The Einstein Intersection (10 page)

It was large, hung from a
knobbly
wrist. -The skin between thumb and forefinger was cracked like stone, and the ridges of his knuckles were filled with sweat dampened dirt. A bar of callous banded the front of his palm before the abruptness of his fingers-that was all hard dragon work. But also, on the middle finger at the first knuckle was a callous facing the forefinger. That comes from holding a writing tool. La Dire has such a callous and I asked her about it once.
Third, on the tips of his fingers (but not his thumb.
It was a left hand) there were smooth shiny spots: those you get from playing a stringed instrument, guitar, violin, maybe cello? Sometimes when I play with other people I notice them. So Spider herds dragons. And he writes. And he plays music....

While I sat there, it occurred to me how hard breathing was.

I began to think about trees.

I had a momentary nightmare that Batt was going to give us something as difficult to eat as
hardshell
crabs and steamed artichokes.

I leaned on Green-eye’s shoulder and slept.

I think he slept too.

I woke when Batt lifted the cover from the stew pot. The odor pried my mouth open, reached down my throat, took hold of my stomach and twisted. I wasn’t sure if it was pleasurable or painful. I just sat, working my jaws, my throat aching. I leaned forward over my knees and clutched sand.

Batt ladled stew into pans, stopping now and then to shake hair out of his eyes. I wondered how much hair was in the stew. I didn’t care, mind you.
Just curious.
He passed the steaming tins and I rested mine in the hollow of my crossed legs. A charred loaf of bread came around. Knife broke open a piece and the fluffy innards popped through a gold streak on the crust. When I twisted some off, I realized the fatigue in my arms and shoulders and almost started laughing. I was too tired to eat, too hungry to sleep. With the paradox both sleeping and eating left the category of pleasure, where I’d always put them, and became duties on this crazy job I’d somehow got into. I sopped gravy on my bread, put it into my mouth, bit, and trembled.

I shoved down half my meal before I realized it was too hot. Hungry like I was hungry, hungry beyond need -it’s frightening to be that hungry.

Green-eye was shoving something into his mouth with his thumb.

That was the only other human thing I was aware of during the meal till Stinky spluttered, “
Gimme
some more! “

When I got my seconds, I managed to slow down enough to look around. You can tell about people from the way they eat. I remember the dinner Nativia had cooked us. Oh, eating
were
something else back then-a day ago, two days?

“You know,” Batt grunted, watching his food go, “you got dessert coming.”

“Where?”
Knife asked, finishing his second helping and reaching out of the darkness for the bread.

“You have some more food-food first,” Batt said,
“ ‘cause
I’m damned if you’re gonna eat up my dessert that fast.” He leaned over, swiped Knife’s pan from him, filled it, and those gray hands closed on the tin edge and withdrew into the shadow again.
The sound of dogged chewing.

Spider, silent till now, looked with blinking silver eyes. “Good stew, cook.”

Batt leered.

Spider who herds dragons; Spider who writes; Spider who has the
multiplicated
music of Kodaly in his head- good man to receive a compliment from.

I looked from Spider to Batt and back. I wished I had said Good stew because it was, and because saying it made Batt grin like that. What I did come out with, the words distorted by that incredible lash of hunger, was: “What’s dessert?”

I guess Spider was a bigger person than me. Like I say, that sort of hunger is scary.

Batt took a ceramic dish out of the fire with rags.
“Blackberry dumplings.
Knife, reach me the rum sauce.”

I heard Green-eye’s breath change tempo. My mouth got wet all over again.
I watched-examined Batt spooning dumplings and berry filling on to the pans.

“Knife, get your fingers out!”

“. . . just wanted to taste.” But the gray hand retreated. Through the dusk firelight caught on a tongue sliding along a lip.

Batt handed him a plate.

Spider was served last. We waited for him to begin, though, now that the bottom of the pit was lined.

“Night . . . sand . . . and dragons,” Stinky muttered.
“Yeah.”
Which was very apt.

