“He was my son.”
“Oh, this is neat,” I said. “In a hundred years or so when he grows up, he’ll come to the House by the Bridge to avenge his father. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about my future. A hundred years from now, I won’t get bored. Where is he now?”
“I sent him home to his mother. Yesterday I arranged for a merchant who was going to County Xotta to take them both away with him. I didn’t think I would get out of Jafax alive.”
“Did your son know about your plans? Has he been helping you?” I said. “Don’t lie to me.”
“He knows nothing, Master. Why would I tell him anything? Last night I just asked him to go to the old hag’s house, give her the money, and take the cloak. I raised my son well—he didn’t even think of asking questions.”
I shook my head. I could hear the tone of a classic abusive parent in his voice. I wanted to cover him top to bottom with my venomous spit. I hate coercion, and talking to bastards like him makes me furious, even when they have no way of coercing me personally. It was good that I had recently learned to contain myself.
The child is very lucky, I thought to myself. For the next couple hundred years, his abusive daddy won’t be able to practice his perverted parenting methods. If I were him, I’d run away. I could hardly stand my own parents, who had been much more normal. But then again, people get used to everything.
“Right, then the boy can go home,” said Kofa. “The last thing we want is to arrest a child. Max, I’m afraid you’ll have to move your backside after all. Take Sir Nennurex to some vacant cell. We’ll call the guys from Xolomi later. Juffin won’t forgive us if we deprive him of his favorite pastime.”
I took the great avenger to the doors of one of the small detention cells. Instead of walking inside, he shuffled his feet in the doorway, boring a hole in me with the look of a martyr. Of course, I thought. He can’t stand parting with me without getting a command, and letting him go would be dangerous—Sir Nennurex is a slyboots. Who knows what’s on his mind?
“You must be without me now,” I said. “I want you to feel good and behave yourself. Actually, why don’t you just go to sleep, Sir Nennurex? Go to bed and sleep until somebody wakes you up.”
He obediently got into bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. The submissive indifference of this iron-willed man was something so abnormal that I shuddered. I found my own ability to make normal people stare at me with a devoted look and prattle “I am with you, Master” somewhat revolting.
But by the end of my journey back to the office through the long hallways and corridors of the Department, I had put this silly problem out of my head. It certainly wasn’t worth jumping off a bridge into the Xuron over.
While I was gone, Kofa hadn’t been wasting any time. He had put the pitcher with kamra on the burner and heated it up. I sank into the armchair and stretched my legs. There’s nothing better than a hardearned break.
“You can go home now if you want to,” said Kofa. “I don’t know how many gallons of Elixir of Kaxar you’ve consumed today, but you don’t look all that chipper to me.”
“I’m just malingering so that you’ll feel sorry for me,” I said. “And it looks like I’m really good at it.”
“You’re so good at it I’m about to cry,” said Kofa. “Finish your kamra and scram. I’m going to stay here and wait for Juffin. He’d better fix my foot if he doesn’t want me to stay home in bed until the Last Day of the Year. Also, if I were you, I’d start collecting your amobilers now. You’ll have all but forgotten where you left them by morning.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “At the very least I should pick up the one I left by the Jubatic Fountain, or the locals will strip it for parts. Which would be sad: it’s a good amobiler. Not cheap, either.” I poured the contents of the cup down my throat and got up—not without regret—from the cozy armchair. “Good night, Kofa. And thank you for sending me home.”
“In some sense, I owe you one,” said Kofa, smiling. “You helped me hush up the consequences of breaching my job protocol. Good night, boy.”
“Speaking of hushing up,” I said, “I’m willing to keep my mouth shut about it if you buy me a good dinner. And something else maybe. I’ll have to think about it.”
“How quaint, Sir Max,” said Kofa. “You have a natural bent for professional blackmail.”
The guy who had driven us away from the inhospitable walls of Jafax was still behind the steering lever. To his utter surprise, I told him to move over but to stay in the amobiler. Then I took the driver’s seat and drove off at a suicidal speed through the orange light of the street lamps, contemplating with a great pleasure the reverential horror in the eyes of my passenger.
