No more walking the road or wandering the grounds: she has three rooms, six books, embroidery and a closet for privacy. The books have lessons. Gnomon’s always a few silent feet away.
Her mother wakes her in the morning and her father tucks her in at night, warm and solicitous. They don’t blame her. She’s a child! She had an ordeal, and what matters now is her safety.
But Nightjar remembers the terrible freedom of the balloon, vulgar conversations, the danger of his hand on her arm. Remembers being an uneasy peer. Remembers Killington’s hat falling, in the spray of black.
Now you can make chili in a pot on the stove in an hour, if you hate Jesus, but the proper way to do it is a slow cook, two hundred degrees all day. Benton can’t leave anything hot at home, though, he’s got a kid, and he can’t have his delicious chili unattended in his cubicle. Plus his wife just died. Anyway, he solves the problem.
One day Morocco collects five bucks from everybody and asks, “how’s it working out?”
Benton straightens with difficulty. “What?”
“The Crock Pot,” says Morocco, pointing headwards, “with the bungee cords?”
“It’s hot,” says Benton.
Sleipnir moves like nothing you’ve ever seen: neither horse nor centipede, he bunches and stretches in two rippling phases. A wave. An earthquake. And fast.
The good thing, of course, is while he’s getting all that horse up to speed a desperate stable boy can just about keep up. Ehrich pelts madly and snatches the bridle–there! He’s got it, but they’re on Bifröst now, slick as rain, and he’s sliding toward its fiery rails–
Sleipnir takes the bit in his teeth, jerks him up with one contemptuous toss of his head, and Ehrich is riding the horse of the gods.
Mocha’s got a two-ton hearse, which isn’t as big as you’re probably thinking but is the only one in town big enough to haul the hermetic casket of Long Jim the Sailor’s Friend. A speaker at his gravesite will play recorded clicks and whistles for visitors. People line the procession route for the hometown hero; children throw origami life preservers and cry.
But we were talking about the hearse.
“Why do you even have one this big?” asks Joule, black-suited in the passenger seat.
“Pair funerals,” says Mocha shortly, “were supposed to be huge,” and smokes a gray cigarette.
She’s already bound into her cryotube, jacketed and manacled, wearing a mesh mask: but when her mic clicks loudly on everybody jumps. Achene might be smiling.
“You can tuck your criminals away in space,” she murmurs, and it echoes through the hall. “You can exile us to Binary Five and pretend we never happened, and soon enough you’ll see it: Hobbes, Locke, Schmitt. Your foundation is murder. You’ll crumble without us. Welcome to nasty, brutish and short.”
Silence. They start to wheel her away; her tiniest gesture turns them back.
“Sorry,” she says dryly, “was I supposed to just recite ‘Invictus?'”
Sabra grabs other people’s sleep where they lose it: in stairwells, under bridges, in hospital waiting rooms. You can fill a bottle from the open window of a house with a new baby. Road work downtown leaves a thick and grumpy wake.
But sometimes. Entering the last week of rehearsal, when the crew slumps into each other as they leave in the wee hours–when sweet young Skipper begs for a neck rub, and Sabra finds a knot with her fingers. So much locked up in there. So easy to extend the fangs under her tongue, lean down, puncture, drink deep.
Huey tears out of his bedroom, rumpled, bloodshot. “Shit you guys!” he says. “Safuckin! Enda world!”
“You notice the world ending, Jeeb?” says Zariel, mashing on her controller.
“Watch the tank,” G.B. retorts.
“Six Six Oh-Six today, gotta do this right!” Huey tugs at his hair. “Set some fires, walk around with barcodes, you know? Art! Anarchy!”
“Was yesterday,” says G.B.
“Eleven days ago in Julian,” says Zariel.
“Happens every decade if you only count the last digit.”
“No Arabic numerals in Revelations, now will you go back to bed?” Zariel cranes around.
Huey grows seven heads and eats her.
“Next, the water-planet, third from the medium star,” gurgles the attendant. “Your judgment, Arbitrix?”
But before she opens her mouths, the Arbitrix is caught in a quantum lasso: her consciousness snatched, bound and stuffed into a tiny biped body. She’s born wailing. She learns human language and human love, the colors of sweat and sunlight. She swims and bleeds, sings, grows taller; she discovers the Secret Order of Cognitists and their cruel but necessary capture of her mind, one last desperate attempt to save their race. She ages, loses, aches, dies.
“Arbitrix?” says the attendant, uncertain.
“Smash it,” she grates.
Dashiell doesn’t want the futon with Becky, who will lie about it and has the beer farts besides, but it beats the floor or (worst of all) another dude. She took the extra pillow; he doubles up and makes do.
Around godawful o’clock he’s awakened by her insistent rump, scooching against him. He’s appalled, if a little flattered. Surely she can’t be? In a room with eight people?
Dashiell rolls over and sees that she’s asleep, after all. Her face is almost pure with it. There’s no intent there, just that simple, clumsy mammalian bump: I’m here. You’re big. Warm me.