The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  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 sidewalk 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 resolved 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 tessellated 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 passers-by.

  ‘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 harassed 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 noncommittal.

  ‘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 sins 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 scant 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 passer-by. 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. ‘Pat,’ 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 that. 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.

  Her lips trembled. It had been only one day, one change to be homeless, but it seemed much longer. If, indeed, she was not homeless still. Someone might have replaced her. Sometimes they did that. Fighting tears she stopped only briefly at the counter to pay her bill and to buy tomorrow’s map before making her way home.

  Inside the laundry, she opened all the machines, as she did every evening before going up the stairs. She would not have been surprised to find a note in her apartment telling her she was fired, or even to find someone else in her place, but all was as she had left it. She put the maps on the table by the door and fell into bed, grateful for the dank dampness of the sheets that told her she was in a place that she knew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Her alarm went off as it always did, too early. The sheets were warm and dry from her body heat. Morning sleep was precious, and she had been dreaming of that other place, that other apartment. A strange dream that seemed to make that place more familiar than this one. She huddled in the bed, half sitting up, the blankets drawn about her neck. The alarm went off again, and she cursed, bitterly but briefly. The dream had left her. She could remember nothing about it. Staggering to the bathroom, she washed her face, surprised that it looked so familiar to her. It should have been another face, with darker hair, darker eyes, a different name.

  A different name? She tried, very briefly, to remember her name. Marianne something, she thought. She had it written down somewhere. While she fixed her morning eggs, she tried to remember where, but could not bring it to mind. Sighing, she put the single dish and fork into the sink, running water over them but not taking time to wash them. She had to get the machines cleaned out before the first customers arrived.

  At the bottom of the stairs she paused, listening. Sometimes there were living things in the machines, and in that case emptying them could be difficult. There were no rustling or thumping noises. Encouraged, she began at the end of the row, unlatching and opening the doors that she had unlatched and opened the night before.

  The indigo machine was empty. So was the green one. When she moved toward the rose washer, she heard a peculiar sound, a high-pitched whining. When the door was opened, she saw a litter of puppies lying on a pile of miscellaneous laundry. Five of them, each a different color and shape, three males, two females, all of about the same age. They half crawled, half fell out of the machine to wobble about on infant legs, tugging at her trousers and whining to be fed. She brought a bottle of milk from her apartment as well as some bread and meat scraps that all five tore at with tiny teeth, growling as they tugged and fought for possession of the best pieces. They seemed to be housebroken already, barking in treble voices to be let out. She thought of taking them to the dog pound. Surely there was a dog pound? And if there were? It could mean a half block walk or an interminable journey.

  She surprised herself by finding the nearest grocery, instead, and buying a large sack of puppy kibble, wondering why she was doing it, admitting to herself at last that she was lonely. She could not remember having had that thought before, and it astonished her with its obviousness. Of course she was lonely. Why hadn’t she realized that in the past? Perhaps it had been yesterday’s unpleasant adventure, wandering quite alone as she had. For whatever reason, she welcomed the pups and made them a bed of a violet chenille bedspread and a bright pink tablecloth in an old fruit crate near the back door. She propped the door ajar so they could get into the weedy backyard to do their business.

  She named them for their colors. Rouge, Liquorice, and Delphinium – Delphy for short – were the red, black, and blue pups. Silver and Gold were the silver-gray and yellow ones. ‘You can stay, at least temporarily,’ she told them. ‘And those names will do until something of your character becomes clear to me. Then I’ll give you new names.’ She did not know where this thought came from, either. The names she had given them were adequate. Why should they need or expect new ones? Why should she?

  ‘You need friends,’ something inside her spoke. ‘You have no friends.?
??

  She laughed. Who could have friends in this world of changing locations? Unless someone actually lived with you, in the same house, one day’s neighbor could become another day’s foreigner, adrift in some remote suburb.

  When she closed the laundry to go for tomorrow’s map, the puppies barked behind her, demandingly, then trailed at her heels in an untidy kite’s tail of staggering doglets as she walked them three blocks to the kiosk and back.

  ‘There’s no excuse for not getting one’s map,’ she confided. ‘There’s always a kiosk within six blocks. It’s arranged that way. If one doesn’t get a map, it’s because one is simply too scatterbrained.’

  ‘Or ill,’ her mind suggested with a discomforting and unusual percipience. ‘Or busy, or unconscious, or held prisoner, or crippled, or old, or drunk, or not very bright.’

  ‘Too scatterbrained,’ she said firmly. ‘We have ours, don’t we?’

  There was scattered agreement from five small throats. Already she was beginning to see differences among them. Liquorice was going to be smooth-haired and large – he had huge feet. Rouge was going to be fluffy. The tips of his ears barely showed above his puff of fur, and he had a tightly curled tail. The yellow female tended to be a slinker, a peerer from corners and under chairs, with curious and suspicious brown eyes. The blue-gray one was afraid of nothing, and would have fur as sleek as lizard skin. The silver-gray one was quiet and thoughtful. She had this habit of looking wisely at Marianne, without blinking.

  ‘I have no idea why they run things this way,’ she told the puppy, sure she had asked a question about the city of Varnatur. ‘It’s always been this way.’