Summerland (46 page)

It would have been very nice, in other words, if Thor could have found a way to leap right into the guy's living room. Maybe someday he would develop that kind of control over his talent. For now, however, they would have to settle for a spot down at the very bottom of Rodrigo Buendía's street. It was a long street that wound its way up to the very top of the hill out of which, a few years earlier, all of Villa Borghese had been carved. Buendía lived, Thor declared, in the house at the top of the hill. This time Ethan didn't ask him how he knew. They started walking up Via Vespasiana. The day was very warm. The succulent plants in the landscaping strip along the sidewalk shimmered in the heat, as did the sidewalk itself. There was absolutely no one in sight. Not even in the loneliest hollow of the Raucous Mountains had they encountered such silence, such emptiness. Only a distant lawnmower whine, and the nearby
chiff-chiff-chiff
of a lawn sprinkler.

When they came to the corner of Via Vespasiana and Via Aureliana, they were spotted by an MSO, sitting in his patrol car in front of 441 Via Aureliana. The MSO radioed to Central Unit to report what he had seen. Central Unit duly logged the report: three children had been observed walking up the street, at 14:13 hours, on Via Vespasiana.

"This place is strange," Jennifer T. said.

Considering where they had just spent most of the last month, Ethan thought, this was saying quite a lot. But he agreed.

"It's so quiet," Ethan said. "I can hear it when I swallow."

They passed a great big beautiful white house with a red tile roof and a green, green lawn. After so long amid the shifting hues of earth and leaf and sky in the Summerlands, the big white house looked so clean and bright to Ethan, its colors so bold, that it might have been built of Lego bricks.

"Now you got
me
hearing it when I swallow," said Thor.

"Yeah," Jennifer T. said. "Thanks a lot."

"Look," Ethan said. He pointed to the house with the Lego-red, clay-tile roof. One of its upstairs rooms had a little Juliet balcony, with a pretty wrought-iron rail. On this balcony there stood a child, a girl, of about their age. She was watching them walk up the street, just standing there, holding on to the wrought-iron rail. There was no expression on her face that Ethan could see. "There's a kid."

They stopped. They had not seen another child, a little reuben, in weeks. Children were as scarce in the Lost Camps as they had been among the ferishers, and those few they
had
seen were like the children in old photographs, silent and rustic and ghostly, dressed in tan britches and dust-colored frocks. This girl had on a sweatshirt as pink as a spoonful of antacid.

"Hi," Jennifer T. said, with an uncertain little wave.

"Hi," said the girl on the balcony.

The MSO, who had been trailing them silently in his patrol car from an average distance of three driveways away, informed Central Unit that the children he had reported at 14:13 now seemed to have become engaged in conversation. This was duly noted in the record at Central Unit.

"Where are you going?" said the girl on the balcony.

Ethan started to tell her, but Jennifer T. stepped on his foot.

"For a walk," said Jennifer T.

The girl wrinkled her nose. "Huh," she said.

Ethan could not tell if the idea of going for a walk struck her as interesting, tiresome, or merely bizarre. After a moment she turned and went back into the house. They kept walking, and the MSO kept tailing them. When the MSO realized that they were walking up to Rodrigo Buendía's house, he informed Central Unit, who agreed that the MSO was now confronted with a CT or Credible Threat. Central Unit authorized interdiction. The MSO got out of his silvery-gray patrol vehicle. He approached the children, a hand reaching for a fearsome-looking electrical-shock pistol that he carried on his hip.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, you kids."

They turned around. Then the girl and the smaller of the two boys looked at the bigger one, and they joined hands, and ran up the driveway of Rodrigo Buendía's house. They ran—the word that came to the MSO's mind was
scampered
—straight through the garage door, which must, after all, have been open, even though the MSO felt certain, and indicated in his subsequent report, that at the time the children approached it, it had definitely seemed to be closed.

THERE WERE TWO CARS IN THE GARAGE—A LARGE BMW SEDAN
and a Land Rover, with space for two more—but it looked as if the house was abandoned. They ran through a series of large, high white rooms with bare wood floors and no furniture. Ethan could hear the crackle of the policeman's radio from outside the house, harsh and angry-sounding. His vague idea of their throwing themselves on the mercy of the great Buendía faded with the emptiness of the house; they were simple trespassers, now. They would be arrested, and imprisoned. But then they fell into the kitchen, a great expanse of white cabinetry and steel appliances, in the midst of which there lay a heap of empty yellow cans of black beans. The cans tumbled over the side of a steel counter and down onto the floor. They were crusted with black ooze and there was something almost vandalistic about the mess they made. The labels were in Spanish:
FRIJOLES NEGROS
. On the stove there was a huge black pot, like a cauldron in a witch's kitchen, and when Ethan looked inside it he saw clinging to its side a brownish skin, with here and there a pristine grain of rice.

"
He's here
," he whispered.

"I know he's here," Thor replied, in his ordinary voice. Was it Ethan's imagination, or was there a trace of TW03 flatness to his tone? "Otherwise I wouldn't have—"

The doorbell rang, a long time, playing a series of churchy tones like a carillon. They froze, looking at each other. Then Jennifer T. crept over to a tall, narrow door by the refrigerator, and opened it. It was a broom closet, equipped with mops and dustpans. There was just enough room for one of them. Jennifer T. motioned for Ethan to climb in. He shook his head.

"
You
," he whispered. "
If they get us, at least you
—"

"They are not going to get us," said Thor. "We can just scamper out."

