The ship seemed almost abandoned. In Jiang’s imagination, ships bustled with deckhands. The riverboats on the Yangtze Gorges continually stirred with people. Here, spindrift crossed bare decks like ghosts. Jiang wandered to the end of the main deck where ladder steps ascended to a well-lighted pilothouse. A figure appeared at the top and hurried down. Jiang glanced about for a place to hide, but there were no hatches nearby. He would have to rush across the deck toward the cargo hold to find a doorway, but then he would certainly be seen. The sailor coming down the stairs turned to hop the last few steps, and Jiang ducked under the ladder. He urged his power to fill his body and reached up for the overhang of the upper deck. Invisible cables hoisted him up, and he clung to a steel support as the sailor reached the deck and walked under him.
Hanging in the dark, Jiang observed again the cold, wispy radiance about his body. The sailor directly below him talked into an intercom in the bolt-studded wall at the foot of the ladder. Jiang couldn’t move, and he hung there in his cocoon of pallid light, hoping the man wouldn’t look up or see the glow.
While he hung with his cheek pressed against the steel, his fingers and ankles clasping the support, the dull fire about him did a frightful thing. It pulled away and swirled into a bodylength of refulgence alongside of him. Jiang watched stupefied as the spectral smoke bulged with definition and a being congealed beside him. Horrendous, its length segmented like an insect, tight-waisted as an ant; its limbs, stunted buds, cleaved and twitched as claws; and its horrible head, inches from Jiang’s sweat-pearled face, formed an abstract mantis mask with vividly simian eyes, madman’s delirious eyes, above fang-meshing mouthparts.
Jiang screamed. His grip relented, and he crashed to the deck. The sailor at the intercom leaped about with a shout, then stuttered into the voice box. He bent over Jiang, who was stunned, eyes fluttering. He slapped the old man and sat him up.
Jarred by the fall, Jiang came around groggily. He searched for the monster and saw men charging down the ladder and stooping over him.
“It’s just an old man.”
“A stowaway.”
“Better call the captain.”
“Don’t be stupid. We were the ones who were supposed to be at the gangways during loading. You feel good about winning with your lucky dice now, dolt? It’ll come out we weren’t on duty, and we’ll all be docked for this. We’re not turning back for an old man. That means his food and the cost of returning him come from our pay—not to mention the penalty for gambling if that’s found out, and where else would we have been, eh? We’ll lose our jobs for sure.”
“Dog guts!”
“Throw him overboard.”
“Sure, who’s going to know? Come on, he’s just a peasant, a turnip-head. Look at his clothes.”
“You can smell the pig shit. Over he goes.”
Laughter swung hilarious loops in the air almost curling into howls, and hands grabbed Jiang and lifted him. He shook his head, trying to clear his jolted brain. He struggled instinctively, but the sailors’ grips were firm. He felt the rail of the ship brush his back, and the white streamers of the ship’s wake flashed phosphorescently in the darkness below him.
As he hurtled into the air, Jiang’s clarity asserted itself, and he reached within his will for the demon power. Too late. He sprawled into his fall.
His muscles thumped powerfully, wrenching him iron stiff, and then going limp as lint. His plunge into the sea stopped inches above the curling wake. Gradually, like a gull facing into the wind, he rose, grazing the sea-mist fuming off the dark swells. He laughed at the stupid shock on the faces of the sailors and pulled up sharply toward the tapping stars.
With arms and legs outstretched to embrace the sky, Jiang sailed into the night, swooping once past the crouching men who had thrown him overboard. The demon power launched him far ahead of the ship in a tremendous lunge of speed that tugged back his hair and whiskers and smeared his features into a bulldog’s frown. He shivered with the frost of space, eyes wind-burned and weepy with wonder, bright with the fury of wonder, as he tilted into the Earth’s curve.
His body blazed with blue-black light. He could see his reflection in the sea below, flitting like the face of the moon over the dark water and lacings of wave froth. Yet, even as he watched his bodylight shadowing him in the sea, the lunar glow flared away. Jiang rolled to his back and saw a ghastly sight. The violet luminescence about his body had pulled away again and taken the shape of the demon he had seen on the ship. Its ravenous maw stretched into a shark’s gape, brambly with fangs, and the clasped hemispheres of its hairless head glinted with numerous spider-beaded eyes. Jiang willed himself faster, and he felt Earth’s hug tighten and abruptly relent, spewing him at bone-aching speed over the black span of the sea.
