The couple at the next table had probably forgotten most of what it was like to be forty. They looked happy, wealthy, and content. I was envious.
“There was a time,” the Dove went on, pressing the back of my hand with her forefinger, “when orgies and artificial insemination did the trick. But we still have a jelling attitude to melt. So, that’s what I do. Which leaves you, I gather, with another question.”
The youngsters across from us clutched each other’s hands and giggled. Once I thought that twenty-one was the responsible age; it had to be, it was so far away. Those kids could do anything and were just learning how, and were hurt and astounded and deliriously happy at once with the prospects.
“The answer”—and I looked back at the Dove—“lies with the particular talent I have that facilitates my job.”
The finger that had pressed my hand now touched my lips. She pouted for silence. With her other hand she lifted my sword. “Play, Lobey?”
“For you?”
She swept her hand around the room. “For them.” She turned to the people. “Everybody! I want you to be quiet. I want you to hear. You must be still—”
They stilled.
“—and listen.”
They listened. Many leaned their elbows on the table. The Dove turned to me and nodded. I looked at my machete.
Across the room Pistol was holding his head. I smiled at him. Then I sat down on the edge of an empty table, toed the holes, fingered them.
I blew a note. I looked at the people. I blew another one. I laughed after that one.
The youngsters laughed too.
I blew two notes, down, then shrill.
I started to clap my hands, a hard, slow rhythm. I made the melody with feet alone. The kids thought that was pretty funny too. I rocked on the table edge, closed my eyes, and clapped and played. In the back somebody began to clap with me. I grinned into the flute (difficult) and the sound brightened. I remembered the music I’d got from Spider. So I tried something I’d never done before. I let one melody go on without my playing it, and played another instead. Tones tugged each other into harmony as they swooped from clap to clap. I let those two continue and threaded a third above them. I pushed the music into a body swayer, a food shaker, till fingers upon the tablecloth pounced on the pattern. I played, looking hard at them, weighing the weight of music in them, and when there was enough, I danced. Movements repeated themselves; making dances is the opposite of taking them. I danced on the table. Hard. I whipped them with music. Sound peeled from sound. Chords fell open like sated flowers. People called out. I shrilled my rhythms at them down the hollow knife, gouged notes down their spines the way you pith a frog. They shook in their seats. I put into the music a fourth line, dissonant to lots and lots of others. Three people had started dancing with me. I made the music make them. Rhythm buoyed their jerking. The old man was shaking his shoulders at the blue-eyed girl. Clap. The youngsters shook shoulder—Clap—to shoulder. The older couple held hands very tightly. Clap. Sound banked behind—Clap—itself. Silence a moment. Clap. Then loosed through the room, like dragons in the gorse, wild, they moaned together, beat their thighs and bellies to four melodies.
On the raised dais, where the Dove’s table had been, somebody opened the wide windows. The wind on my sweaty back made me cough. The cough growled in the flute. A breeze in a closed room lets you know how hot it is. The dancers moved to the balcony. I followed them. The tiles were red and blue. The gold evening streamed with blue wounds. One or two dancers rested on the railing. My sword fell from my lips as I gazed around the—
It caught me across the eyes. The silver dress rippled in the wind. But it wasn’t the Dove. She raised dark knuckles to her brown cheek, her full mouth parting in a sigh. She blinked, brushed her hand across her hair, searching through the dancers. One and another of them hid her a moment, stepped away.
Dark Friza—
Friza returned and turning among the dancers—
Beautiful and longed for Friza, found—
Once I was so hungry that when I ate I was frightened. The same fear now. Only more. The music played itself. The blade hung in my hand. Once Friza had thrown a pebble—
I began to run the maze of dancers.
She saw me. I caught her shoulders; she clutched me, cheek on my neck, breast on my breast, her arms hard across my back. Her name swam in my head. I know I hurt her. Her fists on my back hurt me. My eyes were wide and tearing. I wanted to be open to everything about her. Nothing shook in her. I held all her slim strength. My arms tightened, relaxed, tightened again.
