Nat stared at her angrily. "You ought to know, demoness."
"They told me that my—my destiny was important," Orb said. "That Satan might try to influence me. So I really have no choice."
Nat grimaced. "You insist on this—this trial?"
"I'm afraid I do," Orb said miserably.
"Then let's have the test," he snapped. "What do you have in mind?"
Orb addressed Jezebel. "Please repeat after me the words I say." The succubus nodded. The others were silent; they were embarrassed by this scene.
"Demon," Orb said.
Jezebel smiled. "Demon."
"Person."
"Person."
"Angel."
Jezebel shook her head. "You know I won't say that."
"But could you if you wanted to?"
"Want to? I wish I could! But it's impossible."
"Hell," Orb said.
Betsy jumped. Jezebel smiled. "She's not swearing," she explained. "Hell."
"Earth."
"Earth."
"Heaven."
Jezebel balked. "If only..." she said sadly.
"Satan."
"Satan."
"God."
Jezebel spread her hands, defeated.
"Thank you," Orb said. She turned to Natasha,
"Angel. Heaven. God," he said, disgusted.
Orb felt guilty. "Does someone have a cross?"
"I do," Lou-Mae said quickly. She drew on a thin gold chain at her neck and brought up a fine silver cross.
"Give it to Jezebel," Orb said.
"Please, no," Jezebel said. "Its approach would damage me."
"I'll take it," Nat said. He extended his hand and took the cross. He glanced at Orb. "Satisfied?"
"Almost," Orb said, wishing she had never gotten into this. "I would like to sing a hymn."
"Let's spare the demoness the pain of attempting that," Nat said grimly. He handed back the cross, then inhaled, and sang:
"I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger, A-traveling through this world of woe; But there's no sickness, toil nor danger, In that bright world to which I go."
As he sang, the walls of the chamber faded, and the gloom of the exterior night developed. The darkness was not total; rather, it was the murk of a dismal twilight, through which the man seemed to be trudging. The world of woe.
He proceeded through it, concluding:
"I'm going there to meet my Savior, To sing his praise for evermore, I'm just a going over Jordan, I'm just a going over home."
As he did, the light increased, as from the overflowing brilliance of a transcendent realm ahead. Then, at the seeming point of realization, the effect faded, and the walls of the chamber reappeared.
Natasha glanced once more at Orb, then faced about, and stalked toward the wall.
"Wait!" Orb cried. "I had no choice—"
But already he was fading out. She picked up the harmonies of the traveling theme and knew he was going to some other point on the globe. She tried to match it, but could not. He was gone, and she had no way of telling where.
"I guess I'd be mad, too, if someone accused me of being a demon, and I wasn't," Jezebel said.
"Especially after he helped someone out of a jam," the drummer added.
"You're not helping much, you know," Lou-Mae said.
Orb fled to her bedroom, where she flung herself down sobbing. She was hardly aware as the big fish resumed swimming, moving up through the air, reorienting on the original destination.
What else could she have done?
Chapter 12 - SONG OF EVENING
Time passed, but Natasha did not return. The Livin' Sludge completed its engagement in Hawaii and made it safely back across the ocean. Now that Orb knew the Song of Day, she had no fear of the dancing skeletons; indeed, she was not certain they existed any more. She was grateful to Nat for teaching it to her, wanted to thank him, and could not. Oh, if only she had not affronted him by testing him! Yet still she did not see what else she could have done, given the warning of Thanatos and Chronos.
Lou-Mae shook her head. "You had better go to him, Orb," she said. "We've got a few days off now; why don't we stop at the Llano plain, and you can look for him?"
"I think he would have appeared by this time, if he wanted to," Orb said sadly.
"He's a man. He has his foolish pride. He wants you to make the first move. Go out and sing for him, and he'll hear."
Orb felt hope. "You think so?"
"I don't know a lot about men, but Jezebel does, and she makes a lot of sense. She says they think they're superior. They really believe that their animal lust is nature's highest calling. Pretend you can't live without him."
"I don't think I have to pretend," Orb said forlornly.
Lou-Mae smiled ruefully. "I know how it is. Pretend you're pretending. There's not a man alive and not too many dead who would turn away from you if you sang and danced and pleaded."
"But I don't want to plead! I have my own pride!"
"What's your pride worth, without him? Same as mine without Danny-Boy?"
"Very little," Orb admitted. "He asked to court me, and I thought it was just opportunism, but every time I hear him sing—"She shook her head. "I just want to be with him."
"That man certainly can sing," Lou-Mae agreed. "I thought no one could match you, but he—" She shrugged.
"He can sing," Orb repeated. "I think I live, now, to sing with him."
Jezebel entered the chamber. "Someone sings as well as Orb? That I don't believe."
"You don't?" Lou-Mae asked. "You were there. You didn't like it?"
"I was where?"
"Down on the ocean, when Orb danced with the skeletons."
"Orb did what?"
Both Lou-Mae and Orb looked at her askance. "You don't remember?" Orb asked.
"I certainly don't! What are you talking about?"
Orb glanced at Lou-Mae. Did the demoness have a short memory? How could an episode like that have escaped her so soon?
