Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories

  His beloved Margaret.

  Where was she?

  He built a globe of zabil-force about himself, just in time to fend off the attack of some hairy-beaked thing that had come swooping down out of the neon sign of the Pizza Hut on the corner, and cast the wuzud-spell to seek out Margaret.

  His mental emanations spiraled up, up, through the heavy chill fog, scanning the city. South to Market Street, westward to Van Ness: no Margaret. Wherever his mind roved, he encountered only diabolical blackness: gibbering shaitans, glassy-eyed horrid ghazulim, swarms of furious buzzing hospodeen, a hundred hundred sorts of angry menacing creatures of the dire plasmatic void that separates mortaltime from the nightmare worlds.

  Margaret? Margaret!

  Urnikh cast his reach farther and farther, probing here, there, everywhere with the shaft of crystalline wuzud-force. The swarming demons could do nothing to interfere with the soaring curve of his interrogatory thrust. Let them stamp and hiss, let them leap and prance, let them spit rivers of venom, let them do whatever they pleased: he would take no mind of it. He was looking for his beloved and that was all that mattered.

  Margaret, where are you?

  His quest was complicated by the violent, discordant emanations that came from the humans of this city. Bad enough that the place should be infested by this invading horde of ghouls and incubi and lamias and basilisks and psychopomps; but also its own native inhabitants, Urnikh thought, were the strangest assortment of irritable and irritating malcontents. All but Margaret, of course. She was the exception. She was perfection. But the others—

  What were they shouting here? "U.S. out of Carpathia! Hands off the Carpathians!" Where was Carpathia? Had it even existed, a month before? But already there was a protest movement defending its autonomy.

  And these people, four blocks away, shouting even louder: "Justice for Baluchistan! No more trampling of human rights! We demand intervention! Justice for Baluchistan! Justice for Baluchistan!"

  Carpathia? Baluchistan? While furious armies of invisible ruvakas and sanutees and nyctalunes snorted and snuffled and rampaged through the streets of their own city? They were blind, these people. Obsessed with distant struggles, they failed to see the festering nightmare that was unfolding right under their noses. So demented in their obsessions that they continued to protest in ever-thinning crowds and claques even after nightfall, when all offices were closed, when there was no one left to hear their slogans! But a time was coming, and soon, when the teeming manifestations that had turned the subetheric levels of San Francisco into a raging inferno would cross the perceptual threshold and burst into startling view. And then—then—

  The territorial struggles among the invading beings were almost finished now. Positions had been taken; alliances had been forged. The first attacks on the human population, Urnikh calculated, might be no more than hours away. It was possible that in some outlying districts they had already begun.

  Margaret!

  He was picking up her signal, now. Far, far to the west, the distant reaches of the city. Beyond Van Ness, beyond the Fillmore, beyond Divisadero—yes, that was Margaret, he was sure of it, that gleam of scarlet against a weft of deep black that was her wuzud-imprint. He intensified the focus, homed downward and in.

  Clement and Twenty-third Street, his orientation perceptor told him. So she had gone to see the male-one again, yes. That mysterious Other, for whom she seemed to feel such an odd, incomprehensible mix of ambivalent emotions.

  It was a long journey, halfway across San Francisco.

  But he had no choice. He must go to her.

  It was nothing for Urnikh to journey down the sril-curve to an adjacent continuum. But transporting himself through the streets of this not very large city was a formidable task for a very small dragon.

  There was the problem of the retrograde gravitational arc under which this entire continuum labored: he was required to weave constant compensatory spells to deal with that. Then there was the imperfection of the geological substratum to consider, the hellish fault lines that steadily pounded his consciousness with their blazing discordancies. There was the thick oxygen-polluted atmosphere. There was—

  There was one difficulty after another. The best he could manage, by way of getting around, was to travel in little ricocheting leaps, a few blocks at a time, playing one node of destabilization off against another and eking out just enough kinetic thrust to move himself to the next step on his route.

