HER PILGRIM SOUL

Eight fantasies of reincarnation, immortality, and healing, three of them originally written for The Twilight Zone, by the author of Time and Chance (1989). Compassion is the hallmark of Brennert's imagination, and there's always a second chance for his scientists, artists, and lovers. In ""Sea Change,"" a former pop composer deafened by a terrorist bomb falls in love with an ageless Greek siren who's attracted to him precisely because he can't hear her irresistible voice; when he has a chance for an operation to recover his hearing and his vocation, he refuses until she runs off, but then, hearing regained, goes off in search of her once more. ""Healer"" shows the rise and fall--and rise again--of a small-time thief who stumbles on a stone that can work miraculous cures. The futuristic ""Voices in the Earth"" confronts a mission to mine the burned-out earth with ghostly inhabitants who plead with one of the scientists to leave their dead planet alone and then plot to infiltrate his body to track and follow him back to his own world. And the predictable but highly effective title story, the basis of the forthcoming musical What If?, introduces a rapidly aging hologram named Nola Granville, who devotes her week of regeneration to calming her workaholic investigator's fears about having children of his own. Brennert's conclusions, especially in his shorter stories, aren't always worthy of his arresting situations, but every one is aglow with forgiveness.