Glimmering

She lowered her head. The raised flesh felt warm and rubbery, like a lure worm. As his fingers moved across the words thin music sounded very softly, a glissando of piano and fluttering drumbeats. From the back of her neck a voice whispered.

Think twice before causing
Just anything to be.

Trip snatched his hand away. The woman laughed. “Morton Feldman. Isn’t that neat? I treated myself when I got tenure. Okay, here’s your stop—the lab’s downstairs, I think there’s a sign, but you basically just keep turning right. See you later.”

Inside the building was softly lit by bursts of gold falling from the windows. There were no guards, no electric lights. The security checkpoint had been deactivated; beside the magnetic arch a hand-lettered sign read SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, with Japanese characters penciled beneath. A few students sat in a hallway eating and listening to music percolating from a colorful spinning top. Trip found the stairs and went down slowly. He felt tired and anxious and completely unprepared to do a recording session of any kind. The basement was numbingly cold. Emergency panel-lights cast a faint gray glow. All of the rooms seemed abandoned, heaped with metal chairs and desks and old computer monitors. Finally he reached a black metal door.

BLOEMBERGEN LABORATORY:

DIRECT-VOICE INTERACTION/INTERTEXT RECORDING

STUDENTS: BE PREPARED TO SHOW YOUR PASS!

Under this someone had taped a piece of paper scrawled with magic marker.

PRIVATE RECORDING SESSION. SORRY. NO ADMITTANCE.

T. Marlowe please knock!

He knocked. No one came. He listened but could hear nothing, had his knuckles raised to knock again when the door cracked open.

“Yee-es?” a voice drawled.

Before Trip could say anything someone grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. The door slammed shut.

“Trip Marlowe! You made it!” A slight black-clad man much shorter than Trip whirled him into the room. “Great, this is great! Sammy, get your shit together, we got a go here. Look, boys: Trip Marlowe.”

Trip glanced around helplessly, embarrassed by the man’s mocking tone, the bored expressions of the two technicians who slouched in swivel chairs beside a bank of recording equipment. They were watching television; it showed the GFI experimental dirigible fleet at rest on an airfield, then abruptly cut away to a scene of flames, the tiny cartoonish Blue Antelope logo in a corner of the screen.

“I guess this is the right place?” Trip asked, hoping it wasn’t.

“Oh, ab-so-po-lutely,” the man replied. He clamped a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the far end of the room, where white crosshatched screens rose in front of a lethal-seeming array of still cameras, vidcams, halogen lights, and what appeared to be surgical equipment. There was an indefinable but suspicious smell of smoke. “Nellie said you’d be here, but things have been so fucked up, I was supposed to be in Mirbat for another oil spill—like, where do they get the oil?—but of course our little atmospheric challenge changed all that. I was marooned for two days! Then, of course, the only place I was cleared to land was Logan. I had to leave the troupe back in the city. A total wipeout, but then, thank God, YOU were here—”

The man gazed at him appraisingly. “Leonard Thrope,” he announced.

“Uh—Trip,” said Trip. “Marlowe.”

“Please.” Leonard gestured at an empty chair. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Trip sat. Leonard strode to a pile of bags and began pulling bottles out of a knapsack. Without a glance at labels or contents he opened them, ingesting their contents in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

“Not what you think,” he reassured Trip. “Selenium, pantothenic acid, astragalus, this is some kind of blood purifier. Vitamin K. Spirulina. Saquinavar.” He replaced everything except a tiny lacquered snuffbox. “This of course is Persian Cat,” he added and took a few discreet sniffs. “Want some?”

Trip shook his head, horrified and dazzled. “No. Thanks.” If all the preachers he had ever known had been able to get together and create, from scratch, their own unqualified, indubious, and absurdly outfitted vision of the abyss, this would be it. Leonard Thrope moved with the savage authority of a very small dog approaching an unwary child. His tangled gray-streaked hair was long and braided with glass beads. What little of Leonard’s flesh Trip could see—hands, face, a scabby bit of ankle—was covered with an intricate web of flowers, cuneiform characters, and sexual graffiti. When he moved, flashes of virulent green and yellow appeared through rents in his clothes, like trapped fireflies.

Leonard curled his fingers around the proffered snuffbox. “Right,” he said. “Probably better you don’t,” and tossed it into a bag. “Okay. Let’s roll ’em.”