Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "I remind you of this, so that you may imagine the determination of the survivors to ensure that the Eiffel Tower would never be raised again. Today, we think only of the seven thousand three hundred tons of puddled iron of its superstructure, and of how much it would be worth on the open market. Then, it was seen as a monster, to be buried where it could never be found and resurrected."

  "As indeed, for all this time, it has not. Yet now, you tell me, you have found it. How?"

  "By seeking for it where it would be most difficult to excavate. By asking ourselves where such a salvage operation would be most disruptive to contemporary Paris." He nodded to Surplus, who removed a rolled map from his valise. "Have you a table?"

  Madame d’Etranger clapped her hands sharply twice. From the ferny undergrowth to one end of the orangery, an enormous tortoise patiently footed forward. The top of his shell was as high as Darger’s waist, and flat.

  Wordlessly, Surplus unrolled the map. It showed Paris and environs.

  "And the answer?" Darger swept a hand over the meandering blue river bisecting Paris. "It is buried beneath the Seine!"

  For a long moment, the lady was still. Then, "My husband will want to speak with you."

  With a rustle of silks, she left the room.

  As soon as she was gone, Darger turned on his friend and harshly whispered, "Damn you, Surplus, your sullen and uncooperative attitude is queering the pitch! Have you forgotten how to behave in front of a lady?"

  "She is no lady," Surplus said stiffly. "She is a genetically modified cat. I can smell it."

  "A cat! Surely not."

  "Trust me on this one. The ears you cannot see are pointed. The eyes she takes such care to hide are a cat’s eyes. Doubtless the fingers within those gloves have retractable claws. She is a cat, and thus untrustworthy and treacherous."

  Madame d’Etranger returned. She was followed by two apes who carried a thin, ancient man in a chair between them. Their eyes were dull; they were little better than automata. After them came a Dedicated Doctor, eyes bright, who of course watched his charge with obsessive care. The widow gestured toward her husband. "C’est Monsieur."

  "Monsieur d’Etrang–" Darger began.

  "Monsieur only. It’s quicker," the ancient said curtly. "My widow has told me about your proposition."

  Darger bowed. "May I ask, sir, how long you have?"

  "Twenty-three months, seven days, and an indeterminable number of hours," the Dedicated Doctor said. "Medicine remains, alas, an inexact science."

  "Damn your impudence and shut your yap!" Monsieur snarled. "I have no time to waste on you."

  "I speak only the truth. I have no choice but to speak the truth. If you wish otherwise, please feel free to deprogram me, and I will quit your presence immediately."

  "When I die you can depart, and not a moment before." The slight old man addressed Darger and Surplus: "I have little time, gentlemen, and in that little time I wish to leave my mark upon the world."

  "Then–forgive me again, sir, but I must say it–you have surely better things to do than to speak with us, who are in essence but glorified scrap dealers. Our project will bring its patron an enormous increase in wealth. But wealth, as you surely know, does not in and of itself buy fame."

  "But that is exactly what I intend to do–buy fame." A glint came into Monsieur’s eyes, and one side of his mouth turned up in a mad and mirthless grin. "It is my intent to re-erect the ancient structure as the Tour d’Etranger!"

  "The trout has risen to the bait," Darger said with satisfaction. He and Surplus were smoking cigars in their office. The office was the middle room of their suite, and a masterpiece of stage-setting, with desks and tables overflowing with papers, maps, and antiquarian books competing for space with globes, surveying equipment, and a stuffed emu.

  "And yet, the hook is not set. He can still swim free," Surplus riposted. "There was much talk of building coffer dams of such and so sizes and redirecting so-many-millions of liters of water. And yet not so much as a penny of earnest money."

  "He’ll come around. He cannot coffer the Seine segment by segment until he comes across the buried beams of the Tower. For that knowledge, he must come to us."

  "And why should he do that, rather than searching it out for himself?"

  "Because, dear fellow, it is not to be found there. We lied."