A few moments later, I stopped by the Jubatic Fountain and got into my own amobiler.
“Did you enjoy the ride?” I asked the young driver. He just nodded. The poor thing was lost for words. I felt great. It was as if I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in spite of my relatives, former classmates, and ex-girlfriends—everyone who had once given me up for lost. A moronic feeling. I shook my head, ridding it of the excess of stupidity, then smiled at the driver. “Remember this ride next time you get behind the lever. You’re pretty good at driving this thing, and if you really want to, you’ll be able to drive as fast as I do. Or even faster. There are no special skills involved. You just have to stop fearing high speeds. You should dream of it.”
I spoke in the tone of a newly minted guru, but I couldn’t resist the desire to pass on my “great knowledge” to a potential pupil. In addition, I was guided by practicality. I wanted to have at least one speed demon among the staff drivers of the Ministry of Perfect Public Order. Occasionally, I needed their services.
The only way I could account for the fact that I had enough energy left to undress when I walked into the small bedroom on the second floor of the Armstrong & Ella fifteen minutes later was the amount of Elixir of Kaxar I had consumed during this long, long night.
Perhaps it was an overdose of that tonic that pushed me into committing another rash action. After a few moments of pondering, I put my head down onto Tekki’s pillow, in dangerous proximity to her silver curls. I thought that one more meeting with the “great and mighty” Magician Loiso Pondoxo wasn’t going to hurt. If he really wanted to hurt me, he would have done it last night.
On the contrary, I thought, I have a good chance to get answers to a whole lot of questions. Loiso was a very sociable fellow. I don’t know about Juffin, but I sure look a lot like a chiffa, the Kettarian fox. Loiso was spot on there.
I closed my eyes, and the coming dream swirled me into its delightful and merciless whirlpool.
Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I experience a short but very intense bout of panic. It is during that unique and brief moment that I realize why sleep is often called a little death. I’m scared that when I fall asleep I will disappear, and that tomorrow a completely different creature will wake up in my place. It will call itself Max, but only by coincidence. Even so, that new Max will last only until the next night.
This time, the panic was so strong that I screamed and jumped out from under the blanket, not even considering that I might have woken up Tekki. I forgot that she even existed, let alone slept right next to me.
I looked around and shuddered: instead of the pile of the rug, pale blades of dry grass were moving in the hot wind around me. I was standing at the foot of the familiar gently sloping hill and not in the bedroom.
I’d been known for having extravagant dreams, but never before had I fallen asleep while jumping out of bed and screaming. Woken up screaming? Yes, but fortunately not very often.
“Loiso! Are you here?” I shouted. Clearly I was losing my mind.
If you want to see me, come up. I can’t go down this side of the hill. It’s too great a luxury for such an honorable prisoner of this place.
Strange as it might seem, Loiso Pondoxo’s Silent Speech had a soothing effect on me. I composed myself an
d began climbing uphill. A few minutes later, I was at the top—sweating, panting, but absolutely calm. Sometimes all it takes to recover from a shock are a few kind words and exercise.
Loiso was sitting on the same amber rock in the same posture: strong hands folded on his knees, his face hidden by his long blond hair.
“Back so soon?” he said. “Even sooner that I expected.”
“You’re so good at standing on your head that I simply can’t stay in my foxhole,” I said, laughing, as I realized that I had been caught in the snares of his metaphor for good.
“Perhaps that’s what I’ve been doing, in some sense. Not just now, though, but all my life,” said Loiso, turning to look at me.
“I came to ask you a ton of questions,” I said, sitting down next to him. “I thought that since you hadn’t had the opportunity to chat in so long, I might have a chance to get answers to a couple of them.”
“I might,” he said, nodding. “Ask me whatever you want. If you need a talkative interlocutor, you’ve come to the right place.”
