Uptown Local and Other Interventions (30 page)

They exchanged skeptical glances. “We’ve been to New York,” Kit said. “And in this weather, the subway is the pits.”

“You’ve been to
a
New York,” Tom said.

Nita and Kit looked at him oddly. Tom went rummaging through his top desk drawer, shut it, and, muttering, opened the next one down, a deeper one. “No, I’m not speaking figuratively. There’s more than one universe, you know. The comic book writers have known it for years, and now the physicists are finally agreeing with them. Took them long enough. More than one universe; therefore, more than one New York. You have subway fare?”

“Who needs to go through the turnstiles?” Nita said. “We can teleport in and just sink down through the sidewalk. Or walk through the walls.”

“Shame on you,” Tom said, sounding a touch severe. “You want the universe to die early? Then don’t rip off energy. Wizards are for slowing down the energy running out of the universe, or for putting some extra back in—not for making everything run out of steam sooner. You use a system, pay for what you use. That’ll be three bucks.”

Taken aback, Nita and Kit fished around for change, while Tom dug deeper in the drawer, turning over papers. Annie came over, looking interested, and put her head in the drawer. “No cookies for you,” Tom said, rummaging. “Get out of here.
Look
at this mess,” he said, resigned, coming up with a double handful of bizarrely assorted stuff and dropping it on the desk beside the computer.

“Wow,” Nita said, taking the six quarters Kit handed her and then reaching out to take something hanging by a thin chain from the assortment of crumpled papers, dead batteries, credit card receipts, old check registers, and ballpoint pens run dry. On the chain was a shiny metal fish charm, the kind with a jointed body that moves a little when you bend it.

“Like it?” Tom said.

“Yeah!”

“Take it. Carl got it out of a gumball machine. He gets so bored in the supermarket... Besides, it’s as good a key as any.”

“Key?”

“Aha,” Tom said, pouncing on something in the drawer. “Here.” He held out his hand for the money. Nita passed him twelve quarters; Tom passed her two subway tokens. When she saw them she almost dropped them. In her hand they glowed as if they were red-hot, but they felt cold as ice.

“The subway system doesn’t take tokens anymore,” Kit said.

“It’ll take these,” Tom said. “You can use them as many times as you need them. They have the transfer function built in. Just give them to someone else when you’re ready to come home. Keys like that”—and he gestured at the little metal fish Nita held—“will influence where the trains take you. So will preferences that aren’t physically embodied. Watch what you think while you’re riding. And watch what you’re carrying. Anything else you need?”

“Clearer instructions,” Kit said, giving the fish a cockeyed look.

“Get on a train,” Tom said. “Ride until you feel like getting off. Then have a look at where you’ve wound up. When you’re tired of it, catch another train.
No
time traveling,” he said, looking severely from one of them to the other. “If you change history, you may not have a home left to come back to. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Which train should we take?”

“I am
not
going to tell you everything,” Tom said with dignity, and turned back to his computer. Nita and Kit grinned at each other and headed out of the house.

“Speak to strangers,” Tom said to their backs, pounding at the keyboard and not turning around.

*

They did teleport into the city—straight to Grand
Central worldgate, the one hidden at the end of the food
hall by the Lexington Avenue Local entrance; and no one  saw them (apparently) step straight out of a soda cooler, because almost no one in New York sees anything that doesn’t speak to them first. Nita paused only long enough to buy a bag of Wise potato chips, her favorite, from the nearby deli stand, and then she and Kit headed around the corner, toward the Lexington Avenue Local entrance.

“Get your face out of the bag for a moment,” Kit muttered as they went down the steep stairs to the turnstiles. “Where’re the tokens?”

“Here.” She gave him one.

“Euuw. You got gunk on it!”

“You should talk? The Mud King of Nassau County?” Nita snickered at Kit’s back as he went through the turnstile ahead of her, onto the crowded platform. She slipped her token into the machine, saw that it somehow fit, and went after him. “After that last ride down Dead Man’s Hill, I thought your mom was going to—
Oh.”

She stopped dead, staring at her hand. The token was in it again.

“Come on, kid, move it,” said some weary New Yorkish voice behind her. Nita hurriedly slipped over to one side, where Kit was looking with as much surprise at his own hand. “It’s back,” he said. “And it’s still got gunk.”

“No pleasing some people,” Nita said. She pocketed her token and headed down the platform.

