Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Castine nodded. “Ghosts are the force-carrying particles, of course.” She spread her hands. “The TUA hoped to interview them, learn what they knew.”

  Laquedem made a spitting sound. “Perhaps at first, lady, but that wasn’t why they kept summoning the poor idiot revenants, poor fragments. Your boss just wanted two-way traffic, whatever he may have told you his purpose was.”

  Vickery was still smarting from the old man’s scorn, and impatient with his know-it-all tone. “They’re not all idiots,” he objected, thinking of the girl in overalls. “Ghosts, I mean.”

  Laquedem opened his mouth, then closed it, and Vickery suspected he had been about to say something like, One idiot can’t recognize another. “You’ve met good chess-players among them, have you?” the old man said finally.

  “One ghost,” said Vickery, “a little girl, has twice warned me when I was about to get killed.” When Laquedem raised his eyebrows in mock interest, Vickery went on to describe his encounters with the phantom who called herself Mary, and at several points Castine and even Santiago nodded.

  Laquedem’s mocking expression had sagged. “You poor fool,” he said when Vickery stopped talking. “That was your daughter.”

  “Wrong,” snapped Vickery. “I—well, I happen to know that I have no daughter.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Damn it, I—”

  “I wasn’t contradicting you. You noted that she doesn’t suffer from the dementia that ordinary ghosts exhibit. The never-born ones are . . . naïve, but they’ve never had the mind-fracturing experience of death, since they never quite got to live.” He stared at Vickery. “Expanded possibility there. She’s a daughter you might have had. That’s the only reason she would follow you, look out for you, as she has.”

  Vickery’s face was suddenly damp and cold, and he could hear his pulse thudding in his temples, and he lowered his head and stared at the cement. For several seconds his thoughts whirled in broken fragments, and then two came to the fore: She did look like Amanda, and, I threw them both away.

  He remembered that the phantom girl hadn’t eaten anything, after showing Santiago how to work the microwave in the truck; She looked at the food, Santiago had said, like she would have liked some, but she didn’t touch it. And Vickery had supposed that she had liked Mexican food when she’d been alive.

  No. She had never got to taste food at all.

  Castine had asked, Can they eat? and Vickery had answered, No, it’s for us. Like life.

  “What,” he asked, but he had to swallow before going on, “happens to . . . never-born . . .?”

  “If you were to close the conduit,” said Laquedem slowly, in a carefully level voice, “the ones who have come across stay here, and eventually fade to nothing. Painlessly. If the Labyrinth—which is to say the Minotaur—is imposed here and explosively strives to fully become the freeways, they’d be consumed by it, along with everything else.”

  For a long ten seconds while nobody spoke, Vickery looked away from the others, across the hills. Finally he asked, “Can I still close it?”

  The breeze blew across the grass and tossed Castine’s hair.

  “If you go back into the Labyrinth now,” said Laquedem, “and do what I told you yesterday, bring out something real and fix it at the omphalos. Yes. It’ll be worse in the Labyrinth now; that state is getting more polarized and churned up by the hour—something like tidal forces as the worlds get closer together—and the highway might not be accessible anymore. But,” he said, rubbing a hand across his eyes, “there’s another real place there.”

  “The factory,” said Castine with sudden certainty.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Yes,” said Laquedem, “the factory.” He took hold of one of the crutches and poled himself up from the planter wall. “I’ve got a bus to catch. If you can drive me to the Greyhound station on 7th, I’ll tell you more, on the way. If you’re not interested in all this, I’ll go inside and have them call me a cab.”

  “You can’t go back there, Sebastian,” said Castine. She looked around at the lengthening shadows, then added, “And how long will a detour to 7th Street take?”

  “You go on the bus with him, for sure,” Vickery told her. “If I . . . don’t, I’ll split the rest of the money with you. But—do you remember that noise, that roaring, in the Labyrinth? It knocked me flat, and I couldn’t think at all till it stopped.”

  Santiago was helping Laquedem with his crutches. Castine stepped forward as if to help too, but the boy frowned at her and she moved back.

