“The lit-tle Lord Je-sus lay down His sweet head,” Hattie joined in.
Jane stared, then smiled and swayed with them, shoulder to shoulder.
A buzzing was beginning in her ears. It had started when she drank Boomer’s South Dakota Everclear. It had intensified in the cold night air when Zyunsinth had flowered in her brain—Zyunsinth as it had been, probably still was and likely would be.
Now the hum enveloped her, as if memories were congregating in her body, were milling through her arterial and nervous systems, swarming in her brain cells, looking for a home.
The voices came again—partly the strange recalled sounds of the Zyunsinth around their keep-fires, partly words from her recent, easily remembered past as Jane Doe here, partly the disembodied voices of those others that she sometimes heard sliding in and out of focus in the space behind her eyes.
* * *
“The lynx return. We are almost able to locate the probe.”
“The lynx were lost. Broken. Disconnected.”
“They mend.”
“Not through our manipulation.”
“No, through spontaneous regeneration.”
“The probe repairs itself?”
“The probe betrays itself. It replays data that we hold. Data call to data. And probe to probe.”
“The voyager cell has emerged.”
“And merged. We speak as One.”
“And say—?”
“We must retract this errant probe. We must recall it.”
“It no longer answers our cell summons. Even with the lynx reweaving, it remains uncontrollable.”
“There is one summons it cannot resist, one source it cannot refuse.”
“The mother-cell means nothing to this creation of another species.”
“There is a mother-cell within it. There is that it cannot resist, especially since it has taken control into its own hands.”
“What is this invisible leash we hold—a tracer gene? A dormant molecule of DNA? What does this renegade probe have that would be strong enough to betray it now that it has gone beyond us?”
“Itself”
* * *
Jane blinked, The lynx… no, the links. She was beginning to feel the links reforging in her body—to understand who, and how…
Before her eyes, so little time had passed that Boomer was still leaning, laughing, singing across the fire.
“It’s past Christmas,” Hattie put in.
“Still a good song,” Boomer answered, resuming. “The little Lord Je-sus a-sleep in the hay—”
Boomer leaned farther over the flames, his brown bag tilted into the white mouth of Hattie’s cup that announced “the Best Revenge” through her mittened fingers.
The bottle slipped, whipping a lash of liquid over the fire. The flames fought back, snapping high into Boomer’s face. He reared away, shouting something that wasn’t a song.
Hattie screamed.
Jane watched.
The flames sprinted for the dangling blanket edges and quickened, shooting like bright gold embroidery over the fabric. Thickening smoke dimmed the vision of a writhing wall of orange-gold heat sealing the three people into the dumpster’s heavy metal insides.
“Oh my God, oh my God…”
Jane couldn’t tell who called—Boomer, Hattie, or the voices in her head. She felt their bodies press her against the dumpster’s back, felt hot wind singe her cheeks and smoke stopper her eyes, ears, nose, mouth…
It stunned her, this force she had once generated without even thinking about it, as Kevin had helped her remember under hypnotism. It was savage, swift, pitiless.
She heard only coughs around her now, racked and faint. Jane realized that she had not inhaled in some moments, that the air in her lungs remained clean. Some self- preserving instinct let it seep into her system in cunningly husbanded amounts.
Someone nearby was clutching her arm. Someone far away was drumming on the dumpster’s metal skin. Jane stood, feeling the dumpster ceiling brush the top of her borrowed hat. There was nothing here to contest, no electric pulse that found a sister echo in her neurons. There was nothing here to defend against but the hunger of the fire.
Jane felt force gather in an inner depth, then come spilling out, flinging itself to her extremities, to her fingertips and the stiff, outflung ends of the hair on her head. Panama Hattie’s hat popped off as an electrical storm of psychic force stiffened Jane’s hair into a corona of energy.
Everything in her—the force, her intentions—flung outward and upward. The dumpster cracked free from its skirts of snow, tipping a slice of cold fresh air into the contained space. Its movement tilted the three occupants onto the snow-covered earth—Jane stepped off the metal lip as it moved, Boomer and Hattie tumbling sideways to the snow.