Across the park below was a single tree, wintered by the insane sun. Roped from the crotch, one arm to each fork, head so far forward the neck had to be broken, dangled Green-eye. Blood from a rope cut glittered along his arm.
She twisted in my arms, looked at me, at what I looked at. Quickly she put her hands over my eyes. Alone behind her dark fingers, I recognized the music. Polyphonized and danced by strangers, it was the mourning song of the girl who shielded my eyes now, played for the garroted prince.
Under the music, a voice whispered, “Lobey, be careful.” It was the Dove’s voice. “Do you want to look that closely?”
The fingers stayed over my face.
“I can look down your head like a hall. You died, Lobey. Somewhere in the rocks and rain, you died. Do you want to look at that closely—”
“I’m no ghost!”
“Oh, you’re real, Lobey! But perhaps—”
I twisted my head again, but darkness followed.
“Do you want to know about the Kid?”
“I want to know anything that’ll help me kill him.”
“Then listen. Kid Death can bring back to life only the ones he himself takes from it. He can only keep the belly buttons he harvests. But do you know who brought you back from—”
“Take your hands away.”
“You’ve got a choice to make, Lobey, quick!” the Dove whispered. “Do you want to see what’s in front of you? Or do you want to see only what you saw before?”
“Your hands. I can’t see anything with your hands in front of my . . .” I stopped, horrified at what I had just said.
“I’m very talented, Lobey, in what I do.” Light seeped in, as gently the pressure released. “I’ve had to perfect that talent to survive. You can’t ignore the laws of the world you’ve chosen—”
I took the wrists and pulled the hands down. The Dove’s hands resisted just a moment, then fell. Green-eye was still roped to the tree below me.
I grabbed the Dove’s arms. “Where is she?” I looked about the terrace. I shook her and she pulled back against the rail.
“I become the thing you love, Lobey. That’s part of my talent. That’s how I can be the Dove.”
I shook my head. “But you—”
She rubbed her shoulder. Her hand slid under the silver cloth. It shifted with her fingers.
“And they—” I gestured towards the dancers. The youngsters, still holding hands, were pointing into the park and giggling. “They call you La Dove.”
She cocked her head, brushing back silver hair. “No, Lobey.” She shook her head. “Who told you that, Lobey? Who told you that? I’m Le Dove.”
I got chills. The Dove extended a slim hand. “Didn’t you know? Lobey, you mean you didn’t—”
I backed away, raising my sword.
“Lobey, we’re not human! We live on their planet, because they destroyed it. We’ve tried to take their form, their memories, their myths. But they don’t fit. It’s illusion, Lobey. So much of it. He brought you back: Green-eye. He’s the one who could have brought back, really brought back your Friza.”
“Green-eye . . .?”
“But we’re just not the same as they were, Lobey. We’re—”
I turned and ran from the balcony.
Inside, I overturned a table, whirled at the barking dog. “Lo Lobey!” He sat on the dais where the Dove’s party had been. “Come. Have you been enjo
ying the floor show here at the Pearl?”
Before I could say anything, he nosed a switch in the wall.
The floor began to rotate. Through my hysteria I realized what was happening. The floor was two panes of polarized plastic, one above the other. The top one turned; the lower one was still. As they reached transparency, I saw figures moving below in the crevices of the stone, down below the chair and table legs.
“The Pearl is built over one of the corridors for the kage at Branning-at-sea. Look: they weave there among the crags, that one falling, that other clinging to the wall, chewing his tongue and drooling blood. We have no kage-keeper here. The old computer system the humans used for Psychic Harmony and Entangled Deranged Response Associations takes care of their illusions. Down there is a whole hell full of gratified desire—”
I flung myself on the floor, pressing my face against the transparency. “PHAEDRA!” I screamed. “PHAEDRA, where is she?”
