‘Can’t, can’t I? Oh, yes I can. I say out, I mean I haven’t got any. Except one for me. Now, if you’d like to share it?’ He leaned toward her, one hand out as though to touch her, his face twisted into a suggestive leer. She turned away, keeping her face quiet, trying to be dignified about it. No doubt he meant what he said; he’d share if she’d come home with him, and it would be legal to do so. Cohabitors could share maps. Mothers and children. Married couples. Lovers. She shuddered in revulsion at the idea of sharing anything with the vendor who stood watching her, his nose twitching. Before he could say anything more, she moved away, fumbling with the map, which resisted being unfolded, almost as though it were a living thing with a natural resentment at being disturbed.
She had circled the laundry with red pencil, almost at the edge of the map, far from its important, stable center. From there she traced her way to the kiosk where she was now, then searched for the nearest location marked with a spoon and a large, red ‘24.’ There were two twenty-four-hour restaurants within reasonable traveling distance. The street she was on ran directly toward one of them, then circled away at a narrow alley labeled ‘Mock Street.’ If she could catch a number twenty-seven bus – the number clearly marked on the map—and get off at Mock Street, it would be a walk of only a few blocks.
She went directly to the bus stop, ignoring whatever it was the vendor shouted after her, checking carefully to be sure the number twenty-seven stopped at this particular place. It was a favorite trick of the mappers to have busses halt at only every third or fourth stop, letting the people in between stand helplessly as the bus rumbled by, clattering over cobbles or sections of trolley track that led nowhere but seemed always to crop up in three or four block-long sections. This stop was scheduled for number twenty-seven busses at twenty-minute intervals.
What was scheduled had no connection with what actually happened. No bus arrived. She jittered, moving to and fro on the pavement. There was a vengeance booth on the corner, and the vendor leaned from behind her counter to solicit Marianne’s business. Tine, fresh vengeance fish,’ she called. ’Caught just this morning and spell cast before it was dead. Name it for your enemy and let him eat it. Stop his heart, stop his mind, stop his life, lady?’
‘I don’t have any enemies,’ Marianne called softly. ‘I don’t need a fish, thank you.’
‘No enemies? Think of that. Here in this city, and she says she has no enemies?’ The woman cackled with laughter and closed the booth front. When Marianne looked up a moment later, she had gone, and Marianne sighed with relief. Sometimes the vendors were very persistent. Twice or three times, she had bought things that she didn’t want, carried them home with her, and then had to put them out for the trash men. There had been a set of thumb screws, she remembered. And a whip braided out of human hair with little sharp bones set in it. Things that made her squirm with revulsion when she looked at them. She sighed, turning to stare down the street in the direction the bus should come from.
When forty-five minutes had passed, however, none had arrived. She counseled herself sternly not to start walking. As soon as she did, particularly if she were in between widely separated stops, the bus would come and pass her by. She checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Plenty of time. It was only a half-hour ride, and the streets would not shift until midnight. Eleven at the earliest. Or ten-thirty. Plenty of time.
She shifted from foot to foot, staring down the street, uttering silent invocations. ‘Bus, good bus, come on, bus.’
At eight-thirty, she began to worry. If she started now, she could reach the all-night restaurant by walking. If she waited too long, it would be impossible to reach it at all. Good sense warred with her weariness. She didn’t want to make the long walk.
‘You have to,’ she told herself. ‘You have to.’
She turned and strode down the street, checking her progress against the map at every crossing. It would be a walk of some sixty blocks. About five miles. She could be there well before shift time.
A number twenty-seven bus passed her by and stopped two blocks down the street. She began to run, senselessly, knowing it wouldn’t wait.
It pulled out just as she came close enough to touch the rear of it. A man who was passing shook his head and murmured, Tough luck. Why don’t you just wait for the next one?’
