I took a step forward, feeling nothing inclement despite my nudity.
“Glory?” I called, my voice seeming oddly muffled. “You out here, snaky lady?”
There came no reply, and I took another step, as it seemed for a moment that something low and dark was flowing by.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back inside.”
I moved to take yet another step and I felt my ankle seized. Stumbling back, I noticed that the thin, pale hand which had taken hold of me had emerged from a bundle of rags by the front door.
“No!” came a harsh voice from that same level. “You must not the underlying fullness set foot upon.”
“I’m just looking for my girlfriend—Glory. I thought she might have come this way.”
“None have departed here since you brought the place to this condition.”
“You can let go my ankle now.”
“I’m not so sure but that, disbelieving me, you might walk ahead.”
“What would happen if I did?”
“‘Tis not a street for you to step out onto.” With that, another hand emerged from the bundle, this one holding a bottle. Then a hair-covered head and face I had not recognized as such were raised from the floor. A few final drops were poured from the bottle into the sphincter-like mouth which dilated open. There followed a small belch, then the arm was drawn back and the bottle cast forward. “Shade your eyes!’ the mouth writhed, barely in time.
It was soundless and incredibly brilliant, x-raying me, it seemed, with its intensity.
“What the hell!”
“Photon smear,” he replied. “We let there be light.”
“I saw something black, low, flowing by,” I said, through clenched teeth.
“Only old Ouroboros making his rounds.”
“That’s just mythology.”
“Man is a metaphor-making mammal, and that is the secret of his success.”
I blinked against blindness, waiting for it to pass. Then, “Who are you?” I inquired.
“Urtch.”
For all its apparent frailty, his hand still held my ankle like a manacle.
“You can release me now. You’ve made your point. You seem to know a lot for an old drunk.”
“Street smarts,” he replied, letting go, “and if you’re acknowledgin’ you owe me one, I’ll take you up on it.”
“What do you want?” I asked, leaning against the jamb.
“Go back inside and find me a fresh bottle of wine.”
“Hell, you can come on in and drink it there,” I told him. “Be a lot more comfort—”
“No, this is my street, and I’m happy on it.”
“Sure,” I told him. “Just a minute.”
I turned up a straw-basketed bottle of Ruffino Chianti through a fading violet haze, uncorked it, and took it to him.
“Will Chianti do, Urtch?”
“Just fine.” He extended an arm upward and accepted it. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Alf”
He took a drink and sighed.
“Better go find your lady, Alf.”
“Yes. Yes, I should,” and I closed the door and turned away.
I crossed to the Hellhole, and with some misgivings I opened it and entered.
Passing a mundane workbench, I made my way down and back, and it seemed that I cast more shadows than usual. I went a good distance, but I did not see her until I came to the region of the seven Alfs. She was off to its right, arms moving as if she operated a piece of invisible equipment in the darkness.
“Glory, why’d you come back? What are you doing?”
There followed a solid clunk, as of the closing of a cabinet. I continued to move toward her.
She turned slowly toward me.
“You threw me off schedule,” she said. “I woke and remembered some maintenance I’d neglected.”
I swept past her, reaching into the area where she had been working. My hand encountered only air.
“Where is it?” I asked. “This equipment?”
“We keep it all folded on shelves in other spaces. I draw what I need to a work station, return it when I’m done.”
“Why here?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about it a lot.” She gestured. “The matter of the eight Alfs.”
“Learn anything new?”
“No. You think of anything you’d care to tell me?”
“No.”
She took hold of my arm, turning me gently back in the direction from which I had come.
“I guess that makes us even then.” Her hip brushed lightly against my own.
I found myself growing distracted again, but before it took hold of me completely I said, “I checked outside the front door for you first. Met an interesting old bum named Urtch.”
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“Nevertheless, he was there. Showed me a photon smear. Stopped me from becoming one.”
“You must have been hallucinating, Alf. There couldn’t be anything outside.”
“He was in the entranceway, on the stoop. So was I for a time, watching the fog. So I know it’s possible.”
“Still…”
I turned her as we emerged from the Hellhole, heading back to the front door.
“I’ve thought of more questions I want to ask him. C’mon.”
There was nobody there. Some fog had even crept into the entranceway. And it was too dense now to distinguish the dark flow.
“It can’t be. He was here—just minutes ago.”
“Urtch. Strange name.”
“I also saw the back of the Ouroboros Serpent.”
She placed the fingertips of her right hand between her eyes and made a downward spiraling gesture with them.
“Great ancestor,” she muttered then. “Did he say—anything—else?”
“No,” I replied. “Just mooched a bottle of wine and told me you hadn’t been by that way.”
“Might he have entered, I wonder?” she asked, suddenly surveying the room behind us.
