"Not another museum!" Chuck protested. He had retained no physical ill-effects from his misadventure of the previous night, but since then had been keeping an eye on his surroundings like never before.
Thanks to Blanda's chicken soup, a hot bath and a great deal of fussing over by his fellow passengers, Chuck had managed to get a good night's sleep. The leftover soup had been stretched easily into a down comforter into which he'd curled like a caterpillar in its cocoon. Back out in the world, he felt exposed and vulnerable. The sensation that people might jump out at him at any moment was interfering with his ability to relax while they toured the city of Ephemer.
And, because he was expecting it, they did. Museums were good places for sinister things. Every time he turned around, something seemed to be springing out, but only guides who offered to explain the exhibits, or small children running away from their embarrassed parents. Chuck's nerves were half shot, and it was only midmorning.
There seemed to be thousands of museums in this very busy town. Most of them were dusty holes in the wall, some with only one artifact on display, often an object he couldn't identify. The labels were nearly always in a foreign language, too faint to read, or missing altogether. He enjoyed the little museums more than the sprawling, city-sized ones Keir sometimes led them into where every last darned thing was a relic.
The first giant mega-museum was the worst. In the vast, yellow-painted halls, Chuck was overwhelmed by atmosphere, and became unable to keep his bearings. He knew if he lost sight of Keir he might never find him again in the crowd. The little party was surrounded by groups of eager children, none of whom spoke the same language, with notebooks and pencils; and pairs of adults, one of whom was reading raptly from guidebooks while the other mooched around looking as though he would rather be elsewhere. Every time Chuck caught a glimpse of a case that looked interesting to him, the way was blocked by a dense mass of people. In fact, the more who blocked the way, the more interesting he was convinced the item was. By the time he waited his turn to see, he was almost always wrong.
Keir hustled them in and out of mansion-sized buildings that lined Ephemer's grand boulevard. The next one was an art museum. Chuck felt at home the moment they stepped in the door. One of his aunts was an artist. When he was a boy, she used to let him make a mess with her paints while she worked. Hmm, another memory. Chuck clutched it to him like a teddy bear. He was putting together more of a picture of himself, but so much was still missing. How old was he? Where did he live? What did he do?
Chuck liked the mood paintings, which changed their subject depending on who was looking at them. His were colored blue with worry. He felt bad about that until he saw Morit go by the same display. Every canvas turned black.
Wow, Chuck thought, with sympathy. I wouldn't want to be inside his head.
* * *
"They are working together now," Morit grumbled to himself, as he stalked through the exhibit halls without seeing a thing but the floor. His plan to concentrate on the Visitors one at a time had hit a serious drawback. Persemid Smith had turned aside the attack on Chuck Meadows singlehandedly! The focus must expand to include the other Visitors, but her especially. He couldn't explain why he disliked her so much. She was a Visitor, he thought, furiously. That was more than enough reason.
Morit was frustrated. This last failure was worse than the previous ones because all the conspirators involved had been taken into custody by the authorities. He knew none of them would ever flap their tongues, but it was a setback. Every Dreamlander who did not participate in the conspiracy made them that much weaker. Morit knew the conspirators must make a more concerted effort, something better. He still did not want to go as far as their fail-safe plan, but would if he had to.
A museum docent stood up from her chair by the door and approached him to hand him a leaflet. He held up his hand to forestall the young woman, but she looked at him intensely and thrust the paper at him.
"What is it, my dear?" Blanda asked, while he scanned it.
"Just a flyer for a special exhibition," he told her. He crumpled the letter from his comrades and put it in his pocket.
This was the quietest place that they had yet visited. Feeling like a child walking through a haunted house, Chuck crept along a darkened corridor whose dimensions he couldn't guess. It was lit only by quivering white lights the shape of cartoon ghosts. He was only able to tell he had come out into a larger room by the way his footsteps and breathing sounded. It was delightfully spooky.
