Caine's Law (5 page)

Just like he adopted me.

So I’d had a shitty night, and morning without the horse-witch looked to be worse, and then I mopped my face with the rotting rag that passed for a hand towel and saw the old guy in the mirror.

I had to stare for a while before I could make anything make sense. I’m not sure how long. Sometimes I’m fast with shit—usually how to hurt people, but let that go—and sometimes comprehending shit takes me roughly twice forever, and I don’t even remember which flavor of shit this had turned out to be. For the longest time, I couldn’t get my head around how the old bastard hadn’t been lying to me.

His mom really had died when he was my age. She really was in the back of the clinic that morning. Too.

I didn’t give the sonofabitch enough credit. Whatever else anybody can say about him, that old fucker was an honest man.

It was raining weird all over the damn place. Except this wasn’t so much raining weird as it was a hurricane of fucking impossible. There’s a reason it’s not called the 2nd Guideline of Thermodynamics.

Because if that was possible—shit, more than possible, considering it actually happened—what else is possible?

What isn’t?

I remember thinking about everything I’ve done. Everything I’ve seen. Everything I know. And I remember a wave of wonder breaking over me when I finally realized what it meant.

That’s when I started to smile.

That’s when I looked at my reflection in a ragged patch of silver and thought,
Fuck you too, old man. Everybody’s fucking sorry
.

The difference between him and me?

Hard to say. He obviously didn’t expect to find Dad and me in the clinic, which means I’ll never be him, because he must not have had that memory. So my future won’t be that. The horse-witch would say he wasn’t me. He was somebody who looked like me. Somebody who had my scars.

But, y’know, the horse-witch isn’t always right about everything.

Kris—Emperor Deliann, who also isn’t always right about everything—would say that each of us is the sum of his scars, which is what has always made the most sense to me. Even if I never find my way to the clinic on the day my mother died, that old guy was Hari Michaelson. Caine. Jonathan Fist. Dominic fucking Shade, even.

If you have my scars, you’re me too.

But being me didn’t mean I’m him, or that I ever will be. You neither. Shit, I wasn’t the same guy I’d been the night before. I’m not the same guy I’ll be after I go back to the Boedecken. That’s part of why the horse-witch has her thing about names. Sometimes your name is just a dodge to fool yourself into thinking you’re the same guy you were ten years ago. Six months ago.

Yesterday.

Funny thing, though: the old guy didn’t remember us meeting. That means at least something about his childhood had unhappened. His childhood had been warped by a Power into
my
childhood. He’s who I would have been.

So—stick with me here—his childhood, the one that led him to that morning in the Mission District Labor Clinic, never existed. But I still remember him. I remember all of it. Even though
he will never exist
. He can’t. He himself has unhappened, but he still exists as a feature of my youth. Existed. Language fails.

That scene couldn’t have happened; it’s an acausal loop, a self-canceling sideslip of history. Couldn’t have failed to unhappen.

Except it did.

Time-binding is not accomplished lightly. There have been, according to Monastic Vaultbound Histories, only two human beings who could do it at all. One of them was Jantho of Tyrnall, called the Ironhand, who crafted the Covenant of Pirichanthe, created the Vaults of Binding, and founded the Monasteries. The other was his twin brother, Jereth.

He’s the one we call the Godslaughterer.

That white plastic crutch … those things are hollow. And the old bastard didn’t need it for walking. I
really
wish I could ask him what was inside.

I guess, unlikely as it seems, there’s a chance I might find out.

And there was another difference between him and me. The big one. The biggest there is: I had something I could do about shit he’d been just sorry for.

Which was good because, y’know, save the world one goddamn time and it’s your fucking job forever.

M
y cell in the Buke had no way to measure time. Night was when they turned off my lights. Day was when they turned them on. Meals were delivered through a feeding tube attached to a nozzle just behind my collarbone, minimizing solid waste, so I couldn’t even track time by how often I have to shit. It was actually kind of relaxing. Though still, it wasn’t the kind of place I thought I’d miss, until I woke up somewhere else.

Apparently food isn’t the only thing delivered through my feeding tube.

Some things haven’t changed. I’m still stripcuffed to a restraint bed. I still have no feeling below my waist. The room décor is still general-purpose cell, just with walls of institutional green instead of white, and actual furniture instead of molded extrusions of the floor. There’s even a window—or at least a very convincing imitation of natural light—behind me where I can’t see, but low enough to cast my bed’s shadow on the wall. And I can tell time here. When the steel doors slide open and Simon Faller’s standing there with a jumbo economy-size palmpad, I know exactly what time it is.

Half-past the rest of my life.

He’s in the same grey suit from before. The fit hasn’t improved. He looks drawn, nervy, round-eyed. A fawn scenting wolves. From the look of his collar, he’s lost more weight and isn’t really keeping up with his laundry. He flicks me half a glance from the doorway, then steps aside to clear the lines of fire from me to six Studio Security spec-ops guys, who block the door open and cover me with smartgrip power rifles.

Six. That’s almost respect.

