I eat my heel of bread, then stump into the room that Daisy calls the Butler's Pantry, that I use for my office and shut the door. Our e-zine, *Sit/Spin,* went from occasional to daily when I took it over after New Year's, and I commandeered an office to work in. Apparently, it's *de rigueur* cafe reading in Copenhagen. Whatever. The important things are: 1) I can spend a whole day in my office without once remembering to need to take a pill; 2) When I come out, Daisy Duke is always the first one there, grabbing my comm and eating the ish with hungry eyes. I start to collect the day's issue, pasting in the pict of Tony and Daisy under the masthead. # I'm on a Harbourfront patio with a pitcher of shandy in front of me, dark shades, and a fabbed pin in my knee when the mothaship comes back. I took the cure in February, slipped out and left a note so Daisy wouldn't insist on being noble and coming with, lying about my name and camping out in the ER for a week in the newly recaptured Women's College Hospital before a doc could see me. Daisy kissed me on the cheek when I got home and then went upside my head, and Tony made everyone come and see my new knee. While I was in, someone had sorted out the affairs of the Process, and a government trustee had left a note for me at general delivery. I got over fifty dollars and bought a plane-ticket for a much-deserved week in the Honduras. I tried to take Daisy, but she had stuff to do. I beach-fronted it until the melanomas came out, then home again, home again, only to find that the house crime-scene taped and Tony the Tiger and Daisy Duke were nowhere to be found in a month of hysterical searching. So now, on the first beautiful day of spring after a fricken evil, grey winter of pain and confusion, I work on my tan and sip beer and lemonade until the sirens go and the traffic stops and every receiver is turned to the Emergency Broadcast System -- *This is not a test*. I flip open my comm. There's a hubble of the mothaship, whirlagig and widdershins around our rock. The audio track is running, but it's just talking heads, not a transmission from the mothaship, so I tune it out. The world holds its breath again. # The first transmission comes a whole pitcher later. They speak flawless English -- and Spanish and Cantonese and Esperanto and Navajo, just pick a channel -- and they use a beautiful bugout contralto like a newscaster who started out as an opera singer. Like a Roman tyrant orating to his subjects. My stomach does a flip-flop and I put the comm down before I drop it, swill some shandy and look out at Lake Ontario, which is a preternatural blue. Rats-with-wings seagulls circle overhead. "People of Earth," says the opera-singer-cum-newscaster. "It is good to be back. "We had to undertake a task whose nature is. . . complex. We are sorry for any concern this may have caused. "We have reached a judgment."