by Tony Daniel
Maybe not yet, thought C, but every professional bone in his body told him that there was no form of communication that couldn’t be spied upon somehow or another.
“Cureoak couldn’t be blackmailed,” C said. “So tomorrow I’m going to kidnap his daughter and exchange her for the Cassady-13 key.”
It was a lie, of course. But the ultimate outcomewould be true in a matter of hours. Of that, C was confident. Time would tell. He must have sounded confident, for Amés chuckled. It resounded in C’s mind like a beaten bell. Once again, he collapsed to one knee, then pulled himself upright.
You are a ruthless piece of garbage, Mr. C. I’ll give you that. Not a shred of honor among spies, eh?
“Not unless honor happens to be expedient, sir.”
C touched his temples. They were damp and hot. The sun was directly above, and he felt as if the sun were both outside and inside his head. As if he were standing in the stark, merciless landscape of his own imagination.
“Sir, you are killing me with this transmission. You took out my band filters, remember?”
I wanted to remind you of what could happen. Of how it will be if you fail in your assignment.
“I understand.”
Do you?
“I understand what I am, sir.”
What is that?
“A means to an end.”
My end.
“Yes, sir.”
There was a certain symmetry, C thought. You had to give Amés that. Amés was a man of undeniable genius. He’d gotten control of all those interlocking directorates and authorities of the inner system Met, and he was using them. It was a great project that in many ways was also a worthy project. In the last hundred years, the Met—the great spread of interplanetary cables between the inner planets—had gotten congested and complacent. The outer system was steadily eating the business and the power away from the center, like a school of piranhas taking bite after bite out of a living carcass. Amés had tapped into the outrage of that old wallowing monster. He was about to lead it to war against the outer system colonials.
But the Harmony code was something else again. It was the one step he had not been able to take to obtain complete control. Its lack over the years was the thorn in his lion’s paw—for the Met was inoculatedagainst Harmony. Whenever the Harmony code was deployed, Mamery’s bone-change would follow in an instant. At the moment, Amés was a Napolean or Caesar. With the Harmony code operational he would be . . .
I am as a pianist to the piano, Mr. C.Youare the central key that I am now striking. You are the first note in a great symphony that I will play upon the Met. You are part of a new and mighty song. You should feel lucky.
“Oh, I do,” C said to him. “I live to serve.” Which was another lie he was telling Amés, but also, in a way, the genuine truth.
C had journeyed to Earth to do the bidding of the man who was the boss of him after Amés had dug him up from the little corner of Met Intelligence that C had established and for which he was the sole operative: the Crypto-horology Division. It had been years since he’d done fieldwork. For the past decade, he’d been lost in the backwater area of horologic ciphering—safe, he thought, from notice from above. But Amés had found him, and doing Amés’s bidding now was part of the job. Before Amés had taken power, it had been C’s duty to oppose him. Now Amés was the boss, and C was back on Earth, responding once again to Amés’s drive to power.
I should feel lucky, C thought. Lucky to be alive. Freedom is a bit much to ask for, under the circumstances.
Farther. Show me what you see.
Amés transceiver was patched into C’s visual centers, and he could look through C’s eyes if he wanted.
Keep walking. Keep walking. Here. Yes, HERE!
C grasped his head and fell, his knees and elbows skidding on bone.
You did this.
A playground. Children streaming out the door, frozen now. Their faces bewildered, terrified, determined to get away as they see something really bad is coming. Something really bad and horribly white. But they could not get away. Burning sun on their white unchanging faces. Pigeon shit on their shoulders and heads.
You did this. Nowundoit! And tell me in good faith that you don’t deserve to be a slave.
They can’t see me, C told himself again and again. And even if they could,they wouldn’t know what I did.
C felt a sudden chill at his back, and a storm front of street-sweeping grist moved through. It saw that he was alive, parted, and moved around him, as if he were a great mountain blocking its path.
