Bone Dance

2.0: A place for everything, and everything wired in place

Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that’s out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don’t have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.

The beauty of the Night Fair was that no matter how one defined happiness at a given moment, it was usually available there. The price was negotiable, within limits. That’s why the Night Fair endured: because we never stop needing something to make us happy.

The sun had set in a smear of indigo and orange when I reached that chainlink border. I twined my fingers in the fabric of the fence and felt bits of rust grind away under my grip. I was in my own country again. Here there were no gods but the Deal, no spooks but those that could be conjured for money at the buyer’s request. I was safe from Sherrea’s riding spirits, if not my own.

I traveled the fence line to the nearest of the three gates and found it open. The Night Fair was alive from sunset to full dawn. At any other time it was locked and silent, and no one climbed the fence.

What is that? she’d asked, and, A market, I’d told her. And an ocean is a large body of water, and hearts pump blood. The subtleties are lost.

What the Night Fair had been before I knew it, I couldn’t say. Now it was ten blocks of the City, in various states of repair. There were places where buildings had been knocked down or burnt away, and in those cavities and in the streets were the market and carnival places, the booths, the games of skill and chance, the food and drink vendors, the rides, the freak shows. For less easily granted wishes, one had to look to the buildings. There was no directory, no skyway map, no Guide to Retailers. If one wanted something in the buildings, one had to want it enough to go looking. I was as confident of the Night Fair as any of its patrons, but I went carefully when I left the streets.

I was so hungry I felt transparent, so thirsty that my own saliva rasped in my throat. But that was a state I could change, with a little currency. I could trudge to the other side of the Fair — but that was a long trudge. Besides, I wanted to feel the Deal in action. I had enough concentration left to do a little magic, if I could spot someone who’d shell out for it.

The Fair was half-asleep, so early in the evening; some of the stands were empty, and the ones that weren’t were gaudy islands without their proper context. The smell of cooking-oil lamps seemed strong without the stronger smells of food and fuel and humanity to bury it. But in a courtyard I found the kind of thing I was looking for, or in this case, listening for. A fat Oriental kid was running a duckshoot, and trying to catch custom with the City-run all-dance broadcast channel playing through an old Carvin PA speaker. Every bass note had the crunchy sound of a ripped speaker cone.

He looked hopeful when I approached, less so when I pointed to the speaker and said, “Sounds bad.”

His mouth turned down at the corners. “Sounds okay to me.”

“Ah. I guess you won’t want it fixed if there’s nothing wrong with it.” I half turned away.

“Why do you say it sounds bad?” he asked quickly, and I knew it was going to be all right. The passage of arms was begun.

“Well, last time I heard that jam, the guy playing the giant piece of cellophane wasn’t with them.”

“You mean that little noise?” He shrugged, and rather well, too. “It ain’t much. Nobody but an audiofreak’d notice.”

“Must be an audiofreak convention in town. People are crossing to the other side of the street.”

He scowled. No patience. With more patience, he could have been good at this. “What would it take to fix a little thing like that?”

“The right person, and twenty hard bucks.” The kid spit to his left. A ward against liars. “Hell, I could get another whole speaker for twenty.”

“You couldn’t get one of those for less than a hundred, and you’d have to find one first. And you know it.” Oh, he could have gotten something for twenty bucks. Maybe even that speaker, from someone who didn’t appreciate its solid, deep-throated sweetness.

“Five,” he said, one syllable of pure bravado. “Soft.”

“Kid,” I said, smiling kindly and leaning on the counter between the popguns, “have you ever heard the joke about the plumber and the little teeny hammer?” He was beaten. I could tell by his eyes. “Tapping, fifty cents; knowing where to tap, fifty dollars? Now, because I always enjoy telling a joke, I’ll give you a deal: fifteen, soft.” I should have held out for ten hard, but visions of carbohydrates were beginning to dance in front of my eyes.

It was a little tougher job than the plumber had. But I got the grille off and the cone out, and I carried a few things in my pockets that nobody else would have recognized as valuable. A roll of heat-shrink fiber tape, for instance; good for strain relief on cords, for covering spliced wire, and for mending tears in any stretched material. I covered the rip in the cone with a narrow piece and borrowed matches from the kid to shrink it tight. The speaker was not as good as new; one more fine and irreplaceable thing had slipped out of the world, and the world, as usual, hadn’t noticed. But a normal human being could now listen to it with teeth unclenched. At least, if said party liked City broadcast.

I wandered off with a light head, a sense of duty done, and fifteen folding City-made dollars. The first food vendor I came upon did Chinese. After six pot-stickers and three cups of lemon-balm tea, I was able to see the world with less prejudice. After another block, a few smoked pork ribs, and a skewer of batter-fried vegetables, my sense of proportion was restored. I tallied the day’s accomplishments. Today, after an impressively bad start, I had saved the life of one twelve-inch speaker cone, fed myself, and got all the way to Sherrea’s under my own (I granted myself some poetic exaggeration) power.

Where I’d been made no wiser, and been told besides to start shoveling or don’t show my face again. A fine friendly gesture. How was I to get my ordure in order if she couldn’t even give me useful clues? My theories about her mind reading were a little shaken, too; I refused to believe that the afternoon’s display of amateur theatricals had come out of my head.

In the deep, gritty voice that, looking back, I couldn’t call male or female: That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you. I wasn’t bound. That would have been flying in the face of good sense, and I tried not to do that. Surely the pure voice of my subconscious would have a better handle on me than that. Sherrea — or her friend — seemed to declare that sacrifice was the road to salvation; but I wanted to fix a busted head, not a rotten soul.

