“Under a cabbage, where else? I’ll bet I can tell you some things you don’t know. For instance, I have a blood clot in my brain. Did you know I have amnesia? I admit there are times when I stretch the facts a little, but this isn’t one of them. If your boss had been more astute, he wouldn’t have done business with that agent. The guy was a crook.”
“What do you mean, amnesia? What are you talking about, kid?”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I told you a dozen times. Wierton.”
“Mine’s Daryl.”
“Okay, kid.”
“Okay, Wheaty. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’m ambulatory but that’s about it. Shove me hard and I’m liable to go out like a green ring ducking inside this cabin.”
He shot to his feet and checked the alarm on the wall, tapped it, placed his ear against it. The dial was pale pink. There wasn’t a ring anywhere nearby.
“Could be I gauged you wrong,” he said. “Could be you ought to be slapped silly and locked in a cage.”
“Remember my blood clot.”
“You remember it. It’s in your head, not mine.” He looked at me with his mouth slightly open but his washed-out blue eyes were steady. “Why do you tell such lies? You’re in good shape. Admit it.”
An old hound named Googs lived in the stable. She was supposed to hunt me down in case I found an opportunity to run. The idea had amused me but Deron assured me that Googs wouldn’t forget her training no matter how friendly I got with her. In fact, so he said, the better the hound became acquainted with me, the easier I would be for her to keep track of.
Deron was some kind of professor-spy who liked nothing better than to put on dirty clothes and pitch hay or try to ride Bandit Or maybe being a cowpoke-spy was his profession and donning the university cloak was the way he spent his vacations. Where Wheaty was of medium height and strongly built, Deron was tall and wiry. Where the former was possible to get to know, the latter wasn’t.
“My ex-wife accused me of being unknowable,” he said to me. It was later in the morning and he was looking off into the distance, squinting his almond-shaped brown eyes. “She said I had no pzing. When I asked her what that meant, she said it included everything ordinary.”
He climbed onto Bandit’s back, stayed there about thirty seconds, picked himself up out of the dirt and dusted his jeans with his big hat. “A psychiatrist once told me to father a child, or adopt one.”
“Don’t look at me. Your ex-wife was right. You’re cold as a frog.”
“I wasn’t looking at you except in a clinical way. I doubt if Kisko will ever get any use out of you. You’re a maverick like this horse.”
I untacked the mount who was quiet now, scarcely heaving from the exertion of having cleared his back of unwelcome weight “Do you know why you can’t ride him?” I said to Deron.
“You tell me.”
“You’re afraid of him.” Taking handfuls of the coarse black mane, I swung astride the broad back and kicked hard with my bare heels. We jumped every fence on the place and took off across an endless plain of flowing grass. I kicked that animal black and blue and he loved every second of it, responded by bucking like a truck that had suddenly lost its shocks. More kicks and a few shouts and again we raced with the wind, ate up the ground as if it were speeding toward us and not the other way around.
I had good legs and knew just where to grip that specimen to diminish his speed. One thing a horse took note of was a rider who sat down hard and dug in with the knees. How did I know? It was just as well that no one asked me, since I had no answer. At any rate, when I eased the pressure, Bandit showed his appreciation by charging like an express train. Far behind us came the baying of a hound. Poor Googs. All she would get for her efforts today was a taste of dust.
I lay on top of a hill, sucking in air and sweating like a coolie. Bandit grazed nearby, tethered on a long vine. It had taken an hour of walking to cool him off. The sun tried to blind me, bugs made a strong attempt to eat me alive, my soul was in repose. I stuffed on apples, found a walnut tree and a hard rock and sampled several dozen, swilled from a brook, consumed red berries, blackberries, strawberries, crab apples and chewed sassafras bark.
