SECOND MOVEMENT
*12*
TECHNICOLOR
No sensation of movement. The four were not caught up in a whirlwind and tossed around until they landed nauseous and dizzy. Nor did they experience a few infinitely long seconds of freezing cold followed by a crack! as they broke through something unbreakable but fragile. No, Lyndess’s magic was as prosaic as John’s cloak; only the scenery changed, as if a button had been pressed on a slide projector.
For a moment they just stood, not seeing where they were, only that they were no longer targets; then they started to laugh. They held onto each other roaring as tension rushed out of them like balloons escaping into the bright blue sky.
Except George, who fell over.
When the others calmed down, wiping their eyes and gasping, they attended to him. He was out cold, whether from the lust dust or simple fear they couldn’t tell.
John made as if to pick George up, but Paul caught John’s elbow with a gloved hand, saying "We shouldn’t move him, you’re not supposed to move someone if he’s gone into shock."
"Right." John pulled his arms back. "You lads keep an eye on him, I’ll go find a doctor or whatever they’ve got around here."
The others two agreed, and for the first time they really looked at Ta’akan.
They stood next to a pink granite statue of a rearing horse that sat in the center of a large grassy space bounded by astonishingly colored buildings. One glittered with the kind of metallic gold paint usually reserved for cars on Earth; another was black with green blotches; a third’s basic white served as the background for lifelike portraits of naked men and women. And between the buildings could be seen red, pink, orange, blue, yellow, purple, more green, more black, more gold.
Exacerbating the chaos was the fact that the buildings faced every which way, like brightly colored toys that a child had dumped from a bucket and righted where they fell. There weren’t any roads to force them into symmetry; the grassy ground served as both lawn and street. Paul voiced what John and Ringo were thinking: "There must be some kind of law against organization."
"Against people, too," said Ringo, for the place was nearly deserted. Except for a single person who came into view briefly between two houses, the four were the only ones around. (John wasn’t quite as struck as the others; he could hear people in some of the buildings and crowd noises in the distance.) This, coupled with a birdsong-and-breeze silence that was more appropriate for a field than a town, and the complete lack of trash on the ground—despite the stables attached to most of the buildings—gave the Earthmen the feeling they’d blinked into an abandoned amusement park. "I’d call it Disneyland again," said Paul, with a rueful grin, "but it didn’t work out last time."
Then George moaned, and the other three quit their gaping.
"You might run after that chap we saw," said Ringo.
"Nah, there’s probably someone in there," said John, pointing at the golden building, which had an open door and a sign: THE GOLDEN PILLOW—best inn in Ta’akan (and the sounds of some-one stirring inside). He sprinted off across the grass, black cloak flapping.
At the inn’s entrance, he paused to check the cloak’s clasp, making sure it was secure; then he stepped through the shiny doorway into a well-lit, wood-paneled, surprisingly modern motel lobby, complete with gold carpeting and chairs and a reservations desk. The smell of cinnamon filled the air, and John licked his lips; he was getting seriously hungry.
Behind the desk a woman sat reading a book. Dressed in green silk shirt and pants, she might have been sister to Lyndess, with her bronze skin and beak of a nose. However, she was thicker around the mouth and shorter than the wizard, and her black hair was long and elaborately braided.
The woman’s eyes flicked up from the page as John approached. Then the book tumbled to the floor, pages flapping, as the woman leaped from her chair and slammed her palms on the desk, crying, "What are you selling, olyrr-sar? Do you have tyrin magic?"
"Uhhh..." Caught off guard, John backed up a step. "Uh, I’m sorry, I haven’t got anything for sale. Is there a doctor around here?"
The woman scowled, then wrinkled her nose and fanned her hand at John. "Phew! Bathe, broken olyrr-sar, before the Tahil rebirth just to kill you. My bottom rooms have cleans and drys—a gold a night."
John blushed; he reeked of four days in Ketafa, especially after having slogged through Focan twice. "Sorry. I’ll do that later. Is there a doctor around?" he repeated.
Plumping back down in her chair, the woman made a show of picking up her book and riffing through the pages, looking for her place. "What is a ‘docta’?" she muttered into her book.
Christ, now is not the time to hit the language barrier! John impatiently explained: "It’s some-one you take a sick person to, to help them get better." He glanced out the door at the other three. "My friend’s fainted, and we’re afraid to - "
"Oh, a healer," the woman interrupted. She opened a drawer of the desk and pulled out a vial of blue liquid. "None live near, so I sell healing potions. Ten golds."