"Maybe it was a dream," Lou-Mae said diplomatically.
Jezebel shrugged. "Demons don't dream."
The guitarist wandered in, fuzzy-eyed, for it was still before noon. "Hey, big momma," he mumbled, embracing Jezebel.
" 'Sokay, kid," the demoness said, stroking his head.
Orb almost choked. By day? When the succubus was middle-aged?
Then she realized that their relationship had become more than a nocturnal thing. The guitarist, deeply insecure, had emotional need for a luscious, adoring woman by night and for a mature, supportive mother figure by day. Jezebel was serving both needs. Orb realized that she had no call to feel disgusted; it was better that she understand, just as it was better that she comprehend her own nature.
So it was that Jonah swam to the region of the Llano, and Orb got out and took another walk by herself. It was summer now, and the air was nice.
She sang the Song of the Morning, and the dawn came magically, and the flowers bloomed, but Natasha did not appear. She sang the Song of Day, but it wasn't the same without him.
Then she experimented with a combination—some of the travel theme merged with some of the storm-generation theme and some of the Song of the Morning. The result was strange. The night closed, as it did at the onset of the Song of the Morning, but when the dawn came it was inverted. The land was red-orange, the sky green, and the sunrise blue. The illuminated clouds were bright, while the sun was a dark ball. The bright region seemed to be the coldest, while the shadows were warm.
When the flowers bloomed, they started as blossoms and budded stems and roots. Startled, Orb focused more closely on them, and they came apart into separating circles and ovals and lines, as if reduced to their composites, which were mathematical. A larger pattern formed as the parts of the flowers intersected each other, extending their network into the sky and the ground. The ground became translucent, then lost its remaining cohesion.
Orb found herself standing on a pattern whose reality was shifting. The gro
und had become the lines of the pattern, and her feet were sliding down between the lines. Her orientation changed, so that she was no longer vertical, but it didn't seem to matter. She was as she was, and reality was around her. Reality? This was no variant of the reality she had known all her life! The pattern fragments of strange flowers were everywhere, filling her world, displacing what she had known. It was pretty in its fashion, but she preferred the normal values. She had stopped singing, but the pattern remained. It seemed she could not simply revert to normality.
She sang again, the straight Song of the Morning, with no admixture of other aspects of the Llano. The fabric of the inverted flowers tore, and curled to either side as if it were paper, and disappeared.
She stood in a kind of channel that contained a single ridge whose cross section was triangular. It seemed to be made of firm plastic, bright yellow. It was high enough for her to sit on. Beyond the channel there seemed to be nothing, no wall, no landscape, just emptiness.
She sighted along the ridge. To one side it narrowed in the distance until it disappeared. To the other, it broadened until it filled everything.
Perspective? No, it was literal; the size of the ridge really did change with its location; only the convention of her prior experience had made it seem to be even.
Then she saw something moving. It seemed to be a spindle or double cone, rolling along the ridge. But as it moved toward her, it expanded in diameter and evidently in mass, for the ridge was vibrating increasingly. It came toward her, gathering velocity.
She remembered her geometry classes, where much effort had been expended in the analysis of conic sections. One formula defined a slice of the cone, with the size and shape of the slice determined by the parameters of the equation. Some sections were perfect circles, others were ovals, and others looped through on the inside but never closed on the outside. If a knife were taken to a physical cone, so that it sliced through the cone at different angles, these were the shapes it could make.
Now, it seemed, she had encountered the original cone. Size was one of its variables; as it changed its location, it expanded to fill the universe as it existed at that site. That meant that there was no room left for Orb; she was an intruder on its space. What would happen when it reached the spot where she stood?
The thing was coming at her with logarithmic acceleration. She was about to find out! Growing rapidly enormous, it rolled upon her. She would be crushed!
She sang again, the start of the Song of the Morning. The fabric of the ridge and double cone tore and curled, exposing the reality beyond.
It was green. A thought gave her momentary hope: the Green Mother, Nature—could she be here? But it faded.
This was a forest, with huge, quiet trees. Moss and ferns grew up their dusky trunks. Vines descended from their branches. Thick foliage grew at their bases.
But it was poison foliage. The surfaces of the leaves glistened with exudation. Orb knew it would be disaster for her to allow that to touch any part of her.
Yet the foliage grew all around. She could not take a step without encountering it. As she watched, it extended visibly, the branches closing in.
This was not the reality she desired! She sang again, and it tore across as the others had, peeling back to reveal what lay beyond.
It was a city, with many tall buildings. Highways cut through it, separating the sections, and walks crisscrossed, reuniting the sections. She was standing in the center of a broad street. A truck came down that street, its tires squealing. It bore down on her. She ran to the side, but the truck corrected its course to intercept her. Now she knew that she was no detached spectator; these settings were trying to eradicate her!
She sang again, and the street carried up, more paper, taking the truck with it. The new reality was revealed below.
This was a plush chamber, evidently an ornate boudoir, with a huge round bed piled with pillows.
In fact, she was in the bed, clad in a sheer night robe, the type calculated to drive any man who saw any women in it to a madness of lust.