But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords. The card with the dark-haired figure on the sand, the upright swords.

I noticed that I had finished eating; or at least, I didn’t seem to want any more.

By then, the joint was, as they say, jumping. Money, bright and folding, hard and soft, was running in its well-worn channels. Objects and services were passing from one hand to another, and by that alchemy were turned to gold, purifying with each transaction. The streets fizzed like charged water with noise, motion, and change. Here before me was the familiar exercise of my faith, the Deal. The exchange was only its sacrament, the symbol of its larger principles. Nothing Is Free. One way or another, you will pay your debts; better you should arrange the method of payment yourself.

This was what the woman on the tri-wheeler had blasphemed against, and why I feared her. Because she didn’t know the Deal.

The Odeon was open. Under its optimistic, badly lettered sign, block-printed posters taped to the painted-over shop windows promised showings of The Lady Vanishes. I dropped my gaze to the doorway where Huey was sitting in his folding chair, taking tickets, and I shook my head and grinned at him. He rolled his eyes. This was shorthand for (in my case), “Huey, I happen to know that’s a bad third-generation dub of the lousy non-Hitchcock remake that you’re going to show on your crummy nineteen-inch monitor with a misaligned yoke and out-of-whack color,” and (in his case), “So what? You don’t come to no storefront vid parlor, anyhow.” This is a conversation one only needs to have once; after that, it reels out again on fast forward whenever necessary, without further rehearsal.

In front of the Odeon’s shabby blandishments, a herd of nightbabies clumped like a blood clot in the vein of the sidewalk. They weren’t going in, oo dear meee, nooo. Only the crawlers do vid parlors. But it’s sooo Deep ambie, y’knoow?

They were in High Savage, by which I decided they were from the greenkraals at the City’s edge. The tide was going out on Savage; in the towers, Rags was the waxing mode. The nearest nightbaby swayed out in front of me as I came closer. She had a mud-painted face, multicolored mud hair, and an epoxy bone in her nose — or a real one, maybe, but that was considered gauche in some circles.

“Ooo, loook! It’s a preeecious bit of street-meat! Let’s take it hooome and waaash it, and see what it iiis.”

That provoked a unison giggle from the group. I’d probably sold things to their parents. “Cinder in your eye,” I said, held up my palm, and blew across it at her face. She dodged, and I laughed.

She gave me a quick, narrow-eyed look — wondering if she’d been had? She couldn’t have been sure. The blood of the Horsemen had trickled over the continent — still did, though the Horsemen were dead. And where that blood was, where those genes came to rest, a skill might sprout: Sherrea’s mind reading; the placing of a nonexistent cinder in someone’s eye. But I had no inheritance from the wicked riders of the mind.

The mud furrowed and cracked around her eyes as she stared at me. Light reflected into her face for a moment, and I saw that those eyes were a peculiar flat, hard gray. She seemed older than I’d first thought, bones planed with years. “Use it while you can, honey,” she murmured, so angry she forgot to drool over her vowels. I felt her watching me as I walked away.

I passed Banana Sam’s Beer Garden on my way up-Fair, and heard a familiar half whistle, half call, high-low-high. And Cassidy’s voice: “Little bird! Keeper of the fire! Come drink with meeeeee!”

He was already low in his chair, flushed and untidy. His wide eyes sank into their bruised-looking sockets like clams dug into the sand, and the bones below them lurched up against the skin as if to counterbalance. Frail strands of bleached gold hair had slid out of his queue and fallen around his face and ears. The pitcher in front of him had maybe an inch and a half left in it.

Resigned, I came to his table. “What’s this ‘little bird’ riff, Cass?”

“The sparrow,” he said, smug, dignified, and clownish. “Guarded fire for the Devil, ’til Swallow ripped it off and gave it to the walking dung beetles who started callin’ ’mselves Mankind.”

Cassidy always talked like a Taoist mystic with a lobotomy when he was drunk. “I take it tonight we’re on the Devil’s side?” I asked as I sat down. I poured the last of the beer into his glass, and drank off half.

“Hey!”

“You don’t need it. Besides, you invited me.”

“For company. You can damn well buy your own suds.” He peered at me, as if through fog. “I don’t owe you any, do I?”

I considered my answer carefully. But lying, after all, would have been a sin. “No,” I said.

Cassidy looked long at the empty pitcher. “Well, hell. Make it a present, then.”

I set the glass and its last swallow of beer on the table. What was left in my mouth tasted suddenly like soap. I leaned back in the uncomfortable wire chair, away from the table, from Cassidy’s gesture, from him. I felt the need to wound. “I thought you were going to stop drinking at Midsummer.” The picador rises dancing to his toes — thump.

The unfocused camaraderie vanished from his face and voice. “ ’S not Midsummer anymore.” His sunken eyes were bright with resentment.

“Just curious. I don’t care if you drink.” Thump — a second pointed sentence between the shoulders of Cassidy’s amour propre. No doubt the picador also thinks of it as self-defense.

Cassidy frowned down at his knotty fingers. There was a freshly scabbed cut on the back of his left hand, and I wondered, with a jolt of disgust, if he remembered how he’d come by it. In a few seconds that thought came back in my face. Well.

“How’ve you been?” I said, in lieu of apology.

He shrugged. “I’ve been like me, I guess. Like last night, only sweatier.”

“Did I see you last night?” I asked after a moment. My spine felt as if someone was about to hit me there.

“Course you did,” he said, looking hurt. “I bought you a drink.”

“That was nice of you. Where were we?”

“The Merciful Trap. Don’t you remember?”

“Let’s pretend I don’t.”