Spec-ops secmen. Y’know, it never really struck me how weirdly wrong it actually is to have highly trained, highly motivated special-operations troopers—we recruit from the Social Police—to keep order in an entertainment company. On the other hand, considering the specific entertainment we produced, maybe it’s not weird, or wrong either. These particular guys wear the shimmery cardinal-red body armor and the silver moiré helmets of Artan Guards—anti-magick gear.

Interesting. Because if you think you need a defense …

Before I can fully parse the various implications, a couple of Workers roll in a cart that carries a small console with a screen and I.V. stands, like a morphine pump, except I have considerable experience with narcotic painkillers and I know for damn sure that a standard morphine solution doesn’t look anything like the iridescent black goo that fills the four bags on the cart, and it’s only when one of the Workers plugs a line into my feeding tube’s shunt that I finally click on what that shit reminds me of.

Fuck me inside out.

“Simon?” He’s out of sight in the corridor. “What’s going on? Are we still on Earth?”

Because if that’s what it looks like, it shouldn’t even exist … but the secmen carry power rifles, which don’t work on Home …

This is beyond me.

“Uh—” A wet-sounding cough as he comes back in. “Yes. Earth. Mostly.”

I roll my eyes up at the bags of black goo. “And what’s that shit?”

“I … have been told, I mean, they said you’d know what it is.” My eyes roll closed and my head drops back onto the pillow. “This just keeps getting better.”

“I know it’s upsetting—”

“Fuck upsetting. I thought I might be useful for something more than firewood.”

“I—we, ah, I mean, nobody wants to do that. It’s not supposed to kill you. It’s not supposed to even hurt.”

“Yeah, tell me another.”

Faller gives a resigned nod that’s barely more than essential tremor. He comes over by me and picks up the hand unit. “Here. You control it. Nobody else.”

It really is like a morphine pump—just a handle with a button switch that’ll dispense a measured amount of black shit into my bloodstream. “So, what, it’s an assisted suicide thing?”

Faller gives me an exhausted shrug. “I don’t know, Caine. Hari. I don’t know anything. I just do what they tell me.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Could be worse.” He smiles, just a bit. “I could be the cripple stripcuffed to a restraint bed with a crude oil I.V.”

“There’s crippled and there’s crippled, Simon.” He doesn’t ask me to explain, so I don’t. “What happens now?”

Another sigh. He’s barely vertical, bracing himself on my bedrail. “Right. Ah, that offer you made to the Board of Governors—guaranteed permanent Overworld access in exchange for amnesty and a job—”

“Yeah, I was there. What about it?”

“Well … this is, uh—I guess you’d call it,” Faller says reluctantly as he turns my bed so I can see out the window, “their counteroffer.”

“Wow.” I blink, and then I blink again, but it’s all still out there. “I mean, wow.”

The landscape’s grim: blasted hills and rock bleached white enough to hurt my eyes and not one living thing except for about a division of Social Police manning hardened bunkers and pointing everything from radar-directed sea whiz cannon to railguns to turret-mounted sixteen-fucking-inch guns out over the dead moonscape or up into the empty sky.

Honest-to-fuck
artillery
.

And the sky isn’t empty. Not when I really look. Way up high, it’s actually kind of crowded, what with all the shiny pinpoints that are probably the latest generation of riot cars.

Faller coughs behind my head. “The, ah, Social Police are, I guess, hoping to deter a rescue attempt. Or, ah, escape.”

“Somebody did mention to them that I can’t walk, right?”

“They—uh, they like to be thorough.”

“And escape to where? Jesus, look at that shit.”

I nod out toward the ragged hills rising in the middle distance: only the colors of stone and dirt. “There’s nothing out there. Not even sagebrush or cactus or any other goddamn thing. What the hell is this, the Korean Peninsula?”

“Ah, no. No, we’re in North America. We, uh … this installation is in the Dakota Badlands.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard—but I never thought it could still—”

“It is. Even now. Hotter than the provincial authority has ever admitted. That’s why all the slavelanes divert south. There is nothing alive here that we didn’t bring with us.”

“I better knit myself some lead underwear.”

“Better knit yourself a tank.”

Wait … the Dakota Badlands … holy shit again. Holy shittier. “It’s the
dil. That’s
why this fort’s here. That’s why
I’m
here. This is the Earthside face of the
dil T’llan
.”

He shrugs. “No reason to deny it now. Neither of us is going anywhere.”

Well.

Well well well. Explains the anti-magick shit. And the black oil.

Back outside the window some guys are walking by—what the fuck? No armor … and they’re
huge
 … and that color isn’t cammo, it’s their fucking
skin
 …

“Holy shit …” I can’t seem to get my breath. “Ogrilloi …? On Earth? Are you pulling my fucking
dick
?”

“The, ah, Overworld Company has been employing ogrilloi at this facility for, ah—” He coughs harshly, and again, and he wipes his mouth with a handkerchief stained with what looks like blood. “For a while. They, ah, are very reliable. And they need very little upkeep. Mostly meat and beer.”

“Has anybody told them how all their little grills are getting slow-roasted every time they take a step out there?”

“Apparently some factor of their genetics makes them resistant. About the worst they can get here is sunburn. And I’ve never seen an ogrillo with a sunburn.”