James Hogan - Entoverse

“That way!” the one who was near Duncan shouted, pointing with a raised arm at a stairway on the far side of the intersection, leading up to a system of overlooking galleries and walkways. “Head for stairs…“ He vanished in a swirl of people, and the rest of his words were drowned in a roar of voices.

Somebody backed into Hunt and trod on his instep, painfully, at the same time swinging an arm that caught Hunt across the mouth. Hunt shoved him away. The man collided with another, and they both went down. Then a knot of people pushing from the other direction sent Hunt sprawling over both of them.

At that moment, a group with green-crescent banners appeared on one of the levels above and showered leaflets on the marching Purples, and pandemonium broke out. As Hunt was trying to regain his feet, everyone around him began rushing forward as if impelled by a common instinct. He rose onto one knee and started to straighten up, whereupon a fat woman in a red-and-black jumpsuit careened into him and knocked him down again. She stumbled and fell heavily on her knees alongside him, shrilly exclaiming something that he didn’t understand. He tried again to rise, but she was clawing at his collar, using him as a prop to pull herself up.

“Get off, stupid cow!” Hunt shouted, and was answered with a stream of what sounded like alien obscenities. He fought his way to his feet and looked about desperately, but the others had disappeared. Swearing to himself, he plunged into the turmoil, setting his sights on the stairway that the Jevlenese had indicated. But before he was a third of the way there, the marching tide flowed around him and carried him with it toward one of the exits from the intersection. A chanting man in a purple hood tried to link arms with him.

“Let go of me, you daft sod,” Hunt snarled, wrenching himself away.

Another arm grasped his from the other side. Hunt tried to pull away, but the grip remained firm and insistent. “I do believe I hear another voice from back home,” a voice yelled in his ear. It sounded American. Hunt jerked his head around and found himself staring at a ruddy, snub-nosed face with a short, hoary beard, eyes that glittered like light gray ice, and a mouth that couldn’t suppress a mirthful twitch, even in the circumstances. The face was topped by a panama hat sporting an outrageous yellow band with red and white polka dots. Hunt could feel himself being urged along in the direction of the flow.

“Sorry,” Hunt yelled back. “I’m not going on any Batman rallies today.”

“Neither am I. I’m going home. But you won’t get anyplace upstream in this. Have to ride with it until we can jump out.”

“Where?”

“Just stick close.”

They were swept along with the marchers for about half a block, in the course of which the stranger maneuvered them outward toward one side of the flow. Then, as they came abreast of the entrance to a narrow passageway leading off between a shuttered shop front and the base of a pillar, he yanked at Hunt’s arm and nodded. “There!”

They detached themselves from the human river like hoboes jumping from a slowing boxcar and followed the passage to an iron stairway leading up. It brought them to an elevated pedestrian way where people were watching the confusion below. But at least it felt half way back to sanity. Hunt and the stranger stopped for a moment.

“Who the hell are you?” Hunt asked when he had regained his breath.

The glittering gray eyes looked back at him with an amusement that seemed friendly. “English, eh? Well, most people who like me call me Murray. The others usually think up something else.” He jerked his head to indicate the Jevlenese around them. “But let’s leave the formalities till later and get away from all the crazies first.”

Murray led the way through a warren of passages and arcades, up stairs and escalators, across footbridges. Within minutes Hunt had lost any idea of the way back to the intersection. It was like being inside an ocean liner, a supermall, and a Shanghai street market all rolled into one and swelled to a scale that would have encompassed New York’s avenues and Tokyo’s railroad system. Even though there were many shuttered shop fronts and vacated apartments, people were everywhere, though how much of the bustle and activity was normal, Hunt had no way of knowing.

The typical Jevlenese Hunt saw were not exactly like any of the Terran races, Hunt observed. They were orangy in hue, with hair that varied from copper to black. Their faces were wide and flat, their eyes rounded, the skin of many of them speckled or streaked with brownish blotches, and they wore every form of garb imaginable. They tended to be taller than the average Terran, but flabby-probably from spending too much of their existence inertly coupled into JEVEX, Hunt guessed. But there were enough who were shorter, darker, lighter, or pinker to make Hunt feel at least not obviously alien, even if something of an oddity.

Everything had happened too quickly and unexpectedly for Hunt to be in any state of mind to form a coherent picture of what was going on around him. He registered only disconnected impressions that came and went. Some were of people who seemed grandly attired and ornamented, strutting self-importantly, sometimes with retinues of attendants; others were of dirty and shabby individuals, panhandling from passersby. At one place they passed, which seemed to be a restaurant, a small honor guard of staff waited at the door to greet a party from a chauffeured automobile; a few yards farther on, a loudly protesting figure was tossed bodily from the back door of another place. In neither case did anyone else take much notice.

They came to a dingy, not-very-clean-smelling passage between a bar and some closed-down premises, and entered one of several doorways. Inside, a vestibule with a brave stand of exhausted flowers in a long tub opened through to a hall with several doors of various colors, all scratched and battered. One, larger than the rest, looked as if it might be an elevator, but Murray ignored it and, tossing back a terse “Busted” over his shoulder and making a throwing-away motion of his hand, led the way past it to a stairwell at the rear.

On the first landing, they had to step over a snoring body, drunk or under some other influence. A door on the next was open, with a pair of tots playing with toys on the floor outside. They greeted Murray with smiles. He ruffled their hair as he passed, muttering a few words in Jevlenese. From inside, their mother looked out blankly, saying nothing, while from behind a door opposite came strange, atonal music with a heavy rhythm, punctuated by two voices shouting and shrieking at what sounded like the borderline of murder. “Don’t worry about it,” Murray grunted, seemingly reading Hunt’s mind. “It won’t come to that. Jevs never do anything right.”

Two levels farther up, they stopped in front of a purple door with a white surround. Murray said something to it, and a female voice answered from nowhere identifiable. The door slid aside, and Murray ushered Hunt through, just as a woman came out of one of the rooms to meet them. She had a clear, dusky complexion, cherry-colored hair, and was wearing a skintight orange top with, glittery mauve, calf-length pants. By what seemed to be the Jevlenese norm, she was quite trim and shapely-in fact, her figure wasn’t at all bad by most Terran standards, either. Her voice had a bright up-and-down lilt as she chattered more Jevlenese at Murray, who replied in a series of short utterances and grunts.

“This is Nixie,” Murray said when he could get a word in. “All that was the Jev way of saying hi. They talk too much. Nixie, meet a new friend of ours…“ He cocked an eyebrow inquiringly.

“Vic’ll do fine,” Hunt said. Murray said something to Nixie in which Hunt caught the syllable “Vic.”