He’d had too much beer to notice the way I said it. “And you think I have a drinking problem. Yeah, you were burnin’ it last night. Dancing, buying rounds. You asked the band for a bunch of songs I never heard of.” He smiled at me. “They threw you out when they poured one round more than you could swap for.”

He hadn’t had too much beer. He must have watched my face shut up during that recitation, and known that it was an even trade for my unkindness. “Ah. I’m surprised you’ll be seen with me after that.”

“I’m savin’ your reputation,” he said. “Hey — will you introduce me to the redhead? The one with the shoes?”

“What redhead?” I asked, frightened.

“Oh, hell. You really don’t remember? Or are you just being a shit? When they tossed you at The Mercy, she went with you. And the guy dressed in gray, too, with the silvertones. They were worried about you.”

I wished I’d had the sense to be worried about me. But I couldn’t have. I hadn’t really been there. “What was I drinking?”

“Beer.”

“Was I taking anything else?”

“How should I know? You weren’t even drunk when they threw you out. Just kind of warmed up. You were maybe a little crazy, but not like you were dosed.”

“Such fine distinctions. If I wasn’t drunk, why don’t I remember anything?”

That startled him. “I don’t know. Hey, are you just saying you don’t remember so you don’t have to introduce me to the redhead?”

I smiled. “Me? The one who guarded fire for the Devil? Would I do a thing like that?”

“Like what?” said Dana from behind me, in her whiskey-liqueur voice. Of course; what was Leander without Hero? Cassidy was drunk, so it followed that Dana must be within striking distance.

She trailed a hand across my shoulders as she came around the table, sat in the chair between us, and laid her palm over Cassidy’s long, sharp-boned fingers. Dana couldn’t talk to anyone without touching. For someone like me, an acquaintance with Dana was a torture akin to water dripping slowly on one’s forehead.

“Cassidy thinks he’s found a chink in my obliging nature.”

“Shut up, Sparrow,” Cassidy said. Oh, Cassidy. I could have told her it was three redheads, and Dana wouldn’t have cared.

I’d have said Dana took her style from Bette Davis movies, if I thought she’d had access to them. Maybe she practiced in front of a mirror. Those Dana had access to. Her suit was metallic brown, fitted close to her tiny waist and just-ripe hips. Her silvery-blond hair fell forward over one shoulder, the end knotted off halfway down her breast with a black velvet ribbon. Her skin was smooth and faintly, rosily tan, all over her face and throat and disappearing between the lapels of her jacket. She had a supernatural artifice about her that made one want to pour water over her head just to test the strength of the illusion.

It occurred to me suddenly that it was a remarkably expensive illusion. The fabric and tailoring of the suit suggested the money that the nightbabies, in their mud and rags, pretended not to have. What was it that Dana did, when she wasn’t disturbing Cassidy?

“So, did you see me out carousing last night?” I asked her.

“No. Were you?”

“Cassidy says so.”

“Then it must be true.” She riffled a fingertip over Cassidy’s jutting knuckles, as if they were piano keys. Cassidy looked overwrought and a little ill. Alcohol and unrequited love will do that. Dana’s attention remained on me, the intensity turned up full. She’d caught a whiff of the bizarre; her nose never failed her. “Did you have a bang time? You don’t usually get radded up, do you?”

I would not tell Dana about the blackouts. The genuinely freakish always moved Dana to pity. She would exclaim over me; she would advise me, with relish; she would recommend the counsel of her friends, who were legion; and worst, she would pet me. Then Cassidy would probably be sick on the table. “I woke up today feeling as if I’d missed my own funeral,” I said. True, so far as it went.

Dana shook her head. “Is something troubling you? You shouldn’t zero yourself out, sugar. You could dig yourself a hole awful fast.” She clutched my shoulder. “You’re so thin already.”

“Like coiled steel.”

She let go. Her coral liptint was faintly luminous; when she pressed her lips together, they made a glowing rosebud in her face. “Well, at least if you ruin your health, you’ll have your friends.”

“Whew,” I said.

But she wasn’t done. Now she was squinting at the bruise on my face. “And where’s that from?”

“I walked into a door.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “I only want to help.”

“Then it’s too bad you weren’t there when I met the door.” Cassidy, who had looked hurt, now looked affronted as well. He was busy, since he had to be affronted for two; Dana wasn’t doing her share. I hadn’t the heart to watch him work so hard for long. “Well, it’s been an interesting day, and I’m past helping, that’s all. I got sunstroke, rode around with a madwoman, square-danced with Jammers, and was spoken to in tongues. Bare civility is the best I can do.”

I spotted my mistake, and cursed myself for a boiled-brained idiot. Dana’s eyes, and Cassidy’s, were opened wide. Cassidy’s lips parted as if there were a membrane of soap between them and he meant to blow it into a bubble. But Dana got the words out first.

“Jammers! Sugar, did they say anything?”

I closed my eyes, took a breath, let it out. “I don’t remember,” I said.

Cassidy shook his head, very grave. “You should try to. Jammers are kind of like holy innocents. They say what the universe wants you to hear.”

My pal, the helpless drunk, wanted to interpret my oracle. Maybe he was giving up on interpreting Dana. I steepled my fingers and studied them, to keep from meeting Cassidy’s eyes, and said brightly, “Is there anyone in this damn place taking orders, or is it help yourself tonight?”

“Oh, Sparrow, come on,” Dana said. “Was it scary?”

Well, that was my opening. I could make a great story out of it — Dana would love it.

“It was like walking through a cloud of human-sized gnats. It was annoying. They stink.” That would have gotten me nine eggshells on my doorstep from a hoodoo, but I didn’t think the Jammers would mind slander. And Dana’s sense of romance could never tolerate bad smells.

