know what I saw."

"You're almost right," said Scully from behind them.

No one had heard her come into his apartment.  She was just there.
Mulder opened his mouth to say something but never quite worked out
what to say.

"Your man," she explained wearily, "was a woman."




"I saw only pieces, what I could glimpse as she pushed me down
corridors.  Labs, biological and computer, most of them powered down
and covered in plastic.  Boxes marked 'incinerate'.  Cages full of
animals, all dead."  She looked up at Mulder.  "They were
disassembling all of it, the whole operation.  The disuse we saw on
the first floor, I'd thought that was just a front, but what she told
me made it seem like they'd been winding down for some time."

"What did she say?" Byers asked gently.

Scully squinted and touched the bruise on her head.  "She said they
were all giving up.  That they were out of 'threats and a dead
science.'  She said that's all they'd ever had."

Mulder felt compelled to rub his own head, just above his eyes where
it throbbed the most.  "Who are they?"

"Do you need to ask?"

"I guess not."

"That was it.  We emerged in a garage a mile away from the complex and
she pushed me out the door."  She lifted her torn pant leg to reveal
the holster and its contents.  "She even gave me my gun back."

"How did you get here?"

She waved vaguely at the Gunmen.  "We left my car down the road a bit,
in case we got split up."  She covered her temples, both bruised and
unbruised, with her dirty hands.  "I really think I need to go home."

"You can stay," Mulder offered hurriedly.  He made a conscious effort
not to meet Frohike's eye.

She stood up by way of saying no.  "I know how silly this sounds,
considering recent events, but I'd feel a lot safer in my own bed."

"I'll drive you home," Byers said.  "My car is still at your place
anyway."

Mulder and Scully thanked him simultaneously.




When they were gone, when his apartment was dark and quiet again,
Mulder rewound the tape.  He sat close to the screen, his good leg
folded in a lopsided lotus, and waited for the moment in the lab.

There -- the figure, just for an instant, and so quick-moving.  He
wasn't surprised they hadn't seen her.  Still, she wasn't fast enough
to evade "pause".

The frozen image was distorted, and jerked delicately under the hand
he placed on the screen.

"Marita," he whispered.




___________________________________________

                    II

    "There must be many schisms 
     and many dissections 
     made in the quarry and in the timber, 
     ere the house of God can be built."

     -- Milton, _Areopoetica_ (1644)


___________________________________________



The cabin was much as he'd left it.  Dusty white cloths had been
draped over the furniture and the fireplace had been tidied up, but
the seclusion and the cold remained as they had been.  There had been
a third factor once, but secrecy was no longer a concern to him.  He'd
killed men to protect the documents in his hands; now he valued them
only for their use as kindling.

Later, he made a single call.  After hanging up, he gently
disconnected it from the wall.


--

Scully was speechless, but she recovered fast.  "Sir, what are you
doing here?"

He looked only pale now, as if recovering from an ordinary illness,
but the way he leaned on Mulder's desk suggested he needed the
support.  "I'm assigning you to a new case."

"I meant, what are you doing out of the hospital?"

His complete dismissal of her question was a kind of professional
courtesy, she construed.  "Reports have been coming out of a small
town in suburban New Jersey," Skinner began. "Apparitions of some kind
manifesting themselves around children.  Now one child has
disappeared.  It's not conclusively a kidnapping and ordinarily the
FBI would not be involved at this stage, but considering the talk
surrounding the incidents--"

"Sounds like you came to the right place," Mulder answered.  He'd
appeared in the doorway behind Skinner.

Clearly, everyone but Scully was in on this joke.  Her eyes narrowed.
"And what are _you_ doing here?"

In front of his boss, Mulder's competence with crutches improved
magically.  He pivoted across the room, hopped the last few steps to
his chair, and even managed to put one leg up on the desk.  Skinner,
for his part, stood up straighter.

"I can't condone either of you coming back to work," she said.

Mulder shot her a look.  "Condone?"

"I can condone this," Skinner said, dropping the file.  "In fact, I'd
consider it more of an assignment."  To Scully, he added, "Agent
Mulder has requested desk duty in lieu of sick leave, as he claims his
cast will be off in a week.  This leaves you to do the leg work."  A
sudden wrinkling between his eyes suggested that the unintentional pun
was severely painful to him.

"I'll review the file and have a preliminary report back by the end of
business tomorrow," Mulder offered.

"No need, Agent Mulder."  Skinner's expression was, if possible,
especially unreadable.  "I'm certain Agent Scully can handle it.  I do
believe your division owes me quite a backlog of expense reports; your
unfortunate incapacitation would be the ideal time to catch up."

Mulder's leg dropped to the floor suddenly in a way designed to
suggest this was not what he had in mind for desk duty.  Skinner
ignored him.

"--first thing, Agent Scully?"

"Yes sir," she answered.  Scully had no idea what he'd just said.


--

Skinner turned right instead of left out of Mulder's office, after a
quick glance behind him to be sure he hadn't been seen.  He was not
going back to his own floor.  In fact, he was not going back into the
Hoover building.

Safe in his car, he let the residual pain take over.  He should not
have left the hospital.  He should not have even left his bed.

For a change, there was no one waiting in his back seat, and the
parking garage was empty this time of day.  He could slump to the side
and close his eyes, waiting for it to pass.  When it finally did,
Skinner sat up and called to let him know it was done, but the Smoking
Man's phone rang on and on.

In chess, there are only two teams.  Players favor neither.  The sides
have no meaning.  They only exist to win.


--

Shamong, New Jersey was not as interesting as its name.  Skinner had
been wrong; it wasn't suburban, it was practically rural.  To get to
the local stockcar races one had to drive twenty minutes through farms
and forests.  Otherwise, there were a few taverns, a few diners, and a
lot of small-town desperation.

So much desperation that even an eleven-year girl would choose to run
away.  "Mom said she'd send me to Dad's for the summer if I didn't
behave, but he lives in Parsippany.  I wouldn't see my friends.  I
wouldn't see Mittens.  Plus, Dad's girlfriend is kinda dumb."

The mother was approaching and Scully took that as her exit cue.  She
walked away from the dirty but healthy young girl, around the police
lights and the ambulance, even past her rental car parked half in the
ditch she almost hadn't seen.  The night was dark and there were a lot
more stars out than in D.C.

A hand on her shoulder startled her.  "Officer Califf," she said in
relief.

"Sorry there, Agent.  Wasn't trying to sneak up."  He was a young cop,
a townie made good who probably spent most of his time busting kids
for stunts he'd pulled at their age.  Sometimes that made for fair
cops.  Sometimes it made for hypocritical assholes.  Califf seemed
like the former, even though they'd barely made it past introductions.
"You sorry we wasted your time?" he asked.

"I'm not sorry she's okay."

A smart guy, too -- something about his approving nod suggested he'd
been testing her.  What he said next also surprised her.  "It's a sad
state of affairs when even kidnapping might've been a relief."

"You mean you thought she'd been murdered?"

"I mean we're glad it wasn't cancer."

Scully just stared at him.

"No one told you about the cancers?"  He looked around with the
conspiratorial glee of someone who's never faced a real conspiracy.
"This township has a higher rate than any other in state, and this is
the state of New Jersey.  Worse than anything up near New York.  Last
week alone we had four deaths, all different ages."  He shone his
flashlight into the field across from her.  She had parked near a
toxic waste dump, the Superfund sign indicated.

"Nobody can prove it.  We've tried going to the press but some guys
from '60 Minutes' just sniffed around a few days and then left.  Not
enough dead kids yet, I guess."

Scully was stepping away from him without realizing it.  "Has anyone
tried to draw a radius around the site?  Figure out if it's coming
from the soil?  Maybe the water table?"

Califf shrugged.  "I dunno about any of that.  I just know a lot of
people are dying, and the local health inspectors, the state EPA, the
feds -- no one who can help is asking why."

She made a grim mental note.  "What about the apparitions?"

"The what?"

"The ghosts."  She gestured into the night.

He looked at her as if she'd just... well, she supposed she had.
"Agent Scully, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"The reason my team was pulled in to this case," she began slowly,
"was because it was believed that Alexa Kline's disappearance was
related to a series of...  supernatural visions by local children."
She searched his face.  "You've never heard of this."

"No ma'am, I haven't."

Population 2500.  How likely was it that an otherwise well-informed
local cop would not have heard of this supposedly rampant phenomenon?
Not very.

"I'm sorry, Officer Califf.  There must have been a mistake."
Skinner's, she thought.
 



Mulder was skeptical, perhaps not unexpectedly.  "What they need is an
epidemiological study.  Call the EPA."

"What they need is help, because they've already called the EPA.  And
the media.  No one will expose their story -- what does that suggest
to you?"

She could hear him thinking even over the phone.  She imagined he was
looking less for the right answer and more for what wouldn't piss her
off.

"That suggests," he said finally, "that the evidence for a link isn't
as good as your officer friend made it seem."

"It suggests to me an involvement by powers capable of influencing the
media."

He scoffed audibly.  "I think you've got conspiracy on the brain.
That's understandable after what we've been through."

"It's cancer, Mulder."  She hated the way her voice could sound so
small.  She hated the way that voice usually made him give in.  She
hated the way it hurt when he didn't.

"Scully, I--"

"Just tell Skinner that I'm staying.  Tell him I'll take personal time
if I have to.  It's just a feeling I have and I want to look into it."
Also, she thought, tell him he's a goddamned liar and I know it.  I
just don't know why.

"I hope I'm right," Mulder was saying.

"I hope so, too."



He was wrong.  It took her only a matter of days to narrow down the
list of large businesses in Shamong Township.  Only two of them were
scientific or medical.  Both were situated along Route 73, a wide
diner-infested highway cutting southeast towards Atlantic City which
only briefly crossed the town line.  On that border, next to each
other, were a genetics company and a microchip design plant which had
seemingly gone out of business the year before, narrowly preceding the
appearance of the first suspicious cancers.

The Superfund site, however, hadn't been used since 1983.

Scully had no Gunmen and little probable cause, so she perpetuated her
secret infiltration of the genetics company by walking up to the front
door and knocking.

There was no answer.  She put her hand over her sidearm and tried the
lock.  The door opened easily, to nothing at all.  The building was
deserted and smelled of the same suspicious disuse as the nanites
compound.

The chip company shared the same parking lot and the same stand of
dead-dried shrubbery.  A single car in the lot, a white Oldsmobile
Cutlass with considerable wear, had no left mirror and a single bumper
sticker: "My son is an honor student at Shawnee High."  The hood was
still ticking, though.

This door did not open easily, and it was Krycek who answered her
knock.

He looked startled to see her, which was a pleasant role-reversal.
His words were less welcome.  "Did your chip bring you here?"

"My chip?"  She resisted the urge to reach back and touch it.  "Why?"

"Sometimes," Krycek said, "they just send people home."



It wasn't until they were deep into the facility -- underground,
naturally -- that Scully realized he was wearing a business suit.  "I
had no idea conspiracies against the human race had a dress code."

He ignored her, and left her standing in the empty white hallway as he
turned the corner.  She waited until he had to have noticed and then
followed him in.

It was an expansive clean-room.  Robotic arms attached to coils of
cable were suspended over gleaming, silvery metal tables.  Thick clear
walls separated people and their germs from the fruits of this labor.
It was empty of humans other than themselves.  "Day off?" she said.

He produced a roll of papers from inside his suit jacket, flashing a
Hugo Boss logo near the pocket as he reached inside.  He unfolded the
bottom and she saw a series of signatures.  "This is a bill of sale,
transferring ownership of these two facilities to some technology
start-up.  I was just with their lawyers and I came by to do a last
tour of duty before they fill my shitty old office with ergonomic
chairs and brushed aluminum sideboards.  Too bad they won't live to
cash out their IPO."

A million questions occurred to her, not the least of which was
whether Krycek warranted an office better than the one in the
basement.  "Why do you keep talking as if the world is going to end?"

He looked at her blankly.  "Why haven't you shot me yet?"

"I'm waiting for you to answer my question."

"If you believe my answer, you'll realize that by shooting me you'd be
doing me a favor."

"Actually, I was planning on arresting you, but if you feel the need
to shoot yourself don't let me stop you."

"Oh Dana, I would never do that.  Suicide is a sin."

She would not allow herself to scream, or shake with rage, or take out
her gun and blow him away.  Her voice remained even.  "Tell me what
this place is."

He shrugged, it seemed, with a degree of weariness.  Maybe they were
all getting tired.  "This is where we manufactured your chip and
hundreds of thousands like it."

"To control the population."

"To save it.  These two were sister companies, one arm of the research
end of your 'conspiracy'.  On the genetics side, we were looking for a
way to combat the alien 'virus', which is ultimately nothing more than
a strand of DNA that activates ancient genes already present in the
genome."

"How would you combat that?"

"The virus is a little bit like AIDS in that it will mutate frequently
within the same host.  Our DNA and the alien DNA are deeply
intertwined, and finding a single site in which to block the action of
the virus became untenable.  We had to find a way to reverse
large-scale, high-frequency gene expression."

She blinked.  "Like cancer..."

"Exactly.  We introduced rare but spectacular types of cancer in our
subjects before implantation.  The chip designed here would prevent
the expression of that cancer.  If it was removed, it was easy to
track the patients and eliminate them from our lists.  Intervening
would be too high-risk.  If the chip was not removed but merely
failed, then that was our signal something was wrong with the
technology."

Scully was staring past him, through the glass and into the pristine
but inert factory.  "But that's not all the chip does.  It can call
people."

He'd been expressionless before but a shadow now crossed his face.
"That was its other purpose.  The technology for the chips was almost
entirely alien.  On the one hand, we used it to fight the virus, but
its real purpose was to assist it.  The chips were to be placed into
every man, woman and child and used to call them to central locations
where they would be injected with the virus when colonization began.
You could say it's both the curse and the cure.

"Then the rebels found out about our plans and used the compulsion
technology to bring together the early test subjects and incinerate
them."

"Compulsion technology."  The words rolled around in her head.  "How
did these... aliens find out about the chips, then?"

"Not just the aliens, the rebels.  They found out because I told
them."

Her gag reflex came up and she choked.  "You sent hundreds to their
deaths!"

"I thought I had to," he yelled back.  "The Smoking Man and his old
fools had given up.  They were turning over all our technology, all
our evidence of resistance, to the colonists.  They thought there was
no hope of saving mankind, so they tried to save themselves."

"But if the chip worked against the virus--"

"It never worked.  It was 100% effective against earth-borne genetic
disorders, but it could not prevent infection by the alien virus.  At
best it would slow the progression.  The only path left was to turn
the aliens against themselves and reveal to the rebels the extent of
our collaboration.  I'm sorry people got killed but this was war."

"Not everyone who was called died."

His voice did not waver.  "No, not everyone.  I don't know why they
spared you."

She sighed and changed direction.  "Mulder and I found a colony of
bees.  I was infected by one..."

"The bees were a way to both gain some time and score extra credit
points with the colonists.  The aliens wanted us to begin chip
implantation as soon as it was proven to work, back in the late
eighties and early nineties, but they had no idea the scope of this
kind of project.  We could get DNA samples from everyone in the United
States thanks to widespread vaccination, but how to get a chip into a
rice farmer in Northern China?  We convinced them that we needed a
more efficient delivery system: bees turned out to be the smallest
organism which could effectively transmit the virus."

What was the likelihood he was telling the truth?  She decided it
almost didn't matter; false answers were, in a way, more comforting
than no answers at all.  She pressed on.  "Mulder was injected with
something in Russia."

"Ah, how I don't miss that shit-hole.  Russian scientists do their
magic by stealing someone else's work and making it better under worse
conditions.  Mulder ever tell you about the conditions there?"  She
said nothing so he shrugged.  "The Russians went about their business
in a low-tech way, using existing techniques in vaccine development to
try and prevent infection by the virus.  They succeeded, in a way, but
only when the virus was spread by its natural carrier."

"Which is?"

"You've seen it.  It's a viscous black oily substance, alive but
non-sentient.  If it resembles anything from here, it's like a
fast-moving amoeba.  Very fast- moving."

"But Mulder had something, a vaccine he believed was related to the
one he received in Russia, which... treated me when I was infected by
the bee."

He snorted.  "Did that hurt?"

"I don't remember," she answered stiffly.

"Sure you don't.  Look, I don't know why it worked for you.  Maybe the
organism was at a vulnerable stage, or maybe the combination of the
vaccine and your heightened immunity had a positive interaction, or
maybe it was a totally different vaccine altogether.  All I know is
that subsequent tests under similar conditions usually failed."

"Heightened immunity?"

He blinked in surprise.  "Haven't you been following along?  Didn't
the Smoking Man explain it to you on your little sojourn?"

"Krycek, what are you talking about?"

"The chip in your neck -- our chip."  He turned his head slightly and
lifted a tuft of hair near his nape to reveal a familiar scar.  "Yours
and mine.  It's practically useless against the colonizing virus but
it's grandly effective against human cancers."  He pulled a pack of
cigarettes from another expensive suit pocket.  "Smoke 'em if you got
'em."

Dear God, Scully thought.  Her knees had gone weak but this was hardly
the time for hysterics.

Krycek continued as if they were idling around the water cooler.
"There were other groups, other research organizations.  One was the
nanites development, which you saw first-hand with Skinner.  The
original intent was to use microrobots to stop or repel the infection,
but that too was a failure.  Still, we discovered that the basic
process had... other uses."

He allowed her the expression of disgust, and nodded for her to follow
him back down the hall, in the direction from which they'd entered.

"Another group was one to which I had less access.  They were working
more closely with the aliens, I believe, because they got much
further.  They produced the second chip, the one the Smoking Man
arranged for you to take possession of because it was not a group
which he controlled."

"Except that he lied."

"But he led the rest of us to believe that he hadn't, which is why I
contacted you.  He killed his own man who was sent to shoot you after
you were handed the disk with the chip schematics.  Now it seems that
he's chosen to keep it for his own reasons, which I suspect have
little to do with the good of mankind."

Scully frowned as she scrambled to catch up.  They were nearly at the
entranceway, lit by dusty sunlight through disused glass doors.
"Whereas you," she said, "have had nothing but the highest ideals."

"So fatally naive, you two."  Krycek pushed open one of the doors, not
bothering to hold it for her.

"What does it matter now?" she snapped, and there was a hint of rising
desperation in her voice.  "If that lost chip was the only cure for
this so- called alien infection, what good did all those murders do
you?"

Krycek tossed his cigarette to the ground and continued to walk away
from her, towards his car.  He opened the door, holding on to the door
frame.  "It did us no good at all, but I don't have long to live with
myself."

He got in and started the engine.  Scully couldn't help herself -- she
ran towards him.  "How long?" she yelled.

The Oldsmobile kicked up gravel as he pulled out.  "How long?" she
screamed after it.  "How long?"




___________________________________________

                 Interlude

 "Watch an old building with anxious care.  
  Stay it with timber where it declines."
 
  -- Ruskin, _Sev. Lamps_ (1849)


___________________________________________


C. G. B. Spender wasn't expecting visitors, but he wasn't surprised by
this one, either.  "You," he said matter-of-factly.

"I'll take that as my invitation," the other said, stepping into the
cabin.  Whirlwinds of snow clustered around his rubber boots; Spender
watched them settle with vacant interest.  "You hardly made an effort
to disappear," the other man chided.

"Most people would not consider this a place to spend the end of their
days," Spender said, closing the door.  "I doubted anyone would follow
me here."

"Is that what this is?  The end of your days."  The man gestured
grandly around him.  "Doesn't feel like it."

"Don't be stupid," Spender answered, and felt a little of his old
self-satisfied scorn return.  "What else would it be?"

"Oh, now, don't go getting hopeful on me.  It's unbecoming."

Spender sat down in the old bentwood rocker, mainly to keep his
houseguest from taking it.  He squinted with effort and found he
couldn't read the man at all; that wasn't uncommon in people who
valued their secrets.  "What do you want?"

"I'm offering you something.  A gift, as it were.  Let's say it's for
your years of devoted service."

The man was continuing to stand and that irritated Spender, but he
refused to rise.  "Devoted service?"  He laughed quietly.  "I betrayed
or defrauded your group a thousand times over, whenever it suited my
needs."

"Of course you did," the other said, his accent thick with smugness.
How did these prideful men ever pretend to be allies?  "If you had
done any less I would consider you an ineffectual twit like the ones
who burned alive.  Putting their trust in the colonists, the rebels,
the governments -- only those of us who have played our own games are
still here."

"To what end?" Spender said bitterly.

"The right one, of course," the other answered.  "The only way it can
end."

This gave him pause.  "Assimilation?"

"There is no other way to survive."

To live on after colonization was the last hope of all of the
conspirators.  One by one they had given up their hopes for true
survival and accepted this, as they slowly traded away all that they
had.  First their wives, then their children, and finally their
humanity.  The group at El Rico had believed colonization was upon
them.  They had found the location where they would be taken, changed
into alien-human hybrids thanks to their own technology, and allowed
to walk the ravaged earth until ruled by a foreign species.

But they were wrong.  Only a handful knew it was a trap and not until
the last minute.  This man told Spender, Spender told Diana, they had
both tried to save Mulder but in the end hadn't needed to because he'd
run off somewhere else.  As for the others -- they were burnt by the
rebels and the collaboration fell apart.  Without knowledge of the
proper location, there would be no reward for their efforts.  They
would die just like everyone else, except burdened with more guilt.

He regarded the man with a careful blank expression.  "You have the
location?  And the time, you have the exact time?"

"I do."

It had been so long since he'd even considered going on.  He'd held
the possibility in his hands and thrown it in the flames.  Had he
reconsidered?

"The fire's going out," he said absently.  The other man nodded and
leaned forward, pushing a log further into the dying embers with his
bare hand.

Spender held his breath.  That log had been red-hot.  The man looked
over quickly but Spender had already turned away, locking in a
contemplative expression.  Did he know?  Did he know that he'd seen
it?

"You win," he said casually.  "How much time do we have?"


--

Mulder was so happy to see her return that he forgot his leg was still
broken, and when he stood up suddenly the results were catastrophic.
Scully rushed forward, laughing and spluttering with relief, and
dragged him back to the couch.

"I'm starting to make a habit of this," she said.

"Returning from dangerous missions?  I'd rather you didn't."

"No, rescuing fallen partners."  Scully laid him across the sofa, his
cast up against the opposite armrest.  She pushed the coffee table
aside and sat down on the floor next to him.  "Besides, what's
dangerous about New Jersey?"

He sat up on his elbows.  "Scully, that's not what I'm talking about."

"I always hate to say this Mulder, but you were right."

"I was?  That's fantastic.  What was I right about?  I want to
remember this moment."

She swatted his good leg.  "The town, the ca--illnesses.  It was
nothing.  Statistical blip."

He searched her face, moving a clump of hair to get a better look.
"Really?"

"Really.  I had some old college buddies in epidemiology take a look.
They said there was nothing more than an unusual but statistically
insignificant clustering."

His eyes scanned hers one more time until he was satisfied.  He sat
back and grinned.  "How about that.  I was right."

Scully patted his arm as she stood up.  "I'm thirsty -- you want
anything?"

"Can't have beer with codeine, right?"

"Not when your doctor's in the house."

"Coke, then."

"Right.  Coke it is."  She disappeared around the corner.

"I believe the correct term," he hollered after her, "is 'Coke Is
It.'"

"Ha ha ha," came the reply.

"Are you suggesting that my jokes aren't funny?"

"No, Mulder, you're consistently hilarious."  She rounded the corner
with two open cans.  His contained a bendy straw.

"My humor," he said with mock seriousness, "is as high quality as your
bedside manner."

"Mulder, most of my patients are dead."

He smiled more broadly and took the proffered can.  "All the more
remarkable, then."

"Cheers," she said unexpectedly.  He nodded and they clinked cans.

"What are we toasting?" he asked.

Scully seemed to think about this very seriously.  Finally, she said,
"The future," and kissed him very lightly on the forehead.


--

Skinner had learned two things in his brief phone conversation with
C.G.B.  Spender.  One was the location of Alex Krycek, which the
Smoking Bastard knew would interest a man consumed with the desire for
revenge.  He didn't trust himself, so he turned that over to Scully,
knowing she'd find the link between the cancers and the operation the
double-agent was running up there.  The fake X-File was to keep Mulder
out of the loop, at least at the start.  He wanted Krycek brought to
justice, so he could pound his face in himself without Mulder
pulverizing it first.

Skinner had seen Scully fly off the handle, too, and the man who
assisted in killing her sister was certainly a prime candidate to
induce disorderly contact.  Still, he didn't think she would.  Spender
had insisted that Krycek would be pliable.

When he'd asked why the man who'd been so evasive before would be
willing to go to justice, Spender had told him everything -- all the
events that were to come.  Skinner almost wished the old bastard had
lied.

He slowed the car to count the numbers going by.  As often as he'd
thought about coming, he'd never been here before and wasn't quite
sure which building it was.

He knew that by sending Scully on what was essentially his own
personal vendetta he was once against pushing his pawn into danger.
But if Spender was right, this would be the last time.

Number thirty-three was a brickface apartment complex not unlike
Mulder's, with a cluster of big old trees and lots of identical units
facing the street.  He parked illegally and grabbed the bundle on the
seat next to him.

I shouldn't be doing this, he thought.  I should just turn around and
go back home.  It's not the right time, not yet.

There wasn't any more time.

The main door to the building had been left open; the cardboard boxes
in the foyer suggested that someone was in the process of moving.
Skinner walked past them and up the wide, main staircase.  Two guys
with short hair and college t- shirts passed.  One was carrying a
six-pack of cheap cans; the other a stack of stereo equipment.  They
were arguing about where to put the moose head in the new place.

Apartment two-eighteen.  He rang the bell.

"Dude, we can totally hang the hammock out on the porch," someone from
downstairs was insisting.

The door opened.  "Walter," she said.

"Sharon."  He handed her the bundle of daffodils, dozens of times the
single flower he'd given her when he'd asked her to marry him.  "I'm
sorry," he said.

She smiled slowly.  "Come in."


--

"I bet you didn't expect to see me again."

"Not in this lifetime," Marita answered flatly.  "Alex, I--"

"Say you'll let me in," Krycek said.

"Of course I'll let you in."  She frowned.  "Why are you wearing a
suit?"

He stepped around her and looked up in surprise.  The apartment was
really a loft, with enormous ceilings and a dazzling view of
Manhattan.  If the furniture were anything other than milk crates and
computer equipment, it would be stunning.

"I haven't had time to decorate," she explained.

"You know, I was surprised to find you in Brooklyn since it's not your
usual style, but I'm starting to see why."

"In Manhattan, you can only see brick walls.  The best view in New
York is right here."

Something buzzed by his ear -- one of those damned robotic insects.
He remembered waking up once to one of them gazing back at him, having
settled on her pillow in the depression left by her head.  Before he
went to the FBI and she went to the UN and everything, as he was fond
of saying, went to hell.

"Sorry," Marita said.  She tapped something on the nearest terminal.
That insect and dozens like it swarmed back to their "nest" in one
corner.

"You know," he mused, "it's those fucking insects that got us into
this mess."

"I thought it was your boundless immorality."

"Ah, that was our eventual selling point, but what interested them was
your science.  And mine."

"Lots of people are scientists.  Not many of us live in million-dollar
lofts but can't open a bank account under our own names."  She coiled
around the only chair and sipped something from a martini glass.  It
looked inviting.

"Aren't you going to offer me a drink?"

"It's vodka," she said, and added with a smirk, "but it's Polish.  And
I'm all out of glasses."

He strode past her, into the de facto "kitchen", and began rifling
through the cabinets.  "You know, I'd have to say that both my sense
of patriotism and my high-class sensibilities are a little low lately.
I'll take what I can get."  He found a thin-necked bottle and poured a
twenty-dollar shot into an unwashed jelly jar.

"I met Scully," she said suddenly, and he nearly spilled the drink.
"She didn't know who I was.  Mulder wasn't there."

"Where was this?  At the facility?"

Marita nodded.  Her usually-unreadable face contorted into comical
disgust.  "She was dressed up like some kind of commando burglar and
had a few harmless idiots with her.  She had no idea why they were
there."  Krycek did.  She must've traced the device.  "I told her we
were all giving up and that she should do the same thing.  Then I sent
her on her way."  She shrugged, assessing the woman.  "I couldn't
really see what the big deal was."

"That's what you once said about Mulder," he answered steadily.

"That's what I still say about Mulder.  I entrusted him with
information back when I was young and stupid."  Her gaze locked on
Krycek.  "I'm no longer young but apparently I'm still stupid, because
I'm talking to you here and I haven't killed you yet."

"I saved you at Fort Marlene."

Her eyes narrowed.  "Only when you discovered your precious fetus was
missing.  You would've left me there just as you left me with them and
their fucking tests."

"Or the way you left me without the infected boy?" he reminded her.
"We needed that fetus if there was ever any hope of perfecting the
chip, and you know that.  But the boy, he wasn't even your in area.
That was a political move at my expense."

Her voice was rising.  "Because I thought they were right, that
cooperation was our only hope.  The rebels knew too much too early and
we were never going to regain control of the situation.  That's why I
took the boy."

He opened his mouth to retort but this was mutually assured
destruction.  Her tests, his missile silo.  His missing arm, the deep
scars on her face and her shorn, straw-dry hair.  Show me yours and
I'll show you mine that's worse.

He breathed deeply and put down the glass.  "This isn't why I came
here."

"Why are you here, Alex?"

He moved across the room towards her.  The low light and twinkling
Manhattan skyline hid her scars and erased time.  "It's 1986," he said
in a new, quiet tone.  "You have that terrible graduate housing and I
have nothing, so I sneak in every night after your roommate's asleep."

"Alex," she protested.  He continued his approach.

"I'm always kicking over that ridiculous neon phone you have.  Once I
trip over your 45s collection and you want to kill me because I crack
your favorite Duran Duran single."

"It's Arcadia," she murmured, looking at the floor.  "Not Duran
Duran."

"And I want to kill you because you're always correcting me and you're
always right, just like you get all the research grants because you're
so fucking smart."

"But you make it up to me by stealing a hundred copies of the single
and wallpapering my room with them when I'm not home.  Even though I
know it's wrong I like it, because it means you're dangerous and
that's--" her voice cracked, "very sexy."

He was much closer now, only a foot from where she sat.  "And I know
it's wrong but I don't care, because I would do anything to make you
think I'm sexy."

She reached out and ran her fingers across his false arm.  "You looked
different then," she said.  "You were so thin and you had that
ridiculous haircut with the wings."

"Feathers," he corrected.