  “Yes,” she said bleakly, “I remember it.”

  Vickery choked out two syllables of a laugh. “She said she needed to find her secret garden, remember?—with a wall around it and a robin to show her where the key was. I can’t—after everything else, I just don’t see how I can let her be devoured by that thing that roared.”

  “I’ll take the bus,” she said, “I don’t need to be driving around in a stolen taco truck—but you’ll take the bus too. Damn it, Sebastian, think! You might be able to get back into the Labyrinth, but there’s no way you could ever hope to get out again, by yourself. Do you remember how hard it was to hold a thought, how we had to keep reminding each other to work the math? Do you remember just trying to walk? And this guy says it’s way worse now! That little girl . . . she doesn’t exist!” She turned on Laquedem. “Does she?”

  “No,” said the old man. “She just might have.”

  “She’s imaginary!”

  “A daughter times the square root of minus one,” said Vickery. “Right now it seems like all I can do, Ingrid—besides maybe kill myself on the freeway and join her. And her mother.”

  “And very shortly be consumed by the Labyrinth, the, the Minotaur.” She punched him hard in the shoulder. “Another great plan. What was it this guy called you? Something like klutz mit aygen? What does that mean?”

  “Aoygn,” said Laquedem, correcting her pronunciation. “It’s Yiddish for ‘a plank with eyes.’ Not a compliment.” To Vickery he said, “You still have your string abacus?”

  Vickery looked around, as if there might be some direction in which he could run away from all this, then reluctantly nodded. “We’ll at least drive you to the bus station.”

  Vickery drove them all back down out of the hills to Hollywood Boulevard, and then straight east till the boulevard slanted south and became West Sunset. The truck was again showing a tendency to stall at stoplights, and several times he had to shift to neutral and gun the engine until a traffic light turned green.

  Laquedem was sitting back in the kitchen area, on the folded-down seat by the oven, and for the first twenty minutes he didn’t speak at all, and neither did anyone else in the rattling truck. From time to time Vickery glanced to the side at Castine, but her face in profile gave him no clue to what she was thinking. His own thoughts were in suspension, though daughter you might have had and a truly devastating explosion hovered at the fringes.

  As he steered across the curved bridge over Glendale Boulevard, Vickery heard the microwave ping, and half-fearfully glanced over his shoulder; but there was no figure back there besides Laquedem and Santiago, who had apparently used his new skill to heat another couple of burritos.

  A moment later he heard Laquedem say, “Thank you, boy,” and then the old man went on in a louder voice, apparently addressing Vickery, “That poem you heard a piece of, Ovid’s Metamorphoses—ghosts often use lines from it to express their thoughts when they briefly drift near the factory, probably because it’s constantly in the thoughts of . . . an actual dominant person there. And the poem is remembered in 18th century English, not the original Latin anymore, which implies that the person in the factory is slowly picking up some memories dropped by the ghosts, century by century.”

  “So how will—” began Vickery, but Castine interrupted.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “dominant person? In that factory?” She had popped her seatbelt loose, and now turned around in her
seat. “Who’s that, Satan?”

  “By now, maybe,” came Laquedem’s voice.

  “Think about it, Ingrid,” said Vickery. “He’s imprisoned in the Labyrinth; he’s in the factory, he’s an artificer; and I saw him flying, there.”

  “His prison cell, if you want to call it that,” said Laquedem, “the factory, is the only enduring pocket of randomly-generated precision in the Labyrinth. According to ghosts, the highway comes and goes but the factory has always been there.”

  “Are you two serious?” Castine looked from Laquedem to Vickery and back. “Are you crazy?”

  “Definitely serious,” said Vickery.

  Castine exhaled and sat down again. “Good God,” she said softly. She crossed her arms at was silent while Vickery drove two more blocks. Finally she said, “I thought he escaped. His son, Icarus, flew too close to the sun and it melted the wax of his wings, so he fell in the ocean—but I thought Daedalus escaped the Labyrinth.”

