Spider looked confused; then the confusion sank in belligerent, silent embarrassment; he let himself be taken away.
“That could get infected,” Everett Forest said for the third time.
Madame Brown stood across the crowd, folding and turning her hands. The leash swung and sagged and jingled.
Kid kept touching Lanya’s shoulder; they stood watching. (The second time she touched his hand in return, but not the first, third, or fourth.)
Muriel, panting, pushed to her forepaws; then lowered her muzzle again to the ground.
Denny, in the crowding, had pushed against Kid several times, settling a hand on his shoulder, arm, or back. Kid contemplated some response—
“Kid!”
Kid didn’t look around at first.
“If you’ve a few minutes to spare…Kid, do you think I could have you for a few minutes?”
When he did turn (Lanya and Denny turned too), Bill was smiling at him over the surrounding heads, and holding a box that looked much like the controls to Lanya’s dress up near his ear. “Can I have you for a few minutes…Kid?”
This time when Kid touched Lanya and Denny, they came with him. (Thinking: They would have come anyway; both, working within entirely different mechanics, have developed curiosities that would not let them miss it!) “Sure,” Kid said. “What you want?”
“Thank you.” Bill grinned, and adjusted the mike clipped to the pocket in his black turtleneck pullover. “This is on now. We might as well leave it going, so you can get used to ignoring it. But let’s get out of all this noise. Why don’t we go back—Say, what happened to that tall black kid? He’s part of your nest?”
“I cut him,” Kid said.
Bill tried not to look surprised.
“It was an accident,” Kid said to the mike. He unsnapped the ornate blades from his wrist.
“You’re—” Bill noticed Lanya and Denny but didn’t say anything to them—“very strict with your own, aren’t you?”
Kid decided: I’m being told, not asked, and said nothing.
“Where we going?” Denny whispered, and looked warily again at Bill’s cassette recorder.
“To hell, if we’re invited nicely,” Kid said. “Shut up and come on. He’s not going to make you say anything. Just me.”
“Let’s…” Bill looked like he was trying to, politely, think of a way to get rid of Lanya and Denny.
Lanya looked as though she were about to, politely, excuse herself and take Denny with her.
“They should come,” Kid said. “They’re my friends.”
“Of course. I just wanted to ask you a few questions—let’s go this way.” They passed through another garden. “This is really a little confused, what with Roger’s not being here. I guess he’s…gone for the night. He wanted to get a chance to talk to you, I know that; he told me so. He wanted to find out a few things he thought the readers of the Times might be interested in…we were actually going to interview you together. I help Roger with a lot of his newspaper work. Draft a lot of his articles. As you might imagine, he’s a busy man.”
“You write his articles?” Lanya asked. “I always wondered where he got the time to do all he does.”
“I don’t actually write anything he signs. But…I research a lot for him.” Bill turned up a small path Kid remembered having walked over twice during the evening but couldn’t remember where it led. “Roger wanted to ask you—well, we both did…just a few things. I was going to wait for him. But I get the impression that people might start leaving soon. And if Roger didn’t get back in time, I know he’d still want me to use the opportunity.”
Before two spotlights, fixed low to trees at opposite corners of the clearing, white wicker furniture cast black coils and curlicues on the grass.
“Nobody seems to have found their way here yet. Why don’t we have a seat and get started?”
Denny sat beside Kid on the edge of the bench, leaning forward on his knees to look over at Bill, who took the paddle-backed lounge. Lanya stood a little ways away, leaning on a tree trunk, once brushing at her autumn-colored skirts to strike in them silver rain.
“I want to ask you a few questions about your gang—your nest. And then something about your work…your poetry. All right?”
Kid shrugged. He was excited and uncomfortable; but the two states, vivid as feelings, seemed to cancel any physical sign of either.
He looked at Lanya.
She had folded her arms and was listening rather like someone who had just passed by and stopped.
Denny was looking at the control box, wanting to play with it, but also wondering if this were the time.
Lanya hovered among various blues.
Bill ran his hand from the mike along the wire to the recorder, turned a knob, and looked up again. “Tell me first, how do you feel having your book published? It’s your first book, right?”
“Yeah. It’s my first. I like it, all the commotion. I think it’s stupid, but it’s…fun. There aren’t very many mistakes in it…I mean the ones the people who put the type together made.”
“Well, that’s very good. You feel, then, the poems are as you wrote them; that you can take full responsibility for them?”
“Yeah.” Kid wondered why the muffled accusation did not make him more uncomfortable. Possibly because he’d been through it already in silence.
“I mean,” Bill went on, “I remember Ernest Newboy telling us, one evening, about how hard you worked on the galleys. He was very struck by it. Did Mr. Newboy help you much with the poems themselves? I mean, would you say he was an influence on your work?”
“No.” He does think, Kid thought, that I’m seventeen! He laughed, and the familiarity of the deception put him even more at ease. He moved back on the lounge and let his knees fall apart. So far it wasn’t so bad.
Something moved at the corner of Kid’s eye. Bill looked up too.
Revelation stood behind them with Milly, whom he had not seen since they had surprised her in the bushes.
Denny went, “Shhhhh,” took his finger from his lips and pointed to the recorder.
“Can you tell me—”
Kid looked back.
Bill coughed. “—tell me something about the scorpions, about the way you live, and why you live that way?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure.”
“Do you feel that this way of life offers you some protection, or make it easier for you to survive in Bellona? I guess it’s a pretty dangerous and unknown place, now.”
Kid shook his head. “No…it isn’t that dangerous, for us. And I’m getting to know it pretty well.”
“You all live together, in a sort of commune—nest, as you call it. Tell me, do you know the commune of young people that used to live in the park?”
Kid nodded. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Did you get along well with each other?”
“Pretty much.”
“But they’re fairly peaceful; while your group believes in violence, is that right?”
“Well, violence—” Kid grinned—“that isn’t something you believe in. That’s something that happens. But I guess it happens more around us than around them.”
“Someone told me that, for a while, you were a member of this other commune; but apparently you preferred the scorpions.”
“Yeah?” Kid pressed his lips and nodded. “…Well, no, actually. I was never a member of the other commune. I hung around; they fed me. But they never made me a part of it. The scorpions, now, soon as I got with them, they took me right in, made me a part. That’s probably why I like it better. We had a couple of kids hanging around our place who should probably have ended up with the park people; but we fed them too. Then they drifted on. That’s what you have to do.”
Bill nodded, his own lips pursed. “There’s been talk that some of the things you guys indulge in get pretty rough. People have been killed…or so one story goes.”
“People have been hurt,” Kid said. “One guy was killed. But he wasn’t a scorpion.”
“But the scorpions killed him…?”
Kid turned up his hands. “What am I supposed to say now?” He grinned again.
Behind Bill, a dozen others had gathered. Another cough, behind Kid, made him realize another dozen had come up to listen.