“It...” he wags his finger at the Newest, “generates a lot of static.”
“And I’m wearing wool,” he adds over his shoulder a moment later, “which doesn’t help.”
He shoots me a quick grin, out of breath already. I’m wearing bandages, still dripping with soap and water, but I have my bag with me. Somehow I never forget that.
We pause after about fifteen minutes, taking advantage of a little rise that affords us a wider view. The Newest, at this distance, resembles an engine, or part of a tractor or something. There’s a flutter of mechanical animation inside it, that might be caused by flickering pistons, spinning gears.
It is still completely silent. The metal globes are the same size, and must be at least fifty feet across. They swing up and down, meeting without touching first above, and a little behind, and then below, and a little before, the main body of the thing. I can’t see what connects them.
Loring points to something on the ground below it.
“Emitter,” he says.
Now I make it out—another long grey liver thing, the size of a bus, nuzzling around in a little patch of foliage. The light dimly gleaming on its smooth surface is slightly ruffled, and I realize the emitter is spinning, or at least its outside is.
“The Newest doesn’t have senses. It simply knows the position of every object in the world at all times.”
“How do you know that?”
“Will you look? You don’t see any eyes, do you?” he points.
“No.”
He waves his hands, as if this made things so plain he needn’t bother to say any more on the subject.
“The emitter’s changed,” he adds, almost matter-of-factly.
He’s right. The emitter has flattened and spread into a shape like a roulette wheel. There’s even a spindle wavering up from the center, getting taller and more slender.
I don’t know why I make directly for it, but I do. I can hear Loring scramble clumsily after me. There’s a lawn that slopes gradually up to the bulge of a hill, then angles steeply upward, between the woods over on my left and the Newest hovering there on my right, and there’s a field of invisible elasticity between the two of them.
Entering this field I’m overcome with giddy exhilaration. The conversation is darting all around me, the concepts or words or whatever they are. They seem to saturate my skin at once, like a gentle but heavy wave of air.
This is communication, this is no mere transfer of information. The words or whatever I sense blowing to and fro around my body have expressions. The air has expression.
It’s hard to tell whether or not I only imagine this or if, in imagining it, I also make it happen, but I half-visualize myself moving into the center of the stream of this icy cocainated river of reason, presenting not my front but my edge to the brunt of the flow so as to cut it. Cutting things is a way of not interfering with them? As opposed to what—pressing on them?
I feel it close like lips around and over me, so that I can stand in the accelerating current. I don’t know what it’s doing to Loring. He’s become hard to see, and he might be flailing around, overwhelmed and awkward. Snatches of his voice, barely audible in the nearly silent exchange, reach me, but only the briefest particles of words.
It’s odd that he, with his inner models and insistence on immaculate regularity would be the one to curse order while I, who adheres to chance with all the wanton fidelity of an abused wife, would be situated in whatever way you want to describe this. But to me it makes excellent sense, seems exactly correct. I take in everything with a gorgeously cold, autumnal clarity. Now that I’m within only a few hundred yards of the Newest I can begin to pick up a faint sound that probably comes from inside it, and that reminds me incongruously of a subterranean sub-basement electric organ from old surf-rock 45s. A powerful impulse to peel off my bandages and expose myself naked to the expression comes over me and I have to remind myself of the harm that would be liable to do to me.
The emitter is on the slope of the hill, both of us on a common diagonal. Like a dancer: the idea occurs to me about three or four times and it isn’t until the last time that it really hits me. It hits me so hard I hear myself shout or make some strangled, inarticulate sound with my voice. She spins, skirts rise up in scallops and a kind of grooved whorl climbing up them. And this hits me as transcendentally right and perfect, even though I don’t know what I’m seeing.