“I don’t think so. I invited him inside to enjoy his drink, and he said he preferred it out there, on his street.”
She shook her head and hissed. She went back and closed the front door. Then she commenced searching the premises and I helped her—everywhere but the very depths of the Hellhole.
“Urtch, Urtch,” she muttered, from time to time.
“You have seen him about.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s—nothing.”
We checked the final closets and storerooms, even venturing into Adam’s surprisingly neat—almost monastic— quarters. But Urtch did not turn up.
Finally, we repaired to her room, where we distracted each other no end. So, when it finally ended I was too far gone to notice.
“You’re awake?” she said softly, slithering slowly along my right side.
“Yes. You’re good for me, you know?”
She chuckled and stroked my hair.
“It’s mutual,” she whispered. “Shall we throw the Switch and go back?”
“No way. We stay. I don’t know whether I’m ready for more of the yoni-lingam business, but we can always talk while my body figures that one out.”
“Talk. Surely. Say on.”
“I hardly know where to begin. This is such a place of mysteries.”
“So it must seem. But they’re only the sweepings of small puzzlements from across the years.”
“Then let’s start with years. This place has actually been around at least since Etruscan times?”
“Yes.”
“Adam went back there from the future and set up shop in this place?”
“It’s as he told you.”
“And you’ve been living forward since then, doing deals throughout history?”
“Yes.”
“And Adam is being evaluated by his creators on the basis of how he runs this show?”
“Yes.”
“Because he has a super-high IQ and all
sorts of unclassified talents as well?”
“That, too.” She glided slowly across me.
“So you are centuries—millennia—old?”
“As we told you.”
“You are originally from the twenty-fifth century. You went back in time and opened the shop, and now you are headed home via the slow, scenic route.”
“We are not originally from the twenty-fifth century.”
“Adam said that you came here—or, rather, went to old Etruria—from there.”
“This is true. We stopped there on the way back for repairs. This unit where we live and do business was damaged in flight. The twenty-fifth century was the earliest point in time at which repairs might still be made.”
“Oh. Well, where—or rather, when—did you originally come from?”
“I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I promised Adam that I wouldn’t, when you came here.”
“Why?”
“The clones. If you were the clone-master this could be important information to you.”
“In what way?”
She slithered against me again.
“That, too, dear Alf, I may not disclose.”
“I guess I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Then tell me about your genetic origins.”
“Surely. I am snake. Adam is cat. That’s all.”
“It would seem that a lot of gene-splicing would be involved to bring both species to the level of human appearance and equivalent intelligence.”
“The old projects weren’t aimed at giving us minds like yours, but rather at developing our own, with our own styles of thinking, to high potential.”
“Obviously, they succeeded.”
“Yesss.”
“And you breed true? You are your own races now?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then why all the test-tube business with Adam? He made it sound very experimental.”
“He was. Is. He was actually the result of an ongoing experiment to push each of the species to its fullest potential, to see how far each would go, to see which would produce a special being—by means of that ‘cloned quadratic crap.’ The proper term sounds something like ‘Kaleideion’ in your tongue—if indeed it is truly your tongue.”
“Of course it is. Why shouldn’t it be?”
She was all over me for a moment, then still and hugging.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Alf?” she said. “You’re not plotting against us?”
“I wouldn’t even know how, or what to plot for. Lay off, will you?” Then I was hugging her, too. “If I am, I’ve gotten myself fooled as well. So Adam is a Kaleideion?”
She shook her head.
“Not a Kaleideion. The Kaleideion. It is the only time in the long history of the program that the work succeeded and produced such a one.”
“Okay. The Kaleideion,” I said. “Gives me something else to call him. I already knew he was bright and ingenious.”
“It’s more than just that,” she began, then stopped abruptly.
“But you can’t discuss it?”
She nodded.
“I’d already figured that. Don’t feel badly.” I gave her another squeeze. “How do they watch him to evaluate his performance?”
“We think they watch the wave of disruption that we cause on our way through time and its history,” she said, “since they don’t seem able to watch him directly. Unless, of course, you and your clones are a special evaluation team.”
“You never let up, do you?” I asked, shaking my head. “Isn’t it dangerous to let him go around rearranging history? When it catches up with your century you may all turn into pumpkins.”
She laughed.
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “The universe is sufficiently big that it contains, dampens down, and absorbs. Your history is actually a very minor event in its existence. It could never spread to the point of importance. From focusing on it, though, someone in a later age might be able to make guesses as to the Kaleideion’s development.”
“Very poor guesses, I would say, since the nature of this business is so random.”
“Yes, there might be something to that, mightn’t there?” she said, smiling.
“Are you saying I’m right?”
“I shouldn’t say.”
