"It doesn't scan," Wildeblood protested feebly.

A gay swish of starched cloth moved queerly and a nurse's bland blond face appeared looking down at hir. "Anything the matter, dearie?" in a Brooklyn accent.

"What day is it?"

"Wednesday. Still Wednesday." The nurse spoke, as they always do after surgery, as if talking to an idiot.

The doctor recrossed on his peg leg (but that was slipping back into the dream again).

"Circumcision is a Jewish conspiracy. He bit it off, one great CHOMP!!!-and off it came," Dr. Ahab was ranting. "I am the feet's lieutenant. Sprechen Sie Joysbrick?"

A dangling "e" fell past from another book.

They were opening the curtains to let in sunlight. The white wall was a hospital wall. A hand at his wrist told hir that now her pulse was being taken.

Epicene Wildeblood awakened again. "I'm Mary Margaret, " he gasped happily, beached on the shore of reality, cast up from the ocean of dream.

"Yes," said the real doctor's voice (his name was Glopberger, not Ahab), "the operation was um 100 percent successful. You are most certainly Mary Margaret now." He beamed, an artist proud of his work, yet tentative, waiting for the Work's first live movement.

Mary Margaret Wildeblood looked about her at the New World. This is Johns Hopkins Hospital. This is 1983. Everything that went before was just a nightmare. I am alive. I am me. I am free.

"How soon do I get the Curse?" she cried. "When do I become a real woman?" Thinking: the Blood of the Lamb. Glopberger's pink face, agape, was yet another Disney caricature, the waters of unconsciousness calling hir home. Home: back to the stars. And SHe went, she went, into the great ether drift, into the cosmic void again, from dina shaur to turban bay in a michaelsonmorley regurgitation to the Hawkfouledest Convention in Elveron. Yes a forty-four-year-old male rising like Venus on fours out of the waves but aglow gleaming as in Botticelli: hir Self surprised at this astonishingly female body a really successful crossing and one hand crept as she slept toward the crypt rested there happy yes: it was true. A female body. She snored hoarsely.

And Dr. Glopberger, like Baron Frankenstein, looked on his work and saw that it was very good. So far.

MURPHY'S RELIGIOUS

I still recall vividly the shock I experiended on first encountering this multiworld concept. The idea of 10100 + slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies… is not easy to reconcile with comon sense.

–bryce S. dewitt "quantum mechanics and reality." Physics Today September, 1970

They were sitting in a VW Rabbit on Market Street in San Francisco. The marquee across the street still said DEEP THROAT after twelve years. "They never going to change that?" Starhawk asked. "Everybody and his brother been there to see that Linda Lovelace swallow peckers by now. Hell, everybody and his brother been there twice by now."

"She could swallow my pecker anytime," Mendoza said. Mendoza was a cop.

"I seen a funny one the other day," Starhawk said, starting to laugh. "In the men's crapper in the archaeology building. 'Linda Lovelace for President it said. 'Let's have a good-looking cocksucker in the White House.' College kids."

"They're all a bunch of fags these days," Mendoza told him seriously. "Fags and dopers. And they call us pigs. Anyway, what were you doing in the archaeology building?"

"I like to study my people's history," Starhawk said. "There a law against that?"

"The fuck," Mendoza said, "I don't care what you do on your spare time. You make out with those college girls? Don't tell me, I know. You make out like a bandit. You're the greatest thing come down the pike since Burt Reynolds, you are."

Starhawk started to clean his nails with an attachment on his key ring.

"Tell me about the coke."

"Murph owns more guns than the army got, up in Presidio. He's a real nut on guns. I mean, it's your ass he catches you. He won't think twice about it. A police officer catching a burglar in his own house, it's your ass. You got to understand that."

"Dig," Starhawk said. "It's always my ass. You think there's a crib worth knocking over they don't have guns these days? Christ, there's never been a better-armed country since we had the Revolution, is what it is. Even little old ladies. Even in Berkeley for Christ's sake. This is no business for anybody got shaky nerves, these days. College professors, their houses are stacked with enough munitions for Black Panther headquarters. What I don't understand is how come everybody in the fucking country hasn't been at least wounded by now. Everybody's even more crazy-mad than they are shit-scared. It's like High Noon. You don't have to tell me, be careful. I wasn't careful, I'd be one dead Indian."

"Son of a bitch," Mendoza said suddenly, sitting up.

Starhawk was almost startled. "Huh?"

"That dog," Mendoza said. "You see that son of a bitch shit right on the sidewalk? They do that all over the city, the ordinance doesn't mean a fucking thing. Dirty, filthy animals, I d ban them from the fucking city entirely, I was mayor."

Yeah," Starhawk said. "That's our chief problem here, dogs shitting on the street."

"It ain't funny," Mendoza said. "Filthy bastards spread all kinds of diseases. And you take your kid out for a walk and there's two of them humping and the kid says, 'Daddy, what are the doggies doing?' What are you gonna tell her, is what I wanna know. Dirty, filthy animals."

"Yeah, but about Murphy and this job."

"Okay, okay," Mendoza said. "I'm just telling you dirty filthy animals should be banned. With Murph you got to be in and out as slick and sneaky as a preacher's prick in a cow's ass. I mean, he likes guns, more than most cops. And he'd love an excuse to shoot you."

"Murphy?" Starhawk turned in his seat. "Murph and I, we never had any bad feelings."

"Well, okay, he loves the ground you walk on. Like all the hookers on Powell Street, and the housewives up in Marin, and the college girls now too. But he hates what you are. He hates all minorities-Indians, niggers, it don't matter to him, he's democratic about it. The fuck, he doesn't like me much, and we been partners going on ten years this May. And he hates burglars especially. An Indian burglar, that's almost as good to him as a nigger burglar. You got to realize that when you go in there."

"That's a hot one," Starhawk said, not laughing. "That really is a hot one. All the stuff he's fenced for me, and he hates burglars. That really is good. Next thing you'll tell me is the Vice Squad hates hookers."

"Murphy's religious," Mendoza said. "He'd love to make holes in you. That's what you got to understand."

"Support your local police," Starhawk said, "for a more efficient police state."

"Look, you on this caper or you just going to sit here and crack wise? I can get Marty Malloy, you know."

"You're religious too," Starhawk said. "I went and made fun of the department and now you're going to get Malloy. Who'll fuck up the whole job and you'll both be up in Q for the next twenty years. But at least he won't crack wise about the department. He'll leave fingerprints all over the joint, and drop the snow in the bushes on his way out, and crash into an Oakland P.O. car going home, and then lead them right to your front door, but he's got proper respect for the police, Malloy. Yeah, you get Malloy."

"Look, no need to be touchy." Mendoza was ingratiating. "I want you, I don't want Malloy. Just lay off the department, is all."

"Okay, okay. No need for either of us to get antsy." Starhawk smiled like an actor. "How much coke you think?"

"Like I say, who knows? But it's got to be around 500 Gs. That's what Amato says and he's good at making estimates like that. Say Amato is wrong for once in his life, say it's only 300 Gs, still you don't get half of 300 Gs every night you go out and knock over a house."