by J D Cortese
And then he stopped, ignoring the girls, still focused on how to cross the immense gap of the West Street. He had learned something important, that connected him to the two down-world humans.
He had ceased to be just a pair of eyes.
He wasn’t a Watcher anymore.
He had mixed himself with a world his entire life had been purposed to observe with clinical detachment.
And by doing so, he was now on the other side of the observation window.
He had transformed himself from watcher into the one being watched.
Chapter 21
They were in a corner of the city Agdinar didn't know well. Its streets were narrower, and they curved around parks that fit uncomfortably between them. Years before, the neighborhood had been a vibrant and perhaps bohemian part of the city—the remains of restaurants and coffeehouses could be seen on the faded signs hanging over boarded-up first-floor entrances. But the decay and overpowering sadness of the city had taken over the area.
A few lights on the upper floors of buildings, some not even electric, revealed life inside but did little to entice visitors to venture there at night.
Things got even more complicated as coming clouds silenced the moonlight and darkness closed over them. An obvious problem was the absence of functional streetlights. The second and worst problem was that Sarinda was seeking refuge in a friend’s apartment, but she couldn't remember his address.
“This is upsetting,” she said. “I should know where he lives.”
“You seem to know the city very well,” Agdinar said, still marveling at Sarinda’s instincts about guiding them in the dark. Not remembering one person’s address didn’t compare to how she had sorted the ruins of Manhattan South.
“Oh, I know the city all ways around,” she said. Agdinar’s comment might have prompted a memory, and Sarinda started to parallel Agdinar as she walked. “Way back, when Tysa was living in public housing—and then in shelters—I used to wander past the barriers, going south into the old city. It wasn’t as bad as it is now, and I got to learn the parts beyond the uptown grid. Do you know that new maps don’t even have streets south from Canal?”
“No, I didn’t know,” Agdinar said, a half-truth at best. He had seen the strangely truncated map of the island, looking like the ocean had flooded a lot of it. But he just wanted Sarinda to keep talking, exorcising her obvious anxiety over their predicament.
“Yes, no maps show the South Point,” she said, “and the names of all those streets have disappeared from the tourist guides. It is as if the city sank into the Hudson a million years ago. Nobody has been to the Statue of Liberty in…since the late ’30s. They may need to stick a label on the map with “here, be dragons” on top of the old Battery Harbor. I’m saying it, and I can barely believe it.”
“I see,” Agdinar said, keeping pace with Sarinda. “Those were crazy years.”
“For sure. Look at our last couple of days.”
“Yes,” he said, “but just wait until we do this for a whole week.”
At this, Sarinda openly laughed. Their ordeal wasn’t yet beyond humor. But it was ominous, and they stopped talking and continued moving north. The air was cold enough to make conversation a painful alternative to breathing.
* * *
Agdinar had decided to cut through the darkness with his inner viewers. Sarinda was too nervous for him to activate her suit's controls. And he couldn't risk trying to access the Towers’ quantum computers and—for the same reason—wasn't on speaking terms with Dhern. Any communication with his friend’s brethren would be risky.
They wandered around a block twice, and in between three others by tracing their main streets back and forth.
As Sarinda was going to enter a street for a third time—Agdinar realized it was a West-East avenue, 14th Street—he decided to stop her.
“It's getting dangerous,” he said, pointing to a group of men who had congregated on the farthest corner of the big intersection. A weird temple-like building stood there, the darkness making it look phosphorescent; it gave the impression they were walking the streets at the bottom of a black sea.
“You are right,” Sarinda finally answered him, “this is getting downright dangerous. But where should we go?”
“People,” Tysa said, “I'm in pain, it’s after midnight, and I want to get somewhere to rest. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I can't find the street we're looking for,” Sarinda said. “Tysa, do you know how to get to William’s?”
“Hey, why me?”
“You know his neighborhood, and we do need a plan for what to do the rest of the night. It's freezing.”
“Let me see—I have no idea how to get there.”
“Are you upset with me?” Sarinda was trying to look into Tysa's eyes, but she kept her head down.
“What do you think?” This time, Tysa had raised her head and stared at Sarinda. It was dark enough to make them blind to each other. “You two,” Tysa said, “you left me out there, for those idiots to take me. And then came back, only to almost get me killed twice, maybe more times—plus the jumping from buildings and turning cartwheels on that toy car. And now, with a foot that hurts like hell, am I supposed to be the one who figures out where to go? That's a little too much.”
Agdinar thought that Tysa had a point, but still had to ask. “Please, Tysa, help us.”
“You may be more innocent about this mess,” Tysa said, glaring at Agdinar with two glassy eyes, their shine visible even in the bluish darkness. “And you tried to rescue us...I like how you pronounce my name, the sound of it, a little Irish.”
“Thanks, I guess.” Agdinar noticed in Tysa's voice a surprising softness. “So, will you help?”
“Okay, but just because you stayed with me on that ledge.”
“Where are we going?” Sarinda was having trouble controlling her temper, and her words came with a shot of anger.