"A healing potion?" Paul scratched his head as he looked at the vial John displayed in his palm. "Is it real? What’s it do?"
"It heals," John said brusquely, wishing he hadn’t been so quick to buy the thing. He gave back to Ringo the money pouch he’d run out and snatched without explanation. "Right, help me sit him up. She said we just have to pour it down his throat."
But Paul balked. "How d’ye know it isn’t poison, then?"
You had to say that, didn’t you. "I vaguely remember Lyndess usin’ one. Look, we’ve just been teleported, for fuck’s sake, why shouldn’t it be real?"
John said it loudly, to convince himself as well as the others—and to his surprise, it worked, although none of them were truly comfortable as Ringo propped George up, Paul held his mouth open, and John poured in the syrupy potion.
"I just hope - " began Paul.
George’s eyes snapped open, startling everyone. "Hara-ee?" he demanded, then batted Paul’s fingers out of his mouth and looked wildly around. "Where are we? What happened? Did we escape?" The others watched in stark fascination as the pink crept back into his face and a few scratches and pimples he’d developed in Ketafa shrank and faded off his skin.
"Wow!" said Ringo, frankly envious. "How d’ye feel, man?"
"Why?" George felt himself all over, then wiggled his fingers and goggled at his fingertips, which had healed as nicely as everything else. "Are we dead? Is this heaven?"
The others filled him in.…
-CLICK- whirrrrr...
~Copy works. Adventure don’t. This’s the lowest rolling run I ever saw. Psych experiments. Jeez! Why don’t you just run some bacteria while you’re at it?
~Too bad they aren’t Varx’s. He knows what a character’s supposed to be. He could do stuff with the others like he did with that one guy. That would make it fun. But Shag’d never let him. She’s such a mundane.~
George blinked at John. "You have what?"
"Show him," said Paul, turning frosty now that the crisis had passed.
John glared at him. "Sod that! Not here, where anyone could walk by! Let’s rent a room in the Pillow—I’ll do it there."
~I should get outta this program. I promised I wouldn’t run it....
~No, first I gotta find out what that guy can do. He might be worth stealing.~
"I need a drink," George said, mopping his forehead as he sat on the bed.
"Bath first," said Paul, gazing out the room’s window with his hands behind his back as John fastened the clasp on his cloak. "That woman was right—we all stink."
"Who’s first, then?" asked Ringo, scratching his ribs.
Paul glanced at the money pouch. "No point sharing, we’ve got enough cash to get our own rooms. Why don’t you take this one," he said to George. "We’ll leave you alone for a bit."
George was glad of that, but he said nothing as the others filed out of the room (John last, worriedly watching him until the door closed). His brain wasn’t functioning too well just then, numbed as it was from the myriad shocks of the morning. He stared dispassionately around the inn room, barely noticing how Earthlike it was, from the neatly made queen-sized bed to the small paintings on the walls and the round overhead (magical) light.
But even in his reduced condition, bathing sounded like a lovely idea, so he got up and went into the room’s "clean": an oak cubicle with a sunken hot tub, already full. He stripped and, mak-ing sure there was soap at hand, eased into the warm water, which smelled of violets. God, this feels good. He settled back against the jet that spurted fresh water into the tub—it made an excellent massage.
For a while he lay back with his eyes closed, his muscles and mind unwinding from their Keta-fan tangle. Some of his memories bobbed up and floated away, too dilute to affect him any longer. The Arms’ argument in the bedroom, the run through the courtyard, the teleportation—had they really happened? (And less than half an hour ago, too!) Mostly what he had was a hazy impression of fear and nausea. Much more clearly did he recall his enchanted tryst with Fi’ar... and to his surprise and annoyance, he remembered it as enjoyable. He tried to feel violated, for hadn’t he been raped, sort of? After all, Fi’ar had magically forced him to want sex. But he couldn’t forget the enthusiasm with which he’d entered into the thing. And enthusiasm did not result from rape.
But she made me feel that way, he started to think, then stopped and chided himself, Leave off, idiot! You’ve got enough crap in your head, don’t add to it! Especially when the source of the most recent pile was a few rooms away, probably preening his feathers with his nose....
