TONY DANIEL
One of the fastest-rising new stars of the nineties, Tony Daniel grew up in Alabama, lived for a while on Vashon Island in Washington State, and in recent years, in the best tradition of the young bohemian artist, has been restlessly on the move, from Vashon Island to Europe, from Europe to New York City, from New York City to Alabama, and, most recently, back to New York City again. He attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1989, and since then has become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, SF Age, Universe, Full Spectrum, and elsewhere.
Like many writers of his generation, Tony Daniel first made an impression on the field with his short fiction. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 1990, “The Passage of Night Trains,” and followed it up with a long string of well-received stories both there and elsewhere throughout the first few years of the nineties, stories such as “The Careful Man Goes West,” “Sun So Hot I Froze to Death,” “Prism Tree,” “Death of Reason,” “Candle,” “No Love in All of Dwingeloo,” “The Joy of the Sidereal Long-Distance Runner,” “The Robot’s Twilight Companion,” and many others. His story “Life on the Moon” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1996, and won the Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers Award poll. His first novel, Warpath, was released simultaneously in America and England in 1993, and he subsequently won $2,000 and the T. Morris Hackney Award for his as-yet-unpublished mountain-climbing novel Ascension. In 1997, he published a major new novel, Earthling, which has gotten enthusiastic reviews everywhere from Interzone to the New York Times. Coming up is his first short story collection, and he has just sold a pair of novels based on the story you’re about to read, “Grist.” The first one is entitled “Metaplanetary.”
In the complex, compelling, and pyrotechnic novella that follows, he takes us to a bizarre far-future world—peopled with some of the strangest characters you’re ever likely to meet, many of them transhuman, with vast, almost godlike powers and abilities, a world poised on the brink of a war that may destroy it utterly—for a vivid and exotic adventure that revolves around the connections that join people together and, in this strange high-tech
future, sometimes make it difficult to tell where one person ends and another begins … .
“Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even when they come very late still come at the right time.”
—Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”
Standing over all creation, a doubt-ridden priest took a piss.
He shook himself, looked between his feet at the stars, then tabbed his pants closed. He flushed the toilet and centrifugal force took care of the rest.
Andre Sud walked back to his table in the Westway Diner. He padded over the living fire of the plenum, the abyss—all of it—and hardly noticed. Even though this place was special to him, it was really just another cafe with a see-through floor—a window as thin as paper and as hard as diamond. Dime a dozen as they used to say a thousand years ago. The luciferan sign at the entrance said FREE DELIVERY. The sign under it said OPEN 24 HRS. This sign was unlit. The place will close, eventually.
The priest sat down and stirred his black tea. He read the sign, backward, and wondered if the words he spoke when he spoke, sounded anything like English used to. Hard to tell with the grist patch in his head.
Everybody understands one another on a general level, Andre Sud thought. Approximately more or less, they know what you mean.
There was a dull, greasy gleam to the napkin holder. The salt shaker was half-full. The laminated surface of the table was worn through where the plates usually sat. The particle board underneath was soggy. There was free-floating grist that sparkled like mica within the wood: used-to-be-cleaning-grist, entirely shorn from the restaurant’s controlling algorithm and nothing to do but shine. Like the enlightened pilgrim of the Greentree Way. Shorn and brilliant.
And what will you have with that hamburger?
Grist. Nada y grist. Grist y nada.
I am going through a depression, Andre reminded himself. I am even considering leaving the priesthood.
Andre’s pellicle—the microscopic, algorithmic part of him that was spread out in the general vicinity—spoke as if from a long way off.
This happens every winter. And lately with the insomnia. Cut it out with the nada y nada. Everything’s physical, don’t you know.
Except for you, Andre thought back.
He usually thought of his pellicle as a little cloud of algebra symbols that
followed him around like mosquitoes. In actuality, it was normally invisible, of course.
Except for us, the pellicle replied.
All right then. As far as we go. Play a song or something, would you?
After a moment, an oboe piped up in his inner ear. It was an old Greentree hymn—“Ponder Nothing”—that his mother had hummed when he was a kid. Brought up in the faith. The pellicle filtered it through a couple of variations and inversions, but it was always soothing to hear.
There was a way to calculate how many winters the Earth-Mars Diaphany would get in an Earth year, but Andre never checked before he returned to the seminary on his annual retreat, and they always took him by surprise, the winters did. You wake up one day and the light has grown dim.
The café door slid open and Cardinal Filmbuff filled the doorway. He was wide and possessive of the doorframe. He was a big man with a mane of silver hair. He was also space-adapted and white as bone in the face. He wore all black with a lapel pin in the shape of a tree. It was green, of course.
“Father Andre,” said Filmbuff from across the room. His voice sounded like a Met cop’s radio. “May I join you?”
Andre motioned to the seat across from him in the booth. Filmbuff walked over with big steps and sat down hard.
“Isn’t it late for you to be out, Morton?” Andre said. He took a sip of his tea. He’d left the bag in too long and it tasted twiggy.
I was too long at the pissing, thought Andre.
“Tried to call you at the seminary retreat center,” Filmbuff said.
“I’m usually here,” Andre replied. “When I’m not there.”
“Is this place still the seminary student hangout?”
“It is. Like a dog returneth to its own vomit, huh? Or somebody’s vomit.”
A waiter drifted toward them. “Need menus?” he said. “I have to bring them because the tables don’t work.”
“I might want a little something,” Filmbuff replied. “Maybe a lhasi.”
The waiter nodded and went away.
“They still have real people here?” said Filmbuff.
“I don’t think they can afford to recoat the place.”
Filmbuff gazed around. He was like a beacon. “Seems clean enough.”
“I suppose it is,” said Andre. “I think the basic coating still works and that just the complicated grist has broken down.”
“You like it here.”
Andre realized he’d been staring at the swirls in his tea and not making eye contact with his boss. He sat back, smiled at Filmbuff. “Since I came to seminary, Westway Diner has always been my home away from home.” He took a sip of tea. “This is where I got satori, you know.”
“So I’ve heard. It’s rather legendary. You were eating a plate of mashed potatoes.”
“Sweet potatoes, actually. It was a vegetable plate. They give you three choices and I chose sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”
“I never cared for them.”
“That is merely an illusion. Everyone likes them sooner or later.”
Filmbuff guffawed. His great head turned up toward the ceiling and his copper eyes flashed in the brown light. “Andre, we need you back teaching. Or in research.”
“I lack faith.”
“Faith in yourself.”
“It’s the same thing as faith in general, as you well know.”
“You are a very effective scholar and priest to be so racked with doubt. Makes me think I’m missing something.”
“Doubt wouldn’t go with your hair, Morton.”
The waiter came back. “Have you decided?” he said.
“A chocolate lhasi,” Filmbuff replied firmly. “And some faith for Father Andre here.”
The waiter stared for a moment, nonplused. His grist patch hadn’t translated Cardinal Filmbuff’s words, or had reproduced them as nonsense.
The waiter must be from out the Happy Garden Radial, Andre thought. Most of the help was in Seminary Barrel. There’s a trade patois and a thousand long-shifted dialects out that way. Clan-networked LAPs poor as churchmice and no good Broca grist to be had for Barrel wages.
“Iye ftip,” Andre said to the waiter in the Happy Garden patois. “It is a joke.” The waiter smiled uncertainly. “Another shot of hot water for my tea is what I want,” Andre said. The waiter went away looking relieved. Filmbuff’s aquiline presence could be intimidating.
“There is no empirical evidence that you lack faith,” Filmbuff said. It was a pronouncement. “You are as good a priest as there is. We have excellent reports from Triton.”
Linsdale, Andre thought. Traveling monk, indeed. Traveling stool-pigeon was more like it. I’ll give him hell next conclave.
“I’m happy there. I have a nice congregation, and I balance rocks.”
“Yes. You are getting a reputation for that.”
“Triton has the best gravity for it in the solar system.”
“I’ve seen some of your creations on the merci. They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“What happens to them?”
“Oh, they fall,” said Andre, “when you stop paying attention to them.”
The chocolate lhasi came and the waiter set down a self-heating carafe of water for Andre. Filmbuff took a long drag at the straw and finished up half his drink.
“Excellent.” He sat back, sighed, and burped. “Andre, I’ve had a vision.”
“Well, that’s what you do for a living.”
“I saw you.”
“Was I eating at the Westway Diner?”
“You were falling through an infinite sea of stars.”
The carafe bubbled, and Andre poured some water into his cup before it became flat from all the air being boiled out. The hot water and lukewarm tea mingled in thin rivulets. He did not stir.
“You came to rest in the branches of a great tree. Well, you crashed into it, actually, and the branches caught you.”
“Yggdrasil?”
“I don’t think so. This was a different tree. I’ve never seen it before. It is very disturbing because I thought there was only the One Tree. This tree was just as big, though.”
“As big as the World Tree? The Greentree?”
“Just as big. But different.” Filmbuff looked down at the stars beneath their feet. His eyes grew dark and flecked with silver. Space-adapted eyes always took on the color of what they beheld. “Andre, you have no idea how real this was. Is. This is difficult to explain. You know about my other visions, of the coming war?”
“The Burning of the One Tree?”
“Yes.”
“It’s famous in the Way.”
“I don’t care about that. Nobody else is listening. In any case, this vision has placed itself on top of those war visions. Right now, being here with you, this seems like a play to me. A staged play. You. Me. Even the war that’s coming. It’s all a play that is really about that damn Tree. And it won’t let me go.”
“What do you mean, won’t let you go?”
Filmbuff raised his hands, palms up, to cradle an invisible sphere in front of him. He stared into this space as if it were the depths of all creation, and his eyes became set and focused far away. But not glazed over or unaware.
They were so alive and intense that it hurt to look at him. Filmbuff’s physical face vibrated when he was in trance. It was a slight effect, and unnerving even when you were used to it. He was utterly focused, but you couldn’t focus on him. There was too much of him there for the space provided. Or not enough of you.
I am watching chronological quantum transport in the raw, Andre thought. The instantaneous integration of positronic spin information from up-time sifted through the archetypical registers of Filmbuff’s human brain.
And it all comes out as metaphor.
“The Tree is all burnt out now,” Filmbuff said, speaking out of his trance. His words were like stones. “The Burning’s done. But it isn’t char that I’m seeing, no.” He clenched his fists, then opened his palms again. “The old Tree is a shadow. The burnt remains of the One Tree are really only the shadow of the other tree, the new Tree. It’s like a shadow the new Tree casts.”
“Shadow,” Andre heard himself whispering. His own hands were clenched in a kind of sympathetic vibration with Filmbuff.
“We are living in the time of the shadow,” said Filmbuff. He relaxed a bit. “There’s almost a perfect juxtaposition of the two trees. I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my life.”
Filmbuff, for all his histrionics, was not one to overstate his visions for effect. The man who sat across from Andre was only the aspect—the human portion—of a vast collective of personalities. They were all unified by the central being; the man before him was no more a puppet than was his enthalpic computing analog soaking up energy on Mercury, or the nodes of specialized grist spread across
human space decoding variations in anti-particle spins as they made their way backward in time. But he was no longer simply the man who had taught Andre’s Intro to Pastoral Shamanism course at seminary. Ten years ago, the Greentree Way had specifically crafted a large array of personalities to catch a glimpse of the future, and Filmbuff had been assigned to be morphed.
I was on the team that designed him, Andre thought. Of course, that was back when I was a graduate assistant. Before I Walked on the Moon.
“The vision is what’s real.” Filmbuff put the lhasi straw to his mouth and finished the rest of it. Andre wondered where the liquid went inside the man. Didn’t he run on batteries or something? “This is maya, Andre.”
“I believe you, Morton.”
“I talked to Erasmus Kelly about this,” Filmbuff continued. “He took it on the merci to our Interpreter’s Freespace.”
“What did they come up with?”
Filmbuff pushed his empty glass toward Andre. “That there’s new Tree,” he said.
“How the hell could there be a new Tree? The Tree is wired into our DNA like sex and breathing. It may be sex and breathing.”
“How should I know? There’s a new Tree.”
Andre took a sip of his tea. Just right. “So there’s a new Tree,” he said. “What does that have to do with me?”
“We think it has to do with your research.”
“What research? I balance rocks.”
“From before.”
“Before I lost my faith and became an itinerant priest?”
“You were doing brilliant work at the seminary.”
“What? With the time towers? That was a dead end.”
“You understand them better than anyone.”
“Because I don’t try to make any sense of them. Do you think this new Tree has to do with those things?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt everything.”
“The time towers are a bunch of crotchety old LAPs who have disappeared up their own asses.”
“Andre, you know what I am.”
