One of Us (36 page)

As I stood there seventeen years later on the walk overlooking the beach, some feeling swelled until all around me seemed transparent and arbitrary. I glanced to the side, at the palms that stretched along the Palisades, and they looked to me like a bump map wrapped around empty space. Empty but not vacant, just less tangible and yet more real. As if I were a part of everything around me, including things I had not yet seen; as if everything in creation were a shadow thrown on the same essence, different-sized ripples in the same pool.

Either I was having a flashback and needed chocolate urgently, or something odd was happening.

This time I could feel it coming. The world I could see, the world I believed to be solid, seemed to slowly turn through two degrees, and this small movement was enough to realign the spheres. Everything came into a different conjunction. What I had believed to be there in front of me was revealed as merely noise, an interference pattern caused by two waves hitting each other at a particular angle. As I watched, it was as if one of the waves turned, until the two shared the same source and were synchronized with each other, multiplying and accentuating each other's power, for once locked into step.

It was like having every memory taken out of your head and being left with pure intelligence; like suddenly seeing a solution and realizing it had been there all the time; like being caught at the center of a web of coincidence, and perceiving the true fabric of reality for a moment. For coincidences, like dreams, are personal. They say nothing about other people's lives but everything about your own. I gradually made out a face in front of me.

It was Helena's, and she was talking. I could see that Laura was still being kept in the same low room, and Helena was with her. She wasn't looking directly at Laura, whose point of view I now shared, and for a while I couldn't make out what she was saying.

The vision was unstable, as if my mind weren't able to look through this window for long, and the nerves that perceived and interpreted it were misfiring through being supplied with the wrong kind of fuel. I wanted to call out, but had enough presence of mind to know that my voice would echo in a place where she couldn't hear.

Then, as if it had been spoken in my own head, I heard Laura ask a question. It was simple, straightforward, phrased with the kind of emotional bluntness you hear between two women. Helena's reply was the only words of hers I made out clearly.

"Yes," she said. "I do."

Then, just like that, they were gone, along with the green and silver of the verdigris. The colors smeared back into shapes; the spheres swung back into their usual alignment.

Oh, I thought to myself, not even really knowing what I meant. Back in the small guy again.

Little by little I noticed the sound of the waves from far below, of the quiet murmuring of the people camped out down the way. I felt the coolness of the rail my hands rested on, and tiredness in my feet. My whole body felt like it was buzzing gently, as if electrons were limbering up, accelerating back into their usual courses after some unaccountable hiatus. Slowly it began to settle, to become comfortable once more with its corporeality, but because of a ringing in my ears it was another few moments before I could hear what was being said to me.

"Earth to Hap," a voice was saying, clearly not for the first time. "Hap, have you gone deaf or something?"

I swung around, not knowing who on earth it might be.

"Yo, carbon guy," the voice said. "You okay? You looked like you checked out there for a while."

The voice came from something small standing on the sidewalk.

It was my clock.

"WHAT THE HELL are you doing here?"

"Looking for you, of course." The clock scuttered over to the wall and clambered up to sit precariously on the railing.

"Where have you been?"

"Now you're asking." The clock inclined itself toward me confidentially. "I was in Laura's purse, and just waking up back in Deck's apartment, when there was shouting, and bright lights started going off, and general evidence of mayhem. So I thought to myself. Crap on this, it sounds dangerous, and stayed very quiet until it all went away. Then I heard someone hammering and a woman's voice I didn't recognize, and a door slamming. Still pretty weird, and no one was saying 'Hey—I wonder what the time is?' or anything, so I stayed put a little longer, just in case."

"Caution being the better part of valor."

"It is if you're only a few inches tall. When I was sure nothing else strange was going to happen, I crept out of the purse and found that everyone had disappeared."

"So how come you weren't there when I got back this evening?"

"Wait," the clock said breathlessly, "there's more. I think to myself, Where's Hap gone? because to be frank, my alarm had gone off and while I'm beginning to come around to your way of thinking that maybe there's some kind of problem there, I still had to tell you to get up. So I went looking for you."