“Y’know,” Cassidy said, “the Jammers are the only people who aren’t alone.” I looked at him, but his eyes were on some middle distance over my shoulder. “I mean, none of us can know what’s going on in each other’s heads. We all agree” — he shrugged, hunting words — “on what color the sky is. But how do we know we’re seeing the same color? That’s lonely, man, that’s cold.” He shook his head.

“But the Jammers are supposed to be in each other’s heads all the time, right? So there’s always somebody who knows exactly what it’s like.” He stopped, and blinked.

It was one of those moments of genuine, unalloyed thought that sometimes came on him, appearing out of his mental mists like synaptic ghost ships. I found that my gaze had fallen on Dana, and that she was watching me with the idle patience of a cat.

I stood up. “I have to go. I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.” Cassidy’s bleak and startled face was a rebuke. I pushed the glass across the table to him and strode out, heading up again.

I didn’t get far; Dana’s confiding, confining hand on my arm stopped me. “Sparrow,” she said, low against the background noise of the Fair. “You can’t be alone all the time, honey. If you’re in some kind of trouble, and I can help, you come to me, hear?” Perfect skin, flawless hair, costly clothes, and the time to involve herself in other people’s business. If throwing money and influence at the problem could solve it, she probably could help. “Thank you, Dana,” I said. “But there’s really nothing wrong.” This time when I moved off, she didn’t follow.

Maybe secrets are toxic to the organism. Maybe, when kept long enough, they always produced the intellectual and emotional nausea that had suddenly made me want to match Cassidy drink for drink. Born alone in our skulls; living alone there; dying alone. With the grave, then, to keep the secrets. For a moment I’d wanted, desperately, not to be alone, the way people in hiding for too long will dash out into daylight, in front of the guns, just to end the waiting.

I walked through the Fair: shrill and brittle and tawdry, a savorless night with anger lying just under its curling edges. A while ago this had been my country, and I’d returned to it relieved and glad. Now it was as welcoming as a carnival midway. Give us your money and get out. Strings of bulbs giving half their rated light reflected in puddles of what might have been water. Hucksters called from their booths as if everyone’s first name was Hey.

There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. The dead should feel right at home.

I bought a ticket on the GravAttack, hoping that speed and spin, fear and adrenaline, would wash me clean. The closed wheel smelled of rust, sweat, and hot alcohol from the generator; my fellow rubes shrieked; pitch-dark alternated with flashes of light; and centrifugal force mashed my back into the padded bay. I felt as if the wall of my body cavity would give way and let my organs out — but my mind wasn’t so fragile. My mood survived the ride undisturbed.

So I unfolded my last paper portrait of A. A. Albrecht and bought a ride on the Snake’s Tail from a vivacious man dressed in tinsel. The drops fell on my tongue from the little tube in his hand. It tasted like spearmint and red pepper. In five minutes the Night Fair stretched from sea to sea, shining.

I was turning the pages of a rotting paperback at a junkstall (each newsprint page crackled brightly as I turned it, like static electricity in the dark) when a hand closed over my arm. “Hello!” said its owner. “How are you?”

He was tall, with a great, fine white smile that was only a little enhanced by the Snake. He wore a lovely silver-gray suit, like a politician or a talk-show host. His hair, which curled, was a delicate pink, like the inside of a shell. His skin was fine-textured and pale. Over his eyes and ears he wore a pair of silvertones, which would be making his world as bright and beautiful as mine, except that his would be real and mine was a hallucination. My spike of jealousy confused me. So did the feeling that I was supposed to recognize him. “All recovered?” he asked, his fingers tight on my wrist. He was pulling me away from the junkstall.

I didn’t recognize him — but of course, this was the man in gray that Cassidy had mentioned. Still in gray twenty-four hours later. An affectation. I scorned affectation. I tried to scorn him.

“No, no,” he said, laughing. “Myra’ll have my ass if you scoot away now. We’ve got us a conversation to finish.” He pulled me toward the middle of the pavement. Why was he laughing? He was hurting my wrist. At the end of the block where the crowd thinned, I could see a woman standing under a pair of oil lamps. Her hair was the color of dark cherries.

The air went out of my lungs. It had been knocked out, I realized. Riding the Snake’s Tail does that, sometimes, reverses cause and effect. I was sitting in the street, and the man in the silvertones was no longer attached to my wrist. Now he was holding on to someone else, who seemed to be having trouble standing up. He had stopped laughing. The someone else was creasing the lapels of the lovely gray jacket, but other than that, I got no clear impression of him. Next to all that silver and gray and fragile pink, the newcomer seemed like a dim spot on my eye. Down the block, the woman with the cherry-colored hair was coming toward us.

“Jesus, I’m awfully sorry,” said the newcomer, who was still having trouble standing up. “I really don’t — oh, jeez! God, I’m really sorry.”

The man in gray had fallen. A noise like a blast of whiteness came from behind me, and I realized it was a truck horn. Then the truck was between me and the man in gray, and the other one, who’d been having trouble standing, was half dragging me across the street.

I was beginning to feel like a snatched purse. The Snake was tapering off a bit, and I could almost conceive of events outside my mind that might be urgent, so I pulled against his grip.

“Stop that,” said my new companion, in such an ordinary voice that I did. He hurried me up four steps and pushed me down into a hard seat. Just before a pair of doors flew open before me onto darkness, I realized I was m a car for the haunted house ride, I tried to bolt over the side, but the stranger pulled me back. Don’t worry, said his voice, unaccountably pleased, near my ear. “There’s nothing here that’s not dead.”