"And sometimes you were right, even though I wouldn't admit it, and
sometimes we'd sneak into your lab..."

"The only light would be from the phosphorescent chemicals..."

"And you'd put on an old jazz album of some kind, and we'd dance..."

"With those fucking robotic insects buzzing overhead..."

She stood up before him, and touched his other arm tentatively.  "One
of those nights was when they came for us."

He reached around and held her to his chest.  "Shh," he said quietly.
"That's not why I came here.  There isn't time for that anymore."

She leaned back to look at him.  The glitter of a million city lights
was reflected in wavering tracks on her ruined face.  "I know," she
said sadly.


--

The man slept alone and fitfully.  The others slept together,
passionately or chastely, with worried innocence, blissful ignorance
or terrible, unspeakable guilt.

When they all awoke in the morning, another day was gone from the rest
of their lives.



___________________________________________

                   IV
 
   "Great slaughter was made 
    in the flyings of the timber."

    -- Lindesay, _Chron. Scotland_ (1728)


___________________________________________


Scully didn't see Skinner for nearly a week.  Mulder claimed that
ancient Native American spirits had been seen wandering through the
labyrinthine mallways of Minneapolis and by the time she was back in
D.C. she had blisters on her feet and was calling soda "pop."

"This case would've been perfectly acceptable in mid-winter, but
spending my days prowling from skyway to skyway is not how I like to
begin summer."  A stewardess offered her a sympathetic orange juice
and she took it gratefully.

She and Mulder were especially close together because the man in the
window seat had gotten sick within ten minutes of takeoff.  Most, but
not all, of the resulting product had ended up in the designated bag.
He continued to get up every ten minutes presumably to avoid a
reoccurrence.  They would've gladly given him the aisle seat, but this
particular airline had with cheerful sadism reduced the plane's
legroom to mere inches.  Her partner simply wouldn't fit anywhere but
the aisle and the cabin was otherwise full.

Oops, it was time again.  The two agents climbed awkwardly out of the
way, Mulder favoring one leg a little but more or less fully
recovered.  They took the brief respite as an opportunity to stretch
out in their seats.

"Oh, I meant to tell you," Mulder began.  "Skinner called this
morning.  I guess you were in the shower because he said he tried your
room first. He just wants to go over your report about the New Jersey
kid case first thing when you get back."

Scully frowned and looked at her watch, which needed to be reset to
D.C. time anyway.  "We don't land until 8:30."

Mulder shrugged.  "I've seen him there as late as the middle of the
night.  I guess he's not big on the personal life lately."

"And why were you there in the middle of the night?" she chided.

"See?  I'm speaking from experience."

"At least you have evidence to back up these conclusions."

"I always have evidence.  It just tends to mysteriously vanish."

Looking deeply embarrassed and apologetic, their seatmate returned and
they danced into the aisle again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

When they landed, they were enormously surprised to find a message on
Scully's voice mail from Skinner, telling her he'd reconsidered and
she could just give him the report in the morning.  "Late morning,"
his recorded voice said gruffly.  "I might not be in until 10."

Mulder grunted.  "Good for him."

"Indeed," Scully added thoughtfully.




From the perspective of an outsider, the scene was normal.  A younger
agent was entering the office of her superior to review her report on
a case.  She was admitted by his secretary after a brief wait, crossed
his expansive office with her feminine-yet-serious business attire
meticulously arranged, and sat smoothly across from him, notebook and
pen at the ready.

It was not, however, normal for the young agent to ask, "Sir, why the
hell did you send me there?"

Skinner's answer was equally nonstandard.  "If you weren't going to
arrest him, why at least didn't you shoot the son of a bitch?"

"I-- sir, I had no evidence."

"Agent Scully, I don't need to tell you what kinds of misdeeds Alex
Krycek has been responsible for."

"No sir," she said through her teeth.  "You certainly do not.
However, I am trying to avoid making a habit out of shooting
well-deserving but unarmed criminals."

"Unarmed is certainly one way to put it, Agent.  However, there are
currently fifteen federal and state warrants out on this man and I
hardly think you would need to search hard to find a reason to---"
Skinner suddenly stopped, and the unaccustomed confusion on his face
was difficult to witness.  His next words were choked.  "He told you,
didn't he?"

Scully blinked rapidly; she moved to speak but could not.

The assistant director was nodding.  "He did."  His entire demeanor
changed; from thunderous authority figure to... something much less.
"Mulder doesn't know?"

"No, sir."  He waited; it was clear he wanted an explanation.  "I have
to be sure," she said hesitantly.

"That it's true?"

She shook her head.  "That we could stop it.  I don't think I'd want
to know-- if there was nothing that could be done."

"There is nothing that can be done," Skinner said flatly.

"Then how-- how much time, sir?"

He twisted his head to the side, as if he couldn't meet her gaze but
didn't know where else to look.  "A week, a month.  Maybe two.  Not
long."

Scully laughed.  Skinner didn't look surprised at her response and
that scared her more.  His voice softened unexpectedly.  "Is your
house in order, Agent Scully?"

She thought of broken windows, broken bottles, her foyer wrapped in
police tape.  "Sir?"

"Get it in order, Dana."  His head was to the side again and light
from the windows reflected off his glasses.  She turned in her chair
and saw his open briefcase on the conference table, filled not with
papers but with trinkets: a paperweight and a photo of his wife she
couldn't remember being displayed in his office.  Skinner followed her
gaze.  "Don't come back to work," he said.  "Don't ever come back."
 

--

For a basement office it was very well-lit.  At certain times of the
day, in certain months of the year, the sun would sit just so and for
a good hour the room would be bathed in well-defined beams of natural
light.  Before Scully joined the division, Mulder would sometimes tape
casefiles to the wall and investigate the one illuminated by chance.
Later he considered it either a sign that he'd desperately needed a
partner, or that he should watch Indiana Jones movies less often.  The
only thing that was for certain was that he'd stopped once he'd gotten
a roommate.  Some personal rituals were just too embarrassing to
share.

Scully walked in to the office after her meeting with Skinner and
started talking to him, but she'd inadvertently stepped into one of
those brilliant beams of light and the effect was so dazzling he was
failing to listen to her.

"You're not paying attention," said the voice in the maelstrom.  She
was seething with white intensity and it was equally impossible to
look at or away from her.  "That's okay," she continued, and sat down
in front of him, dropping out of the beam.  His partner returned from
the skies, again.  "How's the leg?"

"Oh, it's... it's okay.  But you're probably right -- I should've
taken a few more days before Minneapolis."

"Even my feet hurt."

"What did Skinner say?"

She smiled.  "He told us to take the rest of the day off."
 
"It was that bad, huh?"

"No, that's what he really said."

Misplaced hairs on her head drifted in and out of the sunbeam and
Mulder was certain he'd just been daydreaming.  "Wait, honest?"

"Honest.  Let's go celebrate -- the noodle place, my treat."  Scully
stood, just as clouds swept in and obscured the sun.  Instead of a
being bathed in a halo of unworldly brilliance, it was just his
partner, his officemate, standing in front of him and offering to buy
lunch on an ordinary work day.

He was graciously accepting when his phone rang.  He held up his hand
and answered.

"Mulder," the voice said, and the voice belonged to Marita.  "Do you
know who this is?"

He looked up; the clouds were passing and light was filling up the
room again.  Scully was waiting with a complex but largely positive
mix of emotions on her face.

"I'm sorry," he said into the receiver.  "You have the wrong number."
He hung up.

"Was it really?" Scully asked.

"No."

On their way out, Mulder noticed Skinner exiting the building,
carrying not just his briefcase but a potted plant from his office
windowsill.  If Scully had seen him, she didn't mention it.


--

Following her partner's example, Scully had turned off her cell phone,
but alone in the restaurant bathroom she checked her voice mail.
There was one message, and she immediately recognized the voice of the
woman from the nanites building.

"I should've told you more," the woman said breathlessly.  There was a
noise in the background, like an engine running, and the sound of
wind.  "I was still reading from my notes in Informant 101, giving you
only pieces even while I knew the time for such luxuries had passed.
There's so much to tell, about the aliens, the shapeshifters, the
rebels, the clones, the plans that have been in place since before we
were born.

"If I were you, the one thing I would want to know is what they'd done
to me, and why.  I know that Alex told you about the chip, about its
effects on disease.  You should also know about the side effect of the
vaccine you were given in Antarctica.  It targets the kind of rapid
cell development that occurs after exposure to the virus.  A
consequence of this is that it also prevents pregnancy.  Meiotic
cells: sex cells, ova and sperm, they're treated like alien cells and
destroyed.  Your ova were removed for experimentation, that's true,
but also because it was known that you would be exposed to the virus
someday, and if they weren't removed in advance you would never be
able to conceive.

"How did they know you'd be exposed?  You thought that was an
accident?  Think of the consequences.  Mulder injected the vaccine
into the ship.  The colonists knew of our plans.  Any pretense of
collaboration was over.  In time, the collaborators themselves were
burned alive.

"The rebels have been working with a certain cohort of humans. Many of
us are within the organization itself, others in key sectors in
business, science and technology.  Together we comprise the so-called
black agencies in the government that even people in the government
don't know about."  The voice laughed to herself.  "I'm surprised,
actually, that they didn't try to recruit you."

There was a long pause, while Scully listened to the wind and motor
noises from the other end.  She feared that the voice mail would cut
off the message and---

"I put something in your coat," the woman resumed suddenly.
"Something you forgot."  The line disconnected.

Scully felt around in her jacket pockets and found a vial.  The woman
must've slipped it into her coat when they went to her car; it had
been lying on the driver's seat.

Inside the vial was a computer chip.  A label on the cap read simply,
"Mulder."

A sudden banging on the bathroom her made her jump so abruptly that
she nearly dropped the vial.  "Scully!" her partner was yelling, "get
out here, now!"


--

Skinner's bed was covered in suits.  Some were too small, some were
too informal, some had lapels with the wingspan of a B-17.  He had all
the fashion indecision of a 16-year-old girl and the fashion options
of a 50-year-old DWM who'd last gone shopping back when people paid
with checks.  Tonight he'd be paying with credit, thank you very much,
and he wasn't expecting to get a bill.

There was no time to think about that now.  Now was the time to think
about his appalling lack of attractive ties.  Why hadn't anyone told
him he needed sexier neckwear?

He lined the candidates all in a row over discarded suits, this time
introducing some method into the system.  In turn, he held each up to
the winning suit, turning it against the fading sunlight.  Too red,
too wide, too narrow (he'd bought a few in the eighties, grudgingly).
Candidate number eight was up for assessment when the doorbell rang.

"Sharon?" he said aloud, largely to himself.  She was early if she
were there.  He looked around guiltily.

Not that it should matter.  She'd dressed him to go out more often
than he'd dressed himself.  Or maybe that was why it mattered.  He
wanted to be ready as a package deal, not a hodgepodge of misguided
loyalty, unresolved trauma and overextended masculinity.  There wasn't
time for her to fix him anymore and he doubted she'd be inclined.
She'd resigned from that position years ago.

He let the door ring a second time as he scrambled into the suit.  His
hands were shaking and the tie wouldn't tie -- he tossed it to the bed
and settled for tucking in his shirt.  Just before reaching for the
door, he grabbed at his glasses, dropping them onto a sideboard.

The blurry figure before him was not Sharon.  It was not, in fact,
anyone he recognized at all.  If anything, the figure seemed
especially indistinct, softened, edgeless --

The blaze started in the foyer.




Outside the delicate, white-and-exposed beam Japanese noodle house,
the Lone Gunmen were speaking frantically.  Langly was the loudest.
"The nanites plant is on fire."

"Not just on fire," Frohike added.

"Exploded," said Byers.

Mulder absently handed his napkin to Scully.  "What happened?" he
asked.

"Some kind of chemical incineration.  Very fast, very hot."  Byers
looked around suspiciously.  "And not just there."

Langly nodded.  "Dozens of research institutions, more by the minute,
all over the country.  The media's just getting wind of it.  They'll
calling it some kind of anti-technology terrorist strike."

"No apparent relationships between the companies?" asked Mulder.  The
others shook their heads.  "Deaths?"

"Here and there," said Frohike.  "Some of the facilities were
unoccupied, others weren't."

Mulder was already grappling with his cell phone, muttering to
himself.  Scully reached out.  "Mulder, who are you calling?"

"What?"

She shook his hand forcefully.  "There's no one who can help.  It's
out of our hands."

He gently pulled the phone from her and his voice was worn.  "Scully,
we've seen these types of incinerations before.  You know what they do
to people, and you know who causes them."

She felt stupid and helpless, arguing on the street with a miso soup
stain on her blouse at a time when normal people were at work,
planning their commutes home.  Even the two of them -- they should be
shooting crumbled paper basketball in the office, circling a crime
scene, returning rental cars.  No houses were in order here.  If the
end were inevitable, why couldn't they go out quietly?

If the end weren't inevitable--

When was the last time she'd believed Krycek?  Or hell, even Skinner?

Mulder was watching the indecision on her face and almost certainly
misinterpreting it.  He probably thought she wanted to deny what was
happening.  If only she could.  But she also couldn't tell him what
she knew, not yet.  She needed his belief, not in the paranormal this
time, but in the possibility of a chance.  And maybe the woman had her
own beliefs, too, which is why she was given that vial.

"Okay," was all Scully said.

Mulder began dialing immediately.  "Someone tried to reach me
earlier," he explained.  "Someone who must have known about these
events."

"Someone I know?"

He eyed her strangely.  "You've met, but you haven't been formally
introduced."  He frowned into the handset.  "There's something wrong,
they're not answering."

"You're damn right something's wrong," snorted Langly.  Mulder was
still staring at his phone willing it to connect.

Frohike coughed into his gloves.  "We really need to be getting back
if we're going to monitor this situation.  Is there anything in
particular you want us to be looking out for?"

Mulder shook his head.  Scully looked between them and said, "Just
keep in touch."

"Roger that, Agent Scully," nodded Langly.  The Gunmen piled back into
the Mystery Machine and left the two of them alone on the street.

"I'll pay the check," Scully suggested, moving away slowly.  "I'd like
to go back to my place, to think about our next move."

"Hey," he said.  She stopped just short of the restaurant's
wood-framed door.  "We'll have one, you know.  A next move."

"I know," she answered, and stepped into the restaurant.  She believed
him until she saw the smiling face of their young waitress, looking up
into the eyes of a deeply-smitten boy leaning with forced casualness
at the sushi bar.  The girl giggled at something he'd said, covered
her mouth.  Scully left a twenty-dollar tip.


--

Marita hadn't listened to the radio or watched TV in years, not after
that stint awhile back with the signal processing group.  The things
they could do, the control they could exercise over the population at
large.  It made her research in robotics look like community service.
So she avoided mass media at all times, knowing the Consortium rarely
had qualms about using its own as guinea pigs.  Take her, for example.
On the one hand, her new haircut allowed her to ride in the open jeep
with minimal wind-related hassle.  On the other hand, she felt scarred
and deformed, at least relative to her internal self-portrait, but in
light of some obvious facts she couldn't vent her hair-care complaints
to Alex.  He had considerably more visible wear and tear.

On the floor of the jeep on the passenger side was an enormous pile of
tapes: books on tape.  She figured those were safe, and her
self-imposed moratorium on other forms of entertainment meant that
these were her only available flights of fancy.  All of them were
books she'd already read.  She didn't much like surprises.

The tape clicked and turned itself over.  Heathcliff, mad without
love, was venting his cruelty on the offspring of his beloved, passing
the evil wrought against him on to another generation.  The classics
had such wisdom, she thought.

The storage facility for this last haul was deep in Maine hick
territory, past the shopping outlets and presidential resorts and down
a series of ever- narrowing roads which eventually dissolved into a
pair of dirt tracks.  The very last segment dipped down into a steep
valley; it made the facility more difficult to spot via air
surveillance.  Even this far out, in this remote wilderness, eleven
rows of metal storage sheds hundreds of yards across was likely to
attract suspicion.

The perimeter was surrounded by an invisible network of infrared
tripwires, marked only with a spray-painted X on a tree near the
entrance road.  It was here that she slowed the jeep to a halt,
although not because she feared crossing the barrier.  She was
expected.  Yet even a committed city girl like herself could sense
that something was wrong.

It was the sound, she realized, and the smell.  The sound was silence,
and the smell was smoke.

She cut the engine and hopped out.  It was, indeed, quiet.  No birds
called and no animals rustled.  Even the wind was still.  Marita
walked around the vehicle, bending down slightly to sniff the exhaust.
The back was undoubtedly overloaded with cargo, with boxes of
electronics gear and gigabytes of data storage.  On the highway she'd
been getting no better than eight to ten miles per gallon.  Was the
jeep's engine failing?

No, she knew better, even as she circled a second time.  It wasn't the
smell of a car gone bad, it was the pleasant smell of a summer
barbeque, of charcoal and hickory, of meat sizzling from the heat of
the grill and the heat of the sun.

The smell of meat.

She scrambled back into the driver's side, imagining herself as the
blonde in a horror film, screaming as the car failed to start, but the
jeep turned over immediately and jumped to life as she popped the
clutch in a panic.  The hood buried itself in some underbrush.

"Shit."

She could feel it now: the temperature rising and the caress of the
hot artificial wind as it gained momentum.  She threw the jeep into
reverse and floored it.  The wheels spun only a second before the
vehicle rocketed backward and into another stand of trees.

Marita shifted into first and looked up.  The fire was visible now as
a shimmering wall of heat, dissolving the trees into undulating waves.
Overhead, smoke clouds were clotting the sky.

"Shit," she repeated.  "Shit, shit, shit."

The jeep spun around with its remarkable turning radius and she was
able to tear off, gunning the engine.  The trees around her rocked
sickeningly back and forth, the tapes on the floor rattled impossibly
loud and drowned the cries of young Katherine, and the fire, the fire
was at her back and Mulder and Scully and Alex and no one had answered
her calls, her last-minute calls for help and hope for change.

Marita and the jeep popped out of one track road and onto another, but
this was wider and more well-traveled.  She could go faster, and did,
and the cool wind from her speed overcame the hot wind from the
flames.  She was going to make it.  She was gaining.

There was a noise then, a horrendous boom like the end of the world
come six days early, and like other women before her, her mistake was
to look back.  She saw nothing behind but the retreating wilderness,
and in front, when she turned back, she saw the sudden turn through
the densely-packed woods only seconds before impact.


--

Krycek had lied only once to Scully in their recent conversations, and
that was less of a lie than a misleading truth.  He'd led her to
believe that the New Jersey centers were the sole point of manufacture
and distribution of the chip.  That was untrue.  There were hundreds,
and he had to visit and sell off all of them.  Luckily, the Consortium
fled their original homes in New Mexico and Nevada, warded off by all
the alien nutjobs camping out near Area 51.  In order to keep a lower
profile they'd moved their operations to the crowded Northeast.
Mulder would call it "hiding in plain sight."

The money from the sell-offs didn't matter to them, obviously, but
appearances did.  The colonists didn't have much truck with human ways
and means but they had enough human loyalists who would report any
suspicious behavior.  Cut off operations too soon and they risked
triggering colonization even earlier, and right now a single day was
the most valuable thing in the world.

He was wasting those precious days talking to cocksure twenty year
olds.  Internet startups in the Northeast Corridor were desperate for
office space, and especially desperate for high-tech equipment.  If
the outfit looked like it was kitted out with the appropriate gear and
had enough room for a foosball table, they were ready to deal. Krycek
sat across from those assholes in his ridiculous suit while they took
notes on their Palm Pilots and put their shiny leather Fluevog
wingtips on the conference tables.

This meeting was no different.  A CEO who'd graduated from
toilet-training asked a question about dedicated T1 lines and Krycek
answered out of rote, all the while fantasizing about "upgrading" the
kid's PDA to an A.D. Skinner Special.  It was vaguely ironic that a
double agent in the greatest conspiracy inflicted upon mankind was
spending the end of his days in meetings.  It was immensely ironic
that in doing so, he was saving the world more palpably than a
thousand Mulders and Scullys ever could.  Even if it was only for a
few extra days.

"Is there a fire-retardant facility on the premises for archival
storage?"  inquired one of the potential buyers.  Krycek asked him to
repeat himself; he'd been imagining an endless room of monkey partners
tapping out case reports.

After the torture session had ended, he retrieved his dumpy car from
the parking garage (stopping to peel off the ubiquitous local-culture
bumper sticker) and checked his voice mail.  A message from Marita,
which he saved without listening to it.  He couldn't deal with her
right now.  A message from their lawyers; the deal for the New Haven
facility had gone through.  More money in his account that he couldn't
spend.  The third message was a nasty complaint from Sprint about his
cell phone bill.  Apparently the Syndicate flunkies hadn't paid it in
the last three months.  Typical.

The fourth message was a hang up preceded by anxious, heavy breathing.
He recognized the panting as belonging to Marita, although not the
kind of panting he'd normally prefer.  She sounded
annoyed-bordering-on-concerned and he was considering calling her
right then and there when the screaming began.

He turned and backed immediately into his own car.  Staggering down
the drive from the corporate lot was the last few seconds of a man,
engulfed in what was certainly the alien fire Krycek had never seen
but only imagined in the nightly horror show of his dreams.  The
figure stopped, swayed, reached not for Krycek but towards some unseen
goal, and then collapsed into the gravel still burning.

He could smell it then, not just this one man but the burning of the
whole team, now of the whole office as bodies fell and curtains
ignited.  Fifty feet from where he stood in shocked witness, the
windows of the office he had just sold exploded out, the fire
engulfing not just the building but its grateful new owners as well.

When he turned back towards the car, he himself screamed.  Standing
silently next to him was one of them, the rebels, morphed to seal
their human-shaped eyes, nose and ears.  In its hand was its ignition
weapon.  It had only to reach out towards him but it did nothing.  It
stood there as the building self- destructed and gazed sightlessly at
him.

"Go," he heard, although the creature did not move its non-mouth in
any way.  "Go now."

As the distant approach of authorities were hailed by faint sirens,
Krycek scrambled into the car and drove away.


--

When Scully didn't call for hours, Mulder tried to reach her by phone.
His cellular network was on the fritz again, connecting him first to
his own voice mail, and then to nothing.  Later it rang, but nothing
on the other end answered.

He let himself in to her apartment carefully and without knocking.  If
she was in danger, he was partial to skipping pleasantries.  Much to
his surprise, she was there, sprawled on the floor inches from the
television like a kid on Saturday morning.  Jump-cut images of fire
played across her face, but there was no sound; on the screen glowed
the green letters, "MUTE."

"Scully," he said hesitantly, shutting the door behind him.

"Oh, you're here," she answered.  Her voice was airy and far-away. She
didn't turn around.

"I've been trying to reach you all night."

"My cell, it's not working.  But the land lines are okay.  There's
just no one there to answer."

Mulder frowned.  The streets had seemed plenty crowded on his way
over.  People were maybe a bit anxious over the news reports, but
D.C. couldn't ever be called a laid-back town.  "Scully, what are you
talking about?"

She shook her head and said nothing.

He squatted down beside her and turned her head gently towards him.
Her skin glowed orange in the flickering cathode light.

"What's wrong?"

She met his gaze, but only in the most perfunctory way.  "I tried to
call Skinner earlier, to... ask him something.  His line was
disconnected.  I went over."  She looked away and twined her fingers
through the fraying at the end of her rug.  "His apartment burned,
Mulder.  It burned to the ground, and they can't find him."

The dizziness hit him hard.  When he spoke, his voice sounded
insubstantial, like hers, even to himself.  "How did it..."

She cut him off.  "So I tried to call the Gunmen, to send them over to
investigate while I got you.  But they --" She left the statement
hanging.

"Scully, are you sure?"

"Yes," she choked, and pushed away from him.  "Burned, and Skinner's
gone, and I called my mom and hung up when she answered but I couldn't
call you -- I was afraid you wouldn't be there--"

He grabbed at her blindly and she was so small, suddenly, in his arms.
He ran his hand across the back of her head as she buried her face in
his shoulder.  Mulder could only stare at the television.  An
airbrushed brunette mouthed the names of places and towns that had
burned, of police chiefs and government spokespeople, of eyewitnesses
and their hysterical accounts.  Another quick cut, and low-flying
planes were buzzing across dense forest, spraying down trees and
slowing the conflagration.  Beneath his arms, Scully's body shook with
violent sobs, but they were quick, silent, and when she pulled away
slowly there was no sign they had been there but for her damp-soaked
face.  "Like summer storms," he said, and wiped across her cheek with
his thumb.

She smiled a little, uncomprehending, and took a shuddering breath.
"I'm--", she began.

Her phone had started ringing.  "Krycek?" he muttered, and reached for
the receiver, but she stopped him with a hand on his elbow and waited.

It rang, again and again, and after a thousand rings her answering
machine picked up.  "This is Dana Scully," it lied. "Please leave a
message."

The voice was not Krycek's.  It sounded compressed and far away, as if
broadcast over tin can and string.  It was also faintly accented and
unfamiliar.  "I'm not him," it said, "but he is the one you must
find."

"Who?" Mulder said, looking around.  He was speaking into the air, not
into the phone, which was still resting on its receiver.

"Krycek," the voice answered, amused.  "But I was not addressing you."
It paused, as if turning to face Scully.  "He has something that was
meant for you.  Your work with it is not yet complete."

"Where is he?" Scully asked.

"Go," it said.  "Go now."

The click was loud and final.  When she lifted the phone, the line was
dead.

He stood up to meet her.  "Are you okay?"

She sniffled again, but nodded.  "Yeah."  She rolled her eyes with a
hint of her old sarcasm, and wiped at her face.  "Do you know who that
was?"

"No."  He brushed damp-clotted hair away from her forehead.  "Do you
know what he was talking about?"

"No."

He ducked down a bit to meet her face-to-face.  "We're not sure of
anything, Scully.  The Gunmen, Skinner, they might be okay."

"I know."  Mulder knew too -- he knew that she was lying and it wasn't
for the first time lately, but this was hardly the moment to press
that particular case.  Instead, he turned the television volume back
on.

"No new fires have been reported now in three hours," the brunette was
saying, "the first significant lull in what officials are calling the
worst mass arson in U.S. history.  Twenty-four states have reported
blazes that have been confirmed to be part of the outbreak.  Canadian
law enforcement too are investigating incidents in several provinces."

Mulder turned away from the images.  "Do you think it's over, Scully?"

She didn't respond, only took his hand gently.  The television said,
"We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming."



___________________________________________

                      V

 "Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used 
  till they are seasoned."
  
  -- Oliver Wendell Holmes


___________________________________________



Charred remains found in his apartment were tentatively assumed to be
Skinner's, but no positive ID had been possible due to the severe
nature of the conflagration.  The uncertainty might have raised a few
eyebrows had the situation been any different for the dozens of other
casualties in the same building, or in any of several dozen other
arson sites.

Mulder and Scully had been unable to find any conclusive evidence as
to the whereabouts of the Lone Gunmen; their home base had been so
thoroughly incinerated that no evidence of habitation -- at the time
of the blaze or ever - - could conclusively be established.  Scully
didn't know if they'd even had apartments of their own, and when she
asked, Mulder shook his head in a way that less suggested a negative
answer, and more that he preferred not to think about the situation at
all.

For obvious reasons, any information about the health and well-being
of Alex Krycek was not forthcoming.

While the FBI did some emergency speech-holding, flag-lowering and,
ultimately, departmental reorganization, the X-Files division was put
into a holding pattern.  No official mandates, no replacement agents,
just a note in their mailboxes informing them that the vacation time
for which they did not recall requesting had been approved and was
effective immediately and with a duration extending until further
notice.

Scully could not think of a worse way to spend her time than sitting
around waiting for the world to end, except perhaps sitting around
wondering what she would do with herself if it didn't.

Down on her street, two SUV drivers were engaged in some kind of
competitive parallel parking contest.  She had a chair pulled up to
the open window, feeling the warm spring hair on her face and idly
drawing patterns in the condensation on her drinking glass.  It was
the kind of middle-of-the-day laziness one abandons once out of
school, and she remembered being very young and yet still
understanding that this was a feeling to be savored.  If she didn't
think very deeply, she could certainly get used to this.

One driver abandoned his bloated mini-truck several feet from the
curb, at a distinct diagonal.  The other struggled on, bouncing
enormous bumpers against his neighbors as he attempted to fit the
vehicle in a space designed for a Civic.  Scully sipped at her
lemonade and considered leaning out the window and giving him verbal
directions.

A familiar car entered the scene.  Mulder approached slowly, noting
the erratic parking in progress.  He was barely able to edge around
the SUV before it had spasmodically leapt out into the road again,
belching smoke.  Certainly to that driver's chagrin, Mulder pulled a
few yards ahead into a spot marked with a large "No parking" sign,
which upon closer inspection would reveal itself to apply only to
street cleaning days, of which today was not one.

Scully swung her legs back from their resting place on a dining room
chair and slipped her bare feet into slippers.  Mulder hadn't called
and thus she was not quite prepared for company, such as he was.

"Morning," she said, opening the door for him.  "In the neighborhood?"

"Something like that."  He was dressed only slightly more presentably
than herself, in old jeans and a faded t-shirt.  "You know there's
some kind of monster truck rally going on in front of your building?"

"I did.  I had a front-row seat."

"Had I known I would've come by in my fifty-foot car-crushing,
fire-breathing robot."

"But it's in the shop?"

"Something like that."  They took two of the remaining seats at her
dining table.

"How're you doing?" Scully asked.

"The same.  You?"

"The same," she admitted.  "I'm starting to get a little worried
though -- I'm talking to myself a lot and re-using the same drinking
glass."

He didn't seem pleased with her answer.  "Maybe we should get out
there a bit?"

Scully thought this brought up a good point.  As time went on, it
seemed less and less important for her to pass on what Skinner and
Krycek had said, especially in light of the indisputable continuation
of civilization.  Something bad had happened, at least to Skinner, and
she was fairly certain that he'd been telling her what he'd believed
to be the truth.  The one fact the forensics team had uncovered at his
apartment was that a large number of possessions, likely clothing, had
been taken out of the closet prior to the arson.  As if he'd been
packing.

Whatever Skinner had known, it had been dangerous enough for Krycek to
threaten him with the nanites infection, and possibly to kill him over
it.  She didn't know how that related to the other fires, but she did
know enough that digging through the corporate records of those other
companies would turn up absolutely nothing.

That left them with not only no place to start, but no reason to
start.  It left Scully in her fuzzy slippers and Mulder in her dining
room reading the comics pages, having given up waiting for her answer.

"All the good strips are gone," he said suddenly, folding the paper
over to read the back side.  "Do you have any coffee?"