The demon figure, attached by a hot green umbilical cord, trawled on its taut line behind Jiang. But the speed disfigured it. The thing was not as substantial as he, and its gruesome features bleared in the wind-rush like a torched wax figurine. As soon as it reduced to a blob of blue luster with furry red sparks, Jiang slowed. The tremendous burst of speed had strained every muscle on his boneframe and rubbed the air around him into a hot flash of green fire. Nervous flames smoked away, and from a great distance thunder rolled across the star-splattered night.
Coasting on his back, Jiang studied the shapeless mass of ultraviolet glow shadowing him. He passed his hand through the glistening strands coiling from his navel to the cloudy light, and nothing changed. Whatever it was, it consisted of bright ether. He could see swirlings in it, like alcohol immixing in water. Particles of shadow and flechettes of blue fire whorled in a busy pattern that, with the gradualness of weather, began to take shape. Pincered arm buds appeared at the vaporous fringe of the billowing phosphorescence. A seamed head began bulging forth next, shiningly oiled, its fanged chewing plates and black dewdrop eyes lolling drunkenly on a tiny neck joint.
Jiang commanded his strength to burst the foetal mistings apart. The effort only speeded the monsters twitchy growth. The pleated gills along its dolphin-muscled flank webbed open, and a searing screech stabbed Jiang. The sharpness of the scream gored his brain, and power snuffed out in him, plummeting him into the ocean.
Cold water ripped over him, and he flailed into darkness. He didn’t panic. He was a good swimmer. After all, he had lived all his life at the most riotous bend in the mighty Yangtze. What was a calm ocean, however deep, compared to the treacherous currents and whirlpools of his river?
In the moments it took him to rise to the surface, he kept his eyes open in the stinging water, looking hard into utter blackness for the demon light. He saw it. It bristled with energy in radiant urchin spikes, and Jiang burst the surface and drank air.
He willed himself into the sky again, but the power was gone from him. Like a piece of the moon in the sea, the monster light circled him twice while he treaded water— then, it too vanished. Darkness covered the ocean to the circular horizon where the stars twinkled so brightly they looked wet.
He wondered if he had killed the demon and with it his own power. Is this all? Jiang asked himself. A demon has carried me away from my home to throw me into the sea? Or are there two demons—one of power and one of craziness?
Silence answered him. Yet, within the void—and with no more wattage than an imagined voice—awaited the demon. Jiang heard it with his inmost ear, apologetic as a bumbling monk: “Am I not a grub? I can’t even control myself. My craziness has run away with my strength and left you there to drown. What have I done?”
“Help me!” Jiang called. But the demon, or his imagination, had flitted back to silence.
Real or imagined, all voices made little difference now. The strength in him crumbled and soon would tear, and then he would drown. Only the dreams of the white youth, Dirk, had led him to suspect that something more than an exotic death lay in store for him.
He imagined Dirk vividly and tried to fly again. His will opened empty as a wish. A dream, after all, is jus
t a dream. He spat out salt water and lifted his face to the cringing stars.
***
Painbuffers in the titanohematite brain broke down. Without the buffers, the agony of Insideout’s distance from the hyperfield made human contact impossible. As it was, the four miniscule minds it touched faded in and out. And the lapses would get worse as its stamina wore down. Despair cancered through the alien. How could it hope to save itself among such tiny minds?
Insideout loosened its grasp on the humans, and 4-space widened around it. In a blackness shivering with inner motions, clusters of light cones hung suspended. The clusters formed a brilliantly faceted gem shot through with smoky darkness. Every point inside the gem seemed the center.
The center that Insideout had just crawled out of was the human plane, a dull facet of the gem. The human dead floated there as pale bristles of luminance, slender light cones, barely visible among the coruscations of other life. Only the flash of radio and microwave noise from human technology made the human mind outstanding in the sparkling radiance of the tesseract range. Human space was small, and its smallness became acutely obvious so close to the cetacean minds, which glowed like a galactic splash.
