13
“Tickets! Get your free tickets!”
A man standing in front of the old opera house yelled the line over and over as he waved a fan of narrow stubs in the air.
“Ssee?” Walter hissed, turning to Molly.
Molly pulled him to a halt. “Did you know they were free when you stole them?”
Walter looked away.
“Thought so,” she said, releasing him with a slight shove.
She approached the gentleman, noticing as she did so that most people were doing just the opposite: they were scurrying into the street to avoid him. She wondered if the repulsive effect came from his comical attire: the man had on red pants, a velvety red jacket, and a white shirt with ruffles so long and stiff, they looked like a dozen pale hands reaching up to strangle him.
“Why free?” she asked him. She held up her own ticket as he tried to shove a few in her hand.
“Oh! Very good. Coming to see tonight’s show? Excellent. It’s free because—” He turned to a passing group. “Free tickets!” he yelled, frowning as they declined. “It’s always free on Tuesday nights. Tough day of the week— Free tickets!” More people scurried to the other side of the street. “Tough day of the week to get a crowd,” he finished. “We make it up in fruit and alcohol sales. Free tickets! And of course, we haven’t had this performer in several months. She’s been making quite a circuit around Lok, refining her act. Free tickets! We need to get people hooked again, am I right?”
He smiled and nodded as if answering his own question. Or perhaps to let Molly know he was quite busy enough without having to talk to her. She turned and studied the fa?ade of the old opera house, which loomed up beside her.
It didn’t seem like much, not at first. Colorful dabs of paint clung to ornate carvings in desperate little chips. Rained-on dust dripped down massive columns in streaks, the tracks of brown smears blending with the dirt splattered upward from the sidewalk. The flaking and dripping made the entire building look like a half-burned candle of mud.
Through the grime and neglect, however, Molly saw something: an old grace, like a woman whose beauty had become shrouded in time. The building had tasteful architecture; it possessed a forgotten style that used to require an investment, back when artisans and laborers worked side-by-side, carving and painting masterpieces atop inspired engineering. But it was something else that made Molly’s breath catch in her chest. Something familiar. She actually remembered the place. Her father had brought her there when she was young—to see a magic act, she thought. A man had made loads of things disappear right off a stage before bringing them back again.
The old memory flooded her brain, striking for its clarity: a portly gentleman, bearded, wearing overalls instead of a magician’s suit. Fidgety and nervous, his head had been sheening with perspiration, his voice cracking with discomfort, and yet he had been wildly popular with the crowd. She could hear them in her recollection of that day: roaring all around her as a prairie buggy vanished from stage, then going wild again as it returned with members of the audience sitting inside—the very people who had just disappeared from traps and what-not.
Molly closed her eyes and attempted to corral more details of that night. She placed herself inside the theater of her imagination and tried looking to the side to see her father. She felt like he was right there, turning to her and smiling—
She lost it. It was too dark, that place they’d been in. Or maybe it was her childhood that remained too dimly lit. Still, it felt as though she’d won a kind of lottery, had reclaimed some portion of her fuzzy past.
The Wadi put its cheek next to hers and flicked its tongue out as if it were trying to taste the memory as well. She opened her eyes and coaxed the creature down by her belly where she could cover it with her arm. Walter stood by her side, looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. Molly ignored him and strolled up to the entrance of the soiled building.
“Tickets?” a young boy by the door asked.
Molly fumbled for hers, exposing the Wadi, but the kid didn’t seem to notice or care. “Why do you need them if it’s free?” she asked, trying to make conversation.
The boy looked at her curiously, then glanced out at the gentleman in the street. “Good question,” he said.
Walter pushed on her back, shoving her inside before brandishing his collection of tickets to the boy.
“You only need one,” she heard the lad say.
Molly smiled and stepped deeper into the building, taking in the sight of the lobby, which was slathered in the same sort of red velvet worn by the ticket hawker.
“Thiss is nicse,” Walter hissed.
Molly looked at the stains in the carpet, the torn posters on the walls, the crumbling ceiling tiles. Both the concession stand and ticket office were dark and empty. The former had a glass counter with several of the panes broken, fragments hanging like transparent teeth. The latter looked like it had been broken into, the door askew and clinging to a single hinge. In the center of the lobby stood four grand columns, one of which had a wide crack running its length with rough-hewn lumber nailed across it, making it look like an arm in a splint.
