by Tanith Lee
I ran along the streets, and it was like running through solid dark water, the night was so curiously intense.
When I ran into the room of our flat, he was standing in the middle of the rainbow carpet. The overhead light was on and I saw him very clearly. Seeing him was like seeing the Earth’s center, finding my equilibrium again, landfall. But he stood completely still, completely expressionless.
“Are you,” he said to me, “all right?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky you caught me in,” he said, “I’ve been out since seven, trying to find you. I was just going out again.”
“Out? But we agreed—”
“I thought you might have been hurt,” he said gently. “Or killed.”
The way he said it, for which I can’t find words, rocked me, numbed me like a blow, driving all the words and thought out of my head. And because the words and thought and the events of the evening were so important, I immediately began to push my way back through the numbness toward them, not waiting to analyze his reaction and my reaction to it.
“No. Listen. I’ll tell you what happened,” I said prosaically, as if in answer to the question I had, I suppose, expected from the rational, unperturbed machine.
So I told him, rapidly, all of it. He listened as I’d asked. After a moment, he sat down on the couch and bowed his head, and I sat beside him to finish the story.
“I couldn’t get away. I didn’t dare. Even to call you—I wasn’t sure of the number of the phone downstairs—and then I had to wait for Clovis. It seems so crazy, but are we going to do it? Leave tomorrow, go somewhere else? Like two escaping spies. I think we have to.”
“You’re so scared of this city and what you think it can do,” he said. “To get out is the only thing possible to us.”
“You’re blaming me? Don’t. I am scared, with good reason. I’ve been scared that way all afternoon, all night.” He put his arm round me, and I lay against him. And sensed a profound reticence. He might have been a mile off.
“Egyptia,” I said, slowly, testing, but I wasn’t certain for what. “Egyptia is astonishing. I only saw her speak a few lines—Silver, what’s the matter? I don’t even know if you can be angry, but don’t be. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t come here. And if you think that was being stupid and panicking, at least believe it was sincere panic, not just stupidity. And after what Clovis said about homing devices….Oh, God, I’d better check—”
But his arm tightened, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to move, and I kept still, and silent, and I waited.
Presently he began to speak to me, quietly and fluently. There was scarcely a trace of anything in that musical singer’s voice of his, except maybe the slightest salt of humor.
“On one or two occasions, I can recollect saying to you that you were trying to get me to investigate myself emotionally, something that I wasn’t geared to do. It turns out I was wrong. Or else I’ve learned to do it, the way I’ve learnt a number of other things, purely human knacks. When you were gone—”
I whispered, “I really couldn’t—”
“I know. I also know you’re alive and intact. I didn’t know it until you came through that door. If I were human, Jane, I’d be shaking. If I were human, I’d have walked into every free hospital this side of the city and hurled chairs about till someone said you weren’t there.”
“I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”
“Strangest of all was the inner process through which I put myself. During which I imagined that, since you were dead somewhere, I would never be with you again. And I saw how that was, and how I’d be. You asked if I could be afraid. I can. You’ll have to believe, with no evidence, that inside this body which doesn’t shake, doesn’t sweat, doesn’t shed tears, there really is a three-year-old child doing all of those, at full stretch, right now.”
His head was bowed, so I couldn’t see his face.
I put my arms around him and held him tightly, tightly. Rather than joy in his need, I felt a sort of shame. I knew I’d inadvertently done a final and unforgivable thing to him. For I had, ultimately and utterly, proved him human at last: I had shown him he was dependent on his own species.
The earthquake struck the city at a few minutes after five that morning.
I woke, because the brass bed was moving. Silver, who could put himself into a kind of psychosthetic trance, not sleep but apparently restful and timeless, came out of it before I did. I thought I’d been dreaming. It was dark, except for the faint sheen of snowlight coming through the half-open curtains. Then I saw the curtains were drawing themselves open, a few inches at a time.
“It’s an earth tremor,” he said to me. “But not a bad one from the feel of it.”
“It’s bad enough,” I cried, sitting up.
The bed had slid over the floor about a foot. Vibrations were running up through the building. I became aware of a weird external noise, a sort of creaking and groaning and cracking, and a screeching I took at first for cries of terror from the city.
“Should we run down into the street?” I asked him.
“No. It’s already settling. The foreshock was about ten minutes ahead of this one, hardly noticeable. It didn’t even wake you.”
A candle fell off a shelf.
“Oh Silver! Where’s the cat?”
“Not here, remember?”
“Yes. I’m going to miss that cat….How can I talk about that in the middle of this?”
He laughed softly, and drew me down into the bed.
“You’re not really afraid, that’s why.”
“No, I’m not. Why not?”
“You’re with me and you trust me. And I told you it was all right.”
“I love you,” I said.
Something heavy and soft hit the window. Then everything settled with a sharp jarring rattle, as if the city were a truck pulling up with a load of cutlery.
