beaked, with long sharp wings. Its eyes were two stars shining. “Hail!” it said.
“Hail, fire, and damnation,” Crow growled. “Any results?”
“Lord Taleisin has done as you required, and salted the timelines with songs. In London, Nashville, and Azul- Tlon do they praise her beauty, and the steadfastness of her love. In a hundred guises and a thousand names is she exalted. From mammoth-bone medicine lodges to MTVirtual, they sing of Lady Anne, of the love that sacrifices all comfort, and of the price she gladly paid for it.”
Still the door did not open.
“That’s not what I asked, shit-for-brains. Did it work?”
“Perhaps.” The bird cocked its head. “Perhaps not. I was told to caution you: Even at best, you will only have a now-and-again lady. Archetypes don’t travel in pairs. If it works, your meetings will be like solar eclipses-primal, powerful, rare, and brief.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The creature hesitated, and if a bird could be said to look abashed, then it looked strangely abashed. “I was also told that you would have something for me.”
Without looking, Crow unstrapped his saddlebag and rummaged within. He removed a wooden heart-shaped box, tied up in string. “Here.”
With a glorious burst of unearthly song, the martlet seized the string in its talons and, wings whirring, flew straight up into the sky. Crow did not look after it. He waited.
He waited until he was sure that the door would never open. Then he waited some more.
The door opened.
Out she came, in faded Levis, leather flight jacket, and a black halter top, sucking on a Kent menthol.
She was looking as beautiful as the morning and as hard as nails. The sidewalk cringed under her high-heeled boots.
“Hey, babe,” Crow said casually. “I got you a sidecar. See? It’s lined with velvet and everything.”
“Fuck that noise,” Annie said and, climbing on behind him, hugged him so hard that his ribs creaked.
He kick-started the Harley and with a roar they pulled out into traffic. Crow cranked up the engine and popped a wheelie. Off they sped, down the road that leads everywhere and nowhere, to the past and the future, Tokyo and Short Pump, infinity and the corner store, with Annie laughing and unafraid, and Crow flying the black flag of himself.
Radiant Green Star - Lucius Shepard
Several months before my thirteenth birthday, my mother visited me in a dream and explained why she had sent me to live with the circus seven years before. The dream was a Mitsubishi, I believe, its style that of the Moonflower series of bio-chips, which set the standard for pornography in those days; it had been programmed to activate once my testosterone production reached a certain level, and it featured a voluptuous Asian woman to whose body my mother had apparently grafted the image of her own face. I imagined she must have been in a desperate hurry and thus forced to use whatever materials fell to hand; yet, taking into account the Machiavellian intricacies of the family history, I later came to think that her decision to alter a pornographic chip might be intentional, designed to provoke Oedipal conflicts that would imbue her message with a heightened urgency.
In the dream, my mother told me that when I was eighteen I would come into the trust created by my maternal grandfather, a fortune that would make me the wealthiest man in Viet Nam. Were I to remain in her care, she feared my father would eventually coerce me into assigning control of the trust to him, whereupon he would have me killed. Sending me to live with her old friend Vang Ky was the one means she had of guaranteeing my safety. If all went as planned, I would have several years to consider whether it was in my best interests to claim the trust or to forswear it and continue my life in secure anonymity.
She had faith that Vang would educate me in a fashion that would prepare me to arrive at the proper decision.
Needless to say, I woke from the dream in tears. Vang had informed me not long after my arrival at his door that my mother was dead, and that my father was likely responsible for her death; but this fresh evidence of his perfidy, and of her courage and sweetness, mingled though it was with the confusions of intense eroticism, renewed my bitterness and sharpened my sense of loss. I sat the rest of the night with only the eerie music of tree frogs to distract me from despair, which roiled about in my brain as if it were a species of sluggish life both separate from and inimical to my own.
The next morning, I sought out Vang and told him of the dream and asked what I should do. He was sitting at the desk in the tiny cluttered trailer that served as his home and office, going over the accounts: a frail man in his late sixties with close-cropped gray hair, dressed in a white open-collared shirt and green cotton trousers. He had a long face-especially long from cheekbones to jaw-and an almost feminine delicacy of feature, a combination of characteristics that lent him a sly, witchy look; but though he was capable of slyness, and though at times I suspected him of possessing supernatural powers, at least as regards his ability to ferret out my misdeeds, I perceived him at the time to be an inwardly directed soul who felt misused by the world and whose only interests, apart from the circus, were a love of books and calligraphy. He would occasionally take a pipe of opium, but was otherwise devoid of vices, and it strikes me now that while he had told me of his family and his career in government (he said he still maintained those connections), of a life replete with joys and passionate errors, he was now in the process of putting all that behind him and withdrawing from the world of the senses.
“You must study the situation,” he said, shifting in his chair, a movement that shook the wall behind him, disturbing the leaflets stacked in the cabinet above his head and causing one to sail down toward the desk; he batted it away, and for an instant it floated in the air before me, as if held by the hand of a spirit, a detailed pastel rendering of a magnificent tent-a thousand times more magnificent than the one in which we performed-and a hand-lettered legend proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Radiant Green Star Circus.
“You must learn everything possible about your father and his associates,” he went on. “Thus you will uncover his weaknesses and define his strengths. But first and foremost, you must continue to live. The man you become will determine how best to use the knowledge you have gained, and you mustn’t allow the pursuit of your studies to rise to the level of obsession, or else his judgment will be clouded. Of course, this is easier to do in theory than in practice. But if you set about it in a measured way, you will succeed.”
I asked how I should go about seeking the necessary information, and he gestured with his pen at another
