The Radio Magician and Other Stories (23 page)

On the way out of the lobby, Dorian paused. Had he come up a short flight of stairs to enter, or had the hallway been on the same level? At the foot of the stairs a mineral gift shop offered its wares on wooden trays inside its door. He vaguely remembered passing something like that, but he’d been in a hurry. Had he?

On an impulse, he entered the shop. Rocks and crystals of all kinds filled the shelves. “I’m looking for my wife,” he said to the man behind the counter. “She might have been in here yesterday.” Dorian showed him a photo from his wallet.

The man hooked his thumbs in the top of his overalls and leaned to look at the picture. “Yep, Stephanie, I know her. She liked the amethyst. I figure she spent an hour hunting for a good specimen.”

Dorian caught the edge of the counter to keep from falling. His legs had no strength. He looked at the crate overflowing with purple crystals.

“Didn’t buy anything, though. I offered her iron pyrite, fool’s gold. She said if she couldn’t have the real thing, she couldn’t be happy.” The man smiled. “Besides, she said her husband sometimes buys her gifts, and she didn’t want to spoil his fun.”

“Which way did she go?”

“Didn’t really notice. Down the hallway, I reckon.”

Dorian dashed to the door, then looked the way the man had indicated, as if there might be a chance to see her still. But the hall was empty. He glanced up the stairs into the lobby. The concierge was talking to a couple of men wearing six-shooters and badges. Security? The concierge pointed toward Dorian.

“Thanks,” he called to the mineral shop man.

“Nice lady. I hope you find her.”

The elevator at the end of the hall was not the same one he’d ridden up, but he didn’t want to talk to security, so he rode it down to the transition level he’d come from. When he stepped out, the doors closed, and the elevator returned to the lobby.

Were they really after him?

After a couple confusing turns down hallways that didn’t look the least bit familiar, Dorian stepped onto an open-air bridge that ended at a platform overlooking the canyon. He breathed easier. A quick dash down the transitionway, and he’d be home, but the long cables that carried the tram he’d seen earlier to the ravine’s bottom were next to a platform a hundred yards farther away. An updraft ruffled his hair and dried the sweat on his face instantly. Wrong platform. The problem was how to get from the platform he was on to the one that he’d come from without retracing his steps?

He crossed the bridge back to the mountain where three choices waited: the hallway he’d exited from, a short ramp to another hallway, and a set of stairs that at least headed toward the other platform. At the top of the stairs, a blue and yellow arrow pointed in the right direction.

But the hallway’s transition theme was heavy stone work, like castle fortifications, and on the door’s other side, towering spires and crenelated restraining walls lined the paths. He’d missed the transition back to where he’d started. A dozen flights of stairs, two ramps and an elevator ride took him to another transition, clearly not the right one, but he needed to get back to the Inn at Mount Either he’d come from. Passing through transitions without a guide, he thought ruefully. I’m probably racking up room charges of astronomical proportions.

The next transition felt vaguely Arabic. He ran into a fellow in a rush going through the door in the opposite direction.

“Sorry, my fault,” said Dorian at the same time the other man said the same thing. He only had a moment to notice the fellow was wearing the same kind of pants and shirt he wore before they dashed their separate ways.

The next had a rainforest look, but he recognized none of the birds that flew past the walkways. A blue and yellow arrow pointed down a hallway lined with jungle plants and short vines that dangled from the ceiling. He hurried past the closed doors until the hallway curved and the decor on the wall changed from matted vegetation to slick aluminum and recessed light fixtures. He pulled the door at the end of the transition zone open with relief.

The door closed behind him.

The lights were out.

