Strange music was playing in a round hall, thirty or forty meters across, with a ceiling maybe five meters high. The turquoise floor gleamed with reflected light. Walls of blue marble, dotted with a hundred little lamps, formed an oriental pattern. On the far side of the hall, a steep, chrome-glittering staircase led up.
«Scarlatina number one-forty-one» popped into my head.
What was that? Where from?
Some inexplicable rush of euphoria pushed me toward the staircase. My legs carried me up. On the second floor I found a pale pink floor, lilac walls scattered with lamps. Everything twice the size.
I flew through both the hall and the staircase in no time. Climbed to the third floor and was stunned. Found myself in a purple space with dirt instead of a floor: gravel, rubble, boulders. The walls were papered with photo murals of a cosmic landscape that looked familiar. Right. This was the landscape I’d seen meeting Anton. Uncannily accurate, hyperrealistic, missing only the sound design of a distant artillery barrage.
A faint buzzing reached my ears. From behind a boulder painted on the far wall, a roofless car shot out. The insect-like buzz turned into the roar of an engine and the clatter of a transmission. I froze in place.
Ah… Uh… What was that?
The car, something like an old «Volga» with its roof sawed off, pulled up beside me. Behind the wheel sat a man, vaguely familiar. So vaguely that I couldn’t place which life I’d seen him in — childhood, school, college, or already here.
Where, though? Got it!
He’d been riding the metro too.
The driver waved a hand:
— Hey, kid. Seen the redhead? Wandering around here without panties.
— No, — I lied, for no clear reason.
— Damn it! Where is that woman? — the driver waved his hand again. His look was frantic: darting across the dashboard, over me, the side mirrors, the walls, up to the ceiling, and back down to the gearshift.
The driver was wound up tight, like a coiled spring about to snap loose like a bird taking flight. I instinctively took a step back. The car, throwing up clouds of dust, tore off toward the wall where my own path had started.
Now what?
I couldn’t make sense of anything. Strange place, strange people, strange situations, and me, homeless, unwanted, understanding nothing. What to do? Where to go? Toward what, and why?
Here’s a guy who got a car, looking for a woman, a spitting image of Travis Bickle. Why the hell had I told him I hadn’t seen her? Could’ve said something like: «Sure did. Head to the wall, go down three floors, get out of the sphere, and walk toward the rocks. A couple kilometers on, you’ll find your redhead. Wandering around in a hip wrap, and maybe without panties.»
Madness!
I looked up at the sky… no, at the ceiling… or whatever it was. Clouds drifted off into the distance, flowing around… a staircase. Right. A ladder stood against the wall, leading straight up into the clouds, past them. I jumped up and, along a red carpet runner that had appeared out of nowhere in this purple domain, ran for the ladder.
Climbing up twenty meters, I studied the thick mist streaming past and a hatch overhead. Push it open, or climb back down? I was scared and curious both.
I pushed the hatch. Too hard. It flew open, weightless, off to the side. I stuck my head through the opening and froze, having landed straight in a fairy tale.