  “He did,” said Laquedem, “but his son’s ghost was still there, exerting a pull. And then King Minos caught him again by tricking him into re-enacting his entry into the Labyrinth, and it counted for real.”

  “I don’t remember that part.”

  “Something about a snail shell,” said Vickery.

  “A spiral seashell,” said Laquedem, possibly nodding, “like a whelk, or a conch. Minos made a big bet that nobody could thread a string through the shell, and Daedalus did it by gluing a thread to an ant, and then luring the ant through the shell’s coils by putting honey at the exit. Apparently he thinned the glue for its tiny application by licking it.”

  “Ah,” commented Santiago, “using his spit, in a little Labyrinth! Like knocking on the door—them and their tongues.”

  “And he had made the Labyrinth, remember,” said Laquedem. “It was an entrapping funhouse-mirror image of the Minotaur, but, like any artist’s work, it was also in some sense a self-portrait. Close enough, as it turned out; especially with the ghost of his beloved son already there, calling to him, as it were. It wasn’t as big a step-across—as big a fall-into—for him as it would have been for anybody else.”

  He paused, apparently to take a bite of burrito. After a few moments he went on, “It would be best if you could avoid his factory. With luck the highway is still there, where you saw it, and you can break off a piece of its pavement; and if it turns to water, you get another. Even if a ghost is chasing you. Bring it back to this world, and then bury it in the center of the omphalos—right?—that freeway island by the Avenue 43 exit on the Pasadena Freeway. My mistake in 1960 was taking it away from there, taking it home with me.”

  “A big brass letter L,” said Vickery.

  “It doesn’t matter what it was. The Vatican’s got it now.”

  Vickery frowned, keeping his eyes on the traffic ahead. “So how does putting a piece of broken pavement on that freeway island prevent—” He waved around at the buildings they were driving past, at the whole city. “Is it radioactive? You said you got sick from hanging onto your brass L.”

  “It won’t hurt you,” said Laquedem, “if you leave it at the omphalos and then get away from it. It’s not radioactive. It’s the opposite of radioactive.” The old man sighed and went on with strained patience, “Listen—when the endlessly expanded possibilities of the Labyrinth happen to generate something real, that thing is actually more solidly defined than anything here—more than these streets, this truck, this burrito. It excludes all randomness, it has zero possibility of variation. Its field can, eventually, interfere with things like natural nerve function.”

  Vickery heard him shift on the seat back there, knocking one of his crutches to the vinyl floor.

  “But more to the point,” Laquedem went on heavily, “it repels irrational possibility, which is to say ghosts. Placed at the omphalos, it should keep any more ghosts from coming through from the Labyrinth, and shoo away all the ghosts of freeway casualties from this side. It’s a rectifier that blocks both directions, so there’ll be no more exchange of force-carrying particles. The omphalos should close up, heal, and the imminent merger of the worlds should be prevented.”

  “Should,” said Castine derisively.“We’re all getting on that bus.”

  Vickery started to speak, then just pressed his lips together. For several minutes they drove on in silence.

  Then Laquedem burst out, “Your metronome doesn’t have a cap on it! You can’t get across without one of those things!”

  That’s right, thought Vickery, I broke it off and threw it out the window.

  “I can’t go back to the Galvan commissary to get another,” he said.

  A tightness in his chest seemed to loosen. Maybe this has all been academic, he thought; maybe I have no decision to make, and we do all get on the Barstow bus after all.

  “You’ve got Jack Hipple’s ghost in a pinecone in your pocket,” said Santiago.

  Vickery had forgotten that; and he winced as the awful choice opened up before him again.

  “Really?” said Laquedem. “Jack Hipple, subsumed in a pinecone?” He laughed briefly. “Yes, good, that’ll do.”

  “Throw it out the window now,” said Castine.

  Vickery emptied his lungs in a sigh. “Maybe later,” he told her. “Time yet for a hundred indecisions.”

  He could feel her stare as he slowed for a red light. The brakes squealed.

  She nodded, grudgingly. “If it makes you feel better to wait.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel better.”