“You don’t have to. Makes me wonder why, though.”
“Think about it.”
“You want to fool them.”
“Perhaps.”
“You want them to underestimate—or to misestimate—the Kaleideion, as he is contemplating some action for which he wishes them to be totally unprepared, tricky devil that he is.”
She stiffened. “A guess worthy of the mongoose or coyote people/’ she said.
“Come on. You led me to it.”
I felt her tongue in my ear. Her hands stroked my belly.
“True. Yet there were distractions.”
“I’m not, am I?”
“What?”
“A mongoose or a coyote.”
“We have examined your tissues, remember? You’re definitely standard human.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Or a misfortune. They’re both worthy species. You could do worse.”
“Would you still love me?” I asked, as she slipped loose and slithered over my face.
“Unlike some, I believe in interspecies romance,” she said. “I’m sure you could have won my heart as a coyote. I don’t know about a mongoose, though.”
“There could be great literature in it. Two noble Houses—Snake and Mongoose—mortal enemies, of course. Enter a lovely snake maiden and a dashing mongoose youth—”
“Glory and Alf, the star-crossed!” she cried. “I can see the despairing scene in the tomb where you force my mouth open to break the skin of your lips with my fangs in a kiss that lingers and lingers till the audience realizes you are lying dead beside me. Awakening just a few minutes too late, I raise my hand to my mouth in horror, then bite it—”
“You really have fangs, and poison?”
Her laugh was hissed. “Alf! O pale! Allow a girl some secrets, and fear her if you must!”
Her teeth grazed my ear and I winced.
“I’ve always been decent to you, haven’t I?”
“So far,” she said.
“I hope you haven’t just been sent to keep an eye on me.”
“It’s become more than that,” she said. “Yes, it troubled me, but what the hell! I do it anyway! Kiss me, human!”
Later, my glass shattered on the bedside table as she shrieked in UHF.
Sitting, propped up in bed by pillows, sipping cappuccino— again, with no idea of the passage of time—I said, “You made some sign and said ‘great ancestor’ to my reference to the Ouroboros Serpent. Why?”
“All the species have their totems, their gods or goddesses,” she said. “Adam’s is the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. We all claim at least spiritual descent from such sources. It goes back to the founding of the species, I gather, to give a new people a sense of continuity with ancient things. At least, that’s what is said. It was so long ago, tales get so twisted.”
“It must have taken thousands of years to develop the species and see their numbers reach the point where they could develop a culture.”
“Oh, it did. Though the cultures developed quickly when we each were given our own worlds. Some of us mingle with others, of course, on their worlds, as they with us. But having home worlds helped.”
“All that time, though—plus your long lifespans—and you refer to it as an ancient past. It must be from considerably far beyond the twenty-fifth century that you
come.”
“Oh, it is. It is.”
“I’d figured that. This shop—complete with its wish-effect—bespeaks a technology so advanced that it’s close to magic for me. But what was the purpose of enhancing the various species involved in the program your kin
d came out
of?”
“At first, we were useful in dealing with special problems on newly discovered worlds. Then many other unique talents were manifest, and we became welcome citizens.”
“But probably a big social problem first.”
“True. But we achieved equal rights eventually, and grant of the home worlds. Later, we were courted by our old masters to join the Galactic Union as Terran-bloc worlds.”
“I’ll bet. How many Terran species are there?”
“Twenty-eight,” she said. “Adam’s and mine were two of the earliest.”
“A Galactic Union makes it sound like an extremely distant future.”
“Past,” she said. “It is a part of our past.”
“How did the original human race fare?”
“You were a distinct minority in the union at the time of our creation. Our joining the bloc helped you greatly.”
“And later, in your own day, the time from which you departed?”
“Alf, by then it has grown difficult to explain what human is, the body and mind can be shifted about so many ways. If you mean people who could mix easily with people of this day, they are a minority—or several interesting minorities.”
“I find this somewhat depressing. Was the Earth still around in your day?”
“I don’t like discussing this with so many out-of-contexts. But yes, it was around, but in different form. It had been depleted and its components employed for terraforming elsewhere. On the other hand, it was later reconstructed by groups of political nostalgics. More than once. On still another hand, I see now that they got it wrong in many ways. Perhaps we will take you to see some version one day. Perhaps you already have.”
“Cut the insinuations, Glory!”
“Could your present culture provide you with seven clones? Or get them back through time for you?”
I sipped my cappuccino.
“I hadn’t really thought about it that way,” I said. “I guess I was just fixed on the image of all those Alfs.”
“A future connection would seem necessary. The question is, which future?”
“Any candidates?”
“None that I care to discuss.”
“Any idea how we’re going to resolve this thing?” I finally asked.
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