George threw himself into washing, scrubbing as if to clean his brain along with the rest. Soap soap soap, lather lather lather, don’t think about John, don’t remember how the other three crowded over him, trying to soften the shock by first burying it under a mound of sentences. "Brace yourself, John’s not the same any more." "He had a bit of an accident, he’s grown wings." "Please don’t freak out, I’m still me, I’m not an angel or anything." Forget the flash of white, the sudden studying of the floor by Paul, the apologetic look on John’s face as he gazed down at George and the defiant one when he looked at Paul....
His reverie was interrupted by knocking on the room’s outer door. "George, are you all right?" Paul called. "You’ve been in there an awfully long time."
Startled, George snapped, "Yeah, yeah, I’m fine! I’ll be out when I’m out!" But he hurried anyway, ducking under the water to rinse the soap out of his hair, then pulling his clothes in to give them a cursory wash. About ten minutes later, clothing clinging like plastic wrap, hair drying chaotically, he met Paul and Ringo in the room next door. They had the rumpled look that came from slowly drying clothes; Paul’s one-armed Idri shirt was wrinkling terribly. His gloves lay in a pile on a small table next to two empty vials and the silver chain that Grynun had given him.
Ringo greeted George with bright eyes, minty breath, and "Isn’t this a marvelous place? I can’t believe how civilized it is. We can actually breathe here!" He took a big sniff of air and grinned, then offered George a couple of thick green leaves. "Eatable toothpaste. Man, those healing po-tions are incredible, aren’t they?"
"I don’t remember," George muttered, mechanically putting the leaves into his mouth and chewing the sweetish stuff only a little before swallowing. "Where’s - ?"
"Said he was hungry, went to get something to eat," Paul replied in a tone of voice that sug-gested John had lied.
"Probably diggin’ up worms," Ringo added, grinning.
George glared at him. Paul said, "Well, you adjusted fast, didn’t you."
Ringo shrugged. "Eh, it’s no weirder than Bed Peace or Two Virgins, y’know. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just John bein’ John."
"It’s not the same," began George, but he broke off as the door opened and John came in with a bag of yellow apples, which he held out to the other three. "And there ain’t no worms in ‘em, either," he said, looking directly into Paul’s eyes. "Just in case you wondered."
The apples looked wonderful after four days of half-rotted and/or bland Idri food, and Ringo took one right away. But the other two just stared at John.
John drew himself up, ready to bitch at them, but his resolve crumbled when he looked at George. He said wearily, "Look, I didn’t ask for this to happen, y’know. I’m sorry if I freak you out, but please remember it’s just chrome, I’m still the same chap and on your side in this adventure." He pushed his glasses down his nose and looked over them at the pair. "It’s just me, lads. It’s just me."
For a few moments the only noise among them was the crunching of Ringo’s apple. Then George came up and took an apple. "Still need a drink, though," he mumbled as he bit.
"I know you haven’t changed," Paul said, finally taking an apple. "You’re still a swine."
"Never claimed I wasn’t," John replied.
~Okay, how could I sneak him outta there? Can’t just yank him out, that’s too obvious. Gotta do it some way that don’t make it look like I did it. Lemme check the program. Maybe there’s something in it I can rewrite, or maybe they didn’t debug it all the way.~ Run Jeft’s Outline, level 1.
#%E#HGger6##@&@)****+fvvv25436YET@W$^@==/~?<:L*IJJ:77cclbkytbe
~Geez, look at all that redundancy. Didn’t they ever learn shortcuts? With all that lard, there must be a bug in there.~ Run Jeft’s SuperCheckprog, to level 4.
0000000001111111111222222222233333333334444444444555555555566666 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooA
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooB
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooC
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooXooooooooooooooooooooooooooD
~Just one, in all that mess? Those two are better programmers than I thought. Still, it’s in a good place.~ Expand 38D.
X = ]@!
~What...? I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! They must not have—they couldn’t have checked for that, or they’d’ve set up the sensors to monitor it. Oh, wow! Talk about rolling double 0’s!
~Wait. Calm down, Jeft. You’ve gotta see exactly what this rates at. It’s probably a half-per-cent thing that isn’t worth bothering with.~ Expand result.
X = ]@! = ???68.2%
~Huh? That can’t be right. The decimal point must be off.~ Repeat, applying Jeft’s Precision Doublecheck.
