The Einstein Intersection (7 page)

“Friza used to...” Then I said, “Tell? “

“Well, some of us could understand her.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Some of us could.”

I grabbed the wire mesh near the post but didn’t start climbing.

“Actually,” Dorik said, “I was always sort of sad you never came around. We used to have fun. I’m glad Friza didn’t feel the way you did. We used to-“

“-to do a lot of things, Dorik.
Yeah, I know. Look, nobody ever bothered to tell me you weren’t a girl till I was fourteen, Dorik. If I hurt you, I’m sorry.”

“You did. But I’m not. Nobody ever did get around to telling Friza I wasn’t a boy.
Which I’m sort of glad of.
I don’t think she would have taken it the same way you did, even so.”

“She came here a lot?”

“All the time she wasn’t with you.”

I sprang over the wire, swung over the top, and dropped to the other side. “Where’s that damn rock you’re trying to move?”

“Here-“

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “Just show me.”

“Here,” Dorik repeated in the darkness.

I grabbed the edge of the stone shelved in the dirt. Roots broke, dirt whispered down, and I rolled the stone out. “How’s the kid, by the way? “ I asked.

I had to. And damn, Dorik, why were the next words the ones I was hurting with hoping I wouldn’t hear?

“Which one?”

There was a shovel by the post I jammed it into the grave. Damn Le Dorik.

“Mine and Friza’s,” Dorik went on after a moment, “will probably be up for review by the doctors in another year.
Needs a lot of special training, but she’s pretty functional.
Probably will never have a La, but at least she won’t have to be in here.”

“That’s not the kid I meant” The shovel clanged on another rock.

“You’re not asking about the one that’s all mine.” There were two or three pieces of ice in that sentence. Dorik flicked them at me, much on purpose. “You mean yours and mine.”
As if you didn’t know, you androgynous bastard.
“He’s in here for life, but he’s happy. Want to go see him-“

“No.”
Three more
shovelsful
of dirt.
“Let’s bury Whitey and get out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“La Dire, she said you and me have to take a trip together to destroy what killed Friza.”

“Oh,” Dorik said. “Yes,” Dorik went over to the fence, bent down. “Help me.”

We picked up the bloated, rubbery corpse and carried it to the hole. It rolled over the edge, thumping.

“You were supposed to wait till I came for you,” Dorik said.

“Yeah.
But I can’t wait. I want to go now.”

“If I’m going with you, you’re waiting.”

“Why?”

“Look, Lobey,” Dorik said, “I’m kage-keeper and I got a kage to keep.”

“I don’t care if everything in that kage mildews and rots. I want to get out and get going! “

“I’ve got to train a new keeper, check over the education facilities, make sure of the food inventories and special diets, last minute shelter maintenance-“

“Damn it, Dorik, come on.”

“Lobey, I’ve got three kids in here. One’s yours, one belongs to a girl you loved. And one’s all mine. Two of them, if they’re loved and taken care of and given a lot of time and patience may someday come out.”

“Two of them, yeah?”
My breath suddenly got lost in my chest and didn’t seem to be doing any good. “But not mine. I’m going.”

“Lobey!”

I stopped, straddling the fence.

“Look, Lobey, this is the real world you’re living in. It’s come from something; it’s going to something: it’s changing. But it’s got right and wrong, a way to behave and a way not to. You never wanted to accept that, even when you were a kid, but until you do, you won’t be very happy.”

“You’re talking about me when I was fourteen,” I said,

“I’m talking about you now. Friza told me a lot-“

I jumped over the fence and started through the trees.

“Lobey!”

“What?” I kept walking.

“You’re scared of me.”

“No.”

“I’ll show you-“

“You’re pretty good at showing people things in the dark, aren’t you? That’s how you’re different, huh?” I called over my shoulder.

I crossed the stream and started up the rocks, mad as all Elvis. I didn’t go towards the meadow, but around towards the steeper places, slapping leaves and flipping twigs as I barreled through the dark. Then I heard somebody come on through the shadow, whistling.

There are none here except madmen; and a few there are who know this world, and who know that he who tries to act in the ways of others never does anything, because men never have the same opinions. These do not know that he who is thought wise by day will never be held crazy by night.