Not being precise about this or precise about that, what remains is precision alone, and being precise is how I’m starting to be. There’s nothing I could want more wholeheartedly. The emitter is budding out in a turnip-shaped bulb at the top of a stalk, and this is changing from one uniform color to another. Each successive color is fainter and fainter, and now it becomes completely transparent so abruptly that despite myself I shout again as the colossal diamond appears, totally stationary and signifying concentration. Whatever spin it appears to have is a reflection. The diamond itself is motionless. After a moment I know its present facets are going to become visible, each one reflecting and re-reflecting a total reflection. Seeing that will be too much for me, and I’ll go crazy.
All around me is something like the mind of the Newest, and I can’t tell if it’s confusion or an order I can’t discern from where I see it—if I’m far, it’s too indistinct, and if I’m near, then it’s all around me and I’m done in by the fact I can’t look in all directions at once.
But hearing is different, and what I hear all around me at once sounds like patterns and what’s galloping all around me is like an exchange of dozens of passionately recited long poems—I’ve kept walking, and now I’m coming right under the Newest.
It’s full of whirring, like driveshafts and lathes and turbines, and now there’s a—I can see that it’s got a hollow, it has an opening through the middle and there in the opening is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s a bolt of lightning. It trails down from the sky and is sort of bent and draped along the inner slope of the opening. It’s transparent, and stationary. Fantastic power, in suspense, and as tenuous as jellyfish and candle flame. The outline wavers gradually, like tissue paper stirring in the faintest current of air. It isn’t stationary after all, just amazingly slowed down. It’s a bolt of lightning that could blast me to fragments, but caresses instead.
I hear two quick footfalls rushing up behind me and something knocks me sprawling on my face. Before I can get up again I’ve got a pair of knees on my back and an enormous weight crushing the breath out of me. When I can get myself together again, Loring has my bag, is rummaging in it and looking up eagerly at the Newest.
I call his name and rush him. His face wobbles as he jerks it in my direction and I get his foot against my chest. It sends me toppling over backwards and I land with special emphasis on the steeper part of slope, sliding down with Loring well above me. He’s taken out the tape pistol and jogs with it in his hand, the gaping bag over his shoulder, along the hill. As I get up with difficulty, I glance in the direction he’s going and only now do I notice the little collection of farm buildings, the cinderblock outhouse or whatever it is with a metal star on the side. Loring stands aiming the gun, set against a livid silver cloud looking like the silhouette of an eighteenth-century duellist and the gun clicks.
The emitter begins to spin asymmetrically and the diamond turns plum colored and softens like sucked ice cream. Its skirts separate into rakes and it collapses back into its former liver-shape. The conversation field dies around us.
While I don’t know what exactly this enormity is, it was carried out by blindsiding me and swiping property that might only casually be mine but is absolutely not Loring’s to use in any case, at least not without my permission, at least in the absence of any greater authority—except he is apparently a greater authority than I am, considering the tone of equivalence Clare and Guerrero took with him earlier.
It doesn’t stop me from going at him again in a clumsy tackle and getting swept off his gut onto t
he ground, where only uncharacteristically quick thinking saves me from his kick. As I get up, Loring is already priming to knock me over the head with the butt of the tape gun.
“A hundred times harder.”
My head settles down solidly on my neck, but not from Loring’s blow. I feel him plant it solidly on my crown, but that faint voice I hear the instant before he would have brained me is one I’ve heard before. I register a muffled tap and scrape—the skin must have broken. Then I fling my hundred-times-harder head into his solar plexus.
Loring makes a froglike sound halfway between a gulp and a shout and goes down. Straightening up, my hundred-times-heavier head drags me over backwards with such force I land on the top of my skull and pivot over it, pancaking on my face. At least I have my hands out to break my fall a bit. Loring is moaning and gasping for breath.
“Normal weight,” a voice says in my head, which seems ready all of a sudden to rocket away from the ground.