X = ]@! = ........ ???68.200057%x>
~Sixty-eight? Not six point eight, sixty-eight?~
"Right, now what?" Ringo said as he took the last apple from the bag.
"Well, now we’ve finally got a mission - " began Paul.
"Sod the bloody mission. Let’s explore!" John waved a half-eaten apple around. "This city is just drippin’ with magic. You were in the hot tubs! You see the lights in the room! And in the shop where I got the apples, the guy had ‘em in a refriger-ated box—just this plain wooden box that was cold inside. Let’s see what else they’ve got!"
Ringo made enthusiastic noises, but Paul glanced out the window and said, "It’s getting a bit late, though, isn’t it? It looks close to sundown, and I don’t fancy wandering about in the dark in a place with no streets."
"I’m not sure I’m up to this yet," muttered George.
John ate the rest of his apple, then flipped the core out the window (it landed near the six others he’d tossed) and opened the door. "Fine, stay here, maybe we’ll tell you what we saw."
But in the end they all went, Paul shouldering his guitar—"It broke the ice in Ketafa, maybe it’ll do the same here," he explained, but the others knew he wanted it mostly as a club. The woman at the desk pointed toward the "most interesting" part of the city; so, trusting that she wasn’t sending them into a slum or off a cliff, they left the inn and ambled in the direction she’d indicated (John subtly leading them toward the noisiest part of the city), drinking in everything and experiencing an emotion that had been foreign to them during the last four days: pleasure.
"God, I wish I had a camera!" Ringo kept exclaiming, and the others would heartily agree, because Ta’akan was a city of infinite photographic opportunity. Their mental photo albums bulged at the seams:
Building after wildly colored building
George darting toward a flower garden
Innumerable closeups of George, finally happy, kneeling to look at unusual flowers
The first large number of pedestrians the four encountered, their silky clothing as colorful as their architecture; humans tend to be light brown in skin tone, with elves Caucasian; heights vary, but the norm is at least American; hairstyles are either long and elaborate or nearly-bald short; men and women, humans and elves wear the same things and mingle freely
Closeups of weapons—swords, daggers, maces, axes, etc.—hanging from the belts of some of the pedes-trians. The largest weapons tend to belong to the short-haired people. Caption: "What do they use them for?" (Scrawled underneath: "Do we really want to know?")
Every one of the pedestrians turning to stare hungrily at the four
The pedestrians rushing toward the four from all directions. Caption: "What are you selling, olyrr-sars?"
The hands of the pedestrians thrusting into the camera, waving jewelry, huge gems, money pouches, scrolls, vials, wands. Caption: "I’ll buy water spells! I want movement spells! I need, I’ll trade, I want I want I WANT!"
The backs of the pedestrians as they returned to whatever they were doing. Caption: "What happened three seconds after we told them we weren’t selling anything."
(A note is appended to the album here: "This happened with everyone we met!"—Paul "This was as bad as being famous on Earth!"—John "No it wasn’t, they left us alone afterwards."—Ringo "It must have something to do with our karma, always getting run after like this."—George)
A tall, slender elvish man, unusually drab in a worn brown shirt and pants; he holds the reins of a horse with bulging saddlebags and has a faraway look in his eyes
A boy of perhaps six, short-haired and short-sword-bearing, standing on a tree stump and chat-ting with a couple of men. Caption: "This had to have been a hobbit or something—he sounded like an adult."
(Another appended note: "He was almost the only kid we saw.")
Two women and two men, naked, tangled in the grass, having vigorous group sex; passersby aren’t even looking
The four pressed up against the window of a closed and darkened shop, trying to see inside; the sign overhead proclaims "Fire and Light Magic Shop"
The four emerging from a building decorated with pictures of candy, cramming chocolates into their mouths. Caption: "Yes, Ta’akan is civilized!"
Magic lanterns that hang next to doors, flaring to life as the sky darkens
Four buildings in a row along a well-kept but short cobblestone street that apparently connects two patches of grass. Caption: "What the hell is this doing here?"
More detached lengths of street. Caption: "Maybe they ran out of money or something."
