Ballroom of the Skies

Ten

Mindful of Karen’s last warning, he had the driver stop two blocks from the above-ground lobby of the apartment dwelling where Miguel lived. He gave the man the thousand-rupee note, returned his gun. The man gave him a surly nod, made a screeching U-turn, reckless of his precious tires, drive back downtown, single red eye blinking as the rough road surface joggled a loose connection.

Dake moved with instinctive animal caution, staying on the darker side of the street, stepping lightly and quickly through patches of faint radiance. The above-ground lobby was lighted. He could see the head of the desk clerk bent over a book on the high desk. The soft light of the lobby made a semicircle of radiance that reached almost to the midpoint of the road.

Dake waited for a time in the shadows, oddly restless, and then walked out boldly, heading directly across the street for the doors. His heels were loud on the asphalt. He heard a faint scuffing noise in the shadows behind him and to his left. He did not turn, but lengthened his stride. The area of light was two steps away. He took another long stride and was caught there, motionless. Something had clamped down on volition, something that held him as though, in an instant, he had been turned to ice, or stone. He could not change even the direction of his sight. The clerk was just off his center of vision. He saw the head lift abruptly. He moved then, taking a long step backward with infinite unwilled stealth. Another step.

Miguel Larner appeared suddenly, just inside the doors. Dake had not seen where he had come from, or how. The man wore a pair of florid pajamas. He stood very still. A stranger appeared behind him, another beside him, and a tall woman appeared over near the desk. The five persons inside the bright lobby stood and watched him. They were fifty feet away. He could see no expression on their faces, but their eyes seemed bright, feral. He was aware of how alien they were. They emanated a tangible coldness.

Something behind him was frightened. He could taste fright that nibbled at the edges of his mind. A hard compression of force erupted into his brain. It sucked him forward, running with a vast awkwardness, a shamble-legged, slack-armed lunge that took him stumbling across the sidewalk, diving for the doors that flicked open barely in time, to let him slide and roll on the slick floor, to thud against the base of the desk as the woman stepped lightly out of the way. He sat up. They had all moved closer to the door. They filed out and stood in a row on the sidewalk. On the far side of the street something flounced and rolled and made guttural sounds in the darkness. They all came back in. Miguel Larner came over to Dake. His eyes were vast and hung in pure velvet blackness, unsupported. There was nothing else in the world but the eyes of Miguel Larner. Little fingers pried under the edge of Dake’s soul and flipped him. He fell off the edge into blackness.

It was a cloudless spring morning by Miguel’s dioramic pool. Dake shut his eyes again. He remembered a time long ago. Eight years old. He had seen the overhead lights of the operating room. Then heard a hollow echoing voice in his head, saying, as though in a long tunnel, “mmmm-gas! mmmmm-gas! mmmmm-GAS!”

And then the bleary awakening — the over-large faces of his parents looking down at him on the bed — big faces suspended at odd angles. “How do you feel?” A voice that echoed down a long empty tunnel.

He opened his eyes again. He was on a gay beach chair by the pool. Miguel and a stranger looked at him with that cold sobriety, that extra-human speculation he had seen in the lobby — how long ago? A year, or a minute.

Miguel’s lips moved. “Mr. Lorin. Mr. Merman.”

“How do you do.” Dake wanted to let loose crazy laughter at the quaintness of the formality. He trapped the laughter in his throat.

Merman had a boy’s face, an old man’s eyes.

“You did well,” Miguel said, “to get in range of Johnny. Otherwise Karen’s rather pathetic little exhibition of stubbornness would have been quite pointless. They’ve brought her in. She wants to see you. I’ll call her. Don’t speak to her.”