He took a few steps into the darkness, then waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, the scene became clear. He choked back a gasp. Nothing separated him from the two-thousand foot drop to the bottom of the canyon. For a heart-stopping moment, he felt suspended, as if at any second he would drop to the rocks in an unstoppable plunge, but he didn’t fall. His hands out, he shuffled forward. The floor wasn’t perfectly invisible. He could see now that a walkway leapt to an opaque platform before him, and to each side, no more than an arm reach away, nearly transparent walls and ceiling enclosed him. It reminded him of an aquarium he’d visited once, where the visitors could walk in a glass tunnel right through the water. Sharks and rays swam above and below, and the illusion of being underwater was nearly perfect. Except the illusion here was that he floated in space. Dorian looked up. Stars glinted back at him with unblinking brilliance. He’d never seen a night sky so clean-edged. On the horizon, a quarter moon cast a clear, cold light on the mountain peaks in the distance, and its silver hue glinted off the Inn at Mount Either’s structures that wrapped tight around the mountain above him, but it wasn’t the Mount Either he’d left. Glass and metal flowed smoothly around the contours, seamlessly leading from wall to window to walkway to elevator, and the dim light of the glass told him of the inn’s life behind.

Afraid for his balance, Dorian moved back to the door like a man on ice. He tugged, but the handle didn’t stir. A lighted sign in red appeared above: SORRY, TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE.

After tight-roping his way across the glass walkway, Dorian found himself in a vista room. A line of comfortably padded couches faced the window and the star-studded night outside. Illuminated by the partial moon, people sat in most of the couches, staring silently at the view. He looked out. Moonlight bathed the nearest mountain in grays and blues. Shadows, like black swaths of velvet, outlined ridges and rocks and filled crevices. Dorian took an empty couch and settled in its deep embrace. Yesterday, when Stephanie missed lunch, he’d sat in the restaurant for an extra hour, and he knew something was wrong. He told himself that she must have forgotten, but that wasn’t like her. Using the inn’s maps as best he could—the inn’s structure was complicated—he’d searched the gyms and shops, the salons and museums, hour by hour, panic building.

He realized that this was the first time he’d rested in the last twenty-four hours. Dorian closed his eyes, just for a minute, he thought.

He dreamed of Stephanie. They were in a boat crossing a broad lake. Behind them he could make out a line of trees and a distant dock, but the other shore was lost in mist. Water slapped at the bow, and the air smelled of fish and wet wood. “You’re so far away,” she said. Dorian wanted to weep. “I know,” he said. “I know, but I’m trying to find you.” He was dreaming, and he could feel the couch he was sitting in, and he could imagine the people sitting around him, staring at the night-lit mountain, but he also felt the hard wooden bench and the boat’s gentle motion. “Where are you, Stephanie?” In the dream, she laughed the way she always laughed, an honest burst of humor that animated her face and eyes. She said, “No, I mean you’re so far away in the boat.” Dorian braced himself, lifted his feet over the seat in between them, then slid forward. Their knees touched. Stephanie placed her hands palms up on her knees. Leaning, Dorian covered them with his own.

“Your hands are so warm,” she said.

Dorian kept still, his fingers resting on her wrists, her pulse beating beneath them.

Stephanie looked upon the water, the long line of ripples moving past them, breathing quietly. She said, “I could float here forever. I don’t have to be going anywhere.” The boat rocked, and it was like the lake stroking them. She met his gaze. “If you are with me.”

A voice said, “It’s beginning.”

Dorian opened his eyes, and Stephanie disappeared. For a moment, he imagined the couch moved, as if the floor was the surface of a black lake, but that feeling faded, leaving him with the memory so vivid of her pulse in his fingertips and the way her lips parted when she laughed that he wondered for a second if she’d actually been there before him.

“It’s beginning,” an elderly woman in the couch next to him said again. Her arms looked frail, but her voice was firm.

“What?” said Dorian.

“Shhh!” she said, and hunched forward, all her attention directed out the window.

At first Dorian thought the mountain was catching fire. A flicker of red glinted from the middle of a cliff. Then it spread over the length of the rock, a brilliant, deep red like an electric ruby.

“My God,” someone said. Someone else sighed.

The red spread to neighboring cliffs, but now the center glimmered with yellow, and a few seconds later almost all the red had been replaced by the yellow glow.

Leaning toward the woman next to him, Dorian said, “What is that?”

“Just spectacular,” she said.

“No, what is it?”

She didn’t look at him. “Refracted moonlight on the crystals. It’s only this good a couple times a year, and only from this spot. No other mountain in the world does this, and if this room were any other place, we wouldn’t see it. The moon has to be in the right phase.”