(And in the back of the photo album is a page with blank squares entitled THINGS WE NOTICED THAT WE DIDN’T SEE:
Anyone who looked poor, hungry, sick, or dirty
Anyone who looked like an official or in some way superior to everyone else, be it cop, Idri, priest, or noble
Any building in disrepair
Guns or any piece of technology beyond the medieval level)
Abruptly the clang of steel-on-steel echoed through the air. The four followed the noise until they came upon a group of people, most short-haired and bearing weapons, watching a fight between a small fork-bearded, short-haired man with a spiked mace and a slightly taller, bare-chested, short-haired woman with a sword. Both had been blooded: the man sported a nasty gash across his chest that split his silky orange shirt, and the woman had a slashed left arm. Even so, they were having fun. "Practice on a tree tomorrow!" the woman cheerfully shouted as she neatly parried the man’s swing. "No dead sar could ever beat you!" he called back, grinning, as he avoided her thrust.
Morbidly fascinated, the four drew closer, like motorists slowing down to look at an accident, until they were at the edge of the audience. The spectators nearest the four noticed them and began to turn their way, the usual question forming on their lips—but everyone turned back when the woman drove her blade into the man’s stomach.
He gasped; the crowd murmured, and a few people nodded as if they’d anticipated the out-come. With a satisfied smile, the woman yanked out her sword. Blood gouted forth, splattering the nearest watchers, who jumped back making annoyed noises. The man stared at the wound for a moment, dropped his sword, and sank slowly to the ground, as if he didn’t want to but custom required it.
Then the woman noticed the four hastily leaving the scene of the crime, and she waved her bloody sword in the air. "Olyrr-sars! What are you selling?" But she got no answer, so she, and everyone in the crowd, went running after them, leaving the man lying on his side, dyeing the grass red.
The next few minutes were a nightmare jumble of retching and pursuers with weapons and frantic screams of "NO, WE’RE NOT SELLING ANYTHING!" Only when the message sank in and the Ta’akanians disgustedly stomped off—significantly, without hacking the Earthmen to pieces—did the four have a chance to compose themselves, finding privacy among some tall bushes by the side of a house.
"Well," Paul said, squatting on the ground, clutching his guitar firmly, "they do use those things after all." He shook his head. "I don’t know why it was such a shock that they do, but it was."
"Did you see the way some of ‘em smiled?" growled John. "Fuckin’ sadists."
"How can this place be so civilized while they do that shit to each other?" George demanded. "I mean, how can they have jacuzzis and flower gardens and chocolates and murders in the street?" He looked back at the spot of the fight, which was empty now, the man having been carted off. Nothing was left but bloodstains on the ground. "Don’t they have any cops or Idris to put a stop to this nonsense?"
"I think the short-haired ones are the local Idris," said Paul. "Awful lot of them, though."
"Could we go get a drink now?" pleaded Ringo. "I saw a pub back there."
Paul stood up. "I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I mean, d’ye want to be drunk around here? Besides, it’s getting really dark." Actually, between the many magic lanterns and the rising moons, Ta’akan was quite navigable—but the irregular spacing of the buildings created zillions of dark patches where bad guys could lurk. "I’d rather go back to the inn and wait til morning."
With the mood of the day spoiled, the others readily agreed, so they moved away from the bushes—only to utter a collective "Uh..." as they stared at about a dozen directions from which they might have come.
"`Scuse me," Paul asked a passing woman. "We’re lost, can you tell us how to get to the Golden Pillow?"
"Are you selling anything?"
"No, sorry."
"Then buy a map, broken olyrr-sars."
"Where?"
But the woman ignored him and walked away.
After a few more encounters of this nature, the four reluctantly concluded that the Golden Pillow was not going to see them that night. Luckily, the pub that Ringo had seen turned out to have the Feather Bed Inn nearby. The two buildings were so close, in fact, that even Paul agreed to go have a drink after they reserved some rooms. "But only one, mind you." And he brought his guitar, figuring a bard might be popular in a pub.
Stuffed black bears regarded them from either side of the entrance to The Owner’s Head. Past this dubious welcome was a large, well-lit, busy room of small tables and lively conversation, a long bar topped with white-veined black marble, a few children, chalkboard menus, platters of sandwiches whisked around, servers squeezing between chairs, and clay mugs clunking on wood. Smells of beef and fresh bread and beer mingled and set even Paul’s mouth watering. The walls were most appealingly paneled with white oak and adorned with hammered metal decorations, many of them gold, silver, or copper. And about three-quarters of the customers were short-haired.
