If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  A lot of the American West seen in the story is Mark’s. Creating the Maxee was fun for us both.

  What did I contribute?

  Mainly the feel of driving at eighteen blasted out of your head at the wheel of your car and waking up barefoot and cuffed to the outside of a holding cell because of the benevolence of suburban county cops.

  From each according to his abilities . . .

  JACKET JACKSON

  Richard Bowes and Mark Rich

  I close my eyes and draw in

  blue distances of smoky air

  the coiling strands

  of a City of No Time

  City of Castoff Futures

  —Jacket Jackson

  1.

  In a year of promise deep in the heart of the 20th century, Chris Brown hit the road. He was nineteen. His draft board had lost touch with him. His mother and step-father were just divorced, and he had flunked out of college back east. Driving a blue, beat-up 1954 Dodge Royale ragtop, Chris was as free as any American.

  The man at the last gas stop on 66 had a boozed-up grin and see-nothing eyes.

  No one sees anything, Chris thought. I walk in a dead land with an invisible city carried in the air over my head, and no one sees.

  Chris wrote poetry.

  The tank topped out at two dollars and thirty-five cents’ worth of gas.

  As he pulled away with sixty-seven cents in change, he caught a flash of silver—something barreling down an ebony causeway . . .

  2.

  In Maxee, City of Lost History, a bike and rider swept along the otherwise deserted Esplanade of Silk Serpents. The hands and head of the biker were shiny aluminum. Blue liquid dribbled from its mouth. It wore jeans and boots. A leather jacket, unzipped, flapped in the wind.

  “Ah, but this is bracing to observe,” said the Clockmaster to Tomkin of the Tomkins, his Flux-Agent. They stood in Maxee, City of a Dozen Suns, looking down from the terrace of the Pitch of Dreams. “Desperate fun.” His voice rang like chimes. “Jackson’s remarkable jacket has a new friend. All metal, and on a motorcycle.”

  One sun rose while another set. Orange light bounced off the aluminum torso as the bike roared across Tangle Tongue Bridge, past the Graveyard of Unbearable Children and the centuries-wide Patio of Platitudes. The biker hung a left at the Tobacco Gardens.

  “Remember the Summer of the Raggle Taggle Girl?” the Flux-Agent said, lips pursed in amusement. “We had ground Seth Jackson to dust. All but destroyed the memory of his existence. Yet he returned. A bit of him, anyway. That Girl. She dashed in here wearing Jackson’s jacket and left us with those Gardens.”

  “Then I found her near the Hissing Stairs,” said the Clockmaster. “Creating something that involved an absinthe fountain and a carousel. The tinkle of the music was at the edge of my ear when I drilled the Raggle Taggle Girl full of the darts of Time.”

  “Always deadly, that arm of yours,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins.

  “Yet the jacket crawled off her back, and got away to some obscure solipse in the Outer Possibilities. Only to return with this chrome manikin.”

  As the motorcycle roared past the Tobacco Gardens, the cigar trees all glowed at their tips and puffed clouds of welcome.

  The Flux-Agent heard the Clockmaster tick a bit faster at that. Saw his lips twitch.

  On a terrace elsewhere in Maxee City of Dreaming Spires, a small rubber ball bounced on the marble floor, once, twice, and went over the edge.

  Far below them, Jackson’s jacket said, “Hard right. Go for the Barrows.”

  Metal hands steered the bike toward a long marble ramp. On a terrace five levels down, red flashed on the couch where Pauline of the fiery hair stretched and turned in her mechanical boredom.

  When the cycle hit the ramp, thousands of tiny metal jacks, the kind kids grab at between ball-bounces, went scattering across the road. Piles of them broke and sprayed like gravel beneath the tires. They clicked and clattered, catching in the spokes. They rattled against the engine. The motorcycle coughed and skidded.

  It smashed through a railing.