No answer seemed necessary. Miguel gave Merman a quick sharp look and nodded. Dake had the idea they were communicating with each other. Karen came out to the pool, stood on the apron at the far side of the pool and looked at Dake. He was shocked at the change in her. Her face was wan and pinched, and her eyes were enormous. Her mouth had a trembling, old-lady uncertainty about it, and her fingers plucked at the edges of her grubby skirt. Two things seemed mingled inextricably in her eyes. A keen, warm, personal interest in him, and also a look of confused dullness — the look sometimes seen in the eyes of a dog beaten once too often.

Miguel nodded at her and she turned and left, walking aimlessly, shaking her head, saying something to herself that Dake could not understand.

“What happened to her?” Dake asked.

“I’ll tell you, but just remember it, don’t try to understand it. Later... if you are more than I think you are, understanding will catch up with you. Remember this. Two screens badly torn. The third screen bruised. She’ll be a long time healing, relearning, readjusting. She’ll be a long time here, Dake Lorin.”

“What is this all about?” Dake asked. He had a sense of futility as he asked the question. Miguel Larner went over to the pool, sat and dangled his legs in the water, his bare brown back toward Dake. Dake looked toward the young-old face of Merman. His eyes veered suddenly toward something that had moved on the stones of the terrace. A tiny column of little naked savage figures snake-danced their way toward his ankles. Four-inch figures with animal faces. Their tiny cries were like the cries of insects. He instinctively snatched his feet up into the chair. They swarmed up the chair legs.

The memory of Karen’s voice came to him across present horror. “You’re expected to go mad, my friend. Just keep remembering that. And don’t.”

He shut his eyes and slowly lowered his feet to the floor. He felt them running across his clothing, plucking at him, prodding, pinching. They clambered up his chest, up his face, entangled tiny fists in his hair and swung themselves up. He opened his eyes and he was in utter blackness. He was naked. A long cold something coiled its way slowly across his foot. He set his teeth in his lower lip and did not cry out or move. He fell to hot bright yellow sand. Fat spiders skittered across the sand. He looked more closely and saw that they were dismembered human hands, standing tall and agile on plump fingers, circling him with quick darts of movement. Two of them struggled toward him, dragging something, dragging, he saw, Karen’s head, the spider fingers scrubbling in the sand with the effort. A shadow crossed him. He turned and looked up, squinting at a featureless sky. Something hung there. A figure so huge that it reduced him to the size of an insect. A rope encircled its neck, extending out of sight into the sky. The huge figure turned slowly. He looked up into the purpling bloated face of his father. He turned, ready to run whooping through all the yellow sand of eternity, ready to run with bulged eyes until blood burst his throat. He dropped to his knees on the sand. He covered his eyes. He sensed the ancient brain scar, felt it swell and tear slightly and then knit itself, fiber clasping fiber, compacting into strength. He stood up and turned and looked calmly up at the vast naked face. Spiders scuttled off into the sand waste. Coils moved off into darkness. The bitter little insect squeakings faded into an utter silence.

Miguel’s bare brown back appeared and the sand faded around it, faded into terrace and pool and the still spring morning of the diorama.

Miguel turned and looked at him over the brown shoulder, smiled. “It seems I must be proven wrong occasionally.”

“I’ll never break,” Dake said, not knowing why he had selected those words.

“Merman will show you the way.”

He followed Merman. The rock slid aside. The glowing tunnel shafted down through bedrock. Three cubes of a fatty gray that was no color at all stood in a rough cavern hollowed out of the rock. The radiance in the cavern had an almost radioactive look.

Merman turned to Dake. The boyish lips did not move. “You are going to a place where you will be trained. You will accept training eagerly, because you want to turn it against us. That is to be expected. You wonder what we are. You will not learn that until you are skilled.”

An orifice slit opened in the side of one of the ten-foot cubes. He edged through the opening. The cube, except for a small triple row of studs near the opening, was featureless. Merman reached through the opening, touched a stud, stepped back quickly. The slit closed. Light came through the cube walls. He looked at Merman as though looking through water. Long ago, in his mother’s kitchen, he had delighted in using an object called an egg slicer. Place a hardboiled egg in the cupped place, and pull the handle down slowly. Tiny wires sliced through the egg.