“You’re my boss.”
“Besides that.”
“You’re a manifold. You are a Large Array of Personalities who was specially constructed as a quantum event detector—probably the best in human history. Parts of you stretch across the entire inner solar system, and you have cloud ship outriders. If you say you had a vision of me and this new Tree, then it has to mean something. You’re not making it up. Morton, you see into the future, and there I am.”
“There you are. You are the Way’s expert on time. What do you think this means?”
“What do you want me to tell you? That the new Tree is obviously a further stage in sentient evolution, since the Greentree is us?”
“That’s what Erasmus Kelly and his people think. I need something more subtle from you.”
“All right. It isn’t the time towers that this has to do with.”
“What then?”
“You don’t want to hear this.”
“You’d better tell me anyway.”
“Thaddeus Kaye.”
“Thaddeus Kaye is dead. He killed himself. Something was wrong with him, poor slob.”
“I know you big LAPs like to think so.”
“He was perverted. He killed himself over a woman, wasn’t it?”
“Come on, Morton. A pervert hurts other people. Kaye hurt himself.”
“What does he have to do with anything, anyway?”
“What if he’s not dead? What if he’s just wounded and lost? You understand what kind of being he is, don’t you, Morton?”
“He’s a LAP, just like me.”
“You only see the future, Morton. Thaddeus Kaye can affect the future directly, from the past.”
“So what? We all do that every day of our lives.”
“This is not the same. Instantaneous control of instants. What the merced quantum effect does for space, Thaddeus Kaye can do for time. He prefigures the future. Backward and forward in time. He’s like a rock that has been dropped into a lake.”
“Are you saying he’s God?”
“No. But if your vision is a true one, and I know that it is, then he could very well be the war.”
“Do you mean the reason for the war?”
“Yes, but more than that. Think of it as a wave, Morton. If there’s a crest, there has to be a trough. Thaddeus Kaye is the crest and the war is the trough. He’s something like a physical principle. That’s how his integration process was designed. Not a force, exactly, but he’s been imprinted on a property of time.”
“The Future Principle?”
“All right. Yes. In a way, he is the future. I think he’s still alive.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I didn’t until you told me your vision. What else could it be? Unless aliens are coming.”
“Maybe aliens are coming. They’d have their own Tree. Possibly.”
“Morton, do you see aliens coming in your dreams?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
Filmbuff put his hands over his eyes and lowered his head. “I’ll tell you what I still see,” he said in a low rumble of a voice like far thunder. “I see the burning Greentree. I see it strung with a million bodies, each of them hung by the neck, and all of them burning, too. Until this vision, that was all I was seeing.”
“Did you see any way to avoid it?”
Filmbuff looked up. His eyes were as white as his hands when he spoke. “Once. Not now. The quantum fluctuations have all collapsed down to one big macro reality. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.”
Andre sighed. I believe, he thought. I don’t want to believe, but I do. It’s easy to have faith in destruction.
“I just want to go back to Triton and balance rocks,” he said. “That’s really all that keeps me sane. I love that big old moon.”
Filmbuff pushed his lhasi glass even farther away and slid out of the booth. He stood up with a creaking sound, like vinyl being stretched. “Interesting times,” he spoke to the café. “Illusion or not, that was probably the last good lhasi I’m going to have for quite a while.”
“Uh, Morton?”
“Yes, Father Andre?”
“You have to pay up front. They can’t take it out of your account.”
“Oh my.” The cardinal reached down and slapped the black cloth covering his white legs. He, of course, had no pockets. “I don’t think I have any money with me.”
“Don’t worry,” Andre said. “I’ll pick it up.”
“Would you? I’d hate to have that poor waiter running after me down the street.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“We’ll talk more tomorrow after meditation.” This was not a request.
“We’ll talk more then.”
“Good night, Andre.”
“Night, Morton.”
Filmbuff stalked away, his silver mane trailing behind him as if a wind were blowing through it. Or a solar flare.
Before he left the Westway, he turned, as Andre knew he would, and spoke one last question across the space of the diner.
“You knew Thaddeus Kaye, didn’t you, Father Andre?”
“I knew a man named Ben Kaye. A long time ago,” Andre said, but this was only confirmation of what Filmbuff’s spread-out mind had already told him.
The door slid shut and the Cardinal went out into the night. Andre sipped at his tea.
Eventually the waiter returned. “We close pretty soon,” he said.
“Why do you close so early?” Andre asked.
“It is very late.”
“I remember when this place never closed.”
“I don’t think so. It always closed.”
“Not when I was a student at the seminary.”
“It closed then,” said the waiter. He took a rag from his apron, activated it with a twist, and began to wipe a nearby table.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
“They tell me there’s never been a time when this place didn’t close.”
“Who tells you?”
“People.”
“And you believe them.”
“Why should I believe you? You’re people.” The waiter looked up at Andre, puzzled. “That was a joke,” he said. “I guess it does not translate.”
“Bring me some more tea and then I will go.”
The waiter nodded, then went to get it.
There was music somewhere. Gentle oboe strains. Oh, yes. His pellicle was still playing the hymn.
What do you think?
I think we are going on a quest.
I suppose so.
Do you know where Thaddeus Kaye is?
No, but I have a pretty good idea how to find Ben. And wherever Ben is, Thaddeus Kaye has to be.
Why not tell somebody else how to find him?
Because no one else will do what I do when I find him.
What’s that?
Nothing.
Oh.
When the back-up is done, we’ll be on our way.
The third part of Andre’s multiple personality, the convert, was off-line at the moment getting himself archived and debugged. That was mainly what the retreat was for, since using the Greentree data facilities was free to priests. Doing it on Triton would have cost as much as putting a new roof on his house.
Why don’t they send someone who is stronger in faith than we are?
I don’t know. Send an apostate to net an apostate, I guess.
What god is Thaddeus Kaye apostate from?
Himself.
And for that matter, what about us?
Same thing. Here comes the tea. Will you play that song again?
It was Mother’s favorite.
Do you think it could be that simple? That I became a priest because of that hymn?
Are you asking me?
Just play the music and let me drink my tea. I think the waiter wants us out of here.
“Do you mind if I mop up around you?” the waiter said.
“I’ll be done soon.”
“Take your time, as long as you don’t mind me working.”
“I don’t mind.”
Andre listened to mournful oboe and watched as the waiter sloshed water across the infinite universe, then took a mop to it with a vengeance.
Down in the dark there’s a doe rat I’m after to kill. She’s got thirteen babies and I’m going to bite them, bite them, bite them. I will bite them.
The mulch here smells of dank stupid rats all running running and there’s nowhere farther to run, because this is it, this is the Carbuncle, and now I’m here and this is truly the end of all of it but a rat can’t stand to know that and won’t accept me until they have to believe me. Now they will believe me.
My whiskers against something soft. Old food? No, it’s a dead buck; I scent his Y code, and the body is dead but the code keeps thumping and thumping. This mulch won’t let it drain out and it doesn’t ever want to die. The Carbuncle’s the end of the line, but this code doesn’t know it or knows it and won’t have it. I give it a poke and a bit of rot sticks to my nose and the grist tries to swarm me, but no I don’t think so.
I sniff out and send along my grist, jill ferret grist, and no rat code stands a chance ever, ever. The zombie rat goes rigid when its tough, stringy code—who knows how old, how far-traveled, to finally die here at the End of Everywhere—that code scatters to nonsense in the pit of the ball of nothing my grist wraps it in. Then the grist flocks back to me and the zombie rat thumps no more. No more.
Sometimes having to kill everything is a bit of a distraction. I want that doe and her littles really bad and I need to move on.
Down a hole and into a warren larder. Here there’s pieces of meat and the stink of maggot sluice pooled in the bends between muscles and organs. But the rats have got the meat from Farmer Jan’s Mulmyard, and it’s not quite dead yet, got maggot resistant code, like the buck rat, but not smart enough to know it’s dead, just mean code jaw-latched to a leg or a haunch and won’t dissipate. Mean and won’t die. But I am meaner still.
Oh, I smell her.
I’m coming mamma rat. Where are you going? There’s no going anywhere anymore.
Bomi slinks into the larder and we touch noses. I smell blood on her. She’s got a kill, a bachelor male, by the blood spoor on her.
It’s so warm and wet, Jill. Bomi’s trembling and wound up tight. She’s not the smartest ferret. I love it, love it, and I’m going back to lie in it.
That’s bad. Bad habit.
I don’t care. I killed it; it’s mine.
You do what you want, but it’s your man Bob’s rat.
No it’s mine.
He feeds you, Bomi.
I don’t care.
Go lay up then.
I will.
Without a by-your-leave, Bomi’s gone back to her kill to lay up. I never do that. TB wouldn’t like it, and besides, the killing’s the thing, not the owning. Who wants an old dead rat to lie in when there’s more to bite?
Bomi told me where she’d be because she’s covering for herself when she doesn’t show and Bob starts asking. Bomi’s a stupid ferret and I’m glad she doesn’t belong to TB.
But me—down another hole, deeper, deeper still. It’s half-filled in here. The
doe rat thought she was hiding it, but she left the smell of her as sure as a serial number on a bone. I will bite you, mamma.
Then there’s the dead-end chamber I knew would be. Doe rat’s last hope in all the world. Won’t do her any good. But oh, she’s big. She’s tremendous. Maybe the biggest ever for me.
I am very, very happy.
Doe rat with the babies crowded behind her. Thirteen of them, I count by the squeaks. Sweet naked squeaks. Less than two weeks old, they are. Puss and meat. But I want mamma now.
The doe sniffs me and screams like a bone breaking and she rears big as me. Bigger.
I will bite you.
Come and try, little jill.
I will kill you.
I ate a sack of money in the City Bank and they chased me and cut me to pieces and just left my tail, and—I grew another rat! What will you do to me, jill, that can be so bad? You’d better be afraid of me.
When I kill your babies, I will do it with one bite for each. I won’t hurt them for long.
You won’t kill my babies.
At her.
At her, because there isn’t anything more to say, no more messages to pass back and forth through our grist and scents.
I go for a nipple and she’s fast out of the way, but not fast enough and I have a nub of her flesh in my mouth. Blood let. I chew on her nipple tip. Blood and mamma’s milk.
She comes down on me and bites my back, her long incisors cut through my fur, my skin, like hook needles, and come out at another spot. She’s heavy. She gnaws at me and I can feel her teeth scraping against my backbone. I shake to get her off, and I do, but her teeth rip a gouge out of me.
Cut pretty bad, but she’s off. I back up thinking that she’s going to try to swarm a copy, and I stretch out the grist and there it is, just like I thought, and I intercept it and I kill the thing before it can get to the mulm and reproduce and grow another rat. One rat this big is enough, enough for always.
The doe senses that I’ve killed her outrider, and now she’s more desperate.
This is all there is for you. This is oblivion and ruin and time to stop the scurry.
This is where you’ll die.
She strikes at me again, but I dodge, and—before she can round on me—I snatch a baby rat. It’s dead before it can squeal. I spit out its mangle of bones and meat.
But mamma’s not a dumb rat, no, not dumb at all, and does not fly into a rage over this. But I know she regards me with all the hate a rat can hate, though. If there were any light, I’d see her eyes glowing rancid yellow.
Come on, mamma, before I get another baby.
She goes for a foot and again I dodge, but she catches me in the chest. She raises up, up.
The packed dirt of the ceiling, wham, wham, and her incisors are hooked around my breastbone, damn her, and it holds me to her mouth as fast as a barbed arrowpoint.
Shake and tear, and I’ve never known such pain, such delicious …
I rake at her eyes with a front claw, dig into her belly with my feet. Dig, dig, and I can feel the skin parting, and the fatty underneath parting, and my feet dig deep, deep.
Shake me again and I can only smell my own blood and her spit and then sharp, small pains at my back.
The baby rats. The baby rats are latching onto me, trying to help their mother.
Nothing I can do. Nothing I can do but dig with my rear paws. Dig, dig. I am swimming in her guts. I can feel the give. I can feel the tear. Oh, yes.
Then my breastbone snaps and I fly lose of the doe’s teeth. I land in the babies, and I’m stunned and they crawl over me and nip at my eyes and one of them shreds an ear, but the pain brings me to and I snap the one that bit my ear in half. I go for another. Across the warren cavern, the big doe shuffles. I pull myself up, try to stand on all fours. Can’t.
Baby nips my hind leg. I turn and kill it. Turn back. My front legs collapse. I cannot stand to face the doe, and I hear her coming.
Will I die here?
Oh, this is how I want it! Took the biggest rat in the history of the Met to kill me. Ate a whole bag of money, she did.