Fresh air fed the flames, but the dumpster was inverting, then lifting straight up, as inexorably, as awkwardly as a helicopter. Inch by inch it rose, drawing the dangling flaming curtain up past the people crouched behind it.
Boomer and Hattie lay on the fire-scorched earth, sobbing through shut eyes, their eyebrows seared, their coughs relentless. A semicircle of awed onlookers—shadowy winos, bag ladies, bums—gathered around the fire site, the flames” yellow flickers scrubbing their faces cleaner than water had recently.
Wondering, silent, they watched the dumpster levitate until it hung well above Jane’s head. Then it catapulted backward, like a circus clown’s handspring, and thundered to earth in a sheet of flying sparks.
It lay charred, mouth upward, flames still spitting from its darkened cavity into the darker night.
Jane stood alone in the ring of melted snow. She inhaled deeply, Hattie’s waning sobs crooned like a lullaby.
“A miracle,” said a voice from the dark.
“My God, it’s a miracle.”
They were gathering closer-vague, undifferentiated figures with vacant eyes and pitted faces and mutilated hands clutching empty bottles.
One reached out to touch the hem of Jane’s jacket.
A spark snapped at the night, a tiny comet of energy winking itself out, Jane’s hair fell strand by strand to her shoulders.
Jane looked at them, then up at the full round moon hanging like a silver coin over them all.
She turned and walked into the dark, across the tracks, toward the basalt towers. Court House. The words sizzled into a black blot on a map laid out on her brain as carefully as any congerie of cells.
She walked the thin black lines in her mind, not waiting until tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-two
* * *
Kevin paused on the threshold to the cell, his return making himself the eternal newcomer.
He wanted to be alone. He wanted to think over what Smith had said. He wanted to remember Jane.
Despite appearances, a jail cell did not allow for solitude, for thinking, or for remembering anything other than the law of survival.
On his bunk again, suspended over the crooning moan of Waldo the wacko, Kevin let his mind unravel into self- flagellating filaments of worry and guilt.
How could he have been so stupid? He had managed to strand Jane in an alien cityscape—without money, without food, without the slightest survival skills.
Smith insisted Jane wasn’t as helpless as Kevin thought. And she was powerful, even he had to admit that, powerful in ways that defied speculation. Yet… his conscience writhed. Did only he see her vulnerability?
Kellehay hadn’t. Kellehay had wanted to kill Jane. And had been killed. Carolyn Swanson hadn’t. Swanson had done her parapsychology tests on Jane, pushed Jane, and got results at too high a price. Only Kevin had respected Jane’s selfhood, her unique heritage. And his reward was discreditation, imprisonment, self-delusion, maybe…
Lights-out was coming. The men began to file listlessly into the shower area, eyeing Kevin until he jumped off the upper bunk and joined them. Even Waldo waddled in.
The hiss of communal running water lulled Kevin’s anxie
ty with its deceptively friendly sound, heard in a hundred locker rooms and summer camps. Kevin stripped off his insubstantial greens, turned on the water until the cold ran hot and stepped under the relaxing stream.
Running water gradually cranked off in cubicles around him, until only the patter of his showerhead rang on the concrete floor. He reached to shut off the controls. Before he could, Jesús, the muscle-bound Hispanic, had jerked back the curtain and was barring the exit from his stall.
“Hey… okay, man.” Jesús flashed a grin that had nothing to do with smiling. “You real pretty bare-assed. How about you and me make a date?”
The others, leering, had gathered behind Jesús, a wall of peer group pressure personified. They weren’t necessarily queer, they just needed an edge—any edge—against anyone,
Kevin’s body froze, his mind churning in overdrive. God knew a track career—going for the distance, the solitary, head-bound distance—didn’t count as physical education in self-defense. God knew playing God over a psychiatric couch didn’t engender street smarts. On a purely personal level, Kevin just knew he had better defend his honor or forget it for good.
