In a red box on the gray Moon, Erinnia Bestshot stood confused in Time.
This was U.S. Grant's office now.
Erinnia turned her head, looking for it. And as it crossed to her left eye it flickered like a candle on the mantle. She tilted her head to look at it with her right eye. It warbled again. She gave it her left eye again and it winked at her.
She strode up to it, her pink and black foil suit munched illegally in this frigate like room of rubbing wood and dinging brass.
But this was a turnstile of pewter. A picture frame. Inlaid was a photo of three boys and a girl. That was what her left eye saw. Her right eye saw three girls. These were U.S. Grant's children. But Erinnia knew for fact that Grant had had all girl children and one of them died as an infant.
So Erinnia sidestepped right.
She's been sunk in the rain for three hours now. It's nineteen-fifty nine in Freetown. All that can be told from the proud steeple of the Mammantus rocket she could see, tall and beckoning, over the clean rooflines.
Africa's first rocket. That would not jump clear, so trip, and fall. Flop with its guts full of cloud control device onto a beach of the southernmost Nicobar island.
Erinnia knew them as school buses. The Freetown rocket was a deadringer to hers. Brick orange steeple and white body all. Mammantus rockets brought all the children of Asia together to the Kiev schools.
Erinnia would leave her village (a mudslide waiting to happen) in the morning, walk to the launch pad a kilometer away and land in the center of the Kiev Educational Workshops twenty-five minutes later.
Two mere hours. And Erinnia was still hunting. Her face was a slow searchlight. Oh! Where is it! Is it in the clouds? The light of the day?
I'll just guess. Sidestep to one or the other.
She surrendered to the rain. Her blackening eyes dragging the anchor of desperation. And she saw the minute chime.
The soggy flag. Modest and skimpy. It was the flag of the Mali Confederacy in the left eye. The double-starred Liberian flag in her right.
It would have been six months ago from right now when Sierra Leone had voted to join with Liberia rather than the Confederacy.
And so the Great Romance burst into the Civil Sorrow when President Kan Kanush flew off in his plane to ask why his love had refused him for Liberia's mechanicals and chemicals.
Chancellor Merrill Ungladauku never gave her answer why. Couldn't after her Heart fell into the jungle. And was never found.
Erinnia's eyes narrowed to crosshairs and her lips became a wing.
She sidestepped to the right again.
Her back was up against a red wall of tall granite tiles. All the other walls of this ballroom were glass. As was the field of the ceiling. The Milky Way glowed like a hot locomotive above her head.
All the way to the other end of the room, almost against the glass wall where the pyroclastic death of the moonland sieged, a podium that looked like a maypop bloom had pushed through the floor.
It was ceramic white wetted lavender where the Codename resin was going to leak.
Unlovely around the edges were fifty-one levers. And waist deep in this tiny pasture were the doctors Ren Tindow and Joq Tindow.
Ren is silver, from his wavy mohawk, to his visor eye shades, to his grumpy jaw.
Joq is strawberry, on the top of his blockish skull to nowhere else.
It was Joq who saw Erinnia.
Erinnia saluted toward them with her chrome gun.
Joq pushed his hand against Ren and moved his mouth.
Ren ended a lever push and turned toward Erinnia.
Ren is an exclamation point, Joq is a question mark.
“I had contracts!” Ren blocked.
Erinnia pulled against the old trigger. Hundreds of silver meteors burnt out of the wide muzzle, iced across the room into Ren's face.
His knees locked him upright for ten seconds after his head was gone.
She gave Joq the barrel. “Where did you come from?”
“I'm his son.”
“When did that happen?”
And when the hissing of a hundred rattlesnakes ceased Joq had been tunneled through sternum, out spine. He didn't stand like his dad did and so fell to the floor like a dropped tuna.
She ran low like a fox. Her ballerina strides leap. Her soles hated the ground. Her arms boxed as they pumped.
Her race sounded small as futility and glowered with loneliness. It was an illusion of worth. And success was lint.
Erinnia's black hair moved like a cobra as she scuffed up to the bridge of levers.
She filled up the holster with her gun and tore out some line from her dangling screwdriver.
Screws sleeted onto the floor and levers lay like scythed millet.
Eight levers down she pulled one out that had a nodule of Codename resin grown at its joint. Golden when thin, shitish in volume, so it was here, brown packeted together in this glass bulb but thinning into sunshine as it transuded in a tubing that moved like frozen plastic.
She pushed down the philips head and sprang the knife.
Erinnia gouged and sawed the blade into the tiny conduit. She wasted sweat and breath. But it all became money when she whittled enough away for the resin to drizzle onto the floor.