Molly frowned and rubbed her own arm.
“Thiss iss like a date,” Walter said.
Molly turned and saw him looking up at her, his hand reaching out to grab hers.
She pulled it away and used it to squeeze his shoulder. “This is not a date, Walter. We’re here to meet someone.” She glanced at the various doors leading to the seats. “Let’s go sit up close so we can get her attention after the show.” She headed for the stairs leading down, but Walter ran toward the door marked “Balcony.”
“I wanna ssit up top!” he called over his shoulder.
Molly sighed and headed up after him. She didn’t think it would be difficult to race down after the show and introduce herself to Cat, so she ascending the wide stairway darkened by burnt-out bulbs. Feeling her way up using the railing, Molly groped with her feet for that last, non-existent “ghost step” that always made her feel like a lepton.
Just as she started worrying about it, someone jumped at her, fingers digging into her ribs and nearly knocking her back down the steps.
“BOO!” Walter yelled.
Molly jumped so hard, she nearly pulled a muscle. She swung an open hand at him, but he was already rolling around on the red carpet, panting and wheezing in a full-on Palan giggle fit. Molly pictured herself kicking him in the shins, but somehow restrained herself. Then, the sight of something incredibly familiar loomed in her peripheral, distracting her.
She stepped over Walter and went to the rail, looking down across the seats and the handful of people milling about. She took in the stage, lit only by the house lights, and knew she’d been there before. And more recently than her early childhood. Much more recently.
Dakura. Her mother’s simulated afterlife!
Her mom had whisked her there virtually in an attempt to keep her quiet. It had only been for a moment; her mother’s next tactic had been to strap her into a dentist’s chair, a memory Molly didn’t feel like revisiting. She concentrated on the stage, instead. It was definitely the same place. And it had to be the same theater her father had brought her to as a kid, right before they fled to Earth. She must’ve been six, or very nearly. She looked up at the dimly lit dome above her head, the tall walls to either side dotted with private viewing booths. She remembered sitting in one of those, leaning across the rails—
“Ew!” Walter yelled. Molly turned, and in the dim light she could see him patting his flightsuit, his hands coming away as if something were on them. “Thiss floor iss ssticky!” he hissed.
“Serves you right, you Drenard.”
Walter scrambled to his feet. He looked down at the faint stains on his clothes. “I am a Drenard!” he said proudly.
Molly laughed, reminded once again that some of her habitual cursing no longer made any sense—or at the very least had become ineffectual. She led Walter along the rail to the seats at the center of the balcony, thinking about how she couldn’t tell people to “go to hyperspace” the way she once had. Not since she was yearning to get there herself.
“Where iss everybody?” Walter asked, looking down at the sparse gathering below.
“I hate to break it to you buddy, but I don’t think Cat’s performance is gonna be that nebular.”
She glanced at her watch, which was still on universal time. She did the math for Bekkie, taking into account its fourteen-hour days, and confirmed that it was almost eight. And yet, she and Walter were the only people on the balcony, and just a handful seemed to be gathering below.
Walter settled back and spread both of his arms across the generous armrests. Molly looked at all the empty seats around them and wondered why she felt obligated to sit directly next to him. The Wadi must’ve had a similar thought; it moved from her shoulder to the back of the adjacent seat and flicked its tongue out at a stain. Molly squirmed in her chair and wondered what those jerks on her ship were doing at that very moment.
After a few minutes of agonizing over Parsona and watching the Wadi explore its environment, a chorus of boos signified the start of the show. Molly leaned forward to glare down through the railing at the rude behavior. As the lights began to dim, she saw several people hurriedly purchasing fruits and vegetables from a vendor. A handful of spectators stood in the aisles, carrying on and making a ruckus.
The only other quietly seated people in the audience besides her and Walter were an older couple in one of the box balconies. Molly strained to get a view of them, but the house lights dimmed, and soon, the entire space was pitch-black.