  As it fell, the aluminum driver raised its hands from the handles. The jacket slipped off its arms and billowed open in the air. All akimbo, it floated within sight of the balcony where Pauline now stood at the railing, her eyes bright, her hair twining around her shoulders.

  She reached for the jacket.

  Like a bullet, the rubber ball ricocheted off a wall. It smacked into the jacket and drove it spinning away from Pauline’s outstretched arms. The jacket fell, turning over and over, growing smaller as it fell out of Maxee, City in the Pink Smoke Clouds.

  Seth Jackson was dead. The jacket knew this. The Clockmaster, Prince Of Stasis, had pressed him into the dust that was ground ever finer by Maxee’s turning and writhing foundation.

  Still, the aroma of those trees . . .

  It remembered the factory workroom somewhere in a backwash town near the West End of Humankind, where the liquid fire first flowed from Jackson’s veins into the jacket-shaped webwork of carbon and steel, circuitry and leather. Life coursed into its fabric. It rippled, at its edges, just outside time.

  Jackson had draped the jacket over a stool, then leaned back against a table, lighting a cigar. He stared at his creation. The jacket would stay shining and dark despite the dulling of months. Its fabric would ripple and turn after the hammering of years. Its shape would hold without tattering against the gales of the centuries it swept through.

  Carbon and steel, circuitry and leather, and love and . . .

  Jackson disliked a certain Prince of Stasis.

  As the jacket fell, it called out to the dust of its creator.

  “Where now?” it said.

  “Find him . . .”

  “There?” said the Jacket, seeing a sunbaked, hardened place within a cracked and broken stretch of time. “Listen; there must have been a million jackasses through the centuries who have breathed out one or two of the bubbles that expanded to become Maxee, City of Null Time. What makes you think I can find someone who’s any more important than anyone else?”

  The jacket fell tumbling into the turbulence of the post-Bomb years, toward the backbone of a continent with not much more than gas engines crossing it.

  At first the distant dust being ground beneath the turning city stayed silent.

  Then, with leathery sensors the thin sharpness of glass, the jacket caught the words:

  “This is where the dream is born, in the cracks of this torn-apart version of the world. Here are ones in whom the vision of Maxee, the City Out of Time, is deeply rooted.

  “And here there is one to tear Maxee from the hands of the one who . . .”

  3.

  In the middle of the day under a hot Nebraska sun, on the old wooden bench behind the diner, Chris wrote carefully in the ledger, with his No. 2 Eagle. The ledger had to be as old as the town was, with leather library binding and green-edged paper. Cost almost nothing at the secondhand store.

  Three weeks dishwashing at Jake’s, with his Dodge Royale slowly rusting back at the lot. Seemed a hell of a lot longer than three weeks.

  He closed his eyes. He must not see. Must not think. Blank. Blank. Not think. He closed his eyes. Opened them. He started writing.

  Red is the color of the sky

  above a dozen sunsets. Red

  when I close my eyes to her hair.

  Red is red. Red is the glassy eye

  burning the forest of my head.

  The timeking laughs upon his chair:

  the manikin falls from on high

  onto the fossil riverbed

  leaving red chrome everywhere

  and a scattering of metal leaves.

  Chris stared at the words. The image of a red-haired woman edged into his mind and out of it.

  “Maxee, Number Twenty-Five,” he wrote at the top of the ledger page.

  “What you doing, jackass?” said Weed, the cook.

  “Numbering your good points.”r />
  “Didn’t know you could count that high.”

  “All the way to two.”

  Weed counted to two, with one finger up from each hand. “Count of three, I’ll kick your ass, Chrissy.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Weed,” said old Jay, standing in the door.

  “I’ll kick his ass someday,” Weed said. “I’ll kick his ass.”

  “Kicking your own if you do,” said Jay.

  Later the sun cooled down enough, and enough time had passed, to let Chris think again.

  Out of this town, he thought.

  Out, but with the vision of the city carried with him, greater than even these twenty-five pages in an old ledger.

  Still, they were good pages, so he took them with him.

  4.