A door burst open, and a man entered. No, not a man, he had goat's horns and goat's feet and a caprine beard. His body was furry, his ears were pointed, and his nose projected into a snout. He had one other attribute that was both obvious and shocking. He was a satyr—the original creature of lust. The satyr's blazing eye fell on her. He gave a bleat of anticipation and leaped toward her, his salient characteristic leading. There could be absolutely no question of his intent; it was manifest in his nature and his action.
Orb whammed him in the snoot with a pillow. She rolled off the bed and fled across the floor toward the door. But as she reached it, it closed, merging seamlessly with the wall. She scraped her fingernails across it, trying to gain purchase, but there was nothing. The satyr made a grunt of urgency and leaped again. He was incredibly agile. Orb dodged to the side, but one hooflike hand caught her robe. The material stretched like hot cheese but did not tear; in a moment he was hauling her in, hand over hand, the material molding itself to her backside while it stretched out in a tent before her, bringing her forward in a state worse than nakedness.
She raised a foot to push him away, but he caught her leg and hauled on it, his hoof-fingers hot on her flesh. Drool spilled from his mouth as he brought that salient characteristic into position.
Orb finally remembered her only weapon here, her voice. She sang, and the fabric of the setting tore and curled, the satyr's expression of lust converting to rage as he saw her escaping him.
How had she gotten into this? Could she really have found herself raped by a vision conjured by a modification in the Llano?
Now she stood near the peak of a snowy mountain, the wind cutting cruelly. She still wore the sheer material of the robe; it bagged in front, clung behind, and offered no protection at all from the wind. Already her bare feet were slipping on the icy slope, causing her to lurch toward a clifflike descent.
She sang, and the scene tore away. Now she was in deep night, with stars in their myriads surrounding her. In fact she seemed to be in space, for the stars were in every direction. One was larger than the others, closer, hotter; it drew on her body, hauling her in to itself. Its sphere seemed to expand enormously, its fires reaching out like tentacles. Her gown burst into flame.
She sang—and the scene tore. She stood naked at a shellcovered beach, the waves of a restless ocean surging against it. One wave developed far out, hunching itself into greater mass, looming high and savage as it crashed toward her. She turned and ran from it—but the beach was a narrow island, with no high ground at all, no protection. The wave loomed over her, a white crest broadening at its fringe as its devastating descent commenced.
She sang, and the white crest became a tear. The wave was paper, disintegrating as the tear spread.
She was in a great, dimly illuminated cave, with stalactites extending from the ceiling in toothlike points. All the hues of precious onyx shone from them; lovely swirls and patterns manifested in the dripping stone.
This setting, at least, seemed to offer no immediate threat. Orb cast about for some natural exit, knowing that if she sang again, the scene would tear and thrust her into a new one that might be worse. She had to find some better way out!
She remained naked. It seemed that whatever she lost on one setting remained in that setting; she could not recover it in the next. But perhaps she could find new clothing here and keep it with her.
She walked between the stalactites, finding a path through the cave. The light was brighter downslope; maybe that was the exit to the surface.
It turned out to be the light of a fire. Creatures squatted beside it. She walked toward them, glad for this sign of civilization. "Do you have—?" she began.
The creatures looked up, then leaped up. They were demons, huge and shaggy!
Orb opened her mouth to sing, but paused. The demons seemed afraid rather than aggressive. One of their number remained down, evidently wounded or ill.
"I will—trade you," Orb said, poised to sing herself into another setting if attacked. "Some clothing—for some healing. Do you understand?"
The demons watched noncommittally.
"I—I know a demon," Orb continued. "A succubus. Once I helped her overcome her curse. I think if I sang a regular song—it might help your friend."
Still they stood. They did not seem to comprehend her words. But as long as they did not attack...
She moved slowly toward the sick one. What could she sing that was not the Llano and that might help? Did the song matter, as long as her intent was to help? Why not use one of her old favorites, then?
"By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes, Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond..."
She did not have her harp with her, but the magic came, and it touched the sick demon. The demon stirred, and a light seemed to play about it. It lifted one arm, its paw hesitating in the air.
Orb reached out and caught the paw. With direct physical contact, the channel of magic intensified. She felt the illness in the creature, but already the malaise was retreating before the healing she was making. By the time the song was done, the creature was much improved.
She let go its paw. "I think the tide has turned," she said. "It may take a few days yet."
One of the standing demons moved. It tramped to a pile offers in an alcove. It lifted one and held it out.
They had understood! Gratefully, Orb took the fur. She draped it about her shoulders. It was heavy but warm, reaching down to her knees. It would do.
"Thank you," she said. "Do you know a way out? A way to reach my kind?"
They shrugged. Then there was a rumble. The floor shook, and a stalactite fell. It was a cave-in!
Orb started to sing the Llano, but paused again. She could escape—but what would happen to these demons if she did? Would they be crushed in the rail of rock? Some threat always manifested when she came into a scene; if she had brought this destruction with her, she was responsible.
She could not risk it. "Touch me!" she cried. "Make a chain!" She grabbed at the paw of the ill one and reached for one of the standing ones. "Everyone must touch!"
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