Obliquely fascinated, then, I got out of bed and went to the window. The quake had indeed been minor, yet I’d never experienced one before. Part of me expected to see the distant skyline of the city flattened and engulfed by flames—substance of so many tremor-casts on the news channels. But I could no longer see the city skyline at all. Like monstrous snakes, three of the girders in the subsidence had reared up, sloughing their skins of snow in all directions and with great force, like catapults. Some of this snow had thumped the window. Now the girders blocked the view of the city, leaning together in a grotesque parody of their former positions. It was a kind of omen.
Dimly, I could hear a sort of humming and calling. People running out on the street to discuss what had happened. Then a robot ambulance went by, unseen but wailing; then another and another. There had been casualties, despite the comparative mildness of the shock. I thought of them with compassion, cut off from them, because we were safe. I remember being glad that Egyptia’s play would have finished before the quake. She and Clovis seemed invulnerable.
Only when we were back in bed again, sharing the last tired apple, did I think of my mother’s house on its tall legs of steel. Should I go down to the foyer and call her? But the foyer would probably be full of relatives calling up relatives. What did I really feel?
I told Silver.
“The house felt pretty safe,” he said. “It was well-stabilized. The only problem would be the height, but there’d be compensations for that in the supports.”
“I think I’d know, wouldn’t I? If anything had happened to her. Or would I?”
“Maybe you would.”
“I wonder if she’s concerned for me. She might be. I don’t know. Oh, Silver, I don’t know. I was with her all my life, and I don’t know if she’d be worried for me. But I know you would have been.”
“Yes, you worry me a lot.”
Later on, the caretaker patted on our door and asked if we were okay. I called that we were, and
asked after him and the white cat.
“Cat never batted an eyelid. That’s how you can tell, animals. If they don’t take off, you know it’s not going to be a bad one.”
When he left, I felt mean, not telling him we were going. We’d leave what we could for the rent, most of it, in fact, as far as the month had gone. I wanted to say good-bye to the cat. Demeta had always said that cats were difficult to keep in a domestic situation, that they clawed things and got hair on the pillows, and she was right and what the hell did it matter?
I fell asleep against Silver, and dreamed Chez Stratos had fallen out of the sky. There was wreckage and rubble everywhere, and the spacemen picked about in it, incongruously holding trays of tea and toast. “Mother?” I asked the wreckage. “Mother, where are you?”
“Come here, darling,” said my mother. She was standing on a small hill, and wearing golden armor. I saw, with brief horror, that her left hand had been severed, but one of the robot machines was re-attaching it. I went to her, and she embraced me, but the armor was hard and I couldn’t get through it to her, and I wasn’t comforted.
“Your brother’s dead, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling at me kindly.
“My—brother—”
“Yes, dear. And your father, too.”
I wept, because I didn’t know who they were.
“You must put this onto a tape,” said Demeta. “I’ll play it when I come back.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to make farm machinery. I told you.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s because you don’t want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my armor.”
The Baxter Empire rose into the dusty sky out of the ruins, flattening all of us to the earth with the gale of its ascent. A dismembered monkey lay on the ground where my mother had been standing, and I wondered if this was my brother. Then the monkey changed into Jason, and he wasn’t dismembered, and he said to me, “Hallo, Medea. I put a homing device into a peacock. Wasn’t that fun?”
I woke, and it was getting light. Silver was in the shower, I could hear the cascade of water. I lay and looked at the blue sky of our ceiling as it came clear, and the clouds and the birds and the rainbow. I let the tears go on rolling out of my eyes. I’d never see this ceiling again.
Along with the other things, I’d have to leave my peacock jacket behind too. Were peacocks cursed birds? My mother’s dress, Egyptia’s play, my jacket. I’d have to leave the dress I’d worn under the jacket, too, the dress I’d worn that night we met Jason and Medea as we came off the bridge. I recalled how Jason brushed against me as he ran away. Maybe to run away like that was partly deliberate. They were both good pickpockets, excellent kleptomaniacs—it would have been easy for either of them to slip something adhesive into the fabric. But at two-thirty this morning I’d turned the clothing of that night inside out, and found nothing. Maybe the gadget had fallen out, which could explain how they’d almost traced me but not quite. The thing might have been lying about somewhere in the vicinity, misleading them. On the other hand the gadget might be so cunning that it was invisible to me, but still lodged, and Jason’s failure to get to me due only to some weakness in the device which, given time, he could correct. The micro-magnet in Clovis’s seance glass was almost invisible, and highly accurate, and Jason had worked on that a year ago. They must have sat there by the bridge, just waiting for someone interesting to come along that they could bug, and who should appear but idiotic Jane.
Whatever else, I wouldn’t risk taking that clothing with me. I’d even leave my boots worn that night—I had another shabby, fascinating green pair—I’d even leave my lingerie. I knew the device couldn’t have gone that deep, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
When Silver came out of the shower, I got up, and, very businesslike, used it. I allowed myself only three minutes to lie under the spray and cry at the crimson ceiling and the blue walls and the aeronautic whale.
Dressed, we left the portion of rent money, and the last can of Keep-Kold-Kitty-Meat on the brass bed. Silver wrote the caretaker a note saying a friend was offering us work in a drama in the east. We’d already decided by then to go westward. We’d even talked about Paris, for the future.
