The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  Even at the airport, lightning bugs blinked in the air. They lived in the grass that grew through the cracks in the sidewalks. I ordered up a Hertz with my op-eds. It was an 87 Sagittarius, and the inductors rumbled like driveway gravel. Maybe I should have gone with one of the newer companies instead of aging traditional Hertz, but I liked the fact that all their electrostatics had the same lines as old gas-burning automobiles.

  As the Saj drove me away, a couple of the fireflies smashed against the windshield, and their glowing belly-fire smeared in incandescent arches across my field of vision. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn they were some glitch in the virtual manifestation. But I had my op-eds menued down, and the fireflies were real. For better or worse, I was in Birmingham, in the late twenty-first century, in the frail human flesh. More or less. The briefcase full of guns and brains sat by my side.

  My fictional time-traveling detective, Minden Sibley, would have appreciated the juxtaposition of the old and the new on such a night as this. He was always flitting back a hundred years or so, going after fugitives on the Timeways or just taking a short vacation in days when you didn’t have to have a license to take a goddamn dump. But he always had to return within a week, subjective. That was the First Temporal Law, ingrained into the fabric of his being by his employer, the United States Time Company:

  1. A time traveler can never harm, nor by inaction bring harm to, the resonate period to which he is native.

  You could go away for a little while, but you had to return and take your place as a tooth in the cogwheel that turned the universe when it was your turn to connect up with the Big Conveyor Belt in the Sky. Or whatever. It was all lies, I thought, I’d made them up myself, so what did it matter?

  Granddaddy’s death had made me maudlin, I decided. There is, however, no cure for self-indulgent sentimentality so sure and quick as going to see your family, the living ones, that is, in the flesh. I disconnected from the beltway a few miles from the airport and drove my car down First Avenue North to the BrownService Mortuary. Mom’s old Range Rover was parked outside. Harco, the bioenhancement company in which my father was a midlevel node, would not, of course, waste his work time by sending him to the viewing. Maybe he’d be at the funeral. Probably not. My father was a vague nothing to me, and I didn’t care. And I didn’t particularly want to see Mom, either.

  My mother is an amalgamation of just about every kook spirituality that ever aspired to Ideation. There are feedhorns dangling from her like fat remoras. Yet she is not a node. God knows why. Probably some kind of sick balance in her mind among a variety of pathologies. She’s the one who gave me my first name, as if you hadn’t figured that one out already. She was also the one who saved my ass eight years before. What can I say? I love Mom, but I don’tlike her very much. At least I don’t like being around her any more than I have to.

  I locked my briefcase in the trunk and went inside the funeral home.

  Mom was out in the hallway, talking to one of Granddaddy’s relatives whom I didn’t know—which included just about all of them. I never had been into the extended-family thing as a young man, though Mom had tried to get me interested in reversion genealogy at one time—that fad where some fancy junk supposedly deconstructs your DNA and gives you an op-ed presentation of life in Mesopotamia using your encoded racial memories, or whatever. Mom was convinced at the time that she was a Hittite princess and the rightful heir to the throne. I hated to point out to her that her inheritance nowadays consisted of a death zone of microbes that fried human beings as if they were insects caught in a zapper. The Middle East was no longer a pretty place, if it ever had been.

  “Andy,” Mom said, and disengaged herself from the relative to come and hug me. She smelled, as always, of cloistered eucalyptus. “I’m so glad you’re here. Daddy will really be pleased to see you.”

  As I’d known she would, Mom had had a ghost made of Granddaddy. I glanced through the door and saw him, sitting by the casket and looking morosely at himself.

  “Well,” I said, and walked in.

  Granddaddy was lying in his coffin, looking like he was made up for television. He was dressed in a gray suit that I’d never seen him wear. Mom had probably bought it for the occasion. He was a handsome man. He’d been a real looker in his youth, and the undertaker had obviously done some facial rejuvenation. Ironically, you can make dead skin look far younger than living skin, through some trade secret that I did not care to know or even guess at.

