by Greg Bear
I nodded.
“My guest, however, would have a great deal more use for them.”
“Could you tell me who this guest is?”
“I asked Hawk, finally, who you were, and he led me to believe I was on the verge of a grave social indiscretion. It would be equally indiscreet to reveal my guest’s name to you.” He smiled. “But indiscretion is the better part of the fuel that keeps the social machine turning. Mr. Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson . . .” He smiled knowingly. I have never been Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson, but Hawk was always an inventive child. Then a second thought went by, viz., the tungsten magnates, the Cadwaliter-Ericksons of Tythis on Triton. Hawk was not only inventive, he was as brilliant as all the magazines and newspapers are always saying he is.
“I assume your second indiscretion will be to tell me who this mysterious guest is?”
“Well,” Alex said with the smile of the canary-fattened cat, “Hawk agreed with me that the Hawk might well be curious as to what you have in there,” (he pointed) “as indeed he is.”
I frowned. Then I thought lots of small, rapid thoughts I’ll articulate in due time. “The Hawk?”
Alex nodded.
I don’t think I was actually scowling. “Would you send our young friend up here for a moment?”
“If you’d like.” Alex bowed, turned. Perhaps a minute later, Hawk came up over the rocks and through the trees, grinning. When I didn’t grin back, he stopped.
“Mmmm . . .” I began.
His head cocked.
I scratched my chin with a knuckle. “. . . Hawk,” I said, “are you aware of a department of the police called Special Services?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“They’ve suddenly gotten very interested in me.”
“Gee,” he said with honest amazement. “They’re supposed to be pretty effective.”
“Mmmm,” I reiterated.
“Say,” Hawk announced, “how do you like that? My namesake is here tonight. Wouldn’t you know.”
“Alex doesn’t miss a trick. Have you any idea why he’s here?”
“Probably trying to make some deal with Abolafia. Her investigation starts tomorrow.”
“Oh.” I thought over some of those things I had thought before. “Do you know a Maud Hinkle?”
Hawk’s puzzled look said “no” pretty convincingly.
“She bills herself as one of the upper echelon in the arcane organization of which I spoke.”
“Yeah?”
“She ended our interview earlier this evening with a little homily about hawks and helicopters. I took our subsequent encounter as a fillip of coincidence. But now I discover that the evening has confirmed her intimations of plurality.” I shook my head. “Hawk, I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where the walls not only have ears, but probably eyes and long, claw-tipped fingers. Anyone about me—yea, even very you—could turn out to be a spy. I suspect every sewer grating and second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommy gun, or worse. What I just can’t figure out is how these insidious forces, ubiquitous and omnipresent though they be, induced you to lure me into this intricate and diabolical—”
“Oh, cut it out!” He shook back his hair. “I didn’t lure—”
“Perhaps not consciously, but Special Services has Hologramic Information Storage, and their methods are insidious and cruel—”
“I said cut it out!” And all sorts of hard little things happened again. “Do you think I’d—” Then he realized how scared I was, I guess. “Look, the Hawk isn’t some small-time snatch-purse. He lives in just as paranoid a world as you’re in now, only all the time. If he’s here, you can be sure there are just as many of his men—eyes and ears and fingers—as there are of Maud Hickenlooper’s.”
“Hinkle.”
“Anyway, it works both ways. No Singer’s going to—Look, do you really think I would—”
And even though I knew all those hard little things were scabs over pain, I said, “Yes.”
“You did something for me once, and I—”
“I gave you some more welts. That’s all.”
All the scabs pulled off.
“Hawk,” I said. “Let me see.”
He took a breath. Then he began to open the brass buttons. The flaps of his jacket fell back. The lumia colored his chest with pastel shiftings.
I felt my face wrinkle. I didn’t want to look away. I drew a hissing breath instead, which was just as bad.
He looked up. “There’re a lot more than when you were here last, aren’t there?”
“You’re going to kill yourself, Hawk.”