Fully aware of the strangeness of the domestic scene, Scully drifted
off to the kitchen to retrieve the pot.

"Where would you suggest we go?" she said loudly.

She heard the paper rustle again from the next room.  "I hadn't gotten
that far yet," his voice answered.  "I was hoping I'd come here and
you'd have a game plan."

She returned with his caffeine and a fresh lemonade for her.  "What
would make you think I'd be doing anything other than looking out my
window and reading the Sunday paper?"

He put it down and stared at her.  "Maybe because it's Thursday."

Scully resumed twirling patterns on her glass.

"When are you going to snap out of it?"

She breathed slowly for a second.  "Mulder," she said patiently,
"Skinner and Byers and Langly and Frohike are all dead."

"Yes, but why?"

"We can no more know why they died than I can say how a modern
twenty-story condo building became a 19th century fire trap in a
matter of minutes.  Mulder, we _lost_, in a way far more effective and
devastating than if we were shut down or split up once again.  And
what if this is just a warning?  What if next time it's my mother?  Or
you?  Or me?"

He folded the paper shut.  "It's not all about us, Scully.  We saw
only one of a hundred of those companies.  There's something much
bigger going on, but with fewer and fewer people now to watch over it.
If there's ever been a time we could make a difference..."

"A difference in what?  In fighting a technology we can't even
understand?  And how arrogant to think that the architects of these
conspiracies are really gone -- how could it be possible that a
cover-up of a global scale was perpetrated by that handful of men we
found in the hanger."

"The Smoking Man is still--"

"C.G.B. Spender is probably dead," she snapped.  She was not aware
that she had risen from the table.

"Because he told you he was dying?  He told you a lot of things,
Scully, none of which we could corroborate.  What better time to
pretend to be weak than when They were about to strike."

"But--"

"And what about that phone call to you?  We have no idea where that
came from, and when was the last time Danny told you a call was
completely untraceable?  About the only thing you've said in the last
ten minutes that I'll accept is that we're dealing with a technology
we don't understand, but that's what we do, what we have done for the
last seven years.  We understand what can't be understood, or at least
lay the groundwork for smarter people to pick up where we left off.
That's what _you_ do for us, and to dismiss a task as impossible just
because we don't understand it is, frankly, a gross violation of every
scientific principle I've ever encountered."  He had risen too.  "You
should be ashamed of yourself.  This is not how _Doctor_ Scully should
behave.  Complacency in the face of personal loss is not something
that I will accept.  That is not how I handled losing Samantha, it's
not how I handled losing my mother, and it is not how I intend to
handle losing Skinner or the Gunmen.  But if I'm going to find any
kind of meaning in their deaths, I have to have you, Scully.  Because
I did a pretty shitty job of finding anything important before we
met."

They stared at each other over the table, both with palms flat against
the wood, both breathing heavily and not breathing at all.

Finally, she looked down.  "We know where we have to start," Scully
said.

Mulder nodded.  "With Krycek."

"With Krycek."


--

There were only two facts about him that they had to go on: a name,
and a face.  "Alex Krycek", of course, did not exist, not even in the
FBI database.  He had never attended Quantico.  He had never been on a
case.  He was never an agent.

Alex Krycek the face, though, had the potential to turn up much more.
Computer software could extract the relevant features from the few
photos of him they had in their possession (one, embarrassingly
enough, of Mulder and the fresh-faced agent smiling amicably at each
other), and search the FBI's massive image archive looking for a
match.  Aside from a few security camera stills, both of Agent Krycek
and his nanite-wielding caveman alter-ego, the Feds' database turned
up nothing.

The same procedure applied to a much wider data source -- namely, the
entire CNN video archive -- turned up several interesting leads.

"Where did you get this from?" Mulder asked.  In the wake of their
"vacation", their office had been officially commandeered for use as
temporary storage.  Since it hadn't ever been particularly neat,
stacking it full of a few more overstuffed boxes and discarded
equipment had made little noticeable difference.

Scully further unwrapped the aluminum foil around her falafel.  "The
eScan Wide Media Agent," she said.

"Which is what, and from where?"

"Ever since I bought my iMac I've been getting flooded with junk
computer mail."  She reached into her coat and tossed a glossy flyer
in his direction.  Apparently, "Dania Sculy" was a busy IT
professional with high-tech data processing needs, which was why she
had been specially selected to attend MediaWave 2.0, a D.C. area data
search-and-retrieval software convention.

"It was easier than I thought," she continued.  "I was just hoping to
show up and get some information on products, but as it turned out
they were doing some live demos and I had a copy of one of the photos
with me."

Mulder narrowed his eyes.  "And of course, the light-starved geeks
manning the booth had plenty of time to give you a personal tour of
their software."

She looked up over her sandwich innocently enough, but said nothing.

He waved the printouts.  "So they just _gave_ you this?"

"They just gave me that.  They had the entire CNN video and photo
archive with them for the demo, up until the end of 1999.  I told them
he was my brother."  She crumpled the foil in a ball around the
remainder of the sandwich; she never did actually finish one.  "They
couldn't give me the results of the search electronically, but this
seems good enough."

Mulder looked down at four full-color images dumped out from the
program onto paper.  One was a given -- a freeze-frame of a news crew
from the Duane Barry fiasco.  Krycek's expression was only barely
readable amid the crowd of agents in the background, and whether it
was the clarity or the distortion of hindsight, Mulder couldn't help
but think he looked scheming and malevolent.

The other three were more perplexing and therefore more interesting.
In one, a very young Krycek leaned back from a lab table, facing some
kind of advanced microscope, just to the left of the obvious focus of
the piece -- an older man looking down uncertainly at the lapel mic
being affixed to his lab coat by a pair of hands whose owner was out
of the frame.

The second was clearly stock footage of some kind -- crowds at a
parade.  The software was good, as Mulder couldn't find him at all.
"Where's Waldo?"

"Here," Scully pointed, "behind the baton twirler."

The last photo made the least sense.  It was a video capture of a high
school or college yearbook photo, the bottom of the image cutting off
the named caption.  Printed above the image in lurid capital letters
was the word "MISSING."

"This picture must be at least 20 years old," Mulder mused.  "I mean,
his hair's feathered."  He squinted at the infuriatingly invisible
caption.  "And you have no idea where this actually came from?  Not
even a broadcast date?"

"Nothing."

"There's no demo version?  They don't have a web site?"

"Already checked.  They let you do a few keyword or name searches, but
that's obviously not very helpful to us.  The face recognition
component is big bucks to them -- you have to purchase an 'enterprise
license', whatever that is, and it's not like we can expense things
when we seem to be on permanent vacation.  We're at the mercy of a
handful of computer people here."  She paused, and it was obvious that
she was thinking of the Gunmen.

Mulder cleared his throat.  "We're just going to have to work with
what we have."  He hopped off the stack of retired air conditioners.
He had no idea where they'd come from, but they were old and massive
and felt like they'd been forged whole from one block of iron.  "These
are bad news, Scully.  Building and Grounds is never gonna want to
haul these out."

When he looked up, she was smiling.  Just a little.  "I'll start with
the lab," she said.

"I'll start with the baton-twirler."

"Why does that not surprise me?"

Without thinking about it, he leaned forward and gently kissed the top
of her head.  "I'm kidding," he said, and left.


--

Scully sat up nights going over every detail of the lab set-up itself,
looking for anomalies or unusual equipment.  She could narrow down
only that the work was chemical or biological in nature, rather than
electronic or mechanical, and that it had not dealt with excessively
dangerous pathogens.  Other than that, the lab was pretty generic,
perhaps a college classroom.

If it were only a college lab, why had it been on television?  If it
had been on television, why couldn't it be from one of those news
broadcasts that conveniently puts up captions to describe where they
were?  And what were she and Mulder supposed to do when they found
Krycek, anyway?  Scully buried her face in her hands after tossing the
photo across her dining room table.

"Honey, is it something I can help with?"  Her mother, laden with
groceries, was letting herself in through the front door, and the
concern in her voice was of the refreshing, traditional
mother-daughter kind, not of the widow-abductee variety.

"Seen a one-armed man lately?" Scully murmured.  She looked up through
her fingers.  "Mom, do you need help with those?"

Her mother was already walking back into the dining room, the
groceries having been spirited away and shelved efficiently.  "Nope,
all set."  She glanced down at the photo.  "Who do you know at
U-Penn?"

"What?"

Margaret Scully picked up the empty drinking glass in front of her and
absently wiped at the water ring left behind.  "Those people in the
picture?  Are they colleagues of yours?"

"How do you know they're from U-Penn?"

"Well, they are, aren't they?"

Scully felt years of adolescent exasperation well up.  "Mom, how the
hell should I know?"

Margaret looked taken slightly aback, but nodded at the photo.  "I
recognize it.  Don't you remember, honey, we looked there when you
were applying to school."

"Mom, we looked at about twenty schools."

Her mother shrugged.  "It was important to us."

Scully reached across the table and spun the image around in front of
her.  She stared not at the indoor scene itself, but outside, through
the rows of windows against one wall.  Most of them were covered with
yellowing pull-down blinds, but one was open, the blind pulled up and
the little half-window at the bottom hanging open at a diagonal angle.
In that small sliver, less than a square inch on the physical page,
her mother believed she recognized the location.

"Dana, look here.  It's one of the college signs on the door.  You can
just about make out the insignia."

"Sure, mom," she said doubtfully, but sat back in thought.  When she
finished running through the possibilities, her mother was back in the
kitchen, asking whether she'd like red sauce or white.

The next day she left a message for Mulder telling him she'd be out of
town for a day tracking down a lead.  Driving up, alone, in the middle
of the afternoon when the traffic was non-existent and the sun was
warming the side of her face, everything seemed okay.  She was
focused.  She had a purpose.  Mulder would do the same and then they'd
come back and sit in a cafe and argue about their findings.  Either
that or she could just keep driving until she got to Maine, at which
point she could abandon the car, walk off into the woods, and never
come back.  Both ideas had a certain appeal, but in the end, she took
one of the Philadelphia exits off of I-95.

The University of Pennsylvania was a typical Ivy League university
located in the center of a typical urban war zone.  It was easy to
forget while walking from one sun-dappled brick building to another
that less than a mile away it was unsafe to visit an ATM.  The
students certainly seemed to forget, languishing in the quadrangles or
playing hacky-sack in the parking lots.

With the help of some residual fifteen-year old memories, she found
the building in the image, a biology research center with the date
"1983" carved into the cornerstone.  Krycek could probably smell the
paint drying from wherever he was when that video had been taken.

"Oh sure," said the middle-aged administrative assistant for the
graduate department in biology.  She was considering the image while
Scully stood over her desk listening to the death rattle of the air
conditioning.  Less than twenty-years old and already obsolete.
"That's Professor Weston.  He's still with the university, although he
has a lot less hair now.  When was this from?"

"I'm not sure," Scully said.  "Mid-eighties, I think."

"That's a little before my time, but that seems about right.  He's on
the second floor of this building, although he should be in the middle
of a lab right now."  She looked down at some kind of scheduler to
confirm, and looked up into Scully's badge.  "But of course," she
continued smoothly, "you can go right in."

The course in progress turned out to be undergraduate-level
physiology, where a dozen students were mangling a half-dozen
vivisected rats.  "They're giving them tracheotomies," Tim Weston
explained, and Scully winced slightly when she saw one pair of
horrified girls leaning away from a dissecting tray rapidly filling
with rat blood.  "Well, they're trying anyway."

He left a young teaching assistant in charge and led her into a
neighboring lab.  It looked remarkably similar to the one in the
photo, although that had been taken from the first floor.

"Do you know the name of this person?" Scully asked, handing him a
copy of the image.

Weston was approaching elderly in the photo and now was well over
eighty but seemed witty and sharp.  He only glanced at the paper
before handing it back.  "Of course.  That's Alex Krycek."

Scully blinked.  Stupidly, she said, "That's what he called himself?"

The professor didn't find this question as strange as he might have.
"Yes," he replied simply.

"What can you tell me about him?"

Weston pushed back the last few hairs on his head and sighed.  "He was
a brilliant asshole.  I don't normally use that kind of language, and
never to describe a student, but there's no other way to put it.  He
showed up to classes late, if ever, always cocky, always sure of
himself.  At least when it came to academics -- he wasn't quite as
confident with people."

"How so, Doctor?"

The professor shrugged.  "He was always trying to prove himself, even
though he was doing more as a first-year grad student than most of my
post-docs.  In the lab at all hours, attending every talk, sitting in
the first row arguing with anyone who presented something contrary to
his worldview at the time.  A pain in the neck, really, but quite an
asset in the classroom."  He paused.  "And of course, in the lab.  But
look what happened with that."

"What did happen with that?"

Now he did look surprised.  "I assumed you were here because of the
spring of 1987."

Scully smiled tightly.  "Pretend I don't know why I'm here."

Weston sighed, the stoop in his shoulders growing more pronounced.  He
turned towards the window, looking out towards the same building as in
the picture.

"It started," he began, "just before the interview you see me
preparing for in that photograph."




The spring of 1987 was a good time for the Molecular Biology
department of the University of Pennsylvania.  The department which
would eventually become so specialized as to have one division devoted
entirely to gene therapy was during that spring making some important
advances in using viruses as carriers for replacement genes.  It was a
revolutionary idea: that the human genetic code was not immutable
after birth, that people could remake themselves at the most
fundamental level at any point in their lives.  It was the stuff of
science fiction.

It would turn out to be one of the most difficult problems in science:
a technique with a laundry list of spectacular failures even twenty
years after its inception.  By contrast, twenty years in computer
science made the different between a simple calculator that filled a
room and a microcomputer a thousand times more powerful.

In those early days, gene therapy was the hotshot science that
attracted the bleeding-edge risk-takers in the field.  The old guard
didn't believe it could be done, which left it to the smart-asses of
the world to try.  Dr. Tim Weston wasn't young, but he was a visionary
and he believed in his team.  To draw in the talent and keep them
interested, he gave them free reign in the lab and put them out in the
media spotlight.  Gene therapy had the potential for some
revolutionary cures, and even with only limited success with in vitro
experimentation, the press was clamoring for news of the future.

Alex Krycek was good-looking and self-assured when it came to his
work; he was the natural pick for the role of sidekick when the ABC
affiliate in Philadelphia wanted to shoot a five minute spot on
cutting-edge research in local schools.  They would get 55 seconds to
talk about gene therapy, while other teams from Drexel and Children's
Hospital profiled advances in "massive" high-speed data storage (100
megabyte tapes!) and PET scan imaging.  Ironically, the others became
standard tools of science while stodgy old Weston's group remained on
the fringe.

The news piece was insubstantial fluff; their 55 seconds were trimmed
back to a quick soundbite.  Weston guessed that it ended up in a
national news database after what happened the following week.

"Alex had a girlfriend at the time, which was something new for him in
the two and a half years I'd known him.  She was another brilliant
one, working between the computer science and physics departments on
some robotics projects.  When I locked up the lab the Friday after the
shoot, I could hear them arguing from Alex's office.  Alex was saying
something like, 'We'll never get a chance to do our work here.
They're offering so much more.'  I never knew who 'they' were, but I
did know that when I got a phone call Sunday morning from the
university police telling me the lab had been ransacked and our data
stolen, that Alex and Marita had disappeared."

Something rang familiar about that name.  "Marita was the name of his
girlfriend?"

"Yes, and don't ask me about her last name, it was something
unpronounceable that began with a C.  But I'm sure you can find it in
the school records."

"Yes, I'm sure it's there," Scully said sourly.

"You claim you got this photo out of the CNN news database?"

"Yes, Doctor."

Weston nodded.  "I'm sure it was national news in some circles.  The
police suspected kidnapping for the both of them at first, until I
told them about what I'd overheard.  Then they suspected Alex took
Marita against her will when she refused to go, but if you'd met
either one of them you'd know the likelihood of that scenario was
rather small.  She would've been better equipped to kidnap _him_, that
little runt."

It boggles the mind, Scully thought.  "What do you think happened?"

"Well," Weston considered, "and this isn't something I told the police
about...  That wasn't the first time I heard Alex and Marita arguing
like that."

"Oh?"

"Just before the television piece, I came in early to clean up a bit
for the cameras.  Alex was already there, but that was no surprise.
Part of the reason he was never in class was that he slept most days
and worked all night in the lab.  He claimed the darkness helped him
think.  This time, Marita was there too, and they were hunched over
the classroom phone together talking to someone while going over a
circuit diagram.  I could see everything through there."  He pointed
to the lab's swinging doors, with their narrow safety-glass windows.
"I didn't want to interrupt them, because they seemed very excited.
Marita was talking about 'synthesizing' their two fields of research,
about building a robot that could act like a virus.  She said the most
exciting part would be in the delivery mechanism, that the robots
could fly to their destination so that people wouldn't need to come in
for treatments or vaccinations."

"I'm sorry, flying robots?"

Weston laughed.  "Crazy, but true.  One of the big projects of the
robotics lab at that time was in modeling real-life animals for
robotic behavior.  Still is, actually.  Marita's group, they worked
with insects: dragonflies, I think, and bees.  Really got them to fly,
too, and they could land right on you."  He stopped.  "Agent Scully,
you look a little pale.  Do you need to sit down?"

She coughed a little.  "No, thank you Doctor I'm fine.  Did you ever
see either one of them again?"

"No, regretfully."

"Regretfully?  Doctor, Alex Krycek destroyed your work.  He may have
turned your research over to who-knows-where, some organization that
may use it for purposes you never intended."

"Certainly, I realize that."  He stood up and away from the lab
counter.  "But there are some minds that are too valuable to give up
on.  Alex made a mistake, but the contributions he had to offer
humanity outweigh that mistake."

She didn't mean to sound so bilious, but the hate was uncontrollable.
"Nothing outweighs Alex Krycek's mistakes."


--

Mulder was going over the photos for the nine thousandth time when
Scully burst into the office, running by him and disappearing behind
the stack of newly- deposited broken office chairs.  The noises coming
from her direction sounded destructive.

"You okay back there?" he asked, removing his glasses and pinching the
bridge of his nose uncomfortably.

Scully's reply was muffled, but sounded affirmative.

"It's a little hard to get around back there since we've been
converted to deep storage.  Where've you been?  I've been trying to
get ahold of you."

"We never examined it closely enough," she called back, apropos of
nothing.  Another crashing noise made him wince and he got up and
followed her.

"Examined what?"

She was opening drawer after drawer, not bothering to close them
afterwards.  A few times she tossed papers aside and ignored them as
they fluttered into dark corners, never to be seen again.

"I realize," Mulder began, "that you have little respect for my filing
system, but could you consider--"

"Here!" she cried, and stepped past him into the light of the main
office.  She was carrying a small vial in a plastic baggie, which he
recognized after a moment as the bee which had -- had really pissed
him off.

Scully moved at a clip out of the office and he had no choice but to
chase after her.  Over her shoulder she said, "If you want to talk,
you have to follow.  I'm going to an autopsy."

He felt ridiculous scrambling after her past agents' bemused stares,
and after a minute of it grabbed her upper arm.  "Scully, Jesus, wait.
What are you doing?"

"We, I --" She didn't meet his gaze.  "I didn't do as complete a job
as I should've on this specimen."

He wasn't following her at all.  "Scully, I remember.  You analyzed
the virus carried by the bee.  It wasn't anything, you said."

"I said it wasn't extraterrestrial.  No extra base pairs or branched
DNA or any other exotic flavor.  I did find the propensity to cause
cell damage, at least in culture."

Mulder was squinting with effort, or at least the harsh fluorescents
of the Bureau hallways.  "So you want to re-examine the virus, what,
in a live subject?"

"No, well, maybe.  But that's not what I'm talking about.  It's the
bee -- we never opened the bee."

"'Opened'?"

Scully grabbed his hand.  "Come with me."

She didn't wait for a full autopsy room; she just grabbed the first
exam facility with a light microscope and some dissecting knives.  She
placed the bee on a glass slide, lowered a swing-arm light over the
area, and prepared to make a delicate incision.

Mulder's voice in her ear made her drop the knife.  "You sure you
won't let me?  This bee and I have shared a very intimate moment."
Scully readjusted her lab goggles by pushing at them with the back of
her hand, and resumed her surgical stance.

The bee unfolded with delicate crunching noises.  Mulder walked around
the other end of the table.  "I thought you weren't an entomologist."

"I'll bet that disappoints you," she said smoothly.

Once it was neatly quartered, she placed the slide under the scope and
peered in.  Mulder leaned from side to side, hoping to catch a
glimpse.  "What do you see?"

"It's not real."

"What?"

She turned the microscope in his direction and he looked in
tentatively.  He wasn't sure what a giant bee should look like
normally, so why this one should be any different--

But it was so obvious.  The outside of the bee looked familiar: fuzzy,
yellow and black, large multifaceted eyes.  Some of the inside seemed
right, too, from the venom sack near the tail that glistened
organically to traces of internal fluids had leaked out onto the
slide.  Inside, though, was unmistakable evidence of human
interference in the form of slivers of metal, delicate circuitry
tracings and extremely fine wiring.  It was a masterpiece.

"My God," he said when he looked up.

"Yeah."  Scully turned the microscope back to her and began poking at
the specimen with a thin metal instrument.  "Oh, shit," she said.

"Scully, what, what is it?"

She leaned back.  Her face was the color of snow.  "It's addressed to
you," she said.

"What?"

"Take a look."

He did.  Scully had moved the focus around the bee to reveal a
sagittal slice lengthwise along its body.  Along the "spine" of the
creature, the thick trunk running along its length, someone had
precisely engraved lettering on its infinitesimal surface.

The lettering read, "SORRY FM - MC."

"Marita," they both said, and looked at each other with frank
surprise.


--

Scully left several hours later feeling a bit relieved.  Mulder had
told her a great deal about his third ill-fated informant, but not
everything.  She just had a feeling there.  The relief was that they
were now both definitely holding things back about the past.  Or in
Scully's case, the future.  Maybe it was the future past, or maybe
that was some German tense she'd never got around to learning.

She was exhausted, mentally and physically, yet even as she collapsed
on her bed without bothering to change, the day's revelations went
around and around in her head.

Above all, it came down to this: how much of their lives had been
mapped out in advance?  To what extent were they just following along,
never making a decision of their own unless someone had already made
it for them?

One bee out of thousands, and it literally had Mulder's name on it.
Marita knew, because she had put it there, and she tried to tell
Scully about it even while she was unwilling to admit her own intimate
involvement.  The vial, with what she assumed was the immunity chip,
whose plan was that a part of?  Was Marita just as subject to the
wills of unseen others as the agents had been?

Scully tried to roll back time, to find the cause for the effect of
all of this.  They'd known since their first year together that gene
therapy was being used as a mechanism to transmit a hazardous virus.
That this virus was extraterrestrial in nature was indisputable to
Mulder, and, it must've seemed to him, virtually unprovable to Scully.
Her refusal to accept the existence of an alien threat seemed, at this
point, moronic, or maybe it was just less effort to believe that than
to try to come up with any more new theories.

I want to believe, Scully thought as she drifted off.  I'm too tired
to do anything else.


--

Even with Dr. Weston's information, the search for Krycek was less
than forthcoming.  Mulder's photo research had gone nowhere.  They
still had no records related to "Alex Krycek" besides a few newspaper
reports they'd tracked down on microfiche relating to the lab theft.
The newspaper accounts adhered closely to Weston's version, and the
follow-ups petered out a few weeks after the event as more newsworthy
happenings took precedence.

More newsworthy than Alex Krycek, Scully thought, and laughed aloud.
Mulder looked up at her with interest but said nothing.

They were having that coffee, without the arguments.  There wasn't
enough evidence to fight about.

They turned up a little more about Marita Covarrubias, but nothing
that was particularly helpful.  She had transferred into U-Penn her
sophomore year but they didn't know from where.  She was probably
older than Krycek based on appearance but seemed to be several grades
behind him when they were in college.  Like him, she was reported to
be brilliant but hard-edged and had similarly disappeared into
nowhere.

That was, until she was appointed out of that nowhere into her
position at the United Nations.  Her record there was spotty; it
hadn't been as cleanly erased as Krycek's at the FBI.  She'd been in
the job for three days before contacting Mulder with the information
about the clone farm, and "traveled frequently" afterwards until
resurfacing first in Kazakhstan and then briefly in D.C.  Mulder's
glimpse of her at Fort Marlene -- after which he hadn't been sure he'd
see her standing up again -- was their last known contact up until
Scully pulled her commando-style raid of the nanites compound.

Their reconstruction of these events had some emotional potholes, but
Scully considered it ancient history.  Hell, it was only May and she
considered Christmas to be ancient history.

"You realize," Scully said over her latte, "that the trail's cold
again."

Mulder ripped open another sugar packet, dumped it into his coffee,
tasted the results, and scowled.  "So is this."  He pushed away from
the table and stood.  "I'm going up to get a refill, you want
anything?"

She squinted up at him; they were sitting at an outside table and the
mid- afternoon sun was in full force.  "What day is today?"

Apparently, he had to think about it.  "Uh, Tuesday?"

"Okay, then great -- get me the Sunday paper."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means now look who's giving up.  It means, oh, forget it.  Go get
your coffee, we'll talk when you get back."

Mulder nodded, but he didn't move.  He was distracted by something
across the street.

A young woman in sunglasses was calling the name "Scooter" over and
over again.  In her hand was a broken leash.  A few pedestrians had
sympathetically stopped to help her look for what was presumably a
run-away dog.

Moments later, a very small guinea pig-like creature trailing the
other half of the leash made a mad dash across the street from
Mulder's side.  "Oh Scooter," the woman cried, kneeling down and
suffocating the animal in her relieved grasp.  Relieved, the small
crowd dispersed and the woman bundled herself and Scooter into the
first taxi to roll by.

"Mulder, you're ignoring me again and I hate that."

"No," he said distractedly.  "I'm not ignoring you."  He turned to
face her.  "In fact, I'm doing exactly what you suggested.  Scully,
call Chuck and tell him to meet us at the lab right away."

"Mulder, why?"

"I'm not done with that goddamned bee."




Chuck was staring with dismay at the dissected robot.  "You guys
always did put the 'science' in pseudo-science.  I think this is a
little beyond me."

"Our usual contacts on the matter are unavailable," Mulder answered
flatly.  "Can you do it?"

"I have no idea if there's even a way to jack into its 'brain',
assuming I can find it, much less if we'll know what to do with the
information I can download."

Mulder shrugged.  "That's for us to worry about."

Chuck shifted in his seat, bumping the back of it into a discarded dot
matrix printer.  "A little cramped in here, huh?"

"We're redecorating," Scully deadpanned.  "If anyone comes in here
with more equipment, tell them we could use one of the coffee machines
from the fourth floor."

"I still don't know about this."  He rubbed his head a little.  "I get
the impression you're not supposed to be around here."

"Don't worry about us," Mulder soothed.  "You're the one who isn't
supposed to be here.  Now give either one of us a call when you've got
something.  If you get hungry, well, don't -- you won't be able to get
back in since they changed the locks."

Scully won him over eventually by promising to give him her government
parking permit.  "I'm going out of town anyway," she explained to
Mulder later.

Her partner was alarmed.  "Do I get to know where?"

They were sitting like a couple of tourists on the steps of the
Jefferson Memorial.  The sun was lowering and the white marble around
them glowed a gentle orange.  It was Mulder's favorite time of day in
the city: five thirty in the summer, when the heat went down.  The
visitors had trudged back to their hotels for dinner and the locals
were sitting in traffic.  For a brief hour or two, the national
monuments were practically deserted but for the stray early evening
jogger and bored Mall security personnel.  Most times he ended up
there at that time of day it was to disappear, to meet with an
informant or with Scully or Diana when his afternoon class at Quantico
had been cancelled.

He never met Marita here.  In New York, though, at her
apartment... Krycek was right: she wouldn't have become the person she
was if she'd spent her life fighting off horny undergrads and sleeping
with the dean to get tenure.

He was supposed to be relaxing but his teeth were suddenly clenched.
Scully was telling him that she was taking her mother to San Diego but
it was her low voice that he focused on.  Slowly, he felt himself
loosen up.

"Whose idea was it to go?" he asked.

Scully had picked up a wildflower alongside the reflecting pool and
was gently shredding it around them.  "Mine.  It just seems like a
good thing to do, to get her away from all of this."

"You think something's going to happen?"

"Just a feeling," she shrugged.

He accepted that.  He closed his eyes and accepted it all: the warm
evening breeze on his face, the heat of the dying sun on his eyelids,
the mistakes of his past.


--

Chuck called them at four in the morning, and since they'd dragged him
into this they were obliged to show up.  He'd been awake all night but
the adrenalin had kept him going.  Scully's eyes were puffy and Mulder
came in with his t-shirt on backwards.

"I was about to give up," Chuck was babbling.  "There just seemed to
be no way to get in, no ports, no jacks, nothing.  Then I started
thinking about how I'd build something this small, something designed
to minimize additional weight to maximize flight, and minimizing means
reuse.  So I took a different approach and looked at the components
that were already there, and bam!"  He slapped his hand on the
workbench for emphasis and the two of them jumped awake.

"It's the vision system.  The bee has only one kind of I/O: its light
sensor, and while it uses the visible spectrum to find its way in the
world and avoid obstacles, it uses the infrared spectrum for data
exchange."

"Infrared?" Mulder said sleepily.  "Like a TV remote?"

"Exactly!"  Again the hand slam.  "It could take weeks to try all the
possible combinations, but luckily, when you build a communication
system for a device you tend to use the simplest signals for the
important stuff.  Like this."

The remains of the bee were still laid out on the slide, but in front
of it Chuck had attached a small black device, covered in soft-press
buttons.  Leading away from the device was a spiral cable attached to
a keyboard, and at the narrow end of it the device was aimed at the
front of the bee.

"This thing is like a universal remote control for your entertainment
center.  It's programmable IR, infrared."  He tapped a few keys and
the head of the bee jumped to life, wiggling pathetically on the
slide.  The mechanical whine was almost imperceptible.

"I imagine that if you hadn't diced it first, the bee would be flying
around the room right now--"

"Or dive-bombing women's shirt collars," Mulder interrupted.

"--but the connections to the wings have been severed."

"What about the data?" Scully asked.  "Were you able to get anything
out of it?"

"Yes, that's what this is for."  He swung the "remote control" out of
the way and placed a different device before the bee, this time with a
flat black panel.  "This is an IR receiver.  I can't send and receive
at the same time, so once I got it to transmit I lost a few seconds of
data while I swapped the devices, but I think it was all junk:
protocol negotiation headers and the like.  The real data," and here
he produced a roll of output on paper, "begins here."

