Sunshine

I nodded. "I know they're the good guys and everything, but..."

"I know. Once I found out they were watching me I changed the way I do some stuff. They are good guys and I do work for them and I don't mind - much. But it's all a little nomad for me. And I still have this silly idea that my life belongs to me."

There were good reasons Aimil and I were friends.

I went home that night and stood on the balcony again and said to the darkness, "Con, Constantine, are you all right? If you need me, call me to you."

For a moment I felt...something. Like a twitch against your line when you're half asleep or thinking about something else. It may be a fish and it may be the current...but it may be a fish. (I'd learned to fish because Mel taught me, not because I longed to impale small invertebrates on barbed hooks and rip hell out of piscine oral cavities and smother fellow oxygen breathers in an alien medium.) The flicker itself made me think I was half asleep or thinking about something else, because I was straining after any sign whatsoever. And it was gone again at once.

Thursday afternoon wasn't flash ideal but I managed. Paulie was a little too not-sorry to change his single weekly four-thirty-in-the-morning shift for another afternoon that Thursday, and he hadn't made up the one he'd missed our last thirteen-day week yet either. I'd worry about just how not-sorry he was later. Meanwhile I got up at three a.m. to do a little extra baking like I had a point to make. As I drank the necessary pint-mug of blacker-than-the-pit-of-doom tea to get me going I stood on the balcony again, testing for quivers in the current. All I got was a stronger sense that there was something wrong; but I was good at feeling there was something wrong even when there wasn't - something I'd inherited from my mother - and there was nothing in this case but my own glangy unease to look at.

There are advantages to driving an old wreck instead of a modern car; wrecks bounce around and jerk at your hands on the wheel and help keep you awake. The charms in the glove compartment were more restless than usual too: I think they were objecting to the driving. By the time I got off work at noon I felt it had been several years since I'd had any sleep, and I had a nap instead of lunch. I brought sandwiches in a bag, and Aimil had a pot of tea waiting for me.

It was another gray day, but Aimil had pulled the combox table around so that the chair backed up against the window, which she had opened. What daylight there was fell on me as I sat there, and there was a little wind that stroked my hair.

"Where do you want to start?" said Aimil. "With the bingo! one from the other day, or do you want to start fresh?"

I hadn't thought about it. Good beginning. It was so hard to screw myself to do anything, the details got a bit lost...

Who - or what - was I looking for? Con? Or Bo? Since I was doing it alone with Aimil I wasn't trying to make Pat and Jesse happy. So what was going to make me happy? Define happy.

But if I found something on the other side of the real globe that Pat and Jesse would get all tangled up in negotiations with their local SOF equivalents over, it might get them out of my hair.

Finding Bo wasn't going to make me happy, but I didn't want to look for Con with anyone else around, even Aimil. Which left Bo or the Unknown. The Unknown, at the moment, was unknown. Bo, on the other hand, was after me. Bo, then.

"Let's start with bingo."

Aimil brought up the file, highlighted the cosmail I wanted, and stepped back. I squinted at the screen. I could see the winking bar of highlighting, and the button was under my finger. I pressed.

It was like hands around my throat, a crushing, splintering weight on my breast; there was also a horrible, horrible pressure against my eyes, my poor dark-dazzled eyes...I was lost in the dark, I no longer knew which way was up and which down, I was vertiginous, I was going to be sick...

No.

I steadied myself. I found an...alignment. Somewhere. Somewhere, reaching in the dark...I was...no, I wasn't standing. There didn't seem to be anything to stand on, and I wasn't sure there was any of me to stand with. If my feet had disappeared, then perhaps it wasn't surprising that my eyes - no, my sight - had disappeared too. This wasn't just darkness: this was what came after. This was the beyond-dark. And I could only see in the dark. My eyes were still there - or perhaps they were now my non-eyes - I couldn't see with them and blinking no longer seemed relevant, but the pressure was there. And why was it so difficult to breathe? Especially since at the same time breathing seemed as irrelevant as blinking. Why did I want to breathe?

Where was I? I was - stretched - along some intangible line; a compass needle. Compass needles don't mind the dark. Although I doubted I was pointing toward anything like a north that I'd recognize back in the real world. Maybe I'd found where Aimil's cosmail had come from. But where was here? And was there some clue I could take back with me to the world I knew?

If I could get back there.

I experimented with moving. Moving didn't seem to be an option. I was too much like nothing, here, in this nonplace, in the beyond-dark. Right, okay, next time I come I'll organize my question better going in...

Next time, presupposing I get out of this time alive.

I was grateful for the pressure against my eyes, the difficulty breathing; it made me feel I still existed...somehow. Somewhere.

I was a magic handler, a stuff changer, a Blaise by blood, and lately, by practice. Not much practice but growing all the time.

I remembered another sense of alignment, when I had changed my little knife to a key. I reached for that sense. No, I reached for my knife. It shouldn't have been there, and I had no fingers to feel for it, but I was suddenly aware of it. I couldn't see it, but I knew that it was a light even in this darkness. And by its invisible light I could...see. See. Feel. Hear. Smell. Live...