2.1: You have to invite them in

A skeleton dropped, phosphorescent with grave mold, in front of us, and was snatched away just before its toes brushed my face. The man next to me said, as if he hadn’t noticed, “You don’t want to go back out there yet, anyway. Those two’ll be right behind us.”

The corridor ahead was misty white with webbing; a hundred little movements, of things the size of my fist, scuttled in the haze. I ducked just as the car plunged sharply about four feet. It put my stomach directly under my tonsils, but we passed untouched under the things. I was reasonably sure they weren’t real, anyway.

The car flung around a corner, where a woman in white rotated at the end of a rope. Her face was swollen, purple, and authentic. My self-control was feeling gnawed at. “What is this?” I said.

“It’s a rescue. We kinda slow tonight? Here comes our stop.”

The tunnel in front of us was an illusion, painted on another door that swung open and pitched us into a hall of mirrors. The stranger yanked me out of the car as it took a ninety-degree turn, and I fell full-length on the floor. I could hear the next car hurtling through the doors, so I scrambled. A mirror yielded before us; I caught a glimpse of us before it folded back, our faces strange and wild in the dim light. Then we passed through stuffy blackness and out into the sharp-edged gloom of the Night Fair.

We ran for perhaps six blocks. I had no choice; his hold on my wrist was adamant, though not painful. We stopped when I stumbled for the third time, my breath sore in my windpipe. We’d reached the chainlink border of the Fair. He let the wire stop him and rolled until his back was against it, propped up on the fence. He was panting, too, and clutching his left side. His eyes were closed, his face set in concentration. I dropped onto the curb and took inventory of him. Not every stranger rescues me from the pink-haired, bug-eyed monsters. Or whatever he’d just done.

He was a little sharp-featured, but a wide mouth and dark thick eyebrows saved his face from austerity. His hair was foxy brown, glossy in the oil-lamp light. I could imagine people telling him he was handsome. Bad for his character, probably. He had a tapering, athletic look, and long legs. I was surprised at how much the six blocks seemed to have taken out of him. He looked more durable than that. He wore a polished cotton jacket in the style the SouthAm meres had affected, back before the Big Bang. It might have been that old, too; the glossy finish had dimmed along every surface subject to friction.

He opened his eyes, and they seemed to take a moment to clear, as if he’d been in pain and it was passing away. His eyes were darker than I’d expected, piercing as the stare of some fearless animal. They fastened on me and he grinned, wide and crooked.

“Well, thank you,” he said.

“What?”

“Never mind.” With the whole of his mobile face, he was laughing at me. He just wasn’t using his lungs.

I folded my arms over my knees, as if I was prepared to stay where I was in spite of him or an entire migratory flock of gray-suited, pink-haired men. “So, what the hell did you do that for?”

He looked confused for a moment. Then he dropped down onto the curb next to me, stretched out his legs, and leaned back on his elbows. “Nothing personal. I’m figuring to get to heaven on the strength of my good deeds.” His grin was strictly nonporous; nothing would get past it.

I looked at him, my mouth partway open in case some telling comment came to mind, and waited for the explanation that was owed me. He would realize it soon, that he owed me.

“Okay, okay. But you gotta keep this to yourself, all right?” He shifted on the pavement, settling in for a long chat. “I’m an agent from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Those folks back there are ops of the Nic government in exile. See, they thought you were one of our guys.” He shook his head. “Probably figured to torture you for the location of our headquarters. ”

I made my eyes big. “Then if they try again, I just have to click my heels together three times to get away?”

“You got it.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Oh! I’m sorry.” He smiled and stuck out his right hand. “Mick Skinner. Call me Mick, or Skinner, or whatever you want.”

He had a quarter twist of accent that I thought might be Texas. There was no guile in his face, only an alert sort of sweetness (except for those eyes). It annoyed me. Either Mick Skinner was the village idiot, or he didn’t rate me high enough to deserve a little cunning. Unless that was the most thorough cunning of all.

Then I recalled that the people in the City who would know his joke could be numbered on one hand and leave fingers left over. Only a few more would have gotten mine, about the heels. But he had.

Stiffly, I said, “If you work for the City, I just live here.”

He smiled the impenetrable grin. “Hell, no. I just got here. Not long ago, anyway. It’s not a good thing to work for the City?”

“Depends on the work.” I stood up. “From the samples you’re giving out, I’d say you’re a traveling fertilizer salesman.”

“And you’re not buying.”

“You want something to grow around here, try sprinkling some truth on it.” I looked at him expectantly.

“Ooo-kay.” The truth, to judge from his face, gave him less pleasure. “They thought you might be me.”

I waited for something more; when it didn’t come, I said, “Gosh, we do look so much alike.”

“They don’t know what I look like. They’re hunting on the basis of something else.”

“What?”

“Just something else. Last night I — in the bar, you did things they thought were a giveaway. So they bagged you.”

In front of the brownstone that edged the sidewalk was a ruined wrought-iron fence. I caught and held it to keep me still. Last night. My whole downtime seemed to have been in the spotlight last night, illuminated for everyone but me. “You mean they expected you to order drinks you couldn’t pay for and get kicked out of a club?”

He seemed to find that quietly funny. “Nooo. That was when you began to act like somebody else to throw ’em off the scent. Too late, though.”

Now I had motives, too, out of my control, beyond my comprehension. I wished that the curb was twenty feet high, so I could throw myself off it. And drag Mick Skinner with me. “What else do you know about last night?”

A swift look up into my face. It wasn’t startled or guilty or meaningful at all; it was just a look. “Nothing,” he said.

