Bron squinted. His hair snapped at his head. Lawrence’s cloak whipped back, then forward about his legs, tugging the old man a few steps with it. Bron had to lean against the wind to keep from moving.
After a second or so the dust, which till now had only made low, rounded waves, thick and fast as water, suddenly shot up, swirling, as if—but not “as if,” Bron realized: it was what had happened—it had become a hundred times as light; as light, again, as dust.
The alley was heaped with ten feet of debris.
Dust drifted.
Bron looked at Lawrence (who coughed), at Audri’s building, at the alley, at the building, at Lawrence. “I guess no one’s inside,” Bron said as the dust passed. Then, because that had sounded so inane, he said: “Maybe we better check, though.” He hoped Lawrence wouldn’t suggest checking in the alleyway too. Alfred had been bad enough; this could only be worse.
“Can we get around the side?” Lawrence asked, and obviously (and blessedly) meant the co-op.
Between the co-op building and the building next to it, there was a narrow gate, which, when Bron reached through and lifted the hasp (“Now / never would have thought of that,” Lawrence said), swung open.
“Maybe we can find a window or something and get a look inside.” Bron’s skin tingled with memories of the alley he had just watched collapse. But Lawrence came in right after him, so,he had to keep going forward: there wasn’t room to squeeze back around him. He was wondering who would have a window facing out on a two-foot-wide alley when he came to one, with two, astonished faces in it—which were suddenly pushed aside by three more.
While heated conferral began among the women behind the glass, another woman pushed between them to look: and that was Audri, who grinned, nodded at him quickly, then turned away to join the conference.
Bron made come-out gestures.
They made helpless gestures back.
Bron made open-the-window gestures.
They made more helpless.
Someone carefully mimed something Bron thought must mean the front door was locked.
Bron made stand-back motions, took off his sandal, then thought better and got Lawrence to give him one of the green shoes, and made to hurl it at the window. Some of the women inside looked distressed. Others laughed. They all stood back.
So Bron hurled it, heel first.
The glass shattered into an opaque web—that hung there. It was backed with plastic film so that he had to throw the shoe several times more, and than finally tear it away with his hand, nicking his fingers several places.
“Come on, you’ve got to get out!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to evacuate this area,” he shouted into the shadowed room full of women. “Audri? Hey, Audri, you have to get out of here.”
“I told you those were evacuation instructions,” one of the women was saying loudly to a group at the back of the room, “before the public channels went dead.”
“Audri, you better get your kids and—Audri?”
But she had left the room with several others.
Bron climbed through the window (a woman he hadn’t seen helped him down), while Lawrence went around to the front, and Bron more or less figured out from overlapping snippets that they hadn’t wanted to open the front door because of the man Bron and Lawrence had seen shouting. At which point a dozen children came into the room with several mothers, among them Audri (who was wearing a bright scarlet body-stocking with a lot of feathery things trailing from her head-band). “Hey!” He made his way to her side, took her shoulder. “You better get your kids together so we can get out of here—”
She blinked at him. “What do you think we’re doing? You said we had to evacuate, didn’t you? Everyone will be down in a second.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” More kids came in.
Two women were calling out instructions.
“Urn ...” Bron said. “Hey! They better all wear shoes. There’s lots of junk in the street.”
Three children dashed out of the room to get them.
A woman who seemed to be in charge turned to Bron. “It really was something, your coming to tell us.
Nobody’s quite known what was going on since the retaliation this afternoon. And then with Mad Mike outside—well, he seems to be gone now. But we didn’t know whether he’d done something to interfere with our channel reception or whether it was just part of the general confusion. With gale-force winds going on and off, nobody wanted to go out anyway, especially with the kids.” Freddie and Flossie were the only one-parent family at Serpant’s House; but at a sexually specified co-op, straight or gay, you would expect a few more. Also, of course, this was a woman’s co-op. And, as a public-channel survey had once put it: As long as women bore 70 percent of the children, you couldn’t be surprised that nearly 60 percent of the one-parent families had a woman at their head.
As they were leaving the building (one of Audri’s boys had glommed onto Lawrence, along with another kid Bron had never seen) Bron asked: “Who was that Mad Mike character?”
Audri glanced around, checking, then said, confidentially: “He used to live with John—” She nodded toward a woman, in something flimsy, cream-colored and diaphanous, who, till now, he’d just assumed was one of the older children.
“She had two children by him. He’s some sort of very eccentric craftsman, but what kind I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you let him in?”
Audri humphed. “The last three times she did, as soon as he got her alone, he beat her up; then sat her down for the next hour and explained why it was all her fault he’d done it. Really, John’s sweet, but she’s not very bright. We were trying to get through to the e-girls, but communication was out both in and out of the place.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Yeah ... well. I guess, maybe because they were his children—”
Audri humphed again. “This sudden revitalization of interest only started a year back when he became a Christian. He apparently wasn’t very interested in them back when she was having them, or in the two years right after.” Audri scanned the group as it turned the corner. “I mean, if he wants kids of his own, there are ten ways he can go about getting them—here, that is. And at least twenty-five over in the u-1.”
Bron followed the herd of women around the corner. “I thought he might have been a Christian.” They were heading back toward the Plaza of Light. “From some of the expressions he used.” He looked up at the unfamiliar and unsettling night. “You know, they’re almost as much trouble as the Jews?”
Audri said: “Hev, come on, you kids. Stop horsing around. This way. Where did he go, anyway? He usually hangs around a good deal longer when he decides to make a nuisance of himself. He was getting to be quite a neighborhood character.”
“Oh,” Bron said, feeling uncomfortable again. “Well, he saw Lawrence and me and then he ... went away.”
Audri glanced at him. “You scared him off? You get a vote of thanks for that! Character or not, he was getting to be a pain.”
A child came up to ask Audri about something Bron didn’t understand, to which she returned a (to Bron) incomprehensible answer, while Bron wondered when he would tell Audri of Mad Mike’s fate. No matter how uncomfortable it made him, he had to do that.
Audri said: “It was downright heroic of you to come around and give us a hand like this. We were all pretty scared. Some of the sounds coming in from outside—and I just don’t mean Mike’s carrying on ... Well, they weren’t the sort to encourage you to take to the streets.”