Tales of Old Earth (22 page)

“Your word's good enough for me, pal. Just don't forget to spit in my face before you leave. It'll look better.”

“Have fun,” Lord Eric said, and left the room.

Eric's men worked Crow over good. They broke his ribs and kicked in his face. A couple of times they had to stop to get their breath back, they were laboring so hard. He had to give them credit, they put their backs into the work. But, like Crow himself, the entertainment was too boorish for its audience. Long before it was done, most of the partyers had left in boredom or disgust.

At last he groaned, and he died.

Well, what was a little thing like death to somebody like Crow? He was archetypal—the universe demanded that he exist. Kill him here-and-now and he'd be reborn there-and-then. It wouldn't be long before he was up and around again.

But not Annie.

No, that was the bitch of the thing. Annie was dead, and the odds were good she wasn't coming back.

Among twenty smog-choked cities, the only still thing was the eye of Crow. He leaned back, arms crossed, in the saddle of his Harley, staring at a certain door so hard he was almost surprised his gaze didn't burn a hole in it.

A martlet flew down from the sky and perched on the handlebars. It was a little bird, round-headed and short-beaked, with long sharp wings. Its eyes were two stars shining. “Hail!” it said.

“Hail, fire, and damnation,” Crow growled. “Any results?”

“Lord Taleisin has done as you required, and salted the timelines with songs. In London, Nashville, and Azul-Tlon do they praise her beauty, and the steadfastness of her love. In a hundred guises and a thousand names is she exalted. From mammoth-bone medicine lodges to MTVirtual, they sing of Lady Anne, of the love that sacrifices all comfort, and of the price she gladly paid for it.”

Still the door did not open.

“That's not what I asked, shit-for-brains. Did it work?”

“Perhaps.” The bird cocked its head. “Perhaps not. I was told to caution you: Even at best, you will only have a now-and-again lady. Archetypes don't travel in pairs. If it works, your meetings will be like solar eclipses—primal, powerful, rare, and brief.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The creature hesitated, and if a bird could be said to look abashed, then it looked strangely abashed. “I was also told that you would have something for me.”

Without looking, Crow unstrapped his saddlebag and rummaged within. He removed a wooden heart-shaped box, tied up in string. “Here.”

With a glorious burst of unearthly song, the martlet seized the string in its talons and, wings whirring, flew straight up into the sky. Crow did not look after it. He waited.

He waited until he was sure that the door would never open. Then he waited some more.

The door opened.

Out she came, in faded Levis, leather flight jacket, and a black halter top, sucking on a Kent menthol. She was looking as beautiful as the morning and as hard as nails. The sidewalk cringed under her high-heeled boots.

“Hey, babe,” Crow said casually. “I got you a sidecar. See? It's lined with velvet and everything.”

“Fuck that noise,” Annie said and, climbing on behind him, hugged him so hard that his ribs creaked.

He kick-started the Harley and with a roar they pulled out into traffic. Crow cranked up the engine and popped a wheelie. Off they sped, down the road that leads everywhere and nowhere, to the past and the future, Tokyo and Short Pump, infinity and the corner store, with Annie laughing and unafraid, and Crow flying the black flag of himself.

11

Microcosmic Dog

Ellen Gillespie lived in a world of her own. It looked much the way New York City would had it been wrapped around an asteroid and then turned inside out. Sitting on her balcony she could see a sky full of buildings that curved overhead and warped back down again somewhere behind her back. Ellen had lived in this world so long that it seemed absolutely normal to her.

She was happy there.

Each morning, she cabbed down to the Village for Turkish coffee and bagels with cream cheese and lox at Kuscazk's, a sidewalk café not far from the White Horse Saloon where Dylan Thomas had so famously drunk himself to death. Lunch varied. It might be a salad
vinaigrette
with a glass of white wine at the MoMA or then again it might be a hot dog and a Coke bought from a vendor and eaten in Central Park at the foot of the Alice statue, where she could watch the little children launch their toy boats out on the sailing pond. It depended entirely upon her mood. Suppers—unless she had a date—she ate at Lutèce.

