Ari swore in Hebrew, then swung his legs through and dropped safely to the floor. My lungs got back to work as the black-and-white biplane roared overhead and flew onward, away from the garden.
“Ah, shit!” Michael said. “The old guy raised that dog from a puppy.”
“Very sad,” I said, “but get us out of here!”
“You bet.” Michael handed Ari the rifle and swung around to stare at the window.
The piece of old sheet shimmered and turned into Aunt Eileen’s crisp white shade. The view outside changed into Uncle Jim’s flower beds and lawn. The wallpaper inside bloomed with faded bunches of violets. We were back. LaDonna let out her breath in a sharp sigh.
“Damn!” she said. “Didn’t even know I was holding it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It got me that way, too.”
“That poor dog!” she went on. “I take it that we don’t trust the cops on that world.”
“No, we don’t.” Ari knelt down and began to unload the bullets from the rifle. “Cops is a good name for them. I’d never call them officers of the law.”
“The law of the jungle, maybe,” I said. “Which the place kind of resembles, now that I think about it. It’s too bad we don’t have a more pleasant kind of world to show you.”
“I’m working on that,” Michael said. “The map’s coming along.”
As we left the room, Michael let the others go on ahead but signaled me to hang back. We walked slowly enough to talk in relative privacy.
“That whacked gate upstairs, y’know?” Michael said. “It grew again. It’s hit the third floor.”
“That’s scary,” I said. “Do you think it could spread into the rest of the house?”
“I don’t know. What if it like swallowed the whole house and took it somewhere? Epic fail!”
“Crud! That’s a nasty thought.”
“You bet. Seriously. Jeez, I wish I could talk to Dad.
Even if he’s still in jail, I’m his son. Do you think they’d let me see him without, like, arresting me?”
“I don’t know. Although—” I was remembering a remark of Spare14’s. “It depends on which world Moorwood Prison’s in. In some places it’s not a crime to be a world-walker per se, just to use the talent for criminal purposes.”
“It can’t be against the law to want to see your dad.”
“You wouldn’t think so, yeah. Look, I have a new resource person. Let me talk to him and get back to you.”
“Okay. When?”
“I don’t know. It depends on whether he’s in his office. He warned me he might be gone for a while.”
Michael groaned and rolled his eyes.
“Tell me something. That dog. Why did the cops shoot it?”
“That’s one of their jobs, getting rid of deformed animals so they don’t breed. They do the same thing to people sometimes, but only when the people are real bad off, no arms, can’t talk, super gross stuff like that.”
My stomach clenched hard. If I had eaten recently I would have vomited.
“They call it taking out the trash,” Michael continued. “Pretty shitty, huh?”
“Very,” I said. “What’s that phrase? Epic fail. Yeah—of their humanity.”
After the meal we drove LaDonna around to a few of the sights. Like everyone who came to San Francisco, she wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Victorian houses. I offered to take her out to dinner, too, but she admitted that she was meeting Itzak when he got off work.
“Cool,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re trying to recruit him.”
“The thought had occurred.” LaDonna flashed me a wicked smile. “Fred’s retiring.”
“Who?” Ari said.
“The guy who used to do stuff to stuff,” I said, “like that modified camcorder.”
“Ah.” Ari gave me a sour look. “I suppose one could define that as doing stuff to stuff.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Device engineering, perhaps?”
“Oh, okay, if you want to be stuffy about it.”
Ari did not get the pun. I returned my attention to LaDonna. “Did you want to come over to our flat tomorrow? Ari and Itzak will be working on the security system. You can see if he’s qualified to be the new Fred.”
“Itzak already mentioned that, yeah. I’d like to. Thanks.”
We dropped LaDonna off at her hotel so she could change for dinner, then drove home. I tried to settle down with my research materials, but I felt oddly restless. I kept getting up to prowl around the flat and look out each and every window. I thought maybe I was expecting another vision, but none materialized. I wondered if my brief sight of Interchange had disturbed me more deeply than I’d realized at the time.
While I wandered around, Ari was trying to work at the kitchen table. Finally, he gave it up and shut down his laptop.
“Do you want to go out to dinner?” he said.