She checked her watch. Nine o’clock. There wasn’t time to wait. She lowered her head and kept walking. Another twenty-seven bus went by. She let it go. She had a hard, burning pain in her side and could not possibly run again. The pain in her side moved downward, slowly, first into her hip and then into her right knee and shin. The door of the orange dryer had fallen open and bruised her there. The half-healed muscle still hurt, more and more the farther she walked.
There were infrequent passersby. Sometimes people looked each other full in the face, as though searching for a face they knew. Other times, they ducked their heads and scurried past, as though afraid to encounter either an acquaintance or a stranger. Marianne, on her infrequent forays from the laundry, tried to take her cue from those she passed, but tonight she was too tired to care. She stared at her feet as people went by, praying they would not say anything to delay her.
By ten o’clock she had reached Mock Street. The all-night restaurant was now only a dozen blocks away, but the street she was on turned into a massive concrete overpass, soaring above the surrounding area. The next street over dived down, as though into a tunnel, and did not emerge again for blocks. There were half a dozen access ramps circling up and over, down and under, allowing access to every street except the one she needed. She puzzled at them, plotting her route. If she went down Mock Street one block then turned left she would come to an underpass that would take her under a highway and bring her within two blocks of the restaurant.
She trudged on. The street lights in this part of town threw puddles of dim, dun-yellow light onto the pavement and reflected a furtive glow into alleys and along the curbs, hiding as much as it disclosed. She stopped momentarily, thinking what might be hiding in those alleys. There were stories about bears living in alleys and crocodiles in the sewers under the street. And there were mapless gangs, not storied but real, ever-changing tribes of non-locus aberrants who preyed upon single pedestrians.
The underpass before her was not lighted at all except by a grayish shine at the far end, a perfect location for ambush. She dithered, trying to see if anything lurked against the distant glow, plunging into the semi-darkness at last in an almost fatalistic fit of panic. She got to the center of it, the deepest part, buffeted to the far edge of the sidewalk by gusts kicked up by passing trucks, when there was a shudder, a gelatinous shiver.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ It had only been the vibration of the heavy trucks, she told herself. It couldn’t have been the changeover. It was far too early.
The tunnel seemed endless. When she emerged, the street sign nearest her said ‘Willis Boulevard.’ She turned to her map, only to see it shrivel in her hands and fall to the side-walk in bits of ash, twisting in the light wind, disappearing around an anonymous corner. She stood at an intersection with featureless walls looming around her. A loudspeaker on the lamppost bellowed white noise at her, then muttered, ’Welcome to the City of Trallis.’
‘Oh, God, no,’ she moaned. ‘God, please, no.’
The map she had used was obsolete. There was no more Badigor. She was too late. Now she could not buy a map that would tell her where anything was today. It was illegal – perhaps impossible – to sell anyone a map of today. Only tomorrow’s maps would be available. It was illegal – or impossible – for anyone to share a map with her. She would be unable to find anything except by chance. And if she did not chance upon a map vendor, then the day after today would be even further lost.
She had had nightmares about this, as she imagined most of the people of the city did, though many would not admit doing so. She had considered what she would do if ever she found herself without a map. The one thing she had r
esolved upon was that she would kill herself before she would join the mapless ones with her name tattooed on her face and her hair dyed green.
‘Search,’ she told herself. I’ve got to search.’
‘Sleep,’ some interior voice demanded. ‘You’ve got to sleep, first.’
She couldn’t sleep on the street. She had money in her money belt, plus what was in her wallet. Only idiots went anywhere without money. She could find somewhere to sleep. Perhaps a hotel.
Something.
She began to walk. There were few signs on the buildings, and it would not have mattered if there were more or fewer. Juxtaposition meant nothing. The large blue building with the carved cornerstone – ‘Wilkins Building, July 16, 1917’ – might have stood next to the red stone building yesterday, as it did today, or it might have stood halfway across the district. Only the map and the directory could have told her. If one knew the name of the building, one could look it up in the directory, find the coordinates on the map, then find the building itself. If one didn’t know the name of the building or have a map – then one was lost.
‘Lost,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Lord, I’m lost.’
