Lloyd was smart enough to know that, in the matter of sex at least, there was much that he yet had to learn. Still, it sickened him to hear them, for in one guttural exclamation from the other side of a pile of mice-warm hay he realized that this was how he had come to be. At least in part. Maybe the circumstances had been different—the place, the mood, the smells and tastes—but at the heart it was this same bestial dance-brawl. “There should be a better way to be born,” Lloyd said to himself, even as his own desire was shamefully aroused at the sounds of his parents. Then he clutched himself to fulfillment.
He pulled up his pants and dragged from his pocket the two glass eyes. The more he examined them, the more they seemed to examine him. Disconcerted and afraid, he thrust them back into the depths of the bag, far down into the wads of soiled clothes where he had hidden the box adorned by the Ambassadors from Mars and his uncle’s letter. Then he stowed the bag well under the hay.
None of the Sitturds had anything to say while they breakfasted on stale rolls and can-brewed coffee. Chastened by postcoital remorse, Hephaestus and Rapture did not press Lloyd for any information on how he had slept and gave no indication they knew that he had disappeared in the night.
Meanwhile Lloyd’s brain, once free of his own sexual obsession, began whirring with worries and considerations about the Spirosians and the Vardogers. Could the things that Mother Tongue had told him be true? A war in time between two great secret societies—the real powers behind all other secret societies—the hidden orchestrators of history now brought into lethal conflict over the issues of slavery and expansion, the destiny of America?
He had seen the lights; he could not get around that. Some unthinkable harnessing of electrical energy. And the library beneath the burial ground, the riverboat festooned with moss—he had seen these things with his own eyes. Still, he could not believe that he had been told the truth. Something in a secret place inside him rebelled at the choice he had been given, and the feel of the stuffed dog on the couch returned to make his skin crawl. He was certain that he had heard it breathe.
He bolted from the stable still swallowing a lump of bread, wondering if once he had gone his parents might continue their passionate battle, or if his mother would go off to her laundry and nursing duties while his father returned to his aimless disintegration. It appeared to him that as his capabilities increased theirs diminished, so that even his mother had become his child now. His work was how the family fed itself. And if the family was somehow feeding upon itself, he felt that it was not his fault. St. Louis was the poison. The dance-hall lights. The necessity of money. All the hopeless and hope-mad people wandering through. The one solution he could see lay in getting back on the road to Texas, back to their dream. Then his father might wake and his mother would remember her old, quick joy. He ran to meet Mulrooney, who was camped on a dry-grass common to the west.
The Ambassadors and the Ladies Mulrooney were all sick from rancid milk. The tent stank of their sufferings and hummed with flies. Regrettably, a competition between the two largest of the flying clubs that had formed was scheduled for noon along the riverbank. Given the gastrointestinal crisis that had seized Mulrooney, the showman did not feel fit or able to attend, so Lloyd was left to gather all the soaring toys he could carry on the back of one of the wagon’s horses and make his way there all by himself. The obligation of rewarding the faithful and the opportunity to make some much needed sales was too important. But it did nothing to allay his fears. He had never faced the wall of faces on his own before. Never all alone. He realized that Mother Tongue had been right in a way: he was Mulrooney’s monkey. He had always had the showman to lean on, to back him up. Now it would just be him, a little boy from a small town—a boy with a big brain and bigger dreams, from a small-minded town, now confronted by what seemed a huge city and the