“That,” he said, “was one dramatic touch too many. I’d best go have that spindizzy fixed again, just in case.”
Amalfi shut off the controls with a contented gesture. “If that bindlestiff should show,” he said, “they’ll have a tough time amassing any prestige here for a while. But go ahead, Mark, it’ll keep you busy.”
THE mayor eased his barrel-shaped bulk into the lift shaft and let himself be slithered through the friction fields to the street. Outside, the worn facade of City Hall shone with sunlight, and the City’s motto—MOW YOUR LAWN, LAIW?
—was clear even under its encrustation of verdigris. Amalfi was glad that the legend could not be read by the local folk—it would have spoiled the effect.
Suddenly he was aware that the chanting he had been hearing for so long through the earphones was thrilling through the air around him. Here and there, the sober, utilitarian faces of the Okie citizens were turning to look down the street, and traces of wonder, mixed with amusement and an unaccountable sadness, were in those faces. Amalfi turned.
A procession of children was coming toward him: children wound in mummylike swatches of cloth down to their hips, the strips alternately red and white. Several free-swinging panels of many-colored fabric, as heavy as silk, swirled about their legs as they moved.
Each step was followed by a low bend, hands outstretched and fluttering, heads rolling from shoulder to shoulder, feet moving in and out, toe-heel-toe, the whole body turning and turning again. Bracelets of objects like dried pods rattled at wrists and bare ankles. Over it all the voices chanted like water flutes.