That horse should have been named Took Off. It was all he ever did. Together we found an old mountain trail, climbed it in a hurry and descended even more rapidly. By then it was dusk and in a little while the sun would be gone. A car came winding across the valley toward the road leading to the cabin, turned in and increased speed. Bandit and I came off the mountain trail directly in front of it. My steed showed his annoyance at the intrusion by standing on his hind legs and pawing the wind. I caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man in the drivers seat, his expression frozen as he cut sharply to avoid us and plowed into some thick brush.
Bandit showed him a fat rear and we galloped back to the ranch ahead of a man who was undoubtedly the boss. That evening I lay in my bed and listened to them quarrel.
His tone icy and thick with sneers, Kisko said, “What kind of specialists have we here? Two grown men can’t sit on a little kid for a few days. Maybe I should find less complicated work for you. Could be I should perhaps dislike the sight of your faces so much I wouldn’t want to issue paychecks to you anymore.”
Wheaty and Deron mostly mumbled their responses. They usually backed up whenever Kisko was angry or sarcastic, which was most of the time.
“I think you’re fussing more than the situation warrants. She came back, didn’t she?” I thought it was Wheaty who said that but I couldn’t be sure. Actually, I didn’t care.
“Sure, because she ate a gutful of green fruit and didn’t want to be sick all alone in the big cruel world. What’ll you do the next time she gets away? Send her a message? Please, kid, return to us otherwise we get our cans canned? That’s the idea I’m entertaining at the moment. It’s giving me indigestion. Furthermore, I want that dog out of the cabin and in the stable where it belongs.”
Wheaty came in and took Googs away but I didn’t object because I was too busy wanting to die. My belly stuck out like a watermelon and felt like a hot brick.
I was sick for three days. With Kisko at the ranch, the situation grew rife with strife. When I discovered I was going to survive my bout with wild fruit, I relaxed and fell back into my more slovenly ways. I loafed and was uncooperative about answering questions and expressing a willingness to earn my keep. For my efforts, Kisko put me in a cage, had Wheaty and Deron build one out of wood and hung it on the front porch.
“You shouldn’t have done this to me,” I said. “Just when I was beginning to think we could get along.”
“You bet. Exactly what I was thinking. Like Socrates and his favorite thirst quencher.” Kisko was calm, always calm, but his eyes glittered. Once in a while he rubbed them. His hair was black and so curly it looked like greedy little fingers clutching his head. His shoulders were too big, his waist too small, his hands too clean, his nose too narrow, his teeth too large, his mind too keen.
Making the cage rock back and forth on its rope, I said, “What’s the point you’re trying to make?”
“It concerns castles and kings and who gives the orders around here.”
“It’s easy to give orders but what if you have no takers?”
He smiled. “See the point?”
“I can get out of here any time I want”
“At any given moment?”
“Like spit from between my teeth.”
He stopped smiling. “The first time you touch that horse without permission, I’ll put a bullet in his brain.”
It took me a couple of minutes to digest that “I won’t ride him without permission,” I said, finally.
“You see? Already we’re making point after point.”
“You should have bought someone else from that slave block. I hold grudges.”
“You’re going to get even with me for locking you up?”
“No, for threatening an animal that never did you any harm.
You can lock me up but you can t keep me locked up.”
“We’ll see,” he said harshly. “Speaking of threats, as long as you make them so eloquently and convincingly, stay where you are. Live in a cage like a monkey. Eat like a brute. Learn your lesson, muter. My name is Kisko. You work for me or you don’t live like a human. For all I care, you can stay in there for the rest of your life.”
“There’s such a thing as the law.”
“Forget it. I’m the law.”
That evening Wheaty came to see me. “Go away,” I said. “I know he sent you to soften me up.”
“Since when could I soften up a rock? I just brought some insect spray to make sure the mosquitoes leave enough of you for me to feed breakfast.” He squirted from a can and I complained about the fact that he got some on me. “We’ll give you good schooling if you cooperate with us,” he said. “Deron knows his business. You’ll have the best food, you can ride that maniac in the stable and keep the dog in your room. There are a lot worse jobs you could be offered.”
