The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “For you, Mom. Not for him.”

  “Can’t you have even a little faith, Andy?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Well.” She suppressed another sniffle, then stood up. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  She went off to bed, and I sat at the kitchen table and finished my milk in silence.

  In the morning, I headed into the heart of the city, to the biostatic plants and the hulking infrastructure of what was officially known as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB. What the letters really stood for, everyone knew, was the University that Ate Birmingham. It encysted the south side of the city like kudzu takes a tree.

  In the mid-twentieth century, the iron mills had dominated the landscape, but by the 1990s, they were heaps of rust. Twenty years later, come the biostatic revolution, grossly cheap energy, et voilà—all the towns that had big medical centers became the centers of money and power in the world. Birmingham—after years of a massive inferiority complex—had finally got a leg up on Atlanta in the region. UAB had been a bio mecca for years.

  But once again Birmingham had blown it by concentrating all of its hopes in one industry. Biostatics is old tech now, just as iron had become a century earlier—a tech that is waiting to get picked off by some hotshot genius. And the biowaste, nasty as shit because itis shit, deepens. Good old Birmingham was destined to become a second-rate town all over again. Or maybe the Ideals, so much more intelligent and farseeing than the leaders of the past had been, would save us. And if you buy that, I’ve got a near-Earth C-based asteroid to sell you, dirt cheap.

  The plants are massive and bright, even in broad daylight. They shine and flash like giant test tubes full of neon gas, though what they are really filled with is reactive biomass—soybeans, pond scum, and human feces. They have a certain gross beauty.

  I left my car in the parking garage at UAB and walked the few blocks to Five Points South. As I’d hoped, the Betablocker was still there, in all its shabbiness. Thaddeus had had an apartment over the bar and had practically lived in the bar’s murky confines, frequently taking his meals there, such that they were. Even back when I knew him, he’d been a longtime fixture in the establishment—so much so that the proprietor had given him a cigarette lighter emblazoned with the Blocker’s crest: a skull with the international nil sign encircling and bisecting it. What did it mean? No heads allowed? No thinking? That last was more likely.

  I went inside. The bartender was not a crank, but a young woman, probably a student. Old-fashioned joint. I didn’t recognize her, but I did stare at her for a moment. Here in Birmingham, it was common for two mulattoes to meet, but not in Seattle. In fact, it hadn’t happened to me in eight years. She saw me, saw what I was staring at, and gave me a smile. Not a node. I ordered a beer.

  All the bars these days had nanobreweries, but the Blocker had an old-fashioned glass-windowed instant fermenter behind the bar. I watched the barley turn to brew before my eyes. Then it circled through some refrigeration—an old unit, with freon, not nanos—where it collected in a pool, awaiting consumption.

  My tawny bartender drew it into a mug and brought it over to me. I did my duty. Not bad for the Bible Belt. A little bitter going down, but bitter suited me.

  “You sure got rid of that fast,” said the bartender. “Want another?”

  “Sure.”

  She set the machine to work, then leaned on the bar near me. “I’m Trina,” she said. I looked at her more closely. The smile was still there, but there was something haggard about her face, something sad.

  “Andy Harco. Pleased to meet you.”

  She fidgeted a moment, having nothing else to say, I guessed—or else wanting badly to say something, but not knowing how. Then the beer saved her. She went to get it for me.

  “You been here long?” I asked when she returned.

  “Uh, no. Well, almost a year now. I guess thatis long.”

  She began absently to rub the bar with a towel. Her fingers were long and supple. She was gripping the towel very tightly.

  “Know a guy named Nestor Greenly?”

  “Nope.”

  “He used to tend bar here. Long time ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  She gave the bar a final swipe and put the towel down, then started to drift away. She was humming something slow and soft.

  “I used to live in Birmingham,” I said.

  This got her attention. “Where do you live now?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Really? There’s a guy who comes in here . . .came in here. He knows a cop in Seattle he’s always talking about.”