Scully looked over Mulder's shoulder and nearly burst into tears.
"It's all numbers," she said.

"Of course," Chuck answered.  "You have limited storage space, you're
not going to store whole words.  I'm sure it's all encoded, if not
even encrypted.  But then, that's for you to worry about."

Mulder was running one finger down the rows.  It wasn't all the same:
sometimes the numbers ran cleanly across the page, other times they
were lined up in neat columns.  About midway through, he stopped.

Row after row of letter-number combinations.  His finger rested just
under "N37 54.55 W122 37.61".

Chuck registered the excitement on their faces.  "What is it?"

"Coordinates," Scully answered wonderingly.




There was no point in going to sleep now, so they repossessed a
U.S. map from an old case (Scully dispassionately removing the
thumbtacks representing victims) and spread it across the floor.  Blue
tacks for the points in the bee's database, red points for the
location of the arson sites, and two pen marks for Skinner and the
Gunmen's homes.  There were other coordinates in the database
corresponding to points outside of the United States, but they
couldn't locate a world map and simply hoped it wouldn't be important.

"The bee needs to know where its homing positions are, where to return
after its completed a task, so it carries in its memory the
coordinates of the research facilities.  We're sure of this because
they match up almost exactly with the locations of the incinerated
buildings."  Mulder pointed to the pen marks.  "These were obviously
some kind of a retaliation against us, so they're in a different
class."

Red and blue tacks ran up and down the East Coast, clustered around
New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and Maryland.  Three red tacks were
solo, with no blue neighbors.  "Maybe those were added after the last
time the bee's database was updated," Mulder suggested.

One blue tack was alone, anchored in the middle of Indiana.

"That one must still be there," Scully said.

Down the hall, someone was washing the hallways floors with an
electric machine.  They could feel the vibrations in the floor beneath
them, and as it approached, a red tack popped loose and rolled along
the crease of the map.  They stared at it along time, then glanced at
the two lone pen marks.

"The first flight out is probably in a few hours," Scully said without
looking up.

"Let's go home and pack," Mulder answered.



___________________________________________

                    VI

   "...two pieces of timber, with teeth."  

   -- Dictionaire Rustic et Urban (1704)


___________________________________________



Doctor Concepcion's office had been searched three times that week
already.  At least the fourth time they hadn't stolen her lunch out of
the small fridge.  She ate her peanut butter and jelly (on rye, a
small concession to adulthood) and slowly re-filed her papers.

"Cristina, you too?"  Jake Lee was standing just inside the doorway,
turning over her petrified-rock paperweight with his foot.

"Fourth time this week," she said.

"Shit.  They've really got it in for you."  He eyed her sandwich
enviously.  "You gonna eat that?"

"I am eating it.  Go down to the cafeteria."

"Closed."

Cristina looked with dismay at her nearly-empty can of Sprite.
"Again?"

"I think for good.  Someone actually cleaned the floors."

"Shit."  She chewed in silence for a full minute.  She didn't offer
Jake a seat since he'd certainly take one if he needed it.  It looked
like he didn't know what he needed.

"Do you think it's safe to close the door?" he whispered suddenly.
The supervisors didn't much like secrets that weren't theirs.

Cristina shrugged.  "You think anyone's paying attention anymore?"

That was as a good as an affirmative; Jake closed the door and sat
across from her, leaning forward on his knees.  His normally shiny
black hair looked frayed and dull, and she noticed he was wearing the
same gray shirt as yesterday.  "Are you okay?" she asked.

He laughed quietly and shook his head.  "What do you think?"

"I think you and I missed our chance to get out."

That elicited another rueful laugh, and Lee looked down at his shoes.
"You know, I'm almost glad this place doesn't have windows."

Cristina frowned.  "Why?"

"I used to think it was so we wouldn't realize what we'd given up, you
know, on the outside."  His skin had blanched the color of yellowing
tape.  "Now I think it's a blessing.  So we can't see what we
created."

He left soon after, and she found she couldn't focus on work anymore.
The office clock said three-thirty but she'd been convinced for some
time now that they were deliberately slow.  It's not like she usually
had any outside frame of reference.

She closed up early and requested some time outside.  It was frowned
upon, but grudgingly allowed after they lost a few good people to what
the supervisors called "exhaustion" and the researchers called
"stircraziness."

The compound was intensely secure but also invisibly so.  No fences,
no perimeter guards.  The idea was to maintain the guise of a
nearly-abandoned ranch as much as possible, another victim of
Reaganomics and the reality of modern industrialized farming.  When
they were allowed to leave, they had to dress appropriately, even
though most of the researchers were non-white and really had no hope
of truly blending in.  That was hardly a concern of Cristina's
anymore; she dressed in silence and with automatic movements.

There were fenced areas for the cattle, but the barbed wire had long
ago been trampled into the mud.  The animals could no more leave the
real invisible perimeter than could the humans, thanks to the chips.
On the bright side, they rarely caught any colds.

It was clear moonless night, and so far from the cities that the Milky
Way was bright across the sky.  Cristina walked with her head back and
her eyes wide, not caring if she walked into anything.  She'd always
liked the sensation -- the mild vertigo she felt when she herself
moved but the stars stayed rock still.

A rustling noise off to the east stopped her.  The cattle were on the
other side of the "ranch", and other heartland animals seemed to know
better than to approach the area.  Her heart was pounding even though
she was allowed to be where she was.  She crouched low in the grass,
waiting, and listening.


--

"Anything?" Scully whispered impatiently.  Mulder had been hogging the
night vision goggles along their five mile trek across the fields.
The first mile had been terrifying; at any minute they expected
attacks from helicopters, robotic insects, men in sunglasses, but
nothing.  Just a frustratingly-dark evening and some admittedly
beautiful starscapes.

"I can see the building more clearly; it's definitely some kind of
ranch."  He swung the goggles across the horizon.  "Maybe some cows
too, I'm not sure."

"Something's moving?"

"Yeah, but it's definitely slow and placid."  He paused.  "A hamburger
would be good right about now."

"Don't remind me."  They'd been too nervous to eat after landing.

He lowered the goggles. "Onward?"

"And upwards."

Scully went ahead while he repacked the supplies.  She was a few yards
away when she felt a familiar but difficult-to-place sensation, and
seconds later heard a yelp of surprise.

"Mulder, what the hell happened?" she hissed.

He was sprawled out flat on the dry grass, his pained yet mystified
expression clearly visible even in the darkness.  "I don't know," he
mumbled.  "I just, I don't know, stopped."

Scully walked back tentatively, until she was less than a foot away.
She put out her hand and felt -- nothing.  She was unable to push any
further, though.  When she pulled her hand back, she felt the
sensation again, running up her spine and stopping at the back of her
neck, near--

"It's the chip," a woman's voice said.  They turned, and saw her faint
outline against the horizon.  She stepped closer, raising a small
penlight and pointing it at each of them.

"You're Dana Scully," she said in surprise.  She shone the light back
on Mulder.  "Who're you?"

Mulder had recovered by then and stood up.  "Who the hell are you?
What is this place?"

The woman snorted dismissively and pointed it back at Scully.  They
hadn't been able to see her face clearly yet.  "Why have you come
here?  You're putting yourself in danger."

"We're," Scully started, then sighed.  "We're not sure why we're
here."

"Well, it's safe to assume that whatever you're not sure you're
looking for is probably here, but believe me when I tell you to go
back."  She studied Scully for a moment.  "Not that it'll be easy now
that you've crossed the barrier."

"What barrier, this?"  Scully put her hand towards the invisible
perimeter, trying not to elicit the sensation again.

"Yes.  It's a little like a roach motel for chip implantees.  They go
in, but they don't come out."  They could hear but not see her wry
smile.

"I can't go across because I don't have the chip?" Mulder asked.

"Correct.  It's like a force field.  Alien technology."  She said it
matter-of- factly, as if they should know that personal versions of
the force field were available for $19.95 at Wal-Marts everywhere.

"Is there any way to disable it?" asked Mulder.

The woman shrugged.  "Probably, but like I said, you don't want to
come in here."

The vial with the chip inside was in Scully's backpack.  "Can objects
pass through it?"

"Yes, objects and animals, if they aren't similarly implanted.
Otherwise we'd have a fairly obvious build-up of leaves and other
debris along the perimeter."

She could toss the chip to him, along with the scalpel and sterile
wipes in her bag.  He'd done worse, she could talk him through it and
she knew exactly how her doctors had implanted hers.  Did she want to
tell him, though?

The woman had stepped closer to her and was looking over her like
she'd seen a ghost.  "I have to go back soon," the woman said.  "I was
only out for a short walk, and that's bad enough.  I can help you
remove it, though, if you promise me to put it back as soon as you've
passed through.  I think you know why."

She looked sincerely concerned, with an earnest but tired face that
had once been pretty.  Her hair was pulled away from her face tightly
and had gone gray around the temples.  It looked premature.

"Please," the woman said, and unexpectedly took Scully's hand.  "If
you try to come with me, I'll report you.  If you shoot me, they'll
know I'm missing in a matter of minutes and you will be caught.  There
are perimeter alarms and they already know that someone tried to pass
through; real guards will be here any minute."  She paused, and
lowered her voice so that only Scully could hear.  "You don't know
what you represent to those of us working here.  Just knowing that
you're still alive -- when I tell the others.  We just haven't had any
hope for awhile now."

"I'm sorry," Scully said slowly.  "I don't know what you are talking
about.  How do you know me?"

The woman laughed a little.  "I should hate you.  You're the success
we've been taunted with, surviving the infection even after alien
gestation began."  Her eyes grew bright.  "And you have the real disk
with the real vaccine, not the blank.  You stood up to Spender and
when the time comes soon we'll be ready, right?"

Scully said nothing about the swindled disk or her short-lived career
as alien host.  "I'll leave," she said finally, "and I'll let you help
me with the chip.  But before I go, I need one piece of information
that you might have."

The woman was still clutching Scully's hand.  "Anything."

"Do you know Alex Krycek?"

"Yes."  The distaste was obvious and familiar.

"Do you know where he is now?"

"I'm sorry, no, I don't.  The last I heard he was closing up the East
Coast facilities.  He may still be working on that project."

Scully realized that this woman didn't know about the arsons.  Perhaps
that was for the best.  "Do you know where he lives?  Or where he
might keep things of value?"

"He kept a boat," she answered slowly.  "I think it was his base of
operations on the East.  Nothing fancy, an old houseboat, I think."

"Where?  Do you know where it would be?"

"I'm trying to remember.  Somewhere in New England, I think, maybe."
She looked up.  "Martha's Vineyard."

Mulder choked, "Are you sure?"

"At least it was there last year.  I had to send him a report with
some...  results.  He had it sent to a P.O. box out there, said his
boat was nearby.  I'm really sorry, we have to do this now because I'm
already late."

"What about you?" Scully asked gently.  "Do you have something that
needs removing?"

The woman rubbed the back of her neck and shook her head.  "It
wouldn't make a difference.  They have other ways of keeping me
around."  Before Scully could ask she added, "Yes, I'm sure."


--

Cristina walked back unhurriedly.  She could already hear the movement
of the guards across the grass and wanted to minimize the number of
suspicious activities, so she returned by her usual route, stopping at
the northernmost barn to see if Kelly were there.

She found her daughter crouched high in the rafters, in a position
which used to make her throat fill up with fear but she now knew was
reasonably safe.  The hay on the floor was five feet deep underneath,
and Kelly never ever fell.

Cristina's entrance had been drowned out by the sound of the cattle in
the stalls, shifting position and flicking their tails even when
sleeping.  A great many of the stalls were empty; they had stopped
receiving new shipments of merchandise several weeks ago.

Kelly finally noticed her mother standing in the center of the barn.
"Mom!"  Carefully arranging her toys along the widest beam, she
crab-walked along one support over to the wooden ladder nailed against
the east wall, then scrambled down to the floor.  She ran the distance
between them in seconds, long black hair glittering behind her in the
fluorescent light.

My God, she was already coming up to above my waist, Cristina thought,
then crouched down to kiss her daughter on the head.  "Hi, sweetheart.
Sorry I've been so busy lately."

Kelly shrugged.  It was normal to her that she sometimes went for
weeks without seeing her Mom.  The other kids felt the same way.
Their parents, though...

"How come they're all gone?" Kelly asked.  She was talking about the
cows.  She didn't know that the average lifespan for an animal at the
facility was about ten days.  She thought they were the same ones
returning over and over again.

"They went on a trip," Cristina said.

"Can we go on a trip, Mom?"  Kelly hadn't been beyond the facility
perimeters since she was an infant.

Outside the barn, an alarm was sounding.  Cristina said a little
prayer that Dana Scully had gotten away.  "Maybe soon, dear.  We will
if we can."


--

They skipped straight from Indianapolis to the Vineyard, which meant
terrible layovers and no change of clothing.  Mulder hadn't slept at
all and the view of the island from the ferry evoked nothing but the
rhythmic bright flashes behind his eyes that he got from lack of
sleep.

He wasn't sure what he would've felt otherwise.  It was the first time
he'd been back since his mother had died, and he hadn't thought of any
reason why he'd ever go back.  There were no family secrets left there
to uncover, and frankly if he were choosing a vacation spot, there
were others high on the list.

Scully was below deck, sleeping in a twisted position on a plastic
chair and occasionally jerking back up when she slid too far to one
side.  Her mouth was hanging slack and there were triangular mud
stains on her pant legs.  He hadn't thought it possible, but she
actually looked pretty unattractive at that point.  The thought made
him laugh to himself, if only for a moment.

He leaned forward on the water-slicked railing and watched the gulls
swoop down on a couple of young teenagers who'd unwisely begun to feed
them.  When they weren't diving down suicidally-close to the prow of
the boat they were just hanging in the air, riding the natural
currents of the wind to effortlessly keep pace with the surging
vessel.

It seemed important to consider what he'd do if they found Krycek in
addition to his boat, but there was a lacuna, a blank spot, where his
thoughts should've been.  A seagull dropped shit on the railing only
inches from his hand, but he didn't move, only watched the sea
disappearing under the ship.

Scully woke up when the ferry horn sounded, just before they slipped
in to Vineyard Haven. She stood a little in front of him, watching the
shore approach, and Mulder leaned forward to gently grasp her hair and
pull it away from her face.  She didn't turn around but her shoulders
relaxed a bit, and he looked over her head at the corkscrew kites
flying from the beach instead of at the small fresh scar on her neck.




They started with the larger towns as likely suspects, driving from
one picturesque main street to the next, and then circling the fractal
nests of inlets and docks. There was no point in calling around;
they'd already had someone at the Bureau check for boat licenses
issued to "Alex Krycek" and it was no surprise to anyone that nothing
turned up.

It was high tourist season but also midweek; the beaches were packed
with families but the high-end yacht docks were quiet.  The kinds of
people who owned those yachts drove up from New York or down from
Boston and were more likely to be a weekend type of crowd.

"I'd expect him to be somewhere less high-profile," Scully said.  She
crossed to the end of the fourth dock and repeated the same procedure
they'd used previously: looking at each vessel in turn and noting its
name and basic description.  Mulder tended to get lost in the
terminology and often ended up writing down entries like, "Rowdy
Roddy: White, smallish.  Green trim, orange front cabin thingy."

"Not much about the Vineyard is low-profile," he said, scribbling to
catch up.

They knew they'd found it as soon as they saw it.  On a
less-fashionable commercial dock, a rundown houseboat the color of
washed-away paint had been christened, "Purity Control."

"Hilarious.  Why didn't he just roll a big red carpet right from
D.C.?" Mulder asked.

They paused to conceal handcuffs and weapons into their tourist
attire, looked right and left for any passers-by and stepped onto the
railing of the swaying boat.  They were inside the cabin only for a
second -- before Scully's eyes had even had time to adjust -- when
Mulder leapt into the left corner of the room, dragged Krycek out by
the collar, and punched him hard enough in the face to send him
falling to the floor.

"I wondered when you'd drop by and see the place," Krycek answered,
and spit an enormous wad of blood up at Mulder's shirt.

Her partner roared incoherently and pounded on him again.  Scully
distinctly heard the sound of fragile hand bones snap but Mulder
didn't stop, punched down into Krycek's stomach one more time before
pulling back and grabbing his own hand.

Krycek's bloodshot eyes rolled up to stare at Scully.  "Aren't you
going to scream, 'Stop, stop, this doesn't solve anything?'"  Then he
coughed and spluttered spit and blood into the air.

Scully felt nothing.  She was exhausted and the catnaps had only made
her feel worse.  Both Mulder and Krycek would need medical attention,
but she couldn't think, could barely see.  She turned around and
walked out of the boat.

"Don't kill him," she called back.

When she sleepwalked back to the boat several hours later, she found
Krycek handcuffed (by both arms) to the aft railing, baking under the
relentless summer sunshine and still bleeding a bit.  There was a red
stain along the dock where he'd obviously shifted position to avoid
the sun as it arced across the sky, but the handcuff had caught on a
crossbar and he could go no further.

She couldn't do anything about the sun but she could tend to the
bleeding.  She bandaged his split lip and gently pressed on his nose
to find out if it'd been broken.  He howled in pain but it seemed to
be intact.  There were bruises on his stomach but no broken ribs.
He'd live.

She left him still trying to talk to her but never having listened to
what he said.  She did a quick survey of the boat but couldn't locate
Mulder.  Sleeping in Krycek's home should've been repellent, but she
was exhausted and had forgotten where their motel was, so she curled
up in a dark corner in a room filled with secrets, and slept soundly.




Scully dreamed that Krycek was really Eugene Tooms, that he'd slipped
out from the handcuffs, come to her in the night and covered her with
a blanket.  Her dream-self believed the blanket would paralyze her,
that she'd be unable to move but would remain conscious and have to
watch him remove not just her liver, but everything inside her.  She
screamed and flailed and threw the blanket back at him, and the
dream-Krycek had looked sad and said that he was only trying to help
her, that she was cold in the darkness and needed to be safe.

When she awoke to find herself covered in a real blanket, she
shrieked, and in an instant Mulder was leaning over her, shaking her
shoulders and telling her it was okay, it was him.

"The blanket," she said, confused, and for a moment half-expected
Mulder's features to dissolve into a sticky yellow goo.  Gradually,
her head cleared.

"It's all right, I put it on you when I came in this morning.  You
were shivering.  It gets cold down by the water at night, you know."

"Night?"  Scully had thought she'd only napped again.  "What time is
it?"

"It's one o'clock in the afternoon.  You slept straight through."

"My God."  Scully sat up, rubbed at her face.  "What happened to you
yesterday?"

"I thought you'd gone back to the motel, so that's where I went.  When
you weren't there, I was going to come back to the boat, but it was a
long walk and I was really tired, so..."  He looked apologetic.  "I
slept there and when I got up early this morning, I came back and
found you."

"Krycek, is he--"

"He's still on deck.  I moved him to the shade, though."

Only now did it occur to Scully that keeping a one-armed man
handcuffed on the deck of a boat docked at shoreline was a bad idea.
She mentioned this to Mulder.

"I know.  I guess I wasn't thinking straight.  Last night we got
lucky, but today I moved him so that he can't be seen except from the
water.  We'll have to think about our next step more carefully."

This is kidnapping, she thought, not detainment, but the tiredness
washed in again and she just shook her head.  "I have to get up, or
I'm going to fall back asleep."  Mulder helped her to her feet.  "I'd
like to go and shower, but one of us has to stay here.  Do you mind--"

"No, not at all.  But it's a good twenty minute walk to the motel and
I don't think you'll make it unless you eat something.  It's been,
what, thirty hours since we had dinner?"  Scully nodded reluctantly.
"There's a convenience store down the street that has a small deli.
I'll pick us up some juice and sandwiches and then give you directions
to the motel."

He left, and the darkness of the cabin had a soporific effect that
threatened to drag Scully back down.  She climbed out onto the deck
into the sunlight and hot salt air.  Krycek was still restrained
there, but more comfortably, against a large metal winch with slightly
ergonomic curves.  The swelling on his lip had gone down but his face
was flushed, pre-burnt.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," he leered.

"Shut up."

She walked away, to the opposite end of the boat which faced back
towards the island.  Krycek had picked a good spot for hiding out; no
tourists or even many locals crossed the footpaths and winding roads
she could see from her position.  Even the narrow white beach houses
themselves seemed deserted.

"You're here about the laptop, aren't you?"

Scully half-turned to ask him, once again, what the hell he was
talking about, and then subsided.  The strange voice on the phone was
echoing back to her: "Krycek has something that was meant for you.
Your work with it is not yet complete."

Kritschgau's laptop, with the data from the ship.  Passages from the
Bible, the Koran.  About aliens and human evolution.  It would be the
only complete copy of the rubbings from the craft's surface and their
partial translations, siphoned off from her own work before it was
deleted.

Krycek was still awaiting her answer.  "Yes," she said, careful to
hide her uncertainty.

"I assumed as much.  And I wonder who put you up to it?"

She couldn't answer his question so she asked her own. "How did you
get possession of the laptop?" She stopped and cursed her own
stupidity.  "Oh, you killed Kritschgau."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I was told to.  The Consortium, the collaborators, they need it.
They have the original ship, but haven't broken the code."

"The language of the rubbings?  Why couldn't they?"

Krycek smiled and it almost seemed genuine.  "You'd be surprised how
uncooperative the small Navaho population has been with them, but it's
more than that now.  There's been a tremendous brain-drain.  Massive
attrition from the ranks, from where it counted the most.  And of
course, they lost dozens of founding members last year.

"Without the code, they can't make sense of the messages on the ship,
and if they can't read the messages, all their work in collaboration
is in vain."  He searched Scully's face, looking for recognition.
"Don't you get it?  They won't know where to go.  The final assembly
point, the one in which they will gather to be collected by the
colonizers before the rest of the population will be wiped out."

"But you took the laptop.  They should have the code."

"I took the laptop as ordered but not to turn it over to them.  With
the laptop and the cure-to-end-all-cures, we could defeat the
colonists.  We'd know their plan, and we'd know how to save ourselves.
But as you well know, we don't have the cure, and without that there's
no point."

A horn suddenly, from a nearby boat entering the dock.  Scully moved
quickly to stand between them and Krycek, blocking their view of her
"prisoner".

"I'm having a hard time taking any of what you say seriously.  A few
weeks ago, you had me believing that the end was nigh."  She waved
around them, at the beautiful summer day.  "Looks fine to me."

Krycek was shaking his head.  "I don't know what happened.  The
timetable was set.  Maybe the colonists got word that the
collaborators were in trouble, maybe they found out we were
dismantling the research facilities early."

"'Dismantling'?  Is that a euphemism for arson?"

"No!" he yelled, and the vehemence of his response startled her.  "We
were just shutting them down, like the one in New Jersey.  It's the
rebels: they did the burning, just like in Kazakhstan and Skyland
Mountain, but I don't know why.  I don't know anything anymore -- no
one does."  He looked up at her directly.  "You must know what it's
like, waiting for the end without knowing when.  You can't plan for
the future, you can't enjoy the present.  It's like you're already
dead."

"I know what it's like," Scully said stiffly.  "The difference is that
only one of us deserves it."

He laughed hollowly.  "Oh, I think there are some black marks on your
report card, Agent Scully."

"This is ridiculous," she snapped, and started to move away.

"Wait!  Scully."  He strained on the handcuffs, rattling them against
the rail.  "Listen, you want to have that laptop.  I hadn't even
thought of it after the cure was gone, and there's nothing I can do
with it, but maybe."  He saw that she was hesitating.  "Maybe it'll
help," he finished lamely.

"Where is it?"

"In the hold, but you have to take me down there with you.  I'm not
letting you rifle through my things alone."  He paused, sensing some
leeway.  "And you have to do it now, before Mulder gets back.  I'm
sick of getting punched in the face and I'm sick of his smug
expression when he does it.  There's blood on his hands too."

"I'm not letting you go."

"You have no choice.  And decide now, because when Mulder comes back
he's going to remember he didn't want to leave you alone with me."

Scully looked back towards the shore with indecision, and then nodded.
Mulder was going to be pissed.

It was a little strange, dealing with the prosthesis, but she managed
to uncuff him safely and with minimal stern threats.  She had wanted
to put the restraints back on after he stood but he pointed out with
more than a little sarcasm that it would be inconvenient to climb down
the narrow ladder inside the cabin with his arms tied behind his back.
Instead she kept her weapon out and as close to him as possible
without actually having to touch him.

He led her down the stairs into the cool darkness of the cabin and
lifted up a trap door near the sleeping quarters.  She allowed him to
descend further into the rounded vertical tunnel of the storage area
as long as she kept the pistol aimed at the top of his head.  He
rummaged beneath some spare fluorescent orange safety gear for a
moment, and then pulled out a faded cardboard box three times wider
than it was high.  He glanced back at up at her and just lifted the
cover, pulling out the laptop and reburying the box.

"What else is in there, Krycek?"

"Some things you don't have time to see or think about."  Alien
fetuses?  Proof of the existence of God?  Secrets they'd searched for,
surrounded by signal flares all along.

She reached down and took the laptop from him, then watched
impassively as he scrambled up the ladder with one hand.  When he
awkwardly swung out of the hold, he looked dangerously annoyed.

"Did you ever think," he said, somewhat out of breath, "about why
someone put you, a rookie, up against an experienced agent like
Mulder?"

That derailed her a bit.  "My purpose was to debunk his work."

"To what end?  If he was such a problem to the FBI, why not simply
fire him?"

Scully hesitated and clutched the laptop more tightly.  "He was a
valuable agent.  They wanted me to help bring him back into the fold."

"Then they should've sent him to a counselor and given him some time
off.  Come on, if he was truly out of control, why would they waste
another valuable agent trying to stabilize him?  Didn't this ever
occur to you?"

She remembered nights of recrimination, shouting; Ethan telling her
the whole thing seemed suspect and that obviously they didn't really
want or need her.  He'd suggested she'd been graduated on quota, to
fulfill some necessary government statistic on short Irish female
agents.  She realized now that her career-minded boyfriend was only
trying to tell her that something felt wrong with her first
assignment, that she should've stayed a doctor like everyone wanted
her to, but she'd heard only that he thought she hadn't earned her
position.  They lasted one long month after that conversation, and
then he was gone.

Had she really believed Blevins' rhetoric, or had she simply never
considered any other possibility?  It was unlike her to not
self-analyze, but looking back that was what had happened.  Contrary
to her training and her lifelong philosophy, she had accepted
something at face value and without proof.  Maybe it was because the
FBI were the first people to suggest that the FBI needed her.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"It was a gag, don't you get it?  They dropped a pretty little thing
on Mulder, to keep him distracted, like they did with Marita--"

He was wrong, she knew that.  He was right that it was suspicious but
he was wrong in that there was more to it.  She didn't know why she
knew, but she did.

"Did you kill my sister?"

Krycek's face was smooth.  "I didn't pull the trigger.  But I would've
if they'd asked me to, and I think that's what you really want to
know."

"Did you kill Mulder's father?"

"Yes."

Footsteps on the dock interrupted her before she could even begin to
think how to react.


--

Mulder was trying to calm himself and not pitch the groceries
overboard, but when he saw Scully and Krycek emerge from below deck,
the latter with his arms, such as they were, swinging free and clear
in the breeze, he saw only red heat.  "What the hell are you doing?"
he screamed.

Scully's voice was stony.  "I was getting what we needed from him."

"What?"

"The laptop I'd been using to decode the markings on the ship."

"The African ship?"

"Yes."

He glanced over at Krycek, who was leaning casually against the ship
railing.  "Get the fuck back where you belong," Mulder said, shoving
him.

"Look," Scully began.

"Move!" he roared, and Krycek nodded obediently.  Good dog, Mulder
thought.

He turned back to Scully, little pinpricks of rage floating in front
of his eyes.  "What the hell were you thinking, setting him free?"

"We didn't go far," she said with a sarcastic bite.  "And he wasn't
about to help what with you punching him in the face every five
minutes."

"Look," he said, diving into a speech he'd been rehearsing lately, "I
know you are keeping some things from me.  That's okay.  I trust you.
But there's a point at which you have to let me in.  I'm not just a
grateful sidekick."  She started to retort but he cut her off.  "And
don't you dare tell me that turn about is fair play, because I don't
treat you like some kind of Girl Friday.  When I introduce you, I say,
'This is my partner, Agent Scully,' and I mean partner in the fullest
sense of the word.  Am I your partner anymore, Scully?  What does that
word mean to you?"

She'd withered a little in the assault.  "It means everything to me,
just as it always has.  And you're just going to have to trust my
judgment and take me at my word.  Just as you always have."  She
searched his face and added, "I'm sorry."

"I know you are."

She reached out for him and he couldn't move at first.  Then the rage
drained away and they embraced.

When they broke free, they saw that Krycek was gone.



___________________________________________

                      VII

    "Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
    like seasoned timber, 
    never gives."
  
    -- George Herbert, Virtue


___________________________________________



There was a Catholic church on the island, a miniature St. Patrick's
cathedral with spectacular stained glass that cast colorful slanted
sunbeams across the pews.  There was no service on a Thursday but the
church was not quiet; rows of bored choirboys shoved each other
playfully on either balcony, and a landscaper was playing a boom box
too loudly outside.

Theological questions manifested themselves in Scully's head, and at
one point she would have fearlessly marched around back to find a
priest with whom to consult.  Maybe it was the foreign parish, maybe
it was the boys above her, but she felt inhibited somehow, like her
younger self when church was all about things you couldn't do, the
ways you could get in trouble.  She reached into the wooden pocket set
behind the next pew and removed a song book.

The majority were Christmas carols; she flipped past those.  She
wanted something stern, and in Latin, something reproachful and Old
Testament.  This was some kind of new-fangled parish, though, which
had taken Vatican II a little too far.  What kind of church translates
"Kumbayah", anyway?

She heard rustling noises from up near the altar.  The priest was
puttering around, leading a young couple and what looked to be their
parents around the area.  He described flower arrangements to be, a
pipe organ player, where the photographer should stand to catch the
best light.  They were planning a wedding.

She'd come seeking answers to questions about the origin of man, and
she'd learned that the hourly rate to rent a church was virtually
extortion.  And she thought they'd done away with indulgences.

Mulder was waiting for her outside, squinting against the sun even in
his dark glasses.  He liked the way they looked on him, she could
tell.  She could hardly disagree.

"You don't look spiritually enlightened," he said.

"No, I'm not.  But if you want to get married, we might have to look
elsewhere.  I think it's a little out of our price range."

"I could splurge if the service would be performed by Elvis."

