The thought of resuming his researcher's life at Los Alamos was wonderful beyond belief, but every bit as impossible as being twelve again. Peter Boase had kept prying into anomalous phenomenon despite strong hints that he shouldn't. Peter Boase had been marked for death by the Council of Shadows, and Adrienne had come in to kill him because she was the one who happened to be closest.
Stroke, heart attack, traffic accident, slipping on the soap in the shower; they didn't have to make it look like an accident, they could produce a real accident.
If I was a tub of unwashed lard like, say, Bob Heigel or a pencil-necked geek with adult acne like Johnny Wong, I'd have died right there no matter how interesting my mind felt to her. But Adrienne was a collector and she took a fancy to me. Making me one of her lucies was as good as killing me. Probably just a slow form of killing me. Monica had been there on Lucy Lane for eight years, but that was the longest. We never talked about the others.
The changes that intrigued him had been in certain constants; now he knew it was the effect of so many Shadowspawn mucking with the quantum foam, making probabilities blur into one another. Homo sapiens nocturnus was the source of all legends in more ways than one.
The tales of leopard-men and werewolves and blood-drinking ogres and evil sorcerers came from them, from the Empire of Shadows in the dim pre-Neolithic past, or from chance recombinations of the genes in the ages since producing someone with half-understood powers and inhuman hungers. But the weird, arbitrary, anything-can- happen world of the legends was a folk memory of the way the world was when there were many powerful Shadowspawn in it, enhancing chaos just by existing .
A world where trees could speak and gingerbread houses with ovens for stray children waited in the woods and water flowed uphill…which was happening again.
Concentrate, dammit! he thought savagely. Okay, my old life's gone. And if the Brezes back at Sangre ever get their hands…or talons or claws or tentacles…on me, I'm worse than dead. I know Ellen's boyfriend, Adrian, is supposed to be a good guy, more or less, but I don't think I'll be able to contact him, he'll be hiding too hard and he's Adrienne's equal with the Power, which means he's consistently lucky. If he doesn't want to be found, a normal human would never, ever stumble on him; it's the damned luck. Now, what else did I hear…
Ah. At the party…someone had mentioned a Harvey Ledbetter. And this Brotherhood thing, some sort of resistance group.
'Oh, risky. But I can't just wander around until they find me or I run out of money.'
Still, you could find almost anything on the Web, with a little patience.
He took a deep breath and poised his fingers over the keyboard.
He was screaming. The voice in his ear whispered:
'You love it, don't you, Peter. Tell me how much you love the lovely pain when I-'
Still screaming, he sat bolt upright. The clean sheets were sopping again, and tears streaked down his cheeks. After a moment he bolted for the bathroom again and vomited into the toilet. Then he spit, rinsed out his mouth and sat on the lid.
'Great,' he said to himself. 'I'm over the addiction to the drug in the bite. Now all I've got to worry about is the post-traumatic stress syndrome turning me into a wreck. And I thought I'd be home free, yeah, right, that's the way the world works, Peter.'
He looked at his watch; it was four thirty in the morning. Not all that long to dawn, and he'd gone to bed early. It wasn't that surprising; he had enough memories to give him nightmares and shakes and attacks of depression for a long time. He looked over at the pill bottles, then shook his head violently.
No. That's all I need, another monkey on my hack, one I put there myself.
'All right to use them for physical pain,' he muttered. 'The rest I'm just going to have to tough out. I can't get a therapist, and if I did they'd just put me in an asylum…and something would come walking through the walls to get me there. Something with lots of teeth. There really are shoggoths in the places between.'
Instead of trying to sleep he showered, then lay and watched the light grow gradually on the roof, trying to think.
'I need facilities. I'm about ready to go experimental, in a small way. I need an experimentalist to work with, too. Lots of computer time. And ideally I'd need one of them to work with, as well…Wish for the fucking moon while you're at it, Peter. Wish you smoked, it would be something to do.'
At least he felt physically better than he had, although there seemed to be a weight on his mind, turning his thoughts sluggish. After a while he abandoned the attempt at serious thought and let strings of disconnected images float through his consciousness. Most of them turned out to be the bad parts of his life. Oddly, that was comforting. Nothing had really been as bad as what happened after Adrienne turned up. With that perspective, messy ends to soured relationships and not getting the grant you lusted for paled into the minor toe stubbings they were.
When the sun was fully up he rose and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and running shoes. The computer was plugged in this time, and he'd set it to activate at exactly seven o'clock-checking every five minutes would make the time crawl even more unendurably.
His breath checked in his throat. There was a message: Wait there and don't make any waves. From the Giant Rabbit.
'Okay, calm down,' he told himself. 'Don't exhaust yourself emotionally. You can't afford it, not now.'
Of course, it might be from the wrong people. But he remembered Adrienne raving about how most of the older Shadowspawn hated using information technology. Most of them were older, as you'd expect in a species that aged at about half the human speed and then could survive indefinitely after the death of the physical body. The median age must be well over sixty.
He frowned thoughtfully. You know, that could be a real disadvantage, he thought with some hope. Younger people tend to be more imaginative and innovative.
That was certainly true in physics; most did their best work before they got beyond middle age.
'So they'd be a bunch of Strudlebugs, eventually.'
He wondered what it had been like in the old Stone Age, the hundred thousand years when Homo sapiens nocturnus had dominated the planet as the predator of the apex predator. After a while, almost all of them would be postcorporeal, ageless parasites hiding in caves by day and emerging by night to hunt and feed. The organic phase would be sort of a pupa breeding stage in their life cycle.
'Not as much of a disadvantage then,' he said to the air. 'Nothing changed much back there from millennium to millennium. Or it might be the other way 'round-nothing changed because they were in charge. Maybe that's why it took so long for a human civilization to emerge.'
Eventually it was late enough to head out to T RESA'S for breakfast. A little gaggle of children stopped to stare at him. He heard giggles, and when he turned away a pebble bounced off the back of his head. It was enough to sting, especially in his weakened state.
'Hey!' he said-tried to shout, and heard his voice crack. 'What was that about!'
The children ran off, laughing, all except for one girl about seven. She stood looking at him solemnly from under the brim of a floppy hat, her hair in two glinting blue-black braids over her shoulders, dressed in a loose pinafore-style dress the worse for wear.
'What was that about?' he said again.
Her face was narrow, weasel-like, and her eyes were large and dark.
'Yor a stranger,' she said, in a strong accent like a West Texan rasp. 'You otter move 'long.'
'Hey, I'm staying here.'
'Strangers don't stay here,' she said, and walked away.
He shrugged off an unease and headed for the restaurant. Fortunately he had his personal library with him on his machine, and he could use a lot of time to get his strength back.
Peter looked around. The momentary enchantment of the desert dawn was fading, heading towards another baking white day.
There probably wouldn't be much else to do here…and even his sleep was likely to be unpleasant.
Bad dreams are bad enough, he thought. It's when the nightmares spill over into the waking time that things get really unpleasant.
