A few people jogged against him.
His shoulders had started to ache—from the hunching. He shifted them about, tried to stand a little straighter, just his head forward—which sent a throb along the back of his neck, so that he had to rub it. A real mumble would, of course, give him something to concentrate on. If this was the death of Tethys, what better way to die with it than to have his mind cleared of all quotidian concern (though, despite the random sounds, like rubble of the city itself in his mouth, he felt his mind was anything but clear): he’d been repeating the same three syllables for minutes now, and went ou to something else. (Blinking, he saw his own sandals, and the rag-bound, filthy feet of the woman beside him, taking their tiny steps.) How far had they gone?
Someone squeezed in behind him.
Another interloper? More probably someone had just relinquished the Divine Guide position for peeking. Bron shuffled on, losing his own voice on the thunderous web of sound, trying to judge their slow, headlong progress. He wouldn’t be able to get the ache out of his neck without putting his head straight up and (he suspected) stopping. His calves were beginning to ache too. His hip, at any rate, felt better. And his Mimimo-momizo ... had (he realized) degenerated to Blablabla-blabla ...
Someone on the other side of him tripped, stumbled against him; eyes still tight (and in violation of some sect canon, he was sure), he grabbed the bony shoulders (Bron wasn’t sure if they belonged to man or woman) to steady them. One was sticky, hot, and wet; as his hand hesitated on the swaying back, Bron wondered how anyone could have such knobby vertebrae.
Over the roar of mantras—how many were in the group? Thirty? Fifty? Seventy-five?—other voices were shouting.
He caught the shrieked phrase: “... mutilation of the mind! Mutilation of the body ...” The words “... catastrophe ...” and “... ultimate, seventh-stage catastrophe ...” separated out. And “... but the mutilation of die mind! The mutilation of the body ...”
Again mumblers jarred him.
Suddenly Bron opened his eyes and raised his head.
The darkness surprised him. Had they wandered into the u-1? He looked up. No: it was just that the shield was still out. Green coordinate letters glowed high on a wall ahead. Another mumbler lurched against him. Outside the group, people were shouting and ... fighting with the mumblers at the group’s edge! And there was a chalky smell among the unwashed bodies.
No, it wasn’t burning. But it made his throat feel funny.
“... in the wake of the ultimate, seventh-state catastrophe, we have no recourse but the mutilation of the mind, the multilation of the body ...” came loudly from beyond the mumblers. All Bron’s well-being left. Fear replaced it. He pushed between the mumblers, away from where the shouting was loudest—though there was shouting at the other side too.
A dozen feet off, between two ragged mumblers, stumbling obliviously on, he saw the overmuscled, fouled, and hairy figure, crouching and jeering with mutilated face (a woman, from the ragged mastectomy scars), saw her strike one of the mumblers (who fell to his knees), then turn, chains swinging from her neck, and shout: “... only the mutilation of the body, the mutilation of the mind ...”
Was this supposed to be meaningful ... ? meaningless ... ? He plunged out among them. A scabby fist glanced his jaw. Nobody else hit him directly, but he had to wedge between two sweating, naked creatures, who, he realized on his third push, were pressing together solely to keep him from passing. One growled, inches from Bron’s face, with fouled teeth and a jaw wet with lymph and pus.
Then he was through. Behind, shouting and mumbling made one ugly roar. He looked up, saw a set of green coordinates—
He was in the same unit as Serpent’s House! The e-girls, confronted with a sect who would not have responded to them anyway, not knowing what to do, had let them pass the cordon! Arriving as obliquely as fear was the sudden conviction that he had been incredibly clever. He couldn’t have thought of a more ingenious way of getting through the blockade!
Someone staggered into his back. He heard somebody else grunting rhythmically, under blows.
He didn’t even look but ran forward, turned the corner—to find the street wet, then wetter; finally he was splashing, in his sandals, through two inches of water.
As he crossed the intersection, wind shattered the black glaze along all five streets that converged here, obliterating his own widening ripples; momentarily, it threatened to grow strong enough to push him to his knees. Splashing and staggering, he gained the far side. But the gust had already begun to die.