Tysa walked to each of the streets crossing the intersection, peering in all directions. Her foot made her wobble, but she kept her concentration. “We have turned the wrong way,” she finally said, “west, I think, when we looped back on Gansevoort Street. If we keep going this way, it'll take us straight to the Hudson.”
“And you weren't going to say anything?” Sarinda said, speaking too loud for someone who was trying to prevent danger.
“I don’t know, I was distracted. This is too much for me…I told you that I'm not happy with...with this damnatious day.”
“Let's stop this,” Agdinar said, touching Tysa's shoulder, “and let’s just go—which way?”
Tysa stayed silent for a few seconds. “North,” she said, “one block, starting here; then, maybe five blocks east. It's a very large brick building.”
“These are all brick buildings,” said Sarinda.
“Sure, but it is the rare one with people living inside and none of its windows boarded up.”
Without waiting for an answer, Tysa turned around and started to walk.
Chapter 22
The door of the fifth floor's apartment opened to show three steel chains holding it, although there might have been more locks and reinforcements Agdinar couldn't see from the hallway. Considering the precarious state of the building's entrance, and the lack of any features suggesting a security system, the precautions were needed but probably insufficient.
The man who stumbled to open completely the entrance was quite handsome, tall and with dark skin. He was well dressed, in a classic white shirt and blue tie; it was an old style, something coming from the sophistication of New York at the height of its gentrification.
“William,” said Sarinda, with a broad smile.
“My wonderful girl,” he said, still fidgeting with one of the uncooperative chains. “What has happened to you? And Tysa, you...”
Their disheveled appearance, with a fresh layer of dirt coming from the driving escapade, would have been enough to scare anyone who didn't know Sarinda and Tysa quite as well.
William extended a hand to Agdinar, who had never shaken one. “William Spector,” he said, “and who are you?” William’s eyes were intense, clear, and golden as a shiny topaz.
“I am Agdinar,” he said. “I helped them to escape the Hawks.”
“I can tell you have been chased, friends,” said William, and with a well-practiced gesture he invited them to come into the living room, while leaving the door opened just enough to let them inside. “You don't seem to be from around here,” he added, checking Agdinar as if he couldn’t believe he was there. “And your accent, I can't quite place it. You have an unusual name, quite weird if I might say.”
Agdinar didn't know what to say without revealing secrets and complicating things.
“William is a philologist,” Sarinda said. “He cares a lot about names.”
“Oh, I see,” Agdinar said, clearly not knowing what that profession was.
“You know,” Tysa interrupted before anyone could say anything else, “he studies words.”
Agdinar was surprised and somehow reassured by this. If there were still intellectuals interested in the intrinsic value of human culture, there was hope for the ancient Earth people. At least, it suggested that William had survived the Descent with his mind intact.
As the talking quickly shifted back to the "girls" and what had happened to them, Agdinar wondered—confronted with a word expert—why he hadn't fabricated a more convincing name for the times. Not even Dhern had noticed this, and now his viewers were telling him that there wouldn't be any Agdinars on hand for over a thousand years. A very poor choice.
“What are those lights in your suit?” William said, reaching to touch Agdinar's arm and making him jump.
Agdinar had not realized that using the viewers' memory core would activate lights on his suit, showing the search parameters as surface patterns.
Just one more way he could get in trouble by interacting with perceptive humans.
* * *
William had appeared next to Agdinar without a sound. “Do you like it?”
Agdinar interrupted his acquaintance with a ham and cheese sandwich that was wonderfully tasty but also alien to him. “Oh, yes, it's amazing,” he said, “and I’m impressed with your…so many books.”
Agdinar had never seen a bookshelf library of that size. His experiences with views and 3D-reconstructions—the travel guide of the Watchers—were not in line with seeing an entire room in an apartment, covered wall to wall with paper books placed in all imaginable orientations, fighting for space in each shelf. And the open door farthest from the entrance led to a bedroom whose walls were also a colorful deck of book spines.
The faint smells of paper, ink, and humidity were a background to William's entire dwelling. The darkness of the green walls, plus those leather armchairs, all seemed to have been designed as reading rather than living quarters.
Agdinar could guess why William Spector had not left the city. He was bound to that library.
“You know,” William said, “I didn't like you at first, but someone who's speechless at the sight of books can't be a bad person.”
Agdinar finally stopped staring. “How...I mean,” he mumbled, “what's that you do—or did.”
“I still do, if you think that thinking is doing. We don't do much anymore in the Big Apple; it seems the worms have eaten their full load from that fruit. But I did collect those books—close to eleven thousand—while working as a journalist and writer. That is, when we had newspapers and bookstores all over New York.”
“He wrote big novels,” said Sarinda.
Agdinar, still searching for the strange apple’s reference, noticed in his viewer that William had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the city’s anarchist movement.
