So what now? she asked herself. She could not pull her eyes from the tower, the center of its own dark kingdom. Go home? Kill yourself?
But she had no home anymore. Misha was gone, and Juniper Bay seemed like another planet—like the circus, like the dear, sweet murdered days when she had still been with Aleksandr. And she had pushed away those who might have helped her, Roland McDaniel and her other few friends from work, that nice lawyer Mr. Ramsey. There was nothing left for her but silence.
The voices had brought her practically to the foot of this dreadful black mountain before deserting her. Somehow it was all tangled together—the children, the tower, and the grinning, corpse-white features of Uncle Jingle, the mask she herself had worn so long she wondered if it had not somehow shaped the face beneath.
She opened her pad and sat down at the tiny pressboard motel desk. She found her gaze repeatedly swinging to the window, and at last clapped her hands to close the drapes, unable to think with the distraction of that dark warning finger.
Tired, but happy to have made a decision, Olga began to write her open-ended suicide note.
CHAPTER 6
Talking to Machines
NETFEED/NEWS: Another Rocket Board Fatality Raises Concerns
(visuaclass="underline" kids practicing at Skate Sphere facility, Clissold Park, London)
VO: Another in a string of tragedies involving rocket boards has led members in Britain's House of Parliament to consider a ban on what one member called "a ridiculously dangerous vehicle." But most board users do not agree there is a problem.
(visuaclass="underline" Aloysius Kenneally, age sixteen, in front of Bored! store, Stoke Newington)
KENNEALLY: "It's utterly down the rug. Most all them who blowing up, they like forty-year-old bizboys, seen? Go out on a weekend, ripscrape, crash some wrinkly shopper, dovetail into a hover bus fan. Don't down the rest of us 'cause some bizboy shouldn't even be riding hammers a micro. . . ."
It was like a horror flick, but worse, because it was really happening.
Tiny human shapes quailed before a vast and monstrous thing—a whip scorpion, Kunohara had called it. Paul could see Martine and her miniaturized companions huddled deep in the underside folds of a great leaf that shuddered over their heads as rain thumped down like bombs. He reached out, but it was only a view-window—he could do nothing to help them. The whip scorpion took a step closer, slouching in the cradle of its towering, jointed legs. A slender feeler like a stiffened riding crop reached out toward them—slowly, almost tenderly.
"You destroyed those mutants," Paul shouted. "Why can't you save my friends?"
"The mutants did not belong here. There is nothing wrong with the scorpion." Hideki Kunohara almost sounded offended. "It is only following its nature."
"If you won't help them, then send me. At least let me go to them."
Kunohara regarded him with oblique disapproval. "You will be killed."
"I have to try."
"You scarcely know those people—you told me so yourself."
Tears started in Paul's eyes. Anger expanded like steam, threatening to blow off the top of his head. Dimly, he could hear the threadlike shrieks of Martine and the others as the monstrous scorpion levered itself nearer. "You don't understand anything. I've been lost—months, maybe years. Alone! I thought I was out of my mind. They're all I have!"
Kunohara shrugged, then raised his hand. An instant later the bubble, the view-window, and Kunohara's stolid face all vanished, replaced by a scene of terrifying strangeness.
He was somewhere on the forest floor, trunks of mountainous trees stretching up all around him into the night, so large as to be almost invisible. Rain hissed and thudded all around, drops big as rubbish bins, some even the size of small cars; when they smashed against the mulch of the forest floor, everything jumped.
Paul had a sudden and horrifying recollection of the trenches of Amiens, cowering under the impersonal destruction of the German heavy guns; lightning flashed as if to further the illusion, dazzlingly bright as a phosphorus flare. Something moved on his right with a loud leathery creak he could hear even above the thumping of raindrops; the ground shifted beneath him. Paul turned and felt his heart try to climb out of his chest.
The whip scorpion shuffled another step closer to the base of the leaf and froze, motionless except for its questing feelers. By Paul's scale it was as big as a fire engine but much higher, a low, wide body slung between a gantry of jointed legs. It had no tail that he could see, but the pincers that folded like bumpers below its head were jagged with thorny spikes that would hold prey as inescapably as a crocodile's jaws. Two bright red spots low on its head, visible as the lightning flared again, gave an impression of malevolent eyes, of something summoned from its sleep in the pits of hell and angry at having been wakened.
A stream of water rolled off one of the high leaves onto the scorpion. It hugged the ground as the torrent splashed down, waiting with cold patience for the inundation to stop. For a moment Paul could see past it, to the hollow beneath a drooping leaf the size of a ski chalet, to pale human faces reflecting like pearls in the faint moonlight. He took a few steps toward them even as the scorpion ratcheted up to its full height again.
"Martine!" His voice was swallowed in the bombardment of rain. He reached and snatched up a fibrous piece of wood as long as his arm, a tree-needle or a thorn, and flung it at the scorpion. It fell harmlessly against one of the monster's legs but the movement attracted attention. The scorpion stopped and waved one of its whips in Paul's direction. Suddenly aware of what he had done, he went rigid. The feeler, like a horn drawn out twenty meters long yet not much wider than Paul's leg, swept by only an arm's length from where he stood motionless, heart knocking in triple time.
What have I done? His thoughts were as distracted and swift as his heart. I've killed myself. I can't do anything for them, and now I've killed myself, too.
The scorpion took a rasping step toward him. The whip brushed his chest and almost knocked him over. The shadow swung above him, turning, the legs angled out on either side like a forest of leaning trees. He saw the massive pincers flex outward slowly, then snap back.
Before he could close his eyes to cloak the horror of his coming end, the scorpion suddenly wheeled to the side. A tiny human figure had burst from beneath the leaf and was stumbling away across the uneven ground. The whip scorpion moved after it with appalling speed.
The little shrieking figure staggered as the many-legged darkness covered it. The scorpion's front end dipped and the pincers snatched up its kicking prize, piercing it and smashing it into an impossible configuration before levering it up to the furious machinery of the jaws.
Paul could only stare in stupefied horror. The pursuit and kill had taken only seconds. One of his friends was dead and now the vast monster was turning, leg by leg, back toward him.
Something swept down out of the trees, a column of misty whiteness that shoved the huge creature flat against the ground. Ice began to form all across the monster's carapace and crystallize in powdery chunks on the joints of its legs.
"Seven hells, nothing works anymore!" Kunohara's voice rasped in Paul's ear, then the man himself was standing beside him. Ignoring the mammoth, rigid scorpion, Kunohara grabbed Paul's shoulder, then beckoned to the people still cowering under the leaf. "Step out," he shouted. "Come and join hands—I do not know how far my personal field extends."