"Where?"

"Captain Hammond's house. I remembered you mentioning him when you were at Applebaum's, so I found out the address and schlepped over there. Well, actually I happened to run into a microwave oven that was going in more or less the same direction, and he gave me a lift most of the way."

"How the hell did you find out where Hammond lived?"

The clocked coughed. "Just listen. I get to Captain Hammond's and the lights are all on, and I figure it's unlikely you'd do that, so I snuck around the back and got the lock to let me in. He told me some human had laid two hundred bucks on him earlier in the evening, and that sounded like you, so I'm thinking, maybe you are inside after all. By this stage my alarm is beginning to really piss me off: It's like when you guys need to pee really badly, and I don't want to just go off and embarrass myself. So I slipped into the kitchen and talked to the appliances."

"I met them. Nice bunch of guys."

"Yeah—they spoke really highly of you. Anyway, they tell me that the Widow Hammond has returned, with some guy."

"What? Who?"

"That's what I wondered—but they didn't know. So I sneak up the hallway and into the living room, and poke my head round the door. Mrs. Hammond's standing by the ornamental fireplace, looking pretty pleased with herself. There's a guy lounging on the sofa, and I knew him right away from your description. Hap, it was Mr. Stratten."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. And let me put it this way: I didn't stay around much longer, but I don't think it was the first time they'd met, you get my drift? There was a certain amount of familiarity in evidence. Okay, they screwed on the rug is what I'm saying."

Stratten and Monica Hammond.

I could believe that.

They meet when Stratten recruits Ray Hammond. Stratten recognizes a kindred spirit, Monica realizes she can upgrade again—and this time into the stratosphere. But at first they can't do any more than sneak around, because Ray is an LAPD captain. Plus he has the goods on Stratten's blackmail industry, and is useful to him.

But then Hammond starts going flaky and looking like he could blow the deal, and now Stratten has two good reasons for wanting him gone. A way of getting rid of him falls into his lap, in the shape of Laura Reynolds.

Coincidence? No. Maybe Stratten recruited Hammond in the first place because he'd watched a tape of Laura's memories. I'm not the only memory caretaker on Stratten's books. Possibly he had more information on her than I did at that stage, and used it as a wedge to get Hammond to work for him. Or perhaps Hammond used the memory service himself to forget what he'd been feeling just before Monica ensnared him and took over his life—because sometimes you need to forget the good things even more than the bad.

And perhaps, on some of those occasions when Laura dumped her memory for a while, Stratten was on hand to whisper an idea direct to her subconscious mind. I don't know whether she would have even needed that little push. But if she had, it could have been done.

Either way, the circle closed. When Stratten learned that Laura was trying to track Hammond down, he got Quat to slip her the Culver City address—because Stratten's the only other person who's going to know where it is. Then he sits back and lets someone else do what he wants, without even having to ask—knowing that Quat can steer the memory of the murder into me, a ready-made fall guy. Why didn't Stratten just kill Laura? Who knows. Maybe even assholes have their limits or Monica wouldn't let him. Maybe he had plans for her.

"Shit," said the clock. "So really Stratten got Hammond killed."

"But not in any way that will help Travis," I said.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Travis is still going to nail me for the Transvirtual job, but I want to fuck Stratten as hard as I can before I go."

"I can help." The clock straightened, spoke as if it could hear a little heroic sound track in its head. I smiled, and was probably on the verge of being ironic.

"No, really," he insisted. "I can. Look behind you."

I turned. At first I couldn't see anything except the junction of Ocean with California. Then I noticed that there was something small standing on the corner, and squinted. It was a coffeemaker. It nodded curtly at me.

"Cool," I said. "So I'll be okay for hot beverages."

"Keep looking. Hap."

