“Medusa,” Kanastorous said.
“Come again?” the hound growled.
“The woman who has snakes on her head, instead of hair, the one who can turn a man to stone with her gaze. She lives here in L.A. now. Haven’t you heard of her?”
“I have!” Helena said. “She’s the one with the awful taste in clothes—and she always wears those mirrored sunglasses to keep from turning all her friends to stone.”
“That’s the woman,” the demon said.
“She’s always at some art show or concert,” Helena said. “You see her picture in the papers and on television, usually on the arm of the maseni embassy big shots.”
“Yes, yes,” Kanastorous said, eager to please them. “The maseni are fascinated by those snakes she has for hair—probably because the snakes are so similar to their own tentacles.”
“This Medusa woman was waiting for Jessie in the men’s room of the Four Worlds?” Brutus asked.
“She was, yes.”
“And she turned him to stone?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that as good as killing him?”
“It was only a temporary transformation,” Kanastorous said. “As I understand it, there are ways to bring him back to life.”
“Well, when I went in that restroom,” Brutus said, “there wasn’t any statue that looked like Jessie. Where’d they take him?”
Kanastorous looked up beseechingly, not unlike a Christian in the act of prayer, gazing to the expectant heavens as he kneels. “You must believe that they didn’t tell me.”
Brutus shook his burly head slowly back and forth. “No, I don’t have to believe anything of the sort.”
“But they really didn’t!”
The hound got off his haunches and moved slowly back to the row of candles. “What will it be like for you, Zeke, if I extinguish yet another of the black ones?”
“You wouldn’t, my old hairy-muzzled friend.” The demon grinned a sickeningly pleading grin.
Brutus sighed and leaned toward the nearest of the flames, sucking in new breath with which to blow it out
“I’ll tell! I’ll tell!” the demon cried.
“No tricks.”
“No tricks,” Kanastorous agreed.
“Where’d they take Jessie?”
“To Millennium City,” the demon rasped.
“That new shopping mall over in West Los Angeles?” Helena asked, getting to her feet.
“That’s right,” Kanastorous said.
Brutus grunted. “Why take him there?”
“It had a perfect hiding place,” the demon said.
“But those stores are open twenty-four hours a day,” Helena said. “They’re robotically operated; they have customers at any hour. I don’t see how they could have carted Jessie in there and hidden him.”
“Millennium City is a fancy place,” the demon said, still on his knees, black sweat on his scaly brow. “It has an art museum, a legitimate theater, fountain displays and a sculpture garden for the enlightenment of the patrons.”
“So?” Brutus asked.
“They put Jessie in the sculpture garden, with the other statues. They intend to keep him there until the Tesserax crisis—whatever it is—passes.”
Chapter Eight
Millennium City was a 200-store shopping mall, most of it under a single roof, with indoor pedwalks, indoor and outdoor parks, fountains, convention facilities, hotels, more fountains, amusement centers, free theaters and museums, robot guides to help you find your way, a three hundred million credit wonder that had been completed only a year before. It was staffed exclusively by robots and was efficiently run, enormously profitable.
Only ten years earlier, it could never have been built—and not only because maseni technology was required to construct it. Ten years ago, the city of Los Angeles simply would not have had the room, in the heart of its west side, to contain such a lavish, three-hundred-acre structure. Then, there had been too many people, too much crowding. Now, a decade after the maseni landing on Earth, the city was only half as populated as it had been. Forty-five percent of the city’s people had gone starkers and ended up in homes for Shockies. Many of these, in the following ten years, either took their own lives or died from too long in a catatonic trance. For the most part, the Shockies were those who were already hopelessly at odds with their times; they were, in many cases, those who ignored the warnings of ecologists and continued to have large families, polluting the Earth with excess flesh. Removed from the mating cycle, they no longer contributed to the population boom. Those who adapted to the maseni and the other changes, tended to have no families, or small ones. As the Shockies died, the population dropped, and land became available. With the welfare rolls almost wiped out, and with vital services crying for good workers, everyone again had a job and everyone was more affluent than any time in the nation’s history. There was not only room to build Millennium City, but also credits to spend there. Old office buildings were torn down, as were rows and rows of shabby houses where no one lived any more. They razed factories that had once produced useless gadgets and flashy gewgaws, for none of these things were now in demand; society had suddenly become aware of its own power and of the true value of possessions. Millennium City not only provided services and products, but a place to feel at ease, a center for commerce which was, at the same time, a business establishment and a community meeting place.