It was a good life for a single woman with an income. Her apartment was large enough for the occasional dinner party, and even though she had designated one room her library and set aside another for a dark-room, there was still space enough to work at home on days when she simply couldn't face going to the office. She loved everything about New York—its neverending variety, the sunshine that daily welled up from its many rivers, the fact that it never slept. Sometimes she took a close friend and the futon out onto the balcony at night and they would make love there, illumined only by the splendor of a thousand neon signs and a million starry windows arching overhead.

She was in her study one day, going over photo proofs for a spread that
Vogue
had commissioned, when her girlfriend Stasi walked in—Ellen never bothered to lock her door—with an enormous sheep dog at her heels and announced that she was going away.

“Away? Away where?”

“Oh, you know.” Stasi waved a hand vaguely. “Away.”

“Well, when are you coming back?”

“
Dear
child.” Stasi was a model and had once come within a whisper of supermodeldom. The experience had left its mark on her diction. “I'm not coming back. None of us are. Ever.”

A chill ran through Ellen. “What do you mean? You don't mean that.”

“I just dropped by to ask if you'd take my dog.” Stasi's hand was on the door now. “Don't let it beg at the table. Two meals a day is plenty.”

“Wait!” Ellen cried. Stasi's eyes, when she looked back, were paler than pale—coldly, unblinkingly fixed upon death. It was terrifying. All Ellen's questions, objections, arguments, died on her tongue. “What's the dog's name?”

“Dog.”

“Dog? Just Dog?”

“Dog.”

“Why Dog?”

Stasi shrugged. “That's its name.”

“Oh. Well, that makes sense. I guess.”

And then she was gone.

Ellen closed the door. “Well, Dog, I guess it's just you and me, then. I'd better send out for some dog food. I wonder what you like to eat.”

“Alpo will do fine,” Dog said.

“You can talk!”

“Yes. I'm a talking Dog.” It walked to a corner, turned around three times, then lay down and promptly fell asleep.

Ellen was astonished, of course. But no more so than by the behavior of certain other roommates she had lived with in her time. New York was full of surprises. One either grew used to them or went back home to Idaho or New Jersey or wherever it was that one came from.

She called down to the concierge for a case of Alpo and, for the moment, that was that.

There seemed to be fewer people than usual out on the street the next day. But Manhattan was a chaotic system, full of strange rhythms and unpredictable effects. You never knew what to expect.

Kuscazk's was almost empty, but Conrad said they were out of her coffee anyway, so Ellen had to settle for a mocha latte. Dog lay by her feet, gnawing at a plate of sausages that Conrad had placed thère at her direction. “You really lead a charmed existence,” it remarked.

“You should talk,” Ellen said a little nervously. She still wasn't sure how she felt about sharing her life—her secrets—with a talking dog. “I mean, there you are with your sausages and all the Alpo you could possibly want and somebody to see that you're properly groomed and you don't even have to hold down a job. Some people would say you've got it made.”

“You wouldn't trade places with me, though.”

“No, I guess not.”

She paid with her American Express, left a cash tip, and took a cab to the office.

Rudolfo was waiting for her with a stack of black-and-white glossies he wanted her approval on. They were, as expected, technically brilliant, but—“Rudy, these are perverse! What happened to this woman's fingers? They're deformed. My God, all these people are missing things! Ears and legs and—this is supposed to be a fashion shoot, not a wallow in the gutter.”

Rudolfo drew himself up haughtily. He was tall and thin and young and black; disdain looked good on him. “Perversity sells, daarling. Anyway, these are the best we can get. Every physically whole model in Manhattan has gone away.”

She came to a photo of a woman with part of her skull missing and put a hand over it so she wouldn't have to see. “What about the agency in Soho? The one that made that big presentation last week.”

“Out of business. I went there yesterday and it was gone. Vacated.
Tout perdu
. Models gone, the building torn down, and the street packed up into vans and shipped away.”