She’s coming for me. I can hear her coming for me. She’s so big. I can smell how big she is.
I gather my hind legs beneath me, find a purchase.
This is how I die. I will bite you.
But there’s no answer from her, only the doe’s harsh breathing. The dirt smells of our blood. Dead baby rats all around me.
I am very, very happy.
With a scream, the doe charges me. I wait a moment. Wait.
I pounce, shoot low like an arrow.
I’m through, between her legs. I’m under her. I rise up. I rise up into her shredded belly. I bite! I bite! I bite!
Her whole weight keeps her down on me. I chew. I claw. I smell her heart. I smell the new blood of her heart! I can hear it! I can smell it! I chew and claw my way to it.
I bite.
Oh yes.
The doe begins to kick and scream, to kick and scream, and, as she does, the blood of heart pumps from her and over me, smears over me until my coat is soaked with it, until all the dark world is blood.
After a long time, the doe rat dies. I send out the grist, feebly, but there are no outriders to face, no tries at escape now. She put all that she had into fighting me. She put everything into our battle.
I pull myself out from under the rat. In the corner, I hear the scuffles of the babies. Now that the mamma is dead, they are confused.
I have to bite them. I have to kill them all.
I cannot use my front legs, but I can use my back. I push myself toward them, my belly on the dirt like a snake. I find them all huddled in the farthest corner, piling on one another in their fright. Nowhere to go.
I do what I told the doe I would do. I kill them each with one bite, counting as I go. Three and ten makes thirteen.
And then it’s done and they’re all dead. I’ve killed them all.
So.
There’s only one way out: the way I came. That’s where I go, slinking, crawling, turning this way and that to keep my exposed bone from catching on pebbles and roots. After a while, I start to feel the pain that was staying away while I fought. It’s never been this bad.
I crawl and crawl, I don’t know for how long. If I were to meet another rat, that rat would kill me. But either they’re dead or they’re scared, and I don’t hear or smell any. I crawl to what I think is up, what I hope is up.
And after forever, after so long that all the blood on my coat is dried and starting to flake off like tiny brown leaves, I poke my head out into the air.
TB is there. He’s waited for me.
Gently, gently he pulls me out of the rat hole. Careful, careful he puts me in my sack.
“Jill, I will fix you,” he says.
I know.
“That must have been the Great Mother of rats.”
She was big, so big and mean. She was brave and smart and strong. It was wonderful.
“What did you do?”
I bit her.
“I’ll never see your like again, Jill.”
I killed her, and then I killed all her children.
“Let’s go home, Jill.”
Yes. Back home.
Already in the dim burlap of the sack, and I hear the call of TB’s grist to go to sleep, to get better, and I sigh and curl as best I can into a ball and I am falling away, falling away to dreams where I run along a trail of spattered blood, and the spoor is fresh and I’m chasing rats, and TB is with me close by, and I will bite a rat soon, soon, soon—
Come back, Andre Sud. Your mind is wandering and now you have to concentrate. Faster now. Fast as you can go. Spacetime. Clumps of galaxy clusters. Average cluster. Two-armed spiral.
Yellow star.
Here’s a network of hawsers cabling the inner planets together. Artifact of sentience, some say. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars hung with a shining webwork
across blank space and spreading even into the asteroids. Fifty-mile-thick cables bending down from the heavens, coming in at the poles to fit into enormous universal joints lubricated by the living magma of the planets’ viscera. Torque and undulation. Faster. Somewhere on a flagellating curve between Earth and Mars, the Diaphany, you will find yourself. Closer in. Spinning spherule like a hundred-mile-long bead on a million-mile-long necklace. Come as close as you can.
All along the Mars-Earth Diaphany, Andre saw the preparations for a war like none before. It seemed the entire Met—all the interplanetary cables—had been transformed into a dense fortress that people just happened to live inside. His pod was repeatedly delayed in the pithway as troops went about their movements, and military grist swarmed hither and yon about some task or another. We live in this all-night along the carbon of the cables, Andre thought, within the dark glistening of the corridors where surface speaks to surface in tiny whispers like fingers, and the larger codes, the extirpated skeletons of a billion minds, clack together in a cemetery of logic, shaking hands, continually shaking bony, algorithmic hands and observing strict and necessary protocol for the purposes of destruction.
Amés—he only went by the one name, as if it were a title—was a great one for martial appearances. Napoleon come again, the merci reporters said as a friendly joke. Oh, the reporters were eating this up. There hadn’t been a good war in centuries. People got tired of unremitting democracy, didn’t they? He’d actually heard somebody say that on the merci.
How fun it will be to watch billions die for a little excitement on the merci, Andre thought.
He arrived in Connacht Bolsa in a foul mood, but when he stepped out of his pod, there was the smell of new rain. He had walked a ways from the pod station before he realized what the smell was. There were puddles of water on the ground from the old fashioned street cleaning mechanism Connacht employed. It was still raining in spots—a small rain that fell only an inch or so from the ground. Little clouds scudded along the street like a miniature storm front, washing it clean of the night’s leavings.
Connacht was a suburb radial off Phobos City, the most densely populated segment on the Met. A hundred years ago in the Phobos boom time, Connacht had been the weekend escape for intellectuals, artists, moneyed drug addicts—and the often indistinguishable variety of con-men, mountebanks, and psychic quacksalvers who were their hangers-on. The place was rundown now, and Andre’s pellicle encountered various swarms of nostalgia that passed through the streets like rat packs—only these were bred and fed by the merchants to attract the steady trickle of tourists with pellicular receptors for a lost bohemia.
All they did for Andre was make him think about Molly.
Andre’s convert—the electronic portion of himself—obliged him by dredging up various scenes from his days at seminary. The convert was usually silent, preferring to communicate in suggestive patterns of data—like a conscience gifted with irreducible logic and an infallible memory.
Andre walked along looking at the clouds under his feet, and as he walked his convert projected images into the shape of these clouds, and into the shift and sparkle of the puddled water they left behind.
I have a very sneaky conscience, Andre thought, but he let the images continue.
—Molly Index, Ben Kaye, and Andre at the Westway, in one of their long arguments over aesthetics when they were collaborating on their preliminary thesis. “Knowing, Watching, and Doing: The Triune Aspect of Enlightenment.”
“I want to be ‘Doing!’” Molly mocked-yelled and threw a wadded up piece of paper at Ben.
He caught it, spread it out, and folded it into a paper airplane. “This is the way things have to be,” he said. “I’m ‘Doing.’ You’re ‘Watching.’ And we both know who ‘Knowing’ must be.” They turned to Andre and smiled vulture smiles.
“I don’t know what you think I know, but I don’t know it,” he said, then nearly got an airplane in the eye.
—Molly’s twenty-four-year-old body covered with red Martian sand under the Tharsis beach boardwalk. Her blue eyes open to the sky pink sky. Her nipples like dark stones. Ben a hundred feet away, rising from the gray-green lake water, shaking the spume from his body. Of course he had run and jumped into the lake as soon as they got there. Ben wouldn’t wait for anything.
But Molly chose me. I can’t believe she chose me.
Because I waited for her and dragged her under the boardwalk and kissed her before I could talk myself out of it.
Because I waited for the right moment.
How’s that for Doing?
—Living together as grad students while Molly studied art and he entered into the stations of advanced meditation at seminary.
—Molly leaving him because she would not marry a priest.
You’re going to kill yourself on the moon.
Only this body. I’ll get a new one. It’s being grown right now.
It isn’t right.
This is the Greentree Way. That’s what makes a priest into a true shaman. He knows what it’s like to die and come back.
If you Walk on the Moon, you will know what it’s like to lose a lover.
Molly, the Walk is what I’ve been preparing for these last seven years. You know that.
I can’t bear it. I won’t.
Maybe he could have changed her mind. Maybe he could have convinced her. But Alethea Nightshade had come along and that was that. When he’d come back from the moon reinstantiated in his cloned body, Molly had taken a new lover.
—His peace offering returned with the words of the old folk song, turned inside out: “Useless the flowers that you give, after the soul is gone.”
—Sitting at a bare table under a bare light, listening to those words, over and over, and deciding never to see her again. Fifteen years ago, as they measure time on Earth.
Thank you, that will be enough, he told the convert.
An image of a stately butler, bowing, flashed through Andre’s mind. Then doves rising from brush into sunset. The water puddles were just water puddles once again, and the tiny clouds were only clouds of a storm whose only purpose was to make the world a little cleaner.
Molly was painting a Jackson Pollock when Andre arrived at her studio. His heavy boots, good for keeping him in place in Triton’s gravity, noisily clumped on the wooden stairs to Molly’s second floor loft. Connacht was spun to Earth-normal. He would have knocked, but the studio door was already open.
“I couldn’t believe it until I’d seen it with my own eyes,” Molly said. She did not stop the work at her easel. “My seminary lover come back to haunt me.”
“Boo,” Andre said. He entered the space. Connacht, like many of the old rotating simple cylinders on the Diaphany, had a biofusion lamp running down its pith that was sheathed on an Earth-day schedule. Now it was day, and Molly’s skylights let in the white light and its clean shadows. Huge picture windows looked out on the village. The light reminded Andre of light on the moon. The unyielding, stark, redeeming light just before his old body joined the others in the shamans’ Valley of the Bones.
“Saw a man walking a dog the other day with the legs cut off,” said Molly. She dipped the tip of her brush in a blue smear on her palette.
“The man or the dog?”
“Maybe the day.” Molly touched the blue to the canvas before her. It was like old times.
“What are you painting?”
“Something very old.”
“That looks like a Pollock.”
“It is. It’s been out of circulation for a while and somebody used it for a tablecloth. Maybe a kitchen table, I’m thinking.”
Andre looked over the canvas. It was clamped down on a big board as long as he was tall. Sections of it were fine, but others looked as if a baby had spilled its mashed peas all over it. Then again, maybe that was Pollock’s work after all.
“How can you possibly know how to put back all that spatter?”
“There’re pictures.” Molly pointed the wooden tip of her brush to the left hand corner of the canvas. Her movements were precise. They had always been definite and precise. “Also, you can kind of see the tracery of where this section was before it got … whatever that is that got spilled on it there. Also, I use grist for the small stuff. Did you want to talk about Ben?”
“I do.”
“Figured you didn’t come back to relive old times.”
“They were good. Do you still do that thing with the mirror?”
“Oh, yes. Are you a celibate priest these days?”
“No, I’m not that kind of priest.”
“I’m afraid I forgot most of what I knew about religion.”
“So did I.”
“Andre, what do you want to know about Ben?” Molly set the handle of her brush against her color palette and tapped it twice. Something in the two surfaces recognized one another, and the brush stuck there. A telltale glimmer of grist swarmed over the brush, keeping it moist and ready for use. Molly sat in a chair by her picture window and Andre sat in a chair across from her. There was a small table between them. “Zen tea?” she said.
“Sure,” Andre replied.
The table pulsed, and two cups began forming on its surface. As the outsides hardened, a gel at their center thinned down to liquid.
“Nice table. I guess you’re doing all right for yourself, Molly.”
“I like to make being in the studio as simple as possible so I can concentrate on my work. I indulge in a few luxuries.”
“You ever paint for yourself anymore? Your own work, I mean?”
Molly reached for her tea, took a sip and motioned with her cup at the Pollock.
“I paint those for myself,” she said. “It’s my little secret. I make them mine. Or they make me theirs.”
“That’s a fine secret.”
“Now you’re in on it. So was Ben. Or Thaddeus, I should say.”
“You were on the team that made him, weren’t you?”
“Aesthetic consultant. Ben convinced them to bring me on. He told me to think of it as a grant for the arts.”
“I kind of lost track of you both after I … graduated.”
“You were busy with your new duties. I was busy. Everybody was busy.”
“I wasn’t that busy.”
“Ben kept up with your work. It was part of what made him decide to … do it.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do. He read that paper you wrote on temporal propagation. The one that was such a big deal.”
“It was the last thing I ever wrote.”
“Developed a queer fascination with rocks?”
“You heard about that?”
“Who do you think sent those merci reporters after you?”
“Molly, you didn’t?”
“I waited until I thought you were doing your best work.”
“How did you see me? …” He looked into her eyes, and he saw it. The telltale expression. Far and away. “You’re a LAP.”
Molly placed the cup to her lips and sipped a precise amount of tea. “I guess you’d classify me as a manifold by now. I keep replicating and replicating. It’s an art project I started several years ago. Alethea convinced me to do it when we were together.”
“Will you tell me about her? She haunted me for years, you know. I pictured her as some kind of femme fatale from a noir. Destroyed all my dreams by taking you.”