An electric speaker popped, and then blared with a shriek of feedback. Finally, a voice—deep and loud—boomed through the mostly-empty building: “Ladies! Gentlemen! Lokians! Welcome to another Tuesday performance from Cripple Cat! We regret to inform you, she has made a change in her routine during her recent tour of Lok. The management would like to stress the need to throw early and aim true.”
The speakers clicked and popped again as a button was released somewhere. There was another shrill of feedback as it was pressed once more: “Enjoy the performance!”
As the announcer fell quiet, a new and worse sound took his place: a metallic crash followed by a terrifying wail of vibrating steel. It threw Molly’s spine sideways, then the sound rang out again. And again. Each bang was like an off-key tuning fork sending out sonic tendrils to molest her ears. Through the noise, Molly could just barely hear the screams and boos calling out from below. The poor Wadi jumped from its perch, did a few circles in her lap, then started digging its way under her shirt.
Bang! Screeee! Over and over.
Molly stuck her fingers in her ears, but the horrid sound wormed its way through and just rattled around, trapped inside her skull. The assault on her one sense was so terrifying, it seemed to bleed over to others. She could taste metal. Pops of light burst in her stunned vision, although it was still pitch-black all around her. Even her nose hallucinated somehow, as an electrical burn tickled her nostrils.
The stage lights gradually brightened as the horrendous noise con-tinued; they revealing a lone figure on the stage: a nude Callite, her back turned. At first, Molly couldn’t tell what she was doing. Then she noticed several objects rising and falling in front of the woman. She glanced at Walter and could see his outline huddled and cringing from the awful noise.
They needed to get out of there before they went permanently deaf.
Just as Molly considered an escape from the barrage of awful sounds, the first volley of fruit arced from the crowd and into the puddle of light on stage. Molly watched, horrified, as the raw and rotten foodstuffs splattered across the alien’s bare back. Something like cabbage exploded against her head, and the crowd could be heard whooping over the furious noise. The female Callite, seemingly naked, kept throwing the objects up in the air. Her back, brown and webbed with the lines of interlocking plates, shed the incoming missiles, her muscles rippling like turbulent, muddy water.
Molly pushed on her ears and watched intently. The Wadi finally managed to dig its way under her shirt; it crawled around to the small of her back where it huddled and shivered.
The woman began to turn. Another light came on, illuminating something floating down from above. Molly glanced up and saw a clear bubble descending—and the audience must have noted it as well. The hail of rotten edibles became thick and frantic, most of them missing. The spectators began using both hands, as more objects zoomed through the air at once than there had been people below.
Some of the produce found their target, and as Cat spun around, Molly saw she wasn’t completely nude. She wore a very short apron—almost like a welder’s smock—that just covered her body from her breasts to the top of her thighs. She completed her turn, facing the audience and the hail of edibles, and Molly finally recognized the source of the clamor: two hammers, like small sledges, were being wielded in each hand. The woman swung them in tight circles, knocking the falling objects repeatedly into the air. The things she hit looked like woks, but with the handles removed. She struck them on their flat bottoms with such precision that they rose straight up, never spinning over. She just kept juggling them with noisy violence.
Molly matched each of the objects with their unique brand of auditory pain. All three had their own signature, like merciless handwritten scrawls etched with fingernails on a blackboard. A piece of fruit glanced off one of the woks, sending it wobbling. Molly heard excited whistling from the crowd as Cat fought to stabilize the blaring cone of steel. Meanwhile, the lip of the descending bubble was close to protecting her, so the aim from the unseen firing squad shifted to her bare legs, both of them already flecked with the salad of disgruntled viewers.
Molly felt hope swell in her chest for the tormented performer, glad that Cat had added the shell as some sort of feeble defense. The lip of the inverted bowl finally met the stage, locking inside a round collar and sealing it tight. Residual noise continued to ring in Molly’s ears, but she could tell the source of the painful vibrations had gone away, as she could no longer feel the fabric of her shirt buzzing against her chest. She pulled her fingers out of her ears and worked her jaw, feeling something pop inside her skull.
The Wadi wiggled out of its makeshift cave and crawled up inside her shirt, peering out the collar. Molly leaned forward to take in the scene below as fruit from the audience continued to impact the barrier, sliding down and leaving colorful tracks behind.
