Tony Daniel (8 page)

“How’s Molly?” said TB. “She was becoming a natural wonder last I saw her.”

“She is.”

They waited, and the water boiled again. Andre poured it off and put in new water from the jug.

“Andre, what are you doing in the Carbuncle?”

“I’m with the Peace Movement.”

“What are you talking about; there’s not any war.”

Andre did not reply. He stirred some spice into the poke sallit.

“I didn’t want to be found,” TB finally said.

“I haven’t found you.”

“I’m a very sad fellow, Andre. I’m not like I used to be.”

“This is ready.” Andre spooned out the poke sallit into a couple of bowls. The coffee was done, and he poured them both a cup.

“Do you have any milk?” TB asked.

“That’s a problem.”

“I can drink it black. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I don’t mind. What kind of cigarettes are those?”

“Local.”

“Where do they come from around here?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Andre put pepper sauce on his greens, and TB followed suit. They ate and drank coffee, and it all tasted very good. TB lit a cigarette, and the acrid new smoke pleasantly cut through the vegetable thickness that had suffused Andre’s quarters. Outside there was a great clattering as the rocks lost their balance and they all came tumbling down.

They went out to the front of the quarters where Andre had put down a wooden pallet that served as a patio. Here there was a chair. TB sat down and smoked while Andre did his evening forms.

“Wasn’t that one called the Choking Chicken?” TB asked him after he moved through a particularly contorted portion of the tai chi exercise.

“I think it is the Fucking Annoying Pig-sticker you’re referring to, and I already did that in case you didn’t notice.”

“Guess all my seminary learning is starting to fade.”

“I bet it would all come back to you pretty quickly.”

“I bet we’re never going to find out.”

Andre smiled, completed the form, then sat down in the lotus position across from TB. If such a thing were possible in the Carbuncle, it would be about sunset. It felt like sunset inside Andre.

“Andre, I hope you didn’t come all the way out here to get me.”

“Get you?”

“I’m not going back.”

“To where?”

“To all that.” TB flicked his cigarette away. He took another from a bundle of them rolled in oiled paper that he kept in a shirt pocket. He shook it hard a couple of times and it lit up. “I make mistakes that kill people back there.”

“Like yourself.”

“Among others.” TB took a long drag. Suddenly he was looking hard at Andre. “You scoundrel! You fucked Molly. Don’t lie to me; I just saw it all.”

“Sure.”

“I’m glad. I’m really glad of that. You were always her great regret, you know.”

Andre spread out his hands on his knees.

“Ben, I don’t want a damn thing from you,” he said. “There’s all kind of machinations back in the Met, and some of it has to do with you. You know as well as I do that Amés is going to start a war if he doesn’t get his way with the outer system. But I came out here to see how you were doing. That’s all.”

TB was looking at him again in that hard way, complete way. Seeing all the threads.

“We both have gotten a bit ragged-out these last twenty years,” Andre continued. “I thought you might want to talk about it. I thought you might want to talk about her.”

“What are you? The Way’s designated godling counselor?”

Andre couldn’t help laughing. He slapped his lotus-bent knee and snorted.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” said TB.

“Ben, look at yourself. You’re a
garbageman
. I wouldn’t classify you as a god, to tell you the truth. But then, I don’t even classify God as a god anymore.”

“I am
not
a garbage man. You don’t know a damn thing if you think that.”

“What are you, then, if you don’t mind my asking?”

TB flicked his cigarette away and sat up straight.

“I’m a rat-hunting man,” he said. “That’s what I am.” He stood up. “Come on. It’s a long walk back to my place, and I got somebody I want you to meet.”

Sometimes you take a turn in a rat warren and there you are in the thick of them when before you were all alone in the tunnel. They will bite you a little, and if you don’t jump, jump, jump they will bite you a lot. That is the way it has always been with me, and so it doesn’t surprise me when it happens all over again.

What I’m thinking about at first is getting Andre Sud to have sex with me and this is like a tunnel I’ve been traveling down for a long time now.