White lights sprang up near his feet. He discovered himself in the center of a huge, twelve-sided room. Shadows were thrown up on the wall. If it had not been for the big ears he had that day, he wouldn't have recognized his own silhouette. He wiggled his ears, and snickered at the way the shadows mimicked him. He stuck his thumbs up on top of his head and made moose antlers. The shadows followed suit.
All but one. Chuck turned to look fully at the one placed at eleven o'clock, whose hands were down by its side. Why wouldn't it cooperate? Maybe this was an art thing. Or maybe someone was behind him! Chuck started toward it to have a look. The shadow sprang up in alarm, and shot out of the room.
"Hey!" Chuck yelled, and ran after it into the dark corridor. This is silly, he thought. How do you chase a shadow in the dark? He heard no other footsteps, and when he reached the next well-lit gallery, saw no one among the few patrons present who could have cast the long, thin shadow. He must have been imagining it, he told himself. He made his way back into the chamber, and stood in the center again. This time he counted twelve identical shadows. The anomaly must have been an intentional effect of the light by the artist. Unsatisfied but unable to find any other explanation, Chuck went on with his explorations.
* * *
His stomach began to remind him that breakfast had been a long time before. He was starting to regret not following Keir's example of becoming less dependent on food.
He remembered that back in one of the galleries depicting dioramas of grade-school classrooms, he'd seen a hot dog stand. Chuck followed his memory back through white-walled chambers and tiled hallways, until his nose led him the rest of the way. There was nothing like the way cooking frankfurters smelled when one was hungry.
The cook looked surprisingly unkempt for such an elegant setting as the museum. He wore a T-shirt that had once been white, covered with a stained apron that could have been put on the wall in the modern art section without hesitation. Chuck propped an elbow on the counter and waited for the cook to pay attention to him. Minutes passed. The man cut pickles into long spears, refilled the shaker with celery salt, turned the hot dogs on the grill.
"Hey, mister," Chuck said. "You've got a customer. Excuse me. Sir? I'd like to buy some food." No matter how he yelled, the rude so-and-so never turned around. He took out coins, jingled them, then slammed them on the counter. "Hey!"
"He's just an image," Bergold said mildly, strolling over from the model of a kindergarten.
"What?"
"This is a work of art," Bergold said, indicating a label on the floor. "Notice how the aroma follows you wherever you go."
"I notice, I notice!" Chuck exclaimed, feeling hungrier than ever. He felt in the bags on his back for all those snacks he knew had been in there. No food. He came up with a bunch of yo-yos instead.
"Bah," he complained, digging through collections of priceless bakelite or carved jade yo-yos in hopes of finding one single bag of pretzels. Where had all those treats gone? He had had enough to feed the whole train! Instead, he found more of the round toys.
While he was decanting the yo-yos onto the floor, a guide in a smock and a serious expression stopped his tour alongside. He turned his pointer toward Chuck.
"Now, here," he said in an authoritative voice, "is the piece, `Man and Yo-Yos.' A seminal work by Meadows. Notice the expression of frustration and concentration, coupled with the symbol of the toy that plays up and down the string but never truly goes anywhere. A veritable expression of Futility!"
Thanks a heap, pal, Chuck thought. He reached the bottom of the bag. No food at all. He started scooping the yo-yos back off the floor. When he put the last one in his bag and fastened it up, the tour group gave him a polite pattering of applause.
* * *
Keir herded them all into baskets balanced on the back of dinosaurs whose bony dorsal plate supported the harnesses like the girders of a suspension bridge. "The next few stops are a distance from here. It's a little too far to walk." He did a head count, and sighed. "I'll be right back. Please sit tight, everyone."
"While you're gone can I get off to look at the dimetrodons?" Chuck asked, excitedly.
"I would rather you didn't," Keir said.
"These are the first dinosaurs we've seen in a while," Chuck pleaded. "I didn't get to see the others up close."