  Ping and he leaped across the financial district, almost to Market Street. A pair of fanged jagannaths paused in their mortal struggle to swipe at him as he went past; but with a hiss and a growl he drove them back amid flashes of small but effective lightnings, and landed safely atop a traffic light. Below him, a little knot of people was marching around and around in front of a church, crying, "Free the Fallopian Five! Free the Fallopian Five!" None of them noticed him. Pong and Urnikh moved on, a diagonal two-pronged ricochet that took him on the first hop as far as the Opera House, from which a terrible ear-splitting clamor was arising, and then on the next bounce to Castro Street at Market, where some fifty or eighty male humans were waving placards and chanting something about police brutality. There were no police anywhere in sight, though a dozen hungry-looking calibargos, tendrils trembling in the intensity of their appetites, were watching the demonstration with some interest from the marquee of a movie theater a little way down the block.

  If only these San Franciscans can focus all this angry energy in their own defense when the time comes, Urnikh thought.

  Poing and he was off again, up Castro to Divisadero and Turk, where some sort of riot seemed to be going on outside a restaurant, people hurling dishes and menus and handfuls of food at one another. Pung and he reached Geary and Arguello. Boing and he bounced along to Clement and Fifth. A tiny earth-tremor halted him there for a moment, a jiggle of the subterranean world that only he seemed to feel; then, bing bing bing, he hopped westward in three quick leaps to Twenty-third Avenue.

  The Margaret-emanation filled the air, here. It streamed toward his perceptors in joyous overpowering bursts.

  She was here, no doubt of it.

  He stationed himself diagonally across from the male-one's house, tucking himself in safely behind a fire hydrant. The street was deserted here except for a single glowering magog, which came shambling toward him as though it planned to dispute possession of the street corner with him. Urnikh had no time to waste on discussion; he dematerialized the hideous miasmatic creature with a single burst of the seppul-power. The stain left on the air was graceless and troubling. Then, as safe behind his globe of zabil-torce as he could manage to make himself with his depleted energies, he set about the task of drawing Margaret out of the apartment across the way.

  She didn't want to come. Whatever she might be doing in there, it seemed to exert a powerful fascination over her. Urnikh was astonished and dismayed by the force of her resistance.

  But he redoubled his own efforts, exhausting though that was. The onslaught of the subetheric ones was imminent now, he knew: it would begin not in hours but in minutes, perhaps. She must be home, safe in her own apartment, when the conflict broke out. Otherwise, paralyzing thought, thinking the unthinkable, how could he protect her?!

  Margaret—Margaret—

  It took all the strength in his power wells. His zabil-globe spasmed and thinned. He would be vulnerable, he realized, to any passing enemy that might choose to attack. But the street was still quiet.

  Margaret—

  Here she was, finally. He saw her appear, framed in a halo of light in the doorway of the house across the way. The male-one loomed behind her, large, uncouth-looking, emanating a harsh, coarse aura that Urnikh detested. Margaret paused in the doorway, turning, smiling, her fingers still trailing the touch of his hand, looking up at the male-one in such a way that Urnikh's soul cried out. Margaret's aura coruscated through two visible and three invisible spectra. Her eyes shone. Urnikh felt all the moisture of his a
doration squeezed out of him.

  Never. She had never looked at the dragon in her bookcase like that. Cunning, clever, cuddly, a wonderful artifact; but never with eyes that held the cosmos.

  For an instant, he felt anger. Something like what the mortals called hatred, the need for balance, revenge, something to strike or corrupt or disenfranchise. Then it passed. He was a dragon, a force, not some wretched flawed mortal. He was finer than that. And he loved her.

  Enough, he thought. Enough of that. Associate with them just a short time and their emotional pollution seeps in. Time's short.

  Come, Margaret, he murmured, pouring more power into the command. Come at once! Come now, immediately, come to safety!

  But her final moments with the male-one took an eternity and a half. Exerting himself utterly, nonetheless there was nothing the little dragon could do about it. Twice, as tiny inimical fanged creatures with luminous wings and fluorescent exoskeletons came swooping past the doorway in which she stood, he mustered shards of his steadily-diminishing energy to club them into oblivion.