  "We have told lies before, and had them turn out to be true."

  "That too is covered. Over a century ago, an eccentric Parisian published an account of how he had gone up and down the Seine with a rowboat and a magnet suspended on a long rope from a spring scale, and found nothing larger than the occasional rusted hulk of a Utopian machine. I discovered his leaflet, its pages uncut, in the Bibliothèque Nationale."

  "And what is to prevent our sponsor from reading that same chapbook?"

  "The extreme unlikelihood of such a coincidence, and the fact that I later dropped the only surviving copy in all the city into the Seine."

  That same night Darger, who was a light sleeper, was awakened by the sound of voices in the library. Silently, he donned blouse and trousers, and then put his ear to the connecting double doors.

  He could hear the cadenced rise and fall of conversation, but could not quite make out the words. More suspiciously, no light showed in the crack under or between the doors. Surplus, he knew, would not have scheduled a business appointment without consulting him. Moreover, though one of the two murmuring voices might conceivably be female, there were neither giggles nor soft, drawn-out sighs but, rather, a brisk and informational tone to their speech. The rhythms were all wrong for it to be one of Surplus’s assignations.

  Resolutely, Darger flung the doors open.

  The only light in the office came from the moon without. It illuminated not two but only one figure–a slender one, clad in skin-tight clothes. She (for by the outline of her shadowy body, Darger judged the intruder to be female) whirled at the sound of the doors slamming. Then, with astonishing grace, she ran out onto the balcony, jumped up on its rail, and leaped into the darkness. Darger heard the woman noisily rattling up the bamboo fire escape.

  With a curse, he rushed after her.

  By the time Darger had reached the roof, he fully expected his mysterious intruder to be gone. But there she was, to the far end of the hotel, crouched alongside one of the chimney-pots in a wary and watchful attitude. Of her face he could see only two unblinking glints of green fire that were surely her eyes. Silhouetted as she was against a sky filled with rags and snatches of moon-bright cloud, he could make out the outline of one pert and perfect breast, tipped with a nipple the size of a dwarf cherry. He saw how her long tail lashed back and forth behind her.

  For an instant, Darger was drawn up by a wholly uncharacteristic feeling of supernatural dread. Was this some imp or fiend from the infernal nether-regions? He drew in his breath.

  But then the creature turned and fled. So Darger, reasoning that if it feared him then he had little to fear from it, pursued.

  The imp-woman ran to the edge of the hotel and leaped. Only a short alley separated the building from its neighbor. The leap was no more than six feet. Darger followed without difficulty. Up a sloping roof she ran. Over it he pursued her.

  Another jump, of another alley.

  He was getting closer now. Up a terracotta-tiled rooftop he ran. At the ridge-line, he saw with horror his prey extend herself in a low flying leap across a gap of at least fifteen feet. She hit the far roof with a tuck, rolled, and sprang to her feet.

  Darger knew his limitations. He could not leap that gap.

  In a panic, he tried to stop, tripped, fell, and found himself sliding feet-first on his back down the tiled roof. The edge sped toward him. It was a fall of he-knew-not-how-many floors to the ground. Perhaps six.

  Frantically, Darger flung out his arms to either side, grabbing at the tiles, trying to slow his descent by friction. The tiles bumped painfully beneath him as he skidded downward. Then the heels of his
bare feet slammed into the gutter at the edge of the eaves. The guttering groaned, lurched outward–and held.

  Darger lay motionless, breathing heavily, afraid to move.

  He heard a thump, and then the soft sound of feet traversing the rooftop. A woman’s head popped into view, upside down in his vision. She smiled.

  He knew who she was, then. There were, after all, only so many cat-women in Paris. "M-madame d’Etra–"

  "Shhh." She put a finger against his lips. "No names."

  Nimbly, she slipped around and crouched over him. He saw now that she was clad only in a pelt of fine black fur. Her nipples were pale and naked. "So afraid!" she marveled. Then, brushing a hand lightly over him. "Yet still aroused."