“Now that's ridic—”

Dog, lying motionless on a sheepskin rug, suddenly said, “A singularity engine requires a black hole no more than a yard across of at least 0.00023 Solar mass embedded within a curdled self-generated matrix of electromagnetic flux. It is capable of generating and maintaining a wavefront reality at a complexity of 86 million polygons per second. A single engine—”

“
What
,” Ellen snapped, “are you talking about?”

Dog snorted, and twitched, and gracelessly stood—a process similar to watching the film of an avalanche being run backwards. “I'm sorry, I must have been talking in my sleep.”

“You were saying something about black holes and polygons. And numbers—there were a lot of numbers involved.”

“Was I?”

“Excuse me,” Rudolfo said. “What's with the mutt?”

“Its name is Dog. It can talk.”

“Typical. Here I am, trying to hold a serious conversation about something important and you're off in Never-Never Land, talking to the animals as if you were Eliza Doolittle.”

“Eliza Doolittle did not—oh, what's the point? Rudolfo, why are you being so
difficult
today?” She stopped. “Did you have a fight with Gregor?”

“Who?”

“Gregor. Your boyfriend!”

Rudolfo looked blank.

“The guy you've been living with for the past three years. The one with the dimples and a thing for Quentin Tarantino movies. The one who did the cute trick with the cheese omelet that I told you I'd have to strangle you if you told me about it one more time.
That
Gregor!”

“I honestly don't know what you're talking about.”

“Take out your wallet,” Ellen said. “Look in the card holder. You'll find a photo of the two of you together, behind your driver's license.”

Rudolfo obeyed. He slid out the photograph and stared wordlessly at it for a long time. Finally he said, “He's gorgeous.”

“Well, that's what I've always said.” Ellen smiled.

“But I have no memory of him whatsoever,” he said in a troubled voice. “Or of any other boyfriends, for that matter. I can't remember my mother. I can't remember my childhood. I don't even believe I had one.”

“Now I don't know what
you're
talking about.”

Rudolfo sank to the floor, put his head in his hands, and began to cry. Alarmed, Ellen crouched down beside him and put an arm over his shoulder. “Don't cry, Rudy. Whatever the trouble is, it's not that bad.”

“It is!” Rudolfo raised his tear-stained face from his hands. “I've lost my past, I've lost my memories, I've lost this boyfriend you tell me I had … Dear God, what's happening to me?”

“I don't know,” Ellen said fearfully. “But it's time we found out. We'll start by talking to Gregor.” She lifted the phone and hit speed dial. But the line was dead. She tried clicking the receiver like people did in the movies. Nothing. “Okay, then, we'll go over in person. Where is it you guys live, anyway?”

“In Brooklyn,” Dog answered for him.

Determination filled Ellen. “Come on,” she said to Rudolfo, “we're going to get to the bottom of this thing.”

There was a roadblock at the Brooklyn Bridge. All the cars were being turned back. “Keep moving, keep moving!” the traffic cop shouted.

Ellen shoved Dog aside and stuck her head out the window. “What's going on?”

“Brooklyn is closed.”

“What are you talking about? Brooklyn can't be closed. It's a borough, for cripes sake.”

“It's closed,” the cop repeated, “for repairs.” To the cabbie he said, “Now clear out before I yank your license!”

So they left. “Did you hear what he said?” Ellen asked, a little hysterically. “He said that Brooklyn was closed for repairs!”

“Does a cinnamon bun taste the same to you as it does for me?” Rudolfo asked in a lifeless monotone. “Do you experience its texture in more detail? Is it buttered? Are there raisins?”

“Rudolfo, you're not making any sense.” Ellen stared at the passing buildings. They all looked alike. Had they always been so drab? So … unornamented?

“What is it like to live a complete life? One that's continuous, and detailed across the full bandwidth for every physical sense? One in which nothing is experienced in synopsis? I can't imagine how glorious your existence must be.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

There was no reply.

When Ellen turned to look, she was—save for Dog—alone in the back seat. “Where'd he go?” she asked in astonishment. “What happened to Rudolfo?”

“I ate him,” Dog said.

“Very funny.” Ellen shivered and settled back in her seat. This was creepy and then some. Something was seriously wrong.