Inside the card: My body.
Beneath that is the scrawled name Eira, and a telephone number. Should I call her? Dare I?
Bear in mind (as I must constantly remind myself to) that nothing the demon said can be trusted. Neither can anything that she herself said. She would have had me take her for a living woman, if she could.
Has the demon devised an excruciating torment for us both?
Or for me alone?
The telephone is at my elbow as I write. Her card is on my desk. If I dial the number, will I be blundering into the snare, or will I have torn the snare to pieces?
Should I call her?
A final possibility remains, although I find it almost impossible to write of it.
What if I am mad?
What if Foulweather the salesman merely played up to what he assumed was an elaborate joke? What if my last conversation with him (that is to say, with the demon) was a delusion? What if Eira is in fact the living woman that almost every man in the world would take her for, save I?
She cannot have much money and may well be staying for a few days with some chance acquaintance.
Am I insane? Deluded?
Tomorrow she may be gone. One dash three one four—
Should I call?
Perhaps I may be a man of courage after all, a man who has never truly understood his own character.
Will I call her? Do I dare?
Because its demons are evil, this story is a favorite of Kathe Koja’s.
I know how she feels. The first writer who presented Satan as a cheerful companion with supernatural powers was giving us an interesting novelty; that novelty has become the norm. Speaking not for Kathe but for myself alone, I have had it with little giants, chatty dragons, bumbling invaders, and their ilk. If you enjoyed this story, I hope you’ll look into The Knight, a book that tries to return giants, dragons, and invaders to their roots—a book in which the knights who wage war on all three are hard-bitten fighting men.
Petting Zoo
Roderick looked up at the sky. It was indeed blue, but almost cloudless. The air was hot and smelled of dust.
“Here, children. . . .” The teaching cyborg was pointedly not addressing him. “Tyrannosaurus rex. Rex was created by an inadequately socialized boy who employed six Build-a-Critter kits . . .”
Sixteen.
“. . . which he duped on his father’s Copystuff. With that quantity of Gro-Qik . . .”
It had taken a day over two weeks, two truckloads of pigs that he had charged to Mother’s account, and various other things that had become vague. For the last week, he had let Rex go out at night to see what he could find, and people would—people were bound to—notice the missing cattle soon. Had probably noticed them already.
Rex had looked out through the barn window while he was mooring his air-bike and said, “I’m tired of hiding all day.”
And he himself had said . . .
“Let’s go for a ride.” One of the little girls had raised her hand.
From the other side of the token barrier that confined him, Rex himself spoke for the first time, saying, “You will, kid. She’s not quite through yet.” His voice was a sort of growling tenor now, clearly forced upward as high as he could make it so as to seem less threatening. Roderick pushed on his suit’s AC and shivered a little.
It had been cool, that day. Cool, with a little breeze he had fought the whole way over, keeping his airbike below the treetops and following groundtrucks when he could, pulled along by their wake.
Cold in the old barn, then—cold, and dusty—dust motes dancing in the sunbeams that stabbed between its old, bent, and battered aluminum panels.
Rex had crouched as he had before, but he was bigger now, bigger than ever, and his smooth reptilian skin had felt like glass, like ice under which oiled muscles stirred like snakes. He had fallen, and Rex had picked him up in the arms that looked so tiny on Rex but were bigger and stronger than a big man’s arms, saying, “That’s what these are for,” and set him on Rex’s shoulders with his legs—his legs—trying to wrap around Rex’s thick, throbbing neck . . .
Had opened the big doors from inside, had gone out almost crawling and stood up.
It had not been the height. He had been higher on his airbike almost every day. It had not been his swift, swaying progress above the treetops, treetops arrayed in red, gold, and green so that it seemed that he followed Rex’s floating head over a lawn deep in fallen leaves.
It had been—
He shrugged the thought away. There were no adequate words. Power? You bought it at a drugstore, a shiny little disk that would run your house-bot for three or four more years or your drill forever. Mastery? It was what people had held over dogs while private ownership had still been legal.
Dogs had four fangs in front, and that was it, fangs so small they did not even look dangerous. Rex had a mouthful, every one as long as Roderick’s arm, in a mouth that could have chewed up an aircar.
No, it had not been the height. He had ridden over woods—this wood among them—often. Had ridden higher than this, yet heard the rustling of the leaves below him, the sound of a brook, an invisible brook of air. It had been the noise.
That was not right either, but it was closer than the others. It had been the snapping of the limbs and the crashing of the trees falling, or at least that had been a lot of it, the sound of their progress, the shattering, splintering wood. In part, at least, it had been the noise.
“He did a great deal of damage,” the teaching cyborg was saying, as her female attendant nodded confirmation. “Much worse, he terrified literally hundreds of persons. . . .”
Sitting on Rex’s shoulders, he had been able to talk almost directly into Rex’s ear. “Roar.”
And Rex had roared to shake the earth.
“Keep on roaring.”
And Rex had.
The red and white cattle Rex ate sometimes, so short legged they could scarcely move, had run away slowly only because they were too fat to run any faster, and one had gotten stepped on. People had run too, and Rex had kicked over a little prefab shed for the fun of it, and a tractor-bot. Had waded hip deep through the swamp without even slowing down, and had forded the river. There were fewer building restrictions on the north side of the river, and the people there had really run.
Had run except for one old man with a bushy mustache, who had only stood and stared pop-eyed, too old to run, Roderick thought, or maybe too scared. He had looked down at the old man and waved, and their eyes had met, and suddenly—just as if the top of the old man’s head had popped up so Roderick could look around inside it—he had known what the old man was thinking.
Not guessed, known.
And the old man had been thinking that when he had been Roderick’s age he had wanted to do exactly what Roderick was doing now. He had never been able to, and had never thought anybody would be. But somebody was; that kid up there in the polka-dot shirt was. So he, the old man, had been wrong about the whole world all his life. It was much more wonderful, this old world, than he, the old man, had ever supposed. So maybe there was hope after all. Some kind of a hope anyhow, in a world where things like this could go on, on a Monday right here in Libertyberg.
Before the old man could draw his breath to cheer, he had been gone, and there had been woods and cornfields. (Roderick’s suit AC shuddered and quit.) And after lots of corn, some kind of a big factory. Rex had stepped on its fence, which sputtered and shot sparks without doing anything much, and then the air-car had started diving at them.