Bone Dance

“That’s not true!” Careful, careful. Chilly. “I’ve always kept even-up with you. I know the Deal.”

Sherrea looked at me as if I’d sprouted ante

The stem bent in my fingers.

“There’s one you can pay Theo back with; I don’t think he’s been disillusioned yet. He still talks as if you’re a guy, anyway.”

“Make up your mind,” I said. It came out thin. “Which am I?”

“My mind has nothing to do with it. When I figured out that either you were both or neither, I started watching for it. You do a chameleon thing — maybe it’s not even conscious — that makes you seem female when you’re with a woman, and male when you’re with a man. Like you take on the local coloring. In a mixed group you kind of shift around. I was still trying to figure out if you were natural or technological when the Horseman showed up. Then I knew — I just did — that they were in it somewhere. And I was afraid she could control you with it, so I said what I did to you.”

“You said… I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

“That you don’t belong to them. Never did, and don’t now.”

I blew air out through my nose, like laughing. “Maybe I don’t now. But as far as ‘did,’ you’re wrong. I was a custom order.”

“No.” She rose and brushed nonexistent grass off her trousers. “I’m the kick-ass bruja, and I say so. You never did.”

I’d peeled all the leaves; now I had a bare, battered stalk with a little cluster of magenta blossoms. “What kind of flower is this?” I asked suddenly. She stood with her hands in her pockets, her feet planted. She didn’t answer immediately; then she said, “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.” Inside each star-shaped circle of petals was another ring, little bristly projections, like eyelashes around a circular eye. It still didn’t smell like anything. I tossed it on the water, where it wandered until it disappeared along the bank.

“I’m going back to the house,” I said, and slid off the boulder.

“Can I go with you?”

“It’s a big house.”

She didn’t flinch; she just closed her eyes for a moment.

6.2: Time stands still on the road

Altogether, my stay in that house was four days long. It seems longer; not because time dragged, but because of things I did, of things I looked at, of conversations I had. It seems strange that they all happened butted up against each other in four days. Maybe time, during those days, ran the way the hallways did when Frances and I’d tried to find our way out. The hallways themselves, after that first surreal morning, remained where they were put.

Mr. Lyle had promised me the library, and delivered when I came back, still snappish, from the garden. It was another long-windowed room on the first floor. The heavy moldings around the door and windows, the shelves, the pedestal table, were oak; the chairs were high-backed and upholstered in a dark fabric full of birds and flowers. The shelves were anywhere the windows weren’t, except for the floor and the ceiling. The rug under the table and the smaller ones by the windows were deep red, figured with detailed geometric medallions in many other colors. There were lamps on brackets and on stands by the chairs, and a huge oil and candle chandelier over the pedestal table. Reading after dark, it seemed, was expected.

I was impressed, but I was also in a lousy temper, and not inclined to show I was impressed. I began to read spines. I’d been caught off-guard in the ivy parlor; it would be a good deal harder to make me gape now.

Part of the collection might have been acquired in reaction to the events of the last hundred or so years: all the books in the Foxfire series, for which I had a sort of uninvolved respect; several works, theoretical and not-so, on global warming; a delectable variety of how-to books on solar and water and wind power, and the attendant wiring, storage, water heating, and whatnot. (The latter were shelved in plain sight, which nearly ruined my resolution. How secure was this house, its land, this island? Any City deputy who got a glimpse of those books would burst a blood vessel.)

The rest of the shelves, the majority, had been filled by the process of finding a book that looked interesting and bringing it home. The finders, I hoped, had been plural; there was a point at which diversity of interest became multiple personality, after all. Eventually, under Mr. Lyle’s benign eye, I found the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I took a volume down at random and pecked at the begi

“Which?” said Mr. Lyle.

“You’ve read this one?”

He nodded. “The bit about the maid shaking the pillowcase, and the pistol falling out and going off.”

“You read Spanish?” he asked after a moment.

I looked up and closed the book. The title was Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada. “Is that so odd?”

“Some. It’s the lingua franca, or one of them, but most of the people who use it can’t read it. Many of them can’t read at all.” I remembered my mood suddenly. “I don’t imagine it bothers them. As long as they can count.”

“No, they’re perfectly happy. They have no idea there are things like this out there.”

He might have been talking about the Marquez book, or the library, but I saw something in his hand, and turned to look. It was one of the books on wind-powered generators.

I put the novel back and stood where I was, my arms slack at my sides. “I saw them the first time.”

“I was watching you when you did, too. Once you remembered that you shouldn’t react, you had a very good stone face. What does this mean to you?” He gestured again with the book.

“It’s illegal as hell to have it,” I said, my eyes wide. “Isn’t it? Any of those books.”

“And that’s what impressed you? The wickedness? Maybe it was. But tell me, why is it illegal?”

Well, there was a limit to how brainless I could be expected to be on the subject. I said, “In a town where the City controllers have an energy monopoly? Information about free, unregulated, untaxable energy? Heck, I can’t imagine.”

He smiled. “And don’t you know anyone who buys untaxed methanol? Or has a portable generator with no registration tag in the cellar?”

I raised my hands and opened them; the international symbol of helplessness. “Afraid not. If you’re looking for households to raid. I guess you’ll have to find your own.”

“My own would be a good place to start. But you’ve forgotten, I think. I rode in your elevator.”

I had forgotten. “My elevator?” I asked, blinking.

“Up and down. I was glad you’d left the call button working on your floor, after I had a look at the stairwell. But it took us half an hour to make it run from inside.”

If it had ever occurred to me that I’d be escaping from my own floor, I’d have torn out the damned call button. If I’d realized I’d be facing this exceedingly large person who held a copy of Ru