Tyranny and anarchy are never far asunder.
Jeremy Bentham
Give me a place to stand, and I'll probably move along anyway.
Walter Slovotsky
The nightmare is always the same:
We're trying to make our escape from Hell, millions of us running through the immense castle's unbelievably long corridors, past the empty rooms, toward the main gate, and safety.
Too many of us, no matter how much the corridor widens, there's always too many of us; I'm constantly being scraped against the red-hot walls, blisters flaring and bursting with a horrid pain that doesn't go away even as they disappear.
Everybody I've ever loved is there, and some of them look to me for guidance, as though I'm supposed to know something. What the hell do they want of me?
Behind us, the demons follow: silent men in black, blades flowering from their fingertips, seeking innocent flesh.
We follow the crowd as it plunges into a stairwell at the end of the corridor and down through the endless spiral of staircase that I hope leads to safety, as though safety is a place.
They're all swept away from me: Janie, reaching out a hand to bring her baby sister along; Aeia, mouthing a promise to wait for me; Doria, smiling reassuringly as she vanishes in the crowd; Kirah, with a quick squeeze on my arm that speaks of a lingering sort of affection.
"Once more," Karl says, a hand clasped to my shoulder. "One last time, Walter."
And then what, asshole?
They all line up, blocking the corridor. All the old ones, too old to do this, but unwilling to give in to age, any more than they'd accept defeat by any other enemy.
"But we're not here," old Jonas Salk says, his right hand shattering a demon with just a gesture, "this is just your dream, just a figment of your imagination. I'd be in my lab, where I belong."
Eleanor Roosevelt rends another demon with her fingers, and tosses it aside. "And I would be giving speeches, I trust, where they would be listened to. That's my place, Walter."
Sister Berthe reaches out a gentle hand to pat my shoulder, then pulls the ruler out of her habit and slaps another demon into dust. "I taught you what a metaphor is, Walter. That's all your dreams are. You don't have to be so," she sniffs, "literal all the time."
The old sailor is there, his beard white as fleece against his lined, leathery face, the scar on his leg, taking his position next to me
Omygod. I know who he is, finally.
" 'Though much is taken, much remains,' " I say to him, and he smiles.
"Some work of noble note," he says, "but it need not be your work of yesterday." He looks down at me, concerned. "You're getting a bit too old for this, Cricket," he says, his face my father's, his voice Big Mike's. "You can't be a young stud all your life. Time to learn how to be an older stud, eh?"
And then I wake up.
Doria and Bren Adahan were downstairs in a room off the main corridor that had always been called the Prince's Den for no reason that anybody I knew of knew.
She was wearing a black robe, as though she had come from bed, but there was a suspicious bulge at the waistline under it that made me decide this was no accident.
Bren looked like an ad for some sort of postcoital clothing catalogue: a thin, loose, long cotton shirt open to the waist, the high collar almost covering a bite mark at the base of his neck.
He smiled a greeting, and I returned it as I plopped down in the chair next to Doria's.
"Late-night crowd, eh?" I asked as I reached for a bit of sweetroll on the plate by her elbow.
Doria shrugged her shoulders. They were nice shoulders. "And you've been dreaming again. Care to talk about it?"
"Ulysses," I said. "I've been dreaming of all the old ones, starting with Ulysses."
At the edge of my vision, Bren's forehead wrinkled, but Doria nodded. " 'To sail beyond the sunset,' eh?" She turned to Bren. "It's a poem some of us studied, about an old king, too old for wandering and adventuring, who sets out again, because even if he's not what he once was . . ." She closed her eyes for a moment.
" 'Tho' much is taken,' " she said, opening her eyes and looking at me, " 'much abides; and tho'
" 'We are not now that strength which in old days
" 'Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are . . . ' " Her voice trailed off.
It had been too many years since Sister Berthe had taught me the poem, but the years didn't matter.
" ' . . . that which we are, we are;
" 'One equal temper of heroic hearts,
" 'Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
" 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' " I shrugged. "Sorry; I can't give it all up. And I'm not going to try."
She nodded. "So, you're leaving us?" Doria was always a step or two beyond me.
"Yes, and no." I thought about it for a moment, and thought about how neither Bren nor I was meeting the other's eyes, and how that wasn't because we were angry or anything, but because we'd divided the world into halves, his to watch out for and mine.
I didn't particularly like him, and I very much didn't like the thought of Kirah lying warm in his arms at night, but sometimes it doesn't matter even to me what I like.
"The point isn't to keep doing what you've been doing until you get too old for it, but to keep making yourself useful. I'm starting to slow down, and while I'm more than a match for most, I'm not a match for all. 'Tho' much is taken, much abides'I'm going to have to leave this jumping out of windows and fighting in alleyways for the younger folks sooner or later, and I'd better get used to the idea that that's a good thing, not a bad thing. There's other things I can do, and not necessarily boring ones, either."
Doria smiled. "Still a little fight in the old boy, eh?"
"Maybe." I shrugged.
You up for a night flight tomorrow night? I asked Ellegon.
*Depends where, I suppose. Oh, sure. Why not? What have you got in mind?*
Job interview.
Bren looked over at me, and tilted his head to one side. "You want some company?"
I nodded. "I was sort of counting on it."