  “I did live to a ripe old age,” said the ghost softly.

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t find it in me to be rude to the holoware. A first for me. But, however shallow and stupid, the thing was all that was left of the algorithm that had raised me and formed my own deep-down programming.

  “I wanted to say something to you.” The ghost spoke in a stiff voice, as if it were being forced into a subroutine it did not particularly like but was ordered to follow.

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t try to make eye contact. It wouldn’t be the same, no matter how lifelike they made the holo.

  “First, power me down as quick as you can.”

  “Mom won’t like it.”

  “Convince your mother.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “The other thing,” he said, then was quiet for a moment, as if he were digging for something lost in his depths. But therewere no depths to ghosts. “The other thing is, don’t take no shit off nobody. Except poor folks who can’t help it and don’t know any better.”

  “I remember when you told me that,” I replied. “I’ll always remember.”

  The ghost appeared relieved. He crossed his legs and turned back to looking at himself in the casket. “Almost one hundred fifty. A ripe old age.”

  I left the room after another minute or so. Mom tried to get me to stay at her apartment, but I needed to be alone tonight. Also, I was a little worried about Freddy Pupillina looking me up, and didn’t want Mom to get involved in that kind of shit. She had enough problems as it was.

  I found a money crank around the block and got some cash vouchers issued from my account. This would be the last traceable transaction I planned to make tonight. Just to be sure, I got out the Portalab and ran the voucher cards through a launderer. No real harm done, since they could be cashed at the Federal Reserve, but no more junk on them that could connect them to my account. Slightly illegal, but I made sure to do it away from the usual nanowatcher patch points, and out of satellite view. Being a cop hath its advantages.

  I checked into a motel in Bessemer, on the west side of town, far from the funeral home and my mother’s place. The clerk—a crank (it wasn’t a classy joint)—asked for I.D. when my voucher cards didn’t produce an origination code. I showed it more fruits from the Portalab, and it legally had to be satisfied. My room was dingy and I couldn’t control the air-conditioning. The temperature was much too cold. Air-conditioning. The South was both the master of it and its slave. Nothing in the history of the region was more important.

  That night, I dreamed of Abby. I often do. Nothing specific. Just her autumn hair, her slender fingers. Her breath. It always smelled like rain in leaves.

  2

  After the dreaming, I slept hard and woke up thinking I was in Seattle. Then I realized that not only was it freezing cold from the air-conditioning, but the chilled metal of a pistol was pressed against my forehead.“Mr. Pupillina wants to see you,” said a voice from the darkness.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It appears that he does.” That was when I jammed my stungun into where I estimated the voice had a crotch and pulled the trigger. I always sleep with a weapon.

  There was a stifled whimper, a heavy thud, and the lights flipped on. A woman was standing by the door with the biggest damn fléchette pistol I’d ever seen. It had to be one of the Danachek 7s I’d heard of. Nasty way to die. The bullets were said actually to burrow. On the floor lay a big, bearded man in a blue suit. His index finger was through the trigger guard of a big .45. />
  “How the hell did you know where I was?” I asked, by way of breaking the tension. The woman’s tight expression did not loosen. She was heavyset and dark-skinned in a dirty sort of way, maybe in her late forties. Ugly as ten-day-old roadkill. She, too, wore blue, with tiny pinstripes that made her look fatter than she was, which was fat enough. Or big-boned, I should say, being a gentleman and all.

  “Rental cars check in with their location every hour,” she said flatly.

  “Only to the cops,” I said, then realized how stupid that sounded. In Birmingham, Freddy might not own the cops, but he sure as hell could get a little favor done for him—like a report on rentals.

  “I hope this doesn’t take too long. I have a funeral to attend,” I said. The woman looked at me funny.

  “So you already know,” she said. I couldn’t think what the hell she was talking about and finally decided she was talking about myown funeral, har, har.

