If I had not subverted the curse, there would not have been anyone around. His trouble was my fault, if anyone’s. “Tell me again why no one was supposed to see you?” I asked.
He explained at great length, waving his arms and striding to and fro across the tiny room. It had to do with history, with changing things that had already happened, which might change other things in the now. He used words I didn’t know. Permutations of the possible. Linked events. Making a closed loop that would pinch off. I didn’t understand much of it. He glared at me and shouted, “I don’t know what to do with you. Jaybee and Martin expect me to put you down the disposal chute, but I don’t want to do that. We’ll have to talk about it and decide.”
“I think you should put me back where I was,” I said, trying to keep calm. “I don’t like it here.”
“Ha,” he muttered. “Ha, ha.” He went on striding, talking, muttering, waving his arms. After a time, I grew weary and my eyes closed. It had been long since we had slept, Grumpkin and I. I heard the little man talking, through a veil, as though he were far away.
Then his hands were on me, gently enough, pulling off my shoes, taking off my cap, feeling my chest.
I sat up, my hair spilling down my back.
“You’re a very pretty girl,” he accused me, putting his hand back on my chest to make sure I was a girl. “We have very little prettiness anymore, and that makes you noticeable, which makes things difficult.”
I drew away, offended. “Actually,” I told him through a fog of weariness, “I’m a duke’s daughter.” I don’t know why I told him this. Perhaps it was because I had just been wakened. Perhaps it was to reassure myself that I was really myself.
He buried his head in his hands. “That butcher, Jaybee. He’s sick. The things he does, the way he thinks! Not that Alice is that different. She’s the only one who can handle him. They both ought to be put down the chutes, but he’s a genius, so they don’t, they haven’t, and now he’s dragged you along, they’ll put us all down the chutes. What am I going to do?”
“Put me back,” I suggested again. “I won’t tell anyone. No one would believe me, anyhow.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have an authorization code. We can’t use the machine without an authorization code. Even if I could use it, I couldn’t put you back at the same time. The tolerances aren’t close enough. If we make a closed loop, it will pinch off and everything will collapse!”
He wrung his hands for a while, then told me, “Go on, go to sleep. I’ve got to think. I’ve really got to think.”
I lay sidewise on the bed I was sitting on, a narrow bed to be sure but no harder than the one I slept upon in Westfaire. Grumpkin lay beside me, munching on the strange biscuit with an expression of remote disdain upon his face. I took a fragment of the biscuit and put it in my mouth, letting it dissolve there. It had sustenance in it but no pleasure. I could live on it, but if it were all there was to eat, I thought living might not much be worth it.
13
The day after my arrival, Bill went away, returning sometime later very strange in his manner. “All for nothing,” he cried at me, as though something had been my fault. “Why wouldn’t you let us finish it?” He slammed around the tiny place for a while and then went out again, giving me an intense, wondering look as he left. When he returned, he was giggling and staggering a little, happier, for some reason. He seemed to have forgotten whatever had bothered him before, and I did not ask him what the trouble had been.
In the days that followed, I grew to know the un-taste of the biscuits and the boundaries of the tiny room all too well. It had many folding places in it: a folding place to wash, a folding place to relieve oneself, folding places to store things. The bed slid into a pocket, the table slid into another pocket, each thing became something else. Bill went away each day, telling me to stay out of sight. He locked the door behind him and unlocked it when he returned. There was no window. I complained of this, and he told me the room was deep inside a great redoubt; windows would merely have looked into other rooms. There were no windows anywhere, he said, for there was nothing for them to see but more rooms and more rooms. He taught me to use the screen, instead, and gave me a great pile of “documentaries” he had helped make. They made my head hurt, but I watched them nonetheless. It was something to do. I learned to understand the language of the place that way, watching the images on the screen as they flowed and danced. It was my own language, more or less, though strangely changed. Often it was easier to understand the printed words that surged across the picture than the spoken ones.
There were other films, as well. I could watch some of the “porno-mance” ones, but the “horro-porn” ones I could not watch. Jaybee had filmed some of them. I threw them down the disposal chute, but every few days more were delivered from the supply chute. There was no end to them, each one full of pain and blood. I learned very soon