This was that egg slicer, and it happened in the space of a tenth of a heartbeat. A billion wires. Each one sliced neatly through his body. The pain Karen had given him was, by comparison, a tiny pinch, a nip of the flesh.

And the pain was gone, the orifice partially open. His one desire was to get out of that cube as quickly as humanly possible. He was caught in the yielding slit for a moment, and then tumbled free, thinking he was on the floor of the cavern. A sky of such a pallid blue as to be almost white burned overhead, deepening in color toward the horizons. He was on hands and knees on a featureless metallic plain. Around him was a matrix of the gray cubes arranged in painfully perfect geometric design, all joined by gleaming metal tubes. His cube was joined to its neighbors, as were the others. He stood up, and his feet left the metallic surface in an awkward little jump. Here and there cubes were missing from the pattern, leaving the tube ends raw and naked. It was oddly disturbing to see the design incomplete, as though looking at a lovely woman with several front teeth missing.

Low against the horizon off to his right two small moons hung clear in the sky, one slightly larger than the other. The sun overhead had a redness about it that altered the shadows of the cubes and tubes, giving them a burned look.

Far across the metallic plain rose the gigantic trees of childhood, and near the bases of them, dwarfed by their size, he could see the low black buildings to which he must walk. He knew he had to go there. He did not know how he knew. It had the inevitability of a dream compulsion. Strangely, he felt acceptance in him. This was not his world. This was not his planet or his system. He knew that if night came he would see unthinkable constellations. He threaded his way through the geometric maze of cubes, stepping over the low tubes that joined them. He came to the open plain and walked toward the buildings. He tried to hurry and found that the best pace was a long gliding step. There was no rebellion, no questioning of reality. He was here and it was very necessary to get to the black buildings, and very necessary to learn what had to be learned, and acquire the skills that must be acquired. There would be only one chance.

They came out of the buildings and he was but mildly aware of his own odd lack of curiosity about them. There was merely a sense that some of them were learning, as he would learn, and some of them taught, and some of them ran the machines for teaching.

All of them, men and women, and the odd-looking non-men, and non-woman, wore only heavy skirt-like garments that extended to mid-thigh. They chattered in strange tongues, and some spoke awkward English, and some spoke good English. He was herded quickly into a room, stripped, scorched with a harsh spray of some astringent liquid, given a garment and hurried along into another place where he was measured by a pair of violet-eyed non-women, whose faces were subtly wrong, whose movements were curiously articulated in a quite unexpected fashion. He knew, somehow, that it was measurement that they did. As they swung the little burring heads of the glowing equipment down over his body, as he felt the chitter and nibbling, and saw the smooth gray plates dropping into the trough near the wall, he sensed that every grain, fiber and atom of him was being measured and remembered and recorded. He cooperated like an automaton. Like a man who has gone to the same barber for so many years that he has learned to move his head to exactly the right angle at exactly the right time. He suffered the wheel and blackout of the ribbands that encircled his head, the electronic cluckings of the little plates that sucked against his temples.

Cleaned and dressed and measured and recorded and remembered, he was sent alone down a corridor. He turned in at an open doorway, knowing that it was the right doorway. The door banged down behind him like a guillotine, and automatonism left him at once. He guessed that it was a feeling of suddenly being released from post-hypnotic influence. There was the same fear, the same uncertainty.

The girl stared at him. She had dark tangled hair, broken fingernails, a hard bold bright light in her eyes. Her garment was a livid orange that went well with the slender brown of her dusky body. The room walls were cocoa brown, rounded at the corners, featureless. There was light, without visible light source.

She spoke to him in a harsh tongue, her voice rising at the end of the phrase in a question.

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.” She tried again, slowly. He shrugged. She made an obscene gesture with her hands, spat on the floor toward his feet, turned her back.

He stared at the simple furnishings of the sealed room, the rigid cots, the two chairs, the single table.