  “I’m him.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “You heard about Thaddeus?”

  “I heard. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Did you like him?”

  She was crying now, softly. “I didn’t love him,” she said. Then I understood.

  “How long were ya’ll together?”

  “No,” she said. She knelt and got the bar towel again, then wiped her eyes with it. “You’ve got it wrong. We weren’t together. We just . . . once.”

  “I see.”

  “But he was here every day. He lives upstairs, you know.Lived. I haven’t seen him for weeks, though.” She said the last with a measure of acrimony.

  I sipped my beer. Another customer came in, and Trina went to wait on him. He ordered a whiskey sour. It was nice to see a real human being mix a drink. Somehow it was more graceful than a crank, and I’ll bet the guy got a stiffer drink. After she’d finished, she came back over to me.

  “Can I see his apartment?” I asked.

  “The police have been up there,” she said. “They have it sealed off.”

  “I am the police, Trina.”

  “Oh. Well. Then I guess you can.” She reached under the bar and pulled out her purse. She searched around in it until she came up with a plastic key. It went with a cheap lock, no doubt, with magnetized junk. I could have opened it in two seconds without her help. But the thought counted.

  There was a P.D. spiderlock on the door. It ate a couple of skin cells off my finger and let me use the key. Thaddeus’s place looked like the back room at a shoe store after a big sale. It always had. He kept things in boxes; the only furniture he owned was a bed and a desk. He had no link screen to write on, no unlinked computer either, and I knew, from asking him, that he didn’t work in virtual.

  He wrote onpaper , with the self-recharging nano pen I’d given him years ago. I’d gotten it off a bad element who wouldn’t be needing it anymore. One of Thaddeus’s favorite tricks was to stick it into the toilet to feed the nanos. This apartment still had liquid plumbing. I set my briefcase on the bed, and looked around.

  The pen was on the desk, next to a pile of paper. New poetry, maybe. The place smelled of cigarettes, dust, emptiness. I sat down in the desk chair. It squeaked, but in a wooden, comforting way. The local guys had obviously been through the place. I’d scan their report later. I’m sure that Freddy’s hired help had combed it as well. I didn’t expect to find anything.

  I wasn’t even sure what I was doing here. I picked up a poem. Thaddeus’s chicken scratch was almost impossible to read. Like ancient Hebrew, vowels were merely a line, and you had to guess from context. There were mark-outs, added lines, intense revisions. No title on this one.

  Then the sadness finally hit me. I laid the poem back down and sobbed once, wiped a tear. This was it. The last of Thaddeus Grayson. Ink on paper. He had been my friend.

  We didn’t stay in constant touch over the years, but got together every few months in virtual, found some out-of-the-way algorithm to get jangled in. He was into edge music, and lots of times we’d sit in on this or that band that was supposed to be fresh kill. When I’d first met him, back when I was a rookie rental, he’d been trying to make it in an edge act called Strategic Magnificence. They made rock-and-roll-influenced vibes with some l
unar tonic imagery and, for spice, Afro-Hispanic mambito rhythms. It wasn’t great stuff, but the lyrics were hot. Thaddeus wrote them all, of course. Most of the time they played at the Betablocker.

  P.D. stormed the place one night looking for headjunk, and I’d arrested him for minor possession. We had a fascinating conversation about science fiction on the ride back to the station. Thaddeus read it, and was even writing some of it back then, as was I. That was before his debut at Southern Voices, before his first poems hit big inYardworks and every licensing program in America wanted to give him instant tenure.

  After I’d seen him through the paperwork and got him on-line with the best defense junk I knew at the time, we went back to the Blocker for a beer. The defense junk got him off with a week of public service, which he worked off the next few days by riding around with me as patrol ombudsman. What a weird-assed combination that was! But we got along, and I introduced him to Abby. This was before she and I were married.