"I think there are still prohibitions against ordaining men with
swiveling hips."

"Guess there's no hope for me then," he said, and demonstrated.  She
clapped politely.

Behind them, the heavy wooden doors of the church creaked open.  The
priest looked back and forth at them curiously.  "Are you the band?"

They giggled all the way back to the boat.




"Really," Scully protested, "there's nothing you can do.  Not unless
you have a deep knowledge of Navaho I didn't know about."  She was
seated at the cheap little motel desk, clicking the complimentary pen
repeatedly.

"I placed all the calls you asked me to, but so far nothing.  Looks
like the codetalkers have gone underground."  I hope, he implicitly
added.

Scully sighed and looked back at her notes, the disorganized data dump
that Kritschgau had stolen from her before other groups of people
stole it from her better.  Then Krycek had killed him and stolen it
again, and now he was loose and she had no idea where to start.  "This
makes me want to cry," she said of the mess in front of her.

"We're in no hurry.  I'm taking some enjoyable trips down memory
lane."

"Really?  It's okay?  We can go back to D.C., there's really no reason
to stay..."

"Go back to one hundred percent humidity and an office encroached by
discarded furniture?  That sounds appealing."  He didn't mention the
fresh ghosts of Skinner and the Gunmen.  Did they really even know
anyone in D.C. anymore?  "I'm fine.  Coming home is something I've
needed to do for awhile."

"Okay."  She was thinking of something to add but he left, closing the
door gently behind him.

"I can do this," she said to herself.  Mulder was no Dr. Ngele, but he
was helpful.  He brought her things to eat when she was too busy to
get up, and dragged her away from the desk when she was too busy to
realize she was overworked.  Besides, the sunsets were fiery red,
cheap entertainment.

She concentrated first on the twenty-four hull panels representing the
human chromosomes.  They couldn't possibly encode the entire genetic
code of a single person.  There were billions of amino acid base pairs
and the size of the ship couldn't begin to suffice.  Maybe it encoded
only certain genes, the important ones, but going from a series of
genetic instructions to a single protein, much less a complex
function, was entirely beyond the capacity of any human or even any
computer.  The function of genes was discovered by trial and error, by
finding the gene after identifying the condition.  Have a family with
a high incidence of schizophrenia?  Compare their genes to those of
unaffected families.  Take the common differences among them all, and
bam, you identify your gene related to schizophrenia.

Going the other way around, from the instruction set to the product,
was simply impossible.  That was a mystery she was just going to have
to let go.

She moved on to the religious passages.  Not all of them were
immediately identifiable, it turned out, which was understandable as
Scully's background was firmly Judeo-Christian, and on the Christian
end of that only.  The lines from the various books were all
intertwined, which also complicated identification.  In a few cases, a
single message on the ship looked to spawn three or four disparate
versions in a variety of religions.  The most ancient she could
recognize, from the Old Testament, was perhaps thousands of years old,
but she imagined many of the others went back much further.  Yet there
were a few which sounded like modern sales pitches from
televangelists.

Not all of it was even official religious doctrine.  Mixed in with
some passages Dr. Ngele had identified as Vedic was a short treatise
she translated as describing "Satan's fall from grace."  In margin
notes she'd written, "Milton?"

All of it was fascinating, and would've kept Scully up all night for
the rest of her life, but she needed something different.  She needed
conclusive data about the meeting place of which Krycek spoke.  She
needed coordinates, directions, hell, narrowing it down to a continent
would be nice.  Yet there was nothing.

The motel room phone rang, shattering her thoughts and sending her
jumping half out of her chair.  It was nothing, probably Mulder,
telling her to meet him to lunch, or dinner, or whatever time it was.

"Dana Scully?" the voice asked.  It was female and a bit familiar.

"Yes?"

A relieved gasp.  "Oh thank God.  I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to
find you again; I took a huge chance in asking around and finally
someone left this number under my door..."

Krycek? she thought.

"I can't tell you my name, but we met in Indiana."

"I remember."

"I didn't know if I should call you, but I think you should know..."
The voice cut off suddenly.

"Hello?" Scully asked.

"I'm sorry, I'm here.  Someone was walking by -- I needed to be quiet.
We're being moved out."

"Moved out of where?  The compound?"

"Out of the country.  We heard what happened, to the other
researchers.  Everyone's scared.  Now we find out we're being
relocated..."

"Where?"

"I don't know, they don't tell us, but everyone is saying Africa," the
woman said.

"Africa!"

"Yes.  I'm so afraid, and my little girl, I don't know if she's coming
with me."

Scully's mind raced.  "What do you want us to do?  Try to bring you
out of there?"

"No, no, there isn't time.  We're leaving in a few hours -- I should
be packing my things..."

"Please, calm down.  I want to help but I need more information."

"I'm sorry, that's all I know.  I can't--" The line disconnected.

"Dammit!" Scully slammed down the phone.  She knew she should've taken
the woman out when she had the chance, even if it meant going back to
get her child.

It always comes back to Africa, she thought.  The ship, the origins of
the human species.  But where?  It was the biggest continent in the
world.

Her first thought was the discovery site of the ship and the artifact.
The Ivory Coast.  But the ship was already gone, and if they'd been
there to begin with, it would've been taken by the time she got there.
Where else?  She stared at the screens of data which eluded
explanation, and willed them to answer her.

A sudden knock at the door made her jump.  Without getting up, she
yelled, "Who is it?"

"Reception desk.  You have a FAX?"

I do? she thought.  Scully looked through the peephole, recognized the
mustached Indian man who'd checked them in.

"Thanks," she said wonderingly, and took the proffered paper.

It was typed, and read only, "HURRY."


--

If he'd had any of his old sense still, Krycek would've left the
island.  The problem was that now he really had nowhere to go and
nothing to do.  He was afraid to return to the houseboat, but all his
cash was there.

For a world-traveling double-agent, he was something of a creature of
habit, and one of the habits he'd developed over time was to watch
Mulder and Scully.  At first it had just been an assignment: watch
them up close, then from afar.  After awhile, when the assignments
dried up and became more inconsistent, surveying them became something
close to a hobby.  Other people would come home from a hard day's
work, crack open a beer and watch the sitcoms.  He'd observe them and
take notes.

Now none of his professional contacts could be reached, all the
facilities were in ashes, and his old house had been repossessed by
the enemy.  There was nothing left to do but lie low, keep quiet, and
keep watch.

He just wished that Scully would change clothes in front of the window
more often.


--

Mulder's face was slick with sweat when he pounded back to the motel.
It was a quiet night, the buzz of the neon "Seabre ze Motel" sign
(with the "e" burnt out) was the only sound to be heard over the
distant waves.  No cars, no pedestrians, a late Sunday night on the
Cape when the tourists have gone home and the locals have gone to bed.
He remembered how much he hated those nights as a kid -- the tourists
brought the outside world with them, and when they left he was
shuttered again by family drama and the rhythms of island life.  The
first thing that had attracted him to the FBI was, he had to admit,
all the travel.

Scully's light was still on, as it had been all the night before.
He'd knocked quietly sometime around three in the morning yesterday
and there had been no answer; when he'd peeked through her curtains he
had seen her outline at the desk, slumped over.  It had been a
terrific effort not to get the proprietor to open her room so he could
put her to bed, but a stiff morning neck was hardly a medical
emergency, and they'd done a good job thus far not attracting any
attention.

This evening, the wind had picked up, and in the distance he heard the
dull thud of the masts of two adjacent sailboats colliding in the
sudden waves.

"Hey," Scully said when she opened her door.  She looked a little
better than when he'd left her, like she'd showered, but the color
under her eyes was still bruised-purple.

"Hi."  He sat down on the stiff fabric of the side chair, wiping his
forehead on his sleeve.

"Good run?"

"Sure."

Mulder studied the framed pastel sunset over her bed very intently.

"Hey," she repeated.  He turned to look at her, and she sighed.  She
was holding a sheet of paper with a single typed word printed on it.
He read it and shivered.  She noticed.

"I think," she started.  "I think that if I don't find what I'm
looking for very, very soon, we're going to have a problem."

And she told him, hesitantly at first, about her life for the last few
months.  "It started with C.G.B. Spender telling me to go with him,"
she began, and explained in detail what had happened with Krycek, the
cancer incidents in New Jersey, Skinner's involvement and her
suspicions about his disappearance, and Marita's description of the
Consortium or the Syndicate or the Organization or whichever word they
were capitalizing these days.  She described what the researcher in
Indiana had told her, that Krycek had given over the laptop and even
encouraged her to work on it ("Perhaps a bad man can sometimes do the
right thing").  She told him everything up through today, about the
phone call yesterday and the mysterious FAX, that she had no choice
but to believe them, that it was really happening now and their only
hope to go on was to make it to this rendezvous site, to save
themselves and whoever they could bring along.

Mulder said nothing, listened to it all while the air conditioning
blew his face cold and dry.  Finally, he said, "Tell me again why you
want to go to Africa."

Whatever she'd been expecting him to say, this obviously wasn't it.
Her expression was sour and somehow desperate at the same time.
"Because-- because that's the only place that will be safe."

"Safe?  You want to spend the rest of your life in some containment
facility watching the Earth burn?"

"But--"

He stood.  "Forget it, Scully.  The end of the world?  I've seen that.
I've seen it in my dreams and in my nightmares.  Fight, or be resigned
to my fate -- I already made that choice, and you helped me make it."

"I--"

"My father, the man who raised me anyway, did some pretty horrific
shit in his career, but I know now that he did it with the intention
of resisting to save us all.  I can't forgive his methods, but I can
honor his cause and I will not passively go to the hiding hole these
men in power have been building for fifty years."

Scully grabbed a handful of papers in front of her and shook them.
"What about these?  What else are we supposed to do?  Go back to the
FBI?  Do you think they're ever going to reinstate us?"  She laughed
as if she might shatter.  "I've been threatening for years to go back
to my old life, 'be a doctor.'  Do you think I could do that now,
after what I've seen and what I've lost?  I wouldn't know the first
thing about being a regular person much less a doctor."

Mulder had risen, crossed over to her and began repeating a quiet
"shh" sound.  "It's okay," he said when he reached her.  He squatted
down beside her and laid his hand on her leg.  "Scully, shh.  You're
right.  We have to find it.  Our options have been narrowed down to
this.  But I'm not going to become one of the Chosen Ones.  I don't
want to be a slave.  I want to stop them, not join them."

Her eyes filled up yet not with joy.  She searched his face.  "You
obviously haven't been living with this for as long as I have.  How
can we succeed where hundreds of other people have failed?"

"First," he touched her arm, "I've been living with this for years,
remember?"  She nodded, and broached a small smile.  "And second, I
don't know.  I think it's important to try."

She wasn't crying, but she let out an enormous sniffle.  "And besides,
what else are we going to do?"

He leaned to one side and kissed the back of her hand as it rested on
the arm of the chair. "Right."




Mulder took the second shift while she slept at last.  It was slow
going, reconstructing her thoughts all the way back from Africa.  He
read her notes, which began as meticulous scientific details she'd
recorded but gradually slid into journal-like musings.  Some of them
were addressed to him; he read those quickly, not sure if that was an
invasion of her privacy.

There was just so much data to go over: the genetic instructions, the
copies of religious texts, the prophesies about the future.  Scully
had sensibly concentrated her recent efforts on the latter, looking
for the location of the meeting point as a consequence of the
apocalyptic predictions, and Mulder began there at first.  After a few
hours he realized he was only retracing her work, and that wasn't how
the two of them solved anything.  So he went in completely the
opposite direction.

"In the beginning," the ship read, one translation of the text at the
center point of the circular craft.  Messages, mostly half-translated
fragments, spiraled outward from there.

The beginning of mankind was Africa, but that was far from narrowing
things down.  Where?  He rifled through the papers on the desk looking
for some kind of map.

"Here," Scully's sleepy voice said.  She was standing behind him
suddenly, and pulled a folded paper out beneath the pile.

"How'd you know what I was looking for?"

"You were mumbling to yourself."  She opened the paper and then
mumbled, "No, data from the bee."  She put it aside and leaned over
him to look through more papers.

"No, hang on."  Mulder pulled the bee data out again and looked at it.
They had only ever investigated the research facilities in the U.S.,
and something had given him a bizarre idea. "Is there some kind of
atlas on this computer?"

"Sure, here, scoot over."  Scully sat beside him on a sliver of the
desk chair and began opening windows at lightning speed.  When she was
done, she turned the computer towards him.

Mulder poked at the atlas software for a minute until he found what he
wanted.  A window dropped down with two fields to fill out.  With
Chuck's output balanced on his knee, he did some quick data entry,
then re-centered the map with Africa as the focal point.

Unlike a paper map which de-emphasizes the polar regions and often
even the oceans, the computer flatted the whole Earth in exact
proportions.  North America shrunk to almost nothing; the Pacific
seemed to be the entirety of the planet.

He tapped another key, and the points he'd entered lit up in red.
Thousands of them, scattered haphazardly but concentrated along the
eastern coasts of North and South America, southern Europe and Western
Asia.  Mulder frowned; there were thousands in Africa alone.

"Well, I'm sure it would've been a coincidence anyway.  It's not like
they'd happen to have a research lab in the location they've been
searching for since 1947."  He looked over his shoulder for Scully's
reaction, but she was staring intently at the map.

"When do you think the African ship landed?" she asked.

"I don't know.  We know from Dallas that there's been a presence here
since at least 25,000 years ago."

"What if it were older than that?"

Mulder frowned.  "I don't follow."

"What if they first came here hundreds of millions of years ago?"

"So?"

"Well, if that were true, the Earth," she waved at the screen,
"wouldn't have looked like that, would it?"

He blinked.  "Continental drift."

"200 million years ago the Earth was a single continent called
Pangaea.  That's what anyone would have faced if they landed here that
long ago."  She dug her elbow into his side.  "Move over, let me see
something."

He did, not taking his eyes off the screen.  She dragged the mouse
pointer around the perimeter of the continents.  Cut, paste, drag.  In
a few minutes, she'd crudely re-stapled the land masses of the Earth
into their original configurations.

They could see already that there was something there.  The scattered
points had evened out and lined up in jagged, concentric rings around
a center area, but that region was still enormous -- it enclosed a
dozen research facilities over thousands of miles of African
geography.

"Not done yet," she said.  From the menu she selected "Show Routes",
which she explained was designed to draw navigational lines between
points.  Green lines between the points appeared, which wound around
natural features in the relief map such as mountains and lakes.  A few
more options to ignore geographic barriers, connect lines only to
nearest neighbors (avoiding a spiderweb pattern as every point
connected to every other point), and finally, "Normalize," which took
the whole mess of unevenly-spaced points and made them even, dropping
a few into the water but generally still conforming to the rough
Pangea map.

"I didn't think it was really going to work," Scully said in
amazement.

There on the monitor in glowing red and green was an almost exact
representation of the familiar outward-expanding triangles found on
the ship.  Mulder would recognize it anywhere.  He'd seen it in his
dreams, built of sand.

Scully's hand was shaking when she clicked "Zoom."  The map rocketed
forward towards its centermost point, and stopped fifty percent
bigger.  They could see with total clarity now the single glowing red
dot at the center of converging green lines.

It was a research facility in southeast Tunisia, near the city of
Tataouine.




Thirty thousand feet in the air and three hours from Houmt Souk,
Scully had a dream.  When she awoke, she only remembered the ending
and that it had been very complicated up until that point.

At first, she was just a disembodied presence, not an actor in the
events.  A group of tired commuters were standing in line on a moving
train, waiting for the next station.  The sallow lighting flickered on
and off as they traveled, and occasionally the car jostled them into
the neighboring seats.  They would get up, apologize to the passengers
they'd fallen into, and resume standing.

Then she was suddenly there, standing among them. Behind her, the
metal door connecting the cabins slid open.  Air from the open space
between the cars swirled around her legs, and she thought that it
should've been hot because of the season, but instead it was icy cold.

A train conductor in a navy uniform stepped into the car and announced
that the next stop was Capetown.  Scully began to panic, because they
were supposed to be going to Tunisia but South Africa meant they'd
gone much too far.  She'd known all along that the conductor would
never announce her stop like she'd been promised.  She grabbed him by
the arm and demanded an explanation, but instead of responding in
anger, he gently took her hand.

"The cat is both dead and alive," he said in an unfamiliar accent, and
pointed out the window of the train.

She turned to look, and saw the whitewashed turrets and green lapping
waves of the port city of Houmt Souk.  It was coming upon her swiftly,
and from far below.  She jumped in her seat when she realized she was
awake and watching as the plane came in to land.

Mulder's hand was around hers, and he squeezed it gently.  "Did you
hear me?"

She scanned his face quickly for some clue as to the current topic.
"No, I'm sorry."

The landing gear thudded against the tarmac and the aircraft bounced
lightly.  A few people from the back applauded.

"I asked if you remembered where we were staying."

"Oh, no.  It's on the itinerary."

"Is that in your bag or mine?"

"Mine."

"Okay."

The plane came to a shuddering halt.  "Mulder, what do you know about
Shroedinger's Cat?"

He looked up from the airline's magazine.  "The Charlie Brown
character?"

"No, I believe that was Shroeder," she laughed.  "Shroedinger's Cat,
it's a theoretical model used to describe Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle."

He flipped over the in-flight reading and glanced at the cover.  "This
wasn't in my issue."  He could see she was at least slightly serious
and half-smiled.  "I've heard of it, but I forget.  Explain it to me."

"You have a box," she drew with her hands, "and inside it is a cat.
And there's a device inside the box that may at any point kill the
cat.  But you don't know if the cat is alive or dead unless you open
the box."

"Does PETA know about this?"

"So the question is, until you open the box, is the cat alive or
dead?"

"Is this like, 'If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there
to hear it...'?"

"Kind of.  So is the cat alive or dead?"

Mulder frowned.  "You know, I vividly remember explaining this at high
volume and with great seriousness in an Oxford pub once.  I was
convinced it held the secret to the universe or something."  She was
still waiting for his answer.  "Um, none of the above?"

She sighed patiently.  "Schroedinger's answer was that the cat is both
alive and dead at the same time.  That both states, cat-alive and
cat-dead, exist until we observe the cat and fix it into one of those
states."

He looked at her closely.  "Scully, what's your point?"

"I don't have one," she said.  "Not really.  It just came up in a
dream."

"You dream about quantum physics?  You are such a nerd."  She laughed,
and then subsided when she saw his serious expression.  "I find it
fascinating, Scully, that the ultimate rationalist would expound upon
a theory in which the power of observation had such a profound effect
on the real world.  Do you really believe that an infinite number of
possibilities exist in the universe and only our choices make them
real?"

"Mulder, observation is only one of the central tenets of science, not
the singular definition.  Besides, the model is entirely theoretical
and used to describe the behavior of subatomic particles, not as a
shortcut for changing the very fabric of the universe."

He raised a finger.  "Ah, but what if you had the ability to do just
that?  Observe a state in the universe and make it real, just by the
strength of your belief?"

Scully paused.  "Then I suppose you would be God."

Everyone around them was standing, waiting to deplane.  Mulder helped
her out of her seat and hesitated briefly.  "Okay," he said.  "My
first choice as God is to make our luggage exist."


--

It was a long drive to Tataouine and, even in a hired car, not a
comfortable one.  They passed mostly overstuffed four-wheel-drive
vehicles and tourist busses on the roughly-paved two-lane highway,
through rocky low desert hills and small rural villages.

As they approached the city, the architecture changed and the tourist
density increased.  The hills became covered in small, rounded
pueblo-like clay dwellings.  They were surprised to learn that these
thousand-year-old enclosures were still occupied.  At their densest,
they looked like honeycombs, populated by bee-sized humans in colorful
dress.

Tataouine itself was a modern city with architecture unusually drab
for an Islamic nation.  Most of the buildings were seventies-style
steel and concrete blocks.  There was not much of a nightlife to speak
of, although Mulder noted with interest the rows of telescopes and
children milling about in an open space just outside the city.

"Astronomic night watch," the driver explained.  Mulder craned his
head out the window and looked up, marveling at the number of stars.

The hotel was expensive and populated almost entirely by European
tourists.  "What is there to see around here?" he asked the desk clerk
as he filled out the required form.

The clerk only stared at him but an older man came out from a hidden
office and answered.  "You must see Chenini."

"Where's that?" Mulder asked.  He was trying to remember his passport
number because the actual item was his bag, spirited away by Scully.

"Very close.  Many people come to see the Mosque of the Seven
Sleepers."

He scribbled something unintelligible next to "Passport Number" and
handed the forms back to the clerk. "Okay, we'll check that out."  The
clerk looked at him strangely, and then filed the papers.

Upstairs in their room, Scully had already set up camp on the floor in
the absence of a desk.  She didn't look up when he entered but said,
"We're going to need a better map, one with latitude and longitude.
That red dot fills up the entire city on this one."

"Okay."

He'd only asked for one room and she hadn't commented.  She acted as
if she hadn't even noticed.  He had done it without thinking and
without a clear motivation (not even the obvious one), so he said
nothing about it -- just quietly changed clothes and went to sleep,
fading off to the sound of her typing and the quiet shuffle of papers.




Mulder got up early and found the map for her.  He was afraid that if
he didn't, she'd go out by herself, and while Tunisia was one of the
more liberal Islamic countries, the agents were in something of a
backwater and he wasn't sure how the locals would take to a fiery
red-head stamping around asking for directions.  He also brought back
some unidentifiable sweet things made with honey and a copy of the New
York Times.

She was still asleep when he returned, with the single thin bed sheet
tangled around her ankles.  Late morning light was streaming through
the honeycomb- patterned shutters and the shouting and car horns from
the street were much louder than when he had awoken.  He put the
purchases down on the wobbly mosaic- topped side table and sat on the
edge of the bed, watching her and thinking about nothing.

After a moment, bits of the last night's dream came back to him, but
they were confused and jumbled.  He was on the beach again, with the
sandcastle ship.  There was a young boy with him but not the same one
as in his earlier dreams.  This boy was dark-haired and sullen, and he
stood some distance away from Mulder and the ship, just observing.
Mulder remembered talking to the boy but not what was said, and then
clearly recalled his horror as the dark-haired boy became angry and
started kicking at the ship to break it apart.  Then a man was there,
as if he'd always been there, and he was telling Mulder that it didn't
matter because look, the ocean waves were washing over the ship and in
their wake it was rebuilt, not swept away.  Mulder and the man spoke
some more, but he couldn't remember their words or even the shape of
the man's face, which seemed indistinct.  He could only recall the
last words he heard, just before he awoke, and it was a question he
didn't understand: "What will you do when your life is your own?"

Scully had begun to stir, and he leaned down on one elbow to watch
her.  Their faces were inches apart when she opened her eyes, and she
didn't look surprised or even blink.  "Are you ready?" she asked.

For what? he thought, but he knew she didn't know either.  "Yes," he
said.

"Me too."  She looked ready to say more, but instead reached forward
and brushed some stray hair back behind his ears.  She sniffed the air
suddenly.  "Do I smell breakfast?"


--

There were no surprises to be found at the research facility.  In a
tiny but burgeoning industrial neighborhood of Western-style office
buildings at the heart of the "new" city, there was one small compound
that was empty on all floors.  It was deserted, but there was no "for
lease"-like sign, no graffiti, no broken windows.  It looked as if the
three-story building had simply vanished from notice.

"Is the building alive or dead?" Scully asked, shading her eyes and
putting her nose to the glass windows.

Mulder was pacing back and forth past the front door.  "It depends on
what you believe."  With a short glance behind him, he reached into
his pocket and removed a pick set.  "For example," he continued
conversationally, "it would seem that they want us to believe that
this office is empty."  After a moment of deliberately jiggling, the
simple lock turned.  "However, I believe that this office is not."  He
opened the door and turned on his flashlight, and while playing it
across the empty walls and ceilings festooned with dangling cables,
asked, "Scully, what do you believe?"

She had stepped in behind him and closed the door.  "I believe you
might have something there."  She nodded towards the "Emergency" exit,
which lead to a descending staircase.

They proceeded down slowly, noting the immediate change from
half-assed office construction to an almost total lack of drywall or
even consistent flooring.  The first level down was nothing more than
a human-sized crawlspace, with unpleasantly-exposed piping and
alarmingly-exposed electrical wiring.  Consistent with the climate, it
was arid and airless rather than dank, but still not a place one would
want to spend a considerable amount of time.

They circled the perimeter of the area and met back at the stairs, and
while the flashlights didn't illuminate much they make it clear there
was little to see in the largely open room.  "Should we try upstairs?"
Scully asked.

Mulder was frowning.  "How big did you think this building was from
the outside?"

She realized his point immediately.  "You mean, the way it's pretty
clear that this isn't the entire area of the first floor?"

"Right."  The staircase had been almost halfway into the depth of the
building, but at the basement level it ran right along the wall.
Mulder panned the flashlight back and forth across the obstruction.

"There," Scully pointed.  There was a nearly invisible seam running
down the wall and hidden alongside a supporting beam.  She swung her
own light to the left, and found the matching joint against the
adjacent beam.  The pair were connected across the top just near the
ceiling: it was a very well-hidden door.

Mulder handed his flashlight over and pushed against the right side.
The wall gave, pivoting at a central point like a revolving door.  "I
think I saw this in Scooby Doo once," he said, and then jumped back.

Scully felt it too -- a cool breeze that smelled of metal.  They
stepped through the doorway and into a small landing with a
steel-grating floor and stark-white walls.  The floor broke out into a
metal staircase leading down.  The landing area was still dark, but
they could see a soft glow of light from below.  The effect was one of
walking into a whole different building.

Mulder ran the flashlight everywhere: across the walls, over the
finished ceiling, down the handrail.  "Doesn't look like your average
staircase in Tataouine," he said quietly.

"And this is just the foyer." Scully looked down through the grating,
trying to see the floor beyond.  "You first," she suggested.

Mulder nodded as if it hadn't been a small joke and stepped forward.
His movements were slow: heel to toe to make the least sound on the
metal flooring.  When he'd gone four paces to the steps, he grasped
the handrail and shut off his flashlight.  Scully followed suit.

She tried to believe that the light from below seemed strange only
because they were nervous; the area was otherwise so dark and they
were clearly entering a place they were not supposed to be.  She
couldn't shake the feeling, though, that the soft but white, white
light was unnatural -- not the relative warmth of incandescent, not
the flickering, high-frequency blue-white of fluorescent.  It seemed
bright down there but the light traveled strangely, where they could
neither see what was below nor did the light filter naturally up to
illuminate them.  She concentrated on Mulder's shape ahead of her, his
confident but careful steps downward.  After a minute, she
compulsively put her hand on his shoulder and he slowed only for an
instant.

Finally, the strangeness of the light gave way to a clear view of the
room below, like passing through a cloud mid-air but without having
ever seen its wispy edges.  The stairs had led down well over two
floors to a non-descript room surrounded by the same white walls, the
same metal flooring, and the same indistinct white illumination from
below.  In fact, there were no visible lights in the medium-sized room
at all, nothing but a doorway at the end opposite the stairs.

Scully was thinking not of how strange their surrounding were, but how
impossibly quiet.  She could hear Mulder's breathing from several
yards ahead.  He was close enough to see through the narrow doorway,
and had extended his hand behind him, palm flattened, to signal her to
stop.  After a minute, he turned his hand and gestured for her to
approach.

The second room was exactly like the first, except that there were no
stairs and one wall had been sectioned off into a row of cells.  Each
cell contained a white bench, a white sink and a white toilet.  There
was no obvious gate or bars; the cells appeared to be open to the
room.

Six in all, and all were empty, save the third one, in which sat a
small, elderly, bespectacled man with little hair.  He rose when they
entered.

"Agents Mulder and Scully," the man said.  His voice had a faint
Northern European accent yet his English was crisp.

Neither of them had quite drawn their weapons, but they were a
hair-trigger away from it.  "Who are you?" Mulder asked.

"I was a member of what you would call the enemy, until I recently
fell into disfavor.  My name is Hans."

"What is this place?" Scully asked.

"This place?"  He pointed to the walls of his cell.  "This is now just
a jail.  The building was originally a facility for use by our group
to conduct agricultural research."

"In the desert?"

He smiled, a somewhat unpleasant expression as it caused his lips to
disappear.  "I believe you have encountered one of our desert
agricultural projects before."

She glanced at Mulder, and his expression of disappointment could have
been amusing.  "More corn?" he asked.

"Indeed," the man responded.  "However, as you can see, this research
facility is no longer being used for its intended purpose."

"Why was it closed?"

"Why were they all closed?  In preparation for the fulfillment of the
timetable.  Sadly, our work has turned out to be in vain, as the final
piece of information needed has gone missing."

The agents could not help but look at each other in confusion.  The
final piece of information, they thought, was the location described
by the ship, which was where they were standing.  What were the odds
that the Consortium would build one of its own sites atop the secret
location entirely by accident?

It seemed unsafe to ask any questions so they said nothing.  The man
continued.  "Not that it mattered to me either way, since I remain
here."

"How is it that you fell out of 'favor'?" Mulder asked.

"The same way that you did, I suspect.  By not following the plan."

"And your duty was?"

"To oversee the agricultural work both here and abroad.  I would meet
with representatives from the participating nations and go over their
pollination procedures and growth reports, suggest ways to improve the
hybrids."

Mulder looked thunderstruck.  "The alien-human hybrids?"

The man stared at him and then laughed openly.  "No, hybrids of corn.
But that's very funny, you know."  He peered at him closely.  "She was
right, you would've been an enormous asset to us."

"Who?" Mulder snapped.

"Diana Fowley.  She was the United States representative for the
distribution effort."

Scully winced, both for the sake of her partner and at the
"distribution" euphemism.  The man was talking about spreading the
virus designed to end the world.

Mulder, for his part, looked stoic.  "Is there anything else in this
facility?"

"It had been emptied by the time I was brought here, and I have to say
that no one's been by in awhile."  He looked around his cell, which
was spotless.  "I must admit I was wondering if I would starve before
the end came."

"How long has it been since someone came?" Scully asked.

"Four days.  I'd been saving some of my meals in case this very thing
happened, but I'm nearly at the end of those."

"Mulder," Scully said quietly, "whatever this man has done, we can't
just leave--"

"I agree," he said, although he didn't seem happy with the logic.
Then again, neither was she.

She turned back to the prisoner.  "How do we get you out?"

"It's a force-field," he answered.  "I presume you've encountered one
of these before?"  She nodded reluctantly.  "This one is specially
configured.  Passing through with an implanted chip will temporarily
disable the field; I will be able to leave if you enter first."