"Why aren't these back in Rem?" Sean asked, as the beast turned its armor-plated head around to snuffle at its passengers with its pointed lips. Keir took on his womanly aspect.
"Here, they are transportation, probably reflecting the minds of some dreamer or dreamers who watch Saturday-morning cartoons. The real archetypes were wild animals. They wouldn't stand for having people on their backs. Just you wait. These could turn into buses or oxcarts at any moment. Or sealed capsules, and then where would you be?" he asked, turning male again as he addressed himself to Chuck.
"Out on the sidewalk with Keir and Pip," Persemid muttered under her breath. Chuck heard her, and snickered. Keir climbed down and went back into the museum. Automobiles on the street pulled up behind the dinosaurs and honked their horns, making the beasts swish their huge tails. The cars had to find a break in the traffic to pass them.
"That gal has been making us late every time," Kenner said. "Boy, if she didn't have those looks I bet she'd be out of here like a shot."
"The looks didn't get her here," Persemid said, with some asperity. "Even though she annoys me, too, she has talent."
"My mistake, ma'am," Kenner said, blithely. Nothing seemed to spoil his good humor.
Thanks to him, the group had picked up an extra passenger, a beautiful young lady. He really did run strongly to type. This girl slightly resembled the last girl, who resembled the first one on the train platform back in Rem: small-boned, small-featured except for large eyes, and a pretty cupid's-bow mouth that smiled often, except that she had very dark skin and short, kinky hair. She caught Chuck looking at her, and gave him a knowing, familiar smile. He had a funny feeling that he knew her from somewhere, but how could he?
Keir arrived back with Pipistrella, who greeted them all with a happy smile.
"Forgive me," she said, artlessly. "I got into a conversation with the nicest man. He said he was from Porlock. The time just flew." She waved her hands. "I don't know where it went."
The others didn't say anything. The engineer, on the lead dimetrodon, signaled and moved the train of behemoths out into traffic.
In between museums, Chuck continued to be concerned about the mysterious shadow. He'd had a sensation that someone or something had been following him even before he'd been attacked in Phantasie. He didn't want to get beaten up again. Surely the talents he'd been developing in managing influence would come in handy.
While they lumbered along the boulevard, Chuck tried to put the whammy on himself. The best thing, he thought, would be if he could render his skull in some kind of hard rubber, so blows would bounce right off. The others looked at him strangely when he hit himself in the head a few times, but didn't ask for an explanation. With a little experimentation he achieved a satisfactory texture, but no alteration he made remained past more than two changes of influence. It was so frustrating to know that though he had so much power the locals considered him a kind of god, yet he was still very small against the combined forces of billions of other minds. He'd just have to keep looking behind him, whether or not he could keep eyes in the back of his head.
* * *
"Not another art gallery," Chuck groaned, as Keir marched them past the uniformed guards at the door of another palatial building. Persemid looked prim with amusement, and Pipistrella gave Chuck one of her blankest looks.
"This one's different," Keir said, producing a handful of tickets and herding them inside.
The surroundings were very much what Chuck had come to expect: a wide, high-ceilinged hall painted white, with a few, a very few, people staring at some impenetrable frames containing a splosh of paint or two, and maybe a curled-up statue that looked like it was suffering horrible internal distress.
"Cheer up," Kenner said, bringing up the rear of the group with another of his endless string of women clinging to his arm, "maybe there'll be some nude figures! That last bunch had a few really great babes!"
Persemid shot him a laser-hot look of disgust, to which the Dreamlander paid no attention. He was too busy explaining the architectural features of the hall to the young woman.
