“That’s because you don’t want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my armor.”
The Baxter Empire rose into the dusty sky out of the ruins, flattening all of us to the earth with the gale of its ascent. A dismembered monkey lay on the ground where my mother had been standing, and I wondered if this was my brother. Then the monkey changed into Jason, and he wasn’t dismembered, and he said to me, “Hallo, Medea. I put a homing device into a peacock. Wasn’t that fun?”
I woke, and it was getting light. Silver was in the shower, I could hear the cascade of water. I lay and looked at the blue sky of our ceiling as it came clear, and the clouds and the birds and the rainbow. I let the tears go on rolling out of my eyes. I’d never see this ceiling again.
Along with the other things, I’d have to leave my peacock jacket behind too. Were peacocks cursed birds? My mother’s dress, Egyptia’s play, my jacket. I’d have to leave the dress I’d worn under the jacket, too, the dress I’d worn that night we met Jason and Medea as we came off the bridge. I recalled how Jason brushed against me as he ran away. Maybe to run away like that was partly deliberate. They were both good pickpockets, excellent kleptomaniacs—it would have been easy for either of them to slip something adhesive into the fabric. But at two-thirty this morning I’d turned the clothing of that night inside out, and found nothing. Maybe the gadget had fallen out, which could explain how they’d almost traced me but not quite. The thing might have been lying about somewhere in the vicinity, misleading them. On the other hand the gadget might be so cunning that it was invisible to me, but still lodged, and Jason’s failure to get to me due only to some weakness in the device which, given time, he could correct. The micro-magnet in Clovis’s seance glass was almost invisible, and highly accurate, and Jason had worked on that a year ago. They must have sat there by the bridge, just waiting for someone interesting to come along that they could bug, and who should appear but idiotic Jane.
Whatever else, I wouldn’t risk taking that clothing with me. I’d even leave my boots worn that night—I had another shabby, fascinating green pair—I’d even leave my lingerie. I knew the device couldn’t have gone that deep, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
When Silver came out of the shower, I got up, and, very businesslike, used it. I allowed myself only three minutes to lie under the spray and cry at the crimson ceiling and the blue walls and the aeronautic whale.
Dressed, we left the portion of rent money, and the last can of Keep-Kold-Kitty-Meat on the brass bed. Silver wrote the caretaker a note saying a friend was offering us work in a drama in the east. We’d already decided by then to go westward. We’d even talked about Paris, for the future.
I’d packed our clothes into various cloth bags, some of the shawls from the bed, towels, oddments, and, in some curious superstitious urge, the three then currently complete chapters of this. I think I had the notion of putting on our escape as an addendum to the history. Or just of keeping a journal, like lady travelers of old.
Silver carried all the bags and his guitar. I had been entrusted with the blue and gold umbrella.
A little before nine, we sneaked out of the building. The white cat was jauntily stalking its shadow in the street, and ran over to meet us. I nearly suffocated it, holding back my tears.
“If only we could take her with us.”
“The old man needs her more than we do. He’s very fond of her.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We’ll buy a cat.”
“Can we?”
“We might even train it to sing.”
A tear fell, despite my efforts, on the cat’s nose, and it sprang away in disgust, awarding me an accidental parting claw on the wrist.
“There you are,” he said. “A farewell present.”
We planned to walk into the center of the city. To get a cab from this area to the outskirts was almost impossible.
As we turned into the boulevard, I saw our estimation of the quake had been premature.
Buckled and humped like a child’s maltreated nondurable toy, the elevated dominated the air and, in surging over, had made havoc of the street below. As I looked at it, I remembered the awful creaking and squealing noises I had heard and then put down to the shifting girders. Being downtown, not a lot was being done about the elevated, though a couple of private demolition vans were cruising about. The vehicular road, however, was closed.
We bought doughnuts at one of the stalls that had missed the eruption of the rusty tracks. The woman stared at us through the steam of her urn.
“Jack’s lost all his glass. All smashed.”
We told her we were sorry, and drank tea and went on.
The quake had not been so very violent in itself, but hitting those areas still weakened and faulted by previous tremors, had taken its toll. It seemed to have come back to collect dues missed twenty years before.
At the first intersection, we came on the confusion that the diversion from the road on the boulevard had caused, jams of vehicles hooting vilely and pointlessly at each other like demented beasts. Farther on, a group of earlier tremor-wrecks twenty-five stories high had given up and collapsed across the street; this road, too, was closed, and more pandemonium had resulted.
As we neared the Arbors, we ourselves were diverted by robot patrols into side streets and alleys. A line of cars had crashed, one after the other, off a fly-over, when it shifted like a sail in the wind.
“This is horrible,” I said inanely.
“Look at that building,” he said.
I looked. There seemed nothing wrong with it. It only occurred to me ten minutes later he’d been directing my eyes away from something lying in the gutter, something I’d only taken for a blown-away bag…