Mulder jumped all over this.  "How do we know you're telling the
truth, that Scully won't be trapped inside with you?"

"As you should know, non-living objects can pass through effortlessly.
If I did something to suggest harm, you could shoot me right from
where you stand."

Scully was frowning.  "How did you know that I--"

She never got to ask her question -- they all heard the footsteps from
the entrance room and the sudden unhealthy wheeze of breath.

C.G.B. Spender, who could be said to have seen better days, stood in
the doorway.  His eyes were fixed on the man in the cell but he
addressed the agents.  "What has he told you?"

Mulder was likely frozen with repressed rage; Scully answered instead.
"That he opposed your plan to aid the colonists and has been
imprisoned for it."

Spender made a hissing noise which she eventually realized was bitter
laughter.  "You have believed some ridiculous lies, but that is by far
the most humorous."  He stepped into the room and moved towards the
cells.  "Do you have any idea who this man is?"

The agents said nothing.  The man in the cell was also silent.

"His real name," Spender said as he passed the first cell, "is
Strughold.  Before the Project, he was a wealthy German mining
entrepreneur."

The prisoner tore his eyes away from Spender with obvious difficulty
and fixed them on Scully.  She in turn found it difficult to look
away.

"It is likely that much of his original holdings came from property
stolen by the Nazis, but his family was clever and resourceful enough
to hide that fact after the war.  When he was a young man in the
1950's, he was already known to be quite rich."  He passed the second
cell.  "What was not known is that one of his mines had then just
uncovered a deposit of a strange black oil, found in association with
a large crushed metal object of unknown manufacture.  Strangest of
all, these findings were in a deposit of rock known to be over one
hundred million years old."

He stopped in front of the prisoner's cell, placing himself between
the older man and Scully.  "These findings attracted the attention of
a number of men in high places who knew of similar discoveries around
the world.  These men formed a coalition, a consortium if you will, to
safeguard these findings and finance research into what they might
mean."  Spender lit a cigarette casually.  "I think everyone in this
room is by now quite familiar with what those findings turned out to
mean."

"Save it, Spender," Mulder said.  His voice was tired and he hadn't
bothered to draw his gun.

Spender sighed.  "You're never happy when I give you what you want,
Fox.  I give you cures for diseases, you put a gun in my face; I give
you answers, you tell me to shut up."

"Why are you here?" Scully said to Spender.  She was genuinely
curious.

The man's crevassed face lit up grotesquely.  "Ah, Dana.  I am so
happy to see you again.  But I'm afraid the circumstances are less --
optimistic than they were last.  A beautiful woman in a beautiful
dress was almost enough to convince me that humanity was worth saving.
Almost.  But you spend any amount of time listening in to the thoughts
of your fellow man and you realize that is fanciful nonsense."  He
glanced at Mulder.  "Surely you understand.  Oh, except it was a bit
overwhelming for you.  It's a bit overwhelming for me, as well.
Fortunately, there won't be much of fellow man around soon."

Scully was trying to follow his elliptical speech to reach some kind
of conclusion.  "You did something to Mulder to remove his ability to
hear thoughts."

"That's one way of looking at it.  Another way would be to say he did
something to me."

"And the disk?  You didn't give me the real disk, but you didn't give
it to the Consortium, either.  You let them believe that I had it."

"As usual, you are correct.  I gave it to that lake, as it so
happens."

She imagined all those who could've been saved, and the cure
disappearing into murky waters.  "Why?" she asked.

Spender dropped his cigarette on the grated floor; it disappeared into
the light below, still lit.  "Agent Scully, everyone I have ever cared
about is dead."  He laughed to himself.  "I suppose that includes me,
as well.  What would I gain from saving the rest of these miserable
people?"

"Why should you have to gain anything?  Why do it for the sake of
yourself?"

Spender continued his slow approach.  Scully felt unable to do
anything about it, perhaps because she was perversely interested in
his response.  "Even you, Dana, are not that altruistic.  You want me
to believe that you're thinking of the entire world but I see the
images in your mind -- your family, your friends, Mulder.  These are
the people who concern you.  These are the people you want to save,
not the untold billions."

Scully took a step towards the old man's cell.  "If you want to fault
me for being unable to think of six billion people at once, go ahead.
But I do want to save them as well.  Maybe you only see what you want
to see."

Mulder, she thought, help me.

"He won't help you and you won't help yourself," Spender said calmly.
He was standing just in front of the third cell, barely an arm's reach
from Scully or from the old man, who had not moved or spoken.
"Because you understand on some level the truth, about the plan, about
Strughold.  You were right all along to oppose us.  Our goal was to
save lives, to maintain some control when the inevitable colonization
began.  But after all you've seen, you must realize the only true
freedom is to choose to accept our fate."  He stepped sideways into
the cell, and as before there was nothing to indicate he had passed
through a barrier.  "There can be no more interference from those who
would attempt to save us."

From his jacket, Spender produced a short switchblade-like tool, and
in the instant of her stunned paralysis he leapt forward, grabbed an
unresisting Strughold around the neck, and stabbed.

At the very same moment, a shot rang out.

"Mulder!" Scully screamed, but he had neither fired nor been fired
upon.  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Spender and
Strughold both crumpling to the floor, but her gaze was fixed on the
new figure in the doorway.

Krycek was lowering his gun, his firing hand balanced on his
prosthetic and his expression stricken.  "He was one of our own," he
said sadly.

Mulder asked, "Who?"

"Strughold," Krycek said, and all three turned to see the old man,
scrabbling across the grating with an ice pick protruding from his
neck.  It wobbling sickeningly as he moved, and the fluid that was
left behind as he crawled was green, not red.

"But he's an alien," Mulder said.

"He was a rebel," Krycek answered as he stepped towards them.  "And
yet the leader of the collaborators.  That was the only reason we had
ever had a chance."

When Strughold passed the threshold of his cell, one arm shot up.
Scully reached forward without thinking and grasped his hand, only to
have Krycek shove the arm aside.  "God dammit, Scully, he's toxic,"
Krycek swore.

Indeed, her hand was stinging a bit.  The sensation was not quite
unpleasant and had started to fade already.  Krycek was flexing his
palm as well, as if he felt the same thing.
 
She knelt down beside Strughold, who hadn't moved.  His chest was not
rising and falling.  He was still and he hadn't spoken a word.
 
"He's dead," Scully said.



___________________________________________

                     VIII

 "Quoyle looked at his boat.  The timbers 
  were the real stuff of it, he thought, 
  mistaking the fact for the idea.  For 
  the boat had existed in Yark's mind 
  for months."

  -- E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News


___________________________________________



The events at the research facility had taken a great deal out of
them.  It had even obliterated an old desire for revenge.  Krycek sat
with the agents at the small round table in the hotel bar as casually
as an old friend, but while there was no open hostility there was no
amiability either.  Mulder could tell they all felt drained, empty.

Yet they were playing an impromptu game.  Each of them would start a
new topic with the phrase, "But what I don't understand is."  It was
Scully's turn.  "But what I don't understand is how you got here if
only I had the laptop."

Krycek was shaking his head.  "All I did was follow you from the
Vineyard.  I had some help figuring out where your connecting flights
were, I still have a few of those kinds of friends.  But in terms of
final destination, you could've been flying to China for all I knew."
He crumpled up an unused napkin.  "What I don't understand is why
there would be an existing research facility at this point for which
they have looked so hard."

"All of the sites of the research labs appear to have been determined
some time ago," Mulder said.  He considered adding that they'd likely
been determined back when the real estate market was pretty much tied
up by the dinosaurs, but thought better of it.  He didn't have an
explanation for that anyway.  Instead he added, "It seems as if the
human collaborators weren't communicating well enough with their alien
friends."

"What I don't understand," Scully said, and her voice was suddenly
hard, "is if the collaborators were headed up by a rebel, why any of
it -- the experiments, the secrets -- needed to happen at all."

"Don't you get it?" Krycek snorted.  "It was better for everyone: us
and the invaders.  If we hadn't negotiated deals with the colonists
back in the 40's, we would probably all be dead now.  But so would a
lot of colonists, and a full- scale invasion would bring in the rebel
faction.  We'd have an alien war on our turf and we would lose either
way.  Collaborating with the humans allowed the aliens to proceed with
a 'peaceful' takeover at the cost of maybe a few decades.  And I doubt
that means shit on their timescale."

"So now what?" Mulder said.

Krycek laughed.  "Now nothing.  If the colonists weren't coming any
minute before, they sure will now.  With Strughold dead, the remaining
rebels will flee.  Some of the smarter ones might go right back to the
womb and tell the colonists they repent now that their leader is
dead."  He raised his glass of whiskey, which he hadn't touched.
"Drink.  Relax.  See the town."

Mulder was looking down at the table but could see Scully sitting
immobile to his right.  "I'd like to see this mosque the guy at the
desk was talking about," he suggested faintly.

"Hmm?" Krycek asked.

"The Mosque of the Seven Sleepers, I think he called it.  But he
didn't say where it was."  Mulder leaned back and signaled to the
bartender.  Through a complicated series of gestures and loud English
words, he attempted to describe the man who had helped him at the
desk, but decided he'd communicated wrong because the bartender
insisted that no such man worked there.  "I guess I'll pick up a
guidebook," he sighed.

"I have to go," Scully said suddenly, standing up.  Krycek and Mulder
stood up awkwardly in response.  "I'm exhausted," she explained.

Mulder guided her out of her chair.  "Do you want me to come up now?"
he whispered.

"No, I think I need some time alone.  But I'm okay, really."  She did
look tired.

"Okay.  I'll see you later."  Mulder added a small hesitant wave;
Krycek was already seated again.  Scully nodded a little and backed
away as if she wasn't quite sure she wanted to leave yet.  Then she
nodded more forcefully, turned, and passed out of sight behind a
free-standing screen.  Mulder lowered himself into his seat and found
himself unable to look his tablemate in the eye.

Krycek was smoothing out his napkin and precisely aligning it with the
edge of his table.  He didn't look up either.  "But what I don't
understand," he said after a full minute's fidgeting, "is why you
haven't made me buy you a drink."

There was a lot to that statement, Mulder understood.  It was an
apology, of sorts, and yet a refusal to accept that an apology was in
order.  Krycek believed that he'd done what had needed to be done,
that Mulder and Scully had been, for the most part, naive little shits
who had served only to get in his way.  That the things he'd done to
them could've been avoided as much by them as by him, that if it
hadn't been him, it would've been some other thug, and what he could
really only ever be sorry for was that it _was_ him.  But he couldn't
even be sorry for that, because when he'd had the choice for it to not
be him, he'd always refused that choice, because there was too much at
stake to ever, ever trust anyone else to do it right.  When other
people did his jobs, they shot Melissa Scully instead of Dana Scully,
and somehow Krycek could be sorry both that Scully's sister was dead
because Scully had loved her, and sorry that he'd failed to kill
Scully in the first place because that had been his job.  He was sorry
that he hadn't destroyed them and yet sorry that he'd hurt them so
they could never trust him.

Some of this he saw in the way Krycek ran his good hand over the
napkin again and again, trying to smooth out the creases but never
returning it to its unblemished state.  Most of it, Mulder admitted to
himself, he'd been thinking over for years, wondering what he would
say if he had a minute with Krycek where he wasn't consumed with rage.

Tonight, he found himself ordering a vodka and tonic, and he and
Krycek drank slowly together and said nothing else.


--

Scully sat on a small rounded cushion near the window, inhaling the
jasmine- scented air, and stared at the wall.  There was light from
the street below and it shone up into the room, filtered through the
pattern in the closed shutters.  Steady star-like patterns were cast
against the wall unless a car passed by, in which case the headlights
caused the stars to jump to one side, move swiftly up and over the
desk and climb the wall, until they neared the ceiling and abruptly
disappeared.

She put her hand up when the next car passed, casting a large
hand-shaped pattern on the wall which remained still as the stars
swept under it.

"I'm sorry," a male voice said, and she jumped in her seat.  "--for
scaring you," he finished.

"Who are you?" she asked with alarm.

"Please call me Hans," the disembodied voice answered.  "Strughold
I've always found to be an ugly name."

"Where are you?"  She rose, but found herself unwilling to step
forward.  "I can't see you."

"You're not ready to see me yet, but you will be soon enough.  There
are some things you still need to understand."

"Like what?  Why you're not dead?"  She squinted into the darkness.

"Oh, little things.  Who we are, who you are, why we created you."

Scully scoffed.  "Created us?  You want me to believe you're God?"

"I should hope not!" he laughed.  "If I were, I would be on the wrong
side."

"Oh, so you're the devil?"

"Dana, I have a question and I hope you will indulge me by answering."

"I'll answer if I can see you."

The voice laughed again, gently.  "Certainly you do not need me to
tell you how to turn on a lamp?"

Scully could see no further into the room than the small nightstand
within arms' reach.  There was a wobbly table lamp with a cracked mica
shade on it, and she reached forward slowly, clicking the small dial
on the power cord.  The lamp obediently lit up.

Hans Strughold was indeed seated across the room near the door, his
legs planted wide and his hands firmly on each knee.  The lamplight
reflected off the frames of his glasses but she could clearly see his
smile, the slight rise in his eyebrows.  "Splendid," he said, as if
she'd just completed her schoolgirl piano recital.

"Why did you say I wasn't ready to see you yet?"

"That should be obvious enough.  You weren't ready to see me because
you hadn't turned on the light."

This struck her as one of those solipsistic Zen koans that was meant
to induce contemplation but more frequently irritated her ordered
mind.  "What are you doing in my room?" she asked.

"No, no," he reprimanded.  "My question now."  He lifted his hands,
laced his fingers, and extended them, eliciting an audible "crack".
"There's an old saying but I forget exactly how it goes.  It's
something like, 'History is written by the...'"  He gestured to her.

At the opposite end of the room, Scully answered faintly, "Winners?"

He snapped.  "Exactly!  And based on your work with the ship from
Africa, who would you say wrote the great religious texts of the
ancient and modern world?"

"I would be able to reach no such conclusion.  There is not enough
evidence to support--"

"Come, come, Dana.  The ship you yourself have claimed is hundreds of
millions of years old.  That certainly predates, say, Gilgamesh -- one
of the oldest written creation myths -- yet you found fragments from
that text in your translations of the ship."

"The age of the ship was pure speculation on my part," she protested.

"But it was substantiated by your findings related to the placement of
the research labs.  It would be highly unlikely that the circular,
concentric pattern you noted was due only to coincidence."  Scully
said nothing.  "Fine, so we've established that much.  We have a
scenario in which the once and future alien colonists are the authors
of both some specific human genetic code as well as of your
fundamental value systems.  That's a pretty serious contribution.

"Now let's look at those value systems.  Specifically, let's look at
yours.  Who are the three major players in Judeo-Christianity?"

Scully stared at him.  "God," she said flatly.

"Right, that's one."

"Humankind."

"That's two.  And I'll save you the guessing games -- the third is
Satan.  How do you define Satan?"

Scully swallowed and she could hear the dry click in her head.  "The
personification of evil."

In response, Strughold stood up and moved forward with considerable
speed and forcefulness. "No," he stated.  "It is much more fundamental
than that.  Satan is the embodiment of that which is not God."

"Because God is love and goodness," Scully said with no irony, "Satan
must therefore be evil."

He was practically looming over her.  "And how do you know that God is
love and goodness?"

"Because of the works that He has done."

A Bible had appeared in Strughold's hands.  Her Bible, in fact -- she
recognized the pattern of creases on the vinyl cover.  "Ah, yes," he
said, flipping through the onionskin pages.  "War, pestilence,
murder."  He stopped and shut the book with a hollow thud.  "It seems
to me that the only reason God is love and goodness is because He
claims to be so, in the text that you believe He wrote."

"I believe that the authors of those passages were inspired by Him,
not they speak the literal Word of God."

"Either way," he said, his voice incredulous, "essentially God is
'tooting his own horn,' as you might say.  You think that _I_ speak in
sophistry, how about an entity that defines itself?  And by defining
itself, it defines its not-self and characterizes the values of that
not-self as 'evil'."

"I see where you're going with this," Scully said sourly.  "The
colonists created my notion of God, defining Him as good, and you as a
rebel to their cause were written as Satan.  Except really you're just
misunderstood."

Strughold stepped back and sat on the edge of her bed.  "Well," he
said, "I guess you've saved us both some additional repartee.  I can't
say I'm not disappointed.  But yes, that is what I am proposing to
you."

"I refuse to accept the idea that the religions of the world are
merely the transcripts of a master plan by Mulder's little green men."

"Why?"

"Because there is more to the Bible than merely the assertion that God
is a positive force.  There are lessons of love, of faith, of healing,
of compassion.  I believe in God because of those messages, not
because someone has told me to believe in Him."
 
He considered this solemnly, then nodded.  "What you should realize
from your translation work is that the texts on the ship are anything
but the complete plan for a spiritual system.  Just as the snippets of
genetic code are not the complete instructions for building a human
being.  Instead, imagine the religious passages to be suggestions, a
gentle push in the right direction from millions of years ago."

"And which direction would be 'right'?"

"What traits would any conqueror want in his conquered people?
Conformity.  Suggestibility.  Fear.  Adam and Eve eat from the
forbidden Tree of Knowledge and who is behind the plan?  Satan.  Satan
encourages free thought, dissention, a value of the physical here and
now.  God demands obedience and a belief that the rewards come in the
next life, not this one.  These were the values implanted into the
human psyche to prepare the oppressed for the inevitable.  Likewise
with the genetic code, lying mostly dormant in the genome until the
time came for the alien virus to awaken it and turn every man, woman
and child on the planet into a vessel for the colonizing aliens."

Scully stood and looked down at the night-drenched street through the
shutters of her room.  "This is ridiculous," she said.  "You're
telling about world domination yet all of this applies only to one
religion out of thousands."

"I'm not talking about one religion -- I'm talking about _your_
religion.  If you were Hindu, or a Zoroastrian, or a Mayan priest,
we'd be having a different conversation."

She clapped the blinds shut suddenly.  "Why have any conversation?
The last few months of my life have been hell, with people popping up
out of nowhere, telling me the world's about to end, and then it never
happens, nothing."  She could hear herself yelling now but couldn't
stop it.  "I'm wrong, this is worse than hell.  It's limbo, and I'm
stuck running from place to place getting handed information that
people have died for, that I've killed for, and I don't understand
why.  Why?  Why don't you just end it?"

Strughold was gazing at her with undisguised sadness.  "We've been
waiting for you, Dana."

"I don't understand!" she screamed.

His figure was fading out, no, everything around her was fading out --
the room was becoming hazy and in its place she could see waves, and a
beach, and a deadly rise along the shore from which men were running.
She could still hear his voice clearly, though it sounded like it was
in her own head now.  "You were wrong to call it limbo.  There is no
state in between.  You are in both at once, Dana-alive and Dana-dead,
and the time has almost come for you to decide which it will be."

"Wait," she said, "you were going to tell me why you created me."

"If I'd had my choice, I would've created you for this," Mulder said.

Scully sat up in a panic, ripping herself out of his arms.  Light was
streaming into the room and she blinked back at the brightness, just
as if she'd been in near darkness minutes ago.  "What's going on?" she
said breathlessly.

Mulder looked up from the pillow, the crenellated bedsheet falling off
his chest as he turned to face her.  "You were having a nightmare.
It's okay, it's morning."  He glanced at the travel alarm on the floor
next to the bed.  "Almost afternoon."

"What happened last night?"  There was a question she hadn't needed to
ask since college.

"I came up a few hours after you, woke you up which I swear I didn't
mean to do, and we talked for a little while.  Then we went to sleep."
He paused and then continued solemnly, "But if you'd like I could make
up additional details."

She snorted.  "What did we talk about?"

Mulder frowned in obvious concentration.  "It's a little hazy, but I
think you were telling me about shipbuilding."

"Shipbuilding?"

He sat up next to her.  It was difficult not to notice that the
bedsheet had migrated further south.  "You said your dad had taught
you about how you find the right wood for a ship, how to waterproof it
and bend it into shape.  You said: 'You can't just cut down a tree and
expect it to sail.  It has to be prepared, weathered.  A tree isn't
born a ship.  It's made one.'"

Not for the first time, Scully looked skeptical.  "I said this?"

"You did.  And then you fell asleep sprawled sideways across the bed
and I had to shove you out of the way if I was ever getting a spot.
You don't remember any of this?"

She shook her head.  She was thinking of a young woman with serious
hair and bad suits, and an older woman with a clear conscience firing
at an unarmed psychopath.

"Who was at work in me?" she had asked.  Mulder had suggested God.

"What if it wasn't?" she'd answered.

Yet this morning, God was the destructor and Satan had been working to
save lives.

"Do you think we can get Turkish coffee in Tunisia?" she asked
curiously.


--

Sufficiently caffeinated, the agents (who had long since stopped
thinking of themselves in the capacity of their seemingly-distant
employment) roamed the outskirts of the city.  Tatouine was in the
south-central portion of the country, deep into the desert but still
along well-traveled roadways.  The original Berber name of the city
meant "mouth of the springs," but Mulder saw nothing but rocky desert
scrub and overburdened roadways.

His credit card was approaching complete max-out, and the funds from
his mother's will were still tied up in paperwork (grotesquely enough
because the Consortium had erased enough of Samantha's files to make
it difficult to prove she was legally dead).  Nevertheless he signed
for the Land Rover and driver without a second thought, and he and
Scully spent much of the day playfully fighting for control of the
guidebook and trying to communicate with the driver, who spoke only
Arabic and French.

They were absolutely unfazed to find Krycek tailing them after
visiting one of the traditional Ksour villages.  He made no effort to
hide himself, even when Scully pointed directly at him.  The uneasy
truce he had formed with the man the night before dictated that Mulder
neither shot at him nor invited him over, but simply nodded and went
on his way.  They were all moving in something of a dream state.

The twilight sun was boiling up the desert landscape when Mulder
remembered where he had wanted to go.

"Mosque of the Seven Sleepers?" he asked the driver.  The man was
honking the horn at a Bedouin who was lazily whipping an indifferent
donkey across the street.  The Bedouin paid the driver no attention
and continued to converse on his cell phone.

"Oui," nodded the driver.  "Bien s-r.  A Chenini?"

"Um, yes?"

"Okay!"

"Okay!" Mulder answered, and sat back with intense relief.

"What is this place again?" Scully asked.  She was sitting sideways
against the rear left door, because she said it gave her a better idea
of where they'd already been in addition to where they were going.
Mulder could find no complaint with that.

He was holding the guidebook, he realized.  He flipped to the
appropriate page.  "'The Mosque of the Seven Sleepers,'" he read,
"'There are several contradictory legends regarding this ancient site.
One is that the seven sleepers in question were young girls who slept
for two hundred years only to awaken and find that their lovers were
long dead.  Another is that in the 3rd century, Roman Emperor Dece
persecuted Berber Christians, who fled to Chenini only to be captured
and walled into their tombs, where they slept for four centuries.
When they awoke to find an Islamic country they converted and then
died.  Either way, the message of the legends is the same: there is
little value in outliving our friends and family.'"

"That's an awfully reflective travel guide."

"Yeah," Mulder said, flipping through the pages thoughtfully.  "It was
outside our hotel room when we got up this morning."

"No hot water, but complementary English-language reading material."

The landscape changed dramatically between the city of Tataouine and
the village of Chenini, near the site of the Mosque.  Instead of flat,
cracked desert they began to pass into low, cinnamon-colored
mountains.  Endless straight-aways suddenly became sawtoothed
roadways.  The agents heads swung side-to-side in the backseat as they
bumped along.

"Chenini," their driver pointed.

They had rounded a bend and entered a low-slung valley of sharp peaks
and otherwise barren streaks of land mottled by dark scrub.  Some of
the hills looked especially ragged, but on second inspection were
revealed to be habitations extruding from the living rock.
Squared-off dwellings of sandy- colored stone perforated with arched
windows lined the mountains in neat rows.  In most cases the building
extended only halfway down the mountain; the last row of construction
hung precariously over angry, eroded hillshide.

At the top of the settled mountain was what Mulder recognized as a
ksar, a fortified ancient citadel surrounded by two to three story
former grain stores.  Most of the stores now were used as tourist
accommodations or craft shops.  Below that, the more modern village
blended almost imperceptibly into the sandy hills, except for a bright
white building which glinted almost painfully in the sunlight.

"Mosque of the Seven Sleepers?" Mulder asked.

"Yes," the driver nodded.

The mosque consisted of a tall minaret surrounded by a high unmarked
wall, nestled in the slopes between two peaks.  Both structures had
been carefully whitewashed to distinguish them from the surrounding
cave-like houses.  The effect of this singular brightness in the face
of uniformity was startling.

Mulder said, "I'm starting to understand why the housing board in my
neighborhood gets so pissed off when somebody paints their porch
fluorescent green."

"How old are these buildings?" Scully wondered aloud.

He glanced down at the guidebook.  "Twelfth century, but the Bedouins
have been using the oasis for much longer."

"This is an oasis?"

"I guess they were speaking relatively."

Their car passed up into the hills, following the increasingly twisted
mountain paths.  Ripe pumpkin light flickered across their faces as
they moved in and out of the path of the setting sun.  The violet sky
was cloudless and when they were high enough, Mulder could see Venus
sparkling brightly near the horizon.

"Should we get a hotel first?" Scully asked.  She had turned all the
way around and was watching the twisted land fall away beneath them.

"No," Mulder said thoughtfully.  "Let's go straight there.  I think
we'll make it before dark."

They did, just barely as the desert heat had already begun to escape
into the night. They had to park some distance away and take
additional time to cover Scully's head and arms in preparation for
entering the mosque.  Mulder managed to successfully communicate "wait
for us here" to the driver, who he realized after a good look was
wearing a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt.  The driver nodded pleasantly
enough, leaning back in the seat and smoking quietly.

It was a bit of a walk and uphill most of the way.  Dust and rocks
would've made short work of Scully's traditional footwear but she had
traveled sensibly.  Mulder had not, and his mind was more on his
scuffed leather than on issues religious or archaeological.  He
stopped to inspect the damage; when he looked up, Scully was further
ahead, regarding the minaret with interest.

"It's crooked," she noted.

"So it is."  The minaret began straight but about halfway up
demonstrated a pronounced lean to one side.

From this distance he could now see the cluster of dome-topped
buildings alongside the wall.  They were similarly whitewashed.  Near
the domes was an open courtyard; Mulder could barely make out a series
of long mounds about six yards in length.  "Those are the graves," he
pointed.

Scully, still ahead of him, nodded and moved in that direction.
"There's more than seven here," she said.

He jogged across the expanse of dry gravel to catch up with her.  Only
when he heard the sound of his feet pounding on the loose ground did
it occur to him that it was completely silent up on this hill.  Yet
the guidebook had described Chenini as quite a tourist trap.

"Do you think it's closed?" he asked as he stopped at her side.

The mounds were lined up along the same axis, but not in even rows.
Each mound was covered with the same sand-colored irregular stones
used as building material, and between the mounds someone had placed
an occasional potted desert plant.  Mulder concluded that it was
frequently tended, even if one of those times was not now.

"There's more than seven," Scully said again.

"Yes, there are."

"Which ones are the seven sleepers?"

They descended into the courtyard.  He stopped next to the nearest
grave and opened the book again.  "It doesn't say," he told Scully
after a moment.  "It just says that the surprisingly length of the
graves is because for the hundreds of years the soldiers were buried,
they were--"




"--growing in size," Strughold said.

Scully knelt down beside one of them, running her hand lightly across
the dusty stones.  "While they slept?"

"Indeed.  Imagine what it would be like to leave behind everyone you
know, to prepare for battle, and then to emerge ready but as a
grotesque monster.  No wonder they died soon after."

She was still considering the stones when she heard the old man jump
spryly off of the graveyard wall and walk towards the mosque.  She
watched him touch the high walls lightly, tracing along the cracks in
the hundreds of years of overlaid paint.  "Which ones are the seven
sleepers?" she asked him.

"Oh, you should know that the number seven is like the number forty,"
he answered.  "It's meaningless.  Ancient people knew when math was
important -- building pyramids, collecting taxes -- and when it just
confused the issue."  He squatted down in front of another grave and
regarded her at eye level.  "There are far more than seven sleepers,
Dana, but only one that matters."

"Which is that?"

"Look up."

Night had crept upon the scene with clever stealth, as it often did.
Her eyes had been adjusting to the lowering light without her notice,
but the passage of time was obvious from the sudden appearance of
stars.  The constellations in this part of the world were still
familiar, but the sheer brightness of them in this remote village
seemed wondrously new.

"What was the event which you believe began the universe?" Strughold
asked.

"The Big Bang," she answered immediately.

"A centralized event.  Scientists believe that there is a pattern to
the distribution of galaxies which serves as proof of this beginning.
Galaxies radiate outward more or less evenly from where they emerged,
because of course they are still being propelled away from that
explosion.  If you could roll back time --"

"Like with the research labs," she interrupted.  "If you could watch
the expansion of the universe in reverse, you could find the point
where it all began."

He nodded.  "You could find the singularity."

Suddenly, the heavens were moving.  The stars, the clusters of stars,
the hazy fog of distant galaxies, all of them had begun to rotate.
First slowly, then more swiftly as they moved to close in on each
other.  New stars and new galaxies appeared from behind mountains and
over the horizon, also moving towards the others, and with increasing
speed.

Strughold's voice was just behind her ear, whispering in his soft
accent.  "It is the most important place in the universe, because it
is the only place that is unlike any other.  And it is unlike any
other only because there can be only one origin of the universe."

"You're talking in circles again," Scully said slowly.  Her eyes were
transfixed on the stars, which were coalescing into a single brilliant
point of light.

"I'm sorry," he sighed.  "I feel like all I do lately is apologize for
things."

The last few stars swept in, and the single point in the sky was now
as bright as the sun, but only the size of a pinhole in the night's
canvas.  It hung just to the east of where she stood, and when Scully
took a tentative step in that direction, it swung in the opposite
direction until it was just overhead.  It was as if the star were only
a foot above her rather than millions of light years away.

She stepped onto the grave over which it hovered and reached up.  It
felt cool and yet soft, like melting ice.  When she opened her hand
again, it fell out slowly, feather-light, and disappeared between the
stones of the grave.

She knelt down and began to remove one stone at a time.  "That's okay.
I for--"




"--give you," Scully said.

Mulder continued to watch her desecrate the grave for a minute, and
then knelt down beside her.  "I don't ever recall forgiving you for
not believing my hunches."

"I guess I'm just a more civilized person," she said demurely.

