"Liiiieees," Rikka snarled, drawing the word out with her best ganga sneer. "They tell you they got something, something good, but they got nothing. Nothing but lies."
"They got secrets," Shenka piped up, and I looked for Rikka"s reaction.
"Better they keep they secrets," Rikka retorted, but she did not deny the idea. "They secrets na good to me. Fill my belly? Na. Make me rich, ride a hovercycle like them? Na. Bring Pigatzo down on us? Yes, that they do. Let them keep they secrets, I had plenty Pigatzo beatings already my life."
"She"s scared," I whispered, sure there was more to the Bookali than secrets.
But Shenka took this as an attack on Rikka and came suddenly to her sister"s defense. "Rikka na scared!" she objected. "You scared, Trabina."
"You call me scared?" Rikka demanded, turning on me suddenly with a large wooden spoon in her hand. "You call me scared, little girl?" She was an imposing sight, taller than I would ever be, braids jutting out in all directions, and with a jagged scar under one eye.
"You scared," Shenka repeated, trying in time-honored fashion to refute the charge by reversing it.
"Am na!" I objected, being very much so.
"When you run with ganga, you na scared nothing," Rikka boasted, advancing on me with the wooden spoon. "I na scared some Bookali with stun gun. Pah! You little rat-rot scared."
"Am na!" I said again, edging my way toward the door.
"Are so!" Shenka taunted, trailing behind her sister.
"Na!" I insisted, wondering if I could bolt and run before that spoon whacked across my skull.
"So, so, so!"
"Na, na, na!"
Suddenly Rikka stopped and the sneer twisted back onto her lips. "You na scared, little rat-rot? Show us."
My heart stopped.
"Yeah, show us," Shenka echoed.
Rikka"s sneer stretched her painted lips across her teeth and left traces of color there. "You go down to Bookali, little rat-rot, if you na scared."
"Yeah, you go down," Shenka chimed; then, "I dare you."
I hated Shenka for that. I could have run from Rikka, could have run back to my mother and avoided that spoon and that sneer, but not from Shenka. If I ran from Shenka, I might just as well keep running. There is no worse sin in the projects than to be scared in front of your friend. You can refuse a dare from your enemies, but you can never refuse one from your friend.
"All right," I bl.u.s.tered, fear twisting my insides. "All right. I show you then. I show you. I dare." Late, far too late, I turned and ran from the room.
Down the stairs I raced, toward my own destruction, for so I knew it was. Powers-Powers would beat or kill at the slightest provocation. Only at the front door did I stop, stop to catch my breath, stop to let reason strive with madness. Which did I fear more, the Bookali, or my friend"s disdain?There was no question; it has ever been so. I opened the door and slid out.
The near guard turned at the sound and zeroed her rifle in on my heart. I waited, eyes clenched shut, for the sound of the shot that would end my life; but I heard only a soft, "Huh,"
and the sc.r.a.pe of a cleated boot. I opened one eye to see the guard standing in her place, feet wide apart, rifle resting once more in the crook of her arm. "Jess," she called to one of her fellows. "We have a curious one."
The rhythm of her speech was of a kind I had never heard before. Another guard turned and looked me up and down, and a smile twisted up one half of his face. He was dark, like Shenka, and thick-limbed.
"Curiouser and curiouser," he said obliquely.
"What you think, child?" the first one said to me, shifting to the lilt of the projects. Her skin was as pale as any I had ever seen, and in the shadow of her helmet shrewd eyes glittered.
My heart pounded, wondering if they were just toying with me the way Tunnel Runners would toy with children before they carried them off. At any rate, I knew I had to answer, for not to answer was to admit weakness, and to admit weakness in the projects was death. "Heavy boxes," was all I could think to say.
The woman laughed. "Heavy, yes. Reason for that. You think?"
"If you say," I replied cautiously. Two Bookali loading a sled had paused just briefly to glance in our direction. Their shirts were soaked with sweat and they were smiling, too, as though it were some great joke that the boxes were heavy. "What in them box?" I asked finally.
The woman looked furtively to left and right, then took half a step toward me. "Secrets," she said, and nodded knowingly.
Secrets, after all! Shenka"s uncle was right. I remembered then that he also said these secrets made people sick. But the Bookali didn"t look sick; they looked very fit and healthy, indeed, with biceps bulging as they stacked the heavy boxes one atop another. What kind of secrets could be held in boxes, anyway? And why should they be heavy?
Seeing that they were not going to blast me for being in the street, I edged down the steps, my back ever to the rail. I peered at the boxes from this distance, hoping for one that was torn or open so I could see what was inside. But they were well sealed, with numbers on the outside. I knew numbers because code locks had numbers, and one had to remember them to get back into the safety of a building. "Those secrets coded?" I asked in a flash of insight. The Bookali guard nodded wisely. "All coded. You know codes?"
"Just my codes," I answered, with visions of those boxes exploding if someone tried to use the wrong code to open them.
