The bicycle race results were on then, and Soma scanned the lists, hoping to see his favorites’ names near the top of the general classifications.
“That’s the Tennessee River, dammed up by your Governor’s hubris.”
Soma saw that his drink was nearly empty and heard that his friend Japheth was still talking. “What?” he asked, smiling.
“I asked if you’re ready to go to the Alley,” said Japheth.
“Good good,” said Soma.
The math was moving along minor avenues, siphoning data from secondary and tertiary ports when it sensed her looming up. It researched ten thousand thousand escapes but rejected them all when it perceived that it had been subverted, that it was inside her now, becoming part of her, that it is primitive in materials but clever clever in architecture and there have been blindings times not seen places to root out root out all of it check again check one thousand more times all told all told eat it all up all the little bluegrass math is absorbed
“The Alley at night!” shouted Soma. “Not like where you’re from, eh, boys?”
A lamplighter’s stalk legs eased through the little group. Soma saw that his friends were staring up at the civil servant’s welding mask head, gaping open-mouthed as it turned a spigot at the top of a tree and lit the gas with a flick of its tongue.
“Let’s go to my place!” said Soma. “When it’s time for anthem we can watch the parade from my balcony. I live in one of the lofts above the Tyranny of the Anecdote.”
“Above what?” asked Japheth.
“It’s a tavern. They’re my landlords,” said Soma. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”
But that wasn’t right.
Japheth’s Owl friend fell to his knees and vomited right in the street. Soma stared at the jiggling spheres in the gutter as the man choked some words out. “She’s taken the feathers. She’s looking for us now.”
Too much rum punch, thought Soma, thought it about the Owl man and himself and about all of Japheth’s crazy friends.
“Soma, how far now?” asked Japheth.
Soma remembered his manners. “Not far,” he said.
And it wasn’t, just a few more struggling yards, Soma leading the way and Japheth’s friends half-carrying, half-dragging their drunken friend down the Alley. Nothing unusual there. Every night in the Alley was Carnival.
Then a wave at the bouncer outside the Anecdote, then up the steps, then sing “Let me in, let me in!” to the door, and finally all of them packed into the cramped space.
“There,” said the sick man, pointing at the industrial sink Soma had installed himself to make brush cleaning easier. Brushes…where were his brushes, his pencils, his notes for the complexity seminar?
“Towels, Soma?”
“What? Oh, here let me get them.” Soma bustled around, finding towels, pulling out stools for the now silent men who filled his room.
He handed the towels to Japheth. “Was it something he ate?” Soma asked.
Japheth shrugged. “Ate a long time ago, you could say. Owls are as much numbers as they are meat. He’s divesting himself. Those are ones and zeroes washing down your drain.”
The broad man — hadn’t he been broad? — the scrawny man with opals falling off him said, “We can only take a few minutes. There are unmounted Detectives swarming the whole city now. What I’ve left in me is too deep for their little minds, but the whole sphere is roused and things will only get tighter. Just let me — ” He turned and retched into the sink again. “Just a few minutes more until the singing.”
Japheth moved to block Soma’s view of the Owl. He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “Yours?”
The blue-eyed boy moved over to the sink, helped the Owl ease to the floor. Soma looked at the pictures. “Yes, mostly. I traded for a few.”
Japheth was studying one charcoal piece carefully, a portrait. “What’s this one?”
The drawing showed a tall, thin young man dressed in a period costume, leaning against a mechanical of some kind, staring intently out at the viewer. Soma didn’t remember drawing it, specifically, but knew what it must be.
“That’s a caricature. I do them during Campaign for the provincials who come into the city to vote. Someone must have asked me to draw him and then never come back to claim it.”
And he remembered trying to remember. He remembered asking his hand to remember when his head wouldn’t.
“I’m…what did you put in me?” Soma asked. There was moisture on his cheeks, and he hoped it was tears.
The Owl was struggling up to his feet. A bell tone sounded from the sky and he said, “Now, Japheth. There’s no time.”
“Just a minute more,” snapped the Crow. “What did we put in you? You…” Japheth spat. “While you’re remembering, try and remember this. You chose this! All of you chose it!”
The angry man wouldn’t have heard any reply Soma might have made, because it was then that all of the Kentuckians clamped their ears shut with their odd muffs. To his surprise, they forced a pair onto Soma as well.
Jenny finally convinced the car to stop wailing out its hee-haw pitch when they entered the maze of streets leading to Printer’s Alley. The drive back had been long, the car taking every northern side road, backtracking, looping, even trying to enter the dumping grounds at one point before the bundle bugs growled them away. During anthem, while Jenny drummed her fingers and forced out the words, the car still kept up its search, not even pretending to dance.
So Jenny had grown more and more fascinated by the car’s behavior. She had known cars that were slavishly attached to their owners before, and she had known cars that were smart — almost as smart as bundle bugs, some of them — but the two traits never seemed to go together. “Cars are dogs or cars are cats,” her Teacher had said to explain the phenomenon, another of the long roll of enigmatic statements that constituted formal education in the Voluntary State.
But here, now, here was a bundle bug that didn’t seem to live up to those creatures’ reputations for craftiness. The car had been following the bug for a few blocks — Jenny only realized that after the car, for the first time since they entered the city proper, made a turn away from the address painted on its name tag.
The bug was a big one, and was describing a gentle career down Commerce Street, drifting from side to side and clearly ignoring the traffic signals that flocked around its head in an agitated cloud.
“Car, we’d better get off this street. Rogue bugs are too much for the THP. If it doesn’t self-correct, a Commodore is likely to be rousted out from the Parthenon.” Jenny sometimes had nightmares about Commodores.
The car didn’t listen — though it was normally an excellent listener — but accelerated toward the bug. The bug, Jenny now saw, had stopped in front of a restaurant and cracked its abdomen. Dumpster feelers had started creeping out of the interstices between thorax and head when the restaurateur charged out, beating at the feelers with a broom. “Go now!” the man shouted, face as red as his vest and leggings. “I told you twice already! You pick up here Chaseday! Go! I already called your supervisor, bug!”
The bug’s voice echoed along the street. “No load? Good good.” Its sigh was pure contentment, but Jenny had no time to appreciate it. The car sped up, and Jenny covered her eyes, anticipating a collision. But the car slid to a halt with bare inches to spare, peered into the empty cavern of the bug’s belly, then sighed, this one not content at all.
“Come on, car,” Jenny coaxed. “He must be at home by now. Let’s just try your house, okay?”