Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (34 page)

“Let’s go to my place!” said Soma. “When it’s time for anthem we can watch the parade from my balcony. I live in one of the lofts above the Tyranny of the Anecdote.”

“Above what?” asked Japheth.

“It’s a tavern. They’re my landlords,” said Soma. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

But that wasn’t right.

Japheth’s Owl friend fell to his knees and vomited right in the street. Soma stared at the jiggling spheres in the gutter as the man choked some words out. “She’s taken the feathers. She’s looking for us now.”

Too much rum punch, thought Soma, thought it about the Owl man and himself and about all of Japheth’s crazy friends.

“Soma, how far now?” asked Japheth.

Soma remembered his manners. “Not far,” he said.

And it wasn’t, just a few more struggling yards, Soma leading the way and Japheth’s friends half-carrying, half-dragging their drunken friend down the Alley. Nothing unusual there. Every night in the Alley was Carnival.

Then a wave at the bouncer outside the Anecdote, then up the steps, then sing “Let me in, let me in!” to the door, and finally all of them packed into the cramped space.

“There,” said the sick man, pointing at the industrial sink Soma had installed himself to make brush cleaning easier.
Brushes . . . where were his brushes, his pencils, his notes for the complexity seminar?

“Towels, Soma?”

“What? Oh, here let me get them.” Soma bustled around, finding towels, pulling out stools for the now silent men who filled his room.

He handed the towels to Japheth. “Was it something he ate?” Soma asked.

Japheth shrugged. “Ate a long time ago, you could say. Owls are as much numbers as they are meat. He’s divesting himself. Those are ones and zeroes washing down your drain.”

The broad man—hadn’t he been broad?—the scrawny man with opals falling off him said, “We can only take a few minutes. There are unmounted Detectives swarming the whole city now. What I’ve left in me is too deep for their little minds, but the whole sphere is roused and things will only get tighter. Just let me—” He turned and retched into the sink again. “Just a few minutes more until the singing.”

Japheth moved to block Soma’s view of the Owl. He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “Yours?”

The blue-eyed boy moved over to the sink, helped the Owl ease to the floor. Soma looked at the pictures. “Yes, mostly. I traded for a few.”

Japheth was studying one charcoal piece carefully, a portrait. “What’s this one?”

The drawing showed a tall, thin young man dressed in a period costume, leaning against a mechanical of some kind, staring intently out at the viewer. Soma didn’t remember drawing it, specifically, but knew what it must be.

“That’s a caricature. I do them during Campaign for the provincials who come into the city to vote. Someone must have asked me to draw him and then never come back to claim it.”

“I’m . . . what did you put in me?” Soma asked. There was moisture on his cheeks, and he hoped it was tears.

The Owl was struggling up to his feet. A bell tone sounded from the sky and he said, “Now, Japheth. There’s no time.”

“Just a minute more,” snapped the Crow. “What did
we
put in you? You . . .” Japheth spat. “While you’re remembering, try and remember this. You
chose
this! All of you chose it!”

The angry man wouldn’t have heard any reply Soma might have made, because it was then that all of the Kentuckians clamped their ears shut with their odd muffs. To his surprise, they forced a pair onto Soma as well.

Jenny finally convinced the car to stop wailing out its hee-haw pitch when they entered the maze of streets leading to Printer’s Alley. The drive back had been long, the car taking every northern side road, backtracking, looping, even trying to enter the dumping grounds at one point before the bundle bugs growled them away. During anthem, while Jenny drummed her fingers and forced out the words, the car still kept up its search, not even pretending to dance.

So Jenny had grown more and more fascinated by the car’s behavior. She had known cars that were slavishly attached to their owners before, and she had known cars that were smart—almost as smart as bundle bugs, some of them—but the two traits never seemed to go together. “Cars are dogs or cars are cats,” her Teacher had said to explain the phenomenon, another of the long roll of enigmatic statements that constituted formal education in the Voluntary State.

But here, now, here was a bundle bug that didn’t seem to live up to those creatures’ reputations for craftiness. The car had been following the bug for a few blocks—Jenny only realized that after the car, for the first time since they entered the city proper, made a turn
away
from the address painted on its name tag.

The bug was a big one, and was describing a gentle career down Commerce Street, drifting from side to side and clearly ignoring the traffic signals that flocked around its head in an agitated cloud.

“Car, we’d better get off this street. Rogue bugs are too much for the THP. If it doesn’t self-correct, a Commodore is likely to be rousted out from the Parthenon.” Jenny sometimes had nightmares about Commodores.

