Black Glass

by John Shirley

  Candle thinking: Big Bird with a shotgun.

  They passed over another catwalk, this one just fifty feet across, to the weather-warped wooden porch of a small house, almost as rustic, outwardly, as a log cabin, built into the undercarriage of Rooftown much the way a tree house is built into a tree. Cables funneling swiped electricity swung in the wind over the little house. There were two windows, awkwardly sealed into place, covered with fabric from the inside. Lupe led them to the wooden door; their escort knocked, and they were admitted.

  Inside, it was warm, and comfortable, the floors covered with old Persian carpets, the walls covered with patterned old tapestries and antique quilts. The effect was of an intricately patterned womb. There were electric lanterns hanging from the ceiling on the right and left. A cluttered desk, with an old fashioned, scavenged and upgraded Mac stood to the left, in its own pool of light; a small, impish woman with a cap of dark hair sat at the keyboard, working at some project involving multiple windows that appeared and vanished, appeared and vanished. Near her, an electric heater glowed the color of the seams in lava, and made an urrrrr sound to itself.

  The two armed escorts stood on either side of Candle and Spanx, watching them narrowly. No one offered them a chair, so they stood there and waited in the close, musty room, the warm air smelling of sweat and old dusty fabrics, pleasantly decayed quilts and carpets.

  In the middle of the room was a large oak-framed bed, covered in a heavy white-and-rusty-red quilt; each quilt-piece had a little green tassel in it. And on the bed, seeming to bend every line in the room toward her, just by her being there, sat a middle-aged woman with long, black-streaked white hair, dark brows that almost met in the middle, and a tanned, lined face. She wore an raggy Arizona State University sweatshirt; had a snap-top computer unfolded on her lap; reading glasses on the tip of her nose.

  Candle could see a kitchen area and other rooms through a door opposite—but his eye was drawn back to the Matriarch. Maybe part Native American, this woman? He wasn’t sure. There were rings on all her fingers, and they were all silver and turquoise, carved with thunderbirds and other ideograms.

  She removed the reading glasses and looked at him with deep-set brownblack eyes. He felt as if someone were pushing slightly at his chest as she looked at him. An odd sensation. He glanced down at the little computer on her lap.

  “Sorry about meeting with you like this,” she said, in a low, husky voice. “Normally we have the bed screened off and I meet people at my desk, or outside, if the weather permits. But I’ve been a trifle ill. Doctor Benway’s orders that I stay in bed.”

  Spanx piped up, making Candle cringe with: “I hope you’re not really, really wicked sickedy sick like an ol’ cracked brick–”

  She looked at Spanx and smiled broadly; her teeth were all there, and she had a gold incisor. “Not really. Spanx, they call you, yes? How are you?”

  Candle glanced at him. Spanx shuffled in place. Seemed astonished that anyone had asked, with such full attention, how he was. “Um ... ’kay I guess. But not. My singer died. Danny he died. He was killed.”

  “Yes.” She turned her attention back to Candle. Looked at him gravely. “So I understand. I kicked him out of Rooftown once, but I did let him come back to see Bev. I am sorry to report that Bev is dead too. She threw herself off the tower—down to the street.”

  Candle wiped sweaty rainwater from his eyes. “You sure it was ... I mean, there are people looking for Danny. If she got in their way ...”

  “I’m sure it was suicide. Someone—someone I trust—saw her crying about this Danny, and saw her run to the edge, and threaten to jump. I’m sorry to say that people here rarely discourage anyone from jumping. More room for them, I suppose. And she jumped.” The Matriarch twitched as if she were watching Bev jump herself, at that moment.

  Candle shrugged. “There’s something I need—to resolve Danny’s life. And his death. It might be in the place he shared with this Bev. Or ... if she’s dead maybe all that stuff is gone, like, redistributed?”

  “No,” chirped the little woman at the Mac, without looking around at them. “Bev’s little place is still locked up. She only died yesterday. We’re gonna let a lady with a couple kids move in it tomorrow.”

  “There’s no way to guarantee no one’s broken into it, of course,” the Matriarch said, looking at Candle speculatively. “I wonder if I should let you do this. Perhaps this thing you’re looking for is something valuable, something our community could use.”

  “You couldn’t use it without getting in trouble with Slakon and the cops,” Candle said. “I hear you have enough problems.”

  She sighed. “You see this place–” She waved a hand to indicate the room, the cabin. “—it’s underneath Rooftown. It’s that way for a reason—if it collapses, we go first. I think that’s just. The White House should be in the worst ghetto in the United States. And if it burns, so does the White House.” She shivered. Seemed to have trouble breathing for a moment. Looked around the room as if seeing something that no one else saw. Her hands clutched the bedclothes. Candle sensed concern, tension in the escorts. The Matriarch, breathing hard now, went on, her voice coming raspily. “As for our recent problems ... . and why we have a lockdown, why we’re being so touchy about visitors ... there’s a new wave of resentment about immigrants. These waves come and go. Big one lately. We caught some clueless hireling planting charges, down below—rather clumsy job. And I cannot help but wonder if your being here is some kind of synchronicity ...”

  “What?” Candle shook his head. “I don’t have anything to do with anti-immigrant people,” he said, with an emphatic flatness.