Within minutes they had piled up a substantial number of rocks behind
them, tunneling into the mound at one end.  It was Mulder who first
felt the cool, smooth metal underneath.

"I think it's a door or something."  He considered the huge pile of
rocks still covering the "grave."  "To hell with this," he said, and
began kicking away the remainder with his foot.  Scully joined with
enthusiasm.  Despite the incredible noise, no one came to investigate.

"It's a door," Scully said when the last of the debris was scattered.

"That's some conclusion Agent Scully.  Are you sure you don't need
scientific verification?"

"Mulder, shut up."

He grabbed the metal handle at the bottom and pulled up.  The door
opened easily.  Mulder looked around briefly and nodded to himself.
"I'm going to go down--"




"--first," Strughold suggested.

Scully nodded and jogged lightly down the slope of beach.  The sky was
heavy with slab-like clouds which grayed out the sky and the ocean.
She followed a series of deep prints in the rock-strewn sand towards
the group of men and the enormous wooden construction.

It was the outline of a ship, she could see, but only the massive keel
was laid out, capped on either end by the bowpost and sternpost.  The
remainder of the construction was of heavily-weathered scaffolding and
devices used to clamp or bend the planks.  The men were uniformly
stocky, with thick brown or red beards, all wearing plain-colored
tunics tied at the waist, thick cloth pants and soft leather,
slipper-like shoes.

Along the perimeter, several of them had laid out tremendous logs and
were scraping bark from them with long-handled spades.  Young boys
collected the bark as soon as it hit the sand and piled it into wooden
barrels.

"The bark will be used to tan hides," Strughold observed at her side.
"None of the tree will be wasted."

A pair of boys lifted up a completely denuded log and carried it to
two older men who had been speaking quietly on their own.  They nodded
to the boys and pointed to the beach at their feet.  The log was
deposited and as one of the men lifted an enormous iron axe, the other
removed a series of wooden wedges from a pocket in his tunic and stood
at the ready.  The axe-wielder let out an enormous grunt, swinging the
axe in a precise circle over his head and bringing it down directly
upon the center of the wood.  The second man knelt down, gently
hammering the wedge into the split near the axe.  Then he hammered the
axe head itself further in, widening the split.  The process was
repeated all the way down the length of the log, until the wood gave
way and collapsed into two equal halves.

"They do have saws, of course," Strughold said, "but a saw will cut
against the grain whereas a split will travel with the wood.  This
makes for a stronger timber.  It's also important to pick the right
kind of tree.  A lone tree will be unprotected from the elements,
especially wind, which will cause it to twist and deform undesirably.
A tree grown amid neighbors will have a central trunk which is
straight and tall.  But of course, it must be removed from the other
trees eventually, to be prepared."

Scully watched the men for some time.  "Why do they build here on the
beach?  Wouldn't it be easier to construct the boat on flatter, drier
ground?"

"Undoubtedly.  But the shipbuilders believe that exposing the wood to
the salt and the sea will weather it for its new purpose.  It's
important that when the ship is completed and launched for the first
time, there be no great shock.  It is an enormous investment of
resources for them to build a warship -- failure at the last stage
could be disastrous."

"I should like to see that," Scully said.  "Launching this vessel."

Strughold looked at her sadly.  "Oh, I very much doubt it.  These
ships did not have their maiden voyage christened with champagne.
This warship will be launched over the blood of a human --"




"--sacrifice," Mulder joked.

"Staying with you has never been a sacrifice," Scully answered
seriously.  She reached forward in the darkness and found his hand.

The door had been metal but the remainder of the tomb was quite
ancient.  Stone steps descended into a narrow passageway with a
pitched roof.  The height was sufficient for Scully but Mulder moved
ahead in a low crouch, feeling ahead with his free hand.  The walls
were dry to the touch, so much so that his fingers felt the moisture
leaching away from them.

Neither had thought to bring their bags from the vehicle, and
consequently they had no light source in the completely dark
passageway.  Mulder immediately dismissed the idea of going back --
there was no guarantee that they would be able to re-enter the
cemetery undetected again, and the presence of that faceless metal
door suggested that they were violating something other than an
ancient burial place.

Or perhaps it had something to do with Scully's calm insistence that
they move quickly.

There was a gentle downward slope, he realized, but as the passageway
continued that became an obvious geographic constraint.  The mosque
was constructed on a narrow natural bridge between two of Chenini's
peaks, on a plot of land no more than two hundred yards across.  They
had been moving, even at their slow pace, for at least fifty or so,
and the graveyard was near to the front slope.  At some point, they
would have to follow the gradient of the hill downward.

Mulder heard rather than felt the passageway open into a larger space.
The echo of his shuffling footsteps had become more faint and he could
hear the air circulate differently.  Then he felt the change in
temperature, becoming surprisingly warmer rather than cooler.
Finally, his hand found the edge of the wall as it turned in a rough
ninety degree angle; he reached forward with his foot carefully and
discovered the short step down into the chamber.  He tightened his
grip on Scully's hand and led her forward.

Mulder had a split-second sensation of human proximity before he
physically bumped into the person.  An unseen hand immediately clamped
over his face and a female voice whispered, "Be quiet."

A lighter was flicked on suddenly, and Mulder discovered he was mere
inches from Marita's wide eyes.

"What the," he began, and then the room was suddenly filled with --



--light in the bright basement office.  It was smaller, as it was back
in 1992 before her assignment there convinced Facilities to knock out
the wall between Mulder's space and the nearby storage area.  Of
course lately, it had seemed as if the storage area was reclaiming its
heritage.

Strughold was facing away from the doorway while seated behind
Mulder's desk.  Slides and papers spread out in front of him.

"Agent Mulder," she felt herself saying, "I'm Dana Scully, I've been
assigned to work with you."

Strughold shook her hand.  "I had promised I would tell you about why
you were here, what it was that had been done to you.  I thought it
appropriate to go back to the beginning.  Or at least the beginning
for you, for now."

"Actually," she said with forced cheerfulness, "I'm looking forward to
working with you. I've heard a lot about you."

"You see, we didn't learn the lessons of those ancient shipbuilders
until it was nearly too late.  We had started preparing Mulder very
early, but the nature of those preparations made him an outsider, a
loner, a bit unstable.  Not a fit keel for the ship."  He smiled
sadly.

"If you have any doubt about my qualifications or credentials--"

He stood, holding a bound copy of her thesis.  "But you came from a
strong background, a stable family environment.  You had a structured
mind but also a firm moral footing."

"Did you bother to read it?"

Strughold nodded.  "I did. I liked it."

Something in the room shifted, and she no longer felt bound to a path.
She shuddered, then began to move slowly around the room, just shy of
touching the artifacts.  This was a museum.

"Your thesis revealed that you had the intelligence and flexibility of
mind we would need.  Understanding that time and space were ultimately
relative is the conceptual framework needed for any of the rest of it
to follow.  Mulder knew this implicitly, you learned it academically,
but in either case that was the critical first step.  The next was to
understand more deeply that perception and reality were equally
relative.  That was what the next few years would teach you."

"Teach me?" she asked, looking at the blank wall where the slide
projector would point.

"The X-Files were a classroom.  The lesson was the mutability of the
universe.  We hoped that seven years would be enough time in which to
learn, but it wasn't.  Hence, our dialogues now."

"I don't understand."

The room began to dissolve, enlarging and darkening.  Her personal
items appeared: her books and her X-Ray light box.  The ceiling over
Mulder's desk became punctuated with pencils.  The enormous filing
cabinet in the back solidified out of the darkness.  The drawer
containing the bee file was still left open, other papers strewn on
the ground.

Strughold walked over to the cabinet.  "In 1991, there were
twenty-three cases marked as X-Files.  In 1992, the year you joined,
there were one-hundred and five.  In 1993, two hundred fifty.  1994,
three hundred and eighty. 1995, four hundred and nine."

Scully shook her head.  "What are you saying?"

"1996, five hundred. 1997, five-fifty. 1998, six hundred.  My
goodness, Dana, it's a wonder you two ever slept. 1999, seven
hundred."

"What is your point?" she yelled.

"My point is that you're not much of a scientist if you don't question
these numbers.  How could there be seven hundred reported but
unexplainable phenomenon in a year?  You can't call these cases fringe
anymore -- these are practically routine."  Strughold opened a drawer
seemingly at random.  "Look here, fifty- five spontaneous human
combustions in Massachusetts in 1999 alone.  That's almost twice the
number of murders in the city of Boston in the same year."

"Our network of contacts expanded," she protested.  "Our
identification techniques improved."

"That's bullshit and you know it."  His forcefulness startled her.
"You found these cases because you wanted to find them, because you
needed to find them."

"Are you saying that we misidentified normal events as X-Files?"

Strughold slammed the cabinet shut in frustration.  "No, of course
they were X- Files.  They almost always were, weren't they?  The point
is that they _became_ X-Files _because_ you were looking for X-Files."

Scully folded her arms.  "Just because I look for my keys in my purse
doesn't mean they're not locked inside the car."

The man sighed, and walked back to sit on the edge of the desk much as
Mulder often did.  "You are correct.  There are events which can be
changed and those which cannot.  It is the most important ones which
are subject to being altered by our perception.  This is a paradox, I
realize, but you have an understanding of paradoxes."  He nodded
towards the thesis.  "You've heard a great deal about 'alien
technology', but that is a short-sighted perception.  Where we have
much to offer you is in 'alien philosophy'."

"All I have seen you offer so far is death."

Strughold's head was down.  "I'm afraid that has been the other
important lesson we have needed to teach you."

"Death?"  Scully felt her voice crack.  "I think you've taught me that
quite well.  My sister, my daughter."  She laughed without joy.  "And
what about my friends?  Krycek says I have the rebels to thank for
those fires."

"That is not what I am talking about, although we had a hand in those
events as well.  I will admit that, even if it saddens me.  Remember,
the tree cannot become a ship--"

"--until it's removed from the forest, yeah, I got that."

"I'm afraid we learned too late that there are other ways to focus
attention."  He paused.  "Although soon enough to save some."

"Not too late for whom?  Skinner?  My friends, are they alive?"

"This isn't the time," he sighed.  Strughold began to search her face
as if looking for a way to bring her back to his side.  "The other
lesson that I mentioned: I was talking about teaching you to kill."

"Well, then you must know my old teacher, Agent Adams.  He turned me
into quite the shot for my class."

"The FBI taught you how to use a weapon.  We need you to be a weapon."
He was holding Mulder's gun now, loosely in two hands.
"Dispassionate.  Remorseless.  Deadly."

She nearly choked on her words.  "I am none of those things."
 
"But you have been," he said quietly, and she knew he was talking
about Donnie Pfaster.

"What if it wasn't God?" she had asked.  She'd been right.

He slid off of the desk and put both his hands on her shoulders.  He
was much taller than her now, although she was certain he'd been
closer to her height when she'd found him in the cell.  "There are
four fundamental paradoxes.  Four irreconcilable states which must
nevertheless co-exist to ensure humanity's continued existence.
First, that time and space are one.  Second, that reality obeys
perception.  You now understand the third -- that true strength lies
in the ability to destroy as fiercely as you love."

She was sobbing now, openly, because she did not want to believe that
this was what she had become.  She was not the person she had been,
and she never would be again.  It was as futile as her threats to
leave the FBI, to leave the X- Files, to leave Mulder.

Strughold's arms were around her, holding her, and while his form was
that of a stranger the starch-pressed scratch of his clothing on her
face reminded of similar embraces from her father.  "Shh, Dana, it's
okay.  You're not alone."

"What," she began, rubbing her face and pulling away, "what is your
fourth paradox?"

He chuckled.  "It's what I just said.  That you are not--"




"--alone?" Mulder whispered.

"Yes," Marita answered.  He watched her eyes shuttle nervously between
his and Scully's.  "At least, I think so.  I was in Maine, there was
an explosion--"

"You were at a facility?" Scully asked.  Mulder was almost amused to
note her switch to an investigative voice.  He half-expected her to
start taking notes.

"Yes," Marita answered.  She had dropped that pretentious sibilance
and now sounded only tired.  "I veered off the road into a tree, I
think.  I blacked out.  I woke up here, in Tataouine, in a hotel room
that had been paid off for a week.  There was a note on the pillow
next to me, telling me to come to this location and await further
instructions."

Mulder frowned.  "You came in through the tomb?"

Marita was shaking her head.  "What tomb?  No, one of those stone
huts, the ones in the mountain.  I followed the passageway to here."
She pointed to the opposite end of the expansive room; Mulder noticed
for the first time that the warehouse-sized chamber had dozens of
small exits, perhaps even hundreds.  Yet they were the only people in
the room.

"There must be a whole network of passages through the mountain,"
Scully said.

Marita regarded his partner expressionlessly.  "I didn't have time to
explore; I felt my way in here in total --"




--darkness, complete moonless darkness.  Scully could sense
immediately that they were outside, someplace far from settlement.  It
smelled fresh and green, like an hour after rain, and yet almost
uncomfortably warm.

A cluster of stars appeared overhead but were quickly swallowed up
again.  The sky was heavily clouded with only an occasional break.
She could see nothing else. When she bent down to feel the ground, she
came away with a handful of damp and springy fiddleheads.

Strughold's voice was expected and didn't startle her.  "You know
where we are," he said.

She let the young ferns fall from her hand.  "Yes.  This is Chenini,
one hundred million years ago."

"Indeed."

She was supposed to wait, but she had to ask.  "Were you personally
here?  Is that how you can show me this?"

"Oh, no," he laughed.  "No one was here.  But I've seen a lot of PBS
documentaries."

It was approaching.  She could hear the terrible rent in the sky,
getting angrier by the second.  Unseen and perhaps unimaginable
creatures began fluttering in the surrounding foliage; something
brushed by Scully's ankle which felt warm and leathery.

She thought it was an illusion at first but there was clearly a red
flickering from above, diffused by the heavy clouds.  It was tracking
a rough path from left to right and descending faster and faster.
Finally, there was an instant where the red heat illuminated the
clouds just overhead, and then the impact.

Scully heard nothing, felt nothing.  She supposed that anyone really
standing there would be instantly vaporized.

What she did was see -- see the instant white flash brighten the world
like the sun come down, see the perfect black core impact and then
radiate upwards and outwards in ragged circles, see deathly dark
comets with flaming paper tails rain down over the horizons.

Scully imagined the passage of time over this place.  The
supercontinent would shudder and fragment, sending colonies of fragile
life adrift in the newly- defined oceans.  Brought with them would be
the landing sites of these carriers of alien genetics, the deposits of
black oil which would seep into the evolutionary tree and reshape the
direction in which life developed.  Occasionally, every few million
years, a ship would arrive to inspect the progress.  When the right
host species had developed, Homo sapiens, the visits had increased in
frequency as the colonists injected not genes but memes -- religion
and philosophy and other transmittable ideas -- to ready the minds as
well as the bodies of the hosts.

"The fission of the atom, the explosion of the atomic bomb, was our
signal that humanity had achieved sufficient technological expertise
to begin assisting in their own colonization.  That was when we first
made contact and negotiated the terms of the collaboration."

Scully watched the terrible light show with a great sadness.  "Why any
of it?  Why not just spread the virus to everyone, like it was given
to me, and allow the natural events to take place?"

"We needed a delivery mechanism for this world.  Each one is
different.  The black oil is only the phase one carrier: although it
can start production of the child organism, its primary function is to
induce slow genetic change over time."

"So you needed humans to develop the bees as carriers?"

"That's part of it, yes.  But humans to us are more than just
incubators.  The hybrid project -- that was the true motivation behind
the collaboration.  We recognize the contributions you have to offer.
Many people would become hybridized."

"Like the collaborators and their families?"

"That's one group, yes."  He shook his head.  "Listen to me, I sound
like one of the colonists."

"And why aren't you?  Mulder said that the rebels believed the
colonization process was a dilution of their race."

"Most believe that, yes.  They want our species to develop on its own
course rather than making -- stealing -- advancements from others."
He hesitated, showing some uncertainty for the first time.  "Others of
us have our own motivations."

A small fragment, a mini-comet, landed beside her, casting shadows
against the prehistoric undergrowth.  Where it landed a fist-sized
shape was burnt.  The pool of cool blackness began to move, cutting a
swath through the young life directly towards Scully.

"It can smell your genes," Strughold observed.  The flickering
death-light from the fallout played over his solemn face.  "Come," he
said, extending a hand.  "It's almost --"




"--time."

Mulder looked in the direction of Scully's voice.  "Almost time for
what?"  He felt her hand grasp his, felt her run her fingers over the
inside of his palm.  She said nothing.  "Scully!" he whispered, and
then the light came back on.

There were at least a thousand people in the room with them.

"It's the fourth paradox," Scully said.

"What?"

"We are not alone."



___________________________________________

                    IX

    "There are no fewer forms of minds 
     than of bodies among us."
     
     -- Ben Jonson, Timber


___________________________________________



Krycek froze when he heard Scully's words, despite their non-ominous
delivery.  She almost sounded relieved.

Hunched down as he was just several feet shy of the end of the old
passageway, he couldn't see much besides Mulder's ass.  The point of
that quick little kiss in the man's apartment years ago had been to
unnerve, not to arouse, and so the ass was, at this point, merely an
irritation.  He wanted to see who else was in the room with them.

He heard Mulder ask one of his stupid questions.  "Who are they?"

"I don't know," was the reply, and it was not Scully.  The feeling of
relief that swept over him was so all-encompassing that the surprise
came later.  Marita was alive.

"They're not doing anything," Mulder said.

He could see Scully's hand move up her partner's back, slowly.  "It's
okay," she said.

What the fuck was he supposed to do?  The urge to leap out, to grab
Marita and run was almost enough to overcome his more primal urge to
wait and see how he could profit from the situation.  He pulled his
pistol from beneath his shirt and stared at it as if it could provide
answers any better than the seriously lousy ones it had suggested thus
far in his life.

A steady voice spoke from behind.  "She's right, you know."

Krycek couldn't turn instantly in the cramped space, so he thrust his
gun arm first and let his body take its time.  He was pointing it at
nothing at all -- the passageway was empty.

"Go in," the voice said.  It was Strughold, who was dead.

"Sure," Krycek answered, and strode into the room with his usual
swagger.  If he'd finally gone insane, there wasn't anything left to
lose.


--

Scully could see the events in her immediate vicinity -- Krycek
entering the scene, Marita's conflicted response, Mulder's surprise
despite his knowledge that the assassin had been following them for
some time.  Yet she was attending more to the rows of strangers before
her, the solid wall of humanity filling the room from front to back.
They looked, like her own motley assortment, to be mostly disoriented
and confused, but in a more diverse array of races and colors.  They
were grouped in twos: some pairs of men, some pairs of women, but
largely men and women, and the way they looked at each other varied
from outright adoration to undisguised hatred.  None of them regarded
his or her companion with disinterest.

Scully turned back towards Mulder.  It was difficult to hear over the
din of the others and so shouting at him was useless.  She simply
willed him to look at her.

He turned his head and their eyes locked, instantly.  It's the most
important realities which we can bend with our minds, she thought.
Destruction and love, time and space.

The last paradox was this: that one is many, and many are one.

She and Mulder embraced, and it was a small paradox of its own that
the kiss was neither the first nor the last.


--

One minute he was in a big room full of people he didn't know or
people he wished he'd never met, and the next he was standing beneath
a highway overpass with a windblown plastic bag making love to his
shins.  "Okay," he said aloud, "the insanity hypothesis is still
holding up."

He kicked the bag away and it tumbled into the slipstream of a passing
semi.

"Alex?"  He could barely hear the voice over the roar of the passing
vehicles.  Marita, appearing and disappearing behind fast-moving walls
of truck trailers and SUVs, was waving at him from across the road.

"Shit," he said, and slumped down onto the inclined packed dirt
beneath his side of the overpass.  There was a discarded blue backpack
within reaching distance; he grabbed for it and shook it for weight,
then stared in amazement.

Not at the backpack -- that was empty -- but at the arm holding it.
His arm.  He dropped the dirty thing and flexed in wonder.  This was
one hell of a nice hallucination.  He hoped no one shot him up with
drugs and brought him back.  Now if only he could do something about
his location.

"Alex?"

Not to mention the companionship.

Marita was at the edge of the road, looking back and forth
frantically, waiting for an opening in the traffic.  It was his dream,
so Krycek willed for a speedy little black Corvette to veer right,
scoop her up, and take her away.  If she were alive in real life that
was great and he was happy, but he had better fantasies to explore
here than those involving an untrustworthy, lying, ex- girlfriend
who'd slept with more enemies than he knew he'd had. "Go away," he
suggested.

She successfully dashed across the two lane highway and began to
scramble up the incline. So far, his wish fulfillment was batting
zero.  "Alex," she panted, "what's going on?"
 
Krycek sighed and unzipped his fly.  "Can we get this over with?  I've
got a roomful of dewy-eyed lesbians to convert."

"What the fuck are you doing?"  She kicked at the dirt near his feet,
sending clods into the air which rained down on his parade.

"Trying to make the best of a bad situation.  What are you doing in my
insanity?"

"What happened to the room?  Where are Mulder and Scully?"

Krycek sullenly brushed off his pants.  "You're not going to invite
them too, are you?"

Marita flailed her arms in frustration in an appealing way.  In
college, he'd won her over with his insistent obnoxiousness.  Now he
stopped to consider her more closely -- there was something different.

Her face.  The blemishes from the tests were gone.  She didn't look
younger, just normal. She seemed to be looking at him in much the same
way.  "Nice arm," she muttered.

"Thanks, I just got it back from the shop."

Marita opened her mouth to say something else, and then frowned.  She
turned and looked behind them in both directions along the road.

"What?" he said.  Something had caught his attention, too, but he was
pretty sure it wasn't what she was looking at.

"Alex, what happened to the cars?"

"I don't know, but do you hear what I think I hear?"

She turned her head and her face dropped.  She could hear it too, and
she knew better than anyone what it meant.


--

Mulder was kissing Scully and the world smelled of salt.  He opened
his eyes and found they were standing ankle-deep in a seaside marsh.

Fresh water flowed slowly in from the west and became brackish here
with backflow from the ocean.  The wide expanse of flattened marsh
grass cut through twisted but hardy pine trees which suctioned the
limited nutrients from the sandy soil.  Nearby, a tire floated,
half-exposed with its rusted hubcap facing upwards, and on the
opposite side, a small untethered motorboat wobbled.  In the distance,
a row of large old homes with the sea-bleached wooden sides marched
out on spindly pylons into the bay.

Mulder jumped as a flock of small black birds, previously hidden in
the tall grass, took off and flew away in swirling patterns like
schools of fish.

"Where are we?"  He looked behind them, towards the land, and spotted
an old pick-up truck the color of rust.  Tire-width tracks ran away
from the truck and disappeared into a stand of trees.

"I'm not sure," Scully answered.  He looked down at her and laughed
gently.  "What?" she asked.

"We've been out here for five minutes and you've already got
freckles."

Instantly, her hands flew away from him and covered her cheeks.
"Stop," she snorted.  "Besides, we have no idea how long we've been
here."

"Long enough to ruin my shoes."  He lifted his feet from the muck and
they came up dripping mud and weeds.

"Let's hit some dry land," she said, putting out her hand.  He let her
lead him to the bank near the old truck.

They turned and faced back towards the bay, taking off their shoes and
emptying them.  The sky in that direction was all white, but it faded
to blue as it moved shoreward.  Mulder heard a rustling nearby but it
was only a row of four brown birds with long necks, preening each
other.  They were standing on a barely- visible log and the effect
from a distance was of floating on water.

The partners sat in companionable silence for some time.  "Scully," he
finally said.  "What are we doing here?"

She pulled some hair behind her ears.  "I'm not positive, but I think
we're supposed to be building and strengthening our bond."

"I don't know about you, but our bond feels pretty strengthened."

"Yeah," she agreed.

They stood up, leaning on each other to put on their shoes.  Mulder
was giving his pant leg a final shake when they heard the mechanical
whining sound.

It was the motorboat.  It was falling sideways into the water.  The
whining noise became louder as it completely disappeared and a large
metal chute began to rise out of the water in its place.

"A prop," Mulder said wonderingly.

The chute stopped with a loud snap.  All was silent for a moment.
Then, the rumbling noise started.  More like a hum.  Like electricity.

"I think that's our cue to go," Scully said faintly.

"Run," he yelled, and they broke for the truck.


--

Cristina had only glimpsed Dana Scully and her partner before the
world had grayed out and she'd reappeared where she stood now, at the
center of a small- town cemetery.  Jake Lee was beside her, with an
equally surprised expression on his face.

It was a miniscule plot of land, perhaps a quarter of an acre.  An
ornate brick and ironwork arch marked the entrance but the effect was
cheapened by the chainlink fence around the perimeter, torn in places
from local kids looking for a thrill.  Most of the graves were low and
angled, red granite with simple markings.  A tall white pole flying an
American flag marked the center, with smaller flags stuck next to
graves throughout the plots.  Just along the outside of the fence on
one side, a row of cypress trees were waving their fronds in the faint
breeze.  Behind them, a narrow roadway passed alongside raised train
tracks.  Rolling farmland fell away in all other directions.

It was silent slice of Americana.  There were no sounds but their own
labored breathing and the whisper of the cypress trees.

"Kelly?" Cristina asked tentatively.  Her daughter had once again been
removed from her care when they had landed in Tunisia, but there had
been some commotion at the military airport and many of them had been
separated.  She and Jake had been mixed in with some strangers,
perhaps researchers from other sites, and loaded into what bore a
chilling resemblance to a cattle car.  They had emerged at night in a
mountainous location and brought through a series of winding tunnels
to the large room where she had glimpsed Dana Scully.  Then they were
whisked away again.

"I don't think she's here," Jake was saying as he stepped between the
graves slowly.  "I think we're alone."

Cristina winced.  Jake had said those words once before, out under
cover of one of the dilapidated barns on the compound grounds.  They
had been celebrating a breakthrough in the research -- the first
successful reverse-engineering of the Russian vaccine, back before
they learned it wouldn't save all of them.  She remembered the way
everyone had looked so happy, the alcohol in her system had narrowed
her focus and in her tunnel vision of the world she saw each of them
in turn, with genuine joy on their faces.  When she had locked in on
Jake, she saw for the first time the layers beneath, the hesitation on
his face.  He was thinking of the women from the tests (they always
used women first because of the complications with reproduction): the
run-aways, the abductees, the migrant workers.  Women who would be
neither missed nor believed.  He wondered if it was worth it, if they
had any right.

Lord help her, it had aroused her.  Instead of bonding together
spiritually, plotting to overthrow the work or just to escape, they
had stumbled out into the night together and collapsed just inside the
wrecked barn.  Jake fumbled at her shirt -- Jesus she still had her
lab coat on -- while she scrambled further into the darkness.

"I think we're alone," he said, and the nightmare played over her
closed eyes immediately.  Not of capture, or discovery, but the
mundane fear of bringing him home to Manila, to her racist parents who
would be thankful only that he wasn't Japanese before telling them to
leave.  As if she'd ever see her family again anyway.

Then the real nightmare began: the barn lit up with floodlights and
the alarms sounded.  Cristina's shirt was torn open luridly and Jake's
breath smelled of vodka, not the future.  She shoved him away,
screaming loud enough for the microphones to hear.  "What are you
doing?"

He fell back, his expressed shaped first by astonishment, and then by
weary understanding.  As the guards lifted him to his feet he said
clearly, "I was drunk.  I apologize.  It will never happen again."

Of course, things had gotten worse after that.  Jake had been
transferred to another project, which must've nearly killed him
because the vaccine had been his life.  It wasn't as if another job
would be preferable; they were all dirty, all soaked in human blood.
To her surprise, Cristina was moved shortly after that as well and put
directly under Spender's thumb.  That was when she began dealing with
Krycek, slowly coming to realize that in a twisted way she'd been
given a promotion.  She was working with the players in the
organization.  It only made her feel sicker.

She and Jake weren't forbidden to see each other, of course, and they
both realized that it would look worse if they avoided each other.
They made an effort to speak when in public areas, conversing strictly
about work.  While it was difficult at first, over time she saw that
they were becoming real friends.  Now and then she would get time off
to visit Kelly and find Jake already there, teaching her the names of
things in Cantonese or playing Crazy-8's with a deck of old cards.
Eventually, Jake kept her going as much as Kelly did, but they never
repeated the night in the barn or anything like it.

"It smells different," Cristina observed.  "A little like the sea."

Jake responded by swatting the back of her head.  "What the hell?" she
yelled.

"I'm sorry."  He turned over his hand; a crushed bee lay in his palm.
"It was buzzing around you."

She flicked the dead insect away.  "You shouldn't do that, you know."
She caught a glimpse of something overhead, like a storm cloud.
"You'll only make them mad."

They both heard the sound of the approaching car, actually an old
pick-up with a green tarp hanging off the flatbed.  It was barreling
alongside the train tracks and then stopped in a sudden, dust-filled
halt.  Cristina couldn't quite see into the cab but someone was
leaning out the passenger-side window.

"Get in!  Now!"  It was Dana Scully.

The storm cloud seemed to be lowering and Cristina looked up at it in
amazement.  It wasn't a cloud so much as a cluster of particles,
moving black dots in the sky.  And the hum, there was a humming.

My God, it was a swarm of bees.

"Let's go!" Jake screamed.  He grabbed her arm and pulled her over a
low grave.  She stumbled and nearly fell but he held her up and
dragged her through the arched entrance.

"Hurry!"  Scully leapt out of the truck and threw the tarp back.  "Get
under and cover yourselves."

Jake pushed her in first, then she pulled him up and over.  His knees
slammed into the hard metal floor and he winced, but she didn't give
him time to complain, just yanked the tarp overhead and held it tight.
She felt the truck take off even before the passenger door had slammed
shut.

At the first impact, she screamed.  It must've deafened Jake, or maybe
not because she thought he was screaming too.  The impacts came
faster, harder -- deadly little thuds against the tarp, like hail.
Bees.  They were diving against them.

First just a trickle -- tap, tap, tap -- and then a deluge.  Bees
striking for their heads, their legs.  The thunder drowned out the
humans' screams and even the noise of the truck as it surged over
rough ground.  Cristina wanted to close her eyes but she forced them
open, scanning the edges of the tarp for breaks and pulling down on it
so hard that her knuckles began to bleed against the truck floor.

"Cris!" Jake hollered.  His face was up against hers but she could
still barely hear him.  "On the left!"

She turned and grabbed for the sliver of light which had appeared
beneath the tarp.  A bee snuck in just as she pulled down, but Jake
reached across and with an incoherent yell obliterated it with his
fist.  Cristina wanted to grab his hand with her own but she didn't
dare let go of the tarp.