“And how do you know it?”

“I was there.”

“The hell you say. In what capacity?”

“An observer of the human condition.”

I figured out, then, what his eyes reminded me of. I’d once seen a pet wolf, tame as any dog, loyal and trusty and true. But around the eyes was an incipient feral craziness, a sense that this animal didn’t figure the odds like a real dog did. Skinner’s eyes made his most earnest expression seem ironic.

I pushed off from the railing. “Sure. I’ll go find the guy in the gray suit and ask him.”

“No!” Skinner sat up with a wince. “My God, don’t go making deals with those people, they’ll peel you like an onion. Your one chance now is to make sure they mark you for an innocent bystander.”

I was shaking. Maybe it was anger. Maybe not. “You listen to me. You have no business knowing one goddamn thing about my life. You have no business giving me advice. If I bump into that guy again, I’m going to tell him what you look like and where you are. Then you’ll all be out of my hair.”

Skinner scrubbed at his face with both hands. My getting angry hadn’t scared him. “Well, for your sake, I hope it’s that easy. Jesus, I’m beat. You from around here?”

He spoke as if the question were friendly, the answer inconsequential. But that line of inquiry is one of my least favorite. “No,” I said. And, “Indiana,” I lied.

“Kee-rist. You came up the river? When?”

“Long time ago. I don’t remember it.”

Skinner shook his head. “Last time I passed that way, you had to be careful somebody didn’t eat you. I didn’t mean that far back, though. D’you live around here?”

Now, what was I supposed to make of that? “Yes and no.”

He worried that in his head; I took pleasure in watching him do it. “Let me put it this way. I need someplace to crash tonight. You know anybody might lend me a corner?”

The Snake is a strange set of chemicals. You think it’s worn off long ago; when it really lets you go, you think someone opened a trapdoor under your feet. Suddenly you see the world with the ghastly accuracy you took it to escape from in the first place. In the middle of Mick Skinner’s speech, I fell off the Snake’s Tail. All distortion, illusion, alteration of mood, emptied out and left me beset with a clear head. With it, I recognized several things: First, that I wanted to go home.

Second, that Mick Skinner did not owe me. I owed him. I didn’t know what the man in gray had wanted; but my wrist still ached where he’d had hold of it. I had been given a drug the night before by someone who was not concerned that I have a good time on it. And tonight I might have ended up in something vile, if this bastard hadn’t carried me off like a bandit stealing a chicken. The obligation might have been forced on me, but I couldn’t deny that I had one to Skinner.

Third, that Mick Skinner had just asked a favor of me.

With a strong sense of martyrdom, I accepted all three revelations. “You have any problems with tall buildings?” I asked.

He looked up, startled, shaken out of a focused expression that looked like an exercise in mind control. “Hell, no.”

“Some people do,” I added, hopeful. But of course, none of them were him. No mercy for me tonight. “Come on. I owe you.” I turned and headed up the street, not waiting to see if he followed.

The possibility had crossed my mind, as I spoke, that I was going to commit suicide after all, that I’d chosen my method in showing a stranger where I lived. I didn’t trust Mick Skinner. But like that wolf, there was something straightforward about him, that was part of his alienness. He would do what was smart, what made sense. I just had to keep watching him for signs of hunger. That, at least, was the rationalization.

A block later, he said cautiously, “And I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”

“Did I say I liked you? I said I owed you.”

“No, you don’t. They thought you were me; it was my fault. I’d have felt bad if they got hold of you. Purely selfish on my part.”

“Philosophical tail-chasing,” I muttered. He walked beside me in contemplative silence, as if he hadn’t heard me anyway.

The only break in that silence happened at the sight of the car. It was long enough that in parts of town it might scrape walls when it turned, black enough to have been cut from Death’s own tailcoat. The windows were black, too, the windshield one-way, the engine no louder than snow falling. It appeared like a cruising shark at the end of the street, and Skinner swatted me into the deep shadow of a courtyard entrance. “Back!” he whispered.

“What are you—”

“Turn your face away!” The black car swept slowly past.

“What was that?”

“Trouble,” Skinner said firmly, but would say no more.

There were a number of places around the City where I could spend the night. There was a room on the second floor of the Underbridge, behind the sound balcony; it even had its own outside entrance. There was a squat in an underground garage, which was more comfortable than it sounded. But there was only one place I thought of when I heard the word “home.”

On the south side of the Night Fair there was a rose-red sandstone office building, dating from the far end of the twentieth century. It was over half empty, like many of the buildings in the Fair. On the third and sixth floors, the windows were wide, many-paned arches set in ornamented openings like baroque half-moon picture frames. On the seventh floor, jutting from the mansard roof, were dormers with arched tops, like wide-open cartoon eyes. It was an interesting structure.

Home was a corner of the seventh floor, and the rooftop, somewhat. Or, certain things that were mine took up space on the roof. The stairway that rose out of the lobby inside the front doors was railed with ornamental cast iron, and wrapped level by level around the open center of the building to the third floor. Where it stopped. The back stairs were nearly rotted away; it would have been safer to climb the sandstone bare-handed than to try them. The lobby elevator was ruined; the car was jammed in the shaft between the second and third floors, and the cables were ripped out. The doors were boarded shut.

I was the only tenant above the third floor, because I was the only one who knew where the service elevator was, and that it worked.

