As the bartender protested, the fat man stood up to hit her again, but he was flabby and out of shape and Semple wasn’t. Her knee snapped up and, despite her blurred vision, it connected with his groin. She must have gotten his testicles, too, because the fat man doubled over with an almost girlish scream. Semple didn’t wait around to see what the bartender would do. She was going for the door with all the speed of self-preservation. Her single instinct was to run, into the dirty daylight and away. Except that, right outside the door, unable to check her headlong flight, she collided with something large and hard and blue. Her outstretched hands encountered what felt like the plates of a giant insect. She looked up and found she was staring directly into a blank, unforgiving visor. Blue gloved hands gripped her wrists. “So what seems to be the problem here?”
A second blank mask joined the first. Apparently the cops in Necropolis were at least a head taller than the rest of the population. This one repeated the question. “So what seems to be the problem here?”
Semple wanted to point to the bar, but she couldn’t. The cop still had hold of her wrists. “In there . . . this man . . . ”
The second cop peered into her face and turned to his companion, the one holding her. “No mark.”
The first cop also looked and nodded. “No mark.”
The cops’ voices came from their helmets muffled and metallic. The first cop looked at the second cop. It was like a conversation between two not particularly bright robots.
“Going to have to take her in.”
“Yes. Going to have to take her in.”
Before she could resist in any way, Semple was spun around by the officers; a framelike device of stainless steel clamped over her wrists. The next cop-voice statement was even more robotic, intoned as a legal ritual. “I arrest you as an unregistered female wandering at large as defined under Section Ninety-three, Subsection Forty of the Code of Anubis. All future conduct will become a matter of record in this case. I say again, I am arresting you. Do not resist or you will be immobilized.”
It had all happened so fast that Semple was too stunned to resist. She allowed herself to be led away. Somewhere behind her, other officers had arrived, and the fat man also seemed to be under arrest. It was a fact that offered her little comfort.
***
Long Time Robert Moore handed Jim a fat joint of the finest Hawaiian herb rolled in wheatstraw paper. “Figure we did the right thing back there, Rock and Roll.”
“You mean getting out of town?”
Moore nodded. “I surely do. When them Caribbean Mysteres get to jooking, I always believe it be time to duck and cover, if it ain’t time to plain duck and run.”
Jim took the joint with a certain resignation. Here he was, taking drugs in yet another car, on one more road to who the hell knew where. The story of his life also seemed to be becoming the story of his death. The truth was that he was less than happy about being ordered out of Doc Holliday’s little town. He had hoped the place might have provided him a refuge for a while, a place to chill and maybe get a handle, to reconstruct his memory as far as he could after the destructive craziness of the Moses orgy. He had even been hoping to get to know Lola. He’d thought he might be able to avoid having to run through the darkness yet again, but here he was doing exactly that.
“I thought you were pulling out anyway. Like going to the Crossroads.”
“We’re going to the Crossroads now. That’s for sure.”
“You want to tell me about the Crossroads?”
Long Time Robert shook his head. “No.”
“No? Just like that?”
Long Time Robert Moore’s gravel voice exhibited a definite trace of irritation. The old man might have chops close to divine, but he was one closemouthed son of a bitch. “Listen, Rock and Roll, you gonna find out about the Crossroads soon enough. In fact, if I have you figured, you already know plenty about the Crossroads.”
“I do? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You been to the Crossroads.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Sure you have. You just ain’t recalling it right now.”
Jim drew hard on the joint, deciding that his best policy was probably to shut up and try to avoid annoying Robert Moore. Whatever was coming next would be on him soon enough; there was no point in talking about it. As he passed the spliff back, he glanced into the vast rear of the Caddy and smiled at the Marilyn blonde. She returned his smile with a sexy pout and a recrossing of her legs. That seemed to be her entire repertoire of social communication; Jim began to wonder if she could talk at all. It was hardly his problem, though, and he eased back into the soft leather of the lavish front seat, a virtual in-car armchair, as large as a first-class seat on an airliner. Maybe later Marilyn would serve cocktails. He stretched his legs and did his best not to think. The interior of the car was an easy place to do this, cozy and womblike, an enclosed capsule of safety, reefer, soft darkness, and moving luxury. The only light was the muted green glow from the dashboard, giving it a sense of almost submerged submarine protection in which all possible futures could be held at bay.
Jim narrowed his attention to staring idly out of the window. At that particular, subjective moment, the car hardly seemed to be moving through anything like regular space-time, traveling on a twisting ribbon of unsupported highway that ran through a three-dimensional forest of tall, slender, crystalline pyramids, each of which radiated its own internal blue-green light. Small spheres, Day-Glo red and vibrant acid yellow, drifted overhead in untidy clusters of a dozen or more, just above the peaks of the pyramids, like strange flocks of animated bubbles. Jim wondered if, somehow, the car had switched to traveling on the molecular level. This was, after all, the far country where just about anything was possible.
As soon as he had started to take the pyramids for granted, Jim was surprised to find himself staring at a radically altered landscape. He didn’t remember dozing, but he could hardly recall a transition. “I guess it’s just one of those missing holes in time again.”
Robert Moore glanced sharply at him. “What you say?”
Jim shook his head. “It was nothing. Just talking to myself.”
“Sometimes that’s the only way to get an intelligent conversation.”
The spheres and pyramids had been left behind, and now the Cadillac was rolling on a perfectly normal two-lane country blacktop, under a pitch-black night sky filled with bright, unwinking stars. A huge orange moon hung close to the horizon, and cornfields, flat as a billiard table, without a tree, building, or even a grain elevator to break the monotony, stretched as far as the eye could see. “How did we get to Kansas?”
Long Time Robert Moore looked at Jim as though he were crazy. “This ain’t no motherfucker Kansas.”
“It sure looks like Kansas.”
“I’m telling you, Rock and Roll, this ain’t Kansas. And you ain’t Dorothy and I ain’t Toto.”
As they continued deeper into what Jim was now thinking of as the corn belt, he started to see huge geometric shapes, hundreds of feet long, stamped in the standing crops, circles within circles, joined by the straight lines of extended radii, so they formed complex and enigmatic patterns.
“Crop markings?”
Robert Moore nodded. “Get a lot of them ’round these parts.”
“You ever meet anyone who could read them? Anyone who knew what they meant?”
Robert Moore shook his head. “I did try playing them a couple of times.”
“Playing them? You mean like musical notation?”
“I tried it, but the tunes sounded like shit. All these Neil Diamond chord progressions.”
“You still think they’re some kind of giant song chart?”
Moore turned and looked at Jim. “You know something, Rock and Roll?”
Jim sighed. “You don’t like me asking questions.”