Inside the bubble, Cat juggled the woks, each one rising up toward the ceiling of her shield before sinking back down. Without the agonizing noise, Molly could begin to appreciate the physical ordeal taking place. Each hammer looked to weigh a few kilos, and the woks had to be sturdy to take such a beating and put off so much sound.
Cat’s arms, popping with sinewy muscles, were beautiful in motion. They vibrated with each impact, relaxed, then tensed, then vibrated again. The definition in them stood out through her dark, scaly skin, the movement of them reminding Molly that Callites appeared to be made up of hard plates, but they were just as soft and pliable as she, the webbing no different than how her own skin looked on close inspection.
She shifted her gaze to Cat’s legs, where the alien’s larger muscle groups fought to keep her body stable, her torso rotating gracefully through the cycles of the juggling, hips and shoulders weaving in time to a tune Molly could no longer hear. The entire display was a sort of grace moving to the beat of torture, a sensuous expression of pain. Molly studied Cat’s body and her motions intently, finally noticing the two bands encircling the woman’s thighs, the only things she wore besides the smock-like apron.
Movement in the crowd broke Molly’s concentration. She watched as the bored spectators threw the rest of their ammunition toward the dome. The missiles impacted and exploded as the unhappy silhouettes filed toward the exits.
For them, the night’s entertainment was over.
For Molly, it had just begun.
A hum-filled silence ensued. There wasn’t a peep outside Molly’s head, just a dull, residual roar from the earlier explosions of sound. She watched, mesmerized, as Cat slammed the objects up into the air. It took her a moment, lost as she was in the lovely display of dexterity, to realize something truly awful. Something horrifying:
It wasn’t quiet in that bubble.
The shield, Molly finally understood, wasn’t meant to protect Cat from the hurled objects—it existed for the audience’s benefit. It protected Molly and the rest of the spectators from the gods-awful noise.
Inside that shell—alone and unguarded—Cat endured a torment far worse and of greater frequency than the petty strikes hurled from the crowd.
Molly leaned over the railing, her empathy drawing her down inside that dome. She tried to imagine the horror of standing there, of enduring not just the noise, but the confined echoes of that shield. She felt the sickening inability to escape or win reprieve, the anguish of willingly secluding oneself in tight proximity to such violence.
The thought made her want to yell out for it to stop; she wanted to float to the stage and pound on the glass and put an end to it all; she wanted to throw something, anything at whoever was doing this. But the silence, the barrier between her and that agony, even the sheer beauty of Cat’s precise movements, it all completely paralyzed her.
So she continued to watch, transfixed, at the sublime mastery of kinesthetics on display. And without even realizing it, she began to cry. The tears silently streamed down her face as she clutched the railing with white knuckles and watched an event more meaningful and more beautiful and more terrible than her imagination could properly bear.
????
Close by, the old Wadi responded to the tears and sadness. She kept her head tucked beneath the jutting outcrop of her pair-bond’s chin, and she bobbed her head with grief, swaying with the somber scents she could see and smell like columns of smoke. Falling into a deep trance, she forgot even her great and persistent hunger. She forgot her need to feed her brood. She just lost herself in her pair-bond’s emotions—clear and as moving as canyon music. And those emotions stirred something deep inside. Deep, where her pair-bond had triggered other changes by removing her from her lair. Changes she had once fled to the canyon of solitude to never feel again.
As the chemicals and smells of sadness swirled all around her, the Wadi remembered back to long ago. She remembered the arduous, dry, and hot run to the eggless canyon, that place where she could avoid what the male Wadis had done to her. She had made her home in those canyons where offspring were never produced and where the blue hunters rarely came. It had been so long ago, but she was willing to stay there even longer. She had planned on staying forever, hoping to avoid these changes for the rest of her days.
But now they were taking place, and emotions coursed down her scent tongue, traveling like liquid rays of the twin lights to fill her head and heart. They swelled and consumed her near to bursting—even as her body continued to dwindle. Continued to dwindle as whatever she ate and drank was robbed from her, pulled through some sucking void she couldn’t understand, racing off to feed eggs laid in the eggless canyon, which was so impossibly far away that she could no longer taste it. Impossibly far away, but somehow connected to her, nutrients flowing through a corridor that shouldn’t be there.