“You make me laugh.” Gypsy turned on Shaman suddenly. “The arrogance! You think you can bore into him right here in front of my face!”
“But I am. He’s mine, old Gyp. You can’t do squat zip. Look at the poor worm. Even if you got him to Sandy, he’s not Abu. You make me laugh, Sandulean.”
“Shaman, the only reason I let you get this far is to inoculate him against you. Now he’ll recognize what you do.” And Gypsy slapped me sharply across the face. It stung. My ears rang. The flood of awareness made me conscious all at once of another, deeper violation, and I swung my gaze toward Shaman as if I were wielding a shillelagh.
He drew back, startled. There was the slightest hint of fear, then it passed like the moon shadow of a wisp of smoke, and Shaman was his own again. He smiled a studied smile. I withered.
“I see,” Shaman said to Gypsy. “You want to take away my farm.”
Nora careened to the table and stood over Shaman. There was blood smeared on her neck, down her arms, and across her chest. “You’ve been at him. You said you wouldn’t.”
“Shaman tried to drill him,” Gypsy said, “right here in the Magellanic Stream. Mel threw him out. It was funny, Nora. You should have seen it. Mel bounced him!”
Shaman shot back, “It wasn’t the Earther. It was him, it was Gypsy using the boy like a hand puppet. The boy is mine. He has no will. He has no self. He is nothing. He is my straw, my chocolate flavor straw into the mind of Abu. This had nothing to do with you or with anyone on Sanduleak or anywhere else in the Magellanics.”
“You’re wrong, Shaman,” Nora said. “Abu is our father as well.
“I’m no menace to your galaxies. Why can’t you live and let live?” Shaman pushed away from the table and stormed to what used to be the glass doors leading to the pedestrian walkway. He stood there, staring out into black space. Gypsy applauded sardonically; Shaman’s was the gesture of a Shakespearean actor.
“Nora,” I stuttered, “you’re covered with blood.”
“It was that tattooed man,” she said, “the one who gave me a flower. He must have been in the men’s room when we took off. He stayed there and hid, apparently. I heard him through the wall. I had to kill him.”
21. If and Only If
“Vampires!” My mind rattled like a dryer on three legs; Gypsy’s slap had knocked to center stage the bubbles from Izzy’s quickpatch. Thoughts jostled and non sequitured inside. I ran behind the salad bar and inched back and forth along the sneeze guard, ready to fling dressings at any attacker.
(These days, when I get an audience with Izzy, he likes to give me a lot of grief about that episode. He calls it the Intergalactic Food Fight.)
There wasn’t much Russian left, but I was hoping to do some damage with the Roquefort and Italian, if I had to. I thought the vinegar in the Italian might blind them for a moment. The lumps of Roquefort cheese could slow them down. I could make for the dishwasher and fly us home, beating them back with ladles and meat cleavers and stuff that I found in the kitchen.
But the cheese was probably fake, I was thinking, or skimpy. I might be doomed in interstellar space by larcenous highway restauranteurs. “Vampires! Stay back,” I said.
(Intergalactic Food Fight?IFF. It’s a pun. “IFF” is also short for IF AND ONLY IF. I had to suffer and be a maniac ignoramus so that Abu al-Hawl could get a ride home and Johnny Abilene could ascend to the throne in the Small Magellanic Cloud; once I did all those stupid little things I had to do, the big matters inevitably resolved. IFF. Izzy knew it.)
“Vampires! Stay back!”
“This should be interesting,” Gypsy drawled.
Nora walked toward me slowly. “Trust me, Mel.”
“No.” I picked up a metal bowl of ruffle-cut beet slices and threatened her with it. “You killed that trucker. Did you eat him, Nora? Gypsy ate the cashier. Are you fighting over who’s going to eat me?”