  She motioned me to get up. I had to step over Bluto on the floor to get to my clothes. She made me turn the briefcase toward her when I opened it. She reached for the Glock. So much for Plan B.

  But I did have the rest of the alphabet to work with. I quickly slammed the briefcase shut on the woman’s hand. She cried out in pain, but kept the fléchette pistol leveled at my chest.

  “Let go!” she said, fighting to control the hurt in her voice.

  Instead, I twisted the briefcase as hard as I could and heard the bone in her arm break. She fired the pistol at me, pointblank. Fire and agony in my chest. The force of the bullet knocked me backward, but I managed to hold on to the briefcase, and the woman and I tumbled to the floor together. Her face came down on the studded metal cup in my elbow. Again there was the cracking of bone. She rolled off me, moaning. Her nose was a bloody mess. I kicked the pistol away from her and staggered to my feet.

  After taking a moment to catch my breath, I lifted my shirt to inspect the damage. There was a hematoma on my rib cage. Through the rendered flesh and muscle, an exposed piece of my Kevlar chest plates shone gray as old bone.

  The fléchette bullet lay at my feet, trying to burrow into the carpet’s nap. This sight, and the grinding pain in my chest, fired a rage within me. I kicked the woman in the side as hard as I could. She stopped moaning and passed out. This gave me less satisfaction than I’d expected. These two were just Family muscle. They weren’t made; their pain was their own. To hurt the Family, you had to hit a node. Like Freddy.

  I gathered my things together and left the room. After I stowed them in the Saj, I opened the hood and found the sender box. Taking it out would leave me without traffic control. What the hell; I knew how to drive. I went to the trunk and found the tire tool. The box was full of bionics. It cracked like a skull and leaked gray-white nerve tissue and sickly yellow cranial fluid. While I was putting the tire tool back, the door to my room clicked open, and Big-Boned Bertha stumbled out. Her face was all bloody and she was obviously having trouble focusing well enough to find me. Nevertheless, I got in the car and got the hell out of there.

  My first order of business was a patch job. I had to drive way the hell south to Hoover to find a booth that could handle skin grafts on the order I needed. It took an hour and a half to get me patched up. Funny how you either die or get better really fast these days.

  The booth had my DNA match, and it wouldn’t be long before a sweep would root me out. Obviously Freddy cared enough to try, and had the kind of connections to succeed. I drove around aimlessly for a while, trying to match speed with the surrounding traffic so that I would not show up as an anomaly on the road control junk.

  I pulled into a station for some static, and while the car was recharging, I went to the restroom and tried on my suit. I’d been wrong about it fitting. Over the last eight years, I’d put on at least twenty pounds, most of them in my chest and shoulders. At nine o’clock, when the cleaners opened, I took the suit in for altering. They put it in the nanotank and it was done in fifteen minutes. I paid with some damaged vouchers and headed in the general direction of the east side of town, toward the Church of Branching Hermeneutics, where Mom was holding Granddaddy’s funeral.

  But there was still plenty of time to kill before the funeral. I was dressed in the same shorts and T-shirt I’d worn yesterday, so I pulled into East Lake and did five miles around the track. The lake was gorgeous in the midday sun, clean and full of fish, judging by the anglers on the bank. Years ago, it had been a toxic cesspool, but the nanos had cleaned it up—just like the nanos in my shirt slurped up all the sweat and searched out and destroyed bacteria that made a stink.

  On about the third lap, I got a decent snippet of plot for my next Minden Sibley time-travel mystery. Something about nanos eating up a body that had been sunk into a lake and Minden having to go back in time, before the murder, to make an identification. Maybe the plot could involve the Second Temporal Law. I hadn’t done one of those for a while.

  2. A time traveler must not endanger his own atemporal existence in any way, unless by so doing he is fulfilling his obligations under the First Law.

