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30: Harlequin Dreams
New Year's Eve is celebrated more than once a year in the City of En. They have a great party spirit here. The girls and I were pretty loaded, as was Edgardo, and we had a Ms. Hirsch-lookalike drive us home to Edgardo's place in a middle class bureaucrat neighborhood with a decided 1930s Art Deco Germany feel to it.
"Wheeeee," we said, staggering from the jeep, on a really cold night with frost in the windows and the sky pitch-black and starry. Beyond the black rooftops, sparklers and fire crackers started going off, and multi-colored bombs exploded in the sky.
Neighbors dropped in—Herr Weimar in a fluffy coat, Frau Landwehr wearing a fake Hitler mustache, Mademoiselle Rheinland begging to be invaded—and champagne bottles were opened. A sound system got cranked up, and inky-dinky-parlez-vous we all danced for a while until I dropped into a rather nervy, edgy sleep on the couch in the livingroom.
The guests were all gone, the music was silent, and the house was at rest. Someone had taken my shoes off and put a blanket over me. A window was open, and frigid air blew in. I staggered across the room, tripping on empty bottles and strewn party favors, and closed the window.
I think I was asleep again when I felt a cold blast on my back and turned to find the window open. The curtains were blowing in this Arctic wind, and before I could yell an oath and swing off the couch to catch the windblown curtains and pull the window wings in again, I heard Trini say: "Farr, it's us!"
"Where are you?" I mumbled looking around. I felt as though I were navigating around the bottom of a swimming pool at night. I couldn't see a thing.
"Here!"
I saw them then—they were looking in the window, Sindi and Trini, wearing white overalls like we'd worn when we went down under the Holy City.
"Farr—we came to say goodbye."
"I can't accept your resignations." What was I saying? Was I drunk, or actually out of my mind, or was this all just a bizarre dream?
"There's no way around it, but we want you to know we'll be rooting for you. Take care of our beloved Mars, and make sure Balesso gets the dog biscuit he deserves."
"I refuse to accept your reservations," I screamed soundlessly like a fish in deep water.
They regarded me silently with large, regretful eyes.
When I woke up it was daylight, and I had a head like a diving bell. Edgardo's wife, a dark-skinned woman with kind dark eyes, made me a drink of some kind that made my nose very runny but within 15 minutes my head had cleared, the taut arteries had gone limp, and the blood in my brain was flowing normally. Sindi and Trini came downstairs in hair curlers and turbans, and we feasted on a big breakfast au style Americain, with bacon, eggs, toast, cereal with bananas, the works. I dismissed my crazy dream.
Edgardo saw us off early the next morning in the huge terminal. We marveled at its high ceilings, its hanging lanterns, its glass walls that glittered with starlight. Travelers of time as well as space wandered purposefully in all manner of clothing. In one corner, we saw turbaned men standing around several camels that were resting under heavy loads—bound, perhaps, for when the pyramids were new, or when Roman forts occupied Arabia.
Edgardo took me aside as we stood waiting for the Time Train to be rerouted by busy men and women in gray suits and red hats. I'd noticed his mood seemed markedly different from yesterday. "I learned today that they decided to upgrade you guys to a Level Four, which is the second-highest grade of integration."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"A lot of special enhancements. Like if the Membrane learns you are dead, it makes a strong effort to pull back what it can to the City of En, no matter where you are in the Temporale. He rolled his eyeballs toward the priestesses. "Don't tell them any of this."
I said: "The word is mum, chum."
He kept at this theme, whatever it was: "We have special sanitaria with comatose agents, or worse, and they remain there but we can inject their persona into temporary gestalts that perform all sorts of missions. It's called Amortality."
"I've heard of it," I said. "I understand technically we were dead when the Membrane turned us into Level Ones."
"You were lucky, Farr. Usually Level Ones can't be saved. You were in the right place at the right time. Well, good luck." He stuck out his hand.
An hour or so later, I lay in my shower stall (as I call it) and felt the haze of atomic inertia closing over me, as my atoms relinquished their kinetic energy to the go-dots in the black maw of the underverse.
Just as quickly, it seemed, I felt the soapy mist of the wake-up bath caressing me. A woman's voice kept repeating: "Time to get up, sleepy-head." I realized even half-conscious that it was a malfunction in the wake-up system. The voice kept repeating, over and over again: "Time to get up, sleepy-head" until I was ready to strangle someone.
Then I realized: something was terribly wrong.
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