Walter Jon Williams - The Green Leopard Plague

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The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams
Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the
overhanging banyan tree.
The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew
purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a
penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising
sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth
that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.
The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and
walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and
her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the
channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.
She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her
bare skin, and then pushed off and dove head-first into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool
impact and a rush of bubbles.
Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.
***
After her hunt, the mermaid–her name was Michelle–cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral
above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting
patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the
roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.
The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away
the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like
mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and
irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with
no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-
edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.
Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long
nylon line. She tucked her wings away–they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on
the undersides were delicate–and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a
hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-
dappled forest canopy.
She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.
During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh
bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea,
where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw,
enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on
her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other
for later.
By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s
bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing
tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school
of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.
It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope
walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took
her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.
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There were several journalists requesting interviews–the legend of the lonely mermaid was
spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There
was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw
a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.
Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his
mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a
sib who was a famous astronaut, a McEldowny Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired
wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. A couple of years ago, Michelle had attended a series
of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being,
strictly speaking, biology.
He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered
a good thing. "I have a research project for you, if you’re free," the recording said. "It
shouldn’t take too much effort."
Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no
notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she
asked.
Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.
Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-
haired wife Katrin.
"Michelle!" Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who’d called without turning around.
"Good!" He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for <concern>. "I understand you’ve
suffered a loss," he said.
"Yes," she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.
"And the young man–?"
"Doesn’t remember."
Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.
Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. "Are you all right?" he asked.
Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. "I’m getting better." Which was probably true.
"I see you’re not an ape any more."
"I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that." And welcome isolation.
"Is there any way we can make things easier for you?"
She put on a hopeful expression. "You said something about a job?"
"Yes." He seemed relieved not to have to probe further–he’d had a real-death in his own family,
Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of
that.
"I’m working on a biography of Terzian," Davout said.
" . . . And his Age?" Michelle finished.
"And his Legacy." Davout smiled. "There’s a three-week period in his life where he–well, he drops
right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went–and who he was with, if anyone."
Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by
Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.
"It’s a critical time for him," Davout went on. "He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just
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died–realdeath, remember–and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my
sympathies." He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a
vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. "But my problem is that when he resurfaces,
everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai
conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the
paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory."
Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly impressed>. "How have you tried to locate him?"
"Credit card records–they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in
Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash."
"He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?" Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on
it. "Did you try passport records?"
<No luck.> "But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport
when crossing a border."
"Cash machines?"
"Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference."
The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. "I guess you need me, all right."
<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. "How much would it cost me?"
Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.
Davout frowned. "Sounds all right," he said.
Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike.
"I’ll get busy, then."
Davout looked grateful. "You’ll be able to get on it right away?"
"Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as
possible, especially from around that period of time."
"I have them ready."
"Send away."
An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. <Thanks> she flashed. "I’ll let you know
as soon as I find anything."
At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a
profitable sideline for her. People–usually people connected with academe in one way or
another–hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in
this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do
themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered
worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work–it gave her interesting
sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.
Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very
good at this particular art.
Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well:
Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in
his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body
that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.
The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm
around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who
had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and,
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above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the
table were stowed–temporarily, Michelle assumed–a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the
little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The
opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a
flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There
was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the
picture en route from one place to another.
Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of
Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came
across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous
thinker.
Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked
the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if
he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize
how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy
with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent.
In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s
body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and
curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share
some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.
The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into
the electronic world.
A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded
pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the
garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards,
wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of
security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into
electrons and made available to the universe at large.
A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War–none of it had seemed worth
targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.
What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his
weeks of absence–Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule–there would have been someone with a camera. In stills
of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers
playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that
figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar
mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district–Michelle had
found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.
Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and
stretched–stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles
trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.
Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d
saved till last.
"I don’t understand," he said. "Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!"
His brown eyes were a little wild.
"Don’t you understand?" he cried. "I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!"
Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the
inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark,
shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet:
and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared
kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The
kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient
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double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher
was airborne again.
Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each
over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid across them, withdrawing the huge siphons
as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot
of colors: purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in a eye-boggling pattern.
Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked
up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake
with the sea.
Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were
made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the
ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of
life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors: even now, after all
this time, new species were being described.
During the months Michelle had spent in the islands, she thought she’d discovered two undescribed
species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with
scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka dots, that had
undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-
knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the
appropriate authorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate
version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.