Keir guided them through the anteroom and past lines of people battling among themselves for tickets. Shouting and screaming filled the air to the very ceilings of the marble chamber, and echoed until Chuck's ears rang. Men rolled on the ground, trying to take possession of a single ticket, punching and throwing one another against walls. Chuck was puzzled as to why anyone would put up any kind of fight to get into an exhibition. So far on the tour, the group had ended up seeing scads of artwork, more than Chuck had ever dreamed existed in any world, physical or immaterial. Lots of what he'd seen was desperately bad, but all of it told one a great deal about the maker. Keir had told them time and again to reflect. By the expression on his face, it left as bad a taste in Sean Draper's mouth as Chuck's own, and the Irishman was as confused as he as to what all the shouting was about. Keir looked happy and excited, but the others felt frankly skeptical.
This time Chuck thought the majority was right. On the walls of the first room, the frames looked hundreds of times more expensive than their contents.
"It's all junk!" Chuck exclaimed.
"Don't be so judgmental!" the guide said, ignoring their protests as he herded them along. "You don't know what you're looking at. Here are some very insightful pieces. This is a place where real accomplishments are displayed. Some in symbolic ways, others literally. Not merely for their artistic merit."
"That's certain," said Hiramus, with a sour expression.
"Look, that's part of a vacuum cleaner nozzle," Chuck pointed out. He could even read the brand name on the attachment at the end.
"Ah, but you don't know what it represents! There's more to a piece than its simple physical existence," Keir said. "It's the story behind it that is really interesting. Tales of success in an otherwise ordinary life. Well worth your time to study."
How interesting could that be? Chuck thought, wondering if the whole place was full of pot roasts and wobbly bike rides. Keir took him by the shoulders and set him in front of a picture at the end of a row.
"Now, look, really look." With a firm nod, Keir stalked away to capture his next client.
With a sigh, Chuck stepped close to a frame surrounding a battered cookbook stained with gravy. There was nothing special about it that he could detect, except maybe the strong smell of cooking.
He was plunged directly into a suburban-style kitchen, cheap yellow curtains on the windows, dated contact paper on the walls, and the air full of steam. As he blinked to clear the hot clouds from his eyes, a young woman in limp sweat pants was wiping the hair out of her face with the back of her hand. She leaned over the counter to frown at the very cookbook that Chuck had just seen displayed on the wall. A pot was boiling furiously on the stove, giving off heavy, spicy fumes. He didn't think it smelled edible. Evidently, neither did the young woman. Picking up a measuring cup, she approached the pot fearfully, glanced into it, and with trembling hands, poured in the contents of the cup, then stirred energetically with a wooden spoon. Suddenly, with a sound like harp strings played in glissando, the steam cleared, the kitchen brightened, and a wonderful aroma rose from the saucepan. The astonished expression on the young woman's face said, as clearly as if she had spoken aloud, "It worked!" Chuck almost cheered for her.
He didn't know how he had returned any more than how he had been caught up, but he found himself back in the gallery looking at the cookbook on the wall. It had told him his story, and in spite of his skepticism, had touched his heart. He was eager to try again.
In the next frame over, a dried clump of daisies hung against a backdrop of faded gingham. They told him the story of the romance between two young people that began at a summer picnic with the gift of flowers. The young man gathered them up shyly and gave them to his girl. She offered her lips for a timid kiss that turned warmer, until the two of them sprang apart, surprised and delighted. The couple sat together, not physically far from the hundreds of other attendees, but miles and miles away in their own world.
Years passed from that first simple gift. In moments, Chuck saw the couple grow up, marry and have children, then grandchildren, and retire into golden sunshine that coalesced into the faded bunch of daisies framed on the wall. The next picture was different, but equally compelling, as were all that followed. Chuck found he enjoyed the mini-movies. He didn't understand each and every one he saw, but he cared what happened to the people whose possessions he was viewing. Now he knew why his fellow patrons at the gallery were staring so intently at each display. They were getting the story behind the piece. It was a lot more fun than he'd anticipated. Rather than skipping from place to place as something caught his eye, Chuck discovered he didn't want to miss a single one. Each work seemed to sweep him away for hours or years, yet when he surfaced again he felt as if he'd been standing before it for mere seconds. He was ashamed for complaining in advance that he'd be bored. Keir must think he was the worst kind of whiner.