Now the yellow light enveloped the entire mountain, except at the bottom, which had acquired a purple tint that crawled up the cliffs until the yellow vanished. Purple was Stephanie’s color, the color of amethyst.

“There were clouds in the spring. We missed it,” the old woman said, then she started crying.

Dorian sat with his hands in his lap, unsure of what to do.

“My husband was with me then. We’d never been here before.” She wiped her tears before looking at him for the first time. Her eyes reflected the purple from the mountain. “It’s just a superstition, I know, but they say if you see the lights with someone you love, they will be with you forever.”

Gradually the purple vanished. The edges of a few of the larger rock faces glinted green for a moment. Finally, the mountain looked like it had when he entered the room. People rose from the couches and headed for the exits. Many were couples holding hands. The old woman didn’t move. She’d wrapped her arms across her chest, as if she were hugging herself. Her knuckles were large and arthritic. She said, “I hope you come back when it isn’t cloudy. I hope you come back with someone you love.”

A chill swept the back of Dorian’s head. “I’m looking for her.”

She shrank a little deeper into her chair. “Not me. I’m waiting.”

At the other end of the room, a bellboy bent to talk to a young couple still sitting. They smiled back at him, then each showed him a small piece of plastic. In the room, lit only by reflected moonlight, Dorian couldn’t tell what the plastic was. The bellboy moved to the next lodger, who also showed him a plastic card. There were only a few people between Dorian and the bellboy when Dorian recognized that they were displaying their room keys. His own key didn’t look like the ones they showed.

“What’s the problem?” said a woman as she put her key back in her pocket.

“Nothing of concern, ma’am. A security issue, misplaced guest.”

Dorian slipped out of the room and into a passageway. Half of the wall was transparent, like the entrance bridge near the transition, except the ceiling glowed to provide dim light. He followed the gentle curve and had walked for several minutes when an acetylene-bright brilliance flushed the hall into overexposed surfaces and shadows. He blinked against the glare before shading his eyes. From the mountain’s base, the light grew more intense, until, soundlessly, a rocket, balanced on a flaming pillar, rose past him and streaked into the night.

He heard the people in the hall before he saw them, but short of turning back the way he came, there was no way to avoid them. They laughed and joked loudly. At first Dorian thought they must be going to a masquerade. All wore bulky suits and carried helmets under their arms.

“I’ve never been outside,” said a young man with glasses and a moustache.

“Just don’t sit on something sharp,” said his motherly-looking companion. “And be sure to listen to the safety procedures. Depressurization is nothing to fool around with.”

They were too preoccupied to acknowledge Dorian as they clumped past.

When they vanished around the curve, Dorian stopped, put his hand on the glass wall, and looked out again. The stars never had seemed so sharp and unblinking, and, he noticed, there was no vegetation he could see. None at all. The landscape was as desolate and bare as the—he paused as he made the comparison—as the moon, but there was the moon, nearly resting on the horizon. He shivered. Every transition at Mount Either took the guests to an exotic location, but it had never occurred to him to wonder
how
exotic. This is Earth, he thought, isn’t it? Clearly Earth! But what happened to it?

The mountains weren’t just dead. They were swept clean and bare, like a planet’s skeleton, solid, smooth, dry and with no ability to shrug themselves into life. He pressed his forehead against the glass and shut his eyes. Where was Stephanie? She’d be taking pictures. She’d be stopping at every new view, her head cocked a little to the side, as if she were measuring the world for a painting. She’d tell him about what she’d found, and if he was quiet for too long, she’d say, “What are you thinking?” and genuinely want to know.

Dorian pushed away from the glass and continued walking, slowly at first, but soon with a purposeful stride. At a junction he chose the hallway whose stairs led toward the lobby. An elevator took him up, and when the doors opened, a bellboy stood on the other side. The bellboy, wearing a silk vest that sported a shiny name tag that read, NED, CAN I HELP?, held a personal digital assistant in one hand with Dorian’s face on the screen.

“I’m Dorian Wallace.”

The bellboy checked the image in his hand. “Heavens, you
are
Dorian Wallace! Thank goodness, sir. Your wife has been worried sick. Everyone has been looking for you.”