One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (43 page)

“Surprise!” he blurted out. Then he invited the girl outside to ride with them. She entered the interior and her face drew up in considerable surprise once she realized it was Hieronymus in the car. She gasped. Schmet sat down next to her, directly opposite his two LOS prisoners, and closed the door after himself. Belwin immediately started the vehicle, and they continued on their way among the fast-moving traffic.

“Hello, Windows Falling On Sparrows,” Hieronymus said with total remorse in his voice.

Her shocked expression melted into complete sadness.

“I didn’t betray you!”

“I know you didn’t.”

“He took me in a ship directly into the atmosphere. He lied and he told me we were going to Earth. What you saw, my forward projection of color, was not my leaving the Moon. He took me to Aldrin City. He figured all this out on his own. I did not betray you…”

“Indeed, she did not betray you, Mr. Rexaphin.” Lieutenant Schmet laughed. ”It was the clerk at the hotel who identified you. And, if I may say so, my considerable talent. In any event, you betrayed yourself. You all do that, you know. Eventually, all of you One Hundred Percenters betray yourselves.”

“What about you Fifty Percenters?”

“What was that, Miss Memling?”

“You heard me. It must be rough—dedicating your life to rounding up those who are…let’s say, complete, as opposed to the pathetic and confused half that you are.”

“Keep digging your hole, blue-haired girl.”

“Lieutenant Schmet, if I were to take my goggles off, I would see what the traffic ahead of us would be like. With my LOS vision, I could tell if I’m about to get into an accident, or I could see an accident about to happen, and I could avoid it. It must rip you up. If you were free to openly look at the world with your eye of the fourth primary color, you would have seen that Mega Cruiser fall out of the sky before it happened when you were twelve…”

If Windows Falling On Sparrows were not in the car, Schmet would have smacked Slue in the face for daring to say such a thing, which was, of course, completely true. Instead, he turned to the Earth girl, calling her by his adopted name for her.

“Selene, may I introduce to you, the lovely Slue Memling. She is Hieronymus Rexaphin’s girlfriend.”

Windows Falling On Sparrows looked at Slue, her expression completely neutral above the pang of sadness that sentence gave her.

“I’m not his girlfriend.”

Schment looked at Hieronymus. ”If only every man could have your problems! Look what we have here! My gosh! What do we do? These two girls! How can you not love the both of them? You lucky guy! How do we find ourselves in a police car with these two beauties? One from Earth! One from the Moon! And we are all in trouble! If you confess your love transgressions to either one of these young ladies, you are also confessing your criminal transgressions to me! What a fix we are in! Unless we all come clean right now. About everything. Love and crime! Right now! It has to come from you and you alone! The Earth girl won’t betray you, your father won’t betray you, it’s up to you. Hieronymus Rexaphin, did you or did you not show your uncovered eyes to this girl, Windows Falling On Sparrows?”

Hieronymus looked at Windows Falling On Sparrows. Then he turned his head to the side and looked at Slue. His eyes stayed on her for a long time. Then he turned his goggled stare to Lieutenant Schmet.

“I confess to three things. I confess that I have always loved Slue Memling, from the moment I met her in the third grade, even though I also feel as if I have met her for the first time earlier this evening. I confess that I love Windows Falling On Sparrows, and despite having only met her two evenings ago, I feel as if I have known her all my life. And, Lieutenant, I confess to the crime of Ocular Assault.”

“Charming,” said Schmet with a smile.

“You can’t put him in jail,” Windows Falling On Sparrows protested. ”I’m not pressing charges!”

“It is not a question of you pressing charges. Romeo has broken the law. And it’s a serious one.”

“Then you should arrest me, too. I’m the one who took his goggles off! I begged him to do it! I wanted to see that color with my own eyes! I’m just as guilty as he!”

“I am certainly not going to arrest you, Selene. We have no use for you.”

“No use for me? Why, because I am not a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl?”

Schmet smiled.

“It is true, then. They will be sent to camps on the far side of the Moon and then they will be forced to pilot Mega Cruisers till they die. If my eyes were of the fourth primary color, you’d arrest me, too!”

“Who do you work for?” Slue interjected. ”The police, or one of those private detention facilities you mentioned?”

The plastic face remained still, locked in its false smile.

“Belwin!” Slue shouted. ”Who is going to take custody of us?”

The rescue robot, who had been quiet because of Schmet’s orders, was obliged to answer a direct question. It was part of his programming in the business of saving lives. To be as honest as possible.

“All processed LOS citizens who have been caught breaking Quarantine Directive Number Sixty-Seven are usually handed over to the MacToolie Group.”

Slue and Hieronymus look at each other. That name. MacToolie.

“Wilson MacToolie,” Slue whispered. ”Of course. The painting of the uniformed man in the lobby of the Techbolsinator. Now I remember. Wilson MacToolie. He was the architect of the Regime of Blindness. The MacToolie Group. They must be his descendents—”

“Okay, enough of your conspiratorial blabbering, young lady.” Schmet turned to Windows Falling On Sparrows. He was determined to keep the conversation of politics, and focused on the sentimental.

“And that is who Hieronymus has left you for. An unpleasant, paranoid girl like that. Blue hair—ugh. I told you already that these Lunar Boys with the goggles are all alike—they take advantage of girls from Earth. They seduce you with promises of incomprehensible colors, and they have fun with you for a while. But they always return to their own kind…”

“And what kind do you return to, sir?” Hieronymus asked, looking directly at Schmet. ”Trying so damn hard to prove you are human. Of course, you are one of us. That is why you are so good at catching us. A part of you understands us completely. And always one step ahead. What normal person would think of flying her up into orbit like that? You understand the fourth primary color. You created the event of her leaving because you sensed that she saw it. No normal person would even think of such a thing, except for someone like you—a Fifty Percenter, one leg in the normal world, one leg in the LOS world. Of course, you no longer have your eye, so it’s even worse. You spend your life chasing your other half. And you can’t even see that color anymore, and that makes you crazier than anything else. You miss it, don’t you?”

