Chapter Twelve
Squee needed no prodding. The thrill of discovery of the old house had worn off the moment Red Cliff had surprised them, and he was more than ready to continue his pursuit of the flock. Soma had some more questions for their ungracious host, but realized he had deliberately not answered most of the ones she'd already asked, so she grabbed Bombarda and led him away from there. They walked well into the night, Soma clutching her old mentor in one hand and the rolled up map in the other. She determined that if the map was proportionally correct, they should reach the village by morning, but her plan to keep the march going without sleep was met with utter resistance from her two companions. Squee had zoomed off ahead at the start, but by dusk they caught up with him waiting by the side of the path, which was now much more clearly a path and intermittently marked with faded wooden signs with arrows pointing towards Greenland in one direction, and Nomador in the other. When they met Squee, he and Bombarda both threw themselves on the ground at once and fell asleep immediately.
Soma remained awake for some time, scrutinizing the stars up above, studying them closely to make sure they moved. She had come to trust nothing at all, not in the world, and not outside of it either. She still thought they may perhaps be trapped beneath a dome, a massive one of illusion and deceit, scrolling through fictitious stars to keep the inhabitants below convinced they were the real ones twinkling and sparkling. She tried to focus on the map but in the dim crescent moonlight was unable to make it out clearly. From her memory she could only guess at the gaps, the large section off to the east that was completely unmarked. Did the rest of the world begin there, or were they on an island? Were they even on the planet Earth? She had no way of knowing, and eventually wore herself out with wondering, and joined her friends in dreamless slumber.
When she woke up in the morning, Squee was already gone, and Gowdy still sleeping. She roused him and silently led him on toward the village. He was fully rejuvenated by then, and looked to be no more than twenty five years old. His blond curls stretched below his shoulders, and his ribs stuck through an emaciated but tanned and toned carcass. His eyes were sky blue now, and his pink lips betrayed a shy and sheepish smile as if he were thinking of pleasant but private notions. He did not speak, not even in reply to her most trivial statements. Soma could not remember ever feeling so alone in her life. They walked on steadily for a few hours more in solitude. Meanwhile the path widened into a road, and the wetlands gave way to grassy hills, where now and then they saw small groups of sheep and goats grazing. Then ahead they began to see people, walking before them, also heading towards the town. Soma was content to follow and not stir up conversation, barely nodding and murmuring greetings at those they passed, who responded in like fashion.
They were all of the same general format as had befallen Gowdy, young-looking, tanned and blond, vacant and vaguely smiling. They walked in couples or foursomes, never alone, and never in odd numbers, she noticed. They were always paired by gender as well, and as naked as the people from the sea. The day was warm, but not hot, just as it had been since they emerged from the forest, with little variety in the temperature, even at night. Soma began to sort through her recollections, compiling a record of everything she'd seen and experienced. The fact that it had not rained. The fact that the moon did rise at a different time and place each night. The fact that the stars moved. The fact that the people all seemed to be variations on a theme, even the sea people and the flock, except for the anomaly of Red Cliff and the two reported by Gowdy before his lapse into otherness.
They were joined by more and more people as the morning turned toward noon, and soon they found themselves in a crowd of maybe forty or fifty. Some they passed, while others passed them by, and the road led straight into a cluster of identical wooden buildings on either side of the road. These structures were uniformly two stories tall, connected together, side by side, and stretched along wooden plank walkways under plywood arcades for about a quarter of a mile. Each individual unit was distinguishable from its neighbors only by an alternating paint scheme of pale greenish-yellow, and pale yellowish-green. Each one featured a door set between two windows on the ground floor, and two large picture windows facing the street up above, with the arcade serving as a sort of fence-less and border-less common deck for that story. Soma could see no one inside any of the buildings. She counted thirty two of them on either side of the street.
None of the buildings seemed to house a business of any kind, nor were there any people visible within them. None of the people they walked with came out of or went into any of these units, but all came from the same direction as they, though from where they'd emerged she had no idea. She saw no houses, or tents, or cabins or anything at all along the side of the road as they'd walked. The people had seemed to pop out of nowhere, suddenly appearing as if they'd been there the whole time only she just hadn't noticed them. They continued to follow the group past what seemed to be the end of the town. There another street crossed the main one, and on the other side of that road there was a long wall, about five feet tall, stretching as far as Soma could see to the left and right. The wall seemed to be covered with uniform, multicolored tiles.
The crowd seemed to have multiplied. Now there were dozens of people, most heading determinedly towards the left but some drifting in the other direction, closer to the wall, gazing at the pictures upon it. Soma noticed that these people were all carrying piles of small pink rectangles in their hands. She came to a stop in the middle of the street, and pulled Gowdy to a halt as well. They found themselves surrounded as more and more people flowed around them, filling up the street. Soma felt lost beneath so many creatures so much taller than she, and looked around for a way out, but saw she'd have to go against the grain to get free. She started pushing her way to the side of the street, thinking she'd take cover on the boardwalk in front of the buildings back there, but progress was slow, especially with Bombarda now resisting and trying to pull her towards the wall. She cried out in frustration, and then a space suddenly cleared out before her, and a stranger stood before her, another blond youth who grinned as he greeted her, displaying unusually large teeth, and said,
"Right this way, little lady! Right this way!"
Prisoners of Perfection - An Epic Fantasy by Tom Lichtenberg and Johnny Lichtenberg Page 12