“You have a human name?”
“That’s the closest English equivalent to my real name.”
“The flower or the color?”
“Both.” The alien whirled again. It was like every molecule making it up unmoored itself, turned white, played super high-speed Musical Chairs with its fellow molecules, then settled into a new shape when the music ended.
Now I was staring at Princess Leia, complete with hair buns. In the white robe, not the brass bikini.
I didn’t lose it and mostly managed to not stare at Leia’s tits. “So are you a, you know, male or female?”
More of that popping sound. “Why? Are you going to hit on me, Glyph?” Orchid/Leia batted her eyes at me coyly.
That brought me up short. “No, I just—” I got it then. “You’re laughing, right? With that,” I mimicked the sound. “Popping noise.”
“Yes, and please forgive me. I am not laughing at you.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter if you were. Is laughing, um, universal?”
Leia/Orchid nodded approvingly. “Among organisms who possess the spark of sentience, yes.”
“So is that why you guys came here? To see if we know any good jokes?” An idea so absurd it might just be possible.
Orchid laughed again. “Who knows, maybe we did.” Another whirl, and when it ended I was facing Mr. Spock. Middle-late period, from the second movie. “Now, your coming here was not exactly voluntary, was it?”
“Not exactly,” I admitted uneasily. Now for hard questions.
“You were being pursued by both a gang and the police, correct?”
“Yeah.”
One Spock eyebrow rose. “You seem to be something of a troublemaker. This was not your first brush with the police, or anywhere near the first time your actions have put you in danger, or at loggerheads with society.”
No point in denying it. “I’ve had people take the things I said and did the wrong way.”
“Will you make trouble here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, answering honestly. “I mean, I owe you guys. You gave me a place to escape to and seemed to have fixed me up from getting shot. Thanks for that, by the way. If I wasn’t here I might be dead. But…”
Orchid/Spock whirled into the Tommy Lee Jones character from Men In Black. He frowned forbiddingly. “But what, Glyph?”
How to explain the pressure that is always inside me? “The thing is, when I see or learn about something I think is wrong, I have to do something about it.”
“By, among other acts, defacing public structures with various combinations of words and artwork.”
I smiled sheepishly. “Some of them are so butt-ugly they’re pretty much deface-proof.”
A whirl and now the Terminator filled the space behind the desk, a grim expression on the parts of his face that didn’t reveal metal. He said nothing, and that one red eye bored into my skull.
I managed to keep from cringing. This sort of thing always seemed to happen in job interviews too. Not the whirling thing, but somewhere along the line I would manage to scare or piss off my interviewer. Not a smart move in this case. There probably wasn’t anything keeping Orchid from zapping me right back to the cops and Chrome Lords.
The silence stretched on long enough to become uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.
“Well,” Orchid said at last, whirling into Gandalf. “This has been interesting and educational.”
“For me, too,” I said with a weak smile, wanting to get back on Orchid’s good side. Not sucking up, just making nice.
“Good. Now please stand up.”
I did as I was asked, trying to hold on to that smile.
“Please turn around.”
I felt a spasm of panic. “You’re not going to cap me, are you?”
“We don’t cap people,” Gandalf said. “At least not in the manner you’re talking about. Now turn around.”
Hoping Gandalf/Orchid didn’t turn me into a toad, I obeyed. Now there was a white wall just a few feet behind me. In the wall were two matte black doors like the one that had brought me to Venus. One was marked with a big red X, the other was unmarked.
“You will see similar doors when you join your kind in the Hoop,” Orchid said. “The door with the X will always lead to the same place. Back to your world, and the gate you used to come here. Though you can, by intention, instead end up at the gate nearest the one that brought you out. That’s a provision for those in your situation, ones who might be facing a less than friendly homecoming. Any questions?”
I had head full. “Where does the other door lead?”
“Somewhere else.”
I waited for more information. None came.
“That’s it?” I turned to look at Orchid, seeing that he—or she—had whirled into the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Orchid shrugged, shedding straw. “That’s it. You don’t like where you are, go through a Mystery Door and end up someplace else.”
“Someplace here on Venus.”
Orchid/Scarecrow grinned and spread his hands. “Probably.”
“You’re not giving me much to go on.”
“What do you want, a yellow brick road?”
I examined the doors doubtfully. “So I’m supposed to just walk through and hope for the best?”
No answer.
The desk was gone. Orchid was gone. The only things left to prove any of it had been real were a few stray pieces of straw. As I watched they sank into the white floor and disappeared.
I faced the doors again. Took a deep breath and walked through the unmarked door to wherever.
I had no idea what to expect when I went through that alien doorway. All I could do was brace for the worst, as if ducking into a bar notable for the multiple chalked body outlines on the sidewalk out front.
Still, that didn’t quite prepare me for stepping out into the middle of a grassy field and having a red-faced demon coming straight at me, screaming bloody murder and waving a sword.
I let out a yell—a glass-cracking shriek, actually—and dodged to the side, tripping over my feet, going down and eating turf.
The demon swept past me, slamming into another demon, this one with a horrible blue face. As they went at each other with their swords I realized that they were people in bamboo armor, wearing masks, and wielding rattan swords. I’d landed in the middle of a small but frenzied battle, over two dozen of the demons whirling and screaming and trading blows.
“What the fu—” I began, swallowing the rest of my query and almost my tongue at the sound of a huge gong. The battling demons disengaged and stepped back, bowing formally to each other.
The demon warrior who had nearly run me over strode back to where I sprawled. Offered a gloved hand.
After a moment I took it, letting the demon help me to my feet. “Thanks,” I mumbled. As I dusted off my clothes the demon pulled off his bamboo helmet, dropped it to the ground, and pulled off his mask.
I took a step back, not so much reality-slapped that the warrior was a woman, but at the face behind the mask. Her face, like mine, was the creamed coffee color of mixed race, except in the places where it was the pink of scar tissue. The scars mapped out the left side of her face in thin twisting forks and dead ends, several of them disappearing under the black patch covering one eye. Her hair was a close-cropped brown burr broken by more scarring.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Didn’t break anything when you fell?”
I shook my head, staring even more now. “Uh, no.”
Her smile turned fierce and faintly mocking. “Not used to seeing anyone as pretty as me?” Her voice was soft, but held a dangerous edge, like velvet wrapped around a straight razor.