He shrugged.
“I can’t even tell which are the ones I put there anymore.”
He started to point them out.
“Oh, come on,” I said too sharply. And for the length of three breaths, he grew more and more uncomfortable till I saw him start to reach for the bottom button. “Boy,” I said, trying to keep despair out of my voice, “why do you do it?” and ended up keeping out everything. There is nothing more despairing than a voice empty.
He shrugged, saw I didn’t want that, and for a moment anger flickered in his green eyes. I didn’t want that either. So he said: “Look . . . you touch a person softly, gently, and maybe you even do it with love. And, well, I guess a piece of information goes on up to the brain where something interprets it as pleasure. Maybe something up there in my head interprets the information in a way you would say is all wrong . . .”
I shook my head. “You’re a Singer. Singers are supposed to be eccentric, sure; but—”
Now he was shaking his head. Then the anger opened up. And I saw an expression move from all those spots that had communicated pain through the rest of his features and vanish without ever becoming a word. Once more he looked down at the wounds that webbed his thin body.
“Button it up, boy. I’m sorry I said anything.”
Halfway up the lapels, his hands stopped. “You really think I’d turn you in?”
“Button it up.”
He did. Then he said, “Oh.” And then, “You know, it’s midnight.”
“So?”
“Edna just gave me the new Word.”
“Which is?”
“Agate.” I nodded.
Hawk finished closing his collar. “What are you thinking about?”
“Cows.”
“Cows?” Hawk asked. “What about them?”
“You ever been on a dairy farm?”
He shook his head.
“To get the most milk, you keep the cows practically in suspended animation. They’re fed intravenously from a big tank that pipes nutrients out and down, branching into smaller and smaller pipes until it gets to all those high-yield semi-corpses.”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“People.”
“. . . and cows?”
“You’ve given me the Word. And now it begins to funnel down, branching out, with me telling others and them telling still others, till by midnight tomorrow . . .”
“I’ll go get the—”
“Hawk?”
He turned back. “What?”
“You say you don’t think I’m going to be the victim of any hanky-panky with the mysterious forces that know more than we. Okay, that’s your opinion. But as soon as I get rid of this stuff, I’m going to make the most distracting exit you’ve ever seen.”
Two little lines bit down Hawk’s forehead. “Are you sure I haven’t seen this one before?”
“As a matter of fact I think you have.” Now I grinned.
“Oh,” Hawk said, then made a sound that had the structure of laughter but was all breath. “I’ll get the Hawk.”
He ducked out between the trees.
I glanced up at the lozenges of moonlight in the leaves.
I looked down at my briefcase.
Up between the rocks, stepping around the long grass, came the Hawk. He wore a gray evening suit over a gray silk turtleneck. Above his craggy face, hi
s head was completely shaved.
“Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson?” He held out his hand.
I shook: small sharp bones in loose skin. “Does one call you Mr. . . . ?”
“Arty.”
“Arty the Hawk?” I tried to look like I wasn’t giving his gray attire the once-over.
He smiled. “Arty the Hawk. Yeah. I picked that name up when I was younger than our friend down there. Alex says you got . . . well, some things that are not exactly yours. That don’t belong to you.”
I nodded.
“Show them to me.”
“You were told what—”
He brushed away the end of my sentence. “Come on, let me see.”
He extended his hand, smiling affably as a bank clerk. I ran my thumb around the pressure-zip. The cover went tsk. “Tell me,” I said, looking up at his head, lowered now to see what I had, “what does one do about Special Services? They seem to be after me.”
The head came up. Surprise changed slowly to a craggy leer. “Why, Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson!” He gave me the up and down openly. “Keep your income steady. Keep it steady, that’s one thing you can do.”
“If you buy these for anything like what they’re worth, that’s going to be a little difficult.”
“I would imagine. I could always give you less money—”
The cover went tsk again.
“—or, barring that, you could try to use your head and outwit them.”