Insideout longed to return to its ocean friends, to spend what little time it had left happily, in yes-out-of-mind. But it wasn’t strong enough to leave the hole that it had crawled into. Its strength bled away moment by moment. And its consciousness wrinkled smaller— becoming more human.
***
The night sky, a skillet greasy with stars, covered the desert into which a red convertible cruised eighty miles an hour with Howard Dyckson in the passenger seat. The driver, Tony, a slick-haired, narrow-faced man with a pencil-line mustache and blue silk suit, was taking Howard to a private card game at a desert ranch.
Where didn’t matter to Howard. Where was always right here in the time-melt, minutes ahead of everyone else. Remorselessly ahead. In the tumblehours, a clatter of scenes unfolded: a green felt table and kaleidoscoping playing cards. Ahead. He watched a hurry of slow hands and crooked faces—and at the end of it all the loud neon of the city and Cora laughing in their hotel room. Miles of time teetered before him.
Behind them, Las Vegas dwindled, a smear of light on the black horizon. Howard and Cora had arrived several hours earlier from Peoria. Cora, exhausted from exhilaration, weak with delight at the millions they had won, collapsed in a euphoric heap on the immense bed as soon as they arrived in their posh hotel room. But Howard was too wound up to rest. He wanted to assault the Sleepless City, and Cora reluctantly agreed to tag along. Howard popped like a street dancer when he exchanged his pocket money for betting tokens. She made him promise that he would stop after he lost them. He promised her with a smile as self-assured as a monk’s.
Howard accepted a glass of complimentary champagne from an underwear-clad cocktail hostess and breathed in the carnival energy of the casino. He strolled among one-armed bandits, frisky with the stupendous sensation of seeing just beyond the crested moment. The machines grunted and clanked in a loud frenzy that backdropped the dazing clangor of winners-yet-to-be. Howard could hear them across time. As he passed a machine about to pay off, he could hear the echo of its bells bounding back from the near future. Unerringly, he went from winner to winner. Roulette was the same. The upcoming winning number hung motionless before his eyes in the gauze of the wheel’s spinning motion before the wheel even turned. Within two hours of their arrival in the city, they had visited three casinos, doubled a thousand dollars ten times, and won over a million dollars.
“Howard, why is this happening to us?” Cora asked him when they were alone again in their penthouse suite. The ten million they had won in the state lottery had been a shock—but here, lying on a lordly bed covered with a million dollars in cash, here they had gone beyond shock and entered the kingdom of Unknowing. The events of the last day were unbelievable, incredible, beyond understanding—she thought. And, in fact, she was right. Cora was smart that way. When life became overwhelmingly ridiculous, she knew how to stop thinking about it and sustain herself on life’s primal simplicities: During the time that Howard was laid off from Caterpillar, when he had gambled away all the money they had saved, when she had actually felt grateful that they couldn’t have kids, she had still kept up on the housework, made herself pretty, and wore sexy underwear for Howard. If she could rise above the stifling humility of poverty, she figured she could handle being unjustifiably rich.
The muscadine scent of all that cash acted as a pungent aphrodisiac, and Cora forgot her exhaustion. With her fingers in her husband’s thinning hair and her mouth close to his ear, she asked, “How can anyone be this lucky?”
Howard pretended ignorance. In fact, he was ignorant about how his blessing worked. Or even if it was a blessing. He’d seen enough horror movies about crazed fortune tellers and ill-starred time travelers to wonder whether his power to glean the future was possibly a luck-disguised curse. That’s what kept him from telling his wife about his new power. After fifteen years of marriage, he knew her well enough to keep this secret. She was too conscientious: She recycled the paper of used matchbooks. Their last argument had been about her need to donate a portion of their welfare check to famine relief in Timor. If she knew that he could peek into the next moment, she’d insist that he turn himself in to some scientific institute for the good of humanity. And right now all he wanted to think about, after a decade of hard work and near poverty, was the good of the Dycksons.