I saw the place with Skinner’s eyes when I brought him in the side entrance. The shabby grandeur missed being romantic and fell back on pitiful: the broken black-and-white marble floor, the gouged oak wainscoting, the bits of mirror clinging to the wall above it. The hall smelled like cooked cabbage, and I heard an old-man voice behind one door, singing a pop song with only occasional reference to the tune. The huge brass light fixtures were all defunct; instead there was a swagging of wire from the ceiling, with a bulb every twenty feet. It was dim, but it worked, and no one there could have afforded the juice for the original wiring. Still, it depressed me suddenly, and I blamed Skinner for that.

I unlocked the door to the basement stairs, and led Skinner to the service elevator. He looked around dubiously. I wasn’t inclined to offer him reassurance, so I turned my back on him, dug a pair of wires out of the seeming ruins of the control panel, and crossed the bare ends. I kept what I was doing out of Skinner’s sight. If he missed killing me on this trip, I didn’t want to have shown him how to get upstairs and try again. The cage shuddered and began to climb at an irregular pace, mostly very slow. But silent; I’d used a lot of lubricants to ensure my privacy. Inside the elevator was the inspection certificate, light brown with age and dated 1995. Skinner looked at it and made a clicking noise with his tongue.

“Is this the only way up,” he asked, “or are you doing this for my benefit?”

“You could still find room on the sidewalk for tonight.”

He shook his head, smiling faintly. I didn’t seem to be scaring him.

We ground to a halt on the seventh, and left the box of the elevator. High above the rest of the tenants’ cooking and living, my hallway smelled like decaying building: dusty, dry, abandoned. I fumbled with locks, and opened the door onto the darkness of what had been a reception area. It was an empty room; a last defense against anyone who broke in. Sound bounced off bare walls, the light switch didn’t work — anyone would have concluded that they’d picked the locks for nothing.

I thumbed a box in my pocket that had once opened garage doors, and the bulb lit in the corridor behind the front room. Skinner jumped. “This is it,” I said sourly. “Enter freely and of your own will, and leave something of the happiness you bring.” He laughed. A lot of people wouldn’t have gotten that one, either.

I walked the streak of light from the open doorway and was home. The left-hand room must have held supplies, once; it was just big enough for my wadded-cotton mattress and a chest of drawers. The middle one, which was larger, I’d turned into the living room-and-kitchen. The dormer windows were covered with black felt (a light in the top floor might have attracted attention). I’d hung a sink on one wall, stealing water and drainage from the john beyond it, and had a propane stove on a metal cabinet and an old RV propane/electric fridge next to that. There was a wooden desk that served as countertop and table, and things to sit on, including a leather-and-chrome armchair that looked like a compound slingshot, and a shabby upholstered wing chair. There was also a shelf unit of books, enough to be convincing. I went in and lit the gas lamp over the sink.

Skinner stopped in the doorway, and I watched his gaze go straight to the books. He walked forward and began to read the spines. He touched one now and then, never actually taking a book down. I found myself almost wanting to show him the third room.

“Pale Fire. I haven’t seen a copy… ” His eyes and fingers wandered on. “Four Quartets. ‘The Lady’s Not for Burning.’ Oh, God, The Prisoner of Zenda.” Suddenly his drawl thickened to parody. “Land sakes,” he said, “have you read all these?”

My insides gave a leap of anger. He’d betrayed me into a momentary thaw of attitude, only to dump the resulting ice water over my head. Then I recognized the familiar sound of self-ridicule. My books had caused some failure of reserve in him, and he was only repairing the damage. “Have you?” I asked.

He was a little white-lipped. “Some of them,” he said.

“If you walk off with one, I’ll rebind a few in your hide.”

He ran his thumb down a ragged Britannica spine. “What do I do to get a little slack around here?”

“Sorry, all out of slack.”

He squeezed his forehead between thumb and fingers, which almost hid his face and the turned-up corner of his mouth. “Guess I’ll just get some sleep, then.”

“In here,” I said, and stepped back into the corridor. He followed. I showed him into the little bedroom, and lit the candle on the dresser. “What about you?”

“I’ll sleep in the next room. The sink works like a sink, the icebox works like an icebox — if there’s anything in it; I don’t remember — and the toilet, which is through there, works like a toilet. Whatever you do, don’t smoke in bed, and don’t wake me up.”

I was in the corridor already when he said, “You don’t remember anything that happened last night, do you?”

No. But I never said so to you. “What makes you think that?”

He was standing in the half-open door, that vitreous grin in place, eyes alight and untrustworthy. “Because I do remember.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I know. You ever want to find out what went on all those times you can’t recall — Just ask me nicely.”

With that, the bastard shut and locked my bedroom door.

I could have broken the door open, I now realize. Or apologized lavishly through it, and begged for an explanation. Under ordinary circumstances, I’m sure I would have. Instead, I stared at the blank wood until the insides of my eyes hurt. Then I walked down the corridor to the third room, the one I didn’t show him, unlocked it, went in, and locked it behind me.

(Mick Skinner knows about last night, said my head.)

The third room was accessible through the false back of a closet. It was the largest of the rooms I called mine. It no longer had windows; sunlight does damage, and the sun, at least, I could stop. The heat, too, though not so thoroughly; the thermometer at the duct from the swamp cooler on the roof showed 78 degrees. This was the only room that wasn’t furnished like a thrift-store campsite. The steel shelving covered most of the wall area, the chair was meant to be sat in for eight hours at a stretch, and the light, when I needed it, was strong and steady. This, after all, was the terminus for the cable that came down from the roof, from the batteries that charged off the windmill disguised as a rusty roof vent.

(Mick Skinner knows what happened to me, said my nerve endings.)