  Come on!

  Then, finally, she allowed their fingertips to slide apart, and gave him that look again, and descended the few steps to the sidewalk. Urnikh moved up close beside her in an instant, bringing her within his sphere of power but taking care to remain in the shadows of the zabil-globe. She must not see him, the toy, the cunningly articulated plaything, not here, not so far from the bookshelf in her apartment: it would upset her to know that he had traveled all this way to find her, small and vulnerable as he was. And she wouldn't even understand how much danger he had chanced, just to watch over her. How ironic, he thought: she was the vulnerable one, and yet, most wonderful creature, she would worry so much about him!

  Mortaltime trembled at the brink, and all he could do was worry that she got back to the apartment, that he watch over her, back across the city, to Telegraph Hill.

  Unseen by Margaret, the night erupted.

  The sky over San Francisco turned the color of pigeon-blood rubies! The gateway had fully opened. He had waited too long. The pinhole had become a rent, the rent a fissure, the fissure a chasm, the chasm a total rending of the membrane between mortaltime and the dark spill that lay beyond. The sky sweated blood and screeching demons rode trails of scarlet light down through the roiling clouds, down and down between the high-rise buildings.

  He had waited too long! The Master's faith in him had been misplaced, he'd known that from the start. He was not the good force, never could be, knew too little, waited too long.

  All he could do now, was make certain Margaret got back to the sanctuary of Telegraph Hill. And from there, safe within his sphere of power, he would try to do what he could do. There was nothing to be done. He had done worse than merely fail. He had brought mortaltime to an end.

  She boarded the bus, and he was there.. Steel-trap mouth floaters assaulted the bus, but he sent a tendril of power out through the sphere and squeezed them to pulp.

  He protected her through the long, terrible ride.

  Nights dissolve into days. Days stack into weeks. Weeks become the cohesions humans call months and years. Time in mortaltime passes. The race of dragons ages very slowly. One year, two, four. Wind cleanses the streets and the oceans roll on to empty into the great drain.

  "Would you like another grape?" she asked, looking up from her book.

  The little dragon cocked his head and opened his mouth.

  "Okay, we'll try it one more time...and this time you'd better catch it. I'm not getting off this sofa again, I'm too comfortable." She pulled a grape off the stalk, closed one eye and took aim, and popped it across the room toward the bookcase. Urnikh extended his long jaw on its serpentine neck, and snagged the fruit as it sailed past.

  "Excellent, absolutely excellent!" Margaret said, smiling at the agility of the performance. "We will send you down to one of the farm clubs first, and let you season a bit, and in a year, maybe two, you'll be playing center field at Candlestick."

  She tossed him a kiss, and went back to her book. It was a fine spring day, and through the open window she could smell fuchsia and gladioli and the scent of garlic and oregano from up the street where Mrs. Capamonte was laying it on for the Sunday night spectacular.

  It was, of course, all a creation.

  Outside the tiny apartment everything was black ash to the center of the Earth, airless void to the far ends of space. Nothing lay outside this apartment. It had ended, as the Master had feared. Mortaltime had been killed. No creature lived beyond this apartment in its sphere of power. No child laughed, no bird soared, no sponge grew on the floor of an ocean. Nothing. Absolute nothing existed beyond.

  Urnikh had failed to sew up the tiniest pinprick, had simply not been the good force. And mortaltime had ended. The billions and billions had died horribly, and the world had ended, and everything was dark and empty now, never to grow again.

  Because mortaltime existed only as a dream of dragons; and for this little dragon, assigned to save the puny humans who were his creations, love had been the greater imperative.

  Now, they would exist this way for however long she would live.

  Here, in Urnikh's dream.

  Living in a world of sweetness and light and pleasure—that did not exist. He would do it all for her, only for her. For Margaret he had sacrificed everything. That which was his to sacrifice, and all that belonged to the unfortunates who had vanished.