TB went to town with Bob and left me with Andre Sud the priest. We walked the soft ground leading down to a shoal on the Bendy River where I like to take a bath even though the alligators are sometimes bad there. I told Andre Sud about how to spot the alligators, but I keep an eye out for both of us because even though he’s been in the Carbuncle for a year, Andre Sud still doesn’t quite believe they would eat you.

They would eat you.

Now that I am a woman, I only get blood on me when I go to clean the ferret cages and also TB says he can keep up with Earth-time by when I bleed out my vagina. It is an odd thing to happen to a girl. Doesn’t happen to ferrets. It means that I’m not pregnant, but how
could
I be with all these men who won’t have sex with me? TB won’t touch me that way, and I have been working on Andre Sud, but he knows what I am up to. I think he is very smart. Bob just starts laughing like the crazy man he is when I bring it up, and he runs away. All these gallant men standing around twiddling themselves into a garbage heap and me here wanting one of them.

I can understand TB because I look just like her. I thought maybe Alethea was ugly, but Andre Sud said he didn’t know about her, but I wasn’t. And I was about sixteen from the looks of it, too, he said. I’m nearly two hundred. Or I’m one year old. Depends on which one of us you mean, or if you mean both.

“Will you scrub my back?” I ask Andre Sud, and, after a moment, he obliges me. At least I get to feel his hands on me. They are as rough as those rocks he handles all the time, but very careful. At first I didn’t like him because he didn’t say much and I thought he was hiding things, but then I saw that he just didn’t say much. So I started asking him questions, and I found out a lot.

I found out everything he could tell me about Alethea. And he has been explaining to me about TB. He was pretty surprised when it turned out I understood all the math. It was the jealousy and hurt I never have quite understood, and how TB could hurt himself so much when I know how much he loves to live.

“Is that good?” Andre Sud asks me, and before he can pull his hands away, I spin around, and he is touching my breasts. He himself is the one who told me men like that, but he stumbles back and practically sits down in the water and goddammit I spot an alligator eyeing us from the other bank and I have to get us out quick-like, although the danger is not severe. It could be.

We dry off on the bank.

“Jill,” he says, “I have to tell you more about sex.”

“Why don’t you
show
me?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. You’re still thinking like a ferret.”

“I’ll always be part ferret, Andre Sud.”

“I know. That’s a good thing. But I’m all human. Sex is connected with love.”

“I love you.”

“You are deliberately misunderstanding me because you’re horny.”

“All right,” I say. “Don’t remind me.”

But now Andre Sud is looking over my shoulder at something, and his face looks happy, and then it looks stricken—as if he realized something in the moment when he was happy.

I turn and see TB running toward the hoy. Bob is with him. They’ve come back from town along the Bob-ways. And there is somebody else with them.

“I’ll be damned,” Andre Sud says. “Molly Index.”

It’s a woman. Her hair looks blue in the light off the heaps, which means that it is white. Is she old or does she just have white hair?

“What are you doing here, Molly?” says Andre Sud quietly. “This can’t be good.”

They are running toward home, all of them running.

TB sends a shiver through the grist, and I feel it tell me what he wants us to do.

“Get to the hoy,” I tell Andre Sud. “Fast now. Fast as you can.”

We get there before the others do, and I start casting off lines. When the three of them arrive, the hoy is ready to go. TB and Bob push us away, while Andre Sud takes the woman inside. Within moments, we are out in the Bendy, and caught in the current. TB and Bob go inside, and TB sticks his head up through the pilot’s bubble to navigate.

The woman, Molly Index, looks at me. She has got very strange eyes. I have never seen eyes like that. I think that she can see into the grist like TB and I do.

“My God,” she says. “She looks just like her.”

“My name is Jill,” I say. “I’m not Alethea.”

“No, I know that,” Molly Index says. “Ben told me.”

“Molly, what are you doing here?” Andre Sud asks.

Molly Index turns to Andre Sud. She reaches for his hand and touches him. I am a little worried she might try something with the grist, but it looks like they are old friends.

“That war you kept talking about,” she says. “It started. Amés has started it.”

“Oh, no,” Andre Sud says. He pulls away from her. “No.”

Molly Index follows him. She reaches out and rubs a hank of his hair between her fingers. “I like it long,” she says. “But it’s kind of greasy.”