I’d packed our clothes into various cloth bags, some of the shawls from the bed, towels, oddments, and, in some curious superstitious urge, the three then currently complete chapters of this. I think I had the notion of putting on our escape as an addendum to the history. Or just of keeping a journal, like lady travelers of old.
Silver carried all the bags and his guitar. I had been entrusted with the blue and gold umbrella.
A little before nine, we sneaked out of the building. The white cat was jauntily stalking its shadow in the street, and ran over to meet us. I nearly suffocated it, holding back my tears.
“If only we could take her with us.”
“The old man needs her more than we do. He’s very fond of her.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We’ll buy a cat.”
“Can we?”
“We might even train it to sing.”
A tear fell, despite my efforts, on the cat’s nose, and it sprang away in disgust, awarding me an accidental parting claw on the wrist.
“There you are,” he said. “A farewell present.”
We planned to walk into the center of the city. To get a cab from this area to the outskirts was almost impossible.
As we turned into the boulevard, I saw our estimation of the quake had been premature.
Buckled and humped like a child’s maltreated nondurable toy, the elevated dominated the air and, in surging over, had made havoc of the street below. As I looked at it, I remembered the awful creaking and squealing noises I had heard and then put down to the shifting girders. Being downtown, not a lot was being done about the elevated, though a couple of private demolition vans were cruising about. The vehicular road, however, was closed.
We bought doughnuts at one of the stalls that had missed the eruption of the rusty tracks. The woman stared at us through the steam of her urn.
“Jack’s lost all his glass. All smashed.”
We told her we were sorry, and drank tea and went on.
The quake had not been so very violent in itself, but hitting those areas still weakened and faulted by previous tremors, had taken its toll. It seemed to have come back to collect dues missed twenty years before.
At the first intersection, we came on the confusion that the diversion from the road on the boulevard had caused, jams of vehicles hooting vilely and pointlessly at each other like demented beasts. Farther on, a group of earlier tremor-wrecks twenty-five stories high had given up and collapsed across the street; this road, too, was closed, and more pandemonium had resulted.
As we neared the Arbors, we ourselves were diverted by robot patrols into side streets and alleys. A line of cars had crashed, one after the other, off a fly-over, when it shifted like a sail in the wind.
“This is horrible,” I said inanely.
“Look at that building,” he said.
I looked. There seemed nothing wrong with it. It only occurred to me ten minutes later he’d been directing my eyes away from something lying in the gutter, something I’d only taken for a blown-away bag….
By the time we reached the Beech subway, I was frightened. The tremor, low on the scale, but delving to find any flaw, and split and chew and rend it, had left nightmarish evidence that Tolerance had been lucky.
“From the look of things,” Silver said, “the main force channeled away from the direction of your mother’s house.”
“Yes. And Clovis was in the middle.”
“Do you want to go over to New River and see?”
“No. I feel we’re so conspicuous. But I’ll call him.”
I went into a kiosk and dialed Clovis
’s number. Nothing happened, then there was a click. I thought I’d get the sodomy tape, but instead a mechanical voice said: “Owing to seismic disturbance, these lines are temporarily on hold. We stress this does not mean your party is in an affected area, merely that the connecting video and audio links to this kiosk have been impaired.”
I stood there, trembling. I was afraid, for Clovis, and for both of us. Callously, I was frantically asking myself if this would affect our plan. And I had a mental picture of the unknown Gem who was going to fly us, buried under a collapsed tower, or the Historica VLOs in fragments.
Before I came out, I dialed for the time. It was twenty-two minutes to eleven, and we had to be down at Fall Side by twelve—if the plan was still on. We’d just have to act as though it was.
“Silver, the lines are out.”
“That was a chance.”
“How much money have we got?”
He told me.
“We can phone a cab here. They’ll do pickups from Beech, even this end, I think.”
“You could,” he said, “get it to detour past the New River blocks and see what shape they’re in. If there’s a way through.”
That made things easier all around. For one thing, the cab company might be reluctant to make a pickup at lower Beech for out of town. Sometimes cabs are hired, directed out onto the plain, and vandalized. But I added the detour to opulent New River, implying another pickup there, and they agreed.
The cab came in five minutes.
It shot up unusual side roads. Two or three one-way systems had been provisionally dualized. Robot police were everywhere. I was depressed and awed by the way in which the city had been demoralized. Relief fought with panic inside me. The plan might be in ruins, too, but even so, with all this going on, who would be looking out for a stray silver-skinned man?
As we came around from Racine and then up through a previously pedestrians-only subway, and the New River appeared, I caught my breath. Davideed, the studier of silt, could have had a field day here. It looked as if someone had turned the river over with an enormous spatula. Shining icy mud lay in big curls against the banks and on the street, and spattered the fronts of the buildings. But every block was standing. We went by Clovis’s block. Not a brick was out of place, and though some of the air-conditioning boxes on the ground gallery looked askew, none of the upper ones had shifted.