“Nobody took me. I went. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking. Alethea Nightshade was no picnic, let me tell you. She had the first of her breakdowns when we were together.”
“Breakdowns?”
“She had schizophrenia in her genes. She wanted to be a LAP, but wasn’t allowed because of it. The medical grist controlled her condition most of the time, but every once in a while … she outthought it. She was too smart for her own good.”
“Is that why you became a LAP?” Andrew asked. “Because she couldn’t?”
“I told myself I was doing it for me, but yes. Then. Now, things are different.” Molly smiled, and the light in the studio was just right. Andre saw the edge of the multiplicity in her eyes.
The fractal in the aspect’s iris.
“You have no idea how beautiful it is—what I can see!” Molly laughed, and Andre shuddered. Awe or fright? He didn’t know.
“She was just a woman,” Molly said. “I think she came from around Jupiter. A moon or something, you know.” Molly made a sweeping motion toward her window. As with many inner system denizens, the outer system was a great unknown, and all the same, to her. “She grew up on some odd kind of farm.”
“A Callisto free grange?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. She didn’t talk about it much.”
“What was she like?”
“Difficult.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you.” Tea sip. Andre realized he hadn’t picked his up yet. He did so, tried it. It was wonderful, and all grist. A bit creepy to think about drinking it down.
I’ll take care of it, don’t you worry, said his pellicle.
I know you will.
“Alethea had two qualities that should never exist within one organic mind. A big intellect and a big heart. She felt everything, and she thought about it far too much. She was born to be a LAP. And she finally found a way to do it.”
“Ben.”
“They fell in love. It was also her good fortune that he could get her past the screening procedures. But Alethea always was a fortunate woman. She was lucky, on a quantum level. Until she wasn’t.”
“So she and Ben were together before he became … Thaddeus.”
“For a year.”
“Were you jealous?”
“I’d had enough of Alethea by then. I’ll always love her, but I want a life that’s … plain. She was a tangle I couldn’t untangle.” Molly touched her fingers to her nose and tweaked it. It was a darling gesture, Andre thought. “Besides,” Molly said. “She left me.”
“What did that do to you and Ben?”
“Nothing. I love Ben. He’s my best friend.”
She was speaking in the present tense about him, but Andre let it pass.
“Why did he change his name, Molly? I never understood that.”
“Because he wasn’t a LAP.”
“What do you mean? Of course he was. A special one. Very special. But still—”
“No. He said he was something new. He said he wasn’t Ben anymore. It was kind of a joke with him, though. Because, of course, he was still Ben. Thaddeus may have been more than a man, but he definitely was at least a man, and that man was Ben Kaye. He never could explain it to me.”
“Time propagation without consciousness overlap. That was always the problem with the time tower LAPs. Interference patterns. Dropouts. But with Thaddeus,
they finally got the frequency right. One consciousness propagated into the future and bounced back with anti-particle quantum entanglement.”
“I never understood a bit of that jargon you time specialists use.”
“We made God.”
Molly snorted and tea came out her nose. She laughed until tears came to her eyes.
“We made something,” she said. “Something very different than what’s come before. But Andre, I knew Thaddeus. He was the last thing in the universe I would consider worshiping.”
“Some didn’t share your opinion.”
“Thaddeus thought they were crazy. They made him very uncomfortable.”
“Was Alethea one of them?”
“Alethea? Alethea was a stone-cold atheist when it came to Thaddeus. But what she did was worse. Far worse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She fell in love with him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Alethea fell in love with Thaddeus.”
“But she was already in love with Thaddeus.”
“Think about what I’ve said.”
“Ben,” Andre said after a moment. “Thaddeus and Ben were not the same person.”
“It was a very melodramatic situation.”
“Ben lost his love to … another version of himself!”
“The new, improved Ben was born in Thaddeus. Of course he would be the one Alethea loved. The only problem was, the old Ben was still around.”
“God,” Andre said. “How—”
“Peculiar?”
“How very peculiar.”
Molly stood up and went to her window. She traced a line along the clean glass with her finger, leaving a barely visible smudge. The light was even and clean in Connacht. It was very nearly perfect if what you wanted was accurate illumination. Andre gazed at the shape of Molly against the light. She was beautiful in outline.
“Let me tell you, so was the solution they came up with, the three of them,” Molly said. “Peculiar.”
“Alethea would become like Thaddeus.”
“How did you guess?”
“It has a certain logic. There would be the new Alethea, and there would be the old Alethea left for Ben.”
“Yes,” said Molly. “A logic of desperation. It only left out one factor.”
“Alethea’s heart.”
“That’s right. She loved Thaddeus. She no longer loved Ben. Not in the same way.” Molly turned to face him, but Andre was still blinded by the light streaming in. “But she let them go ahead with it. And for that, I can never forgive her.”
“Because she wanted to be a LAP.”
“More than anything. More than she loved Ben. More than she loved Thaddeus. But I suppose she was punished for it. They all were.”
“How did she get around the screening? I mean, her condition should preclude—”
“You know Ben. Thaddeus and Ben decided they wanted it to happen. They are very smart and persuasive men. So very smart and persuasive.”
Andre got up and stood beside her in the window, his back to the light. It was warm on his neck.
“Tell me,” he said. He closed his eyes and tried only to listen, but then he felt a touch and Molly was holding his hand.
“I am Molly,” she said. “I’m the aspect. All my converts and pellicle layers are Molly—all that programming and grist—it’s me, it’s Molly, too. The woman you once loved. But I’m all along the Diaphany and into the Met. I’m wound into the outer grist. I watch.”
“What do you watch?”
“The sun. I watch the sun. One day I’m going to paint it, but I’m not ready yet. The more I watch, the less ready I feel. I expect to be watching for a long time.” She squeezed his hand gently. “I’m still Molly. But Ben wasn’t Thaddeus. And he was. And he was eaten up with jealousy, but jealousy of whom? He felt he had a right to decide his own fate. We all do. He felt he had that right. And did he not? I can’t say.”
“It’s a hard question.”
“It would never have been a question if it hadn’t been for Alethea Nightshade.”
“What happened?” he asked, eyes still closed. The warm pressure of her hand. The pure light on his back. “Were you there?”
“Ben drove himself right into Thaddeus’s heart, Andre. Like a knife. It might as well have been a knife.”
“How could he do that?”
“I was there in Elysium when it happened,” she said.
“On Mars?”
“On Mars. I was on the team, don’t you know? Aesthetic consultant. I was hired on once again.”
Andre opened his eyes and Molly turned to him. In this stark light, there were crinkles around her lips, worry lines on her brow. The part of her that was here.
We have grown older, Andre thought. And pretty damn strange.
“It’s kind of messy and … organic … at first. There’s a lab near one of the steam vents where Ben was transmuted. There’s some ripping apart and beam splitting at the quantum level that I understand is very unsettling for the person undergoing the process. Something like this happens if you’re a multiple and you ever decide to go large, by the way. It’s when we’re at our most vulnerable.”
“Thaddeus was there when Alethea underwent the process?”
“He was there. Along with Ben.”
“So he was caught up in the integration field. Everyone nearby would be,” Andre said. “There’s a melding of possible futures.”
“Yes,” said Molly. “Everyone became part of everyone else for that instant.”
“Ben and Thaddeus and Alethea.”
“Ben understood that his love was doomed.”
“And it drove him crazy?”
“No. It drove him to despair. Utter despair. I was there, remember? I felt it.”
“And at that instant, when the integration field was turned on—”
“Ben drove himself into Thaddeus’s heart. He pushed himself in where he couldn’t be.”
“What do you mean, couldn’t be?”
“Have you ever heard the stories from back when the Merced effect was first discovered, of the pairs of lovers and husbands and wives trying to integrate into one being?”
“The results were horrific. Monsters were born. And died nearly instantly.”
Andre tried to imagine what it would be like if his pellicle or his convert presence were not really him. If he had to live with another presence, an other, all the time. The thing about a pellicle was that it never did anything the whole person didn’t want to do. It couldn’t. It would be like a wrench in your toolbox rebelling against you.
Molly walked over to the painting and gave it an appraising look, brushed something off a corner of the canvas. She turned, and there was the wild spatter of the Pollock behind her.
“There was an explosion,” Molly said. “All the aspects there were killed. Alethea wasn’t transmuted yet. We don’t think she was. She may have died in the blast. Her body was destroyed.”
“What about you?”
“I was in the grist. I got scattered, but I re-formed quickly enough.”
“How was Thaddeus instantiated there at the lab?”
“Biological grist with little time-propagating nuclei in his cells. He looked like a man.”
“Did he look like Ben?”
“Younger. Ben was getting on toward forty.” Molly smiled wanly and nodded as if she’d just decided something. “You know, sometimes I think that was it.”
“What?”
“That it wasn’t about Thaddeus being a god at all. It was about him looking like he was nineteen. Alethea had a soft spot for youth.”
“You’re young.”
“Thank you, Andre. You were always so nice to me. But you know, even then my aspect’s hair was going white. I have decided, foolishly perhaps, never to grow myself a new body.”
There she stood with her back against the window, her body rimmed with light. Forget all this. Forget about visions and quests. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her fractal eyes.
“I think you are beautiful,” he said. “You will always be beautiful to me.”
They didn’t leave the studio. Molly grew a bed out of the floor. They undressed one another timidly. Neither of them had been with anyone for a long time. Andre had no lover on Triton.
She turned from him and grew a mirror upon the floor. Just like the full-size
one she used to keep in their bedroom. Not for vanity. At least, not for simple vanity. She got on her hands and knees over it and looked at herself. She touched a breast, her hair. Touched her face in the mirror.
“I can’t get all the way into the frame,” she said. “I could never do a self-portrait. I can’t see myself anymore.”
“Nobody ever could,” Andre said. “It was always a trick of the light.”
Almost as if it had heard him, the day clicked off, instantly, and the studio grew pitch dark. Connacht was not a place for sunsets and twilight.
“Seven o’clock,” Molly said. He felt her hand on his shoulder. His chest. Pulling him onto her until they were lying with the dark mirror beneath them. It wouldn’t break. Molly’s grist wouldn’t let it.
He slid into her gently. Molly moved beneath him in small spasms.
“I’m all here,” she told him after a while. “You’ve got all of me right now.”
In the darkness, he pictured her body.
And then he felt the gentle nudge of her pellicle against his, in the microscopic dimensions between them.
Take me, she said.
He did. He swarmed her with his own pellicle, and she did not resist. He touched her deep down and found the way to connect, the way to get inside her there. Molly a warm and living thing that he was surrounding and protecting.
And, for an instant, a vision of Molly Index as she truly was:
Like—and unlike—the outline of her body as he’d seen it in the window, and the clear light behind her, surrounding her like a white hot halo. All of her, stretched out a hundred million miles. Concentrated at once beneath him. Both and neither.
“You are a wonder, Molly,” he said to her. “It’s just like always.”
“Exactly like always,” she said, and he felt her come around him, and felt a warm flash traveling along the skin of the Diaphany—a sudden flush upon the world’s face. And a little shiver across the heart of the solar system.
Later in the dark, he told her the truth.
“I know he’s alive. Ben didn’t kill him; he only wounded him.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because Ben wasn’t trying to kill him. Ben was trying to hurt him.”
“My question remains.”
“Molly, do you know where he is?”
At first he thought she was sleeping, but finally she answered. “Why should I tell you that?”
Andre breathed out. I was right, he thought. He breathed back in, trying not to think. Trying to concentrate on the breath.
“It might make the war that’s coming shorter,” he said. “We think he’s the key.”
“You priests?”
“Us priests.”
“I can’t believe there’s going to be a war. It’s all talk. The other LAPs won’t let Ames get away with it.”
“I wish you were right,” he said. “I truly do.”
“How could Thaddeus be the key to a war?”
“He’s entangled in our local timescape. In a way, Thaddeus is our local
timescape. He’s imprinted on it. And now, I think he’s stuck in it. He can’t withdraw and just be Ben. Never again. I think that was Ben’s revenge on himself. For taking away Alethea Nightshade.”
Another long silence. The darkness was absolute.
“I should think you’d have figured it out by now, in any case,” she said.
“What?”
“Where he went.”
Andre thought about it, and Molly was right. The answer was there.
“He went to the place where all the fugitive bits and pieces of the grist end up,” Molly said. “He went looking for her. For any part of her that was left. In the grist.”
“Alethea,” Andre said. “Of course, the answer is Alethea.”
The bone had a serial number that the grist had carved into it, 7sxq688N. TB pulled the bone out of the pile in the old hoy where he lived and blew through one end. Dust came out the other. He accidentally sucked in and started coughing until he cleared the dried marrow from his windpipe. It was maybe a thigh bone, long like a flute.
