Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Past the parking lot, behind the tall fence and a row of pink-flowering oleander bushes, Terracotta could clearly see half a dozen figures idly shifting back and forth. One old fellow in a suit and tie waved at him, but Terracotta didn’t look closely at him or wave back.

  He had first noticed them a week ago, and when he had asked Brett what those people were doing there, it had been clear that Brett didn’t see them. Terracotta had hastily claimed to have been referring to the owners of the neighboring building to the west; but over the next few days he had established that Ollie couldn’t see them either, nor could one of the radio monitoring agents Terracotta had talked to out here.

  He was sure they were ghosts, Brett’s “deleted persons”—these specimens somehow inadvertently drawn out from their afterlife by all the summonings and interrogations going on in the Extension building. Something analogous to quantum tunneling, perhaps, or wild tobacco growing outside cultivated fields. At first Terracotta had forced himself to approach the swaying figures, not daring to speak to them, but hoping they might reveal something about themselves and their situation; but they made no sounds at all, just waved and beckoned.

  He had been frightened by them, and had wondered: Did they think? Did they know things about life and death that he didn’t know, terrible things?

  Now he simply tried to ignore them; and he had not told his agents that deleted persons apparently could, after all, be visible.

  His right hand shook a cigarette out of the pack of Camels—the pack had already been opened!—and deposited it on his lip, and his left hand raised the lighter and lit it.

  The freeway a hundred-some yards behind him pulsed with a sound like hands quickly brushing silk, and out in front of him, beyond the fence, cars in the right lane were moving slowly, each waiting to enter the southbound freeway onramp. The traffic control light must be on at the top of the ramp, cycling through its timed red-to-green-to-red pattern.

  Do any of those drivers know, Terracotta wondered as he drew the smoke into his lungs, that the air here is as full of ghosts as it is of radio waves? The TUA had field offices in Chicago and New York and D.C., but none of them found their currents as thickly populated as the ones in Los Angeles.

  Terracotta squinted to see the light and dark dots that were the faces in the cars. No, he thought, they don’t know. To them the world was often inconvenient but always logical; they knew nothing of a secret Cold War in which ghosts were the half-wit agents.

  And something bigger, something Terracotta didn’t want to think about; wasn’t able to think about, in fact.

  “Chief,” came a call from behind him. Terracotta turned around and saw Brett in the open doorway. “We got Abbott, pretty lucid,” Brett said. “In the break room.”

  Terracotta tossed the cigarette and hurried inside, and as Brett pulled the door closed he hurried across the wide floor to the little room at the north end of the warehouse.

  When he pulled the door open he could hear Abbott’s voice buzzing out of the speaker, recognizable in spite of being produced without benefit of real lungs or throat or tongue.

  “I need backup,” the voice was saying, “these people won’t hold still, they jump around like grasshoppers . . . the guy’s gone now, but he had wings! He was flying around over that factory on the hill—I’m halfway between it and the highway, it’s still a couple of miles away but I can hear it thumping and clanking . . . smokestacks, and the smoke blows around in all directions like a second-hand . . .”

  One of the men seated by the radio glanced at Terracotta and tapped the keyboard on his lap, and on the monitor over the radio appeared the words, says C was at house on Mholland—doesn’t know xact loc—“low-rent oz.”

  Abbott was now producing a noise like a coughing fit, and Terracotta wondered how he could cough without a throat.

  At last the voice resumed speaking: “My mom and dad were here a minute ago, I think—somebody’s mom and dad, anyway—listen, this place—the terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart—the second coming, scarcely are those words out—surely some consummation is at hand—a low’ring bull’s mistaken lust—”

  A sound behind the voice had grown from a faint rhythmic pulse to a hard thudding, and one of the men by the radio looked up at Terracotta uncertainly.

  Terracotta pushed him aside and switched off the radio speaker. “What did you think that was, static? Damn it, when you get anything like drumming in the background—”

  “Sorry, Chief.” The man sat back and rubbed his eyes. “I thought it might just be the speaker here vibrating.”

  Terracotta took several deep breaths, noticing for the first time that the room was hot, and smelled sharply of sweat. “You take no chances. It’s a toxic malmeme that rides on that noise. You remember when it started up in the Suburban on Wilshire four years ago? Those TUA agents couldn’t quickly turn off the radio, so what did they do?”

  The man nodded dutifully. “They jumped right out into the street.”

  “Lucky for them that they did. And Secret Service Agent Herbert Woods did hear part of it, that day. To his misfortune.”

  He frowned to discourage any questions.

  “Reboot it in a minute,” he said, “and concentrate on Amanda Woods for now. You know the names of the cats she had, right? I think if we find her husband we’ll find Castine too—they seem to be traveling together, both somewhere on Mulholland within the last hour—and push it, will you? If we don’t get Castine back by the end of the day, the odds will be too great that she’s been tainted by the association.” He sighed and waved toward the door. “With luck she’ll have the sense to come back here on her own before that.”

  “After killing Abbott?” objected another of the seated men. “Abbott still insists she did—shot him twice in the throat, he says.”

  Terracotta shook his head. “She knows we’ll take her back if she comes back soon. She’s more valuable, and valued, than Abbott was.”

