Tony Daniel (5 page)

“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 Amés 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 thighbone, 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.

Only in the Carbuncle were such things possible. It was here that the stray bits of coding that inhabited the merci, and the grist matrix of the Met in general, were able to achieve instantiation in physical, biological form. The rats of the Met were just rats. The ferrets were merely ferrets. In the Carbuncle, they were animals that were strangely changed. Something in the slurry of Carbuncle grist would not let the algorithmic security cops that patrolled the virtuality do their job here and keep the programming from intermingling with its surroundings however it so chose. The protocols broke down, and weirdness resulted. Here was where the viruses and bugs and worms could enter into an eerie kind of reality—by taking up residence in the vermin and predators of this garbage dump of humanity.

And, of course, that was why he thought he might find Alethea here. Or what was left of her, fractured into parts—but perhaps recoverable. Entered into symbiosis with the local fauna.

And all I’ve managed to do is to get my friend killed, TB thought.

He couldn’t look at Jill 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, 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 space ship 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.”