Роджер Желязны - Warriors of Blood and Dream

God Damn . He bent to pick it up, and never even felt the wiry arm slither around his neck.

Lightning Elk carefully lowered Cash to the ground. With that nerve strangle, the fat man would be unconscious for about three minutes, and would wake up intact save for the mother of all headaches. He might not even realize what had happened.

Elk slipped Cash's key ring off the guard's web belt, and slid over to a side door, testing keys until he found one that fit. He opened it a crack, stuck a branch in to keep the lock from springing shut, and reattached the keys to Cash's belt.

As an afterthought, he picked up the ten-dollar bill, and slipped it back in his pocket. Strange. He had intended to let the man have it, but after looking at him, he just couldn't do it. Maybe it was judgmental, but for some reason the guy just looked like an asshole.

David flew.

Not as a bird flies, or as a balloon flies, but in the manner that a small dreaming boy flies; with motions vaguely reminiscent of running, with arms and legs flailing at the clouds. His dreaming eyes were wide with wonder.

Los Angeles was far beneath him. He could see his old neighborhood. There was the schoolyard where he had played since he was six, when his father stopped ...

Father ... ?

He flew down and down, through the houses, then touched ground without remembering the last few feet of flight.

The puzzlement fading after a moment or two. Someone sat on the front porch of his old house, a tall, thin, dark man he recognized. He began to run, yelling "Father—"

"We're in REM sleep," Trias said. The line bleeped across the video screen. Her small blue eyes were chips of ice. "Do you think he's all right?" Brenda asked.

Trias rubbed her eyes and leaned back into her chair. "There's no evidence of abuse, if that's what you mean. Maybe we overreacted. But something just told me to get David the hell out of there. It was a judgment call."

Brenda brushed David's forehead with her fingertips. "I just want my boy back."

"Look," Trias said. "He's smiling."

"Daddy?" David said.

His father sat dressed in jeans and a Natalie Cole Live ! T-shirt, epoxying a tail fin onto a red-and-white plastic model rocket. David recognized it—it was called an Egg-Lofter. He remembered constructing one with his father, remembered twisting in the solid fuel engine, and twisting the two little wires down at the bottom. Then he and his dad went down to the schoolyard and shot that puppy off. At ignition, it accelerated too quickly for the eyes to follow, carrying its precious cargo into the sky. At zenith it popped , and a red-and-white parachute flared open. David and his dad watched it float safely to the ground. He felt his father's heavy arm across his shoulder, and knew that everything was well.

"It's been a while, David," his father said. And smiled. It seemed to David that his father's teeth were whiter and larger than he remembered them.

Am

"I thought that maybe we'd go out and fire a couple. What do you say?"

"I'd love it," David said, and felt as if he must be dreaming.

Am I

And the moment he thought it, he must have blinked, or fallen asleep and Dad must have bundled him off in the Impala. They were in the desert now. The mountains wavered in the heat, and the salt flats were hard and crisp beneath his feet. The Chevy looked bright, as bright as his father's teeth. And eyes.

They set up the Egg-Lofter. Dad took one of the igniters, and pushed it into the bottom of the motor tube, bent the wires back, and fastened the igniter clips.

"It's been a long time, eh, Tiger?" Dad said. "How long has it been since Mom took you out and fired a few with you?"

David smiled uncomfortably. "Well, she doesn't." He carefully thrust igniters into another motor.

"She's pretty busy isn't she, David?" Dad's teem were huge, his smile so large that it looked like the smile on that guy the Joker, the one that Batman was almost always fighting, the one who had fallen in the vat of chemicals, and came out as a pasty-faced leering caricature of a human being. The one who looked like a clown, but the only jokes that he told or thought or laughed at were jokes about death and mutilation.

It was that face he saw, for just a moment.

"She's always too busy, isn't she, Davie-boy?" his father said, and reached out a hand for him. The arm was long and muscular, exactly like the brown arm David remembered, backed by the burning black eyes in his father's brown face. And all by itself, the rocket leapt off of the scaffold and into the sky, trailing smoke, and—

Am I dreaming —

Dad took him by the neck. They peered up into the sky together. The clouds burst into flame as the Egg-Lofter exploded. Chicken feathers and chunks of burnt fowl and live flaming birds fell screaming from the air. His father's face was very close to him now.

"You are powerful, David. We are powerful. We don't need your mother anymore. She never loved me, anyway—you know that. That means she can't love the male part of you . You and I don't need anything but each other. We don't need that old fool Elk, that's for sure. There isn't any need to fight—"

The teeth were so large, and so white and so near—

Am I dreaming Now ?

"His skin temperature is 98.4," Trias said. There was just a hint of nervousness in her voice. "His blood pressure has risen slightly. His heartbeat has accelerated." She sipped at her coffee. "I would say that he's just entered a nightmare."

Dad's hand had grown into something very like a claw. It bit deeply into his shoulder. David spun, freeing his collar from the grip, tearing and spinning loose just as the head came down. The head was a human head on the body of a spider, grinning and leering and chomping, teeth clicking shut just an inch from David's throat.

"You're not my father," David yelled.

"But I am ," it whispered sweetly. "I am what your father is now . You can join him." The thing made another absurdly delicate step forward, and David suddenly remembered that this was his dream—

A tomahawk appeared in his hand.

He swung it at a black, jointed leg. Green glop spilled out of the wound. The creature plunged down onto one knee. David raised the tomahawk and struck again and the thing howled—

"Curious," Trias said. "We've got a spike here."

Brenda came close, looked over Trias's shoulder at the video encephalograph. "What does that mean?"

"Not certain. He is undergoing an emotional stress of some kind...."

"Are you certain that that isn't the machine?" she asked. "It seems to be humming a little more than usual."

Trias looked at her in surprise, as if she had just noticed that. "That's not the machine," she said uncertainly. "That's David ."

The spider disappeared. David stood in a hall which receded as far as his eye could see. Candles flickered in ornate holders on the walls, and the walls were covered with precious paintings. Complex piping tones echoed down at the far end.

The music soured as he approached a heavy wooden door. Light gushed from beneath it in waves of smoke. He pushed it open, and entered a maze of computers and drives, printers and monitors, and at the center, surrounded by a massive keyboard, labored Brenda. Her face was suffused with a kind of ecstatic intensity. He had seen it far too often. As her fingers stroked the keys, the piping flowed out, each note rising in the air like a crystal bubble. She worked the keyboard like a master pianist. The closer he came, the more intensely she bore down, stroking, and pounding. Sheets of paper flew out of the printers.

"Mom?" he said. "Mom?"

She worked on.