The doorbell rang again. Then the policeman began to knock, firmly and loud, and for a long time, as if somehow he knew that his persistence would be rewarded. At last they heard, somewhere off in the far reaches of the house, the sound of a man's voice, deep and grumbling. Buendía. The floors resounded with a thunderous tread, a big man pounding down a flight of steps to the front door. He was talking, either to the policeman or to himself, in Spanish. Whatever he was saying, it did not sound particularly kind.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Buendía," the policeman began, but after that his voice fell, and they couldn't catch what he was saying, nor any of Rodrigo Buendía's muttered replies. It did not sound, however, as if he was particularly interested in what the policeman had to tell him. Ethan crept toward the kitchen door, so that he could hear better—they were in the house of Rodrigo Buendía! that voice, muttering and thick, was the voice of the great Buendía!—and as he did so, his foot kicked one of the cans of beans. He winced, and whipped around to find his friends scowling at him for the idiot he was. The voices by the door fell silent, and then there they were, the strange police officer in his tight black coverall, and Buendía,
El Gran Oso
, the Big Bear, tall, dark and shambling, with the tiniest white terry-cloth bathrobe yanked carelessly around him. His hair was all mashed on one side, and under the robe he wore only a pair of tight blue underpants and one sock. But he was glaring right at Ethan, over the top of the policeman's head, and he looked, almost in spite of himself, very much awake.

Ethan knew that he had to say something, that instant, and that what he said had to be a kind of grammer, a series of words that were the right words, the only words, to dissolve the bonds of the ordinary world that were about to be tied tightly around them.

"Chiron Brown sent us," he said, ignoring the policeman entirely, aiming his desperate little grammer directly at the ears, at the big, strong, heroical heart of Rodrigo Buendía.

Buendía, however, seemed not to have heard the magic words. He blinked once, slowly, and then pursed his lips, and looked down at the policeman.

"Get them out of here," he said.

THE POLICEMAN, OR MSO, AS THEY HEARD HIM REFER TO HIMSELF
in his communications with Central Unit, put them into the back of his patrol car and drove them downtown. Ethan looked over at Thor, every so often, but Thor just shook his head. At the Municipal Security building, a kind of Lego fortress in a sun-splashed plaza with a fountain, they gave their names to a pleasant woman wearing a headset telephone. Then their MSO led them into a small room, silent, carpeted, furnished with toys that were much too young for them. There were mirrors on the walls that Ethan suspected must be one-way. No doubt the whole place was bugged. They sat down in three chairs of molded black plastic, side by side. They kicked their feet. A clock on the wall hummed, and occasionally clicked as its minute hand lurched forward. Ethan looked at his watch. It was the Top of the Eighth Inning. Ordinarily he would have informed his friends of this terrible fact, but they were already upset enough.

"'Chiron Brown sent us,'" Jennifer T. said, shaking her head. "Way to go, Feld."

"Well, he did," Ethan said. "I thought he knew Buendía. It sounded like he did."

"He's from
Cuba
," Jennifer T. said. "How could Mr. Brown have scouted him there?"

"Chiron Brown's territory is very big," Thor said flatly. "And I think he's known them all."

Ethan looked over at him, on the other side of Jennifer T., staring down at a red plastic fire truck on the ground.

"Can I ask you a question?" Ethan said. "Who are you, right now, Thor?"

Thor looked thoughtful. He seemed to know just what Ethan had meant by his question: Was he still Thor, the ferisher changeling with the blood and body of a reuben, or had he somehow reverted, now, to TW03, the boy who believed himself to be an android who was trying desperately to be a boy?

"I may never know the answer to that question," he said at last. He looked pretty sad as he said it, and for a second—just for a second—Ethan thought he might be about to cry.

"Let me ask you another question," Jennifer T. said gently. "Can you get us out of here?"

"Sure," Thor said. "I couldn't do it the car because—well, it's hard to explain. I could scamper
with
a moving car, but not
out
of one. It has to do with momentum, I think." He knelt down beside the fire truck and pushed it with one hand. "See, we'd be moving this way, but I would be trying to scamper us
away
from the car." He grabbed one of the plastic fire fighters and pulled it to one side. "But our bodies would still be going
forward
, because of the car." He tossed the little firefighter over his shoulder and it smacked against a wall. "I wouldn't be able to control our momentum. And I really didn't think we wanted that police guy scampering
with
us."

He stood up, and walked over to one corner of the room. He took a deep breath. Ethan went over and turned out the lights, in case anyone was watching from the other side of the mirrored glass.

"Okay, then," he said. "Back to Old Cat Landing. We'll have to tell them—"

"No," Jennifer T. said. "Not to Old Cat Landing. Back to Burger Village or whatever it was called."

"But he—"

"I don't care what he said, Feld," said Jennifer T. "I'm not going back without him."

And that, as was always the case when Jennifer T. had made up her mind, put an end to the discussion.

THEY FOUND HIM IN BED, STILL WEARING ONLY BLUE SKIVVIES AND
a sock, snoring with all the ferocity that his nickname would have led you to expect. He was on his back, one arm cradled under his head, the other fallen over the side of the mattress and clutching the extinct remains of a fat cigar. The room stank of cigar, and cold beans, and unwashed large ballplayer. They knew from their search of the house that this was the only one of its seventeen rooms, aside from the kitchen, that showed signs of human habitation. In addition to the bed there was a nightstand, a dresser topped with scattered coins and unwrapped cigars, and an enormous television with a flat screen. The television was tuned to the Fauna Channel, with the sound off. On the screen a big-eyed little furry creature with dexterous paws helped himself to a nice sticky pawful of tree gum.