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"Intuitively. I do know. What's the theme, then? Have you settled on a title yet? Have you got
anything
I can give them?"

Cat had been putting off this discussion for two months— exactly one month after she'd stopped writing and realized she was blocked. She knew she should simply level with Melissa— Lord knew, Melissa deserved that much courtesy. It was just that if she
did
level with her…

There were a couple of questions Cat hated being asked. The first was how to pronounce her name— "Kate-lynn Meere," she'd explained wearily ever since grade school. The second was, "Where do you get your ideas?"

It was easy enough to brush the latter off with a pat answer, except she always felt a little dishonest doing so. She didn't like being untruthful, but she didn't want to talk about her night-visiting either, didn't want to get labeled as a weirdo and see her name blaring from the front cover of
The Enquirer
in every supermarket: AUTHOR CLAIMS NOVELS ARE GHOSTWRITTEN BY REAL GHOSTS!

She felt guilty enough using those ideas as the basis for her writing as it was. The only way she'd managed to come to terms with it was by convincing herself that since the ghosts came to her in dreams, they must be dredged up from her own subconscious. Ipso facto, the stories
were
her creations.

Oh, really? Then why did she feel like she'd been deserted by her best friend?

Because she had been.

Her writing troubles were almost secondary to the loss of her dreams and the subsequent disappearance of the Other-world and its inhabitants. They'd come night-visiting for as long as she could remember. As gnomes, they frustrated her with their wild antics. As elves, they had awed her with their unearthly beauty. And antlered Mynfel, with her night-deep eyes and resonant silences…

They had convinced her she was losing her mind, had in fact lost it long ago, then helped her rationalize away that same madness. They were her conspirators and her conscience, her freedom and her confinement. But mostly, through a lifetime of never feeling close, really close, to anyone, they had been her friends.

And now they were gone.

She could understand Mynfel's absence. The horned lady came seldom as it was. But the others… Lovely Mabwen with her silvery hair and doe-soft eyes. The poet-bard Kothlen who spoke of Myrddin and ancient kings from firsthand experience. What had become of them? And the gnomes? It had seemed that they were always around, in dreams or not, playing tricks about the house, tangling her already curly hair into elf knots, singing and joking. Especially Tiddy Mun, with his puckish grin and gentle nature.

"Cat? Have you heard a word I've said?"

Melissa was regarding her quizzically. Cat felt trapped, and wished she'd taken her own advice— never accept money for anything that wasn't written yet. Except she'd needed the money then, what with a mortgage payment coming up and the bank account balanced at zero.

She had a third of a novel sitting beside her typewriter. It had a tide—
The Moon in a Silver Cup,
— characters, theme, the first few meanderings of a typical Midhir plot, but nothing else. Kothlen had started the story four months ago when she was still dreaming. Kothlen had started it, but never come back to continue it. She knew she could write something to finish it off, only it wouldn't ring true, and if it didn't ring true, she didn't want it published.

She took a deep breath and gathered her nerve. Melissa was a friend— one of the few she had outside of the Other-world— but that didn't make what Cat had to say any easier. It was more than admitting failure; it was as though she'd suddenly developed a weakness in her character, was a failure as a person as well as a writer.

"I'm blocked," she said at last. "I haven't written a word worth keeping in three months."

Melissa said nothing for a long while. The silence intimidated Cat, and she moved restlessly in her chair.

"It's not like I haven't been trying," she said into that silence. "It's just not working."

"Why didn't you say something sooner? We're supposed to deliver the manuscript in November. That gives us only three months and—"

"I
know
how long I've got to the deadline. It seems like mat's all I can think of— that deadline looming up, getting closer and closer. I have visions of them sending men in pinstriped suits to get back their advance."

"Now don't be—"

"I've got a royalty payment from
Yarthkin
coming at the end of this month. I was planning to live on that money over the whiter, but I suppose I could give them that and get a job or something."

Melissa shook her head. "We'll get an extension on the deadline. That won't be a problem. What's more important is getting you back on track."

"It won't work, Melissa."

"It just feels like it won't work. Everybody runs into these kinds of things."

