Страница 11 из 73
Well, that was my opening. I could make a great story out of it — Dana would love it.
“It was like walking through a cloud of human-sized gnats. It was a
“Y’know,” Cassidy said, “the Jammers are the only people who aren’t alone.” I looked at him, but his eyes were on some middle distance over my shoulder. “I mean, none of us can know what’s going on in each other’s heads. We all agree” — he shrugged, hunting words — “on what color the sky is. But how do we know we’re seeing the same color? That’s lonely, man, that’s cold.” He shook his head.
“But the Jammers are supposed to be in each other’s heads all the time, right? So there’s always somebody who knows exactly what it’s like.” He stopped, and blinked.
It was one of those moments of genuine, unalloyed thought that sometimes came on him, appearing out of his mental mists like synaptic ghost ships. I found that my gaze had fallen on Dana, and that she was watching me with the idle patience of a cat.
I stood up. “I have to go. I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.” Cassidy’s bleak and startled face was a rebuke. I pushed the glass across the table to him and strode out, heading up again.
I didn’t get far; Dana’s confiding, confining hand on my arm stopped me. “Sparrow,” she said, low against the background noise of the Fair. “You can’t be alone all the time, honey. If you’re in some kind of trouble, and I can help, you come to me, hear?” Perfect skin, flawless hair, costly clothes, and the time to involve herself in other people’s business. If throwing money and influence at the problem could solve it, she probably could help. “Thank you, Dana,” I said. “But there’s really nothing wrong.” This time when I moved off, she didn’t follow.
Maybe secrets are toxic to the organism. Maybe, when kept long enough, they always produced the intellectual and emotional nausea that had suddenly made me want to match Cassidy drink for drink. Born alone in our skulls; living alone there; dying alone. With the grave, then, to keep the secrets. For a moment I’d wanted, desperately, not to be alone, the way people in hiding for too long will dash out into daylight, in front of the guns, just to end the waiting.
I walked through the Fair: shrill and brittle and tawdry, a savorless night with anger lying just under its curling edges. A while ago this had been my country, and I’d returned to it relieved and glad. Now it was as welcoming as a carnival midway. Give us your money and get out. Strings of bulbs giving half their rated light reflected in puddles of what might have been water. Hucksters called from their booths as if everyone’s first name was Hey.
There’s go
I bought a ticket on the GravAttack, hoping that speed and spin, fear and adrenaline, would wash me clean. The closed wheel smelled of rust, sweat, and hot alcohol from the generator; my fellow rubes shrieked; pitch-dark alternated with flashes of light; and centrifugal force mashed my back into the padded bay. I felt as if the wall of my body cavity would give way and let my organs out — but my mind wasn’t so fragile. My mood survived the ride undisturbed.
So I unfolded my last paper portrait of A. A. Albrecht and bought a ride on the Snake’s Tail from a vivacious man dressed in tinsel. The drops fell on my tongue from the little tube in his hand. It tasted like spearmint and red pepper. In five minutes the Night Fair stretched from sea to sea, shining.
I was turning the pages of a rotting paperback at a junkstall (each newsprint page crackled brightly as I turned it, like static electricity in the dark) when a hand closed over my arm. “Hello!” said its owner. “How are you?”
He was tall, with a great, fine white smile that was only a little enhanced by the Snake. He wore a lovely silver-gray suit, like a politician or a talk-show host. His hair, which curled, was a delicate pink, like the inside of a shell. His skin was fine-textured and pale. Over his eyes and ears he wore a pair of silvertones, which would be making his world as bright and beautiful as mine, except that his would be real and mine was a hallucination. My spike of jealousy confused me. So did the feeling that I was supposed to recognize him. “All recovered?” he asked, his fingers tight on my wrist. He was pulling me away from the junkstall.
I didn’t recognize him — but of course, this was the man in gray that Cassidy had mentioned. Still in gray twenty-four hours later. An affectation. I scorned affectation. I tried to scorn him.
“No, no,” he said, laughing. “Myra’ll have my ass if you scoot away now. We’ve got us a conversation to finish.” He pulled me toward the middle of the pavement. Why was he laughing? He was hurting my wrist. At the end of the block where the crowd thi
The air went out of my lungs. It had been knocked out, I realized. Riding the Snake’s Tail does that, sometimes, reverses cause and effect. I was sitting in the street, and the man in the silvertones was no longer attached to my wrist. Now he was holding on to someone else, who seemed to be having trouble standing up. He had stopped laughing. The someone else was creasing the lapels of the lovely gray jacket, but other than that, I got no clear impression of him. Next to all that silver and gray and fragile pink, the newcomer seemed like a dim spot on my eye. Down the block, the woman with the cherry-colored hair was coming toward us.
“Jesus, I’m awfully sorry,” said the newcomer, who was still having trouble standing up. “I really don’t — oh, jeez! God, I’m really sorry.”
The man in gray had fallen. A noise like a blast of whiteness came from behind me, and I realized it was a truck horn. Then the truck was between me and the man in gray, and the other one, who’d been having trouble standing, was half dragging me across the street.
I was begi
“Stop that,” said my new companion, in such an ordinary voice that I did. He hurried me up four steps and pushed me down into a hard seat. Just before a pair of doors flew open before me onto darkness, I realized I was m a car for the haunted house ride, I tried to bolt over the side, but the stranger pulled me back. Don’t worry, said his voice, unaccountably pleased, near my ear. “There’s nothing here that’s not dead.”
2.1: You have to invite them in
A skeleton dropped, phosphorescent with grave mold, in front of us, and was snatched away just before its toes brushed my face. The man next to me said, as if he hadn’t noticed, “You don’t want to go back out there yet, anyway. Those two’ll be right behind us.”
The corridor ahead was misty white with webbing; a hundred little movements, of things the size of my fist, scuttled in the haze. I ducked just as the car plunged sharply about four feet. It put my stomach directly under my tonsils, but we passed untouched under the things. I was reasonably sure they weren’t real, anyway.
The car flung around a corner, where a woman in white rotated at the end of a rope. Her face was swollen, purple, and authentic. My self-control was feeling gnawed at. “What is this?” I said.
“It’s a rescue. We kinda slow tonight? Here comes our stop.”
The tu