(I remember that, too. “Tripwire.” A word I’d never heard before he used it. Why did he use that word? It fascinated me. While teaching at Blythe, I used the term in connection with the Silence. Had the Silence been caused by some kind of triggering of a “tripwire,” a set of circumstances under which the gray caps thought they could activate their Machine successfully? If so, what particular stimuli might have come into play? Could we predict when another such attempt might be made? And yet, even after the most minute study of ancient almanacs, historical accounts, the works of a number of statisticians such as Marmy Gort, and anything else we could lay our hands on, I still could not divine those finite, measurable values that might have created the ideal conditions. I concluded that the gray caps’ extraordinary ability to collect information, coupled with their additional spore-based senses, made it unlikely that we would ever be able to know. This did not stop me from continuing to try. Or continuing to ask the most important question: why build a Machine? And what—exactly—did it do?)
We were to find out during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid that year just what happened when Ambergris collectively sprung a tripwire. For the bad Festival was like the antithesis of the Silence, sent to convince us that any semblance of law in the city was illusory, that it could not truly exist, whether we thought it resided in the palm of an obese, elderly Hoegbotton, a thin, ancient Frankwrithe, or the wizened visage of a Kalif none of us had ever seen.
* * *
The night of the Festival, the sun set red over the River Moth. Most of the crepe paper lanterns that people had set out had already been crushed by rubble or by the motored vehicles of opposing forces. The Kalif’s men had stepped up their bombardment of the city from without. They made no pretense anymore of aiming at anything in particular, their bombs as likely to crack open a hospital ward as a Hoegbotton sentry post. Really, it was as random as a heart attack. Why worry about what you cannot defend against? So we walked the streets as calmly as we had before the war, when we hadn’t been hunkered down against threats like a fungal bullet to the brain from some trigger-happy F&L recruit.
No, gunfire couldn’t get to me. What terrified me as I looked out from my apartment at dusk was the proliferation of red flags.
On the way back from our journalistic assignments that day, before we turned in our now infamous “The Kalif Yearns for Every Ambergrisian’s Head” article, the flags of the gray caps had appeared in multitudes—rhapsodies of red that seemed, like the ever-present fungus, always on the verge of forming some pattern, some message, only to fall apart into chaos again.
As we approached Lacond’s offices in the late afternoon, the wind picked up. It rattled the gravel on side streets. It brought with it a strange premature twilight, and a smell that none could identify. Was it a smell come up off the river? It seemed bitter and pleasant, sharp and vague, all at once.
The light, as Martin Lake might have said, had become different in Ambergris.
We left Lacond’s offices tired and ready for rest, Duncan to his and Mary’s apartment, me to my own place much farther down Albumuth Boulevard in the opposite direction. (Not even Lacond could demand we cover the Festival, not that year. The Kalif’s troops were an unknown factor—they made us nervous, as had the uneventful Festival the year before.) Sybel had decided to take me up on my invitation and stay with me that night, just in case. Either we’d celebrate the Festival together or defend ourselves against it. (I left ample protections; I’m sorry they were not enough.) We had all been through many Festivals. We were old pros at it. We knew how to handle it.
I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. (She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.)
Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.
“It’s not good out there,” he said, gasping for breath. “The trees are too still. There’s a silence that’s … like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.”
That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment?
“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just another Festival. Help me with this.”
We pushed a set of cabinets up against the door.
“That should do it,” I said.
Outside, a few dozen drunken youths passed by, shouting as they stumbled their way past.
“Death to the Kalif!” I heard, and a flurry of cursing.
“They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,” Sybel said. “And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.”
“When did you become so cheerful?” I asked.
He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for inventory.
Meanwhile, the gray caps had spores and fungal bombs, and Truff knew what else.
“Do you think we’re much safer in here?” I asked.
Sybel smiled. “No. Not much safer.”
There seemed about him that night more than a hint of self-awareness, mixed with that rarest of commodities for Sybel: contentment. (It was only rare to you because you never saw him in his natural element.)
* * *
We didn’t board up the window until much later, fearful of losing the thread of what was going on outside. The full moon drooped, misshapen and diffuse, in the darkening sky.
Through that smudged fog of glass, we watched rivulets and outcroppings of the Festival walk or run by. Clowns, magicians, stiltmen, and ordinary citizens with no special talent, who had put on bright clothes and gone out because—quite frankly—in the middle of war, how much worse could the Festival possibly make things? True, without the great influx of visitors from other cities there wasn’t nearly the number of people that we had become accustomed to seeing, but Sybel and I still agreed it was a more potent Festival than had been predicted by the so-called experts. (Including us, Janice, in our column in the Broadsheet.)
Then the merrymakers began to trail off. Soon the groups had thinned until it was only one or two people at a time, either drunk and careless, or alert and hurrying quickly to their destinations. Every once in a while, something would explode in the background as the Kalif’s men kept at it. The bright orange flame of the shuddering explosions was oddly reassuring. As long as it stayed far away from us, that is. At least we knew where it was coming from. (Yes, with all the force of His benevolent, if distant, love.)
Sybel and I sat there looking out the window like it was our last view of the world.
“Remember when we used to host parties in abandoned churches on Festival night?” Sybel said. He looked very old then, in that light, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth undeniable.