The mood I’m in—
He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give them demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”
Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrot’s eyes do.
“A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.
“The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”
Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”
—Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle
I don’t know; I don’t know. It’s September, and last week the weather slowly began to turn with a great creak into aumumn. It’ll yet flutter into summery heat now and again, but we’re sleeping under heavy blankets now, and we dress in layers, and I really should be losing this urge to grab half the country by the collar and scream myself hoarse about how mind-bogglingly stupid they are, how blind, how irresponsible.
A blue haze over everything, of invective and two-minute hate.
(Don’t mistake this as a plea for reason and moderation. Can’t we all just get along? Be decent, to one another? —Some of us sure as fuck can’t, but there’s not much we can do about that without persuasion, and it’s hard to persuade somebody when you’re screaming in their face.)
It’s been a week. Alex Lencicki can tell you. He was there, and I wasn’t, and while maybe now that the freak show has packed up its narrow tents there’s maybe something of a catharsis, still, like the summer breaking, it isn’t enough.
And I don’t know now that there ever will be.
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