The car didn’t listen—though it was normally an excellent listener—but accelerated toward the bug. The bug, Jenny now saw, had stopped in front of a restaurant and cracked its abdomen. Dumpster feelers had started creeping out of the interstices between thorax and head when the restaurateur charged out, beating at the feelers with a broom. “Go now!” the man shouted, face as red as his vest and leggings. “I told you twice already! You pick up here Chaseday! Go! I already called your supervisor, bug!”

The bug’s voice echoed along the street. “No load? Good good.” Its sigh was pure contentment, but Jenny had no time to appreciate it. The car sped up, and Jenny covered her eyes, anticipating a collision. But the car slid to a halt with bare inches to spare, peered into the empty cavern of the bug’s belly, then sighed, this one not content at all.

“Come on, car,” Jenny coaxed. “He must be at home by now. Let’s just try your house, okay?”

The car beeped and executed a precise three-point turn. As they turned off Commerce and climbed the viaduct that arced above the Farmer’s Market, Jenny caught a hint of motion in the darkening sky. “THP bicycles, for sure,” she said. “Tracking your bug friend.”

At the highest point on the bridge, Jenny leaned out and looked down into the controlled riot of the Market. Several stalls were doing brisk business, and when Jenny saw why, she asked the car to stop, then let out a whistle.

“Oi! Monkey!” she shouted. “Some beets up here!”

Jenny loved beets.

“It’s funny that I don’t know what it means, though, don’t you think, friends?” Soma was saying this for perhaps the fifth time since they began their walk. “
Church
Street.
Church
. Have you ever heard that word anywhere else?”

“No,” said the blue-eyed boy.

The Kentuckians were less and less talkative the farther the little group advanced west down Church Street. It was a long, broad avenue, but rated for pedestrians and emergency vehicles only. Less a street, really, than a linear park, for there were neither businesses nor apartments on either side, just low gray government buildings, slate-colored in the sunset.

The sunset. That was why the boulevard was crowded, as it was every night. As the sun dropped down, down, down it dropped behind the Parthenon. At the very instant the disc disappeared behind the sand-colored edifice, the Great Salt Lick self-illuminated and the flat acres of white surrounding the Parthenon shone with a vast, icy light.

The Lick itself was rich with the minerals that fueled the Legislators and Bears, but the white light emanating from it was sterile. Soma noticed that the Crows’ faces grew paler and paler as they all got closer to its source.
His work was fascinating, and grew more so as more and more disciplines began finding ways to integrate their fields of study into a meta-architecture of science. His department chair co-authored a paper with an expert in animal husbandry, of all things.

The Owl held Soma’s head as the painter vomited up the last of whatever was in his stomach. Japheth and the others were making reassuring noises to passersby. “Too much monkey wine!” they said, and, “We’re in from the provinces, he’s not used to such rich food!” and, “He’s overcome by the sight of the Parthenon!”

Japheth leaned over next to the Owl. “Why’s it hitting him so much harder than the others?”

The Owl said, “Well, we’ve always taken them back north of the border. This poor fool we’re dragging ever closer to the glory of his owner. I couldn’t even guess what’s trying to fill up the empty spaces I left in him—but I’m pretty sure whatever’s rushing in isn’t all from her.”

Japheth cocked an eyebrow at his lieutenant. “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say all together at once.”

The Owl smiled, another first, if that sad little half grin counted as a smile. “Not a lot of time left for talking. Get up now, friend painter.”

The Owl and Japheth pulled Soma to his feet. “What did you mean,” Soma asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “ ‘the glory of his owner’?”

“Governor,” said Japheth. “He said, ‘the glory of his Governor,’ ” and Japheth swept his arm across, and yes, there it was, the glory of the Governor.

Church Street had a slight downward grade in its last few hundred yards. From where they stood, they could see that the street ended at the spectacularly defined border of the Great Salt Lick, which served as legislative chambers in the Voluntary State. At the center of the lick stood the Parthenon, and while no normal citizens walked the salt just then, there was plenty of motion and color.

Two bears were lying facedown in the Lick, bobbing their heads as they took in sustenance from the ground. A dozen or more Legislators slowly unambulated, their great slimy bodies leaving trails of gold or silver depending on their party affiliation. One was engulfing one of the many salt-white statues that dotted the grounds, gaining a few feet of height to warble its slogan songs from. And, unmoving at the corners of the rectangular palace in the center of it all, four Commodores stood.

They were tangled giants of rust, alike in their towering height and in the oily bathyspheres encasing the scant meat of them deep in their torsos, but otherwise each a different silhouette of sensor suites and blades, each with a different complement of articulated limbs or wings or wheels.

“Can you tell which ones they are?” Japheth asked the blue-eyed boy, who had begun murmuring to himself under his breath, eyes darting from Commodore to Commodore.