Overcome by the poignancy of the moment, he stepped back from the
window, colliding with the three Erinyes as he did so. They moved a
little distance away, arrayed themselves, and started to raise their
right arms. "Oh, can it!" Blake said disgustedly. In the darkness
behind him, someone laughed. "_My love, she's but a lassie yet_," Smith
sang in a cracked baritone. "_We'll let her stand a year or twa,
she'll no be half sae saucy yet!_"
Blake whirled, and flashed his light into the shadows. The light picked
up Smith's retreating figure. "Get out of my mind!" Blake shouted. "Do
you hear me? Get out of my mind!"
Laughter danced in the darkness, silence ensued. Turning back toward
the window, Blake saw that Blake Past and Deirdre Yesterday were
leaving the living room. He watched them come out the front door, walk
around the corner of the house and start down a starlit garden path.
Forsaking Sabrina's trail, he followed them along the path, the Erinyes
at his heels, and watched them sit down on a little white bench beside
a rose-riotous trellis. As he watched, Blake Past broke one of the
roses free and pinned it in Deirdre's cupreous hair.
Blake Present plunged away from the moment and picked up Sabrina's
trail again. _Why did I sit there beside her?_ he demanded silently
of the remembered stars. _Sit there beside her like her lover when
the roses were in bloom? Father-protector--father-fool! I slept with
her mistress, and I would have been her Naoise! Within earshot of her
conched ear I lay with her black whore-mother, and when the satyr in me
was replete I stepped over her thin child's body and ran away!_
Behind him in the night, the Erinyes hissed and murmured to each other
gloatingly.
* * * * *
Sabrina's trail had been erratic before. Now it became even more so.
It approached this boundary and that, only to veer off in another
direction. Sometimes it doubled back upon itself, and each time
Blake was able to cut down on her lead. He should have been elated.
Strangely, however, he was not. Instead, a feeling of uneasiness
afflicted him, increasing as the distance between them shrank.
At length, after detouring around an impassable memory-image of deep
space, the trail extended into what at first appeared to be a vast
woodland park. It was not a park, though. It was a Dubhe 4 rubber
plantation. Blake groaned. Did he have to relive this sequence too?
Apparently he did. Sabrina's footprints were deep and undeniable in
the soft earth. They pointed unerringly in the remembered direction.
Had she discovered that he was following her? Was she deliberately
torturing him by making him back-track along a mental trail that he
wanted desperately to avoid? It would certainly seem so.
He forced himself to move forward among the gray ghosts of trees. He
crossed a shallow, scum-covered stream, leaping from rock to rock, and
afterward climbed a hill. Hearing a loud splash behind him, he turned
and looked back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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