Just the way I’d shied away from lurches, drunks and dropouts. There I was, reflected in a dress-shop window, a grotesque ghost hovering over the stilted dummies inside. A gaping thug, wild-haired, soot-smeared, unshaven, dressed in skin-tight leather that bared arms seamed with small burns and scars, a gaudy braid band like gang colours around my forehead, and a four-foot sword dangling along my leg – God knows, I would’ve run away. Maybe Jyp was right and the sword, at least, they wouldn’t notice; but what was true for him might not be for me. I was too much a part of all this.
Then a truck came roaring down on me without even trying to brake, and I leaped for the sidewalk like an electrified frog. I flipped the driver a gesture, then remembered and stuck up the single finger they understood over here. Not that I altogether blamed him, though, any more than the touchy black character. I looked barking mad and dangerous as hell. I hurried to the machine, thumbed my coins and thrust them in. Just enough – I yanked out the paper and stared. The New Orleans States – Item, published the fourth –
The day after I’d left. New Orleans. A day and a night – right. That was all there was to it. I felt my legs begin to tremble under me. It was true, then … I let the paper fall, turned and ran back the way I’d come, away from lights and cafés and Creole cooking odours and iron balconies, ran like hell for the river and the wharf.
Back to the square I raced, sure of every turn, and came out just by the cathedral, crossed the gardens at full tilt – astonishing some late-night strollers – and ducked panting into the street I’d left. From there it was easy, round every turn just as I’d remembered it, and my memory didn’t so much as falter once. It was easier on foot, this kind of thing, when you could take your time spotting landmarks, when you didn’t have to make snap decisions where to turn. Not that I didn’t give one great sigh of relief, though, when I finally turned into the road where that lying apparition had first hooked me, and saw the broad river gleaming like dull copper under the hazy moon. The Mississippi, no less. Well, I’d something to ask Le Stryge about, at any rate.
From there on in I strolled quietly, getting my breath back. I couldn’t hear any noise of hammering; maybe they’d stopped work for the night. I couldn’t blame them; two in a row was a bit much for anyone. I turned the corner to the wharf; and then I came to a dead halt and clutched at the side of the building, as if the running had suddenly seized my legs and turned them to water under me.
It wasn’t the same building. It was no clapboard shack; there were none, not up or down the broad concrete wharves that stretched out along the river on either side. It was a modern wall of corrugated aluminium, just like all the others I could see, up and down. Beside some there were ships, all right – big cargo carriers with never a mast or smokestack between them, flanked by modern container cranes or grain or mineral hoppers whose banks of floodlights carved out little wedges in the night. Of the Defiance, of all or anything that had brought me here, there was no sign at all.
I could have gone rampaging up and down those wharves, looking; I didn’t. I knew too damn well what had happened. I’d feared it from the moment I saw that paper, that date – though maybe it was already too late by then. Maybe it had been since that moon rose. My assumptions, my Core-bred basic instincts, had tangled with the reality that had brought me here. I’d pushed on too deep, gone back into the Core, seen too much of it that didn’t want to let go its grip. As, no doubt, the Knave meant to happen. And some deeper part of me, despairing of fulfilling the purpose that had driven me so far, so fast, had retreated into what it knew best and shut out the rest. In a foreign country, without papers, passport, money or even a good explanation why I was here, it had stranded me, left me high and dry on a desolate shore. From the Defiance, from Mall and Jyp, from all hope of help, it had cut me off.
There’d been no dawn. Maybe there never would be, any more. There was nothing before me but streets, a cityful of corners to turn, hoping that around one, or the next … hoping against hope. How long would that take? Empty and sick, I gripped the warehouse wall, staring up at the blank little windows high above, eyes as blind as mine to what I most needed to see. It was behind them somewhere, beneath all this modern overlay, the past sheathed in sheet steel – or coffined?
‘Hey!’ roared a hoarse angry voice. ‘Hey you! Whatcha doin’ there? C’mon, beat it!’ I almost drew on him, but remembered in time that in these parts even nightwatchmen would carry a gun; better not call attention to the sword, anyhow. A wavering flashlight tracked me like a spotlight as I stalked away, around the first corner that opened and into the shadows of unlit alleys. Darkness closed on me like a vast fist, and the shadows flooded into my head. Lost, alone, I stumbled blindly through stinking puddles, deeper and deeper into night.
At first I still tried to remember where I was going, turning this way and that, seeking another way back through the darkened ways to the river and the docks. But soon enough my tired mind lost track, and soon after that I forgot the very direction of the docks; but I kept walking, because there was nowhere to stop. Now and again I struggled to think. What did any marooned tourist do? Go see the British consul – with a convenient case of amnesia? I’d be flown home, then. With a lot of explaining to do; about here, about gold, about … what had happened to Clare. I’d be lucky to stay out of Broadmoor. And with her on my conscience, maybe I wouldn’t want to …
After a while I found myself wandering out of the unlit maze into wider streets again, with lights and lit windows; but which streets and where I no longer cared. Some were like the elegant old brick houses I’d seen; others were garishly new, lined with blazing shop windows and neon signs – but all empty, all bare, all dead. I barged into – I didn’t know what; lamp standards, trash cans, street litter. I heard voices, angry voices, didn’t know where they came from. Perhaps there were people on those sidewalks, then; but if there were, I wasn’t seeing them. Only the cars moved, hissing past, featureless, driverless blurs of light and noise. Sometimes, suddenly, they’d come at me with howling horns, from all directions it seemed, and I’d have to dodge and weave my way through, and stagger off before they could come around again.
My sight dimmed. My sense of isolation got worse. The noise, the colours around me, everything my senses told me, seemed to make less and less sense, to add up to nothing, no coherent picture. I felt I had to keep moving at all costs, so this horrible inchoate world couldn’t close in around me and cut me off forever. But I was very tired now, and under my feet from time to time the ground would lurch suddenly and make me stumble. From overhead came a sound I knew, the whine of a circling jet; but I saw only a pattern of beating lights gliding over emptiness, and hid my eyes. Shadow and quiet drew me, and somehow, after hours, maybe, I found myself drifting along lesser ways, suburban streets lined with houses, more homely, less hostile. Yet the lit windows glared down balefully at me, and the cars still hissed by.
Until, with electrifying suddenness, one of them screeched in behind me, right to the sidewalk’s edge. I swung about in sudden fright, and grabbed at my sword – then froze, half-crouching, as a blue-white light flicked across my eyes. I saw nobody, but I heard the voices, hard and harsh.
‘That’s him! We got him!’