Without rising to my feet, I scrabble over to Loring, who has the tape gun in his hand, and yank it away from him. Now he’s up at a bound and pelting away from me at full tilt, pumping his arms and legs, the bag still dangling down his back. I lunge awkwardly for him, but somehow my legs have gotten tangled up. A cool, tingling rises up inside them and numbs the strength out. I follow Loring, but I can’t manage to do more than trot, veering uncontrollably right and left as I go. My feet won’t go where I want them to. Is this curare or something? Already he’s so far away I could nearly blot him out with my hand. Shuffling forward as best I can, I level the tape gun out at arm’s length and try to get him in my weaving sight.
Against the odds I succeed twice, but the gun takes a moment to close and discharge, so both miss. Loring is dashing through some boulders and such down there. In another few seconds he’ll be into the open space beyond; with my loused-up legs I doubt I can catch him out there. So I stop. I steady my hand with my free arm. Once again, Loring lines up with the sight, and I snap the gun earlier.
A hit—Loring squawks like a goosed chicken and goes berserk, dashing around, screeching, flailing his arms. He keeps clapping one hand to the left side of his head. I think I got it in his ear.
The fizziness in my legs abates. I can move the joints more easily, but Loring is doing backflips, so that I have to hustle to get near him. The flips follow in exact rhythm, flexing back double, lifting the spherical body, then up the legs whip and over. The bag is tossing out now on this side, now on the other, and I wonder if the strap will choke him.
I jog clumsily alongside Loring as he does flip after flip, hoping the bag will drop along his arm and onto the ground, and it does this several times, actually more often than not, but he is able, despite his frenzy, or perhaps because, to keep a grip on the strap and yank it along with him on the next turnover. That leaves me making spasmodic efforts, hampered by my still stiff and uncoordinated legs, bare for the most part and increasingly scratched up, to hook the strap as he comes momentarily upright and his arm is not yet a pillar under him.
Loring’s glassy eyes nearly start from his head. He’s drenched in so much perspiration that he splashes the grass every time he vaults upside-down.
When it becomes clear he will get away from me again if present conditions persist, I fling myself wildly down in his path, colliding with Loring. The small of his back connects with me first, I guess, and with a loud “oop!” he careens sideways like a wagon wheel spinning loose. This is not before his shoulderblades have come down on top of me like a pair of oars, swatting me flat against the ground, and I get a good clout from the back of his head as well. Then he’s puffing and stamping and puffing and stamping, diligently backflipping away from me and in no particular direction, while I lie on my side, watching stars float by, my legs trailing off into the blue flames.
Gingerly, I roll over, take a look around. There’s a large black stone that gives me a moment of false hope. In reality, the bag is lying in a puddle, not more than five feet away from my outstretched left hand.
*
“Guerrero’s looking for you,” Darren gurgles. “You’re in trouble.”
He’s watching me, waiting to catch my reaction.
“I wouldn’t recognize myself if I weren’t in trouble,” I say.
He laughs through closed lips.
“You shouldn’t have followed Loring.”
“He persona non grata around here?”
“Nobody likes Loring. I could tell you about it sometime.”
“I don’t want to pay the tuition.”
I’ve finished dressing and reshoulder my bag.
“So—” the swing of the bag jerks the word short. “What’s he doing here, anyway?”
“He’s an agent with the Stationery Office.”
I don’t like the wet, toothy grin he’s giving me.
“That dump?” I ask.
My answer delights him and he nods violently, like he can’t contain himself. This gives way to a slow, soulful headshaking, as he tells me, with an affectation of sadness that only accentuates the pleasure it gives him, “You’ve totally misconstrued the importance of the Stationery Office.”
“What importance?” I ask, “It was one guy.”
He goes on shaking his head, with a phantom giggle slurping in his throat.
“One hangdog guy in an empty room in the basement, whining to me about how he couldn’t get any Operationals.”
“They like to adopt pretenses,” he says. “Believe me, everyone here knows about your flippancy with the senior Censor.”
“So I’m supposed to believe that some VIP sits in an empty office all hours waiting for people to mistake him for a flunky?”