But the grist went to clean the children. Almost gently, little clouds of rainy grist swarm over their still forms. The bird shit was wiped away, and declivities where there used to be eyes and mouths were swabbed. The grist washed the bone children clean.
Then, just as suddenly as it arrived, the street-sweeping grist moved on, leaving behind a playground of gleaming, motionless children, still damp but quickly drying. They seemed to be staring at C with tears in their eyes. But that was only from the cleaning grist. They can’t see me, C thought. They can’t see me, and they’re not crying. They can’t cry. The children can’t see me because they have been changed to bone.
Ire Can Curl
Mamery’s mental state got worse and worse. She stopped going to work. Clare and Cureoak fed her and tried to watch over her. But the more they did for her, the more her induced psychosis told her that they were trying to manipulate and hurt her. Of course, Mamery and Clare could no longer be lovers. And after a time, Clare did not love the person Mamery had become. But as his love waned, Mamery became obsessed with Clare. If she couldn’t have him, she was going to make sure no one ever could.He locked her out of his room, and she had taken to climbing out on the fire escape and sneaking in his window on several nights. She would stand for hours over his sleeping form. Once he’d woken up to find her in his room, looking down at him and holding a pair of scissors over his heart.
Then, on August 13, 2744, Clare woke up near dawn with a dark form standing over his bed holding a bloody knife. At first he thought it was Mamery and this was finally it. He didn’t want to die, but there was nothing he could do about it.
But it wasn’t Mamery; it was Jack Cureoak.
“Well, I killed her,” Cureoak said. “I tried for two days to get hold of a gun, but nobody would sell me one.” He sat down at the foot of the bed, moved into the moonlight that was streaming through the window. He put his bloody hand on his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Nobody would sell me a gun, so I had to do it with a knife.”
“Where?” Clare said. It was the first thing he thought of to ask.
“In the park. Down by the river. I threw her in afterwards. So help me, Clare, I tried to weight her down with rocks, but it didn’t work. Didn’t work and she floated away.”
Cureoak gasped, but it seemed he could not cry.
“I watched her floating away,” Cureoak said. “I’ve never killed anything in my life. Anyone. I watched her floating away dead down that river.”
The first thing Clare felt was a tremendous sense of relief. He’d spent the last weeks believing in his heart that Mamery was going to kill him. He was only waiting to see how it would happen. Everything had been muddled and dark, but now it was suddenly clear. He knew immediately what he had to do. There was no question that Cureoak would go to prison. Clare knew that Jack Cureoak would die in prison, like a moth beating against a window for the light of day. It was clear that the first thing to do was to take care of his friend.
“Give me the knife,” he said to Cureoak.
At the touch of the knife hilt to his hand, Clare felt the awful clarity setting in permanently, the insomniac’s night vision.
“I can’t ever kill another thing,” Cureoak said. “That was all the killing I have in me. I don’t know ifI can live, now. How am I going to live?” Cureoak sobbed, choked it back again. He rubbed his face and belly. He rubbed his hands and stared at them. “I think I broke so
mething,” he said.
“In your hand?” said Clare. But he knew that wasn’t what Cureoak was talking about.
“No. Something that’s not going to mend.”
“You saved my life.” Clare sat up in his bed, in the awful light of knowledge that he knew would never leave him now. “I’m going to help you, Jack.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“I can try.”
“Crutch,” Cureoak said. “I need a crutch.” Those were the last words he uttered that night. He finally broke into wave after wave of sobs. Clare made them both coffee and began planning what they would do in the morning after the body was found.
He would help Cureoak. That came first.
And then, someday, somehow, he was going to get back at the man named Amés. He was going to hurt Amés as much as Amés had hurt Mamery. He was going to twist Amés’s soul as mercilessly as the man had darkened the pure and kind soul of Jack Cureoak. He was going to get back at Amés. Even if it took a thousand years. Even if he had to knock all of time out of kilter to do it.
