“And my life.” Liam stopped in the street and offered the Pooka his hand. “I’m forever in your debt.”
The Pooka looked alarmed. “What are you after saying, Liam O’Casey? There’s no question of debt between us. Favor for favor. Life for life. We’re quits now.”
“Will you be leaving me, then?” asked Liam, and the Pooka could not for the life of him tell whether it was with hope or dread he asked it.
“Not before I’ve had my drink,” he said, and was ridiculously pleased to feel the arm in his relax its tension. “I’ll see you safe up to Mr. Graves’s farm first.”
“Do you think he’s prepared to employ me?”
“Of a certainty. And give you his daughter’s hand in marriage, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Liam laughed aloud. “He’s not much older than I, Madra. His daughter would be an infant, presuming he had one at all. This is the real world we’re in, after all, not a fairy tale.”
“Are we not?” They’d reached Maeve McDonough’s by now and descended into the hot and noisy saloon. “And here am I, thinking there’s room enough for both in a city the size of this. New York’s got life in it, my friend. I’m minded to stay awhile. As long as you come down from the country from time to time and give us a tune. There’s no joy in a city where you cannot hear ‘Whiskey Before Breakfast.’ ”
Now, a quick journey to near-future Manhattan where a certain actor wakes up to find a griffin made of shining metal perched at the end of his bed.
… AND THE ANGEL WITH TELEVISION EYES
JOHN SHIRLEY
One gray April morning, Max Whitman woke in his midtown Manhattan apartment to find a living, breathing griffin perched on the righthand post at the foot of his antique four-poster bed.
Max watched with sleep-fuzzed pleasure as the griffin—a griffin made of shining metal—began to preen its mirror-bright feathers with a hooked beak of polished cadmium. It creaked a little as it moved.
Max assumed at first that he was still dreaming; he’d had a series of oddly related Technicolor-vivid dreams recently. Apparently one of these dreams had spilled over onto his waking reality. He remembered the griffin from a dream of the night previous. It had been a dream bristling with sharp contrasts: of hard-edged shafts of white light—a light that never warms—breaking through clouds the color of suicidal melancholy. And weaving in and out of those shafts of light, the griffin came flying toward him ablaze with silvery glints. And then the clouds coming together, closing out the light, and letting go sheets of rain. Red rain. Thick, glutinous rain. A rain of blood. Blood running down the sheer wall of a high-towered, gargoyle-studded castle carved of transparent glass. Supported by nothing at all: a crystalline castle still and steady as Mount Everest, hanging in mid-air. And laying siege to the sky-castle was a flying army of wretched things led by a man with a barbed-wire head—
Just a bad dream.
Now, Max gazed at the griffin and shivered, hoping the rest of the dream wouldn’t come along with the griffin. He hadn’t liked the rain of blood at all.
Max blinked, expecting the griffin to vanish. It remained, gleaming. Fulsome. Something hungry …
The griffin noticed Max watching. It straightened, fluttered its two-meter wingspread, wingtips flashing in the morning light slanting through the broad picture window, and said, “Well, what do you want of me?” It had a strangely musical, male voice.
“Whuh?” said Max blearily. “Me? Want with you?” Was it a holograph? But it looked so solid … and he could hear its claws rasping the bedpost.
“I heard your call,” the griffin went on. “It was too loud, and then it was too soft. You really haven’t got the hang of mindsending yet. But I heard and I came. Who are you and why did you call me?”
“Look, I didn’t—” He stopped, and smiled. “Sandra. Sandra Klein in special effects, right? This is her little cuteness.” He yawned and sat up. “She outdid herself with you, I must admit. You’re a marvel of engineering. Damn.” The griffin was about a meter high. It gripped the bedpost with metallic eagle’s claws; it sat on its haunches, and its lion’s forepaws—from a lion of some polished argent alloy—rested on its pinfeathered knees. The pinfeathers looked like sweepings from a machine shop. The griffin had a lion’s head, but an eagle’s beak replaced a muzzle. Its feathered chest rose and fell.
“A machine that breathes …” Max murmured.
“Machine?” The griffin’s opalescent eyes glittered warningly. Its wire-tufted lion’s tail swished. “It’s true my semblance is all alloys and plastics and circuitry. But I assure you I am not an example of what you people presume to call ‘artificial intelligence’.”
“Ah.” Max felt cold, and pulled the bedclothes up to cover his goose-pimpled shoulders. “Sorry.” Don’t make it mad. “Sandra didn’t send you?”
It snorted. “Sandra! Good Lord, no.”
“I …” Max’s throat was dry. “I saw you in a dream.” He felt odd. Like he’d taken a drug that couldn’t make up its mind if it were a tranquilizer or a psychedelic.
“You saw me in a dream?” The griffin cocked its head attentively. “Who else was in this dream?”
“Oh there were—things. A rain of blood. A castle that was there and wasn’t there. A man—it looked like he was made of … of hot metal. And his head was all of wire. I had a series of dreams that were … Well, things like that.”
“If you dreamed those things, then my coming here is ordained. You act as if you honestly don’t know why I’m here.” It blinked, tiny metal shutters closing with a faint clink. “But you’re not much surprised by me. Most humans would have run shrieking from the room by now. You accept me.
Max shrugged. “Maybe. But you haven’t told me why you’re here. You said it was—ordained?”
“Planned might be a better word, I can tell you that I am Flare, and I am a Conservative Protectionist, a High Functionary in the Fiefdom of Lord Viridian. And you—if you’re human—must be wild talent. At least. You transmitted the mindsend in your sleep, unknown to your conscious mind. I should have guessed from the confused signal. Well, well, well. Such things are outside the realm of my expertise. You might be one of the Concealed. We’ll see, at the meeting. First, I’ve got to have something to eat. You people keep food in ‘the kitchen,’ I think. That would be through that hallway …”
The griffin of shining metal fluttered from the bedpost, alighted on the floor with a light clattering, and hopped into the kitchen, out of sight.