The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull
her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel
turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant
pink soft corals toward the light.
Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.
The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves,
and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the
tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s
distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.
Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away–Torbiong might be fishing, and
sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle
could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.
"I brought you supplies," he said.
"Thanks." Michelle said as she wiped a rain of sea water from her face.
Torbiong was over two hundred years old, and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes
away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned,
unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he
aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from
hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent
most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and
Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their
researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring
supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.
His boat was ten meters long and featured a waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven
pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the
brilliant yellow of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were decorated with grotesque carved
faces, and dozens of white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden statues of the
kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.
Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae, flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears,
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radar, and a satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could command the boat from an
elaborately carved throne of breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls, radio,
audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio speakers, a depth finder, a satellite
navigation relay, and radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy were whistles
tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing noise when the boat was at speed.
Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving,
screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset–he
normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At
night, she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his
skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.
He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.
"You’re going to make yourself deaf," Michelle said.
Torbiong grinned. "Love that music. Gets the blood moving."
Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.
"I saw that boy of yours on the news," Torbiong said. "He’s making you famous."
"I don’t want to be famous."
"He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him."
"He’s dead," Michelle said.
Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. "That’s a matter of opinion."
"Watch your head," said Michelle.
Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped
over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to
haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang,
Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her
rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings
and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.
Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last
several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and
Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go
with them. Michelle thanked him.
"Most tourists want corn chips or something," Torbiong said pointedly.
"I’m not a tourist." Michelle said. "I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap–I’ve been hunting
smaller game." She held out the specimen bag, still dripping sea water.
Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. "I got some chai and a
chersuuch today," he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.
"Good fishing."
"Trolling." With a shrug. He looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. "I’ve got some calls
from reporters," he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. "I always make sure to send
them tourist literature."
"I’m sure they enjoy reading it."
Torbiong’s grin widened. "You get lonely, now," he said, "you come visit the family. We’ll give
you a home-cooked meal."
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She smiled. "Thanks."
They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an
eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and
groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck,
and checked the progress of her search spiders.
There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished
she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.
The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well focused tourist video from
July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of
Dante, also not in focus, gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the
camera panned across him, he stood with his back to the camera, but turned to the right, one leg
turned out as he scowled down at the ground–the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-
shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned that there was a 78 percent chance that the
man was Terzian.
Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software, decided the chances
of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95 percent.
So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the
video, but then the day was rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.
And his wife had died, of course.
Now that Michelle had a date and a place she refined the instructions from her search spiders to
seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from
there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.
If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed.
The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50
percent chance of Terzian’s being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced
the chance to something near zero.
Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image–Paris, June 26, 13:41:44
hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of Euros and vanished.
<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.
The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame–no doubt this time that it was
him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman
huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought
of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.
Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out
on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.
And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the
piping voice of Pan.
Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the
sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had
been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.
"I’m sorry," he said in French. "But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game
any more."
His silent audience watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture
room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.
Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on
Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-
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contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s "the self does not exist" and Rorty’s "I don’t care," the
stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience,
perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned
him for his audacity.
Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the
sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Light, its every cobblestone a
monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading
to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a
footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?
I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?
I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his
Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.
He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of
getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August,
after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters
of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.
He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.
You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and
you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if that isn’t a command to be
joyful, what is?
It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary
surprise.
When Terzian had been a child his parents–both university professors–had first taken him to
Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band,
Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with
impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.
Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the
blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now
they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place
Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-
flavored medley of old Abba songs.
Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their
guitars.
The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been
excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.
Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And–for God’s sake–was that band now playing Oasis? Those
chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like "Wonderwall." "Wonderwall" on Spanish guitars,
reed flutes, and a mandolin!
Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not
with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer
against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was
stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught
his attention.
The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either
side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.
Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.
There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Wal...iams%20-%20The%20Green%20Leopard%20Plague.txt (8 of 40) [10/16/2004 5:38:27 PM]
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Walter%20Jon%20Williams%20-%20The%20Green%20Leopard%20Plague.txtTheGreenLeopardPlaguebyWalterJonWilliamsKickingherlegsoutovertheocean,thelonelymermaidgazedatthehorizonfromherperchintheoverhangingbanyantree.Theairwasabsolutelystillandfilledwiththescentofnig...

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