  Abby and I turned into his first listeners after that. We’d go out drinking, or he’d come over to our place (after she and I had a place) and read us his latest. We’d either critique it or tell him it was great. But it was all great. Better than anything else being written. I knew it, and even Thaddeus knew it, but he had a hard time believing that he was that good.

  Christ, he could make words sing! He did not see the world as you or I, but in infinitely finer texture and variety. It wasn’t so much that he had a different perspective on things, but that he seemed, rather, to embody all perspectives in his work. A complete writer. God knows, I’ve tried to imitate him, but my best work is a pale shadow, stark black-and-white in comparison to his infinite subtleties of tone. It was always impossible for me to be envious, however. How can you envy a natural force come into the world? It just is.

  Over the years, he had taken on the physical presence to accompany his work. Thaddeus had grown, like a rock taking on moss, and lately had become an immense man. Yet the bulk seemed to be padding instead of fat, a patina of years observed. He was not a rotund, jolly fellow, but imposing. He’d been raised down in scrappy Gulf Shores, Alabama’s Redneck Riviera, by an itinerant mother who was a waitress, when she was working, and he’d always retained the air of a street kid.

  But no longer.

  Thaddeus was gone. Cut off in his prime.

  I shuffled through the other papers. More poems, a letter from a fan, a grade sheet with the names of his students. I scanned in the list, then picked up another poem.

  This one was more readable.

  Upside down, the leaf supports the tree

  the all supports the me

  Bricks, stones, walls

  Quills, pens, porcupines

  Death and life everlasting

  together again for the first time

  Obviously notes and scribblings. Then under all of this a line from Wallace Stevens:

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  The paper wasn’t dated, but I knew that Thaddeus periodically swept everything on his desk into a box, so the line had to have been written relatively recent to his death. Which didn’t mean that it was worth a damn to me.

  I sat there for a long time and stared at the other papers, at the grain of the desk. It was made of real wood. Thaddeus, my friend, would never write here again. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, three months ago, in virtual. We’d taken a pathway that was not quite legal down to a bar on the underside of the City—thevirtual City that was the setting for the meeting of minds across America. The bar had junk in place that bypassed your normal tactile filters. A band called Metastasis of the Liver was pounding out some edge—and in that bar,pounding was what happened to your nervous system. Thaddeus hadn’t talked much, had complained about his work needing a jolt.

  “Maybe I’ll get out of Birmingham,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get out of the South, even.”

  “You? Man, you are in a symbiotic relationship with that city. There’s no way you’ll leave.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a little worried about it becoming parasitic, you know what I mean?”

  “Like how?”

  “Like all my poems are full of shit smells and air-conditioner hum. I can’t get those damned biostatic plants out of my imagination. I don’t know. People tell me Thaddeus is good for Birmingham. I don’t know if Birmingham is good for Thaddeus anymore.”

  Then the band kicked in and blasted away all intimacies of conversation, imagined or real. By the time the set was over, we were both too wasted on the sound and pleasure-center jolts available in such places to resume.

  Drunk. I’d last seen Thaddeus drunk and vaguely unhappy. Did that mean anything? And what was this “the all supports the me” shit? Had Thaddeus been contemplating joining an Ideal? My common sense immediately rejected the notion. Thaddeus knew what selfless idiots nodes were.

  But even to such a man as Thaddeus, who, as far as I was concerned, was ten times more intelligent and ultimately powerful than any Ideal, joining up could become a strange and deep attraction. I’d seen it happen to too many good people.

  I hadn’t realized how long I’d sat there, brooding, until I noticed that the sun was getting low in the west and shining through the room’s blinds in big dusty slants. There was no draft in the room. Evidently the building was coated with heat-pump nanos and the air-conditioning was silent. The dust motes danced about with pure Brownian motion, and I watched them form and deform, coalesce and scatter. Dead people. That was what I’d come home to.

  Then they swirled into tempests and typhoons as someone opened the door and stepped into the gloom of the apartment.

  Trina.