  “You want the jacket because it’s so much better than you,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, Flux-Agent of the Clockmaster, Golden Peregrine to the Far Lands. He stood in his amber robe. Blue laurel twisted around his helmet’s beak, feathered crest, and glassy eyes. “The last creation of your precious Seth Jackson.”

  “It is not better than me. But it is very good.”

  Red Pauline’s dark dress mirrored lights of Maxee that extended far below and far above the black platform on which she and Tomkin of the Tomkins stood, in that rare moment when none of the suns of Maxee shone.

  “And you,” she said, “want it because it has something on you.”

  “It is something I want on me. It probably has something on everyone. But I would have something on poor, dead Jackson, wouldn’t I, if I had it on me?”

  Red Pauline laughed.

  “There must have been a good occasion,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, “to have generated such a laugh for you to recall now, in your cold years, for social purposes. How nice of you to revive it for me, out of your circuits.”

  “How nice of you to unveil your unceasing cynicism. I appreciate nakedness in men.”

  “Exactly the nakedness I would expect a machine to appreciate.”

  She laughed again.

  He smiled. “You realize you are engaging in crime,” he said, “encouraging the jacket to change things this way.”

  “You and the Clockmaster destroyed Seth, and now have exiled his last creation from the Brightness to the Years of Shadow.”

  “Where it will die, too,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, maintaining his smile. “Eventually. Already it is weaker.”

  “You force my hand,” she said, “by rigging the Contingencies and tampering with the Time Streams from the Beginning of the Brightness, to hold Maxee, the Protean City, to its unchanging pattern.”

  “You have been listening to that Simmoo’s wild surmises. The Clockmaster is capable. But not of that. He will find stopping you well within the range of the possible, however. The flow of the Streams is now quite steady, and any disruptive action against Maxee, City Out of Time, will be caught.”

  “I am interested in actions for Maxee. But for a Maxee the Clockmaster will not let come into being.”

  “As you will.”

  The stage winked out of existence, leaving the figures hovering for a moment between the twisting spires of Maxee . . .

  A humming of bees between radiant flowers . . .

  The roar of a distant elevator between stars . . .

  Then they, too, of the burning hair and of the watchful helmet, winked away.

  5.

  Chris carried an empty gas can down a twilit road a hundred miles from anywhere.

  He saw his dream rising briefly against the sky, down another darkening road, and so turned that way.

  How long since he left the Dodge by the road?

  Every kid nineteen years old should be free as the breeze.

  So he had thought with a full tank of gas.

  Breeze, and sand, and stone . . .

  And wind and the roar of a distant elevator between frozen stars.

  Chris abruptly dropped the can and doubled over. He thought he would lose his lunch. The road spun below him, then above him, then below him again. A shimmering vastness passed before his eyes. He saw clearly. He had such moments.

  “Seth Jackson sent me,” it said.

  Just the wind.

  “I cannot quite reach you,” it said.

  Yet, after a time, it did.

  The thing sent by Jackson fitted itself around the kid’s shoulders as he lay face-down, dry-mouthed and empty-headed on the cold sand in that Arizona night. A scorpion regarded him from a pile of black stones.

  “You are too simply blood and nerve,” said the thing that had flapped out of the violet darkness. “Those spineless jelly things of Maxee: they are closer to me than you—but even they I cannot quite fit around, not as I should.” The thickness of the jacket pressed around Christopher. “But we will try this. We will do this, and we will succeed.”

  “Maxee,” said the hollowed-out boy, seizing on the syllables. He felt fingers in his head.

  “It is a where, and it is a when.” The words crept along behind the fingers. “The shadows, the lights, the waterfall of a million miles. The chiming thoughts of a century of bell-headed children.”

  The tendrils of voice pulled away from the boy’s mind, and left in their place a vision of a city so immense it wrapped around the sky. The vision was, Christopher knew, an ideal, a fairy painting made as a collage from all the dim pictures in his mind.

