Her thoughts fuzzed out, but her agile brain kept mulling it over, and in due course she concluded that it was just under one per cent. So what she was seeing now was only a hundredth of what they had started with. So now it was just a shared house, some ugly sex, and a messed-up daughter. Their love-child, as it were. More like a tough-love-child.
“You desire that with Darius?” Maresy inquired alertly.
“It wouldn’t be that way with Darius!” she protested. But uncertainty was closing in, like dark fog at dusk. If she could be with Darius, and go to his wonderful Kingdom of Laughter, and everything was just perfect, would the romance be down to one per cent in fifteen years? Would she be an alcoholic and he be having affairs with other women? Would they have a suicidal daughter?
Maresy faded out, for Colene was now absolutely, totally wide awake. Now she knew: it was time to end it. There was no hope for romance, even if it were possible for her to join Darius. So she had lost nothing, really; there had never been anything to make her life worth continuing.
The dirty pot would do. It wasn’t as if her life were clean. She was the offspring of a garbage marriage, and faced more garbage if she tried to grow up and get married herself. The whole thing was pointless.
She sat with the pot, uncovered it, bared her arms, and picked up the knife. Now was the time. Two swift, deep slices, then hang on. “I’ll lay me down and bleed a while,” she murmured. “Then ne’er up again.”
Yet somehow she didn’t make the first cut. She shivered from the cold and the anticipation, and her arms were goose-pimply, but she just sat there not doing it. She couldn’t quite take that final step. She knew she had been playing at suicide before; she couldn’t bleed to death from the scratch of a compass point. She could have done it from the slash of Slick’s razor, but that had been in company; she had known they wouldn’t actually let her die. But now it was real, and she just couldn’t.
“What a hypocrite I am!” she exclaimed. “I know what to do, and I’m too cowardly to do it!”
The knife dropped from her hand. She sat there and sobbed. She had come to the final test of her life, and flunked it.
Yet she could not quite give up the death either. She sat there, congealing with cold, breathing the miasma of the pot. Everything was hopeless! Maybe she would die of the cold, or at least catch pneumonia and expire. Or would that be cheating?
COLENE! Wait for me!
She snapped out of her drift. Time had passed, maybe a little, maybe a lot. She must have nodded off, and dreamed.
Yet something had changed. She felt a certain imperative, or potential, or something.
Take hold!
It was Darius! It was no dream. Maybe she was crazy, but she was ready to go for it. If it was to be a one per cent romance fifteen years down the line, so be it, but it was a hundred per cent now, and now was what counted. She would give him everything immediately, before the joy of it could fade.
She reached out with her mind and took hold. She felt something settle into place. That was all.
But she knew reality had changed. It was a Virtual Mode: a ramp spanning the realities from his to hers. Darius was coming for her! If he was crazy, she would be crazy too.
Gloriously crazy in love!
What now, of the futility of romance? She didn’t care; she was going for it. Because while she was orienting on love, she wasn’t orienting on death.
She got up and looked around. Nothing had changed physically. But this was here, in her reality. It would be different in Darius’ reality.
But how was she to get from here to there? Well, if this was a true Virtual Mode, all she had to do was walk there. She would be at one end, he at the other. It should be easy enough to cross the ramp and join him.
Why wait for him to come for her? She had wanted to depart this life. Now she could do it—without killing herself.
She would meet him halfway.
Still, it might be a fair distance. She should travel prepared. She wasn’t sure how far it might seem in miles. If there were an infinite number of realities, was that an infinite number of miles? No, it had to be fewer than that. But she should use her bicycle, just in case.
She gathered up her scattered things, such as the canned food she had bought for Darius to eat. He had used some, but she had continued to bring in more as she scrounged it. Now she would eat it herself, if she had to. She also dressed and packed a change of clothing, though what she had here in Bumshed wasn’t exactly clean.
Her bike was leaning against the wall of the shed, under the overhang. It wasn’t in top condition, but it was functional. She hadn’t ridden it much in the past year, because a bike was really kid stuff, and a teenager was not a kid. But a bicycle was the most efficient mode of transport known to man; a person on a bike used less energy than any walking animal or any traveling machine. So she would be a kid again to travel—so that she could be a woman when she got there.
Hastily assembled, she walked the bike out to the road. It wasn’t nearly as late as it had seemed in the shed; actually her watch said eight o’clock. Things were hardly stirring outside. She could get cleanly away before her parents caught on.
That made her pause. How would they react to her disappearance? For she knew she wasn’t coming back.
She walked back to the shed. There she dug out a pad of paper and a pencil. DEAR FOLKS: DON’T WORRY; I AM FINE. I JUST HAVE SOMEWHERE TO GO. COLENE.
She tore off the sheet and set it on top of the board covering the pot. Eventually someone would look in here, and then the note would be seen. That should be enough. They might put out an alert for her, but she was going where their alert could not reach. As she understood it, the ramp intersected her reality only at this spot; everything else was in other realities, no matter how similar to hers it seemed.
She walked her bike back out to the street, got on it, and started pedaling. Immediately, her sense of “whereto” went wrong. This wasn’t the way.
She looped the bike and went the other way. Now it was better. It felt like going uphill, only it wasn’t physical and it wasn’t hard. It was like orienting on a distant light.
Actually the light was a little to the side; the street wasn’t going in quite the right direction. But neither were the intersecting streets. She had to turn and go down one, then turn again.
Then she reached a region where there weren’t cross streets, and had to keep going straight. Gradually her awareness of the proper direction faded. This was no good; it seemed that she had to stay pretty close to the center of the ramp, or she lost it.
Finally there was an intersection, and she turned and rode at right angles. Before long she felt it: the attuning. Good; that meant that she didn’t have to stay on it all the time; she could detour and pick it up later. She might have to do S-shaped figures, crossing and recrossing the ramp, but it did give her more freedom.
But was she getting anywhere? Everything looked ordinary, not magical. She had now biked more than a mile. That wasn’t far, but how far would it be before something changed?
She just didn’t know.
Well, she would give it a real try regardless. After all, she was skipping school, and that would get her in trouble if they caught her. She had to get far enough to be sure they couldn’t.