Schmet had no answer, and in that half second of silence, Hieronymus saw an opportunity. Windows Falling On Sparrows was not wearing handcuffs. Her hands, the same hands that had removed his goggles just two nights earlier, were free. He looked at her, and he spoke.

“They are arresting me because I looked at you. That’s all I did. I only looked at you. You looked at me. And it’s against the law. But you know what really frightens them? What really has the government terrified? They don’t want people like Slue and I to look at each other. With our goggles off. That’s their nightmare. That we will all find out the incredible, unbelievable thing that occurs when two of us look at each other. Slue and I discovered this for ourselves last night. We did not die, but the world around us became…spectacular.”

He spoke the next sentence slowly and intently. In the background, the noise of the speeding traffic they were among intensified. Belwin was changing lanes.

“How nice of Lieutenant Schmet not to handcuff you.”

Windows Falling On Sparrows understood immediately. It took only half a second. She reached forward with both her hands, grabbed the two pairs of goggles in front of her, and pulled them off.

Hieronymus and Slue looked at each other.

The windshield shattered into flying broken glass as a gigantic hummingbird smashed itself through and invaded the vehicle, followed by a dozen more. The car swerved, and there was another glass explosion as a side window vanished into screeching shards and hummingbirds charged into the vehicle. From all directions, the birds in the sky suddenly knew where to go—they flew down to their target, clouds of them changing direction and swarming down upon the fastmoving police cruiser. Hummingbirds from the tops of nearby houses instinctively knew where to find the two young people who had looked at each other’s eyes of the fourth primary color, and even the hidden birds who tunneled under the ground to lay their eggs burst from the soil, as the silent clarion call to converge could not be broken. The spark to give them their righteous color, their lunar hue, their denied fourth primary plumage surpassed all other hummingbird activities, and they swarmed the car by mad instinct, and the closer they got to the people who looked at each other, the closer they felt the newly created circuit, the new inexplicable energy, and the brighter and more resplendent they became as lunar hummingbirds of the fourth primary color.

Within a futtering few seconds, thousands of the hummingbirds converged on the vehicle, filled the interior and obscured the exterior in a circular pulsating cloud of the forbidden color. They dented the panels of the car, trying to get in, and they touched the occupants once they entered. The inside cabin was full of hummingbirds, all hovering and swarming and awash in the special chaos only wild birds could bring. The color, the fourth primary color was everywhere, and this time, Windows Falling On Sparrows was ready for it and she reveled in its finality and its complete shutting down of her mind.

This time, she smiled.

Schmet was too late. He tried to cover his good eye, but he too was engulfed within the endless swarming birds. He fell under the shock of the color and his mind shut down to its primordial state. He curled up into a fetal position halfway on the floor, crying out the names of his seven deceased sisters—including his favorite, the one named Selene.

Belwin was unaffected by the color. But he was extremely confused by the arrival of thousands of hummingbirds smashing the windshield and swarming the vehicle. None of it made any sense. He had no eyes, but his sensors were confounded by the mad fock nevertheless, and the police cruiser began to swerve uncontrollably.

Every car in the immediate vicinity saw the cloud of hummingbirds and their explosion of inexplicable color that enveloped the police car just in their area. Dozens of cars were suddenly driven by incapacitated drivers, and Hieronymus and Slue kept looking at each other as the explosions and cacophony of the highway crashes all around them filled their world.

They kissed, and then they felt themselves spinning, then upside down, the flying shards of glass on all sides, the horns, the screams of the colossal pileup unable to interrupt the meeting of their lips.

The vehicle smashed into the road divider, flipped over again, was hit by several other cars, and then tumbled of the highway, where it smashed through the side of a restaurant.

Hieronymus woke up laid out on a stretcher. There were dozens of people all around him, and of to the side, he saw an ambulance. There were also several other police cars, and he turned his head and saw the smashed-up vehicle they had been riding in now completely bent out of shape and jutting out of the wall of the restaurant. There were fires on the highway, and long pillars of thick black smoke reaching up into the red sky. Other people were on stretchers, but he didn’t recognize any of them. Perhaps they were from some of the other cars, or maybe they were from the restaurant itself. He sat up. Where was Slue? Where was Windows Falling On Sparrows?

For a few seconds, he saw them both. Windows Falling On Sparrows was unconscious and on a stretcher. As none of the medics were fussing over her, she did not appear to be hurt. Only sleeping, or recovering from the fourth primary color. Slue stood over her, looking down at the Earth girl. She seemed completely unaffected by the accident, except for a scratch across her face and her blue hair in a tangle. She was still in handcuffs. A police officer came to her side and started to escort her to another police cruiser. Hieronymus watched as she was escorted to the door, then he watched as she climbed inside, still wearing her velvet poncho. She turned to him, and then she smiled, a look of genuine relief on her face the moment she realized he too was not injured. She ducked into the car and Hieronymus thought,
On what world will I see you again…

Not too far away, and arguing with a pair of traffic officers, was Dogumanhed Schmet. The detective was covering his eye, but he appeared to be guided along by Belwin. He had his back to Hieronymus. He was completely disoriented, and certainly in trouble as he was responsible for his prisoners, and thus the accident was completely his fault. As he argued and pleaded, Hieronymus noticed the small aluminum box he gripped in his hand. He held it tight over his heart, as if he wanted to protect it with his own body from the chaos of such an accident-filled world.

Then Hieronymus noticed something too good to be true. His handcuffs had been removed. Of course! As soon as the ambulance arrived, the medics would have taken the cufs of.