Ballroom of the Skies (13 page)

She didn’t answer. Her high heels clacked busily in double time to his long stride. They came to streetlights again. Brown hair bounced against the nape of her neck as she walked.

“What did you people do to Branson?”

Again she refused to answer.

“If you
are
people,” he said with surly emphasis. “I don’t care about your … motivations. I won’t forgive what was done to Patrice.”

“Please shut up. Stop grumbling.”

Two men appeared suddenly out of the shadows a dozen paces ahead. Dake stopped at once, turned and glanced quickly behind them, saw the others there, heard the odd whinnying giggle of a mind steeped in prono, anticipating
the sadist fury. Karen had kept on walking. He caught her in two strides, hand yanking on her shoulder.

She spun out of his grasp. He gasped and stared at the two men. They had turned into absurd dolls, leaping stiff-legged in grotesque dance, bellowing in fright and pain. One rebounded off the front of a building, caught crazy balance and rebounded again. The other pitched headlong into the gutter and rolled onto his back and began banging his heels against the pavement, arching his back. Dake could think of nothing but insects which had blundered into a cone of light which had blinded them, bewildered them, driven them frantic with heat and pain. Behind them the other men bounded and bucked and sprawled. Karen did not change her pace. He caught up with her. She gave him a sidelong gamin grin, a squint of ribald humor in the glow of streetlights.

“Dance of the pronies,” she said.

“And there is no point, I suppose, in asking you … what did that?”

“Why not? A headache. A rather severe one. It gave them something to think about. Like this.”

He staggered and clapped his palm hard over the lance of pure flame that ran from temple to temple, a rivulet of fire. It stopped his breath for a moment. And it was gone as quickly as it had come. There was no lingering pain. But the memory of pain was almost as hurtful as the pain itself.

She took his hand. “You’d be much more difficult, Dake. Prono makes mush of them. Soft, sticky little brains. Like wet glue. We’ll go over there to that place. A breathing spell. I’ve got to think how I can get us back to New York.”

The fleng joint was a slow cauldron of mass desperation. Prone and fice, and fleng strip routines, and the gut-roil of the kimba music, and the rubbery walls like white wet flesh. During the Great Plague in London, man, obsessed by dissolution, had made an earnest attempt to rejoin the slime from which he had once come. Now the plague was of the spirit, and the effect was the same. They pushed their way through to a lounging table, and
waved away the house clowns, refused a cubicle ticket, managed to order native whiskey. She put her lips, with their heavy makeup, close to his ear.

“We’re going to separate here, Dake. That will be the best way. I could try to help you get to Miguel, but they can find me easier than they can you. I’ll be more harm than help.”

“And if I don’t want to get to Miguel?”

“Don’t be such a fool. It isn’t a case of wanting. If you don’t get there, you’ll die. Maybe you want to do that. If you want to die, then I’m wrong about you.”

He turned toward her and saw the sudden panic change her face. Though her lips did not move, and he was certain she had not spoken, her words were clear in his mind, coming with a rapidity that speech could not have duplicated.

“I didn’t do as well as I thought: A Stage Three picked us up. Coming in the door over there. The man with the long red hair. I’m going to distract him. Leave as quickly as you can and don’t pay any attention to anything. Understand? Anything! No matter how crazy it looks to you. Go to Miguel as quickly as you can and … be careful when you get there. You’ll be safe once you’re in the lobby. But the street out in front will be dangerous. Be very careful. Go now. Hurry!”

He slid from the table and plunged toward the door. A small man with a wooden look on his face hopped up onto one of the show platforms and dived at the sick-looking man with the long red hair. A woman screeched and raced at the red-haired man. Dake felt a surge of terror so strong that he knew, somehow, that it had been induced in his brain by Karen to give him more speed, more energy.

The red-haired man was twisting in a knot of people who oddly fell away from him, as though all interest in him were suddenly lost. Dake burst through the door and found himself running with others. Running with a pack of others. And he saw that they were all himself. He saw a dozen Dake Lorins bursting from the door, running in all directions, and he screamed as he ran, screamed and
looked back over his shoulder as he screamed, saw the red-haired one stand on the sidewalk and then topple as someone dived against his legs. He ran silently then, lifting his long legs, running until white pain burned his side and scorched his lungs. He slowed and walked, struggling for breath, his knees fluttering, sweat cold on his body.