  Darger felt the guttering sway slightly under him and, thinking how easily this woman could send him flying downward, he shivered. It was best he did not offend her. "Can you wonder, Madame? The sight of you. . . ."

  "How gallant!" Her fingers deftly unbuttoned his trousers, and undid his belt. "You do know how to pay a lady a compliment."

  "What are you doing?" Darger cried in alarm.

  She tugged the belt free, tossed it lightly over the side of the building. "Surely your friend has explained to you that cats are amoral?" Then, when Darger nodded, she ran her fingers up under his blouse, claws extended, drawing blood. "So you will understand that I mean nothing personal by this."

  Surplus was waiting when Darger climbed back in the window. "Dear God, look at you," he cried. "Your clothes are dirty and disordered, your hair is in disarray–and what has happened to your belt?"

  "Some mudlark of the streets has it, I should imagine." Darger sank down into a chair. "At any rate, there’s no point looking for it."

  "What in heaven’s name has happened to you?"

  "I fear I’ve fallen in love," Darger said sadly, and could be compelled to say no more.

  So began an affair that seriously tried the friendship of the two partners in crime. For Madame d’Etranger thenceforth appeared in their rooms, veiled yet unmistakable, every afternoon. Invariably, Darger would plant upon her hand the chastest of kisses, and then discreetly lead her to the secrecy of his bedroom, where their activities could only be guessed at. Invariably, Surplus would scowl, snatch up his walking stick, and retire to the hallway, there to pace back and forth until the lady finally departed. Only rarely did they speak of their discord.

  One such discussion was occasioned by Surplus’s discovery that Madame d’Etranger had employed the services of several of Paris’s finest book scouts.

  "For what purpose?" Darger asked negligently. Mignonette had left not half an hour previously, and he was uncharacteristically relaxed.

  "That I have not been able to determine. These book scouts are a notoriously close-mouthed lot."

  "The acquisition of rare texts is an honorable hobby for many haut-bourgeois."

  "Then it is one she has acquired on short notice. She was unknown in the Parisian book world a week ago. Today she is one of its best patrons. Think, Darger–think! Abrupt changes of behavior are always dangerous signs. Why will you not take this seriously?"

  "Mignonette is, as they say here, une chatte serieuse, and I un homme galant." Darger shrugged. "It is inevitable that I should be besotted with her. Why cannot you, in your turn, simply accept this fact?"

  Surplus chewed on a knuckle of one paw. "Very well–I will tell you what I fear. There is only one work of literature she could possibly be looking for, and that is the chapbook proving that the Eiffel Tower does not lie beneath the Seine."

  "But, my dear fellow, how could she possibly know of its existence?"

  "That I cannot say."

  "Then your fears are groundless." Darger smiled complacently. Then he stroked his chin and frowned. "Nevertheless, I will have a word with her."

  The very next day he did so.

  The morning had been spent, as usual, in another round of the interminable negotiations with Monsieur’s business agents, three men of such negligible personality that Surplus privately referred to them as Ci, Ca, and l’Autre. They were drab and lifeless creatures who existed, it sometimes seemed, purely for the purpose of preventing an agreement of any sort from coming to fruition. "They are waiting to be bribed," Darger explained when Surplus took him aside to complain of their recalcitrance.

  "Then they will wait forever. Before we can begin distributing banknotes, we must first receive our earnest money. The pump must be primed. Surely even such dullards as Ci, Ca, and l’Autre can understand that much."

  "Greed has rendered them impotent. Just as a heart can be made to beat so fast that it will seize up, so too here. Still, with patience I believe they can be made to see reason."

  "Your patience, I suspect, is born of long afternoons and rumpled bed sheets."

  Darger merely looked tolerant.

  Yet it was not patience that broke the logjam, but its opposite. For that very morning, Monsieur burst into the conference room, carried in a chair by his apes and accompanied by his Dedicated Doctor. "It has been weeks," he said without preamble. "Why are the papers not ready?"

