The Bronze King Read Online Free PDF Page A

are you?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “We’ll find out how that works after a while, though.”
    â€œWell, what am I, um, supposed to do now?”
    â€œWe got to figure that out. What we start with is, I need your help.”
    News to me. I thought I’d been the one who wished for help. I said, “Help with what?”
    â€œWell, you got a kraken here.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œA kraken.”
    He’d offered me a cigarette, he was sitting here talking with me like a real person, and he knew my Granny Gran. Looking sideways at him so as not to seem to be staring, I could see he wasn’t nearly as old as Granny Gran, but he was old, all right, old enough to be a friend of hers. You know how grown-ups are pretty much just grown-ups, meaning not young, whatever their age, when you first look at them? People in a class with your mom, for instance. But then there are the grown-ups who are old people, which I think means they get to the point where they don’t bother trying to pretend they’re young anymore, so you just take them as they are or leave them, which is a great relief. Usually they have gray hair and they stand up a little more slowly than regular grown-ups, that kind of thing. I decided the violinist was one of those.
    That meant to me that, with him, it was okay not to know everything. He wouldn’t look down on me for it, the way grown-ups do sometimes for that kind of thing, putting you down for being too young.
    So I said, “What’s a kraken?”
    He rubbed at the side of his neck. “Okay. It’s a negative interstitial vortex with a big appetite, and it’s going to try and eat up your world if we don’t stop it.”
    â€œWhoa,” I said, breathless. “Some kind of a monster?”
    â€œYah,” he said, nodding and blowing smoke.
    I looked kind of wildly around me, checking to make sure the park was still there. The skinny boy in chinos was still sitting there, picking at the black rock with a pencil and glancing up in our direction and away again, fast. I wondered if he was some kind of a scout for the Princes, deliberately out of uniform so I wouldn’t recognize him.
    The violinist must have noticed me looking. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He’s all right.”
    â€œYou know him?” I said.
    â€œNo. But he’s all right.”
    â€œWhat does a kraken look like?” I said, keeping my voice down.
    â€œDepends. It hasn’t formed up here yet, physically. But it will, if it can get in. It’s already found a place where your defenses are so weak that it can break through pretty soon.”
    â€œI don’t get it,” I said.
    â€œYou got a slip someplace in the system, and this kraken that’s been spinning out there no place for a long time sees a chance to break into a nice warm world and eat it up. It happens sometimes. People get a little careless, they don’t clean up after their work just right, and you get a fault and a kraken digging at it.
    â€œYour own people that knew about these things left all kinds of protection, special barriers and guardians to keep out something like a kraken. You got the pyramids, the great kiva at Chaco Canyon, big ones like that; and then lots of smaller ones. Only when people get into this mechanistic stage you’re in right now, they start moving things, tearing them down, breaking them to pieces to make room for something new without knowing what they’re doing. It’s a risky time for anybody.
    â€œYou make enough mistakes, you can weaken the system. You bulldoze this ancient graveyard, you close down that old theater nobody cares about, you rip out a special grove of trees to put in some tract housing—pretty soon you got weakness where you need to have strength.
    â€œNow the kraken is doing its own moving, getting the way completely clear to come in here and chew it all