Dinh just hugged herself and shook her head. "I'm an as-is package."
Several tanned little boys were splashing each other in the shallows ahead of them, and after a few steps down the slope Diana stopped, staring at them.
The boys' faces were stiff, almost painted-looking, and their arms seemed to Diana to move as if they were hinged.
Dinh was ahead of her, looking back. "Hmm?"
"Let's … go farther down the beach," Diana said.
The first thing Crane noticed was that old Doctor Leaky was aboard the houseboat, sitting in a wheelchair in the corner under the television set. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with him, aside from the fact that he had wet the pants of his sky blue leisure suit, and he kept fumbling ineffectually at the belt that kept him in the chair.
"Pay no attention to the old man in the corner," said Leon in his booming baritone. Crane looked across the red-carpeted lounge to where the host was already seated at his place at the green table—and Crane made himself just smile and nod.
The Art Hanari body was looking bad. Red lines, apparently inflamed veins, curled and branched down the bad side of his face, and the high cheekbones and decisive shelf of the jaw were lost under puffy swelling. Crane imagined that Leon was yearning to flee into a new body as desperately as he himself had ever yearned for the escape of drink.
The engines shifted out of neutral, and the carpeted deck shifted as the boat got under way.
"Sit down, everyone," said Leon. "We've only got three hours, and we want to get as many hands bought and sold as we can, right?"
Right, Crane thought desperately. One hand in particular.
He squeezed his purse, feeling the bulk of the once again agonizingly stacked Lombardy Zeroth deck, as he hurried to the seat he had selected for himself, the first position to Leon's left this time.
He had thought about buying a pack of cigarettes so that he could at least have one smoldering beside him, even if he couldn't bear to puff on it; he'd forgotten to, but it didn't matter—Old Newt was tremblingly stubbing out a Pall Mall in an ashtray already crowded with butts, having just lit a fresh one.
Leon opened the wooden box and spread the terrible cards out across the green felt. A couple of yesterday's players had not returned and had been replaced by newcomers, and these now shivered and looked ill.
Leon turned the cards face down and began shuffling them. The cigarette smoke curled over the table, and it seemed to Crane that two almost inaudible sounds vibrated the levels of the drinks and made his teeth itch—one sound too low to hear and one too high—and he thought that the interference between them must be about to form words that would resonate unrecoverably deep in the minds of all present.
The brown Art Hanari hands were steady as Leon passed the deck to the man on his right for the cut.
Crane's bad eye stung, and he wiped at it with the lace-edged handkerchief the women had bought for him.
The children had walked with mechanical stiffness out of the lake shallows and onto the hot sand. Beyond them their parents waved and nodded, slowly, like the grasshopper heads of pumping oil wells.
Nardie and Diana hurried away, carrying their shoes now, toward the empty stretch of beach to their right. Diana tried to slant toward the water, but through some trick of perspective, every sliding footstep through the shifting sand took them further away from the lake.
It was in the bending of Nardie's knees that Diana first saw the stiffness start to appear here; then her belly went cold as she noticed that her own arms were swinging metronomically, and that the very birds and waves and stalks of shore grasses were all shifting their positions with angular rigidity.
"What's—exactly—happening," said Nardie, obviously struggling to make her voice come out as something besides a monotone quacking.
Mother, thought Diana in panic, what's happening here?
A concept appeared in her head, and the image of a sword.
Diana tried to put words to it. "Crystallization," she droned, unable to put a questioning lift at the end of the word. "Like—" She searched her mind for an image that would fit the idea. "Like pure silicon crystals—no good for—information transfer. Need—mix—doping of boron or—something. If it's just one pure thing, it's just a crystal—what this is." She inhaled and exhaled jerkily.
The image of a sword: Nardie had said that the turtle in the myth had taken back a sword. "Get out—your sword, your chip."
"Chip," intoned Nardie. "Dip, slip, crip. Chip like in—silicon." She reached up like a saluting robot, and her rigid hand hit her forehead. "Cannot—get it out."
"No," said Diana, wondering how much longer she would even be able to speak. The air was so still it seemed almost to have jelled. "Poker—Poker chip." Repeating the word was the only way she could convey emphasis. "Moulin Rouge."
Nardie nodded and then kept on nodding, but her spread fingers found the pocket of her jeans, and after some ungraceful wrenching she held out her hand.
On her palm was the black and white chip, with its androgynous jester face grinning under the diamond checkerboard pattern of the fool's cap.
The air rippled over it, and Nardie seemed to encounter resistance when she moved her hand—she had to cup her palm around the chip and push it through the air.
Diana sensed cracks spreading invisibly out from the space around Nardie; the field of rigidity was being broken up.
Then the air shifted and seemed to spring apart, and Diana nearly fell as her joints suddenly loosened.
"God," said Nardie, wobbling sinuously and twisting her feet in the rounded sand, her freed voice running up and down the scale, "what in hell was that!"
Diana sighed. "Opposition," she said. "Let's get into the water."
They turned toward the now-wide stretch of sand that separated them from the blue waves, then froze.
The air over the sand was no longer glassy clear.
A crowd of translucent figures and tall structures like oil wells wavered, insubstantial as heat waves over highway pavement, on the expanse of sand between them and the water.
Diana looked closer, trying to see the misty forms in the glare of the sunlight, and she saw without comprehension that they were not living figures but were nearly-transparent moving statues, perhaps not standing at various distances but built to different scales. She strained her eyes to focus on the things and saw that several were dressed in Arab robes and headdresses, some in Roman togas, and a couple as cowboys or prospectors. One was a giant ape, though no more lifelike in its motions than the others.
Then she looked up, and saw that the two tall structures were the clown from the front of the Circus Circus and Vegas Vic, the cowboy who perpetually waved over the Pioneer Casino on Fremont Street.
For a long, stretched-out second she simply stared, her belly cold and her mind blank.
Then she choked off a despairing wail and tried to think above the thudding of her heart. "It's all the figures," she said unsteadily, "from town. Or their spirits, I guess."
"Their shapes." Nardie shook her head, now holding the chip tightly in her fist. "What do they care?"
"I guess Scott's father cares."
"Can they," asked Nardie shakily, "hurt us?"
"I doubt they're here to escort us to the water." The two women had stepped back. "This is his magic, the King's. Male only—he doesn't want a Queen." Diana put one hand on Nardie's narrow shoulder, and they stopped retreating across the loose sand. "My mother gave us the chip. It's yin and yang," said Diana tensely. "Mixed, linked opposites—the face on it is both male and female. His … things might not like it."