"You don't understand," Cat tried to explain. "They're gone."

"They…?"

"Ah…" Now was not the time to start blathering about ghosts and night visits. But she had to say something. "I… I get my inspiration from dreams, and I've stopped dreaming."

Worry lines creased Melissa's brow. "You're a craftsperson, Cat," she said. "Writing's a craft, just like any other creative activity. You have to stay in practice. We both know there's more hard work involved in writing than any mystique."

"But I have to have something to write in the first place."

"Have you started anything?"

"I've started a million things, and they're all shit."

She wasn't going to mention the manuscript sitting beside her typewriter. Melissa would expect her to finish it, and she couldn't. Not without Kothlen, because it was Kothlen's story. Only he was gone. All the ghosts were gone.

"What you need is a change of environment," Melissa said. "You have to get away for a while. When was the last time you took a vacation?"

"I'm not sure. I was down in Vermont for a weekend last spring."

"You need more time away than that. Ottawa's a very pretty city, but there's something about it that leaves a gray film on your mind, don't you think? Too many civil servants all in one place."

"That's a typical Torontonian attitude."

Melissa smiled. "I still think you have to get away from this city for a while and scrape the fog from your mind. Do you have someplace you can go? Friends that live out of town, or even out of the country?"

"Correspondents in the States. A couple in Europe. But I can't just drop in on them."

"Why not?"

Cat shrugged.

"I'd invite you to stay with me, but knowing you, I don't think you'd find Toronto all that conducive either."

"I'll think about it," Cat said. "About going away. I'm just not all that sure it's the right answer. The problem's in here." She tapped her head. "This is where it's empty. Going someplace else isn't going to change that."

"Don't be so sure. Something you writers tend to forget is that you need outside stimuli to get those creative juices flowing."

A small smile tugged at Cat's lips. "The voice of experience?" she asked.

Melissa shook her head. "Those that can't, teach," she replied.

As the waitress in Noddy's was bringing Cat and Melissa then lunch, Peter Band was just finishing up a stock check on the Del Rey backlist and wondering if he'd ever be able to keep Piers Anthony's Xanth series in stock. The damned books sold so fast, and what with
Ogre, Ogre
due in October and a sixth in the series to be released in January, he might have to call the store the House of Del Rey if the sales kept up.

Twenty-two blocks north on Bank Street, between Gloucester and Lisgar, Rick Kirby was in his own store, trying to sell a computer to Henri Cuiscard, who owned the shoe store down the block, and wishing he had a pert little salesgirl working for him so that he could just sit back and watch her work while he collected the loot. Not that Captain Computer was actually out of the red yet, as Stella liked to remind him whenever he brought the idea up. Didn't matter to her that it'd boost sales.

"Twenty-five sixty-five?" Henri asked him.

"Well, I could sell you something cheaper," Rick told him, "but if you're looking for efficiency…"

Just buy the sucker, he thought as he went through his spiel for the third time that day to the same customer. Henri Cuiscard nodded sagely, looking from the baffling— as far as he was concerned— array of hardware to his brochure and back again. He clutched the brochure as though it would impart comprehension simply by his holding it.

"These… ah… floppy disks," he began again. "How do they work?"

"It's very simple," Rick replied, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. "They're like a phonograph record, except instead of one long spiral groove, they have a number of magnetic rings to store the data. This one can hold up to 576,000 characters. You insert it here and…"

Stella, he thought desperately. I
need
a salesclerk.

Two miles west and slightly north of Captain Computer, Stella Sidney was studying a statistical report in her office at Tunney's Pasture and wondering, not for the first time in recent weeks, why she and Rick were still together. She sighed, trying to keep her mind on her work, but last night's argument after returning from the Ex stayed in the forefront of her mind and refused to be dislodged. It was as though they'd fallen into a downward spiral in their relationship, and the more they worked— or at least she did— at making it any better, the deeper and faster they fell.