“You have been placed together because you cannot understand each other’s language.”

The voice seemed to have its origin inside his head. He saw the girl wheel, look for the source of the voice, and he knew that she heard it too.

“This room is so constructed that it aids the projection and reception of thought. When you have learned to give your thoughts to each other, you will find that together you can open the door.”

The voice stopped. They looked speculatively at each other. He looked into her eyes and tried to will her to go to the table and sit at one of the chairs. He made the command clear in his mind. She was staring hard at him. She suddenly shrugged and turned away, and he guessed that she had been trying to will some message into his brain. He had neither projected nor received. It was going to be far more difficult than he had imagined. He tried to think of some simple way they could experiment.

At last he took her arm and pulled her over to one of the chairs. She sat down, scowling at him, obviously disliking being touched. He sat in the other chair so that they faced each other across the table. He bit off a sizable fragment of fingernail, showed it to her. She looked puzzled. He put his hands behind him, transferred it to his left hand, and then placed both fists on the table.

“Left,” he thought. “Left hand.”

She reached out and tentatively touched his left hand. He showed her the bit of nail and she beamed at him, clapped her hands. Then, after many more attempts, they both became depressed. She was correct six out of ten times, then seven out of twelve, and then eleven out of twenty. He tried each time to push the thought into her mind. It was much like being under water and trying to push against a huge stone. One could kick weakly, but there was no pivot place. No place to brace the feet. No way to put force behind the effort.

He was pleased to see that she had a determination and tenacity that matched his own. Her small jaw was set hard with the effort. She took the fragment of nail and tried. He strained to hear her thoughts, found that he was only guessing, operating solely on hunches. They worked at it with stubborn energy until they were exhausted. His despair was transformed into anger at her. He could not succeed because they had given him this fool girl. Anyone else but this ignorant wench with the hot eyes and the gypsy manners.

He looked into her dark eyes and glowered at her. He backed slowly within his mind until he had a place where he could seem to brace himself. As though he had his shoulders against a thin hard membrane an inch in back of his eyes.

You’re too stupid.

Her hard brown hand flashed and caught him across the mouth. She half stood up with blazing eyes and then slowly sank back into the chair, looking a bit awed.

He found the same place within his mind to brace himself and tried this time, forcibly, yet without anger. Nod your head if you can understand me.

She nodded her head violently, white teeth gleaming in the dusky face.

Stand up and then sit down again. She obeyed like a chastened child, demure and obedient. He found that even that short practice enabled him to do it with more ease.

You must learn, too. I found it by accident. He touched his temple. Imagine a thin hard wall in here. You must back against it to... be braced. And then you must... throw your thought from that position, thinking of each word.

She frowned at him. She raised her eyebrows in question.

I heard nothing. Try again.

There was a black flame in the depths of her eyes. You are a big arrogant clown.

I got that clearly. Try again.

She flushed. It was anger. Anger made it easier.

I should have told you that. How did you come here?

A man took me to a large villa. There were other men. I saw frightful visions. They tortured my mind. I was put in a big gray box. It brought me here.

Do you know why you are here?

I am aware that there are things which must be learned. This is one of them. There will be others. This way of talking makes one weary. There is the matter of the door. It was said to us that together we could open it. Yet there is no latch.

When I snap my fingers we will both speak to the door the way we have spoken to each other, as strongly as possible, saying but one word. Open.

They both looked toward the door. He snapped his fingers. He could feel her projected thought blending with his own. The door slid slowly up out of sight into the groove overhead.

She reached the door first, ran through, and then turned and walked, docile and mild, down the corridor.

As soon as he reached the corridor, he felt the automaton will overcome his own. It turned him in the opposite direction.

A huge man who reminded him of a brown bear stepped out of a doorway to bar the hallway.

My congratulations. That was very rapid. You are a latent. Some have remained in that room for a thousand hours. Project to me. It is called para-voice.

Dake found it much harder to manage outside the room. The rigidity against which he tried to brace himself was softer, more yielding.