“Which one is the expert about rings? You or Deron?”
“Neither, but he knows more than I do. Why?”
“There’s something I can’t remember. Ask him a question for me.”
“Sure.”
“If a person is injured in D-2, comes back to D-i and then returns to D-2, will she materialize with the same injury?”
“I’ll go ask him.” Wheaty hesitated. “What do you mean, you can’t remember? How could you forget something like that?”
“I told you. If you don’t believe I have amnesia, I can’t help it.”
He went away and returned in a few minutes. “He says you won’t have the same wound.” He peered through the wooden slats at me. The light from the window played across his anxious face. He reminded me of the dog. “What’s on your mind?” he said. “Are you brewing more trouble?”
“Give my regards to Kisko.”
The secret was in the color of the rings and not in one particular spot of turf. For instance, if I wanted to go to my old camping ground in D-2, I had to find a ring the right shade of blue. Going back to Mutat wouldn’t make the task any easier because it didn’t matter where the rings were. As for the sky outside my cage, there were more colored circles now than there had been during the day, and a blue one changed course at my silent suggestion and dropped within range of the alarms in the paddocks. There were scrambling movements inside the house before Wheaty and Deron broke through the doorway together.
“Nothing to worry about out here, boss!” Wheaty bellowed as he shone a flashlight on the wall alarm. “There’s nothing within a half-mile!” To me he said, “Listen, I see no reason for you to bust a gut laughing over this. You want us to pull you out of there and give you a beating?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“That’s too bad. You don’t get free until your manners improve.”
I hunched in a comer and whined.
“Cut that out,” he said.
“You’re reacting to her,” said Deron.
“Just shut your educated mouth.”
“You know better than to think twice about any of them. I can’t see how this one could possibly reach you. She’s the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Wheaty just looked at him and then went back inside. Deron watched me for a while with a smirk on his face.
“You’re mad because I know how to ride Bandit,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, merely smirked some more and then followed Wheaty.
The lights in the sky were colored moons with smokey coronas, not enough of them to blot out the stars but sufficient to make it look like Christmas. Resembling candles, some of the lights hung low and burned to flickering little sputterings as they receded into the distance, or they smoked and did awkward dances like flashlight beams on a wall. The one that had inspired the commotion was long gone.
Lying in a comer of the cage, I bided my time and watched for something useful to come along. Being the restless type, I needed something to do so I began rocking the cage. It squeaked like a rusty gate and by and by I heard low mutterings from inside the cabin. Eventually the three of them came outside. Kisko was in a smoldering mood but his voice was cool as he ordered Wheaty and Deron to take the cage inside. They complained that it wouldn’t fit through the door while he assured them in his best hatchet tone that it would, and it did.
Wheaty stood outside the bathroom door and when I dawdled too long he kicked open the door, picked me up and put me back in the cage that was now in the middle of my bedroom.
As soon as they all got soundly to sleep again, the ring alarms went off. “You’re enjoying every minute of this,” Kisko said to me. His glittering eyes were droopy-lidded and dangerous.
Deron was studying the wall alarm. “There’s a ring right outside the window.”
“What are the odds it or another one moves inside the house and straight through that cage?”
“About a million to one. We’re worrying for nothing.”
“Shut off the alarms. Let’s go to bed. I can sleep with odds like those.”
They went to sleep and I went to D-2, waited until the cabin was shadow-quiet before beckoning for the ring to come to me. It was blue, not the exact shade I would have preferred but good enough to get me out of the cage and the cabin and away from the three human hard-hearts. I timed it accurately. The blue donut didn’t drift slowly but came at a rapid pace, upended so it seemed to stand on edge as it sped across the floor. It was big enough so that I didn’t need to do anything but just sit there and give it permission to close over me. It continued on through the house and probably flew skyward while I landed on a hot rock in Gothland.