Surprisingly, Cat felt better after lunch. Melissa had been very supportive, and Cat realized that it was her own fear of inadequacy that had kept her from confessing her block before this. The depression that had been glooming her steps for the past few weeks was somewhat lifted, burning away like mist before the sun. If she looked hard, she could actually see the odd ragged patch of blue sky. She didn't expect to go home and pound out a hundred pages of wonderful material. But Melissa
had
assured her that they'd get an extension on the deadline.

"I'll convince them to go for an autumn release," she said just before they left the restaurant.
"The Borderlord
should be doing well in paperback by then. Maybe we can get them to spring for a new double-headed promotion— the old paperback and the new cloth."

That would give Cat at least another five to six months to come up with something publishable. And it removed the pressure of the deadline that had been hanging over her head. Or at least the immediacy of it.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of Noddy's, she watched Melissa head off, then caught a glimpse of her own face on a poster in the window of Arkum Books, a couple of doors down from the restaurant. It was an ad for her latest book.
"The Borderlord,"
the blurb read. "By the author of
Yarthkin,
the winner of the World Fantasy Award."

The artist's conception of Aldon of the Borders wasn't exactly the way she'd pictured the character, but at least he hadn't been turned into a brawny barbarian hefting a sword, with some waxy-faced, impossibly-proportioned woman clutching at his leg. That had happened with the initial print run of
The Sleeping Warrior.
It was her first book, and when she got her author's copies and saw the cover illustration, she thought she'd die of embarrassment. For weeks she refused to go into bookstores, afraid that somehow the people browsing in them would connect her to that garish cover and judge her accordingly.

It was Melissa who'd written a cover-approval clause into all subsequent books— quite a coup for an unknown author, as Cat had been at the time. Melissa had also managed to convince McClelland and Stewart to pick up her latest book— another coup, considering that they weren't exactly renowned as publishers of fantasy.
The Borderlord
was her first book to appear from a mainstream publisher. It was also her first cloth edition— if you discounted the SF book club edition of
Yarthkin.

If
The Borderlord
did well, it would be quite a boost to her career. The reviews that she'd seen so far were promising. If sales proved as good as Melissa thought they'd be…

Cat sighed. If and if. The problem with
The Borderlord's
success, should it prove successful, was that it would put her next novel under that much closer scrutiny. And if Kothlen didn't come back soon to finish telling her the story… if he never came back… She didn't want to think about it. Besides, a successful career meant nothing compared to the loneliness she felt inside.

She tried to recapture the optimism that Melissa had left her with. Looking away from
The Borderlord
poster, she glanced at the rest of the window's display.

The man who owned Arkum Books believed in thematic displays. He had a soft sculpture dragon as a mascot whose name was Arkum as well, Arkie for short; every week it appeared in the window with a new costume that related to the current display. Today it was cookbooks, and Arkie had a tall chef's hat on his spiked head and was proudly brandishing a spatula. Last week it had been guidebooks, and Arkie had appeared in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirt and sandals, with a cheap Kodak camera slung jauntily over his shoulder.

Maybe, Cat thought as she turned from the window, she should write a story about a window-display dragon who got fed up with his job and went off on some mad quest. Tiddy Mun would like that. Maybe if she wrote it out for him, he at least would come back.

As Cat started for home, Farley O'Dennehy was still sleeping off last night's drunk, propped up against a tree on the heavily wooded slope between Parliament Hill and the Ottawa River. His suitcase lay on the ground beside him and he wore a tattered and stained pajama top over his clothes. He
always
wore pajamas when he was sleeping. Or at least as much of them as he could manage to put on before he passed out. Sometimes he even took off the clothes he was wearing first.

Five blocks south of Parliament Hill, on the fifth floor of the L'Esplanade Laurier complex, Debbie Mitchell was typing up Bill Worthington's correspondence. Worthington was the president of Worthington Tremblay Financial Services and Debbie's boss. Worthington was also responsible for the firm's financing one third of Captain Computer at a very reasonable rate of interest. Rick Kirkby and Bill went back a long way, but where Rick jumped from enterprise to enterprise, Bill had simply stuck it out with his partner Emile Tremblay, building up their business until it had become one of the most successful and respected financial services in the province.