Niccolo
Machiavelli/Letter to Francesco
Vittori

Experience reveals to him in every object, in every event, the presence of something else.

Jean-Paul Sartre/Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr

I stopped. The sound of dry leaves under feet, ferns by a shoulder, approached me from behind, stopped. The hills’ rim had begun to gray.

“Lobey?”

“You changed your mind about coming?”

A sigh.
“Yes.”

“Come on, then.” We started walking. “Why?”

“Something happened.”

Dorik didn’t say what. I didn’t ask.

“Dorik,” I said a little later, “I feel something towards you very close to hate. It’s as close to hate as what I felt for Friza was close to love.”

“
Neither’s
close enough to worry about now. You’re too self-centered, Lobey. I hope you grow up.”

“And you’re going to show me how?” I asked.
“In the dark?”

“I’m showing you now.”

Morning, while we walked, leaked up vermilion. With light, my eyes grew surprisingly heavy, stones in my head. “You’ve been working all night,” I volunteered. “I’ve only had a few hours sleep myself. Why don’t we lie down for a few hours?”

“Wait till it gets light enough so you know I’m here.”
Which was an odd answer.
Dorik was a grayed silhouette beside me now.

When there was enough red in the east and the rest of the sky was at least blue, I started looking for a place to fall out. I was exhausted and every time I turned to look at the sun, the world swam with tears of fatigue.

“Here,” Dorik said. We’d reached a small stone hollow by the cliff’s base. I dropped into it, Dorik too. We lay with the blade between us. I remember a moment of gold light along the arm and back curved towards me before I slept.

I touched the hand touching my face, held it still enough to open my eyes under it. Lids snapped back.
“Dorik-?”

Nativia stared down at me.

My fingers intertwined with hers,
hammocked
by her webs. She looked frightened, and her breath through spread lips stopped my own. “Easy!” she called up the slope. “Little Jon! Here he is!”

I sat up. “Where’d Dorik go...?”

Easy came loping into sight and Little Jon ran after.

“La Dire,” Easy said. “La Dire wants to see you . . . before you go. She and Lo Hawk have to talk to you.”

“Hey, did anybody see Le Dorik around here? Odd thing to run off-“

Then I saw this expression cracking through Little Jon’s miniature features like faults in black rock. “Le Dorik’s dead,” Little Jon said; “that’s what they wanted to tell you.”

“Huh?”

“Before sunup, just inside the kage,” Easy said. “He was lying by the grave for my brother, Whitey. Remember my brother-“

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I helped dig it-Before sunup? That’s impossible. The sun was up when we went to sleep, right here.” Then I said, “Dead?”

Little Jon nodded. “Like Friza.
The same way.
That’s what La Dire said.”

I stood up, holding my blade tight. “But that’s impossible! “ Somebody saying, Wait till it gets light enough so you’ll know I’m here. “Le Dorik was with me after sunrise. That’s when we lay down here to sleep.”

“You slept with Le Dorik after Le Dorik was dead?” Nativia asked, wonderingly.

Bewildered, I returned to the village. La Dire and Lo Hawk met me at the source-cave. We spoke together a bit; I watched them thinking deeply about things I didn’t understand, about my bewilderment.

“You’re a good hunter, Lo Lobey,” Lo Hawk said at last, “and though a bit outsized below the waist, a fair specimen of a man. You have much danger ahead of you; I’ve taught you much. Remember it when you wander by the rim of night or the edge of morning.” Apparently Le Dorik’s death had convinced him there was something to La Dire’s suppositions, though I understood neither side of the argument nor the bridge between. They didn’t enlighten me. “Use what I have taught you to get where you are going,” Lo Hawk went on, “to survive your stay, and make your way back.”

“You are different.” This is what La Dire said. “You have seen it is dangerous to be so. It is also very important. I have tried to instruct you in a view of the world large enough to encompass the deeds you will do as well as their significance. You have learned much, Lo Lobey. Use what I have taught you too.”

