Solaris Rising (33 page)

“Al Campo shopping centre is good.”

Two special forces guys burst through the swing doors, gaped at the cancan girls dancing on stage, and the gunslinger fired at them. No, that didn’t happen.

“I’ve a better idea,” said Rachel. “Getting them out of Spain, new identities in Africa: that’s going to cost you a lot and things might go wrong. You’re being too ambitious. It’s the
suits
you want, not the wearers. How about you pay me some of the money
to look after these guys here
? Sort of an advance on wages – since we can’t afford much more than pocket money on top of their keep. I’m guessing they’ll be able to act the Wild West part, help out generally, play poker, talk mysteriously to tourists when they get tipsy. After a while people might come here specially to spot the ghost astronauts, once it’s decent to do so. The Magnificent Five! Remarkable resemblances! We need extra attractions.”

“Seems to me,” said Appleton, “with forty K in their pockets they can pay their own keep here for quite a while, I’d say.”

Rachel beamed. “Oh of course, silly me. Well, call my little cut a finder’s fee. Or an advance on their board and lodging.”

Appleton nodded, sat back and thought.

“Excuse me,” I said to Rachel, “but don’t we get a say in the matter?”

“Good heavens, I’m offering you
sanctuary
.”

“Sounds like a town in the Wild West, Sanctuary,” said Jim. “Next stop, Salvation. Or Tombstone.”

“We want to avoid the Tombstone outcome, don’t we?” said Appleton. “The UFO in its wisdom brought you here as the best way to protect you. By pretending to be what you really are. Which of course you aren’t. Unless you are.”

Chuck woke up with a shudder and said, “I’m hungry.”

“Of course you are,” said Rachel. “You need the
chuckwagon
. And you’re in luck, since our restaurant opens for lunch at high noon. That’s very early to eat lunch in Spain but here we cater for tourists. Usually after lunch people like to have a siesta, so I’ll sort out rooms in the Sheriff’s Office. Would that be five
single
rooms?” she asked sweetly. “After being cooped up together for so long, sleeping alone might seem lonesome? Maybe the gals would like to share? And a couple of you boys? I’m afraid we don’t have a triple room free. Of course if you’d prefer to pair up differently…?”

“I’m happy to share with Barbara,” Juno said quickly.

“And me,” said Chuck, “with Jim.” To me: “If you don’t take that amiss.”

We ate burgers and drank glasses of Sangría, which seemed like sweet fruit juice but packed a punch, as we discovered. Skip to outside the Sheriff’s Office.

“This is a
jail
,” protested Jim. “Bars on the windows.”

Rachel laughed. “I assure you the rooms are much better than cells, and you do get your own keys.”

I felt very woozy from the Sangría. So were we all. A siesta wasn’t an option but a necessity. Nice-looking modern bed in my room, checked gingham curtains at the windows, some kind of stove for winter use, chest of drawers, a smoke or fume detector on the ceiling. I slept soundly till about five o’clock when banging on the door woke me, interrupting a dream of walking through the desert, the Spanish not the Martian. Just in case of a woman being outside, I wrapped a sheet round me. It was Jim, out in the corridor in his cowpoke gear.

“Our suits have
gone
. I woke up a bit ago, so I walked to that dressing-up building, and
no
suits
. Rachel says Appleton went off with all the suits and Pablo. She says Pablo will be back here tomorrow bringing Appleton’s money. I said we never agreed to sell! She made like she was astonished. All our cams and pads have gone missing too, unless Chuck kept his. He’s still out cold after that Shangri-la stuff. We gotta make Rachel phone Pablo to say no deal and to bring our stuff back. I need your back-up.”

“Jim,” I said with perfect conviction, “the suits won’t come back here now.”

“I suppose this country has a police force!”

“Think, Jim, think. Policemen lock up guys with no ID. And then we have no control over our fate. None at all. At least here we can still walk around. We do have the keys to our cells.”