  It always makes for a thrilling moment when a time traveler must decide between himself or the epoch that molded him. He can’t exist without it, yet he won’t exist if it does. Meaningless fun, though. Everybody knows time travel is impossible.

  When I finished up my run, I felt like I’d just stepped out of the shower. I drove around for a few minutes until I found a resistance booth on First Avenue North, then put in thirty minutes working the weights and getting the involuntaries shocked. It had been a good three days since my last workout, and this one left me tired, but with a clean feeling under my skin. Working out is the only way I know of feeling virtuous at no one else’s expense.

  To give the devil his due, I went over to the Krispy Kreme on Eighty-Sixth and had a donut and coffee. The place was over a hundred years old and run by some kind of historical trust. I was served by a node in a polyester waitress getup from the last century. I’d have preferred an authentic foul-mouthed waitress in regular clothes, but they’ve all been replaced by cranks, anyway. The donuts were good, though, and I sat with my coffee and considered times past.

  I thought about a lot of things. Abby, mostly. The night I was running for my life from Freddy’s goons. Mom had pulled some strings with one of her cults, and the Children of Gregarious Breathers were all set to smuggle me out in the Winnebago they used in their nomadic travels. They were on a holy search for the promised land of perfect atmospheric ion concentration or something, and no one questioned their comings and goings. Once out of town, Justcorp could take care of me. In town, my company’s hands were tied by Freddy’s maneuvering. There were two slots in the Winnebago. One for me. One for Abby.

  Only Abby didn’t take hers. She left me that night, in the midst of my need and terror.

  We were on the Southside, standing by the onion-topped Greek Orthodox Church. We were to be picked up a block away by the Breath Children.

  I told her I loved her, that I’d never loved her more than tonight.

  “I know,” she said. She looked at me as if she were full of infinite sadness, infinite wisdom. She was practicing to be a node even then. Abby, with her black hair and brown eyes. The fingers of her left hand worrying at the silver armlet she always wore above her right elbow. “I’m not coming, Andy,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not coming with you.”

  I should have realized. My fear kept the truth from my mind.

  It was me or Birmingham for Abby. It always had been. Part of the reason I’d fallen in love with her in the first place was her devotion to principles larger than herself, her unselfish ways. She loved cities, and this city more than any. She’d majored in urban planning in college, while I’d been studying law enforcement. We met in a criminal-law class, moved in together after I’d got my rookie slot with Justcorp and she’d been hired to monitor traffic and to flip the switch on the Vulcan when it needed doing.
r />   After all those long nights on the traffic watch, pondering the lights, losing herself to the ebb and flow of city life, she’d fallen out of love with me, and into love of another sort. The Big Lie had caught her, before I had known what it was, before I could do anything to help her escape.

  It was me or Birmingham, and Abby chose the city. She said that she loved me. She said that love for one man was not as important as love for humankind. She didn’t want to give up her job at the Vulcan; she had made node. She hadn’t wanted to tell me, knowing my distaste, even then, for Ideals. The city was going to wire her up in a week’s time. She was in line to become the city’s transportation coordinator, she said, to be on the Planning Council. In line to make adifference , to be something more than just one woman against the world. I could not believe what she was saying.

  She had become one of those people who look right over you and don’t see a person when they look at you, who are always thinking about how everything could be different, how everything can be improved. About how individual people are merely stepping-stones on the road to perfection. And gazing into Abby’s eyes, I could see that I was just a point of heat on a particular street corner. No more, no less. She was listening to the buzz of everything so hard she could never hear me pleading with her to stay with me, to leavefor me.

  Abby kissed my numb lips and brushed her slender hand against my trembling face. Then I wondered, for the last time, how it was that she smelled like the rain. I swear to God she smelled like rain in the country. In green leaves. Maybe I’ve already told you that?

  So I boarded the Winnebago alone, and didn’t die. And I stayed a person. I can’t say the same about Abby. My wife. Who was now the heart and soul of the city of Birmingham. Or at least the nerves.