Then he could sleep.
Carr Nuclei
C was the sole rider on an R train when the call finally came from Mr. Percepied. He emerged on a corner near the Flatiron Building on Twenty-Third Street. The Flatiron’s windows were calcified, except for one clear window near the top that somehow had escaped the bone-change grist. C had once heard rumors that a single man lived in the whole edifice, that he was a crazed Ahab who ran up and down the stairs in stark frenzy and occasionally cast chairs and showers of paperclips down upon people in the street. But there was no sign of the lunatic today.It began to rain. C went to the only automat that was still open in this abandoned sector, as per instructions from Hecate Minim. He arrived first and found a booth near the back of the store. There was the ozone-and-peaches smell of malfunctioning grist coming from the cooking machinery, and C skipped the food that was available. He contented himself with another cup of coffee, this time without milk. It tasted faintly of roast beef.
The rain grew harder outside, and Hecate Minim entered holding a paper bag over the heads of Mr. Percepied and herself. When she took it down, there was no doubt about whom C was looking at.
Mr. Percepied was Jack Cureoak.
Older, wrinkled, leaning on a cane. There wasn’t any regeneration grist that could take you past three hundred all in one piece.
Will he recognize me after all these years? C wondered. But there’s hardly any chance of that when I can’t even recognize myself.
Hecate Minim slid into the booth across from C, and Cureoak creakily took a seat beside her, dripping wet.
“Hello, Clare,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” C replied. “But I’ve come with a proposition for you.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Cureoak said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I traveled to Pluto and back and wrote my books about it all. I’m not nearly so afraid of the big house as I was back then. For Christsake, Clare, I’ve been all the way out toCharon ! Do your worse; do your worse.”
“You couldn’t possibly be Cureoak,” C said. “Cureoak drank himself to death in 2767. I’ve done a lot of research on this.”
“Yes, yes,” the old man said. “And you couldn’t possibly be Clare Runic. That would be preposterous.” He smiled like a crack in the sky. “Yes, well. I’m close enough for government work. First-generation dupe. First generation that therewere dupes. Which of us wrote which books, do you think? How can it possibly matter?”
“Cureoak drank himself to death.”
“I’m the Cureoak who didn’t drink himself to death, who wrote the other books afterDesolate Traveler , then went into hiding. Wrote what I had to write, then went on to somethingelse .” He looked tenderly at Hecate. “I always wanted a family, and I couldn’t because of my art. Then Hecate showed up. Do you remember Daphne Minim, that girl I had the affair with during our freshman year? Who’d have thought it would give me comfort in my old age? You never know what you think you know, Clare. You never do.”
“It is not my intention to blackmail you.” Though of course that was exactly C’s intention, in a way. He had to create the appearance of blackmail so that no matter what, Cureoak would not give him the Cassady-13 code today. But he must not alienate the man so that he couldn’t obtain the codetomorrow .
Timing was everything in this operation.
“I don’t know what the hell this Cassady-13 is that you are asking about.”
C almost believed him. But Cureoak had always been such a goddamn good storyteller. Liar. Both of us were gifted in that way, C thought. Maybe that’s why we became friends.
“All right,” C said. “This is what I have.” He took an envelope from the pocket of his coat and placed it on the table.
Cureoak looked long and hard into C’s eyes for a moment, then reached over and picked it up. He tore the end off the envelope and blew into it to puff it open. He tapped it against the table, and the poem fell out. He thumbed apart the folded sheet and looked down at the words. Old, old words.
Clare
They never heard of him
down at the office
although he is well known
in his field and
a kind of genius I think
He lurks in tight spaces
He mixes dark soup with a hammer
Don’t trust him with truths
you don’t want unraveled
At dawn, there is dew
on the web
“It’s just a poem I once wrote,” he said. “For an old friend to take with him to a sad place he had to go.”