“You certainly didn’t make a good impression.”
“Is this plausible?”
Darren’s satisfaction is too obvious to be a put on, but he might be getting his kicks leading me astray. I conjure the man in my memory, but it doesn’t go too well. A paunchy, long faced, long nosed man with bags under his eyes. The image tells me nothing.
“So Loring is avenging the honor of the Censor by tempting me into...” I sigh with the effort of finding one word after another, “...frolics that irritate Guerrero? Seems a bit lame.”
“Loring’s got you where he wants you,” Darren says. “He gets everyone where he wants them.”
“The only way you can do that is by switching places every moment, and that leaves little time for anything else... So Guerrero can’t touch Loring, right?”
“Right.”
“His superior?”
Darren shakes his head and sucks his lips.
“Different authority,” he gulps. “Guerrero, Clare, and Loring are all tops.”
“Swell. Is this the whole set up now? Anybody else I should know about?”
“Maybe,” he chirps.
I’ve had enough. We can resume his being cute some other time.
Tired as I am, I walk out of the infirmary.
The fact that the schizophrenia voices intervened in my fight with Loring leads me to believe that he was acting on prompts from the other side of Chorncendantra. If I knew whether most participants kept steadily on one or the other side, I could start drawing up a chart of teams, but for all I know, everyone could be as loose an end as I am. Are we players or just the gear, or is this also subject to variation?
Beds are in great supply in the camp. There’s actually an overabundance of beds, and each barracks has a storage shed attached to it with spare beds stacked, completely made and ready for immediate use, and some in fact already in use, from floor to ceiling. Beds are withdrawn from these stacks fairly regularly, so it isn’t tough to find a stack low enough to admit a sleeping body.
*
The blare of the claxon nearly precipitates me out of the bed. As the startle response fades, I lie back again, listening as the cry and its echo criss-cross the camp, my eyes fixed on a shaggy wooden beam. The roof is about four feet above me, and my bed is probably as many feet off the f
loor. Tramping boots, another crew of Operationals.
The door to the shed is open; there’s the dirt, there’s the faint residue of light from the paltry few lamps that water down the camp’s shadows, and there’s the same old dark. How do I keep managing to miss the day? When did I last get a look at something in daylight? Is this camp somehow so high in latitude, or so low, that the sun is only putting in a perfunctory appearance for an hour or two out of every twenty-four? Then why is it warm enough for me to sleep on top of the blankets, more or less comfortably, with an open door only a few feet away? Why are these beds all stored and stacked with the linen made up and blankets on them?
The bandages are now well up past my right knee. I slept with the bag strap wound several times around my arm, and looped once around a post in the aluminum, just as a precaution. Opening it, I find my medical supplies are as good as ever. I wonder if they refresh themselves. I find an enamel washbasin on a shelf attached to the outside of the barracks and freshen up.
All the concrete mixers are gargling at once and I have to shout.
“Yunis anywhere around here?”
“Which Yunis?” the woman asks. She’s sturdy and dressed in a grey Operational coverall.
“Tall, black. He wears one of those barette things on his neck?”
She nods.
“Yunis Runamile,” she says, I think. Her hand points me to the center of the mixers.
He notices me. Everything about him, his rubbery hands, his nose, his lips, is big. Those hands are deftly checking the contents of a rucksack, while tools and other supplies hover around him, each choosing its moment to zip into place like bees returning to the hive.
Apart from myself, four others make up the climbing party. There’s a sullen-looking man of about forty with a darkly-tanned face that looks like it was carved in uncooperative wood, and intensely white eyes. His lips compress into a tense little line when he sees me. Judging by the way he exchanges the occasional word with the lean, pale man beside him, they’re acquainted. Lean and pale has the kind of mouth that you can tell what it will look like when it gets old; a drooping lower lip, the tucked-in upper lip, and space in between shaped like a seagull in flight. They are rechecking their packs, which seem pretty ratty and ungainly to me.
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