“The police’ll have to contact the US Embassy to check us out, even if they don’t believe we’re astronauts or that our Mars-suits have gone for a walk!”

“And what if Uncle Sam decides it’s best for our nation if we never returned in a fucking flying saucer? Either we’re dead on Mars or we’ve been on Earth all along with the collusion of NASA and Uncle Sam. Embarrassing, huh? Better swept under the nearest carpet? We just don’t know enough to risk that. We
might
know enough after a few weeks, or a few months. Africa might still be the best bet.”

“So you mean that for now we should negotiate with Rachel…”

“Even learn to ride horses. I dunno, we can be the Something Gang. With two wicked women members, one of them black to add extra colour. We’d better wake up Chuck and the ladies.” This did really seem to me the best plan at the moment, and as mission commander I had a responsibility to my crew.

The Magnificent, or Malevolent, Five headed out to confront Rachel. Behind us, the adobe bank was being robbed for the benefit of onlookers. Up ahead two gunslingers were squaring off, shouting a dialogue of insults at each other in heavily accented English, while other costumed tourists looked on appreciatively. It was all go. One of those tourists, wearing a Marshall’s badge, decided to uphold the law, advancing boldly with his six-shooter levelled at one of the gunslingers. Grinning evilly, the miscreant fired a couple of times: bang bang. Dramatically the tourist dropped his gun, clutched at his heart, then sank carefully to the ground while his wife and friends applauded.

Something fell out of my pocket and I scooped it up. Oh, that bit of food in its clingfilm. This time I noticed a tiny sticker, uncrumpled it, read: Gunther’s Deli, Rachel NV.

NV for Nevada. No connection with Rachel the wardrobe mistress.

My old flying days came to mind. Rachel NV, a tiny tiny place near Nellis air force range close to Area 51. Famous in the world of UFO believers because of strange sightings along Highway, I forgot which number, but years ago the State of Nevada had officially designated that road
Extraterrestrial Highway
. A nice day-trip out from Las Vegas.

I’d stopped at Rachel once. Oddly its weather station monitored gamma radiation as well as the weather. Gunther’s Deli was news to me. Maybe trade was picking up locally.

It couldn’t be, could it, that the USAF, unknown to NASA,
did
have access to alien technology? They couldn’t bear for us to die on Mars, but couldn’t exactly reveal themselves either? Today had been pretty busy so far. I just couldn’t digest this new fact.

We succeeded in passing the shoot-out without any blanks being fired at us.

YOU NEVER KNOW

PAT CADIGAN

Pat Cadigan is a two-time winner of the Arthur C, Clarke Award for her novels
Synners
and
Fools
. Her work has appeared in over a dozen languages around the world (and that’s only counting the legal editions). Born in Schenectady, New York, Pat grew up in New England but now lives in Original England with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, and her son, musician and composer Robert M. Fenner; all under the watchful gaze of Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats.

Standing in the doorway of the curio shop, Dov shook his head. “Can’t believe it.”

Kitty looked up from the box of prints she’d been flicking through for the past ten minutes, her dark brown forehead wrinkling slightly. “Something to disbelieve in this day and age? I’m shocked.”

Dov jerked his grizzled chin at the record store across the street. “They’ve hired another deckhand for the
Titanic
.”

“I told you, Napster’s no match for the combined might of the music industry,” Kitty said as she turned to look. A young girl was at work on the record store’s front window with a squeegee, sponge, and bucket while another employee on the other side of the glass clowned around, pointing at spots she had supposedly missed. The girl showily ignored him as she slopped soapy water onto the glass in wide arcs. “Oh, Kee-
rist!
What is she,
eight
?”

Dov chuckled. “Fourteen, give or take a few weeks.”

“
Bull
shit. My new gynaecologist?
He’s
fourteen.
She’s
barely out of third grade.”

“You say that about everyone,” Dov said, laughing some more.