  Terracotta left the room and walked past the next two doors back to the administration office. Brett followed him in and closed the door.

  Ollie sat at the desk, for once not talking on his phone, and he looked up. “Vendler is in a coma at Kaiser Permanente on Sunset, skull fracture. And the police found no guns on or near the spot where he and Abbott were assaulted.”

  “Odd,” said Terracotta. “Woods might well have grabbed one, but I don’t see why Castine would have wanted a second gun.”

  Ollie shrugged. “Maybe some homeless guy found it before the cops showed up.”

  Brett asked impatiently, “What is this ‘toxic malmeme’? Why is it so important that nobody hear it? Woods heard it four years ago, and it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm.” He spread his hands. “A lustful bull?”

  “A lustful bull?” echoed the mystified Ollie.

  Terracotta made a chopping gesture. “Forget about it. It’s dangerous, all right—I can’t say how.”

  Brett laughed uncertainly. “Uh-huh. If I knew it, you’d have to kill me.”

  Terracotta waved the subject away. I scarcely know it myself, he thought; but these are pieces of something that mustn’t be revealed yet; mustn’t be . . . hindered.

  The terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart . . . surely some consummation is at hand.

  His mouth opened and he began speaking. “Leave the team in the break room tracking Amanda Woods. I’ll join the team in Room Two, and go fishing for Abbott again. He needs to get closer to that factory on the hill—I’m sure we need to know about that place—but he’s got to get away from it again to report. We can’t have him talking while he’s so close to it that we hear the noise of it.”

  “Place?” Brett threw a doubtful sideways glance at Ollie. “All that stuff, the highway in the desert and the flying man, and the factory, that’s just hallucinations of deleted persons. Isn’t it? Sensory deprivation fantasies.”

  “And good luck getting anything specific out of Abbott now,” added O
llie, “wherever he is.”

  “We need to make him obey orders and answer questions,” said Terracotta. “Get a microphone and another speaker in there so we can hit him with feedback if necessary.”

  Ollie shifted in his chair. “Jeez, Chief, feedback is like electric shock to deleteds. I hate to do that to poor old Mike.”

  “It’s not him,” said Brett. “Deleted persons aren’t the people they derived from.”

  “They think they are, though,” said Ollie.

  Terracotta took a deep breath and forced himself to look at the situation in a way these men would understand. “It’s essential that we get on top of this whole phenomenon,” he insisted. “You think China and Russia aren’t aware of this area of research? Iran, North Korea? American agents, and even government clerks and contractors, die in apparent accidents on highways—who do you suppose interrogates them as deleted persons? Damn it, Abbott is our man in place . . .”

  His voice trailed off, and he found that he was thinking of the ghosts outside the parking lot fence. One of them had been waving at him—could that one know something relevant to all this?

  He muttered, “Tell the agents in Room Two I’ll be with them shortly. I’m going to get some fresh air.”

  Ollie raised his eyebrows at this second break in ten minutes, but said nothing.

  Terracotta left the office, hurried across the wide warehouse floor and tapped in the code to get the parking lot door open. Out in the afternoon sunshine again, he coughed in surprise when one of his hands shoved a cigarette into his mouth, but he puffed on it when his other hand waved the lit Bic lighter at it.

  He exhaled smoke, then made himself look toward the south end of the parking lot.

  The shifting figures were still there behind the fence and the oleander bushes, and now he stared at them. Several of them waved. The old man in the suit and tie was opening and closing his mouth . . . and all at once Terracotta recognized him.

  The next thing he was consciously aware of was leaning against the blue-and-white checkerboard wall inside the warehouse, gripping his knees and panting. The cigarette was gone.

  He fought to think rationally.

  Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which itself is irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.

  He had been an orphan when he’d had his name legally changed from Benedetti to Terracotta, and he didn’t want to be reminded of his father.

  The statue killed him, not me.

  Terracotta straightened up, dismissed the ghost of his father from his mind, and strode across the warehouse toward Room Two.

  Vickery rode down Cahuenga and turned left on Santa Monica Boulevard, and then he and Castine were passing new Japanese take-out restaurants and gray office buildings with weathered cornices on the upper stories and garish liquor stores on the ground floors; and as the motorcycle gunned past the stone tower at the entrance to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, he nodded toward it and said over his shoulder, “That’s where we’ll be spending the night.”

  He heard Castine mutter behind him, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  He pulled in to the curb in front of an old building divided by contrasting bright colors of paint into half a dozen narrow-fronted business establishments, and between a Ropa de Bebe y Nino shop and a market advertising Cerveza Fria was an open door below a sign that read Universal Prepaid.

  “You wait here,” he told Castine as he stepped away from the bike, and three minutes later he walked out of the shop and handed her a red Doro flip-phone.

  “I’ve got the charger and a refill card in my pocket, and you owe me fifty bucks,” he said as he swung a leg over the bike’s gas tank and started the engine. “We can get it charged and anonymously activated at the lot tomorrow morning.” He accelerated back into traffic.

