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black-and-white carpet had been anywhere nearby, they'd have picked up a
ticket just like that I saw in my rear-view mirror that they didn't seem to
like the way I was flying, either they zoomed up above me to pass. That would
have earned them another ticket from any constable who saw them.
I thought about signifying my opinion of the way they flew with an ancient
fertility gesture, but I decided not to. As I've mentioned, Hawthorne is a
tough town, and people have been known to get shot or have other unpleasant
things happen to them on the flyways of Angels City. So I just did my best to
pretend the louts didn't exist as they went up and over me.
As they did, though, one of them leaned out past the fringe of his carpet and
dropped something down onto mine. They sped away& and my carpet didn't want to
fly any more.
I had time for one startled squawk and the first two words of the
Shma before the carpet, suddenly just a rug, hit the ground with a thump that
made me bite my tongue and left my backside bruised for the next two weeks. If
I hadn't been wearing my safety belt, if the carpet hadn't rolled up around me
when I hit, or
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if I'd been going faster, I don't care to think what might have happened.
As things were, I wasn't badly hurt, but I had that weird sensation you get
after an accident I was pretty shaky, but I had almost total perception and
recall of everything going on around me. Other carpets kept flying by a few
feet overhead, the people on them intent on their own business and not caring
at all about somebody who'd just had his carpet fail him.
But why had it failed? I couldn't figure that out. Did it have something to do
with whatever the punk had dropped on my carpet? I looked around for that,
trying to find out what it was. I didn't see anything on the carpet itself,
but something was stirring out on the weed-covered dirt just beyond the
fringe.
I bent my head closer. The earth itself seemed to be writhing. For a second or
two, I didn't understand what I was looking at. Then I did, and ice ran
through me: it was a tiny earth elemental, busily digging itself back into its
proper home.
Fire and water are the opposing elements we most commonly notice, but earth
and air are opposites, too. Matt Arnold had talked about sylph-esteem and
sylph-discipline, but if those two guys had tossed an earth elemental down
onto my carpet, that was nothing short of sylph-abuse.
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The elemental had gone now, though, back to its own proper home. I tried the
starting spell. My carpet lifted off the ground as smoothly as if nothing had
ever been wrong with it Very carefully, looking every which way as I went and
wishing for eyes in the back of my head, I flew on home.
All the way there, I tried to make some sense out of what had happened, the
way theologians wrestle with God's will. Was it just a couple of hooligans out
to have some sport with whoever drew the short straw? That's the sort of
random violence that gives Angels City flyways a bad name, but this time I
wished I could believe it I couldn't, though.
Those two guys on that rug had been waiting for me in particular. I'd noticed
them sitting a few feet off the ground in the parking lot while the church
slowly flew by on Angle-wood Boulevard If they'd wanted to head up The Second,
they'd had all the time they needed to do it They'd just waited.
But why? Again, I didn't have much trouble coming up with an answer it had to
have something to do with the case of the toxic spell dump. I did my best to
remember what the two punks had looked like. All
I could come up with was swarthy and dark-haired. They might have been
Persians or Aztecians. They might have been hired muscle, too: Israelites,
Druzes, Indians from the Confederation or from India, even
Hanese or Japanese. I hadn't got a real good look at then, and an awful lot of
people in Angels City match up to the description swarthy and dark-haired.
I came to that dispirited conclusion about the time I set my carpet down in
its parking space back at my block of flats. Somebody was going downstairs
from his carpet as I was coming up from mine. He gave me an odd look as we
passed on the stairs, but I didn't think anything of it past wondering what
was haunting him that afternoon.
Then I turned the knob to my own flat. Judy sat curled up on the couch in the
front room, reading a book on the Garuda Bird I'd picked up a few days before
and hadn't got around to putting on a shelf yet
What started out as her smile of welcome turned into something else when her
mouth sagged open in surprise. "Good God, David, what happened to you?
A lot had happened to me, but I asked foolishly, "What do you mean, what
happened?"
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She sprang to her feet, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me to the bathroom
mirror as if I wasn't to be trusted to do anything that required rational
thought on my own. "Look at yourself!" she commanded.
I mentally apologized to the fellow who'd stared at me while I was coming up
to my flat I looked like someone who'd been French-kissed by a vampire:
streaks of blood ran from the corners of my mouth and had dripped down onto my
shirt Before I wore it again, I'd have to go visit Carlotta or somebody else
with a vampster. All my clothes were disheveled, as if I'd been through a
carpet crash in them.
Funny how that works, I
thought vaguely.
"What happened?" Judy said again.
So I told her, in as much detail as I remembered: pieces seemed blank, while
others that happened only moments later were there in incredible perfection I
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