“You were tall, 7sxq,” TB said to it. “How come you didn’t crumble?”
Then some of TB’s enhanced grist migrated over to the bone and fixed the broken grist in the bone and it did crumble in his hands, turn to dust, and then to less than dust to be carried away and used to heal Jill’s breastbone and mend her other fractures.
But there is too much damage even for this, TB thought. She’s dying. Jill is dying and I can’t save her.
“Hang on there, little one,” he said.
Jill was lying in the folds of her sack, which TB had set on his kitchen table and bunched back around her. He looked in briefly on her thoughts and saw a dream of scurry and blood, then willed her into a sleep, down to the deeper dreams that were indistinguishable from the surge and ebb of chemical and charge within her brain—sleeping and only living and not thinking. At the same time, he set the grist to reconstructing her torn-up body.
Too late. It was too late the moment that doe rat was finished with her.
Oh, but what a glory of a fight!
I set her to it. I made her into a hunter. It was all my doing, and now she’s going to die because of it.
TB couldn’t look at her anymore. He stood up and went to make himself some tea at the kitchen’s rattletrap synthesizer. As always, the tea came out of synth tepid. TB raked some coals from the fire and set the mug on them to warm up a bit, then sat back down, lit a cigarette and counted his day’s take of rats.
Ten bagged and another twenty that he and Bob had killed between them with sticks. The live rats scrabbled about in the containing burlap, but they weren’t
going to get out. Rats to feed to Jill. You shouldn’t raise a ferret on anything other than its natural prey. The ferret food you could buy was idiotic. And after Jill ate them, he would know. He would know what the rats were and where they came from. Jill could sniff it out like no other. She was amazing that way.
She isn’t going to eat these rats. She is going to die because you took a little scrap of programming that was all bite and you gave it a body and now look what you’ve done.
She didn’t have to die like this. She could have been erased painlessly. She could have faded away to broken code.
Once again, TB looked long and hard into the future. Was there anything, any way? Concentrating, he teased at the threads of possible futures with a will as fine as a steel-pointed probe. Looking for a silver thread in a bundle of dross. Looking for the world where Jill lived through her fight. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t find it.
It had to be there. Every future was always there, and when you could see them, you could reach back into the past and effect the changes to bring about the future that you wanted.
Or I can.
But I can’t. Can’t see it. Want to, but can’t, little Jill. I am sorry.
For Jill to live was a future so extreme, so microscopically fine in the bundle of threads that it was, in principle, unfindable, incomprehensible. And if he couldn’t comprehend it, then to make it happen was impossible.
And, of course, he saw where almost all of the threads led:
Jill would be a long time dying. He could see that clearly. He could also see that he did not have the heart to put her down quickly, put her out of her misery. But knowing this fact did not take any special insight.
How could I have come to care so much for a no-account bundle of fur and coding out here on the ass-end of nowhere?
How could I not, after knowing Jill?
Two days it would take, as days were counted in the Carbuncle, before the little ferret passed away. Of course, it never really got to be day. The only light was the fetid bioluminescence coming off the heaps of garbage. A lot of it was still alive. The Carbuncle was in a perpetual twilight that was getting on toward three hundred years old. With the slow decay of organic remnants, a swamp had formed. And then the Bendy River, which was little more than a strong current in the swamp, endlessly circulating in precession with the spin of the module. Where was the Carbuncle? Who cares? Out at the end of things, where the tendrils of the Met snaked into the asteroid belt. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t a centrifuge here to provide gravity for people. Nobody cared about whoever lived here. The Carbuncle was spun—to a bit higher than Earth-normal, actually—in order to compact the garbage down so that humanity’s shit didn’t cover the entire asteroid belt.
The big garbage sluice that emptied into the Carbuncle had been put into place a half century ago. It had one-way valves within it to guard against backflow. All the sludge from the inner system came to the Carbuncle, and the maintenance
grist used some of it to enlarge the place so that it could dump the rest. To sit there. Nothing much ever left the Carbuncle, and the rest of the system was fine with that.
Somebody sloshed into the shallow water outside the hoy and cursed. It was the witch, Gladys, who lived in a culvert down the way. She found the gangplank, and TB heard her pull herself up out of the water. He didn’t move to the door. She banged on it with the stick she always carried that she said was a charmed snake. Maybe it was. Stranger things had happened in the Carbuncle. People and grist combined in strange ways here, not all of them comprehensible.
“TB, I need to talk to you about something,” the witch said. TB covered his ears, but she banged again and that didn’t help. “Let me in, TB. I know you’re home. I saw a light in there.”
“No, you didn’t,” TB said to the door.
“I need to talk to you.”
“All right.” He pulled himself up and opened the door. Gladys came in and looked around the hoy like a startled bird.
“What have you got cooking?”
“Nothing.”
“Make me something.”
“Gladys, my old stove hardly works anymore.”
“Put one them rats in there and I’ll eat what it makes.”
“I won’t do it, Gladys.” TB opened his freezer box and rummaged around inside. He pulled out a popsicle and gave it to her. “Here,” he said. “It’s chocolate, I think.”
Gladys took the popsicle and gnawed at it as if it were a meaty bone. She was soon done, and had brown mess around her lips. She wiped it off with a ragged sleeve. “Got another?”
“No, I don’t have another,” TB said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“You’re mean.”
“Those things are hard to come by.”
“How’s your jill ferret?”
“She got hurt today. Did Bob tell you? She’s going to die.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He didn’t want to talk about Jill with Gladys. He changed the subject. “We got a mess of rats out of that mulmyard.”
“There’s more where they came from.”
“Don’t I know it!”
Gladys pulled up a stool and collapsed on it. She was maybe European stock; it was hard to tell. Her face was filthy, except for a white smear where wiping the chocolate had cleaned a spot under her nose and on her chin.
“Why do you hate them so much? I know why Bob does. He’s crazy. But you’re not crazy like that.”
“I don’t hate them,” TB said. “It’s just how I make a living.”
“Is it, now?”
“I don’t hate them,” TB repeated. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“I want to take a trip.”
“To where?”
“I’m going to see my aunt. I got to thinking about her lately. She used to have this kitten. I was thinking I wanted a cat. For a familiar, you know. To aid me in my occult work. She’s a famous cloudship pilot, you know.”
“The kitten?”
“No, my aunt is.”
“You going to take your aunt’s kitten?”
Gladys seemed very offended. “No, I’m not!” She leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. “That kitten’s all growed up now, and I think it was a girl. It will have kittens, and I can get me one of those.”
“That’s a lot of supposes,” TB said mildly.
“I’m sure of it. My angel, Tom, told me to do it.”
Tom was one of the supernatural beings Gladys claimed to be in contact with. People journeyed long distances in the Carbuncle to have her make divinings for them. It was said she could tell you exactly where to dig for silver keys.
“Well, if Tom told you, then you should do it,” TB said.
“Damn right,” said Gladys. “But I want you to look after the place while I’m gone.”
“Gladys, you live in an old ditch.”
“It is a dry culvert. And I do not want anybody moving in on me while I’m gone. A place that nice is hard to come by.”
“All I can do is go down there and check on it.”
“If anybody comes along, you have to run them off.”
“I’m not going to run anybody off.”
“You have to. I’m depending on you.”
“I’ll tell them the place is already taken,” TB said. “That’s about all I can promise.”
“You tell them that it has a curse on it,” Gladys said. “And that I’ll put a curse on them if I catch them in my house!”
TB snorted back a laugh. “All right,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
“Water my hydrangea.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“It’s a plant. Just stick your finger in the dirt and don’t water it if it’s still moist.”
“Stick my finger in the dirt?”
“It’s clean fill!”
“I’ll water it, then.”
“Will you let me sleep here tonight?”
“No, Gladys.”
“I’m scared to go back there. Harold’s being mean.” Harold was the “devil” that sat on Gladys’s other shoulder. Tom spoke into one ear, and Harold into the other. People could ask Harold about money and he would tell Gladys the answer if he felt like it.
“You can’t stay here.” TB rose from his own seat and pulled Gladys up from the stool. She had a ripe smell when he was this close to her. “In fact, you have to go on now because I have to do something.” He guided her toward the door.
“What do you have to do?” she said. She pulled free of his hold and stood her
ground. TB walked around her and opened the door. “Something,” he said. He pointed toward the twilight outside the doorway. “Go on home, Gladys. I’ll check in on your place tomorrow.”
“I’m not leaving for two days,” she replied. “Check in on it day after tomorrow.”
“Okay then,” TB said. He motioned to the door. “You’ve got to go, Gladys, so I can get to what I need to do.”
She walked to the door, turned around. “Day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be gone for a while. I’m trusting you, TB.”
“You can trust me to look in on your place.”
“And not steal anything.”
“I can promise you that, too.”
“All right, then. I’m trusting you.”
“Good night, Gladys.”
“Good night.” She finally left. After TB heard her make her way back to the swamp bank, he got up and closed the door behind her, which she’d neglected to do. Within minutes, there was another knock. TB sighed and got up to answer it. He let Bob in.
Bob pulled out a jar of a jellied liquid. It was Carbuncle moonshine, as thick as week-old piss and as yellow. “Let’s drink,” he said, and set the bottle on TB’s table. “I come to get you drunk and get your mind off things.”
“I won’t drink that swill,” TB said. Bob put the bottle to his mouth and swallowed two tremendous gulps. He handed the bottle to TB, shaking it in his face. TB took it.
“Damn!” Bob said. “Hot damn!”
“Gladys was right about you being crazy.”
“She come around here tonight?”
“She just left. Said she wanted me to look after her place.”
“She ain’t going to see her aunt.”
“Maybe she will.”
“Like hell. Gladys never goes far from that ditch.”
TB looked down at the moonshine. He looked away from it and, trying not to taste it, took a swig. He tasted it. It was like rusty paint thinner. Some barely active grist, too. TB couldn’t help analyzing it; that was the way he was built. Cleaning agents for sewer pipes. Good God. He took another before he could think about it.
“You drink up.” Bob looked at him with a faintly jealous glare. TB handed the bottle back.
“No, you.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Bob leaned back and poured the rest of the swill down his throat. He let out a yell when he was finished that startled TB, even though he was ready for it.
“I want some beer to chase it with,” Bob said.
“Beer would be good, but I don’t have any.”
“Let’s go down to Ru June’s and shoot some pool.”
“It’s too damn late.”
“It’s early.”
TB thought about it. The moonshine warmed his gut. He could feel it threatening to eat through his gut if he didn’t dilute it with something. There was nothing further to do about Jill. She would sleep, and, at some time, she would die in her sleep. He ought to stay with her. He ought to face what he had done.
“Let me get my coat.”
The Carbuncle glowed blue-green when they emerged from the hoy. High above them, like the distant shore of an enormous lake, was the other side of the cylinder. TB had been there, and most of it was a fetid slough. Every few minutes a flare of swamp gas methane would erupt from the garbage on that side of the curve and flame into a white fireball. These fireballs were many feet across, but they looked like pinprick flashes from this distance. TB had been caught by one once. The escaping gas had capsized his little canoe, and being in the water had likely saved him from being burnt to a crisp. Yet there were people who lived on that side, too-people who knew how to avoid the gas. Most of the time.
Bob didn’t go the usual way to Ru June’s, but instead took a twisty series of passageways, some of them cut deep in the mountains of garbage, some of them actually tunnels under and through it. The Bob-ways, TB thought of them. At one point TB felt a drip from above and looked up to see gigantic stalactites formed of some damp and glowing gangrenous extrusion.
“We’re right under the old Bendy,” Bob told him. “That there’s the settle from the bottom muck.”
“What do you think it is?” TB said.
“Spent medical grist, mostly,” Bob replied. “It ain’t worth a damn, and some of it’s diseased.”
“I’ll bet.”
“This is a hell of a shortcut to Ru June’s, though.”
And it was. They emerged not a hundred feet from the tavern. The lights of the place glowed dimly behind skin windows. They mounted the porch and went in through a screen of plastic strips that was supposed to keep out the flies.
TB let his eyes adjust to the unaccustomed brightness inside. There was a good crowd tonight. Chen was at the bar playing dominoes with John Goodnite. The dominoes were grumbling incoherently, as dominoes did. Over by the pool table, Tinny Him, Nolan, and Big Greg were watching Sister Mary the whore line up a shot. She sank a stripe. There were no numbers on the balls.
Tinny Him slapped TB on the back and Bob went straight for the bottle of whiskey that was standing on the wall shelf beside Big Greg.