It was easier in the room.

“It always is. But I could receive you. We will use normal voice now. Para-voice is tiring. You will be given practice hours from time to time.”

The big man took Dake’s arm. Dake willed himself to pull away, but could not. He allowed himself to be led down the corridor.

“This place is called Training T. I have been here for twice your lifetime. It is work that pleases me best. Now we have our little surprise for you. The technicians found your best memory, my boy. It is ready now. You have not slept in years, you know. Not really slept. Too much conflict in your mind. Here you must sleep. Drugs are not effective. Only true sleep will heal your mind, my boy.”

They came to a big door that was oddly familiar, ringing a tiny chime in the back of his weary mind.

The big brown man turned the old-fashioned knob and the door swung inward, as Dake had known it would. Dake walked into his room and the man closed the door softly behind him.

It was his room. His bed. The lamp was on over his bed. It had been a plain parchment shade, and one day he had found the silhouette of a sailing ship in a magazine. His mother had helped him cut out the hard parts. The room was in perfect scale to him. Perfect scale for an eight-year-old boy. Familiar pattern of the rag rug. The stain where he had spilled the grape juice. Place where he had crayoned the wall through the bars of the crib. No crib now. The big soft bed, with the pillows starched and white. The bed was turned down, and the flannel pajamas were laid out, where Mother always put them. Faded blue pajamas with a faint white stripe. Slippers with the heels all broken down and a lot of the lamb’s wool worn off.

He undressed and put his clothes on the same chair as always and put on the pajamas and pulled the string tight at his waist and tied it. He shoved his feet into the slippers and went through the other door to the bathroom. He had to reach high to get his battered toothbrush with the chipped pink handle. The big tub had feet like white claws that clasped white porcelain spheres. Those tub feet had always fascinated him. He scrubbed his knuckles because there probably wouldn’t be much time in the morning before school. The mirror was too high. He couldn’t see his face unless he pulled the stool over and stood on it. But he was too sleepy for the interesting game of making horrid faces at yourself. The worst one was when you put your fingers in the corners of your mouth and pulled.

He padded back into his bedroom, closing the bathroom door behind him. He looked at his books and ran his fingers over the backs of the bindings. He opened a cigar box and looked at the shells he’d collected at Marblehead last summer. He turned out the light and went over to the window and opened it. He knelt for a time with his chin on the sill and looked out. Boston lighted the sky. He could see the familiar single streetlight across the backyards. It was haloed with soft snow. Snow was falling in Chelsea, sticking to the bare branches of the big elm in the back yard.

Somebody in the neighborhood had Christmas carols on the radio. He wondered if he’d get the bike. They said it was too dangerous in the street, and the police wouldn’t let you ride on the sidewalk. Heck, you could be careful, couldn’t you?

He crossed the dark room, knelt for the barest minimum of prayer, and scrambled up between the crisp sheets, nestling down, pulling the blankets up over him. A red bike. Joey’s was blue.

He yawned and turned onto his side, warm and certain in the knowledge that after he was asleep his mother would look in, tuck the blankets in, kiss him. He could hear Daddy down in the kitchen with some of his friends. He heard the low voices and then the rich explosion of baritone laughter, suddenly hushed. He guessed Mother was telling them not to make so much noise.

He banged at the pillow, turned onto his other side, and gently coasted down the long velvet slope on the magical red bike, into the deep sweet shadows of sleep.

He came vaguely awake when she came in, and he stirred at the touch of her lips. “You think I’ll get it?”

“Get what, dear?”

Irritation at such density. “The bike. The red bike.”

“We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? Now go to sleep, dear.”

Firm hand fixing the blankets. He was faintly aware of the tallness of her standing over him, the faint sweet scent of her. The floor creaked as she crossed to the window, closed it a little. Somewhere people were laughing in the night. She closed his door behind her as she left the room. She hummed to herself as she headed toward the stairs.