  After a moment he remembered to breathe again. He found himself remembering a box of crayons he had when he was five. He drew pictures in his head, and tore them up.

  “And it is a nowhere, and a nowhen. It is a future, but not the Future,” said the thing on his back. “I’ll show you.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Christopher. “It’s real, isn’t it? It’s beautiful.”

  “You’ll see it in more than just your mind.”

  The thing from the future rose off the boy’s shoulders and spread itself as a gauze of black tissue against the stars. It searched and found what it wanted, on another dark highway: two minds with a touch of Maxee, Citadel of the Ice of Time, playing around their edges. It called them.

  Hours later, two figures appeared over the rise of hard earth and stones.

  One voice, a woman’s, said, “There!”

  The figures saw a shadow standing among the shadows as they walked near.

  “We heard there was a boy here, in a leather jacket,” said a man’s voice. “The boy who sees.”

  The shadow vanished.

  They saw in its place a form splayed unconscious on the sands. Radiant above the boy they saw the spirals of the City of Nets, turning through the stillness of a future with no past.

  When the jacket told them of Maxee, they recognized their own dreams.

  When it told them into what hands Maxee had fallen, they wept.

  “Save the boy, and save Maxee,” said the jacket to them.

  They picked Christopher up and carried him away. Not to the City, but to a city, east and into the dawn.

  6.

  “Did you know,” said Simmoo, the One True Historian, in a break from his One True History Class, while sitting with his one true student, “there was only the one person who had a chance to stop what was going to happen.”

  “So I’ve been guessing,” she said. “Had to have been Seth.”

  “Jackson, builder of the first glass bridge across Time. Had no clue what he was getting into, or what sort of chance he was offering the one who would call himself the Clockmaster.”

  “They say he died.”

  “Killed, actually. Most of him was killed, at least. Part of him fled back in Time.”

  She frowned. “Rumor is that he’s back, though.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Just on the grapevine.”

  “Maxee, the One True City, has no grapevines,” he said, smiling. “No people, thus no grapevines. QED.”

  “Yet there are,” she said, pleased to have information Simmoo did not. “I saw t
wo large people, and several small. What clothes they wore were no more than bright colors, and they gazed about with wild surmise.” She used the phrase to see Simmoo’s eyebrow twitch. “They waved color brochures at me. Asked where they could see the Overall Waterfall. I told them it didn’t exist.”

  “Not yet,” Simmoo said thoughtfully.

  7.

  The Outer Possibilities, especially those in the second half of the 20th century, abounded in cults. Mayan temples, pyramids, odd crop patterns, runes and riddles all attracted adherents. Lenin and Lindbergh, by the time of Bill and Alice Deware, were bygones. “Helter Skelter” and lemonade parties in the jungle were yet to be. Houses rose in rows, made of ticky-tacky. The City of Perfumed Sidewalks lay just beyond them, and just beyond the edge of many minds, touching, teasing, and tempting.

  Bill ran a construction business. Alice sold real estate. Everywhere they looked they saw bits of Maxee, without knowing it. Their large, ranch-style house stood on an acre of land, with a carport on the side and a swimming pool in back. Bill’s boy from a former marriage had come to stay with them while he enrolled in the local community college.

  They explained Chris that way.

  Neighbors thought this quiet kid, Christopher, might have been in a little trouble wherever he had been before.

  Not particularly tough, but not particularly friendly in his leather jacket. The kid drove around in his old ragtop and stuck to himself, and it was like the car drove him, one of the neighbors said. The car and the jacket. Always together.

  One evening Christopher found himself on a sidewalk near school staring at a meaningless sign propped in a window.

  The letters finally fell into place. Three names, he saw. The middle one was Chris Deware—his name at present.

  “Beat Poetry Jam,” it said underneath.

  The jacket took him inside. Smoke in a gray smudge against the ceiling. The warm voice of the bartender. A woman sipping a fizzing drink. Five or six tables of students hunched toward each other, and a few older sorts looking around. Sometimes they glanced at Christopher.