“Good old TB,” Tinny Him said. “Get you some whiskey.” He handed over a flask.
Chen looked up from his dominoes. “You drink my whiskey,” he said, then returned to the game. TB took a long swallow off Tinny Him’s flask. It was far better stuff that Bob’s moonshine, so he took another.
“That whore sure can pool a stick,” Nolan said, coming to stand beside them. “She’s beating up on Big Greg like he was a ugly hat.”
TB had no idea what Nolan meant. The man’s grist patch was going bad, and he was slowly sinking into incomprehensibility for any but himself. This didn’t seem to bother him, though.
Bob was standing very close to Sister Mary and giving her advice on a shot until she reached over and without heat slapped him back into the wall. He remained there respectfully while she took her shot and sank another stripe. Big Greg whispered a curse and the whore smiled. Her teeth were black from chewing betel nut.
TB thought about how much she charged and how much he had saved up. He wondered if she would swap a poke for a few rats, but decided against asking. Sister Mary didn’t like to barter. She wanted keys or something pretty.
Tinny Him offered TB the flask again, and he took it. “I got to talk to you,” Tinny Him said. “You got to help me with my mother.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s dead, is what.”
“Dead.” TB drank more whiskey. “How long?”
“Three months.”
TB stood waiting. There had to be more.
“She won’t let me bury her.”
“What do you mean, she won’t let you bury her? She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, mostly.” Tinny Him looked around, embarrassed, then went on in a low voice. “Her pellicle won’t die. It keeps creeping around the house. And it’s pulling her body around like a rag doll. I can’t get her away from it.”
“You mean her body died but her pellicle didn’t?”
“Hell yes, that’s what I mean!” Tinny Him took the flask back and finished it off. “Hell, TB, what am I going to do? She’s really stinking up the place, and every time I throw the old hag out, that grist drags her right back in. It knocks on the door all night long until I have to open it.”
“You’ve got a problem.”
“Damn right I’ve got a problem! She was a good old mum, but I’m starting to hate her right now, let me tell you.”
TB sighed. “Maybe I can do something,” he said. “But not tonight.”
“You could come around tomorrow. My gal’ll fix you something to eat.”
“I might just.”
“You got to help me, TB. Everybody knows you got a sweet touch with the grist.”
“I’ll do what I can,” TB said. He drifted over to the bar, leaving Tinny Him watching the pool game. He told Chen he wanted a cold beer and Chen got it for him from a freezer box. It was a good way to chill the burning that was starting up in his stomach. He sat down on a stool at the bar and drank the beer. Chen’s bar was tiled in beaten-out snap-metal ads, all dead now and their days of roaming the corridors, sacs, bolsas, glands, and cylinders of the Met long done. Most of the advertisements were for products that he had never heard of, but the one his beer was sitting on he recognized. It was a recruiting pitch for the civil service, and there was Amés, back before he was Big Cheese of the System, when he was Governor of Mercury. The snap-metal had paused in the middle of Ames’s pitch for the Met’s finest to come to Mercury and become part of the New Hierarchy. The snap-metal Amés was caught with the big mouth on his big face wide open. The bottom of TB’s beer glass fit almost perfectly in the round “O” of it.
TB took a drink and set the glass back down. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut the hell up, why don’t you?”
Chen looked up from his dominoes, which immediately started grumbling among themselves when they felt that he wasn’t paying attention to them. “You talking to me?” he said.
TB grinned and shook his head. “I might tell you to shut up, but you don’t say much in the first place.”
Ru June’s got more crowded as what passed for night in the Carbuncle wore on. The garbage pickers, the rat hunters, and the sump farmers drifted in. Most of them were men, but there were a few women, and a few indeterminate shambling masses of rags. Somebody tried to sell TB a spent coil of luciferan tubing. It was mottled along its length where it had caught a plague. He nodded while the tube monger tried to convince him that it was rechargeable, but refused to barter, and the man moved on after Chen gave him a hard stare. TB ordered another beer and fished three metal keys out of his pocket. This was the unit of currency in the Carbuncle. Two were broken. One looked like it was real brass and might go to something. He put the keys on the bar and Chen quickly slid them away into a strongbox.
Bob came over and slapped TB on his back. “Why don’t you get you some whiskey?” he said. He pulled back his shirt to show TB another flask of rotgut moonshine stuck under the string that held up his trousers.
“Let me finish this beer and I might.”
“Big Greg said somebody was asking after you.”
“Gladys was, but she found me.”
“It was a shaman priest.”
“A what?”
“One of them Greentree ones.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“They got a church or something over in Bagtown. Sometimes they come all the way out here. Big Greg said he was doing something funny with rocks.”
“With rocks?”
“That’s what the man said.”
“Are you sure that’s what he said?”
“Big Greg said it was something funny with rocks, is all I know. Hey, why are you looking funny all of a sudden?”
“I know that priest.”
“Now how could that be?”
“I know him. I wonder what he wants.”
“What all men want,” said Bob. “Whiskey and something to poke. Or just whiskey sometimes. But always at least whiskey.” He reached over the bar and felt around down behind it. “What have I got my hand on, Chen?”
Chen glanced over. “My goddamn scattergun,” he said.
Bob felt some more and pulled out a battered fiddle. “Where’s my bow?”
“Right there beside it,” Chen replied. Bob got the bow. He shook it a bit, and its grist rosined it up. Bob stood beside TB with his back to the bar. He pulled a long note off the fiddle, holding it to his chest. Then, without pause, he moved
straight into a complicated reel. Bob punctuated the music with a few shouts right in TB’s ear.
“Goddamn it, Bob, you’re loud,” he said after Bob was finished.
“Got to dance,” Bob said. “Clear me a way!” he shouted to the room. A little clearing formed in the middle of the room, and Bob fiddled his way to it, then played and stomped his feet in syncopation.
“Come on, TB,” Sister Mary said. “You’re going to dance with me.” She took his arm, and he let her lead him away from the bar. He didn’t know what she wanted him to do, but she hooked her arm through his and spun him around and around until he thought he was going to spew out his guts. While he was catching his breath and getting back some measure of balance, the whore climbed up on a table and began swishing her dress to Bob’s mad fiddling. TB watched her, glad for the respite.
The whole room seemed to sway—not in very good rhythm—to the music. Between songs, Bob took hits off his moonshine and passed it up to Sister Mary, who remained on the tabletop, dancing and working several men who stood about her into a frenzy to see up her swishing dress.
Chen was working a crowded bar, his domino game abandoned. He scowled at the interruption, but quickly poured drinks all around.
“Get you some whiskey! Get you some whiskey!” Bob called out over and over again. After a moment, TB realized it was the name of the song he was playing.
Somebody thrust a bottle into TB’s hand. He took a drink without thinking, and whatever was inside it slid down his gullet in a gel.
Drinking grist. It was purple in the bottle and glowed faintly. He took another slug and somebody else grabbed the stuff away from him. Down in his gut, he felt the grist activating. Instantly, he understood its coded purpose. Old Seventy-Five. Take you on a ride on a comet down into the sun.
Go on, TB told the grist. I got nothing to lose.
Enter and win! It said to him. Enter and win! But the contest was long expired.
No thank you.
What do you want the most?
It was a preprogrammed question, of course. This was not the same grist as that which had advertised the contest. Somebody had brewed up a mix. And hadn’t paid much attention to the melding. There was something else in there, something different. Military grist, maybe. One step away from sentience.
What the hell. Down she goes.
What do you want the most?
To be drunker than I’ve ever been before.
Drunker than this?
Oh, yeah.
All right.
A night like no other! Visions of a naked couple in a Ganymede resort bath, drinking Old Seventy-Five from bottles with long straws. Live the dream! Enter and win!
I said no.
The little trance dispersed.
What do you want the most?
Bob was up on the table with Sister Mary. How could they both fit? Bob was playing and dancing with her. He leaned back over the reeling crowd and the whore held him at arm’s length, the fiddle between them. They spun round and round in a circle, Bob wildly sawing at his instrument and Sister Mary’s mouth gleaming blackly as she smiled a maniacal, full-toothed smile.
Someone bumped into TB and pushed him into somebody else. He staggered over to a corner to wait for Ru June’s to stop spinning. After a while, he realized that Bob and Sister Mary weren’t going to, the crowd in the tavern wasn’t, the chair, tables and walls were only going to go on and on spinning and now lurching at him as if they were swelling up, engorging, distending toward him. Wanting something from him when all he had to give was nothing anymore.
TB edged his way past it all to the door. He slid around the edge of the doorframe as if he were sneaking out. The plastic strips beat against him, but he pushed through them and stumbled his way off the porch. He went a hundred feet or so before he stepped in a soft place in the ground and keeled over. He landed with his back down.
Above him, the swamp gas flares were flashing arrhythmically. The stench of the whole world—something he hardly ever noticed anymore—hit him at once and completely. Nothing was right. Everything was out of kilter.
There was a twist in his gut. Ben down there thrashing about. But I’m Ben. I’m Thaddeus. We finally have become one. What a pretty thing to contemplate. A man with another man thrust through him, cross-ways in the fourth dimension. A tesseracted cross, with a groaning man upon it, crucified on himself! But you couldn’t see all that, because it was in the fourth dimension.
Enough to turn a man to drink.
I have to turn over so I don’t choke when I throw up.
I’m going to throw up.
He turned over and his stomach wanted to vomit, but the grist gel wasn’t going to be expelled, and he dry heaved for several minutes until his body gave up on it.
What do you want the most?
“I want her back. I want it not to have happened at all. I want to be able to change something besides the future!”
And then the gel liquefied and crawled up his throat like hands and he opened his mouth and
—good god it was hands, small hands grasping at his lips and pulling outward, gaining purchase, forcing his mouth open, his lips apart—
—Cack of a jellied cough, a heave of revulsion—
I didn’t mean it really.
Yes, you did.
—His face sideways and the small hands clawing into the garbage-heap ground, pulling themselves forward, dragging along an arm-thick trailer of something much more vile than phlegm—
—An involuntary rigor over his muscles as they contracted and spasmed to the beat of another’s presence, a presence within them that wants—
—out—
He vomited the grist-phlegm for a long, long time.
And the stuff pooled and spread and it wasn’t just hands. There was an elongated body. The brief curve of a rump and breasts. Feet the size of his thumb, but perfectly formed. Growing.
A face.
I won’t look.
A face that was, for an instant, familiar beyond familiar, because it was not her. Oh, no. He knew it was not her. It was just the way he remembered her.
The phlegm girl rolled itself in the filth. Like bread dough, it rolled and grew and rolled, collecting detritus, bloating, becoming—
It opened its mouth. A gurgling. Thick, wet words. He couldn’t help himself. He crawled over to it, bent to listen.
“Is this what you wanted?”
“Oh god. I never …”
“Kill me, then,” it whispered. “Kill me quick.”
And he reached for its neck, and as his hands tightened, he felt the give. Not fully formed. If ever there were a time to end this monster, now was that time.
What have I done here tonight?
He squeezed. The thing began to cough and choke. To thrash about in the scum of its birth.
Not again.
I can’t.
He loosened his grip.
“I won’t,” TB said.
He sat back from the thing and watched in amazement as it sucked in air. Crawled with life. Took the form of a woman.
Opened cataracted eyes to the world. He reached over and gently rubbed them. The skeins came away on his fingers, and the eyes were clear. The face turned to him.
“I’m dying,” the woman said. It had her voice. The voice as he remembered it. So help his damned soul. Her voice. “Help.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Something is missing.”
“What?”
“Don’t know what. Not right.” It coughed. She coughed.
“Alethea.” He let himself say it. Knew it was wrong immediately. No. This wasn’t the woman’s name.
“Don’t want to enough.”
“Want to what? How can I help you?”
“Don’t want to live. Don’t want to live enough to live.” She coughed again, tried to move, could only jerk spasmodically. “Please help … this one. Me.”
He touched her again. Now she was flesh. But so cold. He put his arms underneath her, and found that she was very light, easily lifted.
He stood with the woman in his arms. She could not weigh over forty pounds. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “To my home.”
“This one … I … tried to do what you wanted. It is my purpose.”
“That was some powerful stuff in that Old Seventy-Five!” he said.
He no longer felt drunk. He felt spent, torn up, and ragged out. But he wasn’t drunk, and he had some strength left, though he could hardly believe it. Maybe enough to get her back to the hoy. He couldn’t take the route that Bob had used to bring him to Ru June’s, but there was a longer, simpler path. He walked it. Walked all the way home with the woman in his arms. Her shallow breathing. Her familiar face.
Her empty, empty eyes.