Her attention went in a circle, and all fifty-one levers she wilted to the floor. Three crystaline capillaries she hemorrhaged.
Before twelve hours the origami would be dead. It would never unfold, but no further creasings or pleats in time would be allowed. It would be ironed out by all the rest of us rolling out over it.
Erinnia squirreled herself up onto this bleeding flower, stood and took three swishing steps over the carcasses and clapped her foot down upon the button at the center. A blue button with a six sparking symbol of gold.
The sound of a growl and a chain in bondage, starting up Hell.
The floor flooded up over her head and she sank to the bottom of a cave. She saw herself in the stainless steel doors. She crossed the room to herself, feeling a martyrdom in her expanding image.
Her finger bowed against the soft button that brightened awake.
The doors parted for her with a sound of brushing velvet. She stepped into the middle and spun on her feet.
The can closed together and she was faced with ecstatic copy of herself, a luminus saint pinned against black. Her only shelter, her pearly nimbus.
He bones and blood lifted, her body grew out an extra centimeter as the floor charged away from the bottom of her feet.
Then the brakes squeezed and she compacted into her dirty shortness as she was placed back onto gravity's shoulder.
She saw herself split when the doors opened and she felt herself crack when she saw the blank city.
For up and away on the high wall of the cavern was the spray blast mark of a burst water main. It had broke like a dry bone when the Moon quaked, trying to shake off the creepy gum of time squalls. Once the aquaduct broke the city instantly became a mummy.
The smell and shine of human skin would have brought in Moonbabies from all over the city, swarming her, their octagon carapace molded with smiling cherub faces. Four long icepick-like legs tapping and jabbing at the creamy rock but always delicate and thoughtful when they touch being to being.
Erinnia began walking through the vortex of the great olivine city, smelling the thickened air (leavening human lungs, anemicizing Moonbaby bloodwater.)
The feminine jungle gym city was eviscerated. The porthole windows should have been eclipsing with movement as the Moonbabies grafted, watered, split and munched their polyp swarms inside these ornate teats.
She should have been hearing the sound of wood blocks polishing against each other as Moonbabies called in each other for a pleasurable triplet copulation.
Instead she heard the occasional rubbery fart ending with a steamy release. Air conditioners. And it came from over there. Marooned on the open ground, a big black chrome boil.
Erinnia slashed toward it; searched along its base looking for the tiny sole crease, found it and pulled up, the cellophane zip louder than anything ever heard down in this place.
She held the door open for herself. So she took a wide step forward and let the door go.
The door made a content crinkling as it wilted close, and Erinnia felt her body wilt with it. She felt an unlived day depart from her life.
The outside of this tent was a dense dome of obsidian. On the inside it is unwalled and roofless. The white sunlight, pounding down into the glassed over canyon, blinds in here as any open.
All that tells of the tent is the black ring on the ground. A black ring like the sharp metal black ring she wears on her thumb. The sharp metal black ring was the ocular ring of the robot known as Kokoschka. And it's been on her thumb ever since she ripped a part of its face off in the space city of Nicollette.
Opposite of the door and sitting up just outside of the ring were the thin pagoda shaped air conditioners blubbering out an atmosphere.
Inside of the ring were two things. And they were both thirty year old grand pianos, fitted to each other if for a duet.
Erinnia lifted the broad top of one and found the tools of extraction. Saws and pliers and picks and scissors. She lowered it slowly and closed it softly, knowing what would be in the next piano. But the case had to be made.
She made her stomach iron and she clenched her teeth.
She flipped open the other Baldwin, and, yes, they were there. The Ginther species. Moonbaby ancestors from one hundred and twenty years ago. Short and chunky. Toddlers made from gray-green clay.
These two lay like pices to each other. In their elbows and knees were slices into raw slate gray flesh down to gold bones.
Erinnia bashed the lid down and leaned on it, trying to break her fingers.
Those damning Baptists! That terminal religion lying in the Yucatan groves. The final faith basking in the Saint Elmo's fire wraithing off the heads and hands of parasitic men with Ginther joint gel grafted onto their livers.
While the Tindows were sidewinding her into moats of history, they were whaling the timeline for ancestral ambergris.
She stiffened, walked out to the middle of the city, and broadcast the stare to the sky, and felt herself turn into a cut piece of mahogany.
Only her legs could move this tiki, and they recollected her back up and out of the Moon and out through the red box that told time as a single, straight, white corridor now.
She became malleable again in the airlock. She unzipped her collar and unrolled her helmet, pulled it over her head, listened to it click then crinkle at it expanded taut with air.
Bubbleheaded Erinnia left the red box toward her silver rocket. She stopped part of the way, sat hard on a rock, and wept quietly as only the Moon could.