“Really, what I wrote most were short stories and essays,” William answered Sarinda, while blushing. “I was a founding member of the ASL, the Americans for Social Liberation, a liberal organization that tried to fight the anarchy of the thirties, those throwback policies driven by the mindless who were powerful back then. The whole of society behaves with consideration for all, but our government—even what's left of it right now—manages to descend to extremes of violent tribal urges and recrimination. I would say that, just by looking out my window, all those movements I sponsored have failed miserably.”
William walked to the window, and he squinted trying to peek through the opaque patches the acid smog had been slowly carving on its surface.
The Descent. Politics, social contracts, even the basics of humanity, all lost in a crash that the elder Watchers thought would be the singular cause of the bigger losses to come.
Agdinar was there because William Spector had failed.
When William turned and came back to them, he seemed to have aged ten years. He was visibly abated by being forced to discuss again how a lifetime of scholarship and political involvement had been destroyed by intellectual dwarfs with big sticks. Even Agdinar knew how the past had come back—and would come back again—to stain the city with tyranny under assumed names, a scourge hiding behind the weaknesses of their government.
A single man—even one who was obviously brilliant—couldn't fight the tide of history.
Agdinar knew that, if William was suffering from this failure, what the future held in store for New York and the world at large would kill him of heartache.
Unknowingly, Agdinar put a hand on William's shoulder. He turned to him, and somehow, he understood.
“Thanks,” he said.
Agdinar couldn't say anything else, and turned to the so-called girls, who, after eating and drinking, were falling asleep on a large, puffy leather sofa.
Before Agdinar could compose himself to keep talking, William had disappeared in the kitchen, busy trying to collect cookies and prepare a later tea for the visitors.
* * *
William lived with his partner, Anatole, who had come home quite late. Anatole worked in an investment firm on the city's North side. Wall Street, homeless after the attacks to Lower Manhattan, had had no problem relocating to Harlem and making it into the richest corner of New York.
Anatole was an impressively good-looking white man, dressed in the eternal black suit of a money handler and with just a touch of gray on his temples, which made him look important and poised. The egalitarian views of William hadn't influenced his pick for a companion, who seemed both conservative and ambitious. But Anatole was all smiles when it came to William. They were both polite to a fault and, after a third round of snacks, left the trio—not before stressing that they should rest well—and retired for the night in their bedroom.
Sarinda and Tysa were soundly asleep on a couch, their usual feisty arguments forgotten and their bodies embracing like little sisters. Agdinar yawned, also sleepy.
William came back from the bedroom, after talking with Anatole, who had said he still needed to work on an appraisal for a new shipping company based in Antarctica.
“Who are you?” William's question took Agdinar by surprise.
“Sorry, I thought I'd explained that to you.”
“No, not really. What I mean is where do you come from? Your body suit, fancy as it seems, is not military, or police-made. It is something else entirely.”
“I am—I work for a research company, and we—”
“Please, don't lie to me. I've had a boyfriend who worked for the military. There's no need for a body suit so sophisticated just to relay information to headquarters. That's a machine much more evolved than the stuff our impoverished military can nowadays pay for; certainly, the thugs who took you can’t afford it. It is something for a valuable observer, like the specialists we sent to conflicts in the South Arabian Nations.”
Agdinar admired William’s mind. The man was bright enough to, with almost no information, make a very educated guess about him being a Watcher.
“So, again,” William said, raising his voice, “who are you?”
The truth was sometimes the best l
ie. “I am a man of the future.”
“No, I'm serious, what do you...?”
“I need a minute,” Agdinar said, avoiding looking William in the eye. “Let me sit for a while…I’m very tired.”
Without another word, he rested on a reading armchair and let the minutes pass with his eyes closed.
* * *
When Agdinar woke up from his unplanned deep sleep, William was standing next to him. He was silent, watching Sarinda and Tysa sleep. “They look kind of peaceful,” he said.
“Yes, and exhausted.”
“You guys had quite an ordeal. How is it that the Hawks took Tysa?”
“They were after both of them, in Central Park.”
“And you happened to be there.”
Agdinar couldn't help but think of his now lost AV. “Yes, I bumped into them as they escaped.”
“So, it wasn't just Tysa.”
“No way to know from where I was seeing them.”
“Have you thought that maybe they were after Sarinda, not Tysa? She's the Major's daughter, a big price if they could get her.”
Agdinar nodded. “I don’t need to speculate,” he said, “I know that. The Hawks' leader, Rychar, he seemed to be quite interested in her.”
“You’ve met Rychar?”
“Yes, he came to see us, to where they were holding us.”
“He came to see you in person? Do you know who Rychar is?”
“Well, just that he's their leader.”
“Nobody has seen Rychar in years. He must have been certain that you would never leave.”
“Or, as you said, he's trying to send a message to Sarinda's dad.”
“Ah, you are smart, Agdinar, quite smart. I really like that. But it’s going to be very hard to protect the girls. You guys, you should seek help, and I mean help with guns.”
“Why?”
“Because they're going to try again, to capture her. And this time, you and Tysa will be expendable.”
