The Golden Globe

I gestured at his 1950s-era baggy gray suit.

"So, do you know something I don't? Am I going to need a lawyer? Are the police closing in on me?"

"Well, there is no statute of limitations. And you know you have no business being here. You know that as well as I do. But as far as I've heard, there's no active search for you. Yet."

"I've been sitting here trying to think of a defense," I said. "How do you think this one would play? 'I was framed, Your Honor! Some dirty rat put that gun in my hand!' "

"I think you'd get charged with a miserable James Cagney impression."

"Stick to the point, counselor. Stick to the facts."

"The facts in this case are in considerable dispute. I think a competent attorney could create a reasonable doubt concerning a possible accomplice. But I'd have to bow out of the case, of course. Conflict of interest."

"I'd rather be represented by that Ransom Stoddard fellow, anyway."

"The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance? He's good."

We sat in silence for a while, watching the parrots break open and eat the peanuts. There were half a dozen of them now.

"But if I can get serious for a minute," he said, "neither one of us would be the right choice for you, if you should find yourself in trouble."

"You mean, for some reason other than the fact that you don't exist? 'That's right, Your Honor, I wish to be represented by my good friend Jesus Christ, seated in this empty chair on my right. Ably assisted by Tinker Bell, who'll circle near the ceiling dispensing pixie dust.' "

He waited patiently until I settled down again.

"No, it's something else entirely. I think you'd do well with counsel a little more versed in modern legal issues. Things I wouldn't know a lot about, nor Mr. Stoddard, either."

I asked him what he meant by that, and he just shook his head. When Elwood wants to be stubborn, there is no moving him, so I eventually had to let it go.

"So what are you going to do, my friend?" he asked, after a long silence.

"Do? Elwood, what do you think I ought to do?"

"Get off this planet and try to lose yourself," he said, without hesitation. "That Comfort fellow isn't going to give up, you know, and it won't be hard to trace you here."

"He's probably here already," I agreed.

"Well, you made it pretty fast. I'd say he'll get here in the next week or so."

"Maybe. But I've got this little problem, Elwood." I thought of the image of the pachinko game. The feeling that all my ru

"I feel like I've been in this big bathtub," I told him. "The water is swirling out the drain, and I've been swimming as hard as I can for a very long time. And now the water is all gone, and I'm sitting on the bottom, naked and wet as a newborn baby. Only I feel like I've wasted seventy years. All that ru

"So you're going to stay here? That's what you want to do?"

I sighed.

"What I really want to do, more than anything, is turn myself in."

I don't think I was sure until the moment I said it that I really did want to surrender. But saying it, I felt such a sense of relief, such a feeling of freedom as I hadn't experienced since that day on the stage of the John Valentine Theater.

With a shock, I realized I'd felt that sense of freedom after I'd killed my father.

Elwood was looking at me, shaking his head.

"Well, I don't entirely disagree with you on that," he said. "And I'd be more than willing to go in with you. Perhaps I could speak to your psychiatrist, give him a little insight into your life, from the perspective of somebody who's spent a lot of time around you. Maybe contribute to an insanity defense, though I don't know how they handle things like that these days. But there's one thing I think you should do first."

"And what is that?"

"Take your shot at King Lear. Never know when you might get another chance." He stood up and held his hand out to me.

I never touch Elwood, for obvious reasons. But this time I didn't even look around to see who might be watching. I took his hand, and he lifted me off the bench.

Bayou Teche is an old "pocket" disneyland just a ten-minute tube ride from the center of King City. When it was first built, they simply called it a disneyland, since an artificial "Earthly" environment almost a mile across and a quarter of a mile high was a very big deal in those days. At first it was hard to get people to visit. "How ya go

Later, when they began building the serious disneys like Texas, Mekong, Kansas, Serengeti, a hundred miles deep and thirty, forty, sixty miles across, the original parks came to be called minis. Now the trend has come full circle as more and more people—those who can afford it—aspire to move into a "natural" environment. Micro-disneys are popping up like bubbles in champagne, but they are not notably wild. Most have golf courses. All modern amenities are just minutes away.

The older parks had a problem. Many turned themselves into "modern" parks, not much different from suburbia on Old Earth: communities of houses from one era or another. Traditionalists pointed out that the whole idea of disneys was to provide a taste of life on Earth before the Invasion, even before civilization. Most compromised, allowing some settlement by "townies," as opposed to permanent "authentics," like Doc in West Texas. Some tried to qualify for government heritage grants by providing environments people might not necessarily want to live in, but which the Antiquities Board felt were worth supporting in spite of their inhospitality.

At Bayou Teche, it was night, and bugs. Twenty-two hours of night every day, and billions and billions of bugs.

This was where Kaspara Polichinelli, the greatest stage director of her time, had chosen to spend her retirement. You may remember her as Sparky's sidekick, Polly.

The only way to Polly's house was by water, in a little boat called a pirogue. Pronounced pee-row. There were no maps. No roads. Hardly any land. The bayous wound in an impenetrable maze designed to re-create the delta country at the end of the Mississippi River.

My guide/taxi driver was a smiling man who introduced himself as Beaudreaux—pronounced boo-drow—who helped me into the little flat-bottomed cockleshell that seemed to be made of scrap lumber and gumbo mud. The bottom was awash in water. I took a seat up front and Beaudreaux started up a little outboard engine no bigger than a football, pulling a rope until it choked to life in a cloud of blue smoke and then settled into a steady puttering. We eased away from the ramshackle dock just inside the visitors' entrance, and into a landscape right out of your worst prehistoric nightmare.

At a dizzying three miles per hour.

Over water black as ink, flowing at a tenth our speed.

Water smooth as old bourbon, but not nearly so sweet smelling.

Luckily, I'd taken my motion-sickness pills.

I was dressed in the only sensible clothing for the Bayou: a head-to-toe silk khaki jumpsuit pulled over my own clothes, rubber boots and gloves, topped off by a safari hat fitted with a mesh beekeeper's veil. Wrists and ankles of the suit were elastic, worn over the sleeves and legs.

They told me the suit was sprayed with a harmless repellent, which had sounded like overkill at the time. The insects couldn't get to me, I reasoned, so what was the point?

Five minutes into the boat ride I decided, with a touch of awe, that without the repellent the bugs might actually pick me up and carry me off, to devour at their leisure.