"You know numbers?" she asked.
"I know my numbers," I repeated.
"You know numbers, you can learn these codes," the guard said confidentially.
I stopped breathing. Was the Bookali offering me a chance to learn the codes for their secrets? I started to edge back up the steps. Maybe they were like the Tunnel Runners, who grabbed children that got too close and dragged them down into their lairs, there to do unspeakable things to them and make them crazy. Maybe these Bookali wanted to grab me and make me one of them.
Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the air. "Fetts!" someone barked. In a flash the Bookaliworkers inside the truck slammed its gate shut. Another worker powered the half-loaded sled inside their headquarters, and the door sealed behind it. The truck roared off down the street.
The guards covered this retreat, heading the while for their hovercycles, twitching nervously this way and that at any sound. When all the other Bookali had disappeared, the guards mounted their shining machines, keyed them to life, and flashed away around a corner. In less than a minute the street was deserted as if no Bookali had ever been there.
In the distance was the whine of other machines, of Fetts on hover-cycles or in hovercars.
My curiosity did not extend so far as to wait for their arrival, so I pelted back up the steps and into the building. Inside, eight steps pa.s.sed in four bounds as I hurled myself to the landing and leaped up to brace my arms on the windowsill.
The hovercycles came first, streaking along the broken pavement, banking around corners, darting up and down streets and alleys. They found nothing, and soon were gone in their driving pursuit of a quarry too alert, too quick for capture.
Behind them came the cars, moving slowly, hovering near (but not too near) windows; stopping now and again as a uniformed Fett jumped out and tried a lock here, a lock there.
Some buildings were open, their codes broken, but the Fetts didn"t bother to check those. Who would stay in a building that could not be locked? For others, they slapped a small box over the key panel, waited a moment, then toed the door open cautiously.
Across the street several Bookali waited within their new headquarters. In my mind I saw them: rifles trained on the door, muscles taut, fingers sweating on triggers, afraid to breathe.
But when the Fetts came to that building, they pa.s.sed it by. I felt a sudden release of tension, a relief as though I had been inside, waiting in dread to be discovered. This puzzled me. Why should I care if the Bookali were found?
Suddenly I realized that I wanted to know what those secrets were. I wanted to go inside that building across the street and see what it was that made the Fetts and Pigatzo hate these Bookali so. Trembling at my own audacity, I crept up the rest of the steps to my apartment and crawled into my bed, hiding far beneath the covers.
The Bookali did not come back the next day, or the next. The Fetts came through again, and the Pigatzo; the Pigatzo beat up two or three ganga that were hanging around and took them away in a slow-moving cart that rumbled along the broken street on wheels. They promised to be back again soon; we believed them.
Other ganga slinked around the project, muttering about making an alliance with the Tunnel Runners, which we knew was only talk. Ganga sometimes became Tunnel Runners, like Rikka"s boyfriend; and the Tunnel Runners would sometimes return a tormented victim; but no one just talked to them and came back all right. They came back dead, or crazy. So mostly the ganga melted away, waiting for things to cool down.
But the Bookali came back. Not in trucks this time, but on hover-cycles, roaring up to their headquarters across the street. They hovered there a moment, engines throbbing; then the door opened and one by one, the hovercycles glided inside. They left one guard standing outside, rifle in hand.
I had to wait till my mother went out. She and Shenka"s mother took bread crumbs and a big cloth bag and went to hunt pigeons on the roof. I was supposed to stay in the stairwell playing, but I glided quietly to the front door and slipped out.The street was empty. Children had found another place to play. I crept down the steps, casting about for watching eyes. Then with a deep breath I screwed up my courage and crossed the street.
The Bookali guard saw me coming. He watched me calmly, never twitching a muscle, just letting me come closer and closer. I stopped square in front of him and looked up into his face.
How handsome he looked to me! His leathers were scarred and his helmet scratched, but his lean face was smooth and blue-shadowed from a beard that would be jet black if it grew.
There was no smile on his lips, just a somber look in his clear blue eyes. We regarded each other wordlessly; then he reached back and keyed the door. With a gentle push he opened it for me. "Lee," he called softly to someone inside. "The amba.s.sador is here."
His voice was so sober, so calm, that no dreadful visions came into my head of what might be done to me in this place. Instead I walked slowly through that open door, mouth gaping in wonder at the sights inside.
Books. I had heard of books on the vid, seen pictures of them with their strange markings, but there were none in the projects. Never had I imagined there were so many in the world.
They were arranged on shelves throughout the room, in a riot of colors and sizes, row after row after row. I scarcely saw the young Bookali woman who approached me. "h.e.l.lo, Amba.s.sador," she greeted. "I thought it might be you."
I looked closely at her then and thought I detected in her pale face, her shrewd eyes, the Bookali who had spoken to me on the street days before. She had shed her leather jacket, so that a plain white T-shirt encased her upper torso, and without a helmet she sported a shock of curly yellow hair. But her voice had that same wise gravity as she spoke again. "Come to see those heavy secrets?" she asked.