The lights did not come on automatically when he stepped through the door, nor when he found the switch box—the cover swung open as though someone had already tried it—and played with the range of press-plates inside. There was junk all over the common room floor; and the glow of unshielded night above told him that the skylight opening was several times too big; and the wrong shape.
From across the room came a sound that might have been a moan. Bron stepped, stepped again, stepped again—and barked his shin, hard—blood trickled his ankle. He’d scraped himself on something he couldn’t see. Something he could, large and black and shapeless, blocked him anyway. He stepped aside on the rubbly rug, felt the wall brush his shoulder. He heard the sound again—it could also have been some piece of junk, sliding; it didn’t sound much like a moan ... A sudden scrambling, then something dodged past. Bron whirled, terrified, in time to see somebody dart out the door—a hand hit the jamb, a-glitter with gems: then the ringed fingers were gone.
“Flossie ... ?” Bron called, after count five. “Freddie ... ?” He didn’t call that loudly. After all (he took another breath and another step) whichever it had been was probably, by now, a unit away. He stepped forward again ... On the fifth step his knee struck sharply on what (probably) was an overturned chair leg. He went back to the wall. That sound again ... No, it wasn’t a moan.
An orangeish glow, above—flickering? No. But it was the balcony door.
His foot hit the bottom step. He grasped the rail—which gave under his hand, much too loose. Bron started up. Something small rolled from his foot and fell, clicking, back down three steps. Under his wet sole, next step, something else equally small cracked.
He reached the balcony, looked through the door. Someone had hung a light cube just inside, which, for some reason, was burning dim orange instead of yellow. Ahead, the left corridor wall sagged incredibly.
On the floor, spraddling the doorsUl (the speaker on the side still gave up the micro-shouts of micro-armies a-clash on micro-mountain ledges), opened out and inlay up, lay the vlet case—stepped on at least once and cracked, drawers loose, screens, cards, men and dice scattered. The astral cube was now only broken plastic lying among bent, brass struts.
Bron stepped lightly (frowning heavily) across the sill. The sagging wall made him dubious about the floor.
Outside, he heard a rushing with a few whistles in it—the wind again! Halfway up the steps to the next floor he saw that those dark blots on the carpet were blood—which either trailed up the steps or down, depending if the bleeding had been getting better or worse. (His ankle was only scratched and had a scab forming.) Halfway along his own corridor, he suddenly wondered why, in the midst of this wreckage, he was returning to his room.
Across from Bron’s door, Alfred’s door was ajar.
From it, a blade of light lay on the orange hall-carpet, swinging.
Bron went to the door, hesitated, pushed it in—it grated on junk over the floor. One wall was down, and half the ceiling; the light fixture dangled from its wires, swaying, a good-sized piece of ceiling still attached. Two of the bed legs were broken, or had gone through the floor. The bed was lopsided.
There were two people in it. (Bron swallowed, opened his mouth, started to step back, didn’t, started to step forward, didn’t do that either, closed his mouth.) A section of wall, and crumbled powdery stuff, had fallen across them.
Bron’s first thought: The w
oman, she’s my age!
It didn’t look that heavy!
It didn’t look that heavy at all!
A very dark oriental lay naked, on her back, one arm pinned. Her other had been trying to push the wall away. Her head had fallen to the side, her mouth and one eye wide.
Alfred lay on his stomach beside her, arms folded under his cheek.
Bron stepped forward.
Under straggly hair, Alfred’s ear was full of blood, mostly dried now. It had trickled his jaw, forked around his mouth, run across his wrist to make a rusty blotch on the sheet, the size of Bron’s hand.
The edge of the falling wall had cracked the red Q. The top part lay on Alfred’s left shoulder, black suspenders wrinkled around it. (How, Bron wondered, could a nine-foot slab of plastic walling—well, maybe twelve-foot—be heavy enough to do all that?) Alfred’s legs were visible (heels up, toes in) from midthigh down, the woman’s (toes up, both leaning left) just from the ankles. The bottom part of the sheet was completely blood-soaked, some still wet.
