“I’m sorry,” Godelhausser said. It was obvious that he required an effort to say no to the merchant.
“You won’t rent?”
“I won’t ”
“Twenty-five thousand, then.”
“I’m very sorry. For both of us.”
Rudi rose, twisted his shoulders so his cape was flung back, the wrinkles flowing out of it like ripples disappearing across the surface of a pond after a stone has been tossed. “You’ll never make departure fees otherwise, you know.”
“Perhaps,”
Rudi shrugged. He was not angry. Impatient, perhaps, restless with the certainty that he would get what he wanted sooner or later, disturbed that time and effort must be wasted to achieve what he wished. “I’ll try again tomorrow evening. Perhaps circumstances will have changed.”
“No,” Godelhausser said. His voice was now so slight, so wavery that it seemed not to be a voice at all, but the stirring of a breeze across a series of open pipes.
“I’ll return just the same,” Alvon Rudi said. He nodded curtly and left them.
Sebastian finished his drink. “What he want?” he asked Godelhausser.
The old man had fumbled his Holistian Pearl from his pocket and was beginning to rub it between his fingers. He had not even eaten yet.
“What he want?” Sebastian insisted.
“My soul,” Pertos said. “But I wouldn’t give it to him” Then the Pearl sent dreams to him as it reached energy storage capacity, and he seemed to enter a trance.
Sebastian left the room because it scared him when the puppet master was holding the Pearl, his hands rolling it automatically while his eyes were closed and his thoughts were lightyears away. He went down the hall and stopped before the closed door of the puppets’ room. He could hear their laughter, husky little voices, the clink of their small glasses that Pertos supplied them. Wissa squealed in delight, and he wondered what game they were playing. When he tried the door, it was locked.
He went to his own room, staggering a little.
He laid his identification cards in his single suitcase, a nightly ritual, and fell into bed with his clothes on. There was a faint smell of urine, and he remembered his soiled pants. But he was too tired to get up and drop them into the sonic cleaner in the wall. The smell and his exhaustion, coupled with his inability to join the puppets or Pertos made him feel more lonely and desperate than he had ever felt before in his life.
Even so, he slept.
Jenny was laughing, dodging from tree to tree. She wore a slouch hat and carried a gun made of plastic that shot sponge pellets at him. She was the spy, she said, though he did not know what a spy was. It was his job, she said, to capture her.
They were running, laughing, hiding from each other, jumping out to scare each other, running more.
And then . . .
And then he caught her, caught the spy, before she could shoot him, like he was supposed to do ….
Only . . . only she had bled . . . and died . . . shooting him with those sponge-rubber pellets . . . alternately begging for help . . . get help . . . run for help . . . tell them . . . about help. .
But he couldn’t do it. He was scared of what they would do to him. Other spies might come and try to kill him for getting their spy.
And then she was quiet, dead. And he got rid of her and went home and when they asked him where she was, where the spy was, he told them a story, because there had to be a story, but it was a broken story and he knew they wouldn’t believe him, would send spies . . . and he would be killed and would bleed like Jenny and would . . . would . . . die….
He woke up to some loud noise. He sat up after a while, after the dream was all gone, and he listened to see if he could hear it again. He could not. He went to sleep again.