  East of the 101 Freeway he slowed, and then leaned the bike across the oncoming lanes into a driveway beside a boxy blue stuccoed building whose only sign was a faded for lease banner. He parked in a dirt lot behind the building, which now could be seen to be an old two-story Victorian house, onto the front of which the stucco structure had at some time been added. The dirt lot was ringed by the back ends of similar old houses, and Vickery knew that from the streets their house-fronts too would be hidden by gaudy, grafted-on shops that crowded right up to the sidewalks.

  Castine got stiffly off the bike while Vickery unlooped a chain and padlock from around the handlebars and threaded it through the spokes of the back tire and around an iron lamp post.

  “We can eat here,” he said, straightening up and waving at the old house. He unstrapped his helmet and pulled it off. “It’s sort of a restaurant, and there’s minimal chance of surveillance.”

  “No cameras,” Castine said, taking off her own helmet.

  “Surveillance of any sort.”

  She shrugged and followed him to the house’s back stairs, carrying the helmet and a bag of supplies they’d bought from Hipple. The bag was light; Castine’s new gun was jammed into her holster, and Vickery’s was tucked into the back of his pants.

  The back door creaked open when Vickery pushed on it with his free hand, and Castine followed him into a wide, wood-floored room with thick mismatched pillars at irregular intervals. The upstairs floor had been largely taken out, surviving only as three wide platforms overhead, and high above them was no ceiling, just the exposed beams of the roof. Bare light bulbs dangling on wires of varying length threw a yellow glow over the scene, and a dozen or so figures were visible sitting at tables that had been set out across the floor and on the platforms. Several clothing store mannequins stood in corners, and framed pictures of faces seemed to cover all the vertical surfaces, the highest ones on the east wall glowing with apricot sunset light from a porthole-window near the roof in the opposite wall.

  “Is this place structurally sound?” Castine asked, blinking around at the unexpectedly open space.

  “The pillars are what’s left of the load-bearing walls,” Vickery said, leading her across the room to a recessed alcove with two unoccupied tables in it. He set his helmet down beside one of them. “They ought to hold for the next hour.”

  Against the alcove wall ran a white-painted railing, interrupted in the middle by a newer-looking metal door. Vickery and Castine got out of their leather jackets and draped them over a couple of chairs before sitting down, and Castine set her helmet and the bag from Hipple’s on the floor beside her chair. The smell here was a weird mix of curry and onions and, faintly, chlorine.

  “Are there waiters?” asked Castine.

  “There’s people that bring food,” said Vickery. “You get what’s on the stoves tonight.”

  She nodded dubiously, then looked at the lower ceiling immediately overhead and the wall behind her chair. “Why a railing?”

  “This alcove used to be the porch of the house.” Vickery leaned out of his chair to tap the wall between two framed pictures. “In 1930 or so, long before a pool supply store was built onto the front, we’d be looking out across a lawn at the boulevard from right here.”

  She shivered. “I imagine ghosts sitting at that other table, with a pitcher of lemonade, staring at the wall. Staring through the wall.”

  “Not in here,” said Vickery. “They don’t like the uncanny valley. Too bad the management doesn’t let people sleep on the premises! Ah, here comes our dinner—God knows what it is.”

  A heavily tattooed gray-haired man in a T-shirt brought two plates and set them on the table, along with plastic tableware wrapped in paper napkins. As he walked away, Vickery looked at what he’d brought them—it appeared to be cold marinated onion and carrot slices beside ladlefuls of steaming curried stuff, possibly chicken. By accident or design, it all seemed to conform to the diet Hippl
e had recommended.

  Castine had freed a fork and was already digging in. “Where’s the uncanny valley?” she asked around a mouthful.

  Vickery waved at the pictures and the nearest mannequin. “All around you. All the faces in the pictures are waxworks or Japanese robots or characters from new animated movies like Polar Express.”

  Castine shifted around in her chair, still chewing, to see the ones on the wall behind her. She swallowed and said, “Oh. Yes. I thought they were pictures of real people.” She looked back at Vickery. “It’s kind of creepy, all these realistic fakes.”

  Vickery nodded. “Exactly.” He paused to take a mouthful of the steaming curried stuff; it was very spicy with cumin and peppers, but it did seem to be chicken. After a few moments he went on, “People don’t mind most representations of faces—statues, animation—they like them better the more realistic they look. But there’s a point when they look just a bit too realistic, and the approval curve drops; that’s the uncanny valley, that dip on a graph. We find it creepy, but ghosts can’t stand the apparent contradiction—it looks genuinely human, but you can sense that it’s not.”

  Castine blew air out through her lips. “This stuff’s not bad, but it’s hot. Do they serve anything to drink?”

  “Beer’ll be along shortly.”

  More people had come in, and Castine looked out across the broad room at the diners at the other tables.

  “I think I know who we are,” she said. “Who’s everybody else?”

  A young woman on one of the open second-floor platforms was leaning out over the edge, looking down and exchanging sign-language gestures with a man in a motorized wheelchair who could surely have no hope of joining her up there, and Vickery wondered how the man had even got the wheelchair into the building; a battered upright piano stood in a far corner, and an old man was laboriously plinking out some unrecognizable tune on the keys; and a trio of teenage girls huddled giggling over a cell phone.