There were a lot of people standing around; evidently the Number Six train was running late again. Nita picked a spot about halfway down the length of the platform, next to a young guy with a boom box, and spent a cheerful few minutes bopping to the music and ignoring the interested or disinterested looks of the people around her. Kit worked his way up the platform reading subway posters, and after a little while, at the rumbling sound of a train coming, he came back to Nita and said, “That ‘unicorn’ is a goat.”

“Huh? Oh, the Ringling Brothers one. Yeah, it’s pitiful—“ Anything else Nita would have said was lost in the scream and rumble of the train coming into the station. It was covered with graffiti; but as it slowed, Nita began noticing something odd about it. The train stopped, and the doors opened, and Nita stood there for a second and let the other people brush past her. Someone had done the Mona Lisa on the side of the train. And there was a square of Marilyn Monroe heads, in Andy Warhol’s style; and one of Diirer’s floppy-eared rabbits; and the Dutch Masters. ... The next car was completely covered (except for the windows) with a giant-sized version of van Gogh’s
Starry Night.

Nita stared at Kit. Kit stared back. And all around them people shouldered their way into the train as if they saw nothing unusual at all.

“Fifty-first Street next; watch the closing doors,” said the bored voice of the conductor over the loudspeaker, and Kit and Nita slipped into the train just as the doors were shutting. They grabbed a pole and hung on as the train did its traditional violent lurching start.

“Fifty-first?” Kit said, or rather shouted, over the rising clamor.

Nita shrugged and nodded.

The ride and the people on the train were perfectly normal: working people in jeans and T-shirts; joggers in warm-up suits heading uptown; some kids dressed very punk, one with striped blue-and-silver hair that Nita immediately began to envy; oblivious businessmen in suits and ties, each using one hand to read papers folded the long way and the other to hang on to a strap. “Fifty-first Street,” said the conductor, and the train began to slow.

Nita swung around her pole and braced herself against the sides of the door as the train screeched and jerked to a stop. She stepped out cautiously and was almost trampled by a little troop of incoming businesswomen in jackets and skirts and jogging shoes. Kit pulled her aside, out of the way, and they looked around them at the little station. There were all the usual things one expects to see—cracked, stained wall tile; a floor well stained with blots of bubble gum; peeling paint on the rails of the stairs going up toward street level; a subway map much worn at the Fifty-first Street stop from being touched a million times; beside it, a poster of the Eyewitness News Team, all wearing mustaches, even the women. Behind Kit and Nita, the train pulled out, thundering. Its last car was decorated with a wrap-around mural version of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

“Come on,” Kit said, and headed up the stairs and out the swinging gate beside the turnstiles. Together they headed up the next flight of stairs, which led to the street. Kit looked up at the darkish sky at the top of the stairs and said something vulgar in Spanish. “Great, it’s gonna rain...”

And he trailed off as Nita slipped ahead of him and put her hand out to something coming through the rails of the subway kiosk, from above ground level: flowers—a branch of dogwood, and on the other side some curling vines of cabbage rose. She glanced up and found that the darkness had nothing to do with rain. Trees hemmed the kiosk in. There was no sidewalk, no street... just the trees, immense and old, making their own twilight under a cloud-streaked sunset sky. That by itself would have been quite enough to astonish her; but then she noticed the clusters of tiny stucco houses clinging to several of the tree trunks like an architecturally minded fungus. And through the air, slipping among the trees as if among a stand of underwater weed, came swimming a placid school of smallmouth bass, silver-scaled except where the sunset struck through the trees and plated them with sliding gold.

Nita fingered Tom’s toy fish on its chain, her “key,” while behind her Kit goggled at the bass. Several of them goggled back briefly, making fish faces, and then swam on. So it was true after all, she thought. “You believe this?” she said aloud.

“This
is NewYork??”

Nita looked across at the little houses and saw curtains being hastily pulled behind windows in several of them. “Not ours, that’s for sure,” she said. “Come on, let’s try somewhere else. We’re freaking the neighbors.”

She turned and went back down the stairs. Cool iron-smelling air breathed up past them, and there was a faint rumbling down there, the sound and wind of another train pulling in. Nita felt in her pocket for the token, found it, put it in the turnstile, bumped through; then the token was in her hand again, and Kit came through behind her, holding a white rose in one hand, sucking a finger of the other where the rose had thorned him. The train roared in.