Included in this display was a very small picture of the Eiffel Tower. It looks like a plain photograph, maybe even a cheap postcard. What was it doing here?
"Look closer," Keir said, appearing at his shoulder. "It's the maker's very first attempt to look inside himself, a signal moment in his life."
Something about it struck Chuck as familiar. Then he did peer closer. It was his jigsaw puzzle, neatly put together and framed. He'd lost track of it. He felt his pockets, but the puzzle was gone.
"It's there," Keir said, nodding at the wall. "You've made progress. That's a marker of where you came from, when you took your first steps into something you could see but not believe in. It's a good start. It belongs here."
"Wow," Chuck said, filled with pride. "That's mine." He looked at the man standing next to him, just coming out of his study of a red leather dog collar. Chuck nudged him and nodded toward the frame. "That's mine."
"It is?" the man asked, curious.
"Yes," Chuck said, feeling as though he should say something profound, but nothing came to mind. The man leaned over and raised his spectacles to get a better look.
"And how long will something like that be displayed?" Sean Draper wanted to know.
"As long as there is living memory," Keir said. "It's now part of the Collective Unconscious. You might see it in one of your own dreams." Sean must have looked a question at him that no one else could hear, because Keir changed into the plump maternal form as he walked over to the tall man and put a comforting arm around his waist. They talked together in low voices. Keir gestured to an open hall at the right, and they walked into it. Chuck watched them go, curious again why the defensive and laconic Draper was with the group. He couldn't hear what they were saying to one another. The level of noise in the hall had risen. People were murmuring to one another. He wanted to know the end of the story that the jigsaw puzzle began. He leaned closer to get involved when a hand grabbed his, surprising him out of his thoughts.
"Chuck Meadows? Aren't you the Chuck Meadows?" a man's voice asked.
"Yes, I am," Chuck said. "Do I know you?" The man pumped his hand up and down.
"No, you don't, Master Chuck, but I had to come and tell you what I thought of your work. Fabulous! Astonishing! Moving. My wife just cried when she saw it."
"Well, thanks," Chuck said, not knowing how to respond. "That's nice of you, but it was nothing, really."
"A great moment in time!" raved a stout, bearded man wearing a tweed jacket. He waved a meerschaum pipe in the air. "I am Fortescue Alarum, a critic for the Ephemer Ephimerides. Really a profound revelation. I must go look at it again."
"Oh, come on," Chuck said, embarrassed. "It's not a Monet watercolor." But the stout man plunged back into the mob surrounding Chuck's little puzzle.
More people crowded around him, offering compliments until Chuck felt his face redden to his collar. He began to wonder if his little puzzle was anything special, or if all these people were crazy. He was glad to see Master Morit and his wife pushing their way through the crowd to the display. They were back in only a few moments. Chuck didn't have to hear the byplay to know that the surly man thought it was rubbish, but his wife wanted him to come and say something nice anyhow.
"Nice," Morit said at last, and it was a concession.
"Thanks," Chuck said. "I know the thing itself is unimportant, but Keir made me think about what it meant. I was just trying to see the story itself. I wanted to know how it came out." He looked back at the now impenetrable crowd.
"It's no use," Morit said, scowling. "You will never make it. All those silly people will use it up until there's nothing left. Sleeper-sent mobs." People who were bustling forward to have a look would glance toward him occasionally, beaming. Chuck smiled back. He liked being where people appreciated him. He and the Nightshades went to a slightly less crowded wall to continue studying other people's pieces. This wasn't a bad place at all.
| Title: | The Grand Tour |
| Author: | Jody Lynn Nye |
| ISBN: | 0-671-57883-9 |
| Copyright: | © 2000 by Jody Lynn Nye |
| Publisher: | Baen Books |