Madison frowned and for a moment his lips narrowed so completely that they seemed to vanish. “What’s done this, Miss Clay? It wasn’t just one night of rioting.”
“I’d like you to call me Lyla,” she insisted. “I like people to be friendly to me instead of just polite! I need someone to be friendly! Oh God, I wish it could be like the old days my parents talk about, when you didn’t mind who you met or who you worked with or who sat next to you. It’s all sort of closing in on us like the walls in The Pit and the Pendulum!”
She glanced wildly around as though actually expectto see the buildings move to trap her.
“People didn’t get killed in riots,” she whispered. “They didn’t! Oh-oh, poor Dan!”
Madison waited. Shortly she was able to go on.
“No, of course it wasn’t just one night. It must have been waiting all the time people were ashamed to let it come out in the open. But something’s proved to be stronger than shame. What is stronger than shame?”
“Fear,” Madison said.
“I guess so,” she admitted. “But why should people be so afraid?” She drew a deep breath. “I’m a pythoness, Harry. I have to get inside people’s minds. I never found anything in anyone’s-not even at the Ginsberg where there are all these people who are supposed to be crazy-which wasn’t in me too.”
She had fallen in beside him again automatically and this time he was taking the lead, heading towards the hotel she had recommended.
“Except you,” she said. “You’re-you’re not the same somehow. And I’m frightened of that too. I think.”
At which point four large strong young men, all blanks, stepped out of a doorway and blocked their path. A bright light flashed in her eyes so that her face could be seen behind the mask of the yash and a voice said, “Mixed!” A hand clamped on hers and something jabbed into the base of her thumb and the ground rocked in a weird swirling curve like water in a spinning bowl.
Blurch. Planet revolving on ungreased axles that howled. Dim unspoken in the recesses of the brain helphelphelp. Scattered to the four filthy corners of the universe the bits and pieces of the person once integLyla Clay. Feebly helphelp and not even strength to move the lips let alone power vocal cords with gust-ing breath.
Eight filthy corners.
help
too much like hard work she abandoned the struggle.
They had put Pedro Diablo in a Federal-financed luxapt development where the contract-drafted by Bustafedrel back in the days of less sharply delineated racial boundaries-included a non-discrimination clause, but it had never been invoked before and his neighbors were so horrified that during the evening (while he was being tracked down by the knee leaders who were in close touch with Morton Lenigo and had also been horbecause they had banked on using Diablo’s talents as a propagandist and now he’d been fired on the say-so of a dirty blank) they were organizing a petition to have him evicted before he lowered the tone of the block.
Eternities later and a different world: a world of black furry hills with a sun half green half red crossed by a slanting bar louring from a gray vertical sky.
A room? Painfully. A landscape of a room, floor plains and furniture mountains. Unheard, a river coursing down a stony cascade, obscene fungoid growths on the footand local weather storming and screaming and clammy heat and the stench of decay.
Crack thunder and ouch lightning and in the immediforeground to which Lyla opened her eyes a Stoneof human bodies, a megalithic circle of arms on shoulders, pallid upright pillar-forms interrupted before the place where she lay by a wide-astride mandrake/ womandrake more exactly paunch sagging over hairy pubis and skin scrawled like a toilet’s wall with names and times in greasy crayon, some smeared and some freshly legible: piggy wallis 0825 della the butch 1215 HORNY HANK DUMONT 1640.
As though catching the fragments of a nuclear expiece by slow piece and forcing them back into the form of neatly machined metal billets Lyla absorbed the facts her senses presented and categorized them into patterns. She felt very ill and her hand hurt where a blunt needle had been jabbed deep into the muscles. Also there was a hot new pain across her right thigh. A red whiplash bar on the skin.