Glen Cook
A matter of time
I. On the Z Axis;
12 September 1977;
At the Intersection
Total darkness. Silence broken only by restless audience movements.
Suddenly, all-surrounding sound. A crossbreed, falsetto yodel/scream backed by one reverberating chord on the bass guitar. A meter-wide pillar of red light waxes and wanes with the sound.
Erik Danzer is on.
Nude to the waist, in hip-deep vapor, he rakes his cheeks with his fingernails. He is supposed to look like an agonized demon rising from some smoldering lava pit of hell.
Light and sound depart for five seconds.
Owlhoot sound from the synthesizer.
Sudden light reveals Danzer glaring audience right. Light and sound fade. Repeat, Danzer glaring left.
Harsh electric guitar chords, with the bass overriding, throbbing up chills for the spine. Mirror tricks, flashing, put Danzer all over the stage, screaming, 'You! You! You!' while pointing into the audience. 'You girl!'
The lights stay on now, though dimly, throbbing with the bass chords. Danzer seems to be several places at once. The pillar-spot moves from man to man in the band.
The man in the shadowed balcony, whose forged German Federal Republic passport contains the joke-name Spuk, neither understands nor enjoys. His last encounter with British rock was 'Penny Lane.' He does not know that Harrison, Lennon, McCartney, and Starr have gone their separate ways. He has never heard of 'Crackerbox Palace,' Yoko, Wings, 'No, No, No, No'…
He wouldn't care if he had.
The pillar roams. The spook lifts the silenced Weatherby. Through the sniperscope, after all these years, the target's face is that of a stranger.
The bass guitarist's brains splatter the organist.
Spuk is a half mile away before anyone can begin sorting the screaming mob in the hall.
II. A Pause for Reflection
Sometimes the balloon is booby-trapped.
Grinning little vandal, full of pranks, you jab with your pin. Ouch! It isn't a balloon at all. It's a Klein bottle. The pin conies through behind you, butt high.
If you're obstinate, you play Torquemada with yourself for a long time.
Take a strip of paper. Make it, say, two inches (or five centimeters if you're metrically minded) wide and fifteen (40 cm is close enough) long. Give it a half twist, then join the ends. Take a pencil and begin anywhere, drawing a line parallel to the paper's edge. In time, without lifting your pencil, you will return to your starting point, having drawn a line on both sides of the paper.
The little trickster is called a Moebius Strip. You might use it to win a beer bet sometime.
Now imagine joining the edges of the strip to form a container. What you would create, if this were physically possible, is a hollow object whose inside and outside is all one contiguous surface.
It's called a Klein Bottle, and just might be the true shape of the universe.
Again, you could begin a line at any point and end up where you started, having been both inside and out.
There is always a line, or potential line, before your starting point and after, yet not infinite. Indeed, very limited. And limiting. On the sharply curved surface of the bottle the line can be made out only for a short distance in either direction. You have to follow it all the way around to find out where it goes before it gets back.
III. On the Y Axis; 1975;
The Foundling
Norman Cash, line-walker, began to sense the line's existence at the point labeled March 4,1975.
It was a Tuesday morning. The sneak late snowstorm had dropped fourteen inches.
'It's killing the whole damned city,' Cash told his partner.
Detective John Harald packed a snowball, pitched it into the churn of Castleman Avenue. 'Shit. I've lost my curve-ball.'
'We're not going anywhere with this one, John.'
At 10:37 p.m. on March 3, uniformed officers on routine patrol had discovered a corpse in the alley between the 4200 blocks of Castleman and Shaw.
Ten-thirty, next morning, four detectives were freezing their tails off trying to find out what had happened.
'Hunch?' The younger man whipped another snowball up the street. 'Think I got a little movement that time. You see it?'
'After twenty-three years, yeah, you develop an intuition.'