I had just taken my blade out to play when Spider said, “You were asking about Kid Death this morning.”

“That’s right.” I lay the blade in my lap. “You had something to say about him?” The others quieted.

“I did the Kid a favor, once,” Spider mused.

“When he was in the desert?” I asked, wondering what sort of person you would have to be to be different and doing Kid Death favors.

“When he had just come out of the desert,” Spider said. “He was holed up in a town.”

“What’s a town? “ I asked.

“You know what a village is?”

“Yeah.
I came from one.”

“And you know what a city is.” He motioned around at the sand. “Well a village grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a town; then the town grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a city. But this was a ghost town. That means it was from a very old time, from the old people of the planet. It had stopped growing. The buildings had all broken open, sewers caved in, dead leaves fled up the streets, around the stubs of street-lamp bases; an abandoned power station, rats, snakes, department stores-these are the things that are in a town. Also the lowest, dirtiest outcasts of a dozen species who are vicious with
a viciousness
beyond what intelligence can conceive. Because if there were a brain behind it, they would all be luxuriant, decadent lords of evil over the whole world instead of wallowing in the junk heap of a ghost town. They are creatures you wouldn’t put in a kage.”

“What did you do for him? “ I asked.

“I killed his father.”

I frowned.

Spider picked at a tooth. “He was a detestable, three-eyed, three hundred pound worm. I know he’d murdered at least forty-six people. He tried to kill me three times while I was bumming through the town.
Once with poison, once with a wrench, once with a grenade.
Each time he missed and got somebody else. He’d fathered a couple of dozen, but still a good number less than he’d killed. Once, when I was on fair terms with him, he gave me one of his daughters. Butchered and dressed her himself. Fresh meat is scarce in town. He simply didn’t count on one of his various kaged offspring whom he’d abandoned a thousand miles away following him up from the desert. Nor did he count on that child’s being a criminal genius, psychotic, and a totally different creature. The Kid and I met up in town there where his father was living high as one could live in that dung pile. The Kid must have been about ten years old.

“I was sitting in a bar, listening to characters brag and boast, while a wrestling match was going in the corner. The loser would be dinner. Then this skinny
carrottop
wanders in and sits down on a pile of rags. He stared down most of the time so that you looked at those eyes of his through finer veils of gold. His skin was soap white. He watched the fight, listened to the bragging, and once made a design in the dirt with his toe. When the talk got boring, he scratched his elbow and made faces. When the stories got wild and fascinating, he
froze,
his fingers tied together, and head down. He listens like someone blind. When the stories were through, he walked out. Then someone whispered,
That
was Kid Death!
and
everybody got quiet. He already had quite a reputation.”

Green-eye had moved a little closer to me. There was a chill over the City.

“A little later while I was taking a walk outside,” Spider went on, “I saw him swimming in the lake of the
Town
Park
.

Hey, Spider-man, he called me from the water.

I walked over and squatted by the pool’s edge,
In
, kid.

You
gotta
kill my old man for me. He reached from the lake and grabbed my ankle. I tried to pull away. The Kid leaned back till his face was under water, and
bubbled,
You
gotta
do me this little favor, Spider. You have to.

A leaf stuck to his arm. If you say so, Kid.

He stood up in the water now, hair lank down his face, scrawny, white, and wet. I say so.

Mind if I ask why? I pushed the hair off his forehead. I wanted to see if he was real: cold fingers on my ankle; wet hair under my hand.

He smiled, ingenuous as a corpse. I don’t mind. His lips, nipples, the cuticles over his claws were shriveled. There’s a whole lot of hate left on this world, Spiderman. The stronger you are, the more receptive you are to the memories that haunt these mountains, these rivers, seas and jungles. And I’m strong! Oh, we’re not human, Spider. Life and death, the real and the irrational aren’t the same as they were for the poor race
who
willed us this world. They tell us young people, they even told me, that before our parents’ parents came here, we were not concerned with love, life, matter and motion. But we have taken a new home, and we have to exhaust the past before we can finish with the present. We have to live out the human if we are to move on to our own future. The past terrifies me. That’s why I must kill it-why you must kill him for me.

