“Up to now,” Lloyd answered. “Get as far away as fast as you can. Somehow I sense I am a lightning rod for these people, this other creature-whatever.”
“Say it is not so, Lloyd, please!”
“You may have gotten lucky before, although I understand you may not think so. But your luck may run out at the next encounter. Go far.”
“What about you?” the gambler garbled, the hand opening and retracting.
“I am destined for some confrontation of my own. Sooner rather than later, I believe. If you are my friend, you will take my advice and keep the hand hidden.”
“I know not what to say,” the gambler replied after a moment’s pause. “You have shed light brighter than any moon or candle. And you have cast shadows darker and more supple than I have imagined. What should we do if this… thing… is among us?”
“There is no ‘if,’ ” Lloyd answered. “You told me at the start there was a time to cut and run. That time has found you. It’s possible that there are many people throughout the world who have stories similar to yours. Our insane asylums, prisons, and military hospitals may be full of them. But there are chinks… like the need to find human form. And they, or it, have some mission of destiny-a master stratagem. That is a strength and weakness, too. Great plans usually fail. On that we can perhaps hang our hats in hope.”
“Here’s to that then,” said the gambler, and tossed his fine brim into the river. “Good night, my friend, however old you are. Tomorrow we will play our last hand, and this hand will be kept under wraps. Perhaps when I reach my new destination I will find someone with the skill and discretion to remove it, as was my first inclination years ago. Sleep well, and may the dreams that find you be your own.”
The gambler headed for his stateroom. Lloyd remained on deck, watching the hat floating away in the moonlight. He had forgotten all about the music boxes-he was taken by the vividness of the hat bobbing along on top of the water. It was the vividness of the hat in the river that finally caused him to wake.
I waited for a moment to summon him outside the tepee-into the light of the deeper horror. He felt my call, even groggy and disjointed as he was. At first he imagined it was the creature somehow escaped from its chain and prowling about the camp, sniffing out the new arrivals.
As remarkable as he may have found that specimen, I knew that he would be more surprised to see me. Vague intuitions had flashed like ripples of star-strewn river through his dreams, but this would be absolutely different and decisive. It could cause untold rents in the spiral schema, but I had no choice. He was a long silent moment longer gathering the concentration and the courage commensurate with his curiosity. Then he appeared-and the image was almost as shocking to me.
To discover yourself standing in the moonlight in waiting is not an easy thing. His jaw cracked, and my green eyes shone back at me.
“What are they? Who-?”
“I think you know too well,” I said as simply as I could. “You are not who you think you are. Or where-or when, either.”
“But!”
“Shh,” I said. “I cannot help the intrusion. And I cannot remain master of the spiral if you resist.”
“I’m still dreaming!” he gasped, for what other explanation could there be? Except for-
“You are in a different kind of wilderness than you imagine,” I said. “And now I must take your place, because I need a deeper hiding place, and to lay a snare.”
“Who?” he hissed, and I could tell that the trauma was already accommodating itself to some terrible new acceptance of the larger hellequinade.
“The Vardogers? The Spirosians?”
I let him gather his wits. Or try to.
“You must go through the door,” I said.
“What door?” he demanded. Just as I would.
“One I have made,” I answered. “The bridges I will have to build now from inside. You will find it right behind me. And you will understand.”
“Are… are you a ghost?” he queried, trying to make sense of what was beyond his grasp.
“I would not put it so.”
“Am… am I… a ghost?”
“Say, rather, a hope. A strategy. A necessity. A casualty of war.”
“But you can’t be real!”
“Real enough.”
“But then what am I?”
Who does not seek the answer to that question?
“A desperate measure in a desperate contest. No more can I say that you could fathom.”
“What if I refuse?”
“You will not. The truth has come for you, and as difficult as it is to accept, you recognize it, as you do me.”
“You’re some kind of will-o’-the-wisp!”
I flung one of the stones I had picked up instinctively.
“Ow!” he whined. “Damn thing hit me.”
“I have more,” I said. “Everything is some kind of will-o’-the-wisp.”
“You’re a Vardoger trick! I’ve been trapped!”
“No, it is I who am in the trap. But they will not anticipate me hiding in the trap.”
He rubbed his eyes, trying to make me go away. An illusion of moonlight, a specter of the mind, a lucid dream. If only the technology were so simple. If only I understood fully how to use it.
At last a hint of a tear escaped from the brilliant green eyes, which was more than a little moving and disconcerting for me to witness.
“Am I going to die?” he asked.
“If life and dreaming are not what you have taken them to be, then how can death be, either?” I replied. “Think what Hattie would do.”
“What will become of her?” he asked. And I saw for myself how much he had grown.
“I can say no more about that than you can, now that I am here. I inherit all your uncertainties-save one.”
“Is this because of the slave, and the Ambassadors-a punishment?”
“I take responsibility for Mule Christian,” I said. “You are released. As to those you call the Ambassadors, they are more an enigma to me than to you. I take responsibility for what happened to them, too, although I suspect I have even less to say about them and their fate than you did in the kite. But now you must face another trial. Remember your teachers-the gambler and the runaway girl. Honor them, even as you doubt me.”
Then he did just as I would have done. He rebelled, with all the force of the meaning I had conceived. For that is the wondrous and diabolical nature of the technology. The coming to life. The independence of tactics and vision.
He charged at me, thinking to wrestle me into the oblivion from which he believed I had emerged to supplant him, not seeing that it was more a change of rider. He had no idea that I was the door of which I spoke-and the instant that he touched me he stepped through, fluorescing in a puzzle of hierograms, like fireflies and lost symbols swept into the cyclone.
I crept into the tepee as the last of the luminous hierograms spiraled into vanishing. I was as sorry to see him fade as he was to have seen the twins blown over the river-and not to have said goodbye to Hattie. Folks like us.
And now the trial was upon me.
The scent of the interior was a moment in hitting-and when it did it hit hard. Astounding. The depth and the texture.
I straggled into the bedding where the talismanic objects lay secret in their bag. Hephaestus turned from his rumpled sack of sleep and mumbled, then wiped his face and stared straight at me without the slightest hint of the unfamiliar. It was an eye-opening sensation, to say the least.