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Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I’ve discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there’s more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my—what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn’t not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I’m glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too. —Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction Table of Contents Introduction Our Lady of the Sauropods Waiting for the Earthquake The Regulars The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa How They Pass the Time in Pelpel The Palace at Midnight The Man Who Floated in Time Gianni The Pope of the Chimps Thesme and the Ghayrog At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party The Trouble with Sempoanga Jennifer’s Lover Not Our Brother Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory Dancers in the Time-Flux Needle in a Timestack Amanda and the Alien Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake The Changeling Basileus Homefaring