Max got out of bed, thinking: He’s right. I should be at least disoriented. But I’m not. I have been expecting him.
Especially since the dreams started. And the dreams began a week after he’d taken on the role of Prince Red Mark. He’d named the character himself—there’d been last moment misgivings about the original name chosen by the scripters, and he’d blurted, “How about ‘Prince Red Mark’?” And the producer went for it, one of the whims that shape show business. Four tapings for the first two episodes, and then the dreams commenced. Sometimes he’d dream he was Prince Red Mark; other times a flash of heat lightning; or a ripple of wind, a breeze that could think and feel, swishing through unseeable gardens of invisible blooms … And then the dreams became darker, fiercer, so that he awoke with his fists balled, his eyes wild, sweat cold on his chin. Dreams about griffins and rains of blood and sieges by wretched things. The things that flew, the things with claws.
He’d played Prince Red Mark for seven episodes now. He’d been picked for his athletic build, his thick black hair, and his air of what the PR people called “aristocratic detachment.” Other people called it arrogance.
Max Whitman had found, to his surprise, he hadn’t had to act the role. When he played Prince Red Mark, he was Prince Red Mark. Pure and simple … The set-hands would make fun of him, when they thought he couldn’t hear, because he’d forget to step out of the character between shootings. He’d swagger about the set with his hand on the pommel of his sword, emanating Royal Authority.
This morning he didn’t feel much like Prince Red Mark. He felt sleepy and confused and mildly threatened. He stretched, then turned toward the kitchen, worried by certain sinister noises: claws on glass. Splashings. Wet, slapping sounds. He burst out, “Damn, it got into my aquarium!” He hurried to the kitchen. “Hey—oh, hell. My fish.” The griffin was perched beside the ten-gallon aquarium on the breakfast bar. Three palm-sized damsel fish were gasping, dying on the wet blue-tile floor. The griffin fluttered to the floor, snipped the fish neatly into sections with its beak, and gobbled them just as an eagle would have. The blue tile puddled with red. Max turned away, saddened but not really angry. “Was that necessary?”
“It’s my nature. I was hungry. When we’re bodied, we have to eat. I can’t eat those dead things in your refrigerator. And after some consideration I decided it would be best if I didn’t eat you … Now, let’s go to the meeting. And don’t say, ‘What meeting?’”
“Okay. I won’t.”
“Just take a fast cab to 862 Haven, apartment 17. I’ll meet you on their balcony … wait. Wait. I’m getting a send. They’re telling me— it’s a message for you.” It cocked its head to one side as if listening. “They tell me I must apologize for eating your fish. Apparently you have some unusual level of respect in their circle.” It bent its head. “I apologize. And they say you are to read a letter from ‘Carstairs.’ It’s been in your computer’s mail sorter for two weeks under personal and you keep neglecting to retrieve it. Read it. That’s the send … Well, then …” The griffin, fluttering its wings, hopped into the living room. The French doors opened for it as if slid back by some ghostly hand. It went to the balcony, crouched, then sprang into the air and soared away. He thought he heard it shout something over its shoulder at him: something about Prince Red Mark.
It was a breezy morning, feeling like spring. The sun came and went.
Max stood under the rain shelter in the gridcab station on the roof of his apartment building. The grid was a webwork of metal slats and signal contacts, braced by girders and upheld by the buildings that jutted through the finely woven net like mountaintops through a cloud field. Thousands of wedge-shaped cabs and private gridcars hummed along the grid in as many different directions.
Impatiently, Max once more thumbed the green call button on the signal stanchion. An empty cab, cruising by on automatic pilot, was dispatched by the Uptown area’s traffic computer; it detached from the feverishly interlacing main traffic swarm and arced neatly into the pick-up bay under the rain shelter. Max climbed inside and inserted his Unicard into the cab’s creditor. The small terminal’s screen acknowledged his bank account and asked, “Where to?” Max tapped his destination into the keyboard: the cab’s computer, through the data-feed contacts threaded into the grid, gave the destination to the main computer, which maneuvered the cab from the bay and out onto the grid. You are to read a letter from Carstairs, the griffin had said.
He’d met Carstairs at a convention of fantasy fans. Carstairs had hinted he was doing “some rather esoteric research” for Duke University’s parapsychology lab. Carstairs had made Max nervous—he could feel the man following him, watching him, wherever he went in the convention hotel. So he’d deliberately ignored the message. But he hadn’t gotten around to deleting it.
As the cab flashed across the city, weaving in and out of the peaks of skyscrapers, over the narrow parks that had taken the place of the Avenue, Max punched a request to connect to his home computer. The cab charged his bank account again, tied him in, and he asked his system to print out a copy of the email from Carstairs. He scanned the message, focusing first on: “… when I saw you at the convention I knew the Hidden Race had chosen to favor you. They were there, standing at your elbow, invisible to you—invisible to me too, except in certain lights, and when I concentrate all my training on looking …” Max shivered, and thought: A maniac. But—the griffin had been real.