“Everyone but you.” Kitty turned back to the prints. “And me.” She started over at the first print and it seemed to Dov that she was looking at each one a bit longer this time. Kitty was the most regular of the regular customers. She came every day without fail – well, every day that he was there – to browse through the prints in the box on the trestle table outside under the awning. Dov could usually count on seeing her twice a day, occasionally three times, and once in a great while, four or more. She didn’t always buy a print but in the two years Dov had been managing the store, he had never known her to buy anything else.

This was her first visit of the day, either a late break or an early lunch, and she had come over from St. Vincent’s in such a hurry that she still had her stethoscope slung around her neck; not the most eye-catching accessory on the lower east side of Manhattan.

“Any sign of Big Brother?” she asked him.

“Not yet. The owners said sometime in the next two weeks. That could be any time between this afternoon and Labor Day.”

Kitty flicked an amused glance at him. “Now, now – don’t go wishing away the summer.”

Dov didn’t answer. After the Fourth of July holiday, time turned to amber. Then all at once, it was getting dark indecently early and there was a cold bite in the air, and December was slipping away like it had somewhere better to go and couldn’t wait to get there.

The security system was supposed to be in by then. Maybe if he rewound the tapes, it would slow things up a little.

Which was probably the most absurd idea he’d had lately, he thought. Although not much more absurd than installing a camera surveillance system in a one-room junk shop. ‘Curio shop’ was the polite name and that was the term on his employee contract but Dov had yet to find anything he’d have called a curio. Most of the inventory came from estate sales and house removals, or from other stores that had gone out of business. Except for the stock of cheap souvenirs, and even those were leftovers, things that hadn’t sold in previous years, junk the owners had picked up for next to nothing from vendors needing shelf space for the current junk. One third of a wall was given to, among other things, I Heart NYC snow globes (a perennial favourite), Empire State Building barometers and pencil sharpeners (also classics in fake bronze), Staten Island Ferry ballpoint pens with a tiny boat that slid back and forth through some oil in the top half of the barrel, Twin Towers coffee mugs, lighters, clocks, and shot glasses
(For World-Class Doubles!)
. Very few items had dates so only a retailer would know they were close-outs. Or connoisseurs of tacky souvenirs. Dov didn’t doubt such people existed but they had yet to find their way here. When they did, he’d probably find out he’d sold them something worth $50,000 for thirty cents and the owners would fire him.

Yeah. Right. His head was full of silly things today. A man in a slightly shredded straw hat paused to look through the old photos Dov had put out on the table. Unlike the prints, which were all matted, wrapped in cellophane, and numbered, the photos were loose in an old cardboard box, unordered and unidentified except for names or short notes on the back –
Dad at Sarah’s house summer 1980; Hamptons Graduation Trip; Uncle Tony and Sally at 6 mos; May 1964
. They came with the second hand stock, stuffed into the packing like an afterthought, the last traces of the end of an era for someone somewhere. They were priced at a nickel apiece, fifty cents for a dozen but Dov usually let them go for less, sometimes even giving them away to some of the bigger spenders. He couldn’t imagine why people would buy old photos of strangers and though he was tempted to ask, he never did.

“Huh,” Kitty said. She had pulled up one of the prints and was studying it with serious eyes. After some unmeasured period of time, she showed it to Dov.

Number fifty-four, according to the small white sticker in the upper left corner, was a detailed drawing of the Manhattan skyline, with water-colour accents. As subject matter, it was unremarkable – Dov had seen the city rendered in more ways than he could count on paper, cloth, and skin, and sculpted in almost every medium from Play-Dough to chocolate. Here, however, the precise, hair-thin ink-line seemed to be one unbroken stroke, the artist not lifting the pen even for the unreadable scrawl of signature in the lower right corner.

By contrast, the water-colour was careless, pale daubs here and there. You had to study the thing for a while to see that the two tallest buildings were actually columns of empty space.

Or were they? Dov took a closer look, then held it at arm’s length before remembering his reading glasses in his shirt pocket. They didn’t help much. Finally, he handed it back to Kitty. “On the house.”