This block was lined with four-and five-story, narrow fronted apartment houses with ornate, Italianate cornices. From high above her the sound of a radio whined into darkness and a white curtain flapped from a dark window, a ghost making a futile attempt at escape. At the end of the block she turned one block left along a muddy path beside a dairy farm, then resumed her original direction. This was a warehouse area, lined with featureless walls and locked entries fronted with iron grates. Sometimes glassy doors showed a light from one back room filtering through to the street in a pallid, fungoid glow.
She moved left another block, a boardwalk past two gambling houses, then onto a tesselated pavement outside the townhouse of some grandee. At the corner, a neon sign identified a drugstore. She went in, searching fruitlessly for the symbol that would have identified the place as a map vendor. None. There was hot coffee, however, and a sweet, sticky doughnut, sustenance for the search. She went out again, noting in passing that she stood at the corner of Bruce and RP4. She walked down Bruce, crossing Eleanor and 5V and Shimstacks. Halfway down the block she entered a place that looked slightly like a hotel but turned out to be a brothel. Redfaced, she returned to the street.
‘Quittin’ early, sweetheart?’ asked a constable, burly in his codpiece and high-laced sandals. He was loud enough to attract the attention of passersby.
‘I thought it was a hotel,’ she said without thinking.
‘No map, eh? Move it, girly. No loitering.’ He stood looking after her, slapping his riot gun into one beefy palm, a sneer on his face that she could feel through her light jacket. ‘You should’ve applied for a job,’ he yelled after her as she turned the corner. Then you’d know where you are!’ Through the furious pounding of her blood in her ears, she could hear his laughter halfway down the next block, joined by that of the sycophants on the street corner.
Police persecuted non-locus people as legitimate prey. They harrassed people whose eyes were bad, as well, people who had trouble reading the maps. Or even foreigners who had trouble with the language. So far as the police were concerned, ignorance of the map was no excuse. She trudged on, leaving the dirty laughter behind.
She no longer tried to make an orderly search pattern. In order to avoid making circles, she turned alternately right and left, without any particular system. When she was so tired she could scarcely drag one foot in front of another, the street lights went off and she found herself in front of an all-night diner. She stared at the door for long, unconscious minutes before recognizing the red ‘24’ painted on the glass. A map vendor.
She ordered coffee, went into the rest room and took enough money from her belt to pay for tomorrow’s map, cursing in futile anger when she caught the crystal in her bracelet on the belt and could not get loose for long moments. ’Get rid of that bracelet,’ she told herself in an unfamiliar voice. ‘It’s always catching on things.’ As she was about to unclasp it and throw it away, however, someone came into the rest room and distracted her. Getting tomorrow’s map was the important thing, she reminded herself. It would not help her today, but at the next shift, she would be able to find her way home.
‘Gettin’ it early, eh,’ the counterman said as he handed her the map. ‘Always smart to have your map early. Glad to see you, too. Didn’t think I’d have any business today. Hate it when I end up surrounded by warehouses this way. At least, I guess they’re warehouses. Just bad for business.’
‘I suppose it would be better in the theatre district,’ Marianne remarked. ‘People staying out late.’
He nodded judiciously. ‘That’s a nice idea, a theatre district. Don’t know I’ve ever seen a theatre district, if you mean a place where the theatres sort of cluster. Not much clustering any more. Lately it seems like every shift scatters things out more and more. I was surprised to see all these warehouses near each other this way when I came down to work this morning, to tell you the truth. Where I was yesterday, there was an aristocrat’s mansion on one side of me and a junkyard on the other, and down the side streets was an amusement park and three office buildings. The noble had his screen up all day. Didn’t blame him, either. That roller coaster practically ended up in my back booth.’
Marianne said something innocuous and noncommital.
‘You on your way to work?’
She nodded, putting down coins to pay for the coffee, saying thank you, going out the door into the light of day with no idea where she was.