The cabdriver was reluctant. He said he didn’t make trips like that. He yielded to two arguments—Dake’s strangling arm across his throat and the thousand-rupee note in front of his eyes. Dake took the man’s gun and shoved it inside his belt. Dawn wasn’t far away as they turned into the only tunnel to Manhattan that had not become flooded and unusable through neglect. In the city the white police trucks were collecting the bodies of those who had died violently in the night. Dake felt caked and dull and old, worn dry with emotional hangover. They went through the dark streets in those predawn hours when life is at its lowest ebb—the hours of aimless regrets, of the sense of waste, of the knowledge of death. The October stars wheeled in a corrosive indifference to all the works of man. The city slept … restlessly.

Mindful of Karen’s last warning, he had the driver stop
two blocks from the above-ground lobby of the apartment dwelling where Miguel lived. He gave the man the thousand-rupee note, returned his gun. The man gave him a surly nod, made a screeching U-turn, reckless of his precious tires, drive back downtown, single red eye blinking as the rough road surface joggled a loose connection.

Dake moved with instinctive animal caution, staying on the darker side of the street, stepping lightly and quickly through patches of faint radiance. The above-ground lobby was lighted. He could see the head of the desk clerk bent over a book on the high desk. The soft light of the lobby made a semicircle of radiance that reached almost to the midpoint of the road.

Dake waited for a time in the shadows, oddly restless, and then walked out boldly, heading directly across the street for the doors. His heels were loud on the asphalt. He heard a faint scuffing noise in the shadows behind him and to his left. He did not turn, but lengthened his stride. The area of light was two steps away. He took another long stride and was caught there, motionless. Something had clamped down on volition, something that held him as though, in an instant, he had been turned to ice, or stone. He could not change even the direction of his sight. The clerk was just off his center of vision. He saw the head lift abruptly. He moved then, taking a long step backward with infinite unwilled stealth. Another step.

Miguel Larner appeared suddenly, just inside the doors. Dake had not seen where he had come from, or how. The man wore a pair of florid pajamas. He stood
very still. A stranger appeared behind him, another beside him, and a tall woman appeared over near the desk. The five persons inside the bright lobby stood and watched him. They were fifty feet away. He could see no expression on their faces, but their eyes seemed bright, feral. He was aware of how alien they were. They emanated a tangible coldness.

Something behind him was frightened. He could taste fright that nibbled at the edges of his mind. A hard compression of force erupted into his brain. It sucked him forward, running with a vast awkwardness, a shamble-legged, slack-armed lunge that took him stumbling across the sidewalk, diving for the doors that flicked open barely in time, to let him slide and roll on the slick floor, to thud against the base of the desk as the woman stepped lightly out of the way. He sat up. They had all moved closer to the door. They filed out and stood in a row on the sidewalk. On the far side of the street something flounced and rolled and made guttural sounds in the darkness. They all came back in. Miguel Larner came over to Dake. His eyes were vast and hung in pure velvet blackness, unsupported. There was nothing else in the world but the eyes of Miguel Larner. Little fingers pried under the edge of Dake’s soul and flipped him. He fell off the edge into blackness.

It was a cloudless spring morning by Miguel’s dioramic pool. Dake shut his eyes again. He remembered a time long ago. Eight years old. He had seen the overhead lights of the operating room. Then heard a hollow echoing voice in his head, saying, as though in a long tunnel, “mmmm-
gas!
mmmmm-
gas!
mmmmm-
GAS!
”

And then the bleary awakening—the over-large faces of his parents looking down at him on the bed—big faces suspended at odd angles. “How do you feel?” A voice that echoed down a long empty tunnel.

He opened his eyes again. He was on a gay beach chair by the pool. Miguel and a stranger looked at him with that cold sobriety, that extra-human speculation he had seen in the lobby—how long ago? A year, or a minute.

Miguel’s lips moved. “Mr. Lorin. Mr. Merman.”