"Oops, heh heh," said the four, abruptly changing their plans and starting to back out. But some patrons started beckoning and calling to them; and it didn’t seem wise to just walk away.
"What are you selling, olyrr-sars?" "I’ll buy all your spells!" "Don’ lishen t’shar, shar’s d’unk! I gah more money’n shar dosh…."
And as their presence became more generally known, a harried young man in a splattered apron came rushing out of the kitchen, crying, "Olyrr-sars! One of you is a bard? Stay, play, and I’ll pay you ten golds and your appetites! Sit there—" he fluttered his fingers at an empty table near a wall "—I’ll have someone take your choices. No, no, don’t play now! The customers will ask you when they’re ready." Which killed any chance the four might have had of leaving the pub.
Smiling uncomfortably (Paul and Ringo) or simply looking uncomfortable (John and George), they picked their way through the tables, murmuring "No, sorry, we don’t have anything to sell," dodging outthrust valuables and sloshing mugs of liquor, and trying not to look at the woman’s head mounted on the wall over the door to the kitchen. Her eyes followed them on their journey and then flicked sideways to watch a new set of patrons entering the pub.
Finally they won through to their assigned table and slid into light wooden chairs in relief. None of them wanted their backs exposed, so they crowded round the sides of the table near-est the wall, Paul resting his guitar where he could keep an eye on it.
John, of course, had to straddle his chair backwards. "If anyone asks me that stupid question again, I’m gonna pull me trousers down and say yeah," he grunted, deliberately ignoring the glances of Paul and George, who suddenly remembered his condition. "Fuck, it’s too warm in here for this thing." He held up a fold of his cloak and let it drop. "Guess I’ll have to get used to it, though."
"We might as well have stayed with the Idris," Ringo complained. "At least they weren’t allowed to get drunk. Did you see the ax that one woman had? Get out of her way when she’s pissed."
They studied the menu on the wall near the head. Most of the items offered were so much babble: vax, kansilabresan, thief, sitkan. At least the word beer was appended to a couple of adjec-tives, so when a serving girl tooled round, they felt reasonably safe requesting aga beer.
John also ordered a couple of beef sandwiches, prompting Paul to blurt, "What, you’re hungry again?"
"No, I’m buildin’ a cow," John snapped.
They sat quiet and cranky and nervous until their order came, the sandwiches and four mugs of a dark, almost black beer with an amber head. Ringo took a swig and his face lit up. "Eh, this is good! Kind of like a German lager."
"Well, here’s to us," said John, hoisting his mug. "We’ve survived so far."
"Maybe we’ll get home soon," added Paul.
They clicked mugs and drank, George chugging his. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "I needed that."
With the beer mellowing them, they were soon talking amongst themselves, filling each other in on the fine points of their solo adventures. When the serving girl came by and offered them more liquor, they prudently (if somewhat reluctantly) turned her down, only to have the young man in the apron bustle up with mugs of green liquid, insisting they try his self-brewed kansilabresan—"I want it known on every world," he explained. The drink proved tasty, so they drained the mugs, and potent, so they objected not at all when the young man came back with purple vax. And foamy sleva beer. And light fal beer...
Eventually a woman came to the table and asked for music. Paul responded by sitting on the table (knocking a few empty mugs off) and breaking into a spirited, if slurred, rendition of "Long Tall Sally." A few bars into the song, Ringo got up and started dancing, waving a plate around like a tambourine. Some of the Ta’akanians looked surprised and not too pleased when Paul’s screams cut through their conversations, and the young man in the apron poked a stricken head out of the kitchen, but most of the customers seemed fascinated, as if they were watching performance art rather than listening to music.
At the end of the song Paul grinned, took a long pull at a mug. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and bellowed, "ARE YOU HAVIN’ A GOOD TIME?"
The room went totally, utterly silent for a moment. Then:
"What’s a ‘gud time’?" about a dozen people called.
Too drunk to understand what went wrong, Paul’s face fell. "Thought y’were." Then he bright-ened. "RIGHT, I’LL FIX THAT! YEEEEEEAAAAAH!" He scratched furiously at the guitar, something like "Tutti Frutti" emerged, and he began jumping around like Little Richard. But the makeshift strap on his guitar snapped, and the instrument crashed to the floor. Now the crowd responded, cheering and crying "More music! More music!" Flushed with liquor, Paul obliged them, this time sitting down before starting again. And if his playing grew more and more ragged, well, he was obeying the best bar band tradition.