Are you so tied up with their past, Kid?

He nodded. Untie me, Spider.

What happens if I don’t?

He shrugged. I’ll have to kill you-all. He sighed. Under the sea it’s so silent . . . so silent, Spider. He whispered, Kill him!

Where is he?

He’s waddling along the street while the moonlit gnats make dust around his head, his heel sliding in the trickle of water along the gutter that runs from under the old church wall; he stops and leans, panting, against the moss-

He’s dead, I said. I opened my eyes. I dislodged a slab of concrete from the beams, so that it slid down-

See you around sometime. The Kid grinned and pushed backward into the pool. Thanks. Maybe I’ll be able to do something for you someday, Spider.

Maybe you will, I said. He sank in the silvered scum. I went back to the bar. They were roasting dinner.”

After a while I said, “You must have lived in town a fair while.”

“Longer than I’d like to admit,” Spider said.
“If you call it living.”
He sat up and glanced around the fire. “Lobey, Green-eye, you two
circle
the herd for the first watch.
In three hours wake Knife and Stinky.
Me
and Batt will take the last shift.”

Green-eye rose beside me. I stood too as the others made ready to sleep. My Mount was dozing. The moon was up. Ghost lights ran on the humped spines of the beasts. Sore-legged, stiff-armed, I climbed a-back My Mount and with

Green-eye began to circle the herd. I swung the whip against my shin as we rode. “How do they look to you?”

I didn’t expect an answer. But Green-eye rubbed his stomach with a grimy hand.

“Hungry? Yeah, I guess they are in all this sand.” I watched the slender, dirty youngster sway behind the scaled hump. “Where are you from?” I asked.

He smiled quickly at me.

I was born of a lonely mother with neither father nor sister nor brother.

I looked up surprised.

At the waters she waits for me

my
mother, my mother at Branning-at-sea,

“You’re from Branning-at-sea?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Then you’re going home.”

He nodded again.

Silent, we rode on till at last I began to play with tired fingers. Green-eye sang some more as we jogged under the moon.

I learned that his mother was a fine lady in Branning-at-sea, related to many important political leaders. He had been sent away with Spider to herd dragons for a year. He was returning at last to his mother, this year of wandering and work serving as some sort of passage rite. There was a great deal in the thin, bushy haired boy, so skilled with the flock, I didn’t understand.

“Me?” I asked when his eye inquired of me in the last of

the
moonlight. “I don’t have any time for the finery of Branning-at-sea as you describe it. I’ll be glad to see it, passing. But I got things to do.”

Silent inquiry.

“I’m going to Kid Death to get Friza, and stop what’s killing all the different ones. That probably means stopping Kid Death.”

He nodded.

“You don’t know who Friza is,” I said. “Why are you nodding?”

He cocked his head oddly,
then
looked across the herd.

I am different so I
bring
 
words
to singers when I sing.

I nodded and thought about Kid Death. “I hate him,” I said. “I have to learn to hate him more so I can find him and kill him.”

There is no death, only love.

That one arrived sideways.

“What was that again?”

He wouldn’t repeat it.
Which made me think about it more.
He looked sadly out from the work-grime. At the horizon, the fat moon darkened with clouds. Strands of shadow through the thatch of his hair widened over the rest of his face. He blinked; he turned away. We finished our circuit, chased back two dragons. The moon, revealed once more, was a polished bone joint jammed on the sky. We woke Knife and Stinky, who rose and moved to their dragons.

The coals gave the only color. And for one moment when Green-eye crouched to stare at some pattern snaking the ashes, the light cast up on his single-eyed face. He stretched beside the fire.

I slept well, but a movement before dawn roused me. The moon was down. Starlight paled the sand. The coals were dead. One dragon hissed. Two moaned.
Silence.
Knife and Stinky were returning. Spider and Batt were getting up.