“Thanks. Well, the first thing I want to understand is this: to get to this place here, I have to fall asleep with my head on your daughter’s pillow. No traveling through the Corridor between Worlds, nothing of that sort. The whole thing seems a lot like a regular dream. But yesterday I scratched my hands on some grass here, and when I woke up, the scratches were still there. Real, ordinary scratches.” I gave Loiso a puzzled look and even showed him my palms.
“Indeed,” he said. “Very ordinary scratches. What was the question again?”
“Is this what’s happening to me here for real?” I said. I seemed to have lost all the clever words I had prepared for the occasion. These things happen to me all the time, and at the most inappropriate moments.
“Is this ‘for real’?” said Loiso. “One could say it is. The odd thing is that we never have any guarantee that what happens to us happens ‘for real.’ When you’re sitting on the toilet at home, you simply have no reason for asking yourself, ‘Is this for real?’ But essentially, that situation is no different from this one here. It is possible that you are a vegetable and you have been gobbled up by some herbivore beast whose gastric juice is capable of inducing realistic hallucinations in the food it’s digesting. You are simply enjoying a mind-boggling illusion of an interesting and eventful life right before it’s time to go. Do you like your hallucination, Sir Max?”
“It’s all right, I suppose,” I said. There was something simultaneously horrifying and comforting in his words. They could be true, which would mean that I was in a pickle (or was a pickle?), but fortunately I had no way of verifying them.
“You shouldn’t pay so much attention to my words,” he said. “It makes no difference. In any event, we have nothing but our senses. Why should we care about the monster that is digesting us if all of our senses are telling us we are sitting on top of a hill under this white sky and chatting, because you think you need to have this chat and I don’t mind indulging my guest’s wishes? Do you have more questions for me?”
“No, thanks. You know, Loiso, I’m a very impressionable fellow, even though nobody believes me when I say it. So I think I’m going to call it a day for now.”
“I don’t believe it, either,” said Loiso. “Not for a second.”
“Oh, great. You too, huh? Fine, suit yourself. But why?”
“See? Now you’re ready for my ‘horrifying’ answers again.”
“Hmm, you’ve got me there,” I said. “But this is something I really need to know. Why did you let me in here? Or did you invite me?”
“It just happened,” said Loiso. “Forgive me for saying such a trivial thing, but it’s your fate. And mine. Nothing we can do about it. According to my calculations, some day you’ll be able to take me away from here. I’m just not sure how. You have this crazy personal trait, you know, the ability to set free anyone you come across. You were born that way, and there’s nothing that can be done about it, either. See? I’m not even trying to keep my plans a secret from you.”
“I’d love to take you away from here this instant, if I only knew how. But . . . Juffin says you were going to bring the World to an end and I don’t like that idea one bit. I just fell in love with your World.”
“That’s because you were born in another place. A different World always has an irresistible charm, however good or bad it might be. But one’s own homeland, on the other hand, often induces painful revulsion, much of it absolutely groundless. If you want my opinion, the World I used to live in could have been ideal if it hadn’t been populated by humans. For the most part, people are completely unsuited to the Worlds they inhabit. Their dull, eternally gobbling faces, clothes flapping in the wind for the sole purpose of hiding from the heavens the flabby, flaccid bodies of the lazy gluttons. Once I simply walked into a tavern in Echo, and an extreme, indescribable fury engulfed me.
“Don’t look at me like a girl who has just seen a spider. Have you forgotten what you felt when you tore to pieces the useless human beings on your beloved sand beach in another World? Don’t try to tell me you weren’t enjoying it. You were as happy as you could be. But fret not. I no longer desire to destroy the World I was born in. It’s silly to repeat a failed experiment. That isn’t my way. There are plenty of Worlds in the Universe, I’ll have you know.”
I didn’t try to object. The heat had turned me into the aforementioned semi-digested vegetable. “What do you really look like?” I said. “You still have my face. Why? I told you there was no need to flirt with me. I’m already—”
“Believe it or not, this is what I ‘really’ look like. Aren’t you disillusioned with your silly term? Was I wasting my time entertaining you with my ominous metaphors?”