Meanwhile, George was getting quieter and quieter as he drank, and looking at John more and more, until with a great sigh he put his head on John’s shoulder. "Fine feddered fiend," he mur-mured.
"Uh-huh," John replied distractedly, looking in his mug—his eighth, yet he was as sober as ever. He couldn’t credit it; the drinks they’d given him had certainly affected the others. Maybe that guy wants me sober for some reason, so he gave me special stuff. He tried George’s drink and it tasted the same, which didn’t surprise him; why would the young man bother? Besides, if anyone should have been kept sober, it was Paul.
Then it dawned on him: he’d changed more than he’d thought….
"Fuck it, it’s not fair!" he snapped, and George, slipping down his shoulder, mumbled agree-ment as his head hit the table. John set his mug down in disgust. Can I get drunk at all? How much will it take? More than he wanted to drink; he was already sloshing.
"Hey!"
John turned to see a very drunk, very muscular woman sway up to Paul. "Don’ wan’ no more mus’c. Sheath it." She slapped the guitar and it spun out of Paul’s grip, crashed to the floor. Paul looked at it bewilderedly, unable to figure out how it got down there. Ringo bopped for a few seconds more, until he realized the music had stopped, and came back to the table, snapping his fingers and swinging his head to some internal rhythm.
An anticipatory hush fell over the pub.
A round-faced man at a nearby table, not as quite as drunk as the woman, made a distressed noise and got up. "I want music, dung eater!" he snapped, picking up the guitar and giving it back to Paul.
The woman regarded the man with interest, then punched him in the chest. He staggered back into a table, and mugs flew left and right as the people seated there jumped up, roaring.
Suddenly, as if everyone had been waiting for someone to break the ice, the whole pub erupted into a fight, chairs smashing over heads and liquor flying into faces and tables overturning as all ages and both sexes swung into it with equal abandon. All the servers and table-cleaners hurried into the kitchen.
"Get down, for Christ’s sake get down!" John bawled frantically at George and Ringo, who paid no attention, the former apparently falling asleep on the table, the latter feebly punching the air, imitating the action.
"Ah, shit!" With one eye on Paul sitting in a stupor as fists and chairs flew past his nose, John picked up George and shoved him under the table. He did the same with Ringo, then dived through the fray to Paul, praying his cloak wouldn’t be yanked off. He shoved his hands into Paul’s armpits -
- and a man in purple and white lunged, fists balled. "Fight, olyrr-sar!" he sang.
"Piss off!" John whipped his right hand free and smashed the man in the jaw.
"Unh!" The man flew backwards into a couple of women beating on each other; all three fell over, but only the women got up.
Time froze as John stared at the unconscious man lying in a puddle of beer, then at his fist. Good God, did I do that?
Then a mug soared past his head and shattered on the wall, and time started up again. John dragged Paul—who was dead weight now, the neck of his guitar clutched tightly in his hand—to safety under the table. The other two hadn’t budged, to John’s relief. The table top had been as good as a cage for them; they’d hit their heads on it every time they tried to get up.
Assured of their passivity, John positioned himself in front of the table, ready for the worst. But no one came over to challenge him, and after a few minutes he saw why: a number of people hadn’t entered into the brawl, but sat and watched as if the floor show had come on. The neutrality of these individuals was carefully respected; John even heard a muttered apology when someone crashed into one of them by accident. And he did not fail to notice that the vast majority of fighters were short-haired, and the vast majority of onlookers were long-haired.
"Huh," said John, still wary but much less concerned. He sat on the table and watched, intrigued, because despite the chair-bashing and broken mugs, the fight had a peculiar grace. People bobbed and weaved like pro boxers, skipped nimbly from beneath plunging objects, and moved with such fluid expertise that John felt he was seeing a dance rather than a brawl, an impression strengthened by the brightly colored clothes and abundant jewelry of the participants. No one was using real weapons, either, in accordance with some unwritten (or maybe written?) rule.
"Olyrr-sar! Olyrr-sar!"