  She had covered her black bartending outfit with a seersucker jacket, and now she had on op-eds. Flat, utilitarian shoes. She had a satchel that looked like it was woven of spider silk. Inside were some lumpy and heavy-looking things. Books, from the shape of them.

  “You’re a student,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  She walked past me, sat on Thaddeus’s bed. Her op-eds were an organic blend, like mine. Pretty nice on a bartender’s salary. Maybe a rich girl, learning to live on her own.

  I ran her through my identification junk and got a split screen display of her file. Trina Oswand. Twenty-five. Bartending part-time at the Betablocker and—ah ha—working on her Poetic License. Current address: 511 Twentieth Street. I blinked up her parents’ address. Mountain Brook. Where all the old money dwelled. So she was a poor little rich girl.

  “Are you one of Thaddeus’s apprentices?” I asked.

  “No. I work with Ammon Hamms.” Hamms was one of the poets at UAB. I liked his work, but thought it a trifle old-fashioned. It was full of misdirected racial anger. Somebody should sit the fellow down someday and explain to him just who was worthy of hate these days.

  And of course Trina wouldn’t be one of Thaddeus’s charges. He wouldn’t mess around with his own students. Other instructors’ students were another matter, however.

  Her voice was strained now, as it had been at the bar, as she struggled to hold in her emotion.

  “I need to know what you really felt for Thaddeus,” I told her. This was true enough, but I could see that she needed to talk, that she hadn’t told anyone else her feelings about Thaddeus—because no one had ever asked.

  “I loved him,” she said. She shook her head, then rubbed her forehead. While she was rubbing, she began unobtrusively wiping her eyes. “Why did this have to happen?”

  “I don’t know, but I plan to find out,” I said. “Do you have any ideas? Guesses?”

  She shrugged. “Gambling, maybe.”

  “He played City games, went to the holofights?” Virtual casinos were not entirely legal, but not difficult to get to if you knew the system well enough. A lot of the virtual bars Thaddeus and I had been to had back rooms for gambling. And holographic computer simulations of every game imaginable were available for wagering.

  “Everything,” Trina said. “Ci
ty, holo, football, kingpin. He made a lot of money that way. At least he claimed to.”

  This was a side to Thaddeus I hadn’t known about. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize my ethics by telling me. Maybe he’d been afraid I’d have turned him in.

  “Anything else you can think of?”

  “You mean motives and stuff?”

  “I mean motives and stuff.”

  “No. Unless some idiot at school got mad at him.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “It’s guaranteed. But those people are the biggest wusses in the known universe. They wouldn’t have the guts.”

  “Did he ever say anything about joining an Ideal?” I asked, as casually as possible.

  “No. I don’t know. He talked about them sometimes, but like everybody does.”

  “Do you think he would have told you if he was thinking about it?”

  She gave me a hard stare, and I saw the sadness in her eyes, beneath the tough act. Tears flowed. It looked as though she were squeezing them out. I found myself hugging her to my chest, stroking her hair.

  “Oh God,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be held all day.”

  “It was tough, finding out?”

  “Nobody knew about Thaddeus and me. We kept it hushed up. So there was nobody I could talk to.”

  She was crying in earnest now, and, so help me, so was I. She looked up at me, smiled, wiped a tear from my face.

  “Why don’t you stay with me tonight, at my mother’s?” I said. “We have an extra room.”

  “Oh, I’ll be all right,” she said.

  So I held her some more. She fit nicely under my chin. To Thaddeus, who was two inches taller than I was, she had probably seemed a tiny, fragile thing. Finally, she wiped her eyes on my shirt, then pulled gently away. She sat down on Thaddeus’s bed, looked around, bit her lower lip to hold back another fit of sobs.

  “Can I stay here for a while?” she asked. “I didn’t know if it would be okay after the police had been here.”

  “Sure. just leave everything like it was.”

  “That’s the way it will always be,” she said, and smoothed a wrinkle from the sheet beneath her.