“How do you do.” Dake wanted to let loose crazy laughter at the quaintness of the formality. He trapped the laughter in his throat.

Merman had a boy’s face, an old man’s eyes.

“You did well,” Miguel said, “to get in range of Johnny. Otherwise Karen’s rather pathetic little exhibition of stubbornness would have been quite pointless. They’ve brought her in. She wants to see you. I’ll call her. Don’t speak to her.”

No answer seemed necessary. Miguel gave Merman a quick sharp look and nodded. Dake had the idea they were communicating with each other. Karen came out to the pool, stood on the apron at the far side of the pool and looked at Dake. He was shocked at the change in her. Her face was wan and pinched, and her eyes were enormous. Her mouth had a trembling, old-lady uncertainty about it, and her fingers plucked at the edges of her grubby skirt. Two things seemed mingled inextricably in her eyes. A keen, warm, personal interest in him, and also a look of confused dullness—the look sometimes seen in the eyes of a dog beaten once too often.

Miguel nodded at her and she turned and left, walking aimlessly, shaking her head, saying something to herself that Dake could not understand.

“What happened to her?” Dake asked.

“I’ll tell you, but just remember it, don’t try to understand it. Later … if you are more than I think you are, understanding will catch up with you. Remember this. Two screens badly torn. The third screen bruised. She’ll be a long time healing, relearning, readjusting. She’ll be a long time here, Dake Lorin.”

“What is this all about?” Dake asked. He had a sense of futility as he asked the question. Miguel Larner went over to the pool, sat and dangled his legs in the water, his bare brown back toward Dake. Dake looked toward the young-old face of Merman. His eyes veered suddenly toward something that had moved on the stones of the terrace. A tiny column of little naked savage figures snake-danced their way toward his ankles. Four-inch figures
with animal faces. Their tiny cries were like the cries of insects. He instinctively snatched his feet up into the chair. They swarmed up the chair legs.

The memory of Karen’s voice came to him across present horror. “You’re expected to go mad, my friend. Just keep remembering that. And don’t.”

He shut his eyes and slowly lowered his feet to the floor. He felt them running across his clothing, plucking at him, prodding, pinching. They clambered up his chest, up his face, entangled tiny fists in his hair and swung themselves up. He opened his eyes and he was in utter blackness. He was naked. A long cold something coiled its way slowly across his foot. He set his teeth in his lower lip and did not cry out or move. He fell to hot bright yellow sand. Fat spiders skittered across the sand. He looked more closely and saw that they were dismembered human hands, standing tall and agile on plump fingers, circling him with quick darts of movement. Two of them struggled toward him, dragging something, dragging, he saw, Karen’s head, the spider fingers scrubbling in the sand with the effort. A shadow crossed him. He turned and looked up, squinting at a featureless sky. Something hung there. A figure so huge that it reduced him to the size of an insect. A rope encircled its neck, extending out of sight into the sky. The huge figure turned slowly. He looked up into the purpling bloated face of his father. He turned, ready to run whooping through all the yellow sand of eternity, ready to run with bulged eyes until blood burst his throat. He dropped to his knees on the sand. He covered his eyes. He sensed the ancient brain scar, felt it swell and tear slightly and then knit itself, fiber clasping fiber, compacting into strength. He stood up and turned and looked calmly up at the vast naked face. Spiders scuttled off into the sand waste. Coils moved off into darkness. The bitter little insect squeakings faded into an utter silence.

Miguel’s bare brown back appeared and the sand faded around it, faded into terrace and pool and the still spring morning of the diorama.

Miguel turned and looked at him over the brown
shoulder, smiled. “It seems I must be proven wrong occasionally.”

“I’ll never break,” Dake said, not knowing why he had selected those words.

“Merman will show you the way.”

He followed Merman. The rock slid aside. The glowing tunnel shafted down through bedrock. Three cubes of a fatty gray that was no color at all stood in a rough cavern hollowed out of the rock. The radiance in the cavern had an almost radioactive look.

Merman turned to Dake. The boyish lips did not move. “You are going to a place where you will be trained. You will accept training eagerly, because you want to turn it against us. That is to be expected. You wonder what we are. You will not learn that until you are skilled.”