“We might as well,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being annoying, but I just can’t seem to sit still.”
I changed into my black satin-backed crepe dinner suit and a pale gray silk shirt. We decided on the Japanese place up on Noriega, where we both liked the food. Or at least, I liked it enough to be able to get some of it down. I was beginning to realize that if he was hungry, Ari would eat anything put in front of him. How else could he eat his own cooking? As usual, Ari insisted we take a table where he could keep his back to the wall and get a clear view of the front door.
I was crunching along on a tempura shrimp when I felt someone watching me. The sensation had not quite reached the level of triggering a SAWM or ASTA, but it registered an interest stronger than idle curiosity. I dropped my napkin on purpose and used picking it up as an excuse to glance around me. None of the other diners were looking my way. I had a few more bites of food, then felt the sensation again. As casually as I could, I turned in my chair, pretended to stretch my back, and looked behind me.
In the far rear corner of the restaurant a blue-violet figure stood beside an empty table. Someone female—I could pick that much up psychically—stood very still and watched
me. Although I couldn’t be sure, I thought she had black rosettes tattooed on her neck and bare shoulders. The image flickered once, then disappeared. The sensation of being watched vanished with her. I turned back to a normal position and realized that Ari was watching me.
“What were you seeing?” Ari said.
I leaned forward and spoke softly. “Another blue-violet apparition like the one Saturday. I still can’t figure out who or what she is, though.”
“Oh, splendid! Perhaps you might tell me when you do.”
I wrinkled my nose at the sarcasm and picked up my chopsticks.
I saw, felt, or heard nothing untoward for the rest of our meal. When we got home, I changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then logged onto the Agency site—no new mail. I filed a quick report on what I’d seen in the restaurant, then logged off. Ari took his laptop and a selection of keyboards into the kitchen.
Since there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch, I returned to my computer. I brought up the file with the Hisperic text I’d found in Dad’s old desk. Thanks to Ari’s notes on the Hebrew words and Dad’s notes on the Old Irish, I’d pieced together entire sentences here and there. The most significant so far was “Each angel has a proper color to its wings that signifies the gate before which it stands.” I was willing to bet that those colors also coordinated with the set of boxes in the wall safe.
All through the document I found odd strings of vowels that appeared completely random. Dad had annotated them as “scribal errors? some sort of stupid nonsense.” My research into Chaos magic, however, tipped me off to the truth. They were chants, meant to be spoken aloud in a particular way, “intoned,” to use the churchman’s word, or “vibrated,” to use the magician’s.
As I looked over the pages containing the vowel strings, I noticed one where Dad had added a note stating that the particular angel’s wings were blue-violet, the color of the sphere thrown by our would-be burglar and of two of the apparitions I’d seen. I logged off, shut down the computer, and went into the kitchen.
“Ari?” I said. “I’m going to go into the bedroom and try an experiment.”
He answered in Arabic. I took this as a sign that he was working.
In the bedroom I turned on the nightstand light, then shut the heavy curtains over the windows to keep the sound inside. I stood at the foot of the bed and laid my printout down on the paisley bedspread where I could read it. The page defined its chant as “aaaa ooo ee aaaa iii.” I spoke in an ordinary voice and tried out various systems of assigning sounds to those letters. The Latinate version produced a slight sense of excitement, so I stuck with that.
I adjusted my stance to let my lungs expand as freely as possible, took a deep breath, and began vibrating each sound the indicated number of times, one letter per time. The first run through gave me a complex sensation: close to sexual arousal, yet my mind seemed clear, not muddled with lust. Qi was flowing, I figured, and tried again. The sensations increased to the point where I was panting on the edge of a mental climax.
I summoned up a memory of the color blue-violet from my work with crayons and ran the chant again. The chant ended in a yelp as the floor fell away from under my feet.
I dropped, then flew, swooping through the air. I looked down and saw below me a nighttime marketplace. The plaza, easily as large as a football field, glowed with tiny lights like strings of white Christmas bulbs. Spindly wood buildings, most three or four narrow stories tall, clustered at the edges of the open space. Moving among wooden booths and tables were people—not humans, I realized, but a species shaped much like us, big-hipped bipedal women.
