He shrugged. “I just don’t. I haven’t for…a while now.”
Loufer came down the last step, to the pavement. “Well, Tak Loufer’s met people here with stranger stories than that. You some kind of nut, or something? You been in a mental hospital, maybe?”
“Yes…” He saw that Loufer had expected a No.
Tak’s head cocked. The shadow rose to show the rims of Negrowide nostrils above an extremely Caucasian mouth. The jaw looked like rocks in hay-stubble.
“Just for a year. About six or seven years ago.”
Loufer shrugged. “I was in jail for three months…about six or seven years ago. But that’s as close as I come. So you’re a no-name kid? What are you, seventeen? Eighteen? No, I bet you’re even—”
“Twenty-seven.”
Tak’s head cocked the other way. Light topped his cheek bones. “Neurotic fatigue, do it every time. You notice that about people with serious depression, the kind that sleep all day? Hospital type cases, I mean. They always look ten years younger than they are.”
He nodded.
“I’m going to call you Kid, then. That’ll do you for a name. You can be—The Kid, hey?”
Three gifts, he thought: armor, weapon, title (like the prisms, lenses, mirrors on the chain itself). “Okay…” with the sudden conviction this third would cost, by far, the most. Reject it, something warned: “Only I’m not a kid. Really; I’m twenty-seven. People always think I’m younger than I am. I just got a baby face, that’s all. I’ve even got some white hair, if you want to see—”
“Look, Kid—” with his middle fingers, Tak pushed up his visor—“we’re the same age.” His eyes were large, deep, and blue. The hair above his ears, no longer than the week’s beard, suggested a severe crew under the cap. “Any sights you particularly want to see around here? Anything you heard about? I like to play guide. What do you hear about us, outside, anyway? What do people say about us here in the city?”
“Not much.”
“Guess they wouldn’t.” Tak looked away. “You just wander in by accident, or did you come on purpose?”
“Purpose.”
“Good Kid! Like a man with a purpose. Come on up here. This street turns into Broadway soon as it leaves the waterfront.”
“What is there to see?”
Loufer gave a grunt that did for a laugh. “Depends on what sights are out.” Though he had the beginning of a gut, the ridges under the belly hair were muscle deep. “If we’re really lucky, maybe—” the ashy leather, swinging as Loufer turned, winked over a circular brass buckle that held together a two-inch-wide garrison—“we won’t run into anything at all! Come on.” They walked.
“…kid. The Kid…”
“Huh?” asked Loufer.
“I’m thinking about that name.”
“Will it do?”
“I don’t know.”
Tak laughed. “I’m not going to press for it, Kid. But I think it’s yours.”
His own chuckle was part denial, part friendly.
Loufer’s grunt in answer echoed the friendly.
They walked beneath low smoke.
There is something delicate about this Iron Wolf, with his face like a pug-nosed, Germanic gorilla. It is neither his speech nor his carriage, which have their roughness, but the ways in which he assumes them, as though the surface where speech and carriage are flush were somehow inflamed.
“Hey, Tak?”
“Yeah?”
“How long have you been here?”
“If you told me today’s date, I could figure it out. But I’ve let it go. It’s been a while.” After a moment Loufer asked, in a strange, less blustery voice: “Do you know what day it is?”
“No, I…” The strangeness scared him. “I don’t.” He shook his head while his mind rushed away toward some other subject. “What do you do? I mean, what did you work at?”
Tak snorted. “Industrial engineering.”
“Were you working here, before…all this?”
“Near here. About twelve miles down, at Helmsford. There used to be a plant that jarred peanut butter. We were converting it into a vitamin C factory. What do you do—? Naw, you don’t look like you do too much in the line of work.” Loufer grinned. “Right?”
He nodded. It was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly. And, anyway, the rush had stopped.
“I was staying down in Helmsford,” Loufer went on. “But I used to drive up to the city a lot. Bellona used to be a pretty good town.” Tak glanced at a doorway too dark to see if it was open or shut. “Maybe it still is, you know? But one day I drove up here. And it was like this.”
A fire escape, above a street lamp pulsing slow as a failing heart, looked like charred sticks, some still aglow.
“Just like this?”
On a store window their reflection slid like ripples over oil.
“There were a few more places the fire hadn’t reached; a few more people who hadn’t left yet—not all the newcomers had arrived.”
“You were here at the very beginning, then?”
“ Oh, I didn’t see it break out or anything. Like I say, when I got here, it looked more or less like it does now.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Sitting on the street with the windshield busted, the tires gone—along with most of the motor. I let a lot of stupid things happen, at first. But I got the hang of it after a while.” Tak made a sweeping gesture with both hands—and disappeared before it was finished: they’d passed into complete blackness. “A thousand people are supposed to be here now. Used to be almost two million.”
“How do you know, I mean the population?”
“That’s what they publish in the paper.”
“Why do you stay?”
“Stay?” Loufer’s voice neared that other, upsetting tone. “Well, actually, I’ve thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with—I got a theory now—freedom. You know, here—” ahead, something moved—“you’re free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become—” they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lobbling from a windowsill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern—“exactly who you are.” And Tak was visible again. “If you’re ready for that, this is where it’s at.”
“It must be pretty dangerous. Looters and stuff.”
Tak nodded. “Sure it’s dangerous.”
“Is there a lot of street mugging?”
“Some.” Loufer made a face. “Do you know about crime, Kid? Crime is funny. For instance, now, in most American cities—New York, Chicago, St. Louis—crimes, ninety-five per cent I read, are committed between six o’clock and midnight. That means you’re safer walking around the street at three o’clock in the morning than you are going to the theater to catch a seven-thirty curtain. I wonder what time it is now. Sometime after two I’d gather. I don’t think Bellona is much more dangerous than any other city. It’s a very small city, now. That’s a sort of protection.”
A forgotten blade scraped his jeans. “Do you carry a weapon?”
“Months of detailed study on what is going on where, the movements and variations of our town. I look around a lot. This way.”
That wasn’t buildings on the other side of the street: Trees rose above the park wall, black as shale. Loufer headed toward the entrance.
“Is it safe in there?”
“Looks pretty scary.” Tak nodded. “Probably keep any criminal with a grain of sense at home. Anybody who wasn’t a mugger would be out of his mind to go in there.” He glanced back, grinned. “Which probably means all the muggers have gotten tired of waiting and gone home to bed a long time ago. Come on.”
Stone lions flanked the entrance.
“It’s funny,” Tak said; they passed between. “You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you’ll find?”
“Queers.”
Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. “Yeah.”
The dark wrapped them up and buoyed them along the path.
There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?