Even during the rare spells of reckless honesty that swelled in him when he thought about his fortune and Cora’s faithfulness to him during his years as a loser, he couldn’t square with her. The timelines wouldn’t let him. The timelines, those contours of movements and shapes yet-to-be that he saw fleetingly about everything he stared at, created an overall effect like a Cubist painting. Strata of images layered his visual field, and the scene of what was really before him appeared not so much clouded with possibility shadows as laser cut into actuality from time’s cumulus: His sight had never been sharper, and he noticed details that had always eluded him. Objects broke the space around them into a mosaic, a hyperbolic lattice of time echoes, so that within their busy auras, each object grew louder in its clarity. When he looked into Cora’s face, he saw her dimpling shyly at twenty-two on their honeymoon, he saw her old, her face eroded by her tirelessness, and most clearly of all he saw her now, her large dark eyes dream-fetched by whatever blessful thing she thought about his face. He wanted to tell her then about his new way of seeing, but as he thought that, the timelines shifted, and in the glass of her face, he saw himself, the flesh sloughing from his skull like a serpent’s old skin.
Howard fobbed off his winnings as pure luck, and Cora, like the amazed casino cashiers who had exchanged his chips for bucks, believed him. What else could she believe? The hour was late—two in the morning desert time—and she was delirious with the suddenness of their wild fortune. They tumbled in the bed among the raw money like hyperkinetic kids. And for the first time in recent memory, they made love magically, hourlessly, until they were hollowed out, their bodies sweat-pasted with hundred-dollar bills.
Howard tucked in his exhausted wife, showered, and dressed in the cream cotton summer suit he had purchased when they first arrived at the hotel lobby’s all-night garb shop. He collected a hundred thousand dollars from the heaped cash on the bed and stuffed his pockets with the bills.
“Where’re you going?” Cora asked through the smoke of sleep.
“My luck isn’t tired,” he said, kissing her eyes closed. “I’m taking it for a walk. I’ll be back for breakfast. Get some sleep. You’re going to need all the rest you can get. Spending money is hard work.”
Cora let him go. He had earned his night on the town. She went with him in her heart, but her body was stunned silly by fatigue and giddiness, and not even the stupendous amount of money all around her could hold her awake. She soared toward sleep contemplating the good deeds this money would buy for
the old friends of her new life.
At the first casino Howard returned to, he met Tony Robello, a thin-mustached, silk-suited gambler. Money pastiched the time-quilt around him. They met at the revolving bar where Howard had gone to steady himself with a few drinks. Beer had been Howard’s sustenance since he was sixteen, but on the flight from Peoria he had discovered that stiffer doses of alcohol helped him to control the jostlings and surges of his prescience. He had been stewing in a welter of ghostly images—sunlight-wincing glimpses of white sand beaches, crisscrossed palms, volcanic craters, and a punk with blond windcast hair and eyes like shattered glass. After a couple of whiskeys, the distracting sun-washed images had disappeared, and he had been left among the brilliant spanglings and neon pulsings of his anticipation of Las Vegas. Since arriving, he had been careful to keep his intake high, much to Cora’s consternation. The alcohol, however, had no apparent effect on him. He walked straight as a gunslinger, and the only doubling of his vision was the eerie superimposition of his future sight.
Tony watched Howard put away three double shots, and he had to restrain a grin when he sidled up to him. He had seen the balding, Adam-appled hick win big earlier at the blackjack table, but he hadn’t approached him then because he was with his hick wife. Now he was alone, the ideal mark for the game his employers played. Tony was paid to round up suckers for private card games subtly rigged to favor his bosses.
In the diamond splinter light quilling about Tony’s sleek head, Howard envisioned money, bundled stacks of old bills. He became interested in a friendly game of poker away from the brash environs of the city. In the short time that he had been in Las Vegas, his winnings had alerted all the casino hawks, and the crowds that had begun to gather at whatever table he visited made him uncomfortable. His outlandish enthusiasm for the games only drew more attention: He couldn’t help but howl when he won. Anything less would offend the powers that gracing him. When he won big, he did his chest-thumping gorilla dance. The gods were pleased. His light-webbed vantage on the future persisted.
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