And he’d loved someone like that?
Now that was crazy! How could anyone sane love such a shallow, and presumptuous, and worthless, and conceited ...
Breathing harder, he launched into the letter again. The first part? This time it just seemed crazy from the start. She must be crazy! First off, if she really thought he had done all those things she accused him of in the second part, why would she have spent any time with him at all? Obviously she couldn’t believe the things she’d said. Why say them, then? Why even suggest them? She was crazy and vicious! That simpering drivel about moonlight and helping others. (And then she’d elbowed him off to go crawling up into bed with someone she could tell how awful he was!) How could he possibly have gone all gooey for someone so obviously deranged and sick as—
Which is when the women in clothes on the bench across from his stood up, staggered a step forward, grasped her throat, and made a strangled sound.
Bron looked up, dragged a great breath in on top of his anger: it did nothing to relieve him. And his ears were painfully stopped.
Somewhere across the Plaza, someone screamed.
Then he felt a breeze on his neck that grew. And grew. And grew. And grew—Bron suddenly staggered erect. The war\ he thought. It must be the ... ! The gale behind him pushed him three steps forward. The letter was snatched away, chattering. It hurled, like a slab of gray slate, against the transport station’s kiosk, which, as if from the letter’s impact, sagged. A piece of the kiosk roofing came off and spun away, bouncing over the Plaza, hit one man, who went down on his knees clutching his head, and shattered a shop window.
And the other kiosk walls were down, were tearing away, were skidding across the concourse.
And it was getting dark.
Staggering in the gale, Bron looked up. The shield’s colors, in patches, were fading to black—a black that was suddenly emptier than any he’d ever seen. The date-lights around the Plaza had gone off too. And the stars—! (A quarter of the sky was dark; more than a quarter!) They looked like the bright tips of long needles, shoved down at him, inches close. And the roaring! Somewhere something was gathering and pulling itself up and then ... it tore loose! Bron was shoved backward. His knees hit the bench; he fell, grabbing the seat, felt something strike the bench hard enough to rattle it. He threw himself down to clutch the ground. Something else hit the bench and shattered. Bron’s eyes snapped open in the stinging wind.
Somewhere people ran and shouted. Then the wind’s roar wedged between them and him; the bench shook above him. One end swung loose. And Bron stood; and ran. The gale growing on his left changed his course, in half a dozen steps, nearly ninety degrees, then sent him sprawling to his knees and palms. He pushed to his feet, took another step and—fell ... in slow motion, while, the air was yanked from his lungs. His face and eyes and ears burned. He flailed onto the ground that heaved, slowly, under him; and broke open (he felt it) not far off.
Then all the air dropped, roaring, back down. The pavement under his palm parted—just a little. Little things struck his cheeks, ears, legs, and hands. His eyes were slits. And he was up and running. Had something hit his hip? It hurt miserably. He ran, hurting.
Lights, here and there, in his streaming eyes, lit fragments of an unreal city. He stopped. The wind was raging but—he realized suddenly—not around him. Somewhere far away something immense fell and took a long time doing it.
Some dozen people suddenly ran around him—and he turned watching them—making for a doorway. He ran again. The street became rubble under his feet. At first he thought the ground had shattered. No, only the
(he stumbled on lengths of plastistrut, broken styro-plate, and crumbling foam) wall of the building beside him had fallen. He stepped on a piece of tilted styro-plate, that shifted. He looked down. An arm stuck out from under it—which made him stop.
It must have been a design-house mannequin or possibly an—
The hand, palm up, suddenly, made a fist (with ir-ridescent, multihued nails). Bron ran.
Twenty yards later he stopped, turned: Go back, he thought. I’ve got to go back ...
He heard them first, then saw them, crossing at the corner—maybe twenty, maybe fifty. They broke around him.
Then one grabbed him, spun him: “You fool! You damned fool! You can’t go that way!” she shouted in his face. “That’s the direction the break is in,” then lurched on. So did Bron, wondering exactly what had broken, and where it was. He was terrified, with a chill, blunt terror that made his throat and the backs of his knees ache.
Ahead, people were stopping.
Someone said loudly: “Not through here! I’m sorry! Not through here!”
People milled. Between them he saw the cordon of e-girls across the way. (The one calling was a woman.) People pressed behind him.
“You can’t go into this area! It’s too dangerous. Now got back!”
Some people, with looks of frustration, were starting to the right or left.
Bron started right—the street sign (here in the licensed part of the city, where the coordinate numbers were green) told him he was two units from his co-op; which surprised him; he hadn’t known he’d come that far.
Following the street he was on, however, would take him into the unlicensed sector—which suddenly seemed the most ridiculous thing imaginable: The middle of a military crisis was not the time to go wandering around the u-1! (The wind was up again, but at a steady pitch—which, when you thought about it, was scarier in its implications than a sudden gust that stopped.) No, it just wasn’t the—
He heard them, nearing; people started to move back, but Bron edged forward. The idea was neither complete nor verbal. He experienced it merely as a yearning to go home, without intellection as to method or its goal.
Trying to unravel the web of sound into their syllabic chains, he gained the crowd’s edge.
The mumblers, ragged and bowed, shuffled up in quarter light.
Anticipating embarrassment, he stepped forward, shouldered among them, closed his eyes (The smell! he thought, astonished. He’d forgotten the sour, unwashed smell!), bent his head, and began to shuffle with them. He commenced his Mimimomomizolalil ... but, a dozen syllables in, got lost; so, in time to his shushing sandals, he rolled his tongue through whatever nonsense came. Once, between squeezed lids, he glanced to the side to see eyes in a scaly face close: the woman recommenced mumbling. So did Bron. And shuffled.
The feeling was of lightness, almost of joy, of reasons and responsibilities, explanations and expiations shrugged off, abandoned. Is this, he thought (knowing a true mumbler should not be thinking), what I ought to have been doing all this time? Was he simply the sort of fool for whom it took some bellicose catastrophe to bring him to enlightment? He mumbled his nonsense, tried not to breathe through his nose, and thought: I will become a novice! I will study, I will renounce the sensory world for the blind trip toward eternity. Something else fell to the right.
A few people jogged against him.
His shoulders had started to ache—from the hunching. He shifted them about, tried to stand a little straighter, just his head forward—which sent a throb along the back of his neck, so that he had to rub it. A real mumble would, of course, give him something to concentrate on. If this was the death of Tethys, what better way to die with it than to have his mind cleared of all quotidian concern (though, despite the random sounds, like rubble of the city itself in his mouth, he felt his mind was anything but clear): he’d been repeating the same three syllables for minutes now, and went ou to something else. (Blinking, he saw his own sandals, and the rag-bound, filthy feet of the woman beside him, taking their tiny steps.) How far had they gone?