Suddenly Bron backed toward the door, hit his shoulder, spun out into the hall.
He did not cross the hall to his own room.
Lawrence’s door was six down from his.
Bron reached it, pounding with both fists. He stepped back, wondering if he should try the doors right and left (Fifty-odd men lived in this co-op. Bron thought. Fifty!), then pounded again because he heard something inside.
The door opened. Lawrence, naked, with wrinkled chin and knees, grizzled hair, and watery eyes, said: “Yes, what can I ... Bron?”
“Lawrence! Alfred’s dead! And some girl!”
“Yes.” Lawrence opened the door the rest of the way. “That’s right. And so is Max. And so is Wang. And then there are two at the end of the hall I don’t even know. I think they may be visitors. I don’t know them at all. I’ve never seen them before in my—”
“What about Freddie and Flossie?”
“Nobody’s seen them since this morning.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, because I thought I saw—No, that’s okay. Never mind. How—?”
“Only on the left side of the corridor,” Lawrence said, frowning again. “Isn’t it strange? The gravity deflection that got us must have stopped halfway under the building. The public channels have been saying that some of the gravity deflections that have hit parts of the city have been as high as three hundred times Triton normal for as much as seven whole seconds. Seven seconds at three hundred gravities! That’s really incredible. I’m surprised that side of the house is even standing.”
“But what about everyone else?”
Lawrence blinked. “Oh, they’ve evacuated. That’s what we were instructed to do over the public channels. The sabotage attempts have been incredibly effective. They still don’t know whether they can get it under control. Evacuate ...” The knuckly finger rubbed at the unshaven cheek. “Yes, that’s what they—”
“Then what the hell are you doing here!”
“Oh ... ?” Lawrence frowned, reached down to scratch his knee. “Well, I ... I’ve been playing pieces from my subscription series of aleotoric compositions from the late twentieth century. I played the Bette Midler track of Friends, which lasts—” Lawrence looked up again, blinking wet eyes—“not quite two and three-quarter minutes. Then I put on the Stoekhausen Aus Den Siegen Tagen, which lasts slightly more than five and three-quarter hours.” (From inside the room came the familiar clicks, electric viola glissandi, and single piano notes, spaced with resonating silences.) “Of course, I’ve heard them before. Both of them. But I just thought I’d ...” Lawrence began to cry. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry ... !” The bony hands grasped Bron’s arms.
“Hey, come on ... !” Bron said, trying to support him. “Look, you better ...
“They’re dead—Max and Wang and Alfred and ...” The face rocked against Bron’s shoulder, wet as a baby’s, “And I’m an old man and I don’t have any place to go!”
“Come on,” Bron said, his arm around the loose, dry back. Annoyance contended with fear. “Come on, now. Come on ...”
“I’m sorry ....” Rubbing his cheeks, Lawrence pulled away. “I’ll be all right. But they’re all dead. And I’m alive. And I’m an old man with no ...”He took a breath, blinked his reddened eyes. “I’m sorry ... just no place to go. I’m all right now. I’m ... What are you doing here?”
“I just ...” Bron rubbed his own shoulder, still slick with Lawrence’s tears. “I wanted to come back and ... well, make sure you were all right. See about my things; about you. And Alfred—” and then remembered Alfred; he decided he didn’t want to go into his own room at all. If it looked like Alfred’s (up to three hundred times normal gravity? That was almost as high as the surface of Neptune!), he just didn’t want to see.
Lawrence thumbed his eyes. “I doo’t know why it should, but it makes an old body like me feel ... well, it’s nice of you to say it, even if it isn’t true.”
“If everybody’s evacuated, we better evacuate too. There’s a lot of debris around. You should put some shoes on.”
“I haven’t owned a pair of shoes since I was seventy,” Lawrence said. “Don’t like them. Never have.”
“Well, I’ve got another pair. Maybe you can get into them. Look, put something on, just for protection—come on, now.” He tugged Lawrence by his skinny arm down the hall.
Bron really didn’t want to go into his own room:
He pushed the door in. The room was perfectly in order. It’s waiting for someone to move in, he thought.