“You must have outwitted them at one time or another. You may be on an even keel now, but you had to get there from somewhere else.”
Arty the Hawk’s nod was downright sly. “I guess you’ve had a run-in with Maud. Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. And condolences. I always like to do what’s in order.”
“You seem to know how to take care of yourself. I mean I notice you’re not out there mingling with the guests.”
“There are two parties going on here tonight,” Arty said. “Where do you think Alex disappears off to every five minutes?”
I frowned.
“That lumia down in the rocks—” he pointed toward my feet “is a mandala of shifting hues on our ceiling. Alex—” he chuckled—“goes scuttling off under the rocks where there is a pavilion of Oriental splendor—”
“And a separate guest list at the door?”
“Regina is on both. I’m on both. So’s the kid, Edna, Lewis, Ann—”
“Am I supposed to know all this?”
“Well, you came with a person on both lists. I just thought . . .” The Hawk paused.
I was coming on wrong. But a quick change artist learns fairly quick that the verisimilitude factor in imitating someone up the scale is your confidence in your unalienable right to come on wrong. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “How about exchanging these—” I held out the briefcase— “for some information.”
“You want to know how to stay out of Maud’s clutches?” He shook his head. “It would be pretty stupid of me to tell you, even if I could. Besides, you’ve got your family fortunes to fall back on.” He beat the front of his shirt with his thumb. “Believe me, boy. Arty the Hawk didn’t have that. I didn’t have anything like that.” His hands dropped into his pockets. “Let’s see what you got.”
I opened the case again.
The Hawk looked for a while. After a few moments he picked a couple up, turned them around, put them back down, put his hands back in his pockets. “I’ll give you sixty thousand for them, approved credit tablets.”
“What about the information I wanted?”
“I wouldn’t tell you a thing.” The Hawk smiled. “I wouldn’t tell you the time of day.”
There are very few successful thieves in this world. Still less on the other five. The will to steal is an impulse toward the absurd and tasteless. (The talents are poetic, theatrical, a certain reverse charisma . . .) But it is a will, as the will to order, power, love.
“All right,” I said.
Somewhere overhead I heard a faint humming.
Arty looked at me fondly. He reached under the lapel of his jacket and took out a handful of credit tablets—the scarlet-banded tablets whose slips were ten thousand apiece. He pulled off one. Two. Three. Four.
“You can deposit this much safely—”
“Why do you think Maud is after me?”
Five. Six.
“Fine,” I said.
“How about throwing in the briefcase?” Arty asked.
“Ask Alex for a paper bag. If you want, I can send them—”
“Give them here.”
The humming was coming closer.
I held up the open case. Arty went in with both hands. He shoved them into his coat pockets, his pants pockets; the gray cloth was distended by angular bulges. He looked left, right. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks.” Then he turned and hurried down the slope with all sorts of things in his pockets that weren’t his now.
I looked up through the leaves for the noise, but I couldn’t see anything.
I stooped down now and laid my case out. I pulled open the back compartment where I kept the things that did belong to me and rummaged hurriedly through.
Alex was just offering Puffy-eyes another Scotch, while the gentleman was saying, “Has anyone seen Mrs. Silem? What’s that humming overhead—?” when a large woman wrapped in a veil of fading fabric tottered across the rocks, screaming.
Her hands were clawing at her covered face.
Alex sloshed soda over his sleeve, and the man said, “Oh, my God! Who’s that?”
“No!” the woman shrieked. “Oh, no! Help me!” waving her wrinkled fingers, brilliant with rings.
“Don’t you recognize her?” That was Hawk whispering confidentially to someone else. “It’s Henrietta, Countess of Effingham.” And Alex, overhearing, went hurrying to her assistance. The Countess ducked between two cacti, however, and disappeared into the high grass. But the entire party followed. They were beating about the underbrush when a balding gentleman in a black tux, bow tie, and cummerbund coughed and said in a very worried voice, “Excuse me, Mr. Spinnel?” Alex whirled.