“No, you weren’t. I just haven’t yet found a substitute for that phrase,” I said. “Does your face . . . really . . . look like mine?”
“It has recently. What it looked like when I entered the Xolomi Higher Institute or a hundred years after I graduated, I don’t remember myself. Guess when was the last time I looked in the mirror?”
“About five centuries ago?”
“Something like that. You have to go now, Max. I am a wearisome interlocutor, if you haven’t noticed, and you don’t yet have the guts to withstand the local climate. The last thing I want to do now is dig you a grave. I can’t tell you how hard the soil is here. Mind you, you don’t need to put your head on my daughter’s pillow. It’s enough to say ‘I want to see Loiso’ before you go to sleep. I needed Tekki to arrange for our first meeting, but we won’t be needing her help anymore. It’s a good thing you didn’t tell her about us. You guessed right: she wouldn’t like it. The girl hardly knows me, yet she dislikes me a great deal. Still, it’s understandable.”
“Can Tekki interfere?” I said.
“Yes, she can. She can do a lot of things. She’ll definitely try,” said Loiso, smirking. “I don’t care, but I don’t think you’re going to like her interference. Well, never mind. There’s no call for alarm—scare tactics don’t work on you. Nothing works on you. You’ll still do whatever you feel is right.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” I said.
“You think it was a compliment?” said Loiso, surprised. My head began to spin, but I tried to continue our conversation.
“Loiso, I’m leaving you as curious and puzzled as I was before I came. You didn’t really tell me anything. Like this apocalypse of yours—what’s your stake in it? Are you just angry? Sure, I remember what I did on the beach, and I understand why you brought it up, but I think that blind fury in and of itself doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t explain anything. You’re not that shallow.”
“I’m not saying it’s just blind fury. It’s a mystery that I have been trying to unveil. The greatest mystery of all of them. He who witnesses the end of a World has a microscopic chance of consuming all the power, all the strength of a dying speck of the Universe. It’s almost impossible, yet it’s worth risking everything you have
.”
“And then what?” I said.
“I don’t know. In order to answer that question, one must destroy at least one World and see what happens. I haven’t had any luck with that so far. But you really must go now, Max. You look like a dead man who’s beginning to disintegrate. You shouldn’t overindulge yourself in talking to evil sorcerers.”
He laughed, got up from the rock, stretched his hand as if to help me get up, and suddenly jabbed me in the side—quite painfully, in fact. That jab was enough to send me rolling down the hill. Sharp blades of grass scratched my face and hands, but I barely felt them. The damn heat had nearly killed me. It looked like I wasn’t that tough to kill after all.
I opened my eyes in the familiar, cozy darkness of the bedroom and closed them again. I was exhausted. He never told me why such a powerful Order had such a ridiculous name, I thought when I was falling asleep. Why a “Watery Crow”? The answer to that question was what lured me into that devilish heat in the first place. And I still didn’t know.
I woke up after the timid winter sun had already made its noon announcement to anyone interested. I lay in bed another half hour enjoying the unique combination of a great mood, extreme laziness, and a complete absence of thought in my head.
I was feeling tired: tired of miracles, of poetry, of mysteries, of Loiso Pondoxo, and of myself, first and foremost. Surprisingly enough, I liked being in this state of exhaustion—though not for too long, of course.
Eventually I managed to drag myself to the bathroom and then to the bar in the Armstrong & Ella. Tekki was already there, and Armstrong and Ella themselves were purring by her feet. I felt like lying on the floor and dying from an overload of tenderness and cuteness. To survive, I opted for a more toned-down expression of emotion.
“Have you looked at your face?” said Tekki. “Did you get into a fight with all the poets in Echo?” I grabbed a tray made out of polished metal from the nearest table and looked at the poor semblance of a reflection in it. “Not quite what you were hoping for, huh?” said Tekki, handing me a small mirror. “Here, have a good look.”