"Did it sting you?"

"No."

She only had a suspicion about the consequences of such a sting, but
that was plenty to scare them.

As unexpectedly as the attack had begun, it ended.  The torrential
downpour of bees slowed and then stopped.  The truck only accelerated
harder, so they must have outrun the swarm with sheer speed.  Still,
Cristina and Jake clung to the tarp and did not move for nearly an
hour.

The truck began to slow down.  She heard voices she couldn't identify,
more than just Scully and her partner.  Then the truck stopped and the
tarp was thrown back exposing the bright white sky.

"Krycek," she said with astonishment.

He looked equally thunderstruck.  "Jesus Christ."  He muttered to
himself, "Maybe I should wake up."

Scully was standing beside him next to the truck, along with a blonde
woman Cristina didn't know.  "Get in," Scully was saying.

"Who the fuck are they?" Jake asked.

Krycek dignified the comment with nothing more than a snarl, and
reached out to pull the blonde woman into the truck bed.  Only then
did Cristina notice his arm.  "What happened to it?" she pointed.

"It got better."  He lifted the woman up and over and led her to the
back.  He and Cristina glared at each other for a moment and then he
smacked the side of the truck loudly.  "Mulder, what the hell are you
doing?  Let's go!"

Scully's partner didn't turn around but he did slam on the
accelerator.  Krycek pinwheeled for an instant but the woman caught
him and yanked him back.  She was stronger than she looked, since she
looked like a fragile twig.  Krycek favored her with an expression
that suggested he'd rather have fallen out of the truck than be
rescued, and then fixed his black eyes back on Cristina.  "At least
now I know how they found my boat."

The blonde grabbed his chin and turned it towards her.  "I said," she
growled.  "Where are we going?"

"I told you, babe.  We're off to see the wizard."


--

Mulder hadn't needed to know where he was driving because the road
went in only one way.  Scully rode silent shotgun, bouncing lightly
off the pleather bucket seats whenever they hit rivets in the dirt
path.  There was no back window in the cab so he couldn't see directly
behind, but he could make out Krycek's angry glare shuddering in the
side-view mirror.  He couldn't see any of the others.

He understood that on some level they were all still standing in the
warehouse.  The world around him had the same kind of surreal dream
logic as his perfect life with Diana.  This time, though, Scully was
by his side and the Smoking Man was still dead.  If he had to pick one
form of unreality, he'd choose this one, although he'd prefer to ditch
the murderers in the flatbed.

If the places they passed through reminded him of anywhere, it was
coastal New England.  Not the elegant summer homes of Martha's
Vineyard, but the working towns of further north, places without
attractive beaches which subsisted on a year-round economy rather than
a three-month tourist one.

They were heading inland, if anything about the local geography made
sense.  He had the dirty window halfway rolled down and the spicy
scent of brine had given way to mown grass and horse manure.  Suburbs
creeping into farm country.  The bees were just a faint cloud on the
far horizon, but they were still approaching.

The road took a surprising turn rightward, past an abandoned warehouse
with a concrete block foundation and heather-green aluminum siding.
Long rows of square windows, mostly broken, glinted in the faint rays
of sunlight which had started to peek through the haze of dust-gray
clouds.  His eyes tracked them as they sparkled in turn while they
passed; when he looked back at the road, he gasped in surprise.

"End of the line," Scully said.

The dirt tracks trickled into a long grassy field which started behind
the warehouse and extended in all directions to the horizon.  Straight
ahead, set against a backdrop of endless sky, was a small amusement
park.  Surrounding it was a haphazard assemblage of parked vehicles
and an even greater number of people walking, mostly in pairs, across
the expanse of grass towards the park.

Mulder let the truck lumber along until he reached the fringe of the
parking area, then stopped.  He got out without bothering to lock the
door or even take the keys.  He sensed that he wasn't going to be
needing it again.

Krycek, Scully and the others were standing on the opposite side
facing the park.  His partner had known something of what was going on
but she now seemed at a loss.  Maybe it was his turn to step in.

"Let's go," he said, only because there seemed nothing else for them
to do.

"Wait," Scully said.  She glanced at Marita, who nodded.  "There's
something I need to give you."

He looked down at her open palm, and saw a vial with his name on it.

"You'll need this," she said.


--

Running largely on autopilot had left Scully exhausted.  Once the chip
had been inserted into Mulder's neck, she had stumbled back.  The
researcher, Cristina, finished the operation without a word, and her
Asian friend had sat beside Scully on the grass while she recovered.

When she claimed she was ready, they continued, but too fast for her
pace.  She lagged behind the group, staring at the ground more often
than looking up to see the incongruous Ferris wheel get larger and
larger.  Her progress was halted by a light tap on her shoulder.

It was a young woman, early twenties, with pale blonde hair and
startling blue eyes.  Despite her age, her face was haggard, and her
blouse and dress pants hung limp as if several sizes too big.  She
said something weary but incomprehensible to Scully, and then tried
again in slow but precise English.  "Can you help me?"

"I-- I'm not sure."  Scully looked around and saw a nearly identical
woman jog up and reach them.

The first woman glanced at the second and then turned back to Scully.
"This is my sister.  She does not speak English.  We are very tired
because we have traveled from Stockholm."  The woman stopped and shook
her head ruefully.  "I lie to you.  We are very tired for many years."

They looked at her expectantly.  Scully still wasn't sure what to say.
"We are scientists," the woman continued.  "We develop --" She
hesitated.  "Invisible walls."

Force fields, Scully realized.  She began to say something but another
couple had joined them, an earnest young Indian man and woman.  "My
wife, she was taken," he said.  He pointed to her back where she had
lifted up her sari and exposed two familiar round marks on her back.
"I have been looking for many years to find where she had gone, these
places she told me about."

"I was taken too," another woman said.  She bore a painful resemblance
to Melissa but her Irish roots were still planted and her accent was
strong.  "And my mother.  She never came back, and I learned my father
was helping them."  She pointed to a red-faced man behind her who
refused to meet any of them in the eye.  "He says that They made him
choose between us, and I know it's true but I haven't forgiven him."

The voices were everywhere suddenly, surrounding her.  A crowd had
formed and every one of them had a story that needed to be heard.
Scully tried desperately to listen to them all but they talked over
each other and the enormity of it all was too much to comprehend.  How
absurd it was that she and Mulder had thought they fought this alone.

"Myself --" "My brother--" "My lover--" She couldn't bear it any more
and felt the weight of it pushing her down, forcing her to cover her
head and cry out.

A hand yanked her up and shook her.  She opened her eyes expecting to
find Mulder at her rescue but it was Krycek, grasping her painfully
with his mysterious new arm.  "Scully!" he said.  "Let's get out of
this Benneton ad.  We have a job to finish."

She stared at him uncomprehendingly; he shook her again.  "I
understand, we all do.  It's bigger than any of us, we have to band
together, blah blah blah.  Now forget the Rainbow Coalition and move
it."  He let go of her roughly and she felt his grasp still on her,
but it was the hot burn of tentative forgiveness, not the numb
lethargy of his earlier touch.  She staggered out of the circle and
after the others, leaving the anxious horde to follow.


--

By the time the entirety of them -- over a thousand -- had gathered on
the grounds of the amusement park, the desperate stories of each of
them had begun to circulate.  Some took crazed mental notes, gasping
as pieces of the larger story came together for them for the first
time.  Others nodded sympathetically, providing counterpoint to the
losses and regrets of their companions.  A few hung back from the
crowd, still unready for what they heard or unwilling to accept that
all of them had some responsibility for what had transpired.

That was all right.  There was a balance in all of it, the believers
and the deniers, the just and the unjust.  No single person present
had committed solely to one side, none had sat by idly or even in
conscientious objection.  They all had one hand dirty and one hand
clean, and it was with either one that they introduced themselves to
the others.

The amusement park was not operating, but they had spread out to
absorb it.  A cluster of Kenyans (many of whom had accepted large sums
of money to rebury a deposit of the black oil) had occupied the
concession stand countertops from which they had a good view of the
entire park.  Two aged Japanese businessmen who had been lovers for
all the forty years they'd been key members of both the Consortium and
the rebellion group swung quietly on the bottom car in the Ferris
wheel.  A SETI engineer and his Puerto Rican wife had conspired to
delete evidence of the colonists' activities from the Arecibo
observatory; now they shoved dormant bumper cars at each other,
laughing.

The voices went silent when the bees came.  From all directions the
swarms flew in -- hundreds of millions of insects and still only a
fraction of the total number to be unleashed.  The sky shuddered,
black with their density.  The frequency of the thunderous hum
resonated with the structures in the park and soon all the walls were
trembling.  Plastic toys and popcorn machines and anything not bolted
down began to shimmy on their surfaces and creep off the edges,
shattering on impact and adding to the din.

No person inside the park made a sound.  They stood still, and
watched.

The movement on the horizons began.  At first they could see only the
dirt kicked up by the approach: a cloud of earth which rose up from
the ground and spiraled in small whirlwinds generated by the crazed
overhead flight of the bees.  Then faces emerged from the clouds,
faces of people in terror all running towards those in the center.
Their arms waved furiously as the bees engaged in kamikaze descent and
stung their victims wherever skin, eyes or ears were available.

Still no one moved.

The people on the outside smashed into the force field that surrounded
the park, each wave burying the next beneath their panicked feet.  The
wall of humanity on the perimeter grew taller and taller, the bottom
layer getting crushed in the madness.  Inside they could hear the
desperate cries, some even calling the names of those safe within, but
they made no response.

Those trapped beyond the field began to issue a new cry, this time
inhuman, and one by one their bodies alive or dead were torn apart by
an angry birth.  Long- faced gods and demons ripped out of their
parents' wombs and surged forward, tearing the new corpses with
undulled claws in their assault on the remaining humans.

Having spent their stings, the bees began to die and fall from the
clouds.  The force field was a dome above the entire park and so they
slid down, robotic raindrops on an invisible umbrella.  They fell and
fell and fell, for forty days and forty nights over the ark filled
with pairs, until they finally ceased.  Clumps of dead insects coated
the newborn aliens and half-buried the remaining corpses.  For a brief
moment, the sky was clear.

Then the ships came, and no one inside made a move.

Beautiful inlaid discs twirled down like snowflakes.  Each was a
glittering jewel in sunlight, a wondrous conglomerate of a million
worlds.  They spread out across the sky and then stopped.  One by one,
the slavering juveniles turned from the park and galloped in sinuous
cheetah leaps towards the nearest ship where they waited and arched
their necks skyward like hungry young birds.  The ships responded with
brilliant beams of light to the ground, down which shimmering human
figures floated.  The figures emerged on foot from the light and
stalked towards the park.  They were human but all alike --
slack-jawed clones standing naked and bare-handed but for long sticks
which ignited the spent human bodies on contact.  The clones made no
effort to run from the flames but merely stood there and were
engulfed.  In minutes, no evidence of the existence of any human
beings could be found.

The beams shimmered again and new figures emerged -- shorter, with
enormous heads and pools of black liquid for eyes.  The juveniles were
grotesquely larger but bowed before these beings.  Their elders held
out their spindly arms and stroked them lovingly, then bent down to
touch the surface of their new world.

Beams from all the ships swung away from the ground and towards the
park, and the witnesses inside were blinded by the light of a million
conquered suns.


--

Scully re-opened her eyes and the light had enveloped her.  She could
see nothing but white above her but around were the faces of the
people in the chamber.  The air was electric: motes of dust seemed to
float upward, hair stood on end.  Everything was in slow motion.  She
remembered now, finally, what it had felt like on Ruskin Dam.

Mulder was at her side this time, and they linked hands delicately.
He looked down at her and a complex play of emotions on his face were
replaced by joy.  He reached down, wrapped his arms around her waist
and lifted her up, high up in the air and shook her gently but
defiantly at the light.  He had a reason to be happy; they all did.
It was a room full of truth-seekers, and they all understood it all
now.

The colonists had come expecting to find a few straggling
collaborators: the Smoking Man and his ilk.  Instead they found
thousands of believers, thousands who had seen what was to come and
would deny that future simply by willing it not to be.  Their minds
were clear, and all of them had lost so much they were no longer
afraid to lose any more.  They had all decided that the world was
worth saving for the sake of itself, because nearly everything they
valued was in the room with them now.

Scully thought of C.G.B. Spender, with the cure for death in his
hands, destroying it rather than let his vendetta against mankind slip
away.  There was no balance to this act, no love.

She thought of those who should have been there: the white-haired old
conspirator who'd led Mulder to Antarctica, the shifting informants
with their uncertain loyalties, even Jeffrey Spender and Diana.

She thought of Melissa.

She thought of Samantha.

She thought of Emily.

Strughold's voice in her head: "The cat is alive."

The lights went out.



___________________________________________

                     X

 "...And still a new succession sings and flies; 
  Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot 
  Towards the old and still enduring skies, 
  While the low violet thrives at their root."

  -- Henry Vaughn, The Timber


___________________________________________



The driver didn't much like it, but they managed to squeeze Cristina,
Jake, Krycek and Marita into the back of the Path Finder, with Mulder
riding shotgun and Scully in his lap trying not to be sodomized by the
stick shift.  She reached for the dashboard as something to hold on to
and that was when Mulder noticed the digital readout above the stereo.
He checked his watch.

"Hey Scully, look.  Nine minutes missing."

"Cool."

He glanced in the rearview mirror, and of what he could see over
Scully's hair, the group in the backseat was considerably more
pensive.  No one could ever tell that ten minutes ago (or nineteen,
depending on the watch), all of them were laid out on the floor of
that large room, sobbing like children.  It was a lot to absorb, the
end of the world.

"Where do you guys want to be dropped off?" Mulder asked.

"Tataouine," Cristina said immediately.  "I have to find my daughter."

Jake Lee was nodding.  "What will all of you do?"

Krycek and Marita looked at each other in a way that suggested the
question had never occurred to them.  Mulder knew how they felt.


--

Scully dropped her luggage outside her door to reach for her keys, and
didn't bother to pick it up once she'd gone inside.  It wouldn't be
going anywhere else for quite some time.  Her neighbors tended to
avoid her end of the floor as it was.

She kicked the door shut behind her and stalked to the answering
machine.  It was blinking furiously.  A message from her mother in San
Diego, wondering when it was safe to come back.  A message from her
landlord asking if she'd need her plants watered again this time --
he'd seen her leave with suitcases.  A message from the Gunmen, who
were curious about why they'd woken up totally naked in a parking lot
of a Wal-Mart with her boss, and where had they been for the last few
months?
 
She rewound the message four times until she was satisfied she'd
really heard it, then collapsed on her bed face-down like a teenager
after an exhausting date.  Something hard was digging into her
shoulder.  Reluctantly, she rolled over and reached for it.

Her Bible felt especially heavy tonight.  Full of lies, and yet full
of truths.  A kind of paradox, really.  She could live with that.


--

The elevator doors opened.  Mulder stepped out automatically and
without thinking.  It was only natural that his healing leg be the one
to snag against the protruding handle of the rusted paper slicer that
was stacked amid a hallway full of boxes and discarded equipment.  His
howl of pain echoed throughout the basement.

"I'm in here," Scully called back brightly.

Mulder limped along the narrow path afforded by the junk and paused in
front of his office, grasping the edges of the doorframe.  "What the
hell is going on?"

Scully pushed past him carrying a stack of reel-to-reel tapes.  She
placed them neatly into a large lopsided box already in the hallway,
and strode back into the office after flashing him a brief smile.
"I'm cleaning," she said.

He peered into the office.  Indeed, nearly all of the accumulated junk
had been efficiently redistributed into the hall.

"It's probably a fire hazard," she continued from the bowels of the
filing cabinets, "but I told them I wanted it out by Friday and got
zero response, so."

"You came into the office last week?"  Their plane had landed on
Thursday, late.  Mulder himself had slept for twenty straight hours
and spent most of the weekend dribbling a basketball in his bedroom
until the neighbors complained.  Then he had done several weeks worth
of laundry, thrown away everything in his refrigerator even if it
wasn't spoiled, stayed up until three in the morning Saturday night
looking at family photos with an enraptured expression as if he'd
never seen these people before in his life, and then slept another
twenty hours.  That was it, except for the nine thousand times he
thought about calling Scully but didn't because he imagined she was
too shaken by what had just occurred.

From the looks of his desk, she had spent the weekend catching up on
her science reading.  Back issues of JAMA and the New England Journal
of Medicine littered his workspace and had spilled out onto the floor.
One of them, incongruously enough, had been left spread-eagled atop
the slide projector.

"I came in early on Friday, yeah.  Can you help me pull this box out?
I have no idea how it got wedged back here."

He obliged, but attempted on several occasions to convey the pain he
was experiencing in his newly-healed leg using only facial
expressions.  It seemed that he'd lost her to the empty but
captivating one-hundred count of black three-ring binders marked
"1970" that had been stored in the narrow space between her specimen
drawers and the back right wall.  She took no interest in his injury
at all.

"What are you doing?" he asked eventually.

She lowered the box and looked up.  He noticed that she wasn't wearing
a suit, just a light-colored cardigan over a tank top and unstructured
cotton pants.  It occurred to him then that he almost never noticed
what she was wearing, since it was invariably a suit that he'd seen
before.

He was surprised to note she was wearing her cross as well.

"I can't think with all of this crap in here," she was saying.

"Think?  About... what's happened?"

"No, about the X-Files.  About how we approach them, how we view
them."

"But no one cares how we view them."

She cracked a smile then, about a private joke to which he was not
privileged.  "How we view them is the most important thing of all."

"Scully, I don't understand."

He was surprised to find her hand on his arm suddenly.  She gave it a
quick, friendly squeeze, and then walked over to the desk.  She lifted
one of the journals and gestured with it.  "My instinct, when I walked
in here on Friday, was to throw all of this away."  She looked around.
"It seemed finished, Mulder.  All of it.  The room was full of
obsolete equipment no one wanted but that no one had the authority to
throw away, and I thought at first, that's us."

He thought he knew what she was getting at.  This was it.  She was
finally walking out.  She thought it was over and she was going to
leave.  "Scully, please, we don't know that the aliens--"

"Mulder," she said curtly.  "They're not coming back.  You know that."

"But--" But she was right.  He just knew, the same way he'd just known
for so many years that they were coming.

If she thought their partnership was over, why was she cleaning up the
office?

"I was wrong, though.  About us, about the X-Files.  It's not over,
but it's not the same anymore either.  So many of these cases,
hundreds of them, even the ones we solve -- what happens to them?
They get filed back here down in the basement.  They go nowhere.
Sometimes we arrest people, save lives, but who else benefits from
what we learned?  Mulder, if we get hit by a bus tomorrow all this is
will be for nothing.  Certainly nobody's going to spend time trying to
read your case notes."

He was squinting with the sheer effort of trying to follow her.  "Are
you suggesting that my new purpose in life should be to type up my
notes?"

She laughed as if it always came easily.  "No, that I am not.  I'm
suggesting that the X-Files have only been for us up until now.  Our
learning, our desire to find the truth.  But it's not about us now.
All those people in Tunisia, Mulder, they've been working and
suffering and dying for the same causes we have, and I think that up
until now it was important that it be for only them and us and no one
else."

He realized that they would never really be able to talk about what
had happened there.  They might refer to it vaguely sometimes, when it
was important, like now.  But those events, no matter how momentous,
weren't going to magically and overnight change them in to different
people.  That was okay, though.  It didn't diminish the fact that it
had happened, and that they'd been together for it.

"I think that now we're ready to start developing a language," Scully
was saying, "a framework in which other people can take the work we've
done and go further with it."

"I don't see why anyone who didn't believe us before is going to
believe us now."

"Mulder, there were over a thousand people in that room -- a thousand
people from all over the world who not only already believe but have
documentation to back it up.  Some of it from their own research, and
some of that research is still out there, waiting to be picked up and
used for the right reasons.  Besides, let's face it, there are a lot
of bright believers now who are presently out of jobs."

He looked around.  "Doesn't that include us?"

"Not necessarily.  Skinner doesn't remember anything that happened
while he was gone but he remembers the circumstances under which he
disappeared.  He was a little incoherent when I spoke to him -- he
kept asking if the hospital sold nice neckties -- but he said once
he's reinstated he'd do anything to bring back the X-Files division
full time.  But--"

Mulder frowned.  "What?"

"I'm not sure that the FBI is the right place for the kind of work I'm
envisioning."  Her voice sounded deliberately flat.

"So you are leaving."

She shook her head with force.  "No, I don't know what I mean yet.
But viewing these," she nodded towards the files, "as cases, with us
just waiting for someone to die before we can investigate, that
doesn't seem right anymore.  It's the wrong conceptual framework."
Her mouth quirked.  "It's obsolete."

"I miss Behavioral Sciences," he blurted out.  He had no idea where
this came from, but it was there.  He missed profiling, missed the
clear-cut bad guys.  He even missed exploring the dark corners of
dangerous minds, because he always imagined leaving a bit of light
behind when he was gone.  If there was an opportunity now, to bring a
little of what the X-Files had taught him into a job in which he could
actually solve cases--

This was all true, but that wasn't all of it.  Scully _was_ leaving,
even if she thought she was undecided.  She wasn't because everything
she said felt right to him too.  The X-Files, their partnership, it
was over, and if he couldn't work on these cases with her, he couldn't
work on them at all.  He should've been distraught over this but he
wasn't.  A curious optimism was in the air, or perhaps it was just the
morning light beginning to flood the office.

He'd missed some of what Scully had just said.  She was talking about
why she'd been cleaning out the office.  "So I need some time to start
thinking like a scientist again.  What I see in the future, it's not
about assigning blame or bringing crimes to justice.  It's about
discovery."

She stopped, as if waiting for him to say something.

"Mulder?"

He didn't answer.

"Mulder, are you all right?"

He could only nod, because the sun was shining into the room again and
her face was bathed in radiance.



___________________________________________

                 Epilogue

      "Well, the universe is shaped 
       Exactly like the earth 
       If you go straight long enough 
       You'll end up where you were."
 

___________________________________________





Not far from coastal Oregon, about halfway between Portland and
seaside Lincoln City, a small, family-owned winery went up for sale.
It was expected that the land would go to developers who would build a
shopping center or a new tract of suburbs.  The winery owners were
prepared to clear the land themselves, to remove the twisted vineyards
and bulldoze the tasting center and winemaking facilities, in exchange
for a good sale price.

This frightened the employees of the winery, especially those who
tended and picked the grapes through the temperamental Northwest
weather.  There were plenty of wineries in the area, but these owners
made an effort to keep the workers around beyond the pruning and
harvest rush, and many of the workers were of questionable immigration
status.  They watched the events surrounding the sale as closely as
they could, relying mainly on rumors supplied by those who worked
inside the winery.  The cleaning staff had the night shift and were
able to peek into the trashcans and at documents left carelessly on
desks.

At first, the workers' fears appeared unfounded.  No one visited the
winery for a tour of the property.  The economy had slowed and the
land was too far from the coast to be especially valuable.  The family
owners fretted and slept poorly for several months, while they worried
over mortgage payments and how to keep their children in good schools.

Finally, mercifully, an interested party came to visit the site.  They
were represented by only two people, a man and a woman, not the usual
entourage of lawyers and surveyors.  Their credentials were impressive
although their approach was at times a bit unconventional.  The man
was hesitant and taciturn at first, avoiding eye contact and often
looking bored.  The woman was slick and cool, as if beads of water
would roll off her unaffected.  She spoke quietly and directly and
only showed emotion when addressing the man, more often than not to
scold him for his disinterest.

They toured the entire site but expressed the most interest in the
least valuable portions of the property: the area of low hills which
began twenty acres from the main road and for which the winemakers had
found little use.  The woman asked puzzling questions about the
operation of the winery itself.  She wanted to know how much
electricity the operation of the presses drew and how much water they
utilized.  At first, the family thought that they were wine- makers
themselves, but the woman responded haughtily to their questions, "No,
we have no interest in that."  Yet the resource consumption of the
working winery was of utmost importance to her.

After several visits, the pair agreed to buy.  Once negotiation began,
the dynamic of the buyers changed dramatically.  The man became
animated and aggressive, asking tough questions and refusing to back
down.  Whenever he became especially animated, the woman would place
her hand on his arm and whisper into his ear -- a curiously intimate
gesture in a business setting -- and he would redden and issue a gruff
apology.  The family looked increasingly puzzled until the woman
pulled them aside during a recess and explained that while the man was
an expert in property negotiation, he had experienced several
"dramatic turnovers" in the past year and wasn't fully committed to
his new business role.  The family nodded as if they understood.

In the last day of negotiation, the buyers sprung their final
surprise: they asked that the family and all the workers stay on.
They wished to purchase the winery as a working business, fully aware
that it had never turned a profit and was unlikely to do so in the
future.  They asked only that they be allowed to build freely on the
hilly remainder of the property, and that while they would guarantee
the legality of their actions, they could not reveal what business
would be conducted there.  They concluded the deal by paying in cash.

Events moved swiftly.  Hive-like complexes of windowless,
aluminum-sided buildings were constructed.  Blank white trucks rumbled
in and out each night for weeks.  Swarms of dark-clothed people
unloaded obscure equipment.  Contractors were brought in to lay new
water, sewer and power lines, and when the digging was complete the
land was quickly covered in sod which obscured the pipes.  The
winemakers watched all this with trepidation, but also great relief,
for their business was intact as well as their futures.

The field workers were similarly relieved.  Under the new management,
they were given significant raises.  There was a rumor that the pay
was in exchange for keeping quiet about the actions of the new
management, although nothing was ever formally stated.  The workers
were only happy to comply, as they were fiercely protective of their
new and more affluent employment.  They saw the new owners only
briefly, at a "town hall" meeting in which they were told that any and
all effort would be made to secure them work visas.  One of the owners
said solemnly that there would be no aliens working at the winery, and
this made the other owners seated behind the makeshift podium laugh
for some reason.

After the initial shock, little changed.  The winery continued to
produce modest amounts of a few varietals.  Tours of the property were
still held, although visitors were kept well away from the new
construction.  There was a brief period of alarm when it was rumored
that the FBI was visiting the property, but no raid ever occurred and
it seemed that this was unsubstantiated talk.

Minor rumors, though, continued to accumulate, about strange nighttime
strolls by white-coated doctors and unnatural flashes of light
flickering from beneath exterior doorways.  One Latino landscaper came
down with a sudden fever and nausea and was taken in to the infirmary.
He did not speak English but was puzzled by the way two of the medical
personnel were arguing with each other.  In the end, one seemed to
relent, handing him some medication and ordering him home.  "No give
others," she said in broken Spanish.  He nodded quickly and left the
winery.  When he arrived home, he learned from his wife that a minor
flu was going around at their children's school, and that both his
daughters had contracted it and probably passed it to him.  The
landscaper wanted to help them but feared the doctor's strange orders,
so after some debate he took the medication himself.  The next day he
was perfectly healthy.  His family was sick for a week.

After that incident, several workers feigned illness just to get
inside, although most admitted it was less out of medical curiosity
and more because it was rumored that all of the doctors were beautiful
women.  The latter turned out to be partially true, but no more
miracle healings were reported.

Time passed, and in light of what happened later it passed
uneventfully.  The late-night equipment loadings and strange flashes
of light did continue, but these activities gradually became part of
the landscape.  No one was even fazed when a small group of cows were
led in and allowed to graze on the off-limits portion of the property.
It was the new owners, not farmhands from the wineworkers' families,
who tended these animals, and more often than not the job seemed to
fall to a couple of manic young children.  The cows were unguarded at
night, but the workers who stayed late avoided them as studiously as
they did all of the new construction.  Some local high school kids
once tried crossing into the property, with the probable intent of
tipping the poor things, but they were so drunk, it was reported, that
they got within ten feet of the cow pen and simply fell over as if
they'd walked into a non-existent wall.

One warm summer Monday, nearly five years from when the new management
had arrived, an onslaught of cars, news vans, and helicopters
descended on the winery.  A few workers fled, fearing a raid of some
kind, but most workers dropped what they were doing and stepped with
trepidation out from the fields to watch.  The vehicles fanned out,
surrounding the property, and the mood amid the reporters as they
leapt out and smoothed their hair was of barely-contained excitement.

A second wave of cars rolled in just afterward, full of what were
mostly ordinary people.  Many of them brought camcorders and cameras,
and photographed everything indiscriminately including the puzzled
field workers.  Some of them were yelling angrily, waving signs, but
most stared around like wondrous children, whispering to each other
and pointing with excitement.

The crowded hushed as a small group of the owners emerged from outside
the main entrance of the largest construction.  Among them was one of
the beautiful doctors; she was holding a clipboard up to her chest and
blinking as if she hadn't seen daylight in some time.  Another was the
rumored government agent, who had visited first infrequently and then,
it seemed, nearly every day in the last year.  Everyone in the group
was looking at each other with nervous smiles.  Some of them held
hands.

The woman broke away and stepped forward.  The press surged towards
her in response, nearly crowding out the view of the field workers.
The woman was bathed in artificial light and barely visible over the
microphones.  When she began to speak, her audience was silent, but
when she finished, the crowd erupted into cheers, shouts, and even
some tears.
 
The workers in the field watched with rapt attention although they did
not understand a word.  Some thought perhaps she was someone famous
who had been hiding out at the winery, maybe a movie star or a
notorious criminal.  Others thought that the entire group was from the
government, conducting secret and dangerous experiments.  A few
speculated that they were simply developing a new kind of wine.  They
argued among themselves quite animatedly, until the bottler's
American-born son ran up the slope from the crowd, shouting the truth
of what had been happening at the winery and how life would be forever
changed.







-----------

Credits:

The quotations in the summary and the epilogue are from the Modest
Mouse album, "The Moon and Antarctica."

Verbose thanks:

An astounding number of people responded to my cry for help on this
story.  In chronological order, Vehemently, Anjou, Meredith and cofax
all made invaluable contributions to style, grammar, factual detail
and overall flow.  Where the story fails is due entirely to those
cases in which I did not heed their fabulously good advice.

Also much appreciated have been the words of encouragement and
outright stalking since the first chapter was posted.  Gee, those
pointy sticks are sharp.

Extra special thanks to Jesemie's Evil Twin, who continually puts up
with my first drafts and has the infinite patience to review the final
version.

Lastly, much gratitude to Scullyfic Listmom Jill Selby, for running
such an inspiring list and contributing the challenge elements that
got this story off the ground: a character in a cast, a homemade gift,
Scully trying to hide a weapon on her person, and a dead cow.


--nev 
  http://nevdull.tripod.com/

April 2000 - December 2000