Bright cloth wrapped their hips but left their arms and breasts bare. Each woman had three pairs of small breasts marching down her chest. They wore their blonde hair so short it looked like fur. It was fur, I realized, mostly blonde but dotted with black spots. In the dim light the scene looked slightly out of focus, but they seemed to have dark rosettes tattooed on their shoulders and necks. I was finally getting a clear look at my apparitions. Leopardlike, all
right, but I couldn’t tell if they were were-leopards or some species derived from the big cats.
I had no real control over the vision. I’d swoop down, then suddenly rise straight up and twist in a wind that blew only on the visionary plane. When I flew high, I looked around to get a fix on the landscape. The marketplace stood in the middle of a city lit randomly by patches of white lights. At one edge of the city I saw dark water, a bay, ocean inlets. At the other rose an oddly familiar pair of hills. Twin Peaks! I recognized their shapes at last and oriented myself. I was seeing a version of San Francisco.
At one point I sank toward the ground at the edge of the plaza. Just when I thought I was going to touch down, my fall stopped itself, and I hovered some eight feet in the air. A leopard woman saw me. She stood taller than the rest, and around her spotted neck hung a weight of silver chains. Her small, curled ears sat much higher up on her head than ours do. She looked up and opened her mouth in a snarl. I saw her white cat fangs clearly despite the dim light.
“You! Here?”
Her words formed in my mind. She sounded as surprised as I felt. The vision caught me again and spun me around, swept me up and sent me reeling into the sky. I was considering chanting to see if I could bring it under control when an alarming truth occurred to me.
“Crud! I don’t know how to get back.”
That break in concentration saved me. I felt myself falling from the interior height and hit the bed that I’d last seen in front of my body. For a moment I stuck, half on and half off the mattress, then slid to the floor onto my knees with my face pressed against the bedspread, an inelegant end to the trance.
I looked up to see a horrified Ari staring at me from the doorway.
“Are you ill?” he said. “Why were you moaning?”
“Was I moaning?” I scrambled to my feet.
“I heard this ah ah oh oh sound. I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Chanting. Vision-inducing chanting.”
My knees threatened to give way. I sat down on the end of the bed. Ari walked over to stand in front of me.
“Are you sure you don’t need to see a doctor?” he said.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“You’re drenched in sweat.”
“That’s from Qi, not a fever.” I realized that my shirt was sticking to my body. My damp hair hung in tendrils around my face. “I shouldn’t have tried that experiment. Should have done more research first.”
Ari sat down next to me on the end of the bed. The lamplight gleamed on his dark hair and turned his eyes into pools of shadow. I could feel his body warmth and smell his clean flesh, but I wondered if I wanted to kiss him or bite him. He would taste good, I figured, salty warm raw meat. Ape: Nature’s perfect food.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” Ari raised a suspicious eyebrow and moved over a couple of feet. “You’re drooling.”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and reminded myself that you should never eat the one you love. I put my hands on my breasts to check: yes, only two. Inadvertently, I’d made a psychic link with the species I’d glimpsed. Perhaps the woman who’d spoken to me had forged it. Whatever else those ladies were, they were carnivores to the max. When I looked at Ari, I fixated on the pulse throbbing in the big vein in his throat.
“Nola,” Ari said, “answer me!”
I wrenched my gaze away and held up one hand for silence. I took a deep breath and began counting backward from a hundred. The link remained strong. Ari moved farther away to the corner of the bed. I could feel that he was ready to spring to his feet. I visualized a flaming torch and saw it circling my body. The link flared and died. I gasped for breath, then steadied.
“Are you back?” Ari said.
“Yeah.”
I’d spoken the truth—almost. I’d destroyed the direct link. Yet a trait of their species resonated with an archetype buried deep in my own psyche and brought it to the surface.
I found myself thinking of the Bacchantes. The ancient Greek chant echoed in my mind: IAO, ee ah oh.
“The way you were looking at me—” Ari said.
“Yeah, I know. Not nice. I’m really sorry.”
“You were in full trance?”
“Till I fell to my knees. And then I got stuck in a lesser trance. Kind of a hyper phase out.”