With no idea where I was going, I turned and staggered away, still dazed by Dorik’s death before sunrise. Apparently the
Bloi
triplets had been up all night fishing for blind-crabs in the mouth of the source-cave stream. They’d come back while it was still dark, swinging their hand-beams and joking as they walked up from the river- Dorik behind the wire in a net of shadow, circled with their lights, face down at the grave’s edge! It must have been just moments after I first left.

I wheeled through the brambles, heading towards the noon, with one thought clearing, as figures on a stream bed clear when you brush back the bubbles a moment: if Le Dorik, dead, had walked with me a while (“I’m showing you now, Lobey.”), walked through dawn and gorse, curled on a stone under new sunlight, then Friza too could travel with me. If I could find what killed those of us who were different, but whose difference gave us a reality beyond dying-

A slow song now on my blade to mourn Dorik; and the beat of my feet on earth in journey.
After a few hours of such mourning, the heat had polished me with sweat as in some funeral dance.

While day leaned over the hills I passed the first red flowers, blossoms big as my face, like blood bubbles nested

in
thorns, often resting on the bare rock. No good to stop here.
Carnivorous.

I squatted on a broken seat of granite in the yellowing afternoon. A snail the size of my curled forefinger doffed his eyes at a puddle big as my palm. Half an hour later, climbing down a canyon wall when yellow had died under violet I saw a tear in the rock: another opening into the source-cave. I decided on
nighting
it there, and ducked in.

Still smells of humans and death.
Which is good.
Dangerous animals avoid it. I stalked inside, padding on all fours. Loose earth became moss, became cement underfoot. Outside, night, sonic lace of crickets and whining wasps I would not make on my
knife,
was well into black development.

Soon I touched a metal track, turned, and followed it with my hands . . . over a place where dirt had fallen, across a scattering of twigs and leaves, then down a long slope. I was about to stop, roll against the cave wall where it was drier, and sleep, when the track split.

I stood up.

When I shrilled on my blade, a long echo came from the right: endless passage there. But only a stubby resonance from the left: some sort of chamber. I walked left. My hip brushed a door jamb.

Then a room glowed suddenly before me. The sensor circuits were still sensitive. Grilled walls, blue glass desk, brass light fixtures, cabinets, and a television screen set in the wall. Squinting in the new light I walked over. When they still work, the colors are nice to watch: they make patterns and the patterns make music in me. Several people who had gone exploring the source-cave had told me about them (night fire and freakishly interested children knotted around the flame and the adventurer) and I’d gone to see one in a well explored arm two years back.
Which is how I learned about the music.

Color television is certainly a lot more fun than this terribly risky genetic method of reproduction we’ve taken over. Ah well. It’s a lovely world.

I sat on the desk and tried knobs till one clicked. The screen grayed at me, flickered, streamed with colors.

There was static, so I found the volume knob and turned it down ... so I could hear the music in colors. Just as I raised my blade to my mouth, something happened.

Laughter.

First I thought it was melody. But it was a voice laughing.
And on the screen, in chaotic
shimmerings
, a face.
It wasn’t a picture of a face. It was as if I was just looking at the particular dots of melody-hue that formed the face, ignoring the rest. I would have seen those features on any visual riot: Friza’s face.

The voice was someone else’s.

Friza dissolved. Another face replaced hers: Dorik’s.
The strange laughter again.
Suddenly there was Friza on one side of the screen, and Dorik on the other.
Centered: the boy who was laughing at me.
The picture cleared, filled, and I lost the rest of the room. Behind him, crumbled streets, beams jutting from the wrecks of walls, weeds writhing; and all lit with flickering green, the sun white on the reticulated sky. On a lamp-post behind him perched a creature with fins and white gills, scraping one red foot on the rust. On the curb was a hydrant laced with light and verdigris.

The boy, a redhead-redder than the
Blois
, redder than blood gutted blossoms-laughed with downcast eyes.
His lashes were gold. Transparent skin caught up the green and fluoresced with it; but I knew that under normal light he would have been as pale as Whitey dying.

“Lobey,” in the laughter, and his lips
uncurtained
small teeth-many too many of them.
Like the shark’s mouth, maybe, I’d seen in La Dire’s book, rank on rank of ivory needles. “Lobey, how you gonna find me, huh?”