"Na secret na more," I informed her haughtily. "Books."
She nodded. "Books."
But I could not keep my attention on her. Books towered to the ceiling: books on shelves, books on tables, books on carousels. There were a few chairs and some vid screens, no doubt, but all I saw were the books.
"So this Bookali headquarters," I said, trying to sound worldly and unimpressed when I was neither.
The woman Lee smiled. "So you call. We call it something else."
I approached the closest shelf, drawn as if by a magnet to those mysterious volumes. Dull blue, faded red, and a whole row with identical gold and black spines. I eyed them carefully, never thinking to reach out and touch one. Lee followed me at a respectful distance, waiting until I turned to her.
"What these book for?" I asked.
"Full of secrets," she replied.
"What secrets?"
"What book?"
Turning around, I pointed to a tall one, mustard yellow with faded green markings. "This one. What secret?"
She reached out, and with a practiced index finger extracted it from the shelf. "Ah, this one."
She opened it and looked at the inside. "Stars," she replied. "This one has secrets about stars.""Like what?"
She turned pages slowly. I kept waiting for an explosion because I hadn"t seen her key the book, and she had told me before that they were coded. But page after page slid past her fingers and she remained whole. "It says," she said finally, "that the sun is really a star."
"Go na!" I scoffed. "Sun too big to be star."
"Stars are big," she replied. "Just far away. Sun is small star, just close-like building that"s close look big, but far look small."
"You lie," I challenged, forgetting to whom I spoke.
"Na," she said gravely. "Book say." And she held the book so I could see the markings that were concealed inside. Her finger traced along a line of them: " "The sun is a relatively small star." "
"I na hear it say," I said suspiciously.
"In code," she replied. "Have to know code."
With sudden insight I realized that the markings in the books were somehow like numbers: when you grouped them together in the right sequence, they made things happen, like opening doors or firing defenses or spitting out food. But unlike number codes, these codes made words happen-words that you couldn"t hear as on a vid, but heard inside your head like imagination. I jumped, startled at the revelation. "You all right, Amba.s.sador?" Lee asked.
"Trabina," I told her. "I na "ba.s.sador. What that book say?" I pointed to a blue one.
Lee laid the first book aside and extracted the blue one. "This one is about gravity," she said. "That"s what keeps us on the ground, instead of floating up into the air."
My brow creased and a tight little knot started in my stomach. Why didn"t we float? It had never before occurred to me to wonder. What would it be like to float in the air? To fly up to the roof of my building, instead of climbing the stairs? "It say how bird fly?" I wanted to know.
"Not this book, I don"t think," Lee said as she flipped through the pages. "But some book will. Shall I find you one?"
"You know all these book?" I demanded. She laughed. "Not what in. Just how to find."
The little knot in my stomach had grown wriggly fingers, but I ignored it. "How you learn code all these book?"
"I was taught," she told me. "When I was your age." Then she squatted down and looked right into my eyes. "I can teach you, Amba.s.sador."
"Trabina!" I said sharply, not liking the way my stomach was twisting. "I Trabina!"
"Amba.s.sador Trabina," she agreed.
I thought of Crazy Rashalla and Ratface Tony, and I wondered what I was being called.
"What a "ba.s.sador?" I asked warily.
"Amba.s.sador is first," Lee replied. "First to cross the street. First to come in. First to learn Bookali secrets."
"Learn secrets?" My stomach cramped sharply and I realized at last what I had done. "Na secrets. Na want to be sick. Na want to be crazy." I spun around and headed for the door.
"Na crazy," Lee called after me. "Only little secrets make crazy. Only half secrets. Books have "most all secrets. Books tell you everything."
"Na, na!" I shouted, tugging at the door handle, terrified by a Power that knew everything.
"Na want Bookali secrets! Na want to be crazy!"But it was too late. Even the few secrets I had learned made me sick, left me cowering under the blankets in my room. I slept fitfully, seeing stars as big as suns, seeing a world gone black because the sun was only as big as a star. In my dreams I floated off the ground, up over the projects, leaving everything I knew behind. When I wouldn"t get up for lunch, my mother fretted over me, asked what I ate, was I rat-bit. I couldn"t tell her I ate a secret, and was bitten by a book.
And then the craziness came, the craziness Shenka had guessed at: I had to go back. It was the same kind of craziness that people got who tried to escape from the Tunnel Runners: they got sick, and then they had to go back, had to have what it was the Tunnel Runners gave them that made them sick in the first place.
Finally, late in the afternoon, I slipped out of my apartment and stole down the stairs.
Shenka was playing on the landing two floors down, the one from which we had watched the Bookali trucks. It seemed long ago. "Trabina, you still sick?" she asked as I approached.
"Na," I lied. The questions were eating at my insides; I could feel them. "Na sick na more." I started to go past her.