I listened to Shaman as a radio "listens" to a broadcast. It went through me. I should have been crying, but, though I looked and looked, I couldn’t find my tears.

"Izzy Molson can’t help you, Mel," Shaman told me. Gypsy twiddled his thumbs and snarled under his breath. "I’m you. And you’re not what you think you are, Mel. I’m you. You didn’t consummate with Nora, Mel, or you’d know how right I am. I’m you. She wanted you to explode inside her, and not just your sperm, Mel. I’m you." I felt like a cow being milked, helplessly and dumbly chewing cud. Shaman squeezing my udders, his fingers sticky with my milk. The hiss of milk spray into Shaman’s bucket. The pressure inside me dwindling. Chewing and chewing.

Then Shaman whispered: "I’m you, Mel. They want to pull the Sphinx up through your mind like a baby gorilla out an aphid’s pussy, so they can install him in the Magellanics. I’m you. Is that what you want, Mel?"

"You make me laugh." Gypsy turned on Shaman suddenly. "The arrogance! You think you can bore into him right here in front of my face!"

"But I am. He’s mine, old Gyp. You can’t do squat zip. Look at the poor worm. Even if you got him to Sandy, he’s not Abu. You make me laugh, Sandulean."

"Shaman, the only reason I let you get this far is to inoculate him against you. Now he’ll recognize what you do." And Gypsy slapped me sharply across the face. It stung. My ears rang. The flood of awareness made me conscious all at once of another, deeper violation, and I swung my gaze toward Shaman as if I were wielding a shillelagh.

He drew back, startled. There was the slightest hint of fear, then it passed like the moon shadow of a wisp of smoke, and Shaman was his own again. He smiled a studied smile. I withered.

"I see," Shaman said to Gypsy. "You want to take away my farm."

Nora careened to the table and stood over Shaman. There was blood smeared on her neck, down her arms, and across her chest. "You’ve been at him. You said you wouldn’t."

"Shaman tried to drill him," Gypsy said, "right here in the Magellanic Stream. Mel threw him out. It was funny, Nora. You should have seen it. Mel bounced him!"

Shaman shot back, "It wasn’t the Earther. It was him, it was Gypsy using the boy like a hand puppet. The boy is mine. He has no will. He has no self. He is nothing. He is my straw, my chocolate flavor straw into the mind of Abu. This had nothing to do with you or with anyone on Sanduleak or anywhere else in the Magellanics."

"You’re wrong, Shaman," Nora said. "Abu is our father as well.

"I’m no menace to your galaxies. Why can’t you live and let live?" Shaman pushed away from the table and stormed to what used to be the glass doors leading to the pedestrian walkway. He stood there, staring out into black space. Gypsy applauded sardonically; Shaman’s was the gesture of a Shakespearean actor.

"Nora," I stuttered, "you’re covered with blood."

"It was that tattooed man," she said, "the one who gave me a flower. He must have been in the men’s room when we took off. He stayed there and hid, apparently. I heard him through the wall. I had to kill him."

"Vampires!" My mind rattled like a dryer on three legs; Gypsy’s slap had knocked to center stage the bubbles from Izzy’s quickpatch. Thoughts jostled and non sequitured inside. I ran behind the salad bar and inched back and forth along the sneeze guard, ready to fling dressings at any attacker.

(These days, when I get an audience with Izzy, he likes to give me a lot of grief about that episode. He calls it the Intergalactic Food Fight.)

There wasn’t much Russian left, but I was hoping to do some damage with the Roquefort and Italian, if I had to. I thought the vinegar in the Italian might blind them for a moment. The lumps of Roquefort cheese could slow them down. I could make for the dishwasher and fly us home, beating them back with ladles and meat cleavers and stuff that I found in the kitchen.

But the cheese was probably fake, I was thinking, or skimpy. I might be doomed in interstellar space by larcenous highway restauranteurs. "Vampires! Stay back," I said.

(Intergalactic Food Fight?IFF. It’s a pun. "IFF" is also short for IF AND ONLY IF. I had to suffer and be a maniac ignoramus so that Abu al-Hawl could get a ride home and Johnny Abilene could ascend to the throne in the Small Magellanic Cloud; once I did all those stupid little things I had to do, the big matters inevitably resolved. IFF. Izzy knew it.)

"Vampires! Stay back!"

"This should be interesting," Gypsy drawled.

Nora walked toward me slowly. "Trust me, Mel."

"No." I picked up a metal bowl of ruffle-cut beet slices and threatened her with it. "You killed that trucker. Did you eat him, Nora? Gypsy ate the cashier. Are you fighting over who’s going to eat me?"

Shaman laughed. "You shouldn’t have slapped him, Gypsy. Now he’s awake, such as he is."

"Mel…" Nora kept walking toward me, undeterred by the beet slices. "You shouldn’t distress yourself over blood. Bodies aren’t important, Mel. Don’t you remember? You were almost there with me…"

"No more love-making!" Shaman warned. "I can do an epoche too, Nora, and you might not like how you’re greeted where I would take you."

"You wouldn’t dare," she said, without taking her eyes off me. "You don’t know how, Shaman. You’d turn the world inside-out. It would be the end of you." She was more beautiful than ever. The blood somehow appealed to me now. It made me tacitly aware of her neck, her chest, her arms. I was hungry for her, starved to the marrow. She kept coming.

"What should I remember, Nora?" I said. Then she would be mine.

"Remember the Sphinx, called Abu al-Hawl!" Shaman shouted. "Remember he who made Chephren. The Sphinx is still thumbing, and in all these millennia, none of you Sanduleans has managed to pick him up. Stay put, Nora. You could wind up in some waterless place for a long time, Nora, and there’d be no WC."

Gypsy burst into flame. "I’m you, Shaman!" he said.

"The hell you are. Don’t try that on me!" Shaman pointed at him, thrusting his arm as if it were a fire hose, and the flames whooshed out.

"What am I?" I said. I dropped the beets.

(The Haymakers still send me tribute every three hundred years: uranium juke boxes, fake books from all parts of the universe?with performance rights granted, since they know I like to gig on the acousticals Johnny gave me in Giza?music boxes with their songs transposed to Larmor frequencies, and so on. Three hundred years is a long time on Sanduleak, but for most of my galaxy, it’s a blink; Johnny and the boys are tremendously grateful to me, even though I really had no choice in the matter, and if I had, frankly, I wouldn’t have helped them.

I know that must sound pretty crass, given that the Italians were using Abu’s head for rifle practice during World War II, among other indignities that Ylemic Lord had to suffer during his captivity. Still, I thought of myself as an individual being for most of the time I was in the Milky Way. I didn’t think that the Sphinx was of any importance whatever! Deluded as that may be, I think you could call it a mitigating circumstance: not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor. I was looking out for Number One, so I thought, as if there were any.)

22. I’m You

"You are Abu al-Hawl," Nora said, "the Father of Terror, Rahorakhty, Sun God of the Two Horizons, and I am Queen of Punt, the land of incense, the land of purified desire. Gypsy is my servitor. Shaman is a foul grave robber. Abu al-Hawl, thou knowest everything. Abu al-Hawl, Soul of the Great Sphinx, Ka, I invoke you."