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 one forty-one» came 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 climbed to the third floor and found myself in a space with bare ground instead of a floor: pebbles, crushed stone, boulders. The walls were papered with photo murals of a cosmic landscape that seemed familiar. Right. This was the landscape I had watched when I met Anton. Very lifelike, hyperrealistic; all it lacked was the cannonade of a distant battle, only a light humming.
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, like a compressed spring ready to spring open as a winged bird. I instinctively took a step back. The car, throwing up clouds of dust, tore off toward the wall where my own path had begun.
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 fellow who got himself a car and is looking for a woman, the spitting image of Travis Bickle. Why had I lied to him that I hadn’t seen her? I could have reported: «Saw her. You need to drive to the wall, go down three floors, step out of the sphere and head for the rocks. A couple of kilometers on you’ll find a red-haired woman. She’s knocking about in a loincloth and possibly without underwear.»
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.
