When you get right down to it, the story I remember is pretty damn preposterous.

A cool breeze is blowing now. The last drifts of fog fall away in tatters, fleeing into the gloom just past the streetlamps. The wind feels fresh on my face.

A third possibility is that I didn’t make any of it up. I’m the hunted last survivor of a secret plot against a powerful outsider civilization, and my enemies will stop at nothing to catch me.

Hmmm. I never put it quite that way before. The next question, I now see, is obvious.

So what?

A smile? Is that what my answer is? A smile?

Yeah. So what? I want to shout. Who cares if they catch me? All they can do is kill me!

Why, in god’s name, have I been making myself so miserable?

Wow.

All right, then. Chuck is a little bit overdone. Hiding as a macho motorcycle repairman is smart, sure. But Chuck doesn’t have to belch in disgust every time a snatch of classical music comes on over the radio. He doesn’t have to watch motorcross on the TV or make snide remarks every time Elise makes a pathetic little attempt at philosophizing.

Amazing I didn’t think of this before. All I have left to lose is my worthless life. Small potatoes. Maybe I really can ease up a bit. Why didn’t I think of this before?

The clouds part and suddenly there is the moon. It is beautiful, like an opal in the night. I can play subjective tricks with it, make it small, a pearl held up at arm’s length, or go zooming in with my imagination, filling the sky with craters and tnaria much as… much as it might look from the portal of a ship.

I can see the Lunar Appenines, trace one of the ridges all the way to a little valley that twists and turns and dives into rocky depth. I can follow that cleft to the lip of a cave, a cave where there’s buried…