John looked in the direction of the cry. From the other side of the fight, a man in a hooded brown half-cape waved like mad, trying to catch John’s attention. When the hooded man saw he had it, he began to thread his way through the chaos to John, pushing past a pair of wrestling men, dodging out of the way of a swung chair, hopping over someone on the floor. This last made his hood flop off, betraying a shock of gray hair and a lined face.
"No! Don’t bother, I’m not selling anything!" John bellowed. The old man smiled and nodded and kept coming.
John winced as a turkey leg whizzed past the man’s face. Jesus, watch out, you senile old fuck! Feeling sort of responsible for the man, John thought about getting up to try and clear a path for him or to meet him halfway or something, but the thought of someone dragging his cloak off kept his rump firmly on the table. Besides, the old man seemed to be taking care of himself pretty well.
Then: Shit! As the man nudged past a red-clad woman who glared into the fight, apparently looking for an opponent, the woman did a double take and pirouetted to face the man’s back. Her face contorted with fury, and she drew a throwing dagger, aimed carefully...
"Watch out!" John screamed. He snatched up an empty mug and flung it at the woman, hit her in the arm.
She yelped; the dagger dropped. The old man turned, sized up the situation, and punched the woman in the stomach. Doubling over, she dropped to her knees, and, with a grateful glance at John, the old man dove on his assailant. Through the general din John could hear the two bumping around on the floor, but he only saw them once more, when the woman staggered out of the pub, clutching her right side, and the old man, limping, followed her.
I hope I didn’t save him so he could kill her, John thought, actually sliding off the table and standing up before shaking the impulse to follow the two. Don’t borrow trouble, Lennon, I’m sure it’ll find you soon enough. It’s probably some kind of mating rite, anyway. Besides, he couldn’t leave the others. So he sat back down on the table and resumed watching the brawl, occasionally sipping some leftover vax.
He was disappointed when the fight petered out into panting and laughing and back-slapping. The brawlers, some sporting scratches or black eyes, others moving stiffly, went back to their seats, righting chairs and tables on their way. The kitchen door opened and the waitstaff flooded back into the room, each carrying a small full bag and a large empty one. From the full bags, patrons took vials of healing potion, and they poured money into the empty ones. Within five minutes, the only signs that a fight had taken place were disheveled clothing and the spread of broken crockery on the floor—
there seemed to be less of it than John had first thought—
there was a lot less. Utterly thrilled, John saw the pottery shards melt away, shrinking like scraps of ice in a warm metal sink. Other small bits of garbage and a puddle of vomit were disappearing the same way, but larger things, like broken chairs and unconscious bodies, were not affected.
John stuck his head under the table. "Quick, look at the floor!"
But the other three were fast asleep, tangled like puppies.
Suddenly a little lonely, John straightened up. "Well, that explains why the streets are so clean," he said aloud, hoping someone at a neighboring table would chime in with an explanation or an agreement. "Like to buy this and sell it to New York."
He glanced around at the patrons, but none of them were paying any attention to the miracle under their feet. A few tables away, the man he’d hit was drinking the second of two healing potions and tenderly feeling his jaw; "Must get a toothgrow at sunbirth," he complained to his companions. Noticing John’s eyes on him, he opened his mouth, pulled down his lower lip, and showed the Earthman a missing tooth. John tensed, thinking the man was going to come over and demand compensation for his wounds, but the Ta’akanian just turned back to his friends.
Wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to offer compensation and perhaps defuse a vendetta, John started to reach for the money pouch—but his attention was stolen by a couple who strolled past the table laughing: a short man with a forked beard, with his arm around the shoulders of a bare-chested woman who was slightly taller than him.
John almost fell off the table. That was the man who’d been stabbed in the street fight. Alive. Perfectly healthy. Even his orange shirt had been fixed.
It can’t be, he thought. It’s got to be his twin brother.
But he recognized the woman. Her wounds were also gone.
"Man, I wonder if they can cure cancer too?" he said softly, watching the couple leave the pub. (Better question: what couldn’t be done around here?)
~Sixty-eight! I couldn’t’ve arranged things better on purpose! When’s that beauty gonna show up?~ Estimate manifestation time of ]@!
.... 2.12 C-d
~Two C’hovite days, huh? Okay. What’s the best way to reveal this to Shag and Varx? I gotta do this with flair—no fun just waiting for it.
~Okay, I know. Gotta stick a little subroutine in their program, but they won’t find it if I bury it deep enough.
~Boy, this run may turn out decent after all!~
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