Chapter 36

  Jimothy

  Skywater City could not be described with a single word. Marvelous was a good one, because it was full of marvels, but that didn’t indicate how large and varied it was. Spectacular was also good because it was full of spectacles, but that didn’t tell about how it was also just a regular place where people lived and worked and slept like normal. Fascinating was good, except that for Jim almost anything could be fascinating in the right light. Skywater city was bright and dark, beautiful and mysterious, chaotic and loud and colorful.

  He got swept away in the experience, just as he had before. He forgot all about meeting his friends. Instead, he watched a creature made of leaves and flowers, taller than Jim though it crouched low to the pavement, opening a door repeatedly for anyone that dropped a few coins into a bucket. The door opened into a different place each time. Then he saw a little gnomish creature with hat after hat stacked up on top of its head. All kinds of hats, piled four or five feet high! And they never fell, though the little creature danced nimbly through the throng. Then Jimothy saw a group of translucent whale-like creatures drifting over the rooftops. It looked like they carried something inside them, some kind of machinery, but Jimothy couldn’t get a good look. Then he found a market and gaped at the strange merchandise and the stranger merchants: a scary two-dimensional cloth-wrapped figure selling jars of colorful smoke; a floating mass of glowing blue wires crackling with electricity, apparently selling pieces of itself; a greenish cylindrical creature with rows of spoke-like limbs selling something that looked like regular chalk. The chalk tempted, but realized anew that he had no money. Maybe they would trade? What did he have to trade?

  Jimothy reached the conclusion that maybe all he had to trade was the ability to color things. After all, he’d been making money doing that back on Earth. He was considering how he might go about this when he saw a creature that looked just like Niri. Those same silver eyes, golden jaw, traceries of lines over the body. But it was bigger, and the lines were darker, and it looked intimidating. In a moment, the creature was gone, absorbed back into the masses from which it had so briefly emerged.

  Jimothy made a feeble attempt to push his way through the crowd to find that creature, but it was no good. Up to this point, he had been edging along the sides of the streets where no one shoved him and he got in nobody’s way. As soon as he entered the jostling mass of strange creatures in the market, he lost his balance, lost his bearing, and lost his nerve.

  Shoved by the crowd, he dropped painfully to his knees. His cane clattered away, lost in the sea of bodies, legs, strange feet. All at once Jimothy felt very hot, very hungry, very tired. A headache throbbed. He knew what was happening now, in a detached way. It was the thing that embarrassed him, but that he couldn’t stop. He gazed around him, eyes wide, startled like a creature caught in bright headlights. Everywhere noise, everywhere commotion, everywhere people he didn’t know, people he knew nothing about, who knew nothing about him, who didn’t care, who didn’t even know he existed. They kept moving, all around him, this way and that, their feet thumping, their shoes clattering, their voices calling and crying, laughing and chattering, and in the midst of it all Jimothy himself, suddenly realizing how lost he was, how unknown, how alone, how much his head suddenly hurt.

  He squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to block out all the light, the movement, the noise. He wanted to be in his room right now, or anywhere instead of this place. Someplace darker, colder, quieter. He tried to focus on the Line, but that made everything worse. It blazed in his mind like

  line?

  road signs at night lit by headlights. He saw them: road signs in the fog, as though he were in Michael’s car looking out the window as they flashed past. They were like people, flashing past, unseen and unknown.

  Everything here was a dream–overwhelmingly unreal, on the other side of the Line, the wrong side–not real, not real–but somehow that made it all worse. Because it wouldn’t go away, and it was still there when he opened his eyes: the noise, the bright heat, the uncaring masses parting around him or sometimes bumping into him because he was so small, so unimportant. They didn’t know him, not at all. To them, he, Jimothy Whyte, wasn’t real.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Somewhere, somewhere, Isaac was playing a shiny piano in the dark. Somewhere, an orange lizard was reading a colorful book and laughing. Somewhere, in the cold, a man made of plants drank tea with a lion. Somewhere, under the biggest tree, a beautiful Leaf picked mushrooms from frigid mud and looked with glittering eyes into glittering skies. Somewhere, an eagle was dying slowly, all alone, all alone.

  And none of this was real.

  “Wake up,” he said to himself. “Just a dream.” But it didn’t seem like a dream. His knees hurt from falling; so did his palms where he had caught himself. He had little cuts and scrapes from falling on Hyperion, and he smelled of ink amidst the mysterious flood of scents of Skywater, and he had something hard and sharp and so very bright right there in his pocket, and he could still hear that little gasp Niri had made when she died, and had that been a dream?

  …dream…

  “Hazel,” he whispered, but now he no longer knew if Hazel was real at all. Had Hazel ever been real? Jimothy tried to think of the most real thing he could and came up with Michael. Michael was real. But where was he? Michael had always been there, but now…

  He felt himself heaving. Was he crying? Yes, he could feel the hot tears, the pain in the throat, the ache deep back behind his eyes. Was he even real? How would he know?

  calm

  He hugged himself, hunched over on his aching knees, and tried to control his panicked breathing. In and out, he told himself. In and out. But his thoughts had no effect on his quick, shallow panting.

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything, and the Line was failing him. Michael. Mike. Where? He was cold, shaking, terrified. He needed to throw up.

  Paint, Jimothy Whyte

  Paint. He should paint something. That always made him feel better. But what to paint? All he saw, through vision blurry with tears, were the white paving stones intersecting beneath him, swarming with moving shadows. The stones were plain white; they could use some color. He reached a trembling hand down to the warm stones and slid his other into the pocket of his coat where the crystal was.

  Jimothy squeezed his eyes shut and painted. As so often happened, he didn’t consciously think about what he was painting. It unfolded in his mind like a blooming flower, revealing something new. What he saw was a pattern, dark and colorful, tessellating triangles and odd shapes, a puzzle not quite put together of a scene he couldn’t quite remember, stars and skies and rocks and sadness, but most of all, his brother Michael.

  He fell over, suddenly very tired. Figures stood over him, their outlines indistinct against the brightness of day. “It’s him,” one of them said in a deep grumble of a voice. “I saw them leave together.”

  “Bring him in, then,” answered another. Jimothy wanted to ask what they were talking about, but his head was now splitting with a headache and he was so very tired.