No one would be there to open the laundry. It might be all right. Business would be light on the day after sin day. Her legs felt like lead weights. She could not possibly lift them to walk another step. She had to find someplace she could sit, someplace she could stay until the next shift. A movie theatre. A park. No one would bother her in either place…
She walked slowly, pausing frequently to rest, leaning against fences, perching briefly on window sills while she pretended to take nonexistent stones out of her shoes. Shadows moved from one side of things to the other. She came to a botanical garden, which made her think of benches. After a moment’s consideration, she paid the small fee to enter and moved among the scanty viewers along the sandy walks.
There was a grove of snatch trees set behind high fences with warning posters every few feet. Just past the snatch trees, a shallow lagoon was bordered with wide-mouthed maneaters, the ground littered with bones and the air thick with attractant scent. A weary-looking woman leaned pensively upon the protective wall, watching silently as the two oldest of her five screaming children teetered atop it. When they dropped safely to the ground beside her, she sighed, smiled apologetically at Marianne, and moved away toward the panther bushes where the barricades were in worse repair.
Beyond the homovores was a vegetable exhibition; beyond that a formal garden and reflecting pool; and beyond that an Oriental garden with a curved bridge over a chuckling stream and a miniature teahouse perched high upon a rock. People turned and moved curiously toward sounds of tragedy from the vicinity of the panther bushes. In moments Marianne was alone. The teahouse seemed to smile down at her from its perch. Without thought, she stepped across the bridge, climbed through the shrubbery and into the little structure, like a child into her own dollhouse. It was only six feet across. She lay down, stretched along one wall, hidden from any passerby. Immediately, she slept, curled like a cat, shivering, but oblivious to the outside world.
When she woke, it was almost dusk. She could not remember where she was. She should have been in her apartment. Tat,’ she said. ‘This room is ridiculously small for the rent I pay.’ The words left no echo. They were forgotten as she spoke them. When she struggled out of the tiny house and across the bridge once more, the gates around the Oriental garden were closed and locked, six feet of close chain link with barbed wire at the top, both fence and wire red with rust but quite sound, for all th
at. She cried soundlessly as she walked back to the bridge, returning there because it would give her a sense of familiarity, however spurious. She sat for a time on the teahouse steps, watching the shadows grow thick among the carefully trimmed evergreens, listening to the lilt of water under the curved bridges. There was a boar scarer in the pool, a length of bamboo that filled with water, became overbalanced to spill the water out, then tipped back to let its momentarily empty length fall with an echoing blow onto a river-rounded stone. She had not noticed the sound in the afternoon among the chatter of sightseers and the cries of children. Now it seemed a drumbeat, slightly too slow to anticipate, coming each time as a surprise, like a hostile blow or shout.
She wept angrily. What good did it do to have tomorrow’s map if one was locked up… though the gates would be unlocked fairly early in the morning. Perhaps. One couldn’t be sure of that. Tomorrow might be declared a holiday, and nothing would be unlocked.
‘Stop this,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t just sit here. Find a way out!’
She began to wander, aimlessly, down across the high-backed bridges, toward the back of the garden where a fence of bamboo stood behind low evergreens and flowering shrubs. There was an unlocked gate. Behind it, she found a shed with loose boards making up the back wall of the gardens. She slipped through into a trash-filled yard only half a block from an evening world of restaurants and theatres.
She was sitting in one of the restaurants, finishing a third cup of coffee when the shift came. It was a soundless vibration, as though the world had been made of gelatine and was shaken, very slightly, making the outlines of everything quiver in semi-liquid confusion. All around her, silence fell, people looked at one another from the corners of their eyes, waiting for any sign that someone in the room might be non-locus. ‘Welcome,’ blared the loudspeakers, ‘to the City of Bimbarnlegume.’ Waiters began brushing up the scattered fragments of yesterday’s maps; conversation resumed, people fished out their maps of today, plotting their way home or to whatever late evening diversion they had planned. The restaurant was called Chez Mazarin. She found it on the map. The Clean Machine was only one block away, much nearer the center of the map than yesterday – no, the day before.
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods Page 8