This doesn’t please me, and Molly Index is wearing the most horrible boots I have ever seen, too. They are dainty little things that will get eaten off her feet if she steps into something nasty. In the Carbuncle, the
ground
is something nasty. The silly grist in those city boots won’t last a week here. It is a wonder to me that no one is laughing at the silly boots, but I suppose they have other worries at the moment, and so do I.

“I should have listened to you,” Molly Index says. “Made preparations. He got me. Most of me. Amés did. He’s co-opted all the big LAPs into the New Hierarchy. But most of them joined voluntarily, the fools.” Again she touches his hand, and I realize that I am a little jealous. He does not pull back from her again. “I alone have escaped to tell you,” Molly Index says. “They’re coming. They’re right behind us.”

“
Who
is right behind you?” I say. This is something I need to know. I can
do
something about this.

“Amés’s damned Free Radical Patrol. Some kind of machine followed me here, and I didn’t realize it. Amés must have found out from me—the other part of me—where Ben is.”

“What is a Free Radical Patrol?” I say.

Something hits the outside of the hoy, hard. “Oh shit,” TB says. “Yonder comes the flying monkey.”

The pilot glass breaks, and a hooked claw sinks into TB’s shoulder. He screams. I don’t think, but I move. I catch hold of his ankle.

We are dragged up. Lifted out. We are rising through the air above the hoy. Something screeches. TB yells like crazy.

I hold on.

Wind and TB’s yells and something sounds like a million mean and angry bees.

We’re too heavy and whatever it was drops us onto the deck. TB starts to stand up, but I roll under his legs and knock him down, and before he can do anything, I shove him back down through the pilot dome hole and into the hoy.

Just in time, too, because the thing returns, a black shadow, and sinks its talons into my back. I don’t know what it is yet, and I may never know, but nothing will ever take me without a fight.

Something I can smell in the grist.

You are under indictment from the Free Radical Patrol. Please cease resisting. Cease resisting. Cease.

The words smell like metal and foam.

Cease resisting? What a funny thing to say to me. Like telling the wind to cease blowing. Blowing is what makes it the wind.

I twist hard and whatever it is only gets my dress, my poor pretty dress and a little skin off my back. I can feel some poison grist try to worm into me, but that is nothing. It has no idea what I am made of. I kill that grist, hardly thinking about doing so, and turn to face this dark thing.

It doesn’t look like a monkey I don’t think, though I wouldn’t know.

What are you?

But there are wind currents and not enough grist transmission through the air for communications. Fuck it.

“Jill, be careful,” says TB. His voice is strained. This thing hurt TB!

I will bite you.

“Would you pass me up one of those gaffs please,” I call to the others. There is scrambling down below, and Bob’s hands come up with the long hook. I take it, and he ducks back down quick. Bob is crazy, but he’s no fool.

The thing circles around. I cannot see how it is flying, but it is kind of blurred around its edges. Millions of tiny wings—grist built. I take a longer look. This thing is all angles. Some of them have needles, some have claws. All of the angles are sharp. It is a like a black-and-red mass of triangles flying through the air that only wants to cut you. Is there anybody inside? I don’t think so. This is all code that I am facing. It is about three times as big as me, but I think of this as an advantage.

It dives, and I am ready with the hook. It grabs hold of the gaff just as I’d hoped it would, and I use its momentum to guide it down, just a little
too
far down.

A whiff of grist as it falls.

Cease immediately. You are interfering with a Hierarchy judgment initiative. Cease or you will be—

Crash into the side of the hoy. Splash into the Bendy River.

I let go of the gaff. Too easy. That was—

The thing rises from the Bendy, dripping wet.

It is mad. I don’t need the grist to tell me it is mad. All those little wings are buzzing angry, but not like bees anymore. Hungry like the flies on a piece of meat left out in the air too long.

Cease
.

“Here,” says Bob. He hands me a flare gun. I spin and fire into the clump of triangles. Again it falls into the river.

Again it rises.

I think about this. It is dripping wet with Bendy River water. If there is one thing I know, it is the scum that flows in the Bendy. There isn’t any grist in it that hasn’t tried to get me.