She said, “Shall I go with you to the hotel?”
“I guess maybe it would be better if I went with you to your place,” Madison countered. “Dr. Reedeth told me you had a bad thing happen last night, Miss Clay, and-and I’m very sorry. I think you look sort of sickly, and I’d feel bad myself if I couldn’t repay your kindness in riding to the city with me.”
There was more than superficial polite concern in the tone. She thought Uncle and reached back into childthe war scare days of the nineties when every knee was treated by every blank as a potential subor saboteur and she, innocently five years old, was worried because they were so teddy-bearish and the little girls in traditional checked dresses with pigtails sticking out and ending in tightly knotted ribbons and it was absurd and not Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus-yes, from a little later, as the scare subsided and only the mental scars could not be cured but the buildings could be mended and the new skimmers took the air in their millions, tidily disciplined into midge-swarms across the sky by masterful computers capable of organizing a billion simultaneous journeys without collisions and-anyway, Uncle Remus with the confidence of a man successful in life and owning something the accidentally rich would eventually learn to want, that could be offered as evidence of him too being the heir to a traa heritage of entertainment and salty wit adaptto the modern world: what else had she done to rid them of the hysterical old woman a moment past but imitate Br’er Rabbit who begged not to be thrown in the briar patch?
“Miss Clay, I think maybe I ought to take you to your doctor first,” Madison said anxiously.
“Who’s in charge here, me or you?” Lyla countered with a forced high laugh. “Yes, I’m sorry, something very bad did happen to me and I’ve got to go back to an apt where there won’t be anyone else, just bloodon the floor to show there was someone yesterday, and there’s not much use worrying, is there? People do get killed. I’ll-”
Somehow she was walking with him, and managing to go the way they wanted to go instead of being pushed back and making detours and getting out of other peoway all the time as she was accustomed to. Not to the hotel, but to the block where she lived. Never mind.
“-simply have to digest the truth no matter how nasty it tastes. I ought to have warned you, though, like I said, because it’s not as though I was wearing my street yash which would mean it could be assumed I was a knee like yourself, I mean here I am walking along with you and all I’ve got on is this pair of Nix and people are looking at us, have you noticed?, with this resentful expression, like when it’s a blank it means what’s that girl doing with a knee? and when it’s a knee it means what’s that knee doing with a blank girl and betraying the cause?”
“Yes,” Madison said. “That’s something any knee grows up with, Miss Clay. You don’t have to spell it out, you know.”
“I’m kind of trying to show that I appreciate it,” Lyla said. “I mean I’m a pythoness and so I’m supto be more than averagely sensitive to-”
Recognized, familiar, the front entrance of her home block: the approach to the elevator.
“-other people, regardless of color. You see I was raised in this kind of old-fashioned background and my parents are very anti-Afrikaner and all that and I think it’s a shame even though it’s obvious why it happened that we got away from what was developing in the last century and-oh Christ, how am I going to get in?”
She stopped dead, on the point of entering the elevator car. “Those fucking busies! They didn’t even let me pick up a key when they dragged me out this mornnothing, I just happened to have this small change in my pocket and.” Frantically, the one pocket checked down to the fluff in the lining, and nothing but the phial of sibyl-pills and the money and an ID card.