Fantastic Metropolis

“Blake? You were supposed—that is—I thought you would come alone.”

Still Blake said nothing. A breeze lilted through the night, hurrying the grass blade by blade before it, like a long wave rolling endlessly to shore. In the windows of the nearby houses, the liquid crystal phantoms gyrated and threw out grasping fingers. Fireflies carved hieroglyphs in the air, flickering trails that burned with strange significance. The air smelled of oil and polished steel.

The two men paused where he stood before his open door. The breeze seized the plastic jug and tumbled it away.

“What is it?” Hollis said. “Blake?”

“Shall we step inside?” the stranger said, his voice reedy and passionless, with a core of iron.

They stepped in. None of them bothered to shut the door. The living room was an alien place to Hollis. He recognized nothing about it. The night had followed them in.

“Blake,” Hollis whispered and the word died on his lips. It trailed into the night, dissipating, remote as the cry of a hunted beast across a moonlit hill.

But stalwart Blake said nothing.

Hollis drifted away from the two men, the thin stranger and the old friend—his only friend—become a stranger now, silhouetted against the moonlight in his wide-standing door.

“What do you want?” Hollis said.

“Are you Raymond Hollis?”

“I should be asking who you are. What gives you the right to come in here like this? Blake—”

The thin stranger looked at Blake. “Is this the man?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Hollis, if you’ll come with us.”

Hollis did not move. He stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the liquid crystal walls, their surfaces silvery and inert.

“Where? Why?”

“Mr. Hollis, please.”

“Why?”

“What is the First Principle, Mr. Hollis?”

Hollis had another flash from his childhood, his rote recital of the principles in a chill and shining classroom. But the words would not come to his lips.

Quietly, as if explaining something to a recalcitrant child, the thin man said: “Democracy, Mr. Hollis, that is the First Principle. And democracy means always having the right to choose.”

“But I haven’t…”

“How have you passed your nights these last years?”

“I—writing. Blake, please...”

But Blake’s silent shade was retreating down the hall, toward the study.

“Writing, Mr. Hollis?”

“Writing—just writing.”

“And what did you write?”

“A story, a novel—”

“In that story—that novel—who decides what happens, Mr. Hollis? Who decides how things come out?”