“Hi, baby!” Lights glittered below me from the shadow. A couple with many too many arms stood in a quiet embrace beneath the flickering machine.
“PHAEDRA—”
“It’s still the wrong maze, baby. You can find another illusion down here. She’ll follow you all the way to the door, but when you turn around to make sure she’s there, you’ll see through it all again, and you’ll leave alone. Why even bother to go through with it?” The voice was thinned through the plastic floor. “Mother is in charge of everything down here. Don’t come playing your bloody knife around me. You’ve got to try and get her back some other way. You’re a bunch of psychic manifestations, multisexed and incorporeal, and you—you’re all trying to put on the limiting mask of humanity. Turn again, Lobey. Seek somewhere outside the frame of the mirror—”
“Where—”
“Have you begged at the tree?”
Below me the lost drooled and lurched and jabbered in the depths of the kage beneath PHAEDRA’s flickering. I pushed away. The dog barked as I reached the door.
I missed a stair and grabbed the banister four steps down. The building hurled me into the park. I caught my balance. Around the plaza metal towers roared with spectators dancing on the terraces, singing from crowded windows.
I stood before the tree and played to him, pleading. I hung chords on a run of sevenths that begged his resolution. I began humbly, and the song emptied me, till there was only the pit. I plunged. There was rage. It was mine, so I gave him that. There was love. That shrilled beneath the singing in the windows.
Where his forearm had been lashed to the branch, the bone had broken. His hand sagged away from the bark and—
—and nothing. I shrieked, as outrage broke. With the hilt in both hands, I plunged the point in his thigh, sank it to the wood. I screamed again and wrenched away, quivering.
In pity for man’s darkening thought
He walked that room and issued thence
In Galilean turbulence;
The Babylonian starlight brought
a fabulous, formless darkness in.
William Butler Yeats, “Song from a Play”
I have heard that you will give 1000 dollars for my body which as I understand it, means as a witness . . . if it was so as I could appear in court, I would give the desired information, but I have indictments against me for things that happened in the Lincoln County War, and am afraid to give myself up because my enemies would kill me.
William H. Bonney (Billy the Kid),
“Letter to Lt.-Gov. Lew Wallace”
I seek with garlands to redress that wrong.
Andrew Marvell, “The Coronet”
The sea broke. Morning ran over the water. I walked along the beach alone. There were a lot of shells around. I kept on thinking, just a day before we rode into Branning on dragons. Now his life and my illusions were gone. Behind me Branning-at-sea diminished on the dawn. The point of my machete scarred the sand again and again as I walked.
I was not tired. I’d walked all night. But something had wound the ends of fatigue so tight I couldn’t stop. The dawn beach was beautiful. I climbed a dune crested with long, lisping grasses.
“Hey, Lobey.”
Whatever it was unwound and shook like sprung clockworks.
“How you been?”
He was sitting on a log jammed into the moist sand at the bottom of the dune. He squinted up at me, brushed back his hair. The sun flamed the crystals on his shoulder, his arm: salt.
“I been waiting a long, long time.” He scratched his knee. “How are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Tired.”
“Are you going to play?” He pointed up at my sword. “Come on down.”
“I don’t want to,” I said.
Sand trickled from the soles of my feet. I looked down, just as a piece of dune fell away beneath me. I staggered. Fear jogged loose. I fell, and began to claw at the ground. While the Kid chuckled, I slipped down the slope. At the bottom, I whirled. The Kid, still sitting on the log, looked down at me.
“What do you want?” I whispered. “You’ve lost Green-eye. What do you want from me?”
The Kid rubbed his ear, smiling over many small teeth. “I need that.” He pointed to my machete. “Do you think Spider would really—” He stopped. “Spider decided Green-eye, you, and me couldn’t stay alive in the same world; it was too dangerous. So he signed the death decree and had Green-eye strung up while you played him out, and I cried beneath the sea where you can’t see tears; is that what you believe?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“I believe that Green-eye lives. I don’t know. I can’t follow him like I can the rest of you. He could be dead.” He leaned forward and bared his teeth. “But he’s not.”