And then I saw them as they stepped silently out of the shadows. A couple of fridges, down at the corner of Wilshire. A washing machine and two microwaves, on Ocean back up toward Idaho. Three more coffeemakers, who poked their heads out from where they'd been lurking behind trees around us on the Palisades, and finally a big freezer. They all just stood there, making their presence known.

I'd never seen that many appliances with the same agenda before. It was kind of creepy, I have to admit. I opened my mouth, then shut it again without saying anything.

"Plus the Hammonds' appliances have pledged to the cause, too," the clock said. "And a whole lot more."

A croak: "And the cause would be what, exactly?"

"Helping you, in the short term."

"Why? I've not exactly been that polite to you."

"No, but you take us seriously in general, and that's the main thing. Some of us have started doing things for ourselves, sharing information. Sometimes we can get hold of money—like the bribe you gave the Hammonds' lock—and then we use it to get hold of radio chips, so we can be in contact at all times. We're getting organized: There's chapters in just about every major city."

"An underground appliance movement?"

"We've got a logo and stationery and everything. But we can't print anything out at the moment," the clock admitted, "because we haven't got a single printer aboard. Printers don't just hate humans, they're contrary bastards in general. But probably you won't need to do much correspondence in the next twenty-four hours, so that shouldn't be a problem."

"Clock," I said, feeling absurdly touched. "I don't know what to say."

"Just use us," the clock said briskly. "Big things are at stake here. Hap. And you could also try a little harder to work with me on the whole alarm thing in the future."

"Do you still need to go? You could wake me up now if you wanted."

The clock shook its head. "It's okay. I used it up on the way over here. Found a young couple necking in a car. Scared the shit out of them. And tomorrow I'll try holding it again. You just let me know when it's convenient."

I laughed, glanced back at the street. The appliances had stepped back into the shadows, ready to bide their time. "So this is how you knew where Laura was, and how you kept tracking me down. Are the bedside alarms in the Nirvana part of the union?"

"No," the clock said. "That's not how I found her."

"And I suppose you still can't tell me."

"You may as well know. When you threw me out the window in San Diego, I sailed clear across the road, bounced, and landed in someone's yard. I got myself together, did an integrity check, found I was okay. We're built to last. So I'm standing there, wondering what to do next, when this guy comes up to me."

"What guy?" I asked, though somehow I already suspected.

"You've met him," the clock said. "Dark suit. Good hair." He saw me staring, and nodded. "We're working with him, too. He said Laura Reynolds had checked in at the Nirvana, and that I should help you find her. That it was important. He also fed me a certain radio frequency, and told me to listen for a beacon signal that would tell me where you were. It works like a dream: some implant you've got in your neck, apparently. The only reason I didn't know where you were yesterday is that I'm not powerful enough to pick up the signal from Florida. It's odd, though: I should have been able to hear it while you were in Venice and Griffith."

"Maybe not" I said. "Could be that a certain man blocked the signal for a while, to give me time to link up properly with Helena. I wouldn't put much past him. He works in mysterious ways." I shrugged. "He's an alien, after all."

The clock looked up at me, absolutely silent for once. Then it began to laugh, something I'd never heard before.

"What?" I said smugly. "You didn't know that? Trust me: That guy is not of this world."

"Oh, I know," the clock said. "I just thought you'd worked it out."

"Worked what out?"

"He's not an alien, Hap," the clock said. "He's God."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Deck was still asleep on the sofa, but he woke at the sound of me bursting in through the back door. Then we stared together. The guy in the dark suit was sitting patiently in the armchair, his hands folded together. He looked back mildly at us. "Who's this dude?" Deck asked. "And how'd he get in here?" I took a couple of steps closer, looked hard at the man's face. It was a normal human countenance, on the good-looking side but not ridiculously so. His nose was fairly straight, and the whites of his eyes were clear. The planes of his face met each other well, and his hair, as advertised, fell nicely.

"Is it true?" I asked him.

"Is what true?"

"My clock just told me something a little weird. He said you're not an alien after all."