Jesús had dressed in a hurry, his greens bleeding quartersized wet spots, using another crude psychological edge, the clothed versus the naked. But Kevin had an advantage only the effete could employ. A college education—and then some. He decided to use it.
His hands fisted into the loose fabric of Jesús’s shirt. Kevin’s rage toward Nordstrom erupted into action as he slammed Jesús hard against the shower wall.
Muscles and brain pulled in concord, his adrenaline pumped madly, his sense of nicety abandoned ship. His attack rammed Jesús’s back against the chrome shower controls, pounded his kidneys into the hot and cold faucets, even tilted the man’s torso as he hit to allow for the fact that the right kidney was lower. Premed Anatomy I.
Breath was still hissing out of Jesús like air from a flat tire when Kevin smashed the man’s head against the concrete shower wall and pinned it there with his forearm, the built-in curved club of his radius bone pressed murderously against the man’s windpipe.
“Lay off, motherfucker, unless you want to kiss your asshole hello.”
Bluff hung in the balance. Jesús hurt bad right now in all the right places, he knew, but five other men with something to prove hovered somewhere at Kevin’s back.
Then a voice keened into the tense silence.
“Ow, Owwww, Owwwww.”
Everyone turned to look.
Wacko Waldo was banging his head against the concrete walls, screaming his “Ows” in rhythmic reaction.
“Shut up!” they hissed, advancing on Waldo.
Harry, his face white as Wonder bread, faded around a corner. Kevin kept Jesús pinned until his eyewhites rolled up, then let him slide to the shower floor.
“Shut up, you crazy creep,” the men were hissing at Waldo, their dark hands reaching for him.
Kevin, his mind and muscles temporarily liquid, pulled on his clothes. Oh, Jesus, he thought, aware of the expression’s irony, he couldn’t just stand by and let them beat on a sad head case like Waldo. Win one, then lose it all… He started toward the men, who were banging Waldo’s head against the wall for him now,
A screaming buzzer went off.
Kevin jumped. So did five other startled men.
“Who the shit hit that?”
Rollo, the industrial-strength black, turned to glare at Kevin, then jerked his eyes to the outer room. “That fuckhead Harry—!”
The overhead mike demanded explanation. Nobody answered it. Then the cops rushed in. Everybody eased back against the nearest wall.
“Who hit the alarm?” a cop demanded.
Silence. Harry, peering over the cop’s shoulder into the shower area, cleared his throat, but kept still.
The cops cruised the showers, finding Jesús soon enough. One knelt to examine the semiconscious man for injuries.
“He fell,” Rollo said abruptly. “Old Waldo ‘started his howlin’ act, then Jesús musta got scared, and slipped in the shower.”
“He’s dressed,” noted a cop.
“He was getting’ out. We didn’t do nothin’, ’cept try to shut up Crazy Waldo. Why is this wacko in here, anyway?”
“He doesn’t belong in here,” Kevin put in.
The cop’s expression tightened. “You all belong in here, or you wouldn’t be here. If Waldo sings too much for your taste—tough.” He rose and prowled into the main area,
where his partner waited.
“The Mexican’s got no external injuries. We don’t check you goldbricks into County General unless you got cuts. So either the guy fell—or somebody in here knows how to throw his weight around without showing.” They holstered their sticks and passed Harry on the way out.
“I guess we don’t have to tell you how sorry you’ll be for hitting that panic button,” one told Harry. The cop’s head jerked over his shoulder to the gathered prisoners. “They will.”
The big brown metal door clanged shut again. Someone outside flipped back the spy door and peered through the smudged glass before shutting the cover.
The black guys glanced at Kevin, then at Jesús, still on the wet stall floor. Their eyes flicked away from both men, from Waldo even, who had sunk to the concrete, boneless as a kitten.
“Keep it shut,” Rollo growled in farewell. He fronted out into the main room. The others followed.
Kevin bent to help Waldo up.
“It’s okay, Doc. Ain’t it? You were real nice to me in State. I ’member that, yes, I do.”