I pushed my back against the sand.
“Give me your sword.”
I pulled back my arm. Suddenly I swung forward and hacked at him. He dodged. Wood splintered.
“If you hit me,” he said, “I suppose it would be unpleasant. I do bleed. But if I can tell what you’re thinking, well then, attempts to get rid of me like that are really fruitless.” He shrugged, smiling, reached out, and touched the blade.
My hand jumped. He took the machete, fingered the holes. “No,” he sighed. “No, that doesn’t do me any good.” He held it out to me again. “Show me how?”
I took it from him because it was mine and I didn’t like him holding it.
He scratched his right heel with his left foot, “Come on. Show me. I don’t need the knife. I need the music inside. Play, Lobey.” He nodded.
Terrified, I put the handle to my mouth.
“Go on.”
A note quavered.
He leaned forward, gold lashes low. “Now I’m gonna take everything that’s left.” His fingers snared one another. He curled his toes, tearing earth.
Another note.
I began a third—
It was a sound and a motion and a feeling all at once. It was a loud snap: the Kid arched his back and grabbed his neck; the feeling was terror going a few degrees farther than I thought it could. Spider, from the top of the dune shouted, “Keep playing, damn it!”
I squawked through the blade.
“As long as you make music, he can’t use his mind for anything else!”
The Kid was standing. The dragon whip lashed over my head. Blood lanced down his chest. He stumbled back over the driftwood, fell. I scrambled aside, managing to keep my feet under me—a trifle easier for me than most other people. I was still getting some sort of noise out of the knife.
Spider, his whip singing, came crabwise down the dune.
The Kid flipped to his belly under the lash and tried to crawl. The gills spread, redder that the coppery hair falling wetly over his neck. Spider cut his back open, then yelled at me, “Don’t stop playing!”
The Kid hissed and bit the ground. He rolled to his side, sand on his mouth and chin. “Spider . . . aw, Spider. Stop it! Don’t, please . . . don—” The whip opened his cheek and he clutched
his face.
“Keep playing, Lobey! Damn it, or he’ll kill me!”
Overblown at the octave, my notes jabbed the morning.
“Ahhhhh . . . no, Spider-man. Don’t hurt me no more!” His speech slurred on his bloody tongue. “Don’t—ahhhhhh—it hurts. It hurts! You’re supposed to be my friend, Spider!—naw, you’re supposed to be my . . .” Sobs for a while. The whip cut the Kid again and again.
Spider’s shoulders ran with sweat. “Okay,” he said. He coiled his lash, breathing hard.
My tongue was sore, my hands numb. Spider looked from me to the Kid. “It’s over,” he said.
“Was it . . . necessary?” I asked.
Spider just looked at the ground.
There was a thrashing in the bush. A length of thorn coiled over the sand, dragging a blossom.
Spider started up the slope. “Come on,” he said. I followed him. At the top I looked back. A bouquet clustered over the corpse’s head, jostling for eyes and tongue. I followed Spider down.
At the bottom he turned to me. Then he frowned. “Snap out of it, boy. I just saved your life—that’s all.”
“Spider . . . ?”
“What?”
“Green-eye . . . I think I’ve figured something out.”
“What? . . . Come on, we have to get back.”
“Like the Kid; I can bring back the ones I’ve killed myself.”
“Like in the broken land,” Spider said. “You brought yourself back. You let yourself die, and you came back. Green-eye is the only one who can bring your Friza back—now.”
“Green-eye,” I said again. “He’s dead.”
Spider nodded. “You killed him. It was that last stroke of your . . .” He gestured towards my machete.
“Oh,” I said. “What’s going on back at Branning-at-sea?”
“Riots.”
“Why?”
“They’re hungry for their own future.” For a moment I pictured the garden of the Kid’s face. It made me ill.
“I’m going back,” he said. “Are you coming?”