This one was old, one of the ancient thirties trains still pressed into service during peak periods, with enameled poles and straps made of real leather. It had graffiti on the outside, too, of the usual spray-can sort, but the lettering was so strange that Nita wondered whether delinquent Martians had been sneaking over the barbed wire of the Bronx train yards to tag the trains. The cheerful bunch of Hispanic kids clustered by the front window of the head car, and all the other commuters inside, reading the Post or gazing out the windows, seemed not to notice, or care.... “Fifty-ninth Street next,” said the conductor over the ancient, staticky loudspeaker.

“Bloomingdale’s?” Nita said.

“Why not?”

They got off, passed without comment a well-dressed man banging fruitlessly at a jammed turnstile, and went up the stairs to the street. At least there was a street this time—the intersection of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-ninth—and Bloomingdale’s was in its usual spot, but there all resemblance to the place where Nita’s dad liked to shop abruptly ceased. The street in front of Bloomie’s was filled with horse-drawn hansom cabs of all sizes and descriptions, and on the sidewalks strolled stylish ladies in long dresses with bustles, and men in what looked like tuxedos. Evening was coming on: a lamplighter went by with the long pole used to light the gaslights in the street. But down Lexington Avenue a traffic light turned red, and across Fifty-ninth, several people were browsing in the window of an electronics shop, looking at DVD players  and entertainment centers....

“Look at that,” Kit whispered. Nita looked up at the source of the ratchety sound that had attracted his attention. Dodging among the skyscrapers, in a blur of brass-and-glass dragonfly wings, came something like a helicopter ... but noisier, less graceful, and far more ornate and bizarre. It darted between two tall office towers, heading for the broad upright of the MetLife Building, and sank out of sight.

“Ornithopter,” Kit said. “Da Vinci did a design for one once.”

Nita looked at Kit curiously. “What have you got in your pockets?”

“Huh? Oh—“ He went through them, coming up with a plastic key ring, some Dentyne, and some loose change, one piece of which was abnormally large. “What’s that?” said Nita.

“Oh, it’s a shilling. English. My dad gave it to me; he was cleaning out his drawers...” Kit paused and looked toward Madison Avenue. A hotel had twin flagpoles sticking out from it, and a soft evening breeze slipped down the avenue and rolled the flags out on the air. They were both the Union Jack.

“Huh,” Nita said. “This New York is still a colony...”

“C’mon,” Kit said, and went back down the subway. “Let’s see what else we can come up with.”

“Watch what you think, Tom said.”

“So watch me. I’m thinking.”

Air rushed up around them again as they went down the stairs, but there was little sound. This was surprising, but only until the train—this one sleek, bare silver—came hurtling into the station without bothering to touch the track with anything, including wheels. It had none. It stopped with the silent abruptness of a vehicle using either artificial gravity or an inertialess drive as a motive force. It had no doors. What it did have were places where its walls suddenly stopped being. Out of these came assorted businesspeople, some schoolkids with book bags, and a mumbling bag lady. “Sixty-eighth Street next,” said the train in a dulcet voice like someone announcing the time over the phone, “watch the closing dilations.”

They got in and for the first time in their lives had a subway ride that did not require hanging on to anything; except for stanchions and ancient lightbulbs flashing past, and the whoosh of wind, they might have been standing still. Then, flick! they
were
standing still, and the clean new tile of the Sixty-eighth Street station was spread out in front of them. Kit led the way up the stairs with a concentrating look on his face.

At first look around, on street level, Nita thought he had blown it. All she saw were the usual buildings and stores, the heart of Hunter College—and then she blinked. When had Hunter’s buildings ever been surrounded by so many trees, a little forest of them?—and when had those buildings ever been such a mass of spires and stained glass and flying buttresses? Gargoyles grinned down everywhere; even the 7-Eleven a little way down Lexington had become a lovely thing, all diamond-paned glass and half-timbered walls, with a roof that was actually thatched. In and out of ornate doorways people passed, dressed in rich clothes: furs and velvets, cloaks, sumptuous academic robes. Gems and gold glittered on passersby in the warm afternoon sunlight. And were those policemen, walking along and chatting calmly in knightly surcoats of night blue velvet and silver, with long, bright swords hanging at their hips? Nita opened her mouth, looking up at the white towers of Hunter, and then shut it again, as wheeling overhead she saw the dragon go by, glittering, black winged, and immense.