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was no way to prove that her diary was a suicide note. Robyn got on their case. I wouldn’t have, but hey, now I have a house, right?”
    “Don’t be bitter, sweetie, it doesn’t suit you.”
    She turned her bleak look on him, but he glared back, and finally she smiled slightly.
    “Fine. I have a house. But the settlement was spent before it arrived. Now there will be no money for food or utilities, unless I get work soon. When did all these laws get passed, anyway?”
    “Laws?”
    “New death duties. Inheritance taxes on top of those. The dead pay, the living pay. Taxes on insurance pay-out, despite the policy. Property tax surcharges.”
    “They passed while you were fighting the sex laws and human rights code violations, and I was fighting racism and the tightening of immigration. We were busy. And face it, did you ever think you’d have to worry about the joys of having money?”
    “Problem is, I don’t really have money. The truly rich pay almost nothing at all. The accidentally fortunate, with no long-term capital to buffer expenditures, are dinged just like the working poor. Well, I’ve had a windfall, like some perverse lottery of the damned, and paid the price of it, and here I am.”
    “You might find a good job. Something fun.”
    “If I can wait for one I like. I may not have time to be picky.”
    “How long can you hold out?”
    “About three more months and I’ll be on my face.”
    “And such a lovely face it is too.”
    She glared at him and he laughed. “That’s what I heard my boss say to the supervisor of engineering yesterday,” he said. “I thought she’d kill him. But, unfortunately, she didn’t.”
    “How’s it going there, anyway?” Russ had returned to the government office where he worked before his “sabbatical” overseas; he spent his days now programming computers and creating net interfaces to inform or, as he darkly grumbled, mislead the public. Morgan figured he’d last a year, two at most.
    “I’ll survive.”
    “Don’t we all.” But she knew that the answer to that was no: we don’t all survive.

    The sky was dark blue in summer intensity when the aliens arrived. In the park down by the river the cyclists on their intricate machines crisscrossed the bicycle trails. Above them on the bluff, looking down over the river toward the towers of the city, sat Morgana le fay, home from the wars.
    If ever a vessel sat empty, scoured by sand and fire, it was Morgan then as she sat looking over the city. Sun’s heat only accentuated her inner chill; she watched the cyclists with the detachment of despair. If suicide had been a word in her lexicon she would have been spelling it, but it was not, so she sat on the riverbank looking out without emotion across the valley.
    She had come from a long distance, and she felt the distance, every moment of it, as she waited for the story she did not know was about to happen.
    Though that day the aliens had arrived, she didn’t know it then, could think of little but her twisted gut. The wind was blowing all the day, out of the south-east, blowing the sky clean of clouds and scouring it dark, blowing as if to wipe the city away. A day or three ago something she ate was wrong, coursed through her body, migraine headache this day and the day before, then suddenly, after she had retreated from the riverbank gale, as she sat reading the newspaper, but starting from the back page as always, the knot loosened in her belly, into a rush of gas and diarrhea, barely controlled, and she missed the front-page news until hours later. Then Russ came in, excited, to her room where she sat on the bed, leaning on the wall at its head, knees up, writing sporadically at a letter between runs to the toilet.
    “Fantastic, eh?”
    “What?”
    “The big news!”
    “What?”
    “You don’t know? Haven’t you seen the paper? Heard the news? It’s practically being shouted in the street!”
    “So what, already? I’ve been sick half the day. I