Of course I had taken a chance traveling. The last time I left this planet I was in extremely poor condition. While in the cage my prime worry had been that Deron was wrong and I would revert to my former state. Fortunately that didn’t turn out to be the case. My two-hundred-kilo mass was healthy and whole and because I was so appreciative I ran fifty miles without stopping.
Where rings and muting were concerned, I had an almost infallible memory, therefore I knew this particular spot had never been one of my favorite landing places. The fact that I often grounded in unfamiliar territory in D-2 was the reason I believed the planet was immense. At any rate, I didn’t have a cache of food here and there wasn’t much of anything to do that was interesting.
After a few days I was restless, felt out of sorts, even experienced odd stirrings in my psyche. Or was it in my stomach? I found myself listening for the baying of a foolish old hound and the clop clop of a horse’s hooves. Where was the sweet wind here, the burgeoning orchards, the green apples that tasted so good and made me feel so bad? It seemed I could almost taste the perspiration on my upper lip as the sun beat down on my human body. I didn’t recognize the feeling but I was homesick.
Shrugging off ennui, I stashed some drees in an ice pit, went swimming in a lake of black pitch, rambled through miles of labyrinths until I eventually gave up the pretense and flopped down beside a bubbling volcano to mourn. The thought of going to D-3 lent me no inspiration. The truth was, I had no desire to grow scales and swim in an endless ocean. I seemed to have lost my appetite for living. If I had any will at all, it was to ride a horse and kiss a dog.
Kisko was charging the battery in his car when I came walking up the road. He straightened as if the cable in his hand had given him an electric shock. Finally he turned and bent again to his task, ignoring me. When I got within hearing range, he said, “I’m going to do you a favor and tell you to leave. I’m giving you the best opportunity you’ll ever have in your life. Go back wherever you came from. Hide under a cabbage or go to the devil, only get away from this ranch.”
Later he showed me a stray cat that had taken possession of a comer of the bam. In the nest with her were six black kittens. They looked like tiny goths. While I sat and watched them, I thought about Kisko. Had he known all along that I would co
me back? Could he have been so clever that he knew how strong an appeal there was in a horse, a dog and a piece of country?
4
I lay in my bed and listened to them fight. Wheaty was yelling, something he did a great deal of these days.
“You heard her yourself! She doesn’t even remember about ring channels. That proves she really does have amnesia. Since when do we use sick kids?”
“You mean wise lads,” said Deron.
“So you don’t like her, so shut your mouth! You, Kisko, what do you think you’re doing? What are we running here?”
“A ladies’ benevolent sorority, or didn’t you know?” came the rasping reply. “Every day we succor the underprivileged and bind up the wounded. In our spare moments, we counsel the confused. We go out of our way to keep people from getting their tender toes stepped on.”
“But a sick—”
“Are we at war or a garden party? Since when do I have to contend with my own men? What do you think we’re running here?”
“This isn’t right.”
“Then go find me somebody who is right. That’s what I sent you out for in the first place. I didn’t tell you to bring me a runny-nosed brat.”
“There are no more. Every muter is strictly accounted for. Except for her, the market is dried up. I’ve watched the papers.
Not a word, no advertisements, no reward offers, no nothing has turned up. I don’t think anyone is looking for her.”
“Which makes the situation here even sadder, I can tell by looking at your face. Except that it makes it better for us. A muter maw doesn’t like the taste of anything but muters, right? Isn’t that what you think we are? A mouth that eats children?” The argument ended there but only for the time being. While Wheaty was usually noisy these days, Kisko was almost always angry. He didn’t like it that he couldn’t pump my brain after giving me a shot of Pentothal.
“What is it with you?” he would say in his most impersonal fashion while I sat being a runny-nosed brat. “Maybe I ought to get a specialist in here to excise that blood clot in your head, or was that little story a lie? Don’t bother to answer because it might be a lie, too. How did you get away from us that night? It was a million to one shot against the ring coming into the room yet it did. I’d be gratified if you explained.”
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