I heard a rustle, like leaves in a breeze. And for a moment I stood on four slender furred legs and I could feel and hear and smell as no human could.

And then I was back again, sitting in Aimil's living room, and her hand was reaching through my powerless fingers and pressing the button. The screen went dark. "That was not good," she said.

"What - happened?" I was amazed at the sense of my body sitting in the chair, of gravity, of sight (light; twinkly shadows), of fingers on a keyboard, feet against a floor. Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways. Had I - ? What had I - ?

The leaves laid sun-dapples on my brown back as I stood at the edge of the woods with the golden field before me. I raised my black nose to the wind, cupped my big ears forward and back to listen.

Yeek. My human fingers closed on my knife. I was still in Aimil's living room.

"You were gone," said Aimil. "Not long - ten seconds or so - just long enough for me to take two steps and reach for the button. But your body didn't have you in it." She sat down, suddenly, on the floor. "Do you know where you went?" She bowed her head between her knees, and then tipped her face back and looked up at me. "Do you know?"

I shook my head. Experimenting with motion. I remembered the void, the alignment, the other senses - my little knife. My tree. My...doe. I wondered, when she had accepted the death she knew she could not escape, if she knew what her death was for, if that could have made any difference, if that was why she...I touched the knife-bulge in my pocket. It felt no different than it ever had. We sat in daylight; if I took it out it would look like any other pocketknife. The second blade, which I rarely used, would be covered with pocket lint; the first blade, which I used all the time, would need sharpening. Folded up it was about the length of my middle finger, and a little wider and deeper; it was scraped and gouged by years in a series of pockets, sharing cramped quarters with things like loose change and car keys. And it glowed in the dark, even in the beyond-dark of the void. Glowed like a beacon that said, "Hold on. I've got you. Here."

I felt - carefully - after my experience of nowhere, of beyond-dark. Had I brought anything back after all, anything I could use?

Yes. But I didn't know what it was. It wasn't anything so straightforward as a direction.

"Not caffeine after that," said Aimil, still on the floor. "Scotch." She got up on all fours and reached to the little cabinet next to her sofa. "And don't even ask me if you want to try again, because the answer is no."

I looked at her when she gave me a small heavy glass with a finger's width of dark amber liquid in it, about the color of the thin wooden plates set into the sides of my little knife. "We won't try it again today," I said. "But we have to try again."

"No, we don't," she said. "Let SOF figure it out. It's what they're for."

"If they could figure it out they wouldn't be asking us."

"The Wars are over," she said.

"Not exactly," I said, after a pause. "Didn't Pat tell you - "

"Yes, he told me we'll all be under the dark in a hundred years!" she said angrily. "I know!"

I slid down to join her on the floor. I felt like a collection of old creaking hinges. I leaned over and put an arm around her. "I don't want to know either."

After a moment she said, "There have been two more dry guys in Old Town this last week. Have you heard about them?"

"Yes." It had been on the news a few days ago - great stuff to hear when you're driving alone in the dark - and Charlie and Liz had been talking about it when I brought the first tray of cinnamon rolls out front. They had fallen silent. I pretended I hadn't heard anything and toppled the first burning-hot roll onto a plate for Mrs. Bialosky. She patted my hand and said, "Don't you worry, sweetie, it's not your fault." Because she was Mrs. Bialosky I almost believed her, but I made the mistake of looking up, into her face, when I smiled at her, and saw the expression in her eyes. Oh. I almost patted her hand back and told her it wasn't her fault either, but it wouldn't have done any good. I guess I wasn't surprised to find out that Mrs. Bialosky wasn't only about litter and rats and flower beds.

"I wouldn't have joined SOF just because Pat can turn blue " Aimil said. "Working in a proofglassed room gives me asthma. Even part-time. Or maybe it's just all the guys in khaki."

I went back to Charlie's for the dinner shift, but Charlie took one look at me and said, "I'll find someone to cover for you. Go home."

"I'll go when you find someone," I said, and lasted two hours, by which time poor Paulie had agreed to give up the rest of his night off after being there all afternoon. Teach him to be glad to escape the four-thirty-in-the-morning shift. I was home by eight-thirty; it was just full dark. Charlie had sent me home with a bottle of champagne that had a glass and a half left in it: perfect. I stood on my balcony and drank it and looked into the darkness. The darkness danced.

I had had an idea. I didn't like it much, but I had to try it. I went back indoors and unplugged my combox. It's never quite dark under the sky, and I didn't have curtains for the balcony windows. I tucked the box under my arm, ducked into my closet, and closed the door. This was real darkness. There wasn't a lot of room in there, but I swept a few shoes aside and sat down. Turned the box on, listened to the resentful hum of the battery; it was an old box, and preferred to run off a wire. The screen came up and asked me if I wanted to enter the globenet. I sat there, staring at the glowing lettering. In the darkness, it didn't flicker at all, it didn't run away into millions of tiny skittish dwindling dimensions, like looking into a mirror with another one over your shoulder. I read it easily.