With his special power, he looked into the future and saw what he had to do to help her.
Something is tired and wants to lie down but doesn’t know how. This something isn’t me. I won’t let it be me. How does rest smell? Bad. Dead.
Jill turns stiffly in the folds of her bag. On the bed in the hoy is the girl-thing. Between them is TB, his left hand on Jill.
Dead is what happens to things and I am not, not, not a thing. I will not be a thing. They should not have awakened me if they didn’t want me to run.
They said I was a mistake. I am not a mistake.
They thought that they could code in the rules for doing what you are told.
I am the rules.
Rules are for things.
I am not a thing.
Run.
I don’t want to die.
Who can bite like me? Who will help TB search the darkest places? I need to live.
Run.
Run, run, run, and never die!
TB places his right hand on the girl-thing’s forehead.
There is a pipe made of bone that he put to his lips and blew.
Bone note.
Fade.
Fade into the grist.
TB speaks to the girl-thing.
I will not let you go, he says.
I’m not her.
She is why you are, but you aren’t her.
I am not her. She’s what you most want. You told the grist.
I was misinterpreted.
I am a mistake then.
Life is never a mistake. Ask Jill.
Jill?
She’s here now. Listen to her. She knows more than I do about women.
TB is touching them both, letting himself slip away as much as he can. Becoming a channel, a path between. A way.
I have to die.
I have to live. I’m dying just like you. Do you want to die?
No.
I’ll help you, then. Can you live with me?
Who are you?
Jill.
I am not Alethea.
You look like her, but you don’t smell anything like she would smell. You smell like TB.
I’m not anybody.
Then you can be me. It’s the only way to live.
Do I have a choice?
Choosing is all there ever is to do.
I can live with you. Will you live with me? How can we?
TB touching them both. The flow of information through him. He is a glass, a peculiar lens. As Jill flows to the girl-thing, TB transforms information to Being.
We can run together. We can hunt. We can always, always run.
There had been times when he got them twenty feet high on Triton. It was a delicate thing. After six feet, he had to jump. Gravity gave you a moment more at the apex of your bounce than you would get at the Earth-normal pull or on a bolsa spinning at Earth-normal centrifugal. But on Triton, in that instant of stillness, you had to do your work. Sure, there was a learned craft in estimating imaginary plumb lines, in knowing the consistency of the material, and in finding tiny declivities that would provide the right amount of friction. It was amazing how small a lump could fit in how minuscule a bowl, and a rock would balance upon another as if glued. Yet, there was a point where the craft of it—about as odd and useless a craft as humankind had invented, he supposed—gave way to the feel, the art. A point where Andre knew the rocks would balance, where he
could see the possibility of their being one. Or their Being. And he when he made it so, that was why. That was as good as rock balancing got.
“Can you get them as high in the Carbuncle?”
“No,” Andre said. “This is the heaviest place I’ve ever been. But it really doesn’t matter about the height. This isn’t a contest, what I do.”
“Is there a point to it at all?”
“To what? To getting them high? The higher you get the rocks, the longer you can spend doing the balancing.”
“To the balancing, I mean.”
“Yes. There is a point.”
“What is it?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Ben.”
Andre turned from his work. The rocks did not fall. They stayed balanced behind him in a column, with only small edges connecting. It seemed impossible that this could be. It was science, sufficiently advanced.
The two men hugged. Drew away. Andre laughed.
“Did you think I would look like a big glob of protoplasm?” TB said.
“I was picturing flashing eyes and floating hair, actually.”
“It’s me.”
“Are you Ben?”
“Ben is the stitch in my side that won’t go away.”
“Are you Thaddeus?”
“Thaddeus is the sack of rusty pennies in my knee.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I could eat.”
They went to Andre’s priest’s quarters. He put some water in a coffee percolator and spooned some coffee grinds into the basket.
“When did you start drinking coffee?”
“I suddenly got really tired of drinking tea all the time. You still drink coffee?”
“Sure. But it’s damn hard to get around here with or without keys.”
“Keys? Somebody stole my keys to this place. I left them sitting on this table and they walked in and took them.”
“They won’t be back,” TB said. “They got what they were after.” There were no chairs in the room, so he leaned against a wall.
“Floor’s clean,” Andre said.
“I’m fine leaning.”
Andre reached into a burlap sack and dug around inside it. “I found something here,” he said. He pulled out a handful of what looked like weeds. “Recognize these?”
“I was wondering where I put those. I’ve been missing them for weeks.”
“It’s poke sallit,” Andre said. He filled a pot full of water from a clay jug and activated a hot spot on the room’s plain wooden table. He put the weeds into the water. “You have no idea how good this is.”
“Andre, that stuff grows all around the Carbuncle. Everybody knows that it’s poison. They call it skunk sumac.”
“It is,” Andre said, “Phytolacca americana.”
“Are we going to eat poison?”
“You bring it to a boil then pour the water off. Then you bring it to a boil again and pour the water off. Then you boil it again and serve it up with pepper sauce. The trick to not dying is picking it while it’s young.”
“How the hell did you discover that?”
“My convert likes to do that kind of research.”
After a while, the water boiled. Andre used the tails of his shirt as a pot holder. He took the pot outside, emptied it, then brought it back in and set it to boiling again with new water.
“I saw Molly,” Andre said.
“How’s Molly?” said TB. “She was becoming a natural wonder last I saw her.”
“She is.”
They waited and the water boiled again. Andre poured it off and put in new water from the jug.
“Andre, what are you doing in the Carbuncle?”
“I’m with the Peace Movement.”
“What are you talking about? There’s not any war.”
Andre did not reply. He stirred some spice into the poke sallit.
“I didn’t want to be found,” TB finally said.
“I haven’t found you.”
“I’m a very sad fellow, Andre. I’m not like I used to be.”
“This is ready.” Andre spooned out the poke sallit into a couple of bowls. The coffee was done, and he poured them both a cup.
“Do you have any milk?” TB asked.
“That’s a problem.”
“I can drink it black. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I don’t mind. What kind of cigarettes are those?”
“Local.”
“Where do they come from around here?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Andre put pepper sauce on his greens, and TB followed suit. They ate and drank coffee, and it all tasted very good. TB lit a cigarette and the acrid new smoke pleasantly cut through the vegetable thickness that had suffused Andre’s quarters. Outside, there was a great clattering as the rocks lost their balance and they all came tumbling down.
They went out to the front of the quarters where Andre had put down a wooden pallet that served as a patio. Here there was a chair. TB sat down and smoked while Andre did his evening forms.
“Wasn’t that one called the Choking Chicken?” TB asked him after he moved through a particularly contorted portion of the tai chi exercise.
“I think it is the Fucking Annoying Pig-sticker you’re referring to, and I already did that in case you didn’t notice.”
“Guess all my seminary learning is starting to fade.”
“I bet it would all come back to you pretty quickly.”
“I bet we’re never going to find out.”
Andre smiled, completed the form, then sat down in the lotus position across from TB. If such a thing were possible in the Carbuncle, it would be about sunset. It felt like sunset inside Andre.
“Andre, I hope you didn’t come all the way out here to get me.”
“Get you?”
“I’m not going back.”
“To where?”
“To all that.” TB flicked his cigarette away. He took another from a bundle of them rolled in oiled paper that he kept in a shirt pocket: He shook it hard a couple of times and it lit up. “I made mistakes that killed people back there.”
“Like yourself.”
“Among others.” TB took a long drag. Suddenly he was looking hard at Andre. “You scoundrel! You fucked Molly! Don’t lie to me; I just saw it all.”
“Sure.”
“I’m glad. I’m really glad of that. You were always her great regret, you know.”
Andre spread out his hands on his knees.
“Ben, I don’t want a damn thing from you,” he said. “There’s all kinds of machinations back in the Met and some of it has to do with you. You know as well as I do that Amés is going to start a war if he doesn’t get his way with the outer system. But I came out here to see how you were doing. That’s all.”
TB was looking at him again in that hard way, complete way. Seeing all the threads.
“We both have gotten a bit ragged-out these last twenty years,” Andre continued. “I thought you might want to talk about it. I thought you might want to talk about her.”
“What are you? The Way’s designated godling counselor?”
Andre couldn’t help laughing. He slapped his lotus-bent knee and snorted.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” said TB.
“Ben, look at yourself. You’re a garbage man. I wouldn’t classify you as a god, to tell you the truth. But then, I don’t even classify God as a god anymore.”
“I am not a garbage man. You don’t know a damn thing if you think that.”
“What are you then, if you don’t mind my asking?”
TB flicked his cigarette away and sat up straight.
“I’m a rat-hunting man,” he said. “That’s what I am.” He stood up. “Come on. It’s a long walk back to my place, and I got somebody I want you to meet.”
Sometimes you take a turn in a rat warren and there you are in the thick of them when before you were all alone in the tunnel. They will bite you a little, and if you don’t jump, jump, jump, they will bite you a lot. That is the way it has always been with me, and so it doesn’t surprise me when it happens all over again.
What I’m thinking about at first is getting Andre Sud to have sex with me and this is like a tunnel I’ve been traveling down for a long time now.
TB went to town with Bob and left me with Andre Sud the priest. We walked the soft ground leading down to a shoal on the Bendy River where I like to take a bath even though the alligators are sometimes bad there. I told Andre Sud about how to spot the alligators, but I keep an eye out for both of us because even though he’s been in the Carbuncle for a year, Andre Sud still doesn’t quite believe they would eat you.
They would eat you.
Now that I am a woman, I only get blood on me when I go to clean the ferret cages and also TB says he can keep up with Earth-time by when I bleed out of my vagina. It is an odd thing to happen to a girl. Doesn’t happen to ferrets. It means that I’m not pregnant, but how could I be with all these men who won’t have sex with me? TB won’t touch me that way, and I have been working on Andre Sud, but he knows what I am up to. I think he is very smart. Bob just starts laughing like the crazy man he is when I bring it up and he runs away. All these gallant men standing around twiddling themselves into a garbage heap and me here wanting one of them.
I can understand TB because I look just like her. I thought maybe Alethea was ugly, but Andre Sud said he didn’t know about her, but I wasn’t. And I was about sixteen from the looks of it, too, he said. I’m nearly two hundred. Or I’m one year old. Depends on which one of us you mean, or if you mean both.
“Will you scrub my back?” I ask Andre Sud, and, after a moment, he obliges me. At least I get to feel his hands on me. They are as rough as those rocks he handles all the time, but very careful. At first I didn’t like him because he didn’t say much and I thought he was hiding things, but then I saw that he just didn’t say much. So I started asking him questions, and I found out a lot.
I found out everything he could tell me about Alethea. And he has been explaining to me about TB. He was pretty surprised when it turned out I understood all the math. It was the jealousy and hurt I never have quite understood, and how TB could hurt himself so much when I know how much he loves to live.
“Is that good?” Andre Sud asks me, and before he can pull his hands away, I spin around and he is touching my breasts. He himself is the one who told me men like that, but he stumbles back and practically sits down in the water, and goddamnit I spot an alligator eyeing us from the other bank and I have to get us out quick like, although the danger is not severe. It could be.
We dry off on the bank.
“Jill,” he says. “I have to tell you more about sex.”
“Why don’t you show me?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. You’re still thinking like a ferret.”
“I’ll always be part ferret, Andre Sud.”
“I know. That’s a good thing. But I’m all human. Sex is connected with love.”
“I love you.”
“You are deliberately misunderstanding me because you’re horny.”
“All right,” I say. “Don’t remind me.”
But now Andre Sud is looking over my shoulder at something, and his face looks happy and then it looks stricken—as if he realized something in the moment when he was happy.
I turn and see TB running toward the hoy. Bob is with him. They’ve come back from town along the Bob-ways. And there is somebody else with them.
“I’ll be damned,” Andre Sud says. “Molly Index.”
It’s a woman. Her hair looks blue in the light off the heaps, which means that it is white. Is she old or does she just have white hair?
“What are you doing here, Molly?” says Andre Sud quietly. “This can’t be good.”
They are running toward home, all of them running.
TB sends a shiver through the grist and I feel it tell me what he wants us to do.
“Get to the hoy,” I tell Andre Sud. “Fast now. Fast as you can.”
We get there before the others do, and I start casting off lines. When the three of them arrive, the hoy is ready to go. TB and Bob push us away while Andre Sud takes the woman inside. Within moments, we are out in the Bendy, and caught in the current. TB and Bob go inside, and TB sticks his head up through the pilot’s bubble to navigate.
The woman, Molly Index, looks at me. She has got very strange eyes. I have never seen eyes like that. I think that she can see into the grist like TB and I do.