He dropped it on the table between them. Hecate quickly reached out to keep it from falling into a ring of coffee that C’s cup had left. But then, watching the look of amazement on her face, C tipped his coffee over and trickled someonto the poem until it formed a puddle on the paper.
“What are you doing? The memory imprints . . .”
“There never were any recovered memories,” C said. “This paper is much too old for that. And besides . . .” He moved the paper about so that the coffee coated all of the poem. “Ithought this coffee was damned acidic. Look how fast it’s working.”
On the note, behind the poem, words began to arise where before there had been nothing. Words written in big block letters.
“Read between the lines,” said C.
I, JACK CUREOAK, KILLED MAMERY ST. CLOUD. I AM SORRY FOR HER, BUT I AM NOT SORRY THAT I DID IT. SHE WAS GOING TO END UP KILLING MY FRIEND, CLARE RUNIC, AND THERE WAS NO WAY TO DISSUADE HER. CLARE COULD NOT BRING HIMSELF TO DO IT, AS SHE WAS A FORMER LOVE OF HIS. I AM WRITING THIS FOR CLARE RUNIC, IN CASE THEY DECIDE TO HANG HIM, WHICH I HEAR THEY STILL SOMETIMES DO OUT ON GANYMEDE. CLARE IS GOING TO PRISON IN MY PLACE. HE IS LIKE A BROTHER TO ME.—JACK CUREOAK, OCTOBER 30, 2744
“Invisible ink,” said Hecate Minim. “How quaint.”
“If you really are Clare, then you know why I can never give you that code.” Cureoak looked at the note again. “Anyway, isn’t there a statute of limitations after three hundred years?”
“It isn’t the three-hundred-year-old Cureoak who is going to be punished.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“There was another download. In 2765.”
“Oh,” said Cureoak. “Oh, my. I didn’t know that. Why would I do that?”
“He was drunk. Why did he do anything when he was drunk?”
“I don’t know.I stopped drinking so that I could write.”
“Nobody knows why he made the dupe.”
“What is he talking about, Papa?” Hecate said.
“There was an archive in an old database,” C said. “I found it. I find everything. And when Amés took over the Met government last year, he found me.”
“Who are you?” Hecate said. “Why did you have to come here?”
“Your father and I went to school together,” C replied. “One of
us became a writer. The other one became a spy. While we were in school, we both knew a woman named Mamery St. Cloud, who studied nanotechnology.”
“What?”
“The early version of grist. She had an accident with that primitive grist. It drove her insane. But in a very clever way. If she couldn’t have Clare, she was going to kill him. She told Clare that herself, but nobody believed him when he tried to get help for her. Nobody except Jack Cureoak.”
“Interesting version of the truth,” Cureoak said. “Which doesn’t change anything. None of this does. I still can’t give you the key. Maybe I’ve even forgotten it.”
“You haven’t forgotten it. You made up the recall phrase yourself.”
Cureoak snorted. “I forget a lot of what I write,” he said. “It’s an occupational hazard after three hundred years.”
“You don’t understand, Jack. The new guy in charge, he’s . . . not kind.”
“That bastard Amés?”
“Yes, him. He’s going to torture you. There is a copy of you being held in a data space on Mercury. You are to be looped for your crimes. Do you understand what this means, to be looped? Do you remember that your first self, the self that spawned you, drank himself to death? Over seven years, you drank and drank, until your gut hemorrhaged and you bled to death out your ass.” C leaned over, touched Cureoak’s old papery hand. “Amés is going to throw you in accelerated virtual and give you whiskey, and make you die over and over again. Like you did before, bleeding from a busted gut and a broken heart.”
Clan I Recur
The subway was long since automated and now no one used it very much. The trains moved at the subconscious whim of the shadowy intelligences who controlled the switching system. But perhaps it had always been that way. When C rose from the underworld the next day, he found himself in Washington Square. It was just after dawn, and dew was on the grass in the park.He sat down on a bench and remembered what he could.
