The path-manager seemed not to hear her and honked the horn several times. The peculiar animals backed off a bit, tails curled under. These wawi would fade back, stop for a moment, then mince forward again, each dog following a sort of ragged orbit around the area in front of the vehicle. Astrid watched, speechless. The pack structure seemed to disperse and re-form in a shaggy cadence, contracting, expanding, contracting, expanding, breathing out England’s air through equatorial lungs.
“I don’t know about wawi,” said the path-manager. “Don’t know English word.” He sounded irritated. Astrid had got him into something over his head.
“Please, keep driving,” said Astrid. She could see Atwell’s dim form poised in her glider. Atwell wasn’t visibly reacting to the horn or the headlamps, and this by itself alarmed Astrid.
She said to the path-manager, “Don’t stop here, if you don’t mind, sir. Pull up a bit, please.”
The path-manager, sounding far away, said, “I don’t like wawi. They are trouble. That’s problem.” The path-manager eased the cab forward slowly, and the animals roved around it for a moment or two, then passed into the night, busy muscles pulling along their dog skeletons like restless little hate-cages on paws.
Astrid got out of the cab. She felt very nervous again. She unlocked two fresh ￡50 Optimatrix holograms for the path-manager, twice the fare—but it didn’t seem much to her, considering. The man frowned upon seeing the floaty red holograms. He pinched them up from Astrid’s hand and muttered a few words in a language Astrid didn’t recognize, much less understand. For a moment, he sniffed at Astrid’s hand (the old counterfeit holograms left a distinctive tomato-leaf scent on the skin), and said, “I like OptiCredits—the holograms cost two pounds in fees, ma’am.” The path-manager pushed the swirling red holograms into his OptiCredit reader. “But I take.” His window popped shut.
He motored away in reverse, the broken-fan sound audible even after the cabcab’s headlamps vanished into the city.
oliver cromwell’s got a jumbie, too
WHEN ASTRID GOT TO PC ATWELL, THE YOUNGER constable hesitated a bit before switching off the pandaglider’s imagiglass windows. This peeved Astrid, a little more than it ought.
“Come on, Atwell. We haven’t all bloody night, have we?”
Astrid knew she was being cruel and highhanded, especially since she’d so delayed responding to the initial orange-freq, but there was a prowling anger in her again after the brief respite in the cab. Cigarette smoke and the scent of crushed almonds poured from the pandaglider. Atwell wore a dazed expression that suggested to Astrid she’d had a tough time waiting alone. A sheen of perspiration covered her forehead. Atwell didn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t look at Astrid. She merely held her arms crossed, rubbing them as if cold.
“Didn’t you see us? Behind you? Smoking, Atwell?”
“I know,” said Atwell. “I just, I—”
“I saw your little jackal dogs,” Astrid interjected. “You called them in?”
“Yes, ma’am. At least half a dozen different units, on their way.” The younger constable leaned forward in her seat for a moment, took a deep, fretful breath.
“Jesus, I’m sorry, Atwell. I am sorry. I’m . . . well, I’ve been. Things aren’t good. You all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She found herself feeling worried about Atwell, and about her own apparent incapacity to help. She wondered whether one of the new viruses might have Atwell.
“You’d said there were some people about, too, right?” asked Astrid. “They’re always the most difficult animals, aren’t they?”
“Yes, some autoreporters—I’ve left them alone, ma’am.” Atwell was finally looking up at her. There remained an odd languor in how she moved, with liquidy arms and a heavy-necked torpor, and she coughed a few times.
“Are you ill?”
“Maybe,” said Atwell.
She wondered whether Atwell herself might be Flōting, though she didn’t have quite the right signs of that.
Atwell said, “Two souls—inside the autonewsmedia glider-truck.”
“Good. They’re safe in there.” Astrid stood on tiptoes for a moment and peered across the glider’s roof. Powerful limbs of plane trees, festooned with bunches of white blossoms, bowered the area where she and the constable spoke. Distant city lights twinkled through the branches. “I would have thought you’ve done just about all you can. All right?”
“Yes, ma’am. I do hope. And there was that strange man I mentioned.” She hacked in a wheezy cough again; she was careful to turn away and cover her mouth. “But I—I had to decide on my own what to do—and I decided not to give chase.”
“Never,” said Astrid. “That wouldn’t have been too clever, I would’ve thought.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Astrid asked, “What did this . . . this funny chap . . . what did he look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, ma’am. Like a crazy man. A long face. He had ginger hair sticking up all over, like his head was going in twenty different directions at once.”