I moved around the room touching things — my talismans, the trappings of my sect. More books: the ones I needed to keep that room working, and the ones that would disappear (and their owner with them) if it were known I had a copy. Thought-contraband in fiction and nonfiction. The video monitor fifteen inches, with three switchable levels of resolution. The record/playback hardware: three videotape decks; a video editing board; three audio cassette decks, one digital; a CD player; an eight-channel reel-to-reel recorder; a turntable, probably used in a radio station; two 120-watt amplifiers from the middle of the last century, probably likewise, but heavily modified for my purposes; a six-channel audio mixer with EQ and other enhancements; two pairs of headphones. And the diamond: a studio-quality recording CD unit and a case of blanks.

(Mick Skinner knows…)

And, of course, the archives. They were mostly copies; I’d sold the previous generation of each one after I’d dubbed it, to collectors rich enough, crazy enough to own something rare and powerful and useless. Then I’d taken the money and spent it on hardware, and on more product, and the media to record it on.

Audio- and videotapes, their mylar bases fragile with age. Vinyl audio disks, brittle as porcelain. Audio CDs, their information becoming vague as if with senility. Two thousand movies, four thousand albums, music and words and pictures like voices whispering from a sweet, sunny past, degrading every time they were played.

It ought to have been depressing — just as every day should be depressing, because it leads to the grave. On bad days I sat in the next room and thought about the value of the plastic tape shells alone to a reprocessor, never mind the mylar, I could be rich… But they were like slaves on an underground railroad, outlaws I hid from the sheriff. Who’d keep them alive, if I abandoned them?

(Mick Skinner knew about…)

I sat in my valuable, comfortable chair and contemplated the possible distractions. I’d found a new CD two days before; I’d check that over. I rolled the chair over to the rack, powered up the CD player, and plugged headphones into the amplified jack. The insert under the scarred plastic of the jewel box was a faded drawing of five bemused-looking people sitting or standing around an immense antique car with a startling paint job. It was only one page, front and back, with a ragged edge — there had been more, once. The name of the group wasn’t familiar. I cleaned the silver rainbow disk, set it in the tray, closed the phones over my ears, and put my feet up.

The first cut opened with a sweet whine of fiddle, the tsk of a cymbal, a muttering of bass. Two women’s voices traded lyrics, as if they were telling each other a story.

Hunched in my chair, I almost laughed. So much for the sweet illogic of a sunshine past. This could have come from Here and Now, from the clean irreducibility of the Deal, from the hard surfaces of the Deeps. Two skips — I’d try another cleaning.

Then the second song began. None of the reckless flourish of the first one; this opened with a plaintive swell and ripple of guitar notes and a shivering fall of chimes. Fingers long since dust slid evocatively on strings corroded, snapped, discarded, on a guitar broken or burned or somehow lost long, long ago, and a voice slid like the fingers, hypnotic with its power of life-after-death. I’d been disarmed by that first song, cynical and safe.

A dead woman sang about isolation, and faced me down with mine.

We were all of us alone in our heads, Cassidy said. Living and dying alone in our unbreachable heads, our indefensible bodies.

The Jammers were mad. The Horsemen before them had breached the unbreachable, gone mad, and pressed the red button on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But the tarot flickered garish on Sherrea’s coffee table, thick with the major arcana, saying, The issue you have raised is largely controlled by others.

And Mick Skinner knew about the blackouts.

The disk played on in my headphones, unattended. Eventually I noticed the silence and the smell of warm circuitry. I was curled up tight in the chair; Sher’s pendant was poking me in the chest. I unfolded, painfully, and turned things off. Then I sat in the dark, thinking hard about nothing. Eventually I fell asleep in the chair.

The sun couldn’t wake me in the archives, and the chair was made to be comfortable. But it was a chair, not a bed. My knees got stiff at last from being bent, my neck got sore from being turned, the circulation slowed in my right arm, and I woke up.

I peeled a corner of the felt back from the living-room windows, squinted out, and found it midmorning. The Night Fair would be sealed, stagnant around the base of the building. I’d go back to sleep until sunset. The Night Fair in sunlight loomed as an unknown, unnatural land, and I wasn’t going to brave it today. But before I slept, I’d look in on Mick Skinner. If I was lucky, he’d have slipped away.

He hadn’t. I’d had a hopeful moment when I found the bedroom door unlocked, but he was there. His cotton jacket and a broken-down pair of boots were on the floor by the mattress. He lay on his back under my blanket, his limbs neatly arranged, staring at the ceiling.

Without blinking.

Once I’d taken a step into the room, I was sure it was true, but death is a diagnosis that can never go untested. I jabbed his shoulder. Then I felt for a pulse in his throat. There was none, and his skin had the same chill on it as the top of the dresser. But his flesh was soft, and his arm, when I lifted it, limp. Didn’t rigor mortis set in as the body cooled? Maybe he had some disease that produced this convincing catalepsy. Who would know — and how could I find them, in the Night Fair in daylight?

I began to examine him for some kind of damage. Perhaps a blow to the head? Nothing. He’d clutched at his side the night before -

Under his shirt, just to the heart side of middle, between one ridge of muscle and the next, there was a hole. Not a large one, not a fresh one, and not healed. I stared at it for a while before I rolled him over. There was a corresponding hole in his back. They were the entrance and exit wounds made by a bullet, and since they hadn’t been dressed, treated, or healed, they must have killed him.

Sometime before we’d met.

It was only a few steps from the corpse to the door; easy to do walking backward. I closed the door. Then I stumbled down the corridor and out into the building hallway. I locked my front door, methodically, watching my hands work. I went down in the freight elevator, climbed the basement stairs, and slipped out, at last, into the silent street. Somewhere in the sleeping Fair I had to find someone who could help me get rid of Mick Skinner.