“Mr. Spinnel, my mother . . .”
“Who are you?” The interruption upset Alex terribly.
The gentleman drew himself up to announce: “The Honorable Clement Effingham,” and his pants leg shook for all the world as if he had started to click his heels. But articulation failed. The expression melted on his face. “Oh, I . . . my mother, Mr. Spinnel. We were downstairs at the other half of your party when she got very . . . excited. She ran up here—oh, I told her not to! I knew you’d be upset. But you must help me!” and then looked up.
The others looked, too.
The helicopter blacked the moon, rocking and settling below its hazy twin parasols.
“Oh, please . . .” the gentleman said. “You look over there! Perhaps she’s gone back down. I’ve got to—” looking quickly both ways—“find her.” He hurried in one direction while everyone else hurried in others.
The humming was suddenly syncopated with a crash. Roaring now, as plastic fragments from the transparent roof chattered down through the branches, clattered on the rocks . . .
I made it into the elevator and had already thumbed the edge of my briefcase clasp, when Hawk dove between the unfolding foils.
The electric eye began to swing them open. I hit DOOR CLOSE full fist. The boy staggered, banged shoulders on two walls, then got back breath and balance. “Hey, there’s police getting out of that helicopter!”
“Hand-picked by Maud Hinkle herself, no doubt.” I pulled the other tuft of white hair from my temple. It went into the case on top of the plastiderm gloves (wrinkled, thick blue veins, long carnelian nails) that had been Henrietta’s hands, lying in the chiffon folds of her sari.
Then there was the downward tug of stopping. The Honorable Clement was still half on my face when the door opened.
Gray and gray, with an absolutely dismal expression, the Hawk swung through the doors. Behind him p
eople were dancing in an elaborate pavilion festooned with Oriental magnificence (and a mandala of shifting hues on the ceiling). Arty beat me to DOOR CLOSE. Then he gave me an odd look.
I just sighed and finished peeling off Clem.
“The police are up there . . . ?” the Hawk reiterated.
“Arty,” I said, buckling my pants, “it certainly looks that way.” The car gained momentum. “You look almost as upset as Alex.” I shrugged the tux jacket down my arms, turning the sleeves inside out, pulled one wrist free, and jerked off the white starched dicky with the black bow tie and stuffed it into the briefcase with all my other dickies; swung the coat around and slipped on Howard Calvin Evingston’s good gray herringbone. Howard (like Hank) is a redhead (but not as curly).
The Hawk raised his bare brows when I peeled off Clement’s bald pate and shook out my hair.
“I noticed you aren’t carrying around all those bulky things in your pockets anymore.”
“Oh, those have been taken care of,” he said gruffly. “They’re all right.”
“Arty,” I said, adjusting my voice down to Howard’s security-provoking, ingenuous baritone, “it must have been my unabashed conceit that made me think that those Regular Service police were here just for me—”
The Hawk actually snarled. “They wouldn’t be that unhappy if they got me, too.”
And from his corner Hawk demanded, “You’ve got security here with you, don’t you, Arty?”
“So what?”
“There’s one way you can get out of this,” Hawk hissed at me. His jacket had come half-open down his wrecked chest. “That’s if Arty takes you out with him.”
“Brilliant idea,” I concluded. “You want a couple of thousand back for the service?”
The idea didn’t amuse him. “I don’t want anything from you.” He turned to Hawk. “I need something from you, kid. Not him. Look, I wasn’t prepared for Maud. If you want me to get your friend out, then you’ve got to do something for me.”
The boy looked confused.
I thought I saw smugness on Arty’s face, but the expression resolved into concern. “You’ve got to figure out some way to fill the lobby up with people, and fast.”
I was going to ask why, but then I didn’t know the extent of Arty’s security. I was going to ask how, but the floor pushed up at my feet and the door swung open. “If you can’t do it,” the Hawk growled to Hawk, “none of us will get out of here. None of us!”