  West Sunset crossed over the 110 Freeway, and Vickery realized that while they were on the bridge they were only a few hundred yards north of the spot where Castine, and then himself, had driven out of this world and into the Labyrinth yesterday; he held his breath for the ten seconds it took to cross the bridge, but there was no sandstorm, and the radios stayed synchronized.

  “It was just down that freeway, wasn’t it?” Castine said quietly. When Vickery nodded, she said, “The weird effects really do seem to have stopped.”

  Behind them Laquedem snorted. “When the ocean suddenly pulls way back away from the shore, does that mean you can relax about tsunami warnings? Hurry up to that bus station.”

  The clearing in the freeway island by the Avenue 43 exit from the Pasadena Freeway was quiet in the slanting, early evening sunlight, but the ground flickered with dozens of tiny lizards that darted from one place to another, apparently without crossing the distances between. Whenever Terracotta tried to focus on one of them, it wasn’t there.

  He had expected to find the usual band of freeway gypsies here, but in fact he was alone on the island. Even the lizards hardly counted as present, the way they behaved.

  He sat under the blue tarpaulin hung from the stepladders, and he was dutifully divesting himself of himself, to make room for the big other. The outermost fringes of the Labyrinth must already have been seeping across through the omphalos, for every memory he called up immediately fell out of his head, never to be recovered. Perhaps the lizards were eating them and jumping back to the Labyrinth to regurgitate them onto the cold sand there.

  He thought of Ingrid Castine, and her smile, and of the intentness and compassion she showed when interviewing deleted persons, and of one time when she had stood so close to him while giving him a report that her breast briefly pressed against his arm; and then there was a new gap in his memory where someone had been—a woman?—and the little lizards appeared and disappeared like bubbles in a simmering pot.

  In 1973, the year before his father disappeared from his life, the old man had taken 16-year-old Emilio on a charter boat deep-sea fishing down the coast of Baja Mexico, and one morning when the sky was still only reddening in the east, his father had taken him up on deck and shown him a carpet of crabs on the sea, all linked claw-to-claw in a vast, rippling lattice. And then the memory was gone, leaving only the idea of some number of primitive creatures holding hands.

  Terracotta blinked around at the lengthening sh
adows in the clearing. What had he been thinking of? Something about his father? The dirt at his feet seemed alive.

  And he thought of the ten-year-old boy he had been, riding his bicycle to deliver newspapers in the rain, with the taste of Brylcreem hair tonic in his mouth as the water ran down his face from his hair, and how he had saved the money he made to buy a microscope—that was when he still believed in important choices and rewards, before he came inevitably to the realization that purpose and person were meaningless illusions; but the realization had had to happen sooner or later. The vacuous truth had been waiting out there all along. What had Neitzsche said? “If the abyss gazes at you long enough, you’ll look back into the abyss.”

  He could still remember that his name was Emilio Terracotta—no, Emilio Benedetti, of course—not Terrafirma or whatever that was that had first occurred to him—but he knew he would shortly lose it, lose his entire self, and be replaced by an entity that could not ever have such a thing as a name.

  At the back end of the Greyhound bus station was a cafeteria, and Laquedem and Castine were perched on stools at a long, low counter while Vickery and Santiago stood in front of them with their backs to a chest-high counter. Castine had kept her face averted as they walked in, and had immediately stopped at the counter and bought big sunglasses and a floppy hat that she pulled down around her face.

  Vickery and Castine had ordered coffee, and Laquedem and Santiago had Cokes. The lenses of Laquedem’s glasses had melted and left dark streaks down the buttonless front of his white shirt.

  “The way it is now,” said the old man to Vickery, “you should be able to get across even without a concussion, or being drunk. The same place you used before would be good—go up Alameda and then turn left—”

  “I know how to get there,” said Vickery. He was holding his paper cup of coffee with both hands to make sure they didn’t tremble.

  “You can’t actually do it,” Castine told him. “It’s been, I don’t know, therapeutic to consider the idea, but now it’s time to face reality and—”