Kevin stared at the foolish face, at the eyes that never quite stopped roving. They all looked alike, after a while, the mentally defective, even the ones you might have been nice to once, years ago.
But the man remembered, my God, the man had remembered him.
“It’s okay,” Kevin answered. “Thanks. But—”
“Oh, I don’t know you. No, sir. I don’t know nothin’. I been on the streets a long time. Long time. I know some things.”
Kevin helped the man back to the bunk. He didn’t have to worry about appearing soft-hearted; the cops had just done him the unwitting service of declaring him dangerous. In here, that was a supreme defense.
Harry was edging along the far wall, his gut quivering against his distended shirtfront. Kevin eyed the emergency buttons strung at regular intervals along the walls. So close, yet so far. Harry got within a couple feet of one and froze. The men watched. Rollo sprang panther-quick, cutting Harry off from the button.
The insurance salesman grimaced a sick smile, then crabbed along the wall in the opposite direction. As he neared a new button, another man intercepted him. Everything was tacit—the game of cat and mouse, the threat. Only the outcome was obvious. Harry would pay for having squealed.
Kevin lay Waldo down in his bunk. He didn’t seem hurt, just pleased with himself. His parting gesture was a finger over his lips and a long, conspiratorial “Shhhhhh.”
Kevin boosted himself into the bunk above, sorry for the man edging ratlike along the walls, but too tired, too damn worn down to worry about it.
“Hey, Blake,” big Rollo yelled, “we could use you.”
“Fuck yourselves,” Kevin growled back with schooled indifference. The worst part was that he was beginning to feel it.
Someone at some outside control console turned off the lights. Kevin lay in the dark and covered his eyes with his forearm. His radius ached a little and his ears heard too much. What he heard last was the soft, repeated, sympathetic “Ow, owwww owwww’s” of Waldo rocking and rolling in the bunk below.
* * *
Away from the fire, it got dark. And cold.
Jane shivered and walked on, aware suddenly that she was no longer sure where she was going. The glittering towers ahead seemed farther away. Dark pooled into an impassable obsidian moat between Here and There.
Jane stopped. Words were sizzling along her synapses. Images in her mind shattered and sc
attered. A map broke into dotted lines that disintegrated into unconnected dots.
The words/voices in her bloodstream boiled into cacophony, part insect-buzz, part radio-dial-static. The voices were neither male nor female; neither brute nor human. They just were.
“Closer. Closer. Tuning in station Kay-Jay-N-Eeeee. Data call to data. Data recall data. Data call… Dada call… Overload. Reload. Ready to disperse. And tired, tired, tired. So tired… Site certain, depositing same. Blue Nuns for White Roses. Kevin Tarzan, Jane… tired, not thinking, slipping away… The same, but different—Kevin gone, Jane missing. Recall. To recall, to be recalled. Something recalling Jane. Something probing… And then—contact! One will go and one will come. One will become None. One will—”
Jane gasped, feeling her mind and her memory shrinking from the sides of her skull. Her feet dragged through the snowdrifts.
Out of the darkness came embodied darkness, striking her, surrounding her retreating self. Two forms collided with hers, emitting words that no longer made sense. Force exploded against the side of her head, shaking all the voices she had ever heard loose, including her own. Alien hands began pawing at her body. Her mind, withdrawing into a cold white night, recorded them even as it declined to interpret them.
“Hurry! Before anybody comes!”
“Was that a light I saw?”
“Where?”
“Over by the River Road?”
“Headlights. Or some fool’s campfire. Quick, roll her into the brush.”
Jane, feeling almost weightless, felt herself plummet, touch bottom and bounce softly—over and over against the sides of the… the holding tank.
Air came to her from far away, absorbed without being breathed. Air by osmosis. Sounds vibrated the glass cocoon, stirred the unnamed ether surrounding her. Voices became meaningless data, eaten but not digested.
“Say, good gloves… !”
“The jacket’s mine!”
“And boots.”
“Shut up. They’re makin’ a fuss across the tracks—”
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