On the floor next to the wall sat his yellow plastic luggage sack, delivered by pneumatic tube from the spaceport.
On his desk, beside the reader, was a black—and gold-edged envelope—this one, presumably, not a facsimile.
“Here,” Bron said, opening a cupboard. Crouching down, he pawed through the slippers, boots, and shoes on the floor. That green pair that were too small for him ... ? No, he hadn’t returned them to his design rental house. “Put these on.”
“Socks?” Lawrence asked, wearily, sitting on one corner of the desk.
“In there.” Bron stood, pushed around the clothes hanging from the circular rack. “Look, put this cape on too. Out there, things fall on you, now. Wrap that around you and it’ll be some help.”
“Bright yellow?” Lawrence, holding the cape up by the hood, brushed through its folds with his other hand. “Lined with iridescent red and blue stripes ... naturally.”
“It may not be the highest style but it’ll do the job.”
Lawrence dropped the cloak over one arm and went back to snapping closed the shoes. The socks he’d slipped on were knee-length and lavender. “I always did think clothes were an obscenity.”
“On you, sweetheart, they look good.” Bron closed the cabinet. “Come on. Move!”
“Well—” Lawrence stood, pulling the cape around his shoulders and frowning down where it brushed the rug—“I suppose, in time of war ...” He pulled the hood up, frowned, then pushed it back again.
At the door, Bron said: “It is the war, isn’t it ... ?”
Lawrence’s wrinkled face wrinkled more. “That’s what the public channels have been saying for the last hour.” Lawrence pulled the cloak around him. “Now that I’m properly attired, just where do you propose to go?”
“Well, first let’s get out of here.” Bron went into the hall. The drive that had returned him had been thrown into reverse by the disaster of Alfred’s room.
“Where’s Sam?” Lawrence thought to ask, behind him. “Did the two of you come back together?”
“Just as far as the spaceport. Then he went off somewhere else.”
“How was your trip to Earth?”
Bron barked a single syllable of laughter. “Remind me to take a lot of cellusin and tell you about it someday. We got out just before war was officially declared.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose,” Lawrence said, hurrying on behind. “The first two days you w
ouldn’t have known anything was different; then, suddenly, this!”
Downstairs, through the hall; and Bron stepped out of the orange light onto the dark balcony. Behind him, Lawrence said: “Oh, dear ...!”
Bron looked back.
Lawrence, stooping in the doorway, turned over the gaming case. “I’ve had this for practically thirty years.’’ He closed it, pressed down the brass claws. The miniature shoutings of men, women, and children, like distant mumbles, ran down and, in a stutter of static, stopped. Lawrence fingered the cracked wood. “I wonder if it can be fixed?” He laid it against the wall and began to pick up pieces.
“Hey, come on” Bron said.
“Just a moment. I want to put these aside so nobody will step on them.” Lawrence picked up the dice, the dice-cup. “When everything started, I ran up here, and as I got to the top, there was some sort of shock. I guess I must have dropped it.” He shook his head. “Thirty years. I was older than you are the first time I saw the game; but I feel like it’s been mine all my life.” He pushed a handful of figures to the wall beside the case. “Be careful when you go down the steps. Some of them may have rolled downstairs. They break easily.”
Bron said, impatiently: “Sure.” But the growing realization that, despite his desire to be somewhere else, he too had nowhere to go, made him wait for the old man.
“You don’t remember where the others were supposed to go?” he asked Lawrence, who was looking up between the buildings. Across the intersection rose a decorative arch, which, with all its light off, looked like two charred ribs from some incinerated carcass. There were a few stars.
“I wish they would turn on the sky again,” Lawrence said. “It’s not really agoraphobia—or ... what would you call it? Anauraphobia? Fear of losing one’s atmosphere? It’s just what with all the gravitational fol-de-rol it ... well, it would be nice to have it back.”
“I think we must have developed at least a couple of holes.” Bron squinted down the walkway, darker now than the unlicensed sector. “The wind got pretty rough for a while ... but it seems to have died down—is that fire along there?”
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