  Ci, Ca, and l’Autre threw up their hands in dismay.

  "The terms they require are absurd, to say the . . ."

  "No sensible businessman would . . ."

  "They have yet to provide any solid proof of their . . ."

  "No, and in their position, neither would I. Popotin–" he addressed one of his apes– "the pouch."

  Popotin slipped a leather pouch from his shoulder and clumsily held it open. Monsieur drew out three hand-written sheets of paper and threw them down on the table. "Here are my notes," he said. "Look them over and then draw them up in legal form." The cries of dismay from Ci, Ca, and l’Autre were quelled with one stern glare. "I expect them to be complete within the week."

  Surplus, who had quickly scanned the papers, said, "You are most generous, Monsieur. The sum on completion is nothing short of breathtaking." Neither he nor Darger expected to collect that closing sum, of course. But they were careful to draw attention away from the start-up monies (a fraction of the closing sum, though by their standards enormous), that were their true objective.

  Monsieur snorted. "What matter? I will be dead by then."

  "I see that the Tour d’Etranger is to be given to the City of Paris," Darger said. "That is very generous of you, Monsieur. Many a man in your position would prefer to keep such a valuable property in their family."

  "Eh? What family?"

  "I speak, sir, of your wife."

  "She will be taken care of."

  "Sir?" Darger, who was sensitive to verbal nuance, felt a cold tingling at the back of his neck, a premonition of something significant being left unspoken. "What does that mean?"

  "It means just what I said." Monsieur snapped his fingers to catch his apes’ attention. "Take me away from here."

  When Darger got back to his rooms, Mignonette was already waiting there. She lounged naked atop his bed, playing with the chrome revolver she had sent him before ever they had met. First she cuddled it between her breasts. Then she brought it to her mouth, ran her pink tongue up the barrel, and briefly closed her lips about its very tip. He found the sight disturbingly arousing.

  "You should be careful," Darger said. "That’s a dangerous device."

  "Pooh! Monsieur had it programmed to defend me as well as himself." She placed the muzzle against her heart, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. "See? It will not fire at either of us." She handed it to him. "Try it for yourself."

  With a small shudder of distaste, Darger placed the gun on a table at some distance from the bed. "I have a question to ask you," he said.

  Mignonette smiled in an amused way. She rolled over on her stomach, and rose up on her knees and elbows. Her long tail moved languidly. Her cat’s eyes were green as grass. "Do you want your answer now," she asked, "or later?"

  Put that way, the question answered itself.

  So filled with passion was Darger
that he had no memory of divesting himself of his clothing, or joining Mignonette on the bed. He only knew that he was deep inside her, and that that was where he wanted to be. Her fur was soft and sleek against his skin. It tickled him ever so slightly–just enough to be perverse, but not enough to be undesirable. Fleetingly, he felt like a zoöphile, and then, even more fleetingly, realized that this must be very much like what Surplus’s lady-friends experienced. But he abandoned that line of thought quickly.

  Like any properly educated man of his era, Darger was capable of achieving orgasm three or four times in succession without awkward periods of detumescence in between. With Mignonette, he could routinely bring that number up to five. Today, for the first time, he reached seven.

  "You wanted to ask me a question?" Mignonette said, when they were done. She lay within the crook of his arm, her cold nose snuggled up against his neck. Playfully, she put her two hands, claws sheathed, against his side and kneaded him, as if she were a true, unmodified cat.

  "Hmm? Ah! Yes." Darger felt wonderfully, gloriously relaxed. He doubted he would ever move again. It took an effort for him to focus his thoughts. "I was wondering . . . exactly what your husband meant when he said that he would have you ‘taken care of,’ after his death."

  "Oh." She drew away from him, and sat up upon her knees. "That. I thought you were going to ask about the pamphlet."

  Again, a terrible sense of danger overcame Darger. He was extremely sensitive to such influences. It was an essential element of his personality. "Pamphlet?" he said lightly.