  For the little dragon, it was sad, and all honor had been lost; but it was worth it. He had his Margaret, and together, here in his dream, they would stay.

  Until she, too, died.

  And then it would be very hard to go on. With her gone. With all that was left of the world gone. It would be terribly hard to bear these human emotions he had taken on. Loneliness, sadness, loss. It would then, truly, be the end of all things.

  And even little dragons grow old—slowly, ever so slowly.

  Keyboard

  Chris Hudak knew he was in trouble when his computer bit him. Not hard, not the first time. Just a nip. The merest drawing of blood from his index finger.

  Chris looked down as the drop of crimson spattered on the keyboard, examined the finger, sucked at the puncture for a moment, then quizzically stared at the rows of input pads. The H key had sprouted a fang. Not a large fang; something like a baby shark incisor. Just enough to draw blood.

  From the kitchen, Sharilyn called, "French toast's ready." He sucked his finger and got to his feet.

  When he walked into the kitchen, she looked up from the sizzling pan. "What's the matter?"

  He walked to the breakfast nook and slid in. He stared at the finger. The surface tension of a new bead of blood was about to break. "My damned computer bit me."

  She looked at him. "Say what?"

  "Bit me. The damned computer. It has teeth."

  "Chris..."

  "I'm not kiddin', Sharilyn. The damned thing grew a tooth and took a nip out of me."

  "Oh, come on, don't start with me this early. I thought we'd talked out the problem last night."

  "This has nothing to do with last night's argument. This is a new thing, and I'd appreciate it if you'd come over here and take a look at my hand before you start telling me I'm losing it. Or go in the other room and check out the keyboard. The H key."

  Carrying the pan, she came to him, and looked down. He held up his hand. The finger was starting to glow an unsavory bluish-green. The bead broke and dropped red on the tablecloth. "Hully Jeezus," she said.

  "Yeah," he said ruminatively. "Ain't that a bitch."

  "So what did you stick it with?"

  He looked up at her. "You're not getting it, are you? I didn't stick it with anything. It bit me!" He made certain to emphasize more words than usual in the sentence. For clarity.

  "Right," she said, and skimmed the spatula under the French toast, and plopped the food onto his plate. "Right. And a little later today I'll have excessive sex with my microwave oven."
r />   Chris started to reply, caught himself, caught his teeth grinding, caught his upper arm muscles tensing, caught the words that were left over from last night starting to bubble up in his throat...and went to work on the French toast.

  The tablecloth had soaked up the spot of blood.

  By Saturday, half his fingers had been stippled. Only the thumbs had been spared. Smarted like hell.

  At first, the first few days, he had considered getting rid of the damned thing, taking it down to Comp USA and trading up to a 90 MHz Pentium. But by Tuesday, for some reason, he didn't want to do that. Not only because Hartschorn at the mail order house was screaming for the assimilated demographics he'd been analyzing, but because...well...he'd gotten used to the machine biting him. It wasn't painful any longer, just smarted like hell. And he seemed to have developed some sort of relationship with the PC. It wasn't anything he'd experienced before. A personal relationship with machinery. He had devised a nickname for his car, of course, a leftover from his teen-age years; and once in a while he'd called the tv remote a dumb bastard when the batteries had gone low; but neither his electric razor nor the weed-whacker had ever manifested any interest in establishing a more meaningful relationship with him.

  And he had begun to forget things.

  "Where did you put that big box of winter clothes from last April?" Sharilyn asked him on Thursday.

  "What box of clothes?'"

  "That big box. Had Bekins on the side. One of the storage boxes from the move. Remember, you said you'd find a place for it?"

  He had no idea.

  "The winter clothes, fer pity's sake!" Sharilyn yelled. Her temper had grown shorter and shorter with him lately. He was beginning to think they were heading for bad times, very bad times. Maybe a breakup, maybe a divorce, maybe worse. He had no idea what worse could mean, but he was feeling a vague disquiet constantly now, a sense that their time together was being razored to an end.