"I feel like I've been in this big bathtub," I told him. "The water is swirling out the drain, and I've been swimming as hard as I can for a very long time. And now the water is all gone, and I'm sitting on the bottom, naked and wet as a newborn baby. Only I feel like I've wasted seventy years. All that running, and here I am. I just don't seem to want to move."
"So you're going to stay here? That's what you want to do?"
I sighed.
"What I really want to do, more than anything, is turn myself in."
I don't think I was sure until the moment I said it that I really did want to surrender. But saying it, I felt such a sense of relief, such a feeling of freedom as I hadn't experienced since that day on the stage of the John Valentine Theater.
With a shock, I realized I'd felt that sense of freedom after I'd killed my father.
Elwood was looking at me, shaking his head.
"Well, I don't entirely disagree with you on that," he said. "And I'd be more than willing to go in with you. Perhaps I could speak to your psychiatrist, give him a little insight into your life, from the perspective of somebody who's spent a lot of time around you. Maybe contribute to an insanity defense, though I don't know how they handle things like that these days. But there's one thing I think you should do first."
"And what is that?"
"Take your shot at King Lear. Never know when you might get another chance." He stood up and held his hand out to me.
I never touch Elwood, for obvious reasons. But this time I didn't even look around to see who might be watching. I took his hand, and he lifted me off the bench.
Bayou Teche is an old "pocket" disneyland just a ten-minute tube ride from the center of King City. When it was first built, they simply called it a disneyland, since an artificial "Earthly" environment almost a mile across and a quarter of a mile high was a very big deal in those days. At first it was hard to get people to visit. "How ya gonna hold the roof up, huh?" Many people never could come, and many still can't, agoraphobia being quite common amongst the tunnel-raised population.
Later, when they began building the serious disneys like Texas, Mekong, Kansas, Serengeti, a hundred miles deep and thirty, forty, sixty miles across, the original parks came to be called minis. Now the trend has come full circle as more and more people—those who can afford it—aspire to move into a "natural" environment. Micro-disneys are popping up like bubbles in champagne, but they are not notably wild. Most have golf courses. All modern amenities are just minutes away.
The older parks had a problem. Many turned themselves into "modern" parks, not much different from suburbia on Old Earth: communities of houses from one era or another. Traditionalists pointed out that the whole idea of disneys was to provide a taste of life on Earth before the Invasion, even before civilization. Most compromised, allowing some settlement by "townies," as opposed to permanent "authentics," like Doc in West Texas. Some tried to qualify for government heritage grants by providing environments people might not necessarily want to live in, but which the Antiquities Board felt were worth supporting in spite of their inhospitality.
At Bayou Teche, it was night, and bugs. Twenty-two hours of night every day, and billions and billions of bugs.
This was where Kaspara Polichinelli, the greatest stage director of her time, had chosen to spend her retirement. You may remember her as Sparky's sidekick, Polly.
The only way to Polly's house was by water, in a little boat called a pirogue. Pronounced pee-row. There were no maps. No roads. Hardly any land. The bayous wound in an impenetrable maze designed to re-create the delta country at the end of the Mississippi River.
My guide/taxi driver was a smiling man who introduced himself as Beaudreaux—pronounced boo-drow—who helped me into the little flat-bottomed cockleshell that seemed to be made of scrap lumber and gumbo mud. The bottom was awash in water. I took a seat up front and Beaudreaux started up a little outboard engine no bigger than a football, pulling a rope until it choked to life in a cloud of blue smoke and then settled into a steady puttering. We eased away from the ramshackle dock just inside the visitors' entrance, and into a landscape right out of your worst prehistoric nightmare.
At a dizzying three miles per hour.
Over water black as ink, flowing at a tenth our speed.
Water smooth as old bourbon, but not nearly so sweet smelling.
Luckily, I'd taken my motion-sickness pills.
I was dressed in the only sensible clothing for the Bayou: a head-to-toe silk khaki jumpsuit pulled over my own clothes, rubber boots and gloves, topped off by a safari hat fitted with a mesh beekeeper's veil. Wrists and ankles of the suit were elastic, worn over the sleeves and legs.
They told me the suit was sprayed with a harmless repellent, which had sounded like overkill at the time. The insects couldn't get to me, I reasoned, so what was the point?
Five minutes into the boat ride I decided, with a touch of awe, that without the repellent the bugs might actually pick me up and carry me off, to devour at their leisure.
Though it was night in the Bayou, it was far from pitch black. We frequently passed homes set on stilts, or built on flat-bottomed boat hulls. Most had kerosene lamps hanging outside the porch and a softer light spilling from the windows. There was a lamp on a pole at the bow of the pirogue, as well. All these light sources were swarming with clouds of flying insects. Moths and lacewings and dragonflies—"skeeter hawks," to Beaudreaux—and beetles and lightning bugs and June bugs and gnats and I don't know what all.
And mosquitoes. Enough mosquitoes to suck you dry in ten seconds.
I hate bugs.
I'd been hearing what sounded like flapping wings since shortly after the trip began. About halfway to Polly's something whooshed by my head, inches away. I ducked, and Beaudreaux laughed. Beaudreaux, who somehow was enduring this trip dressed in denim overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt, no hat, no gloves.
"Bat," he told me. "We got many t'ousan bat in hya. We got de froo' bat, de Mex'can bat, de pug-nose bat, de leaf-nose bat, de red bat, de gray bat, and de renard volant, de flyin' fox, en anglais." At least I think that's what he said. He spoke with an odd accent, a patois of broken English and the occasional French word, and he called himself a "Cajun." Pronounced kay-jun.
He kept up a running commentary throughout the trip, pointing to things I mostly didn't see. We threaded our way through gnarled cypress with long gray beards of moss. I never had a chance to ask him a question, but if I had, it would have been "How do you keep from being eaten alive?" I later learned the answer, which was that residents got a small gene alteration that caused their skin to exude an insect repellent.
According to Beaudreaux there were seventeen species of bat in the Bayou, and they worked in two shifts separated by the two brief light periods known as dawn and dusk. How they got the plants to grow and all the insects to breed with so little light I never found out. I'm sure they could fill you in at the visitors' center. No doubt it's a fascinating story, but keep it to yourself, all right?
Other than the close encounter with the bat, the trip proceeded without incident until I heard a splash and felt the boat rock as if we'd passed the wake of another boat. Beaudreaux stood up and used a long pole to poke at something in the water. He shouted at it, poked again, then sat down and grinned at me.
"Gator," he said.