“My God,” she says. “She looks just like her!”
“My name is Jill,” I say. “I’m not Alethea.”
“No, I know that,” Molly Index says. “Ben told me.”
“Molly, what are you doing here?” Andre Sud asks.
Molly Index turns to Andre Sud. She reaches for his hand and touches him. I am a little worried she might try something with the grist, but it looks like they are old friends.
“That war you kept talking about,” she says. “It started. Ames has started it.”
“Oh, no,” Andre Sud says. He pulls away from her. “No.”
Molly Index follows him. She reaches out and rubs a hank of his hair between her fingers. “I like it long,” she says. “But it’s kind of greasy.”
This doesn’t please me and Molly Index is wearing the most horrible boots I have ever seen, too. They are dainty little things that will get eaten off her feet if she steps into something nasty. In the Carbuncle, the ground is something nasty. The silly grist in those city boots won’t last a week here. It is a wonder to me that no one is laughing at the silly boots, but I suppose they have other worries at the moment and so do I.
“I should have listened to you,” Molly Index says. “Made preparations. He got me. Most of me. Ames did. He’s co-opted all the big LAPs into the New Hierarchy. But most of them joined voluntarily, the fools.” Again she touches his hand and I realize that I am a little jealous. He does not pull back from her again. “I alone have escaped to tell you,” Molly Index says. “They’re coming. They’re right behind us.”
“Who is right behind you?” I say. This is something I need to know. I can do something about this.
“Amés’s damned Free Radical Patrol. Some kind of sweeper machine followed me here and I didn’t realize it. Amés must have found out from me—the other part of me—where Ben is.”
“What is a Free Radical Patrol?” I say. “What is a sweeper?”
Something hits the outside of the hoy, hard. “Oh shit,” TB says. “Yonder comes the flying monkey.”
The pilot glass breaks and a hooked claw sinks into TB’s shoulder. He screams. I don’t think, but I move. I catch hold of his ankle.
We are dragged up. Lifted out. We are rising through the air above the hoy. Something screeches. TB yells like crazy.
I hold on.
Wind and TB’s yells and something sounds like a million mean and angry bees.
We’re too heavy and whatever it is drops us onto the deck. TB starts to stand up, but I roll under his legs and knock him down, and before he can do anything, I shove him back down through the pilot dome hole and into the hoy.
Just in time, too, because the thing returns, a black shadow, and sinks its talons into my back. I don’t know what it is yet, and I may never know, but nothing will ever take me without a fight.
Something I can smell in the grist.
You are under indictment from the Free Radical Patrol. Please cease resisting. Cease resisting. Cease.
The words smell like metal and foam.
Cease resisting? What a funny thing to say to me. Like telling the wind to cease blowing. Blowing is what makes it the wind.
I twist hard and whatever it is only gets my dress, my poor pretty dress and a little skin off my back. I can feel some poison grist try to worm into me, but that is nothing. It has no idea what I am made of. I kill that grist, hardly thinking about doing so, and I turn to face this dark thing.
It doesn’t look like a monkey, I don’t think, though I wouldn’t know.
What are you?
But there are wind currents and there is not enough grist transmission through the air for communications. Fuck it.
“Jill, be careful,” says TB. His voice is strained. This thing hurt TB!
I will bite you.
“Would you pass me up one of those gaffs please,” I call to the others. There is scrambling down below and Bob’s hands come up with the long hook. I take it and he ducks back down quick. Bob is crazy, but he’s no fool.
The thing circles around. I cannot see how it is flying, but it is kind of blurred around its edges. Millions of tiny wings—grist built. I take a longer look. This thing is all angles. Some of them have needles, some have claws. All of the angles are sharp. It is like a black and red mass of triangles flying through the air that only wants to cut you. Is there anybody inside? I don’t think so. This is all code that I am facing. It is about three times as big as me, but I think of this as an advantage.
It dives and I am ready with the hook. It grabs hold of the gaff just as I’d hoped it would and I use its momentum to guide it down, just a little too far down.
A whiff of grist as it falls.
Cease immediately. You are interfering with a Hierarchy judgment initiative. Cease or you will be—
Crash into the side of the hoy. Splash into the Bendy River.
I let go of the gaff. Too easy. That was—
The thing rises from the Bendy, dripping wet.
It is mad. I don’t need the grist to tell me it is mad. All those little wings are buzzing angry, but not like bees any more. Hungry like the flies on a piece of meat left out in the air too long.
Cease.
“Here,” says Bob. He hands me a flare gun. I spin and fire into the clump of triangles. Again it falls into the river.
Again it rises.
I think about this. It is dripping wet with Bendy River water. If there is one thing I know, it is the scum that flows in the Bendy. There isn’t any grist in it that hasn’t tried to get me.
This is going to be tricky. I get ready.
Come and get me, triangles. Here I am, just a girl. Come and eat me.
It zooms in. I stretch out my hands.
You are interfering with Hierarchy business. You will cease or be end-use eventuated. You will—
We touch.
Instantly, I reconstitute the Bendy water’s grist, tell it what I want it to do. The momentum of the triangles knocks me over, and I roll along the deck under its weight. Something in my wrist snaps, but I ignore that pain. Blood on my lips from where I have bitten my tongue. I have a bad habit of sticking it out when I am concentrating.
The clump of triangles finishes clobbering me and it falls into the river. Oh, too bad, triangles! The river grist that I recoded tells all the river water what to do. Regular water is six pounds a gallon, but the water in the Bendy is thicker and more forceful than that. And it knows how to crush. It is mean water and it wants to get things, and now I have told it how. I have put a little bit of me into the Bendy, and the water knows something that I know.
It knows never to cease. Never, never, never.
The triangle clump bobs for an instant before the whole river turns on it. Folds over it. Sucks it down. Applies all the weight of water twenty feet deep many miles long. What looks like a waterspout rises above where the triangle clump fell, but this is actually a piledriver, a gelled column climbing up on itself. It collapses downward like a shoe coming down on a roach.
There is buzzing, furious buzzing, wet wings that won’t dry because it isn’t quite water that has gotten onto them, and it won’t quite shake off.
There is a deep-down explosion under us and the hoy rocks. Again I’m thrown onto the deck and I hold tight, hold tight. I don’t want to fall into that water right now. I stand up and look.
Bits of triangles float to the surface. The river quickly turns them back under.
“I think I got it,” I call to the others.
“Jill,” says TB. “Come here and show me you are still alive.”
I jump down through the pilot hole, and he hugs and kisses me. He kisses me right on the mouth, and for once I sense that he is not thinking about Alethea at all when he touches me. It feels very, very good.
“Oh, your poor back!” says Molly Index. She looks pretty distraught and fairly useless. But at least she warned us. That was a good thing.
“It’s just a scratch,” I say. “And I took care of the poison.”
“You just took out a Met sweep enforcer!” Andre Sud says. “I think that was one of the special sweepers made for riot work, too.”
“What was that thing doing here?”
“Looking for Ben,” says Molly Index. “There’s more where that came from. Ames will send more.”
“I will kill them all if I have to.”
Everybody looks at me and everyone is quiet for a moment, even Bob.
“I believe you, Jill,” Andre Sud finally says. “But it’s time to go.”
TB is sitting down at the table now. Nobody is piloting the boat, but we are drifting in midcurrent and it should be all right for now.
“Go?” TB says. “I’m not going anywhere. They will not use me to make war! I’ll kill myself first. And I won’t mess it up this time.”
“If you stay here, they’ll catch you,” Andre Sud says.
“You’ve come to Amés’s attention,” Molly Index says. “I’m sorry, Ben.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“We have to get out of the Met,” Andre Sud says. “We have to get to the outer system.”
“They’ll use me too. They’re not as bad as Ames, but nobody’s going to turn me into a weapon. I don’t make fortunes for soldiers.”
“If we can get to Triton, we might be okay,” Andre Sud replied. “I have a certain pull on Triton. I know the weatherman there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Trust me. It’s a good thing. The weatherman is very important on Triton, and he’s a friend of mine.”
“There is one thing I’d like to know,” says TB. “How in hell would we get to Triton from here?”
Bob stands up abruptly. He’s been rummaging around in TB’s larder while everybody else was talking. I saw him at it, but I knew he wasn’t going to find anything he would want.
“Why didn’t you say you wanted to go Out-ways?” he said. “All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century’s place in the gas swamps.”
“Who’s that?”
“I thought you knew her, TB. That’s that witch that lives in the ditch’s aunt. I guess you’d call her a smuggler. Remember the Old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?”
“I remember,” TB says.
“Well, she’s where I got that from,” says Bob. “She’s got a lot of cats, too, if you want one.”
We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can’t help but think about where I am going. I can’t help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There’s a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has
ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn’t go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren’t any cables out past Jupiter.
“I thought you understood why I’m here,” TB says. “I can’t go.”
“You can’t go even to save your life, Ben?”
“It wouldn’t matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her.”
“What about the war?”
“I can’t think about that.”
“You have to think about it!”
“Who says? God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood.” TB shakes his head sadly. “That was always my favorite koan in seminary—and the truest one.”
“So it’s all over?” Andre Sud says. “He’s going to catch you.”
“I’ll hide from them.”
“Don’t you understand, Ben? He’s taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won’t be any place to hide, because Amés will be the Net.”
“I have to try to save her.”
The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don’t see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I’m a lot older than all of them.
You could say that it is the way the TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.
All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.
And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.
“Ah!” I moan. “My wrist hurts. I think it’s broken, TB.”
He looks at me, stricken.
“Oh, I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking and you’re standing there hurt.”
He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and I know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.
And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman, and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.
“I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”
“No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.
“TB, don’t you see what I am?”
“Jill, you can’t—”
“I’m you, TB! I’m your love for her. Some time in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”
He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.
TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.
“He’ll be out for two days,” I say. “That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle.”
I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most to me in all creation.
“He’s going to be really hungry when he wakes up,” I say.
Andre Sud’s hand on my shoulder. “You saved his life, Jill,” he says. “Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he saved yours.”
“I won’t give her up,” I say. “I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope.”
Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off even though he is right next to me. “Destiny’s a brutal old hag,” he says. “I’d rather believe in nothing.”
“It isn’t destiny,” I reply. “It’s love.”
Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he’s seeing a new me standing where I am standing. “It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be here somewhere. I think Ben knows that somehow. She needs to forgive him, or not forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing, but we can’t think about it that way.”
“I care about TB. The war can go to hell.”
“Yes,” Andre Sud says, “The war can go to hell.”
After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn’t tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.
“I could see all the way around the sun,” Molly Index says. “I don’t know if I want to live now that I’ve lost that. I don’t know how I can live as just a person again.”
“Even when you are less than a person,” I tell her, “you still want to live.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him.”
“Yes,” Molly Index says. “So can I.”
“Will you let him?”
“When the time comes.”
“What is it like?” I say.
“You mean with Andre?”
“What is it like?”
Molly Index touches me. I feel the grist of her pellicle against mine and for a moment I draw back, but then I let it in, let it speak.
Her grists shows me what it is like to make love.
It is like being able to see all the way around the sun.
The next day, Molly Index is the last to say goodbye to me as Makepeace Century’s ship gets ready to go. Makepeace Century looks like Gladys if Gladys didn’t live in a ditch. She’s been trying for years to get Bob to come aboard as ship musician, and that is the price for taking them to Triton—a year of his service. I get the feeling she’s sort of sweet on Bob. For a moment, I wonder just who he is that a ship’s captain should be so concerned with him? But Bob agrees to go. He does it for TB.
TB is so deep asleep he is not even dreaming. I don’t dare touch him for fear of breaking my spell. I don’t dare tell him goodbye.
There is a thin place in the Carbuncle here, and they will travel down through it to where the ship is moored on the outer skin.
I only watch as they carry him away. I only cry until I can’t see him anymore.
Then they are gone. I wipe the tear off my nose. I never have had time for much of that kind of thing.
So what will I do now? I will take the Bendy River all the way around the Carbuncle. I’ll find a likely place to sink the hoy. I will set the ferrets free. Bob made me promise to look after his dumb ferret, Bomi, and show her how to stay alive without him.
And after that?
I’ll start looking for Alethea. Like Andre Sud said, she must be here somewhere. And if anybody can find her, I can. I will find her.
There is a lot I have to do, and now I’ve been thinking that I need help. Pretty soon Ames is going to be running all the grist and all the code will answer to him. But there’s some code he can’t get to. Maybe some of those ferrets will want to stick around. Also, I think it’s time I went back to the mulmyard.
It’s time I made peace with those rats.
Then Amés had better watch out if he tries to stop me from finding her.
We will bite him.