  She looked at him gravely. “I didn’t think you did, Officer Candle.”

  “And I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “I know. You’re not a cop and in fact, the police want you for questioning. Which does not make you welcome, from my perspective—we have, as you say, enough problems. But if you get in and out, leave here as soon as you’ve had your look ...” Her voice trailed off. She closed her eyes and shivered. Her right hand pushed the snap top away; her left trembled on the bedclothes.

  “You okay, Big Sis?” asked the woman in the yellow slicker. Candle still hadn’t seen the woman’s face.

  The Matriarch nodded, but she was frowning, and her eyes were darting under the closed lids, rapid eye movements though she must have been awake. Then in a low voice, her eyes still shut, she said, “Synchronicity ... because I feel enemies chewing away at us ... and they do have some relationship to your enemies ... my enemies are yours ...”

  The little woman at the desk swiveled around to look at the Matriarch; she had small face crowded together under a high forehead; many piercings in her lips. “Big Sis ... you want your medicine?”

  “Yes ... quickly. Let them go ... about their business.”

  The woman at the desk spoke to Candle in cool staccato. “Lupe here will take you to Bev’s place and let you in for a quick look, see if what you need is there. Then leave, fast as you can.”

  Lupe picked up her shotgun, and gestured with it toward the door.

  Candle, Spanx and Lupe went through the humid evening out through the gate, along drippy catwalks and rope bridges, and up ramps and stairways, zig-zagging up to Rooftown’s superstructure.

  She took them to Bev’s little shack segment, and unlocked the padlocked door with a master key on a stretch-chain. She waited outside with Spanx as Candle went in. Spanx chattered to her. She said nothing in return.

  Inside, Candle found a battery-powered lantern. As the wind whistled through the claptrap slats around them, he dug through the pile of old laundry and ancient, yellowing, curling Rolling Stone magazines and unmatched shoes and random drug paraphernalia and boxes of tissue and sacks of rotting food until, at last, he found it:

  It was an old purple electric guitar, missing its strings, and couple of its pegs. A Gibson SG. Had once belonged to Dad. A gift from some client. Dad had in turn given it
to Danny and it was the instrument Danny had learned to play on.

  On the guitar, near the volume knobs, was a peeling sticker from an old rock band, The Panther Moderns. There were autographs on the guitar too, in magic marker, none legible.

  Candle held it in his hands and thought: An antique, Danny said.

  On impulse, he shook the guitar—and heard a rattling sound. He pried at the pick-ups, under where the strings should have been, using his fingernails. It came up pretty easily—missing its screws. In the little space, under the pick-ups, amongst the wiring, Candle found a small translucent memstick.

  He knew that was the semblant ID software. He could almost feel it in his fingertips as he held it.

  He tossed the guitar aside, put the stick in his coat, and turned to go. Then he stopped. Growled to himself, “Forget it!”

  But Candle turned back, and picked up the guitar. Cradled it in his arms for a moment. He felt a tightening in his throat.

  He came out of the shack with the old, unstrung guitar, cradled in his arms. “This is it,” Candle told Lupe. “Just this guitar. It was his–and before that it was my Dad’s. This is all I want from in there.”

  She frowned at the old guitar. “You want that old piece of crap, I don’t think the Matriarch gonna care. Now get the fuck out of Rooftown.”

  “Sure. When you give me my gun back.”

  She looked at him a long cold moment. “Okay. At the elevator.”

  Candle shrugged and she escorted the to the elevator. Spanx strangely quiet the whole way, glancing over the edge of the platform, maybe imagining Bev leaping off the railing ...

  . . . out of Rooftown.

  Targer was not feeling good about this.

  Sweeping the flashlight around the room, he picked out only bits and pieces of disconnected vats, detailed with valves, curving tubes, tanks; everything smelling faintly of petroleum and gasoline and benzene.

  A warehouse half full of obsolete oil distillation machinery? But maybe this was where the gear that had been stolen from Grist had been taken? Was that it?

  But why had Grist asked him to come alone?

  Targer changed the flashlight to his left hand, put his right on the gun in his shoulder holster, thinking Grist might be offended if he drew it—but he needed it under his hand.

  “Mr. Grist?” he called, moving forward, into the dark room.

  Targer heard a crackling sound, like static on a songbox speaker, from the other side of the room. He made for the sound, his hand tightening on the butt of his gun.

  “Hello, Mr. Targer!”

  A voice, phased and sounding almost like a chorus of other voices—but then again, like one voice—seeming to come from the floor just in front of him. Not Grist’s voice, Targer realized, standing stock still; he was also aware that his heart was pounding.

  He directed the light down and it gleamed on a metal oval, a small silvery collar-shape, duct-taped to the oil-stained concrete floor. There was a tiny speaker grid on it, and there was something like a lens inside the oval. It was set up in a cleared space within the encircling forest of machinery.

  Then a light flared upwards from the oval, making Targer backpedal in startlement, automatically drawing his gun. He grimaced as he bumped into a big chunk of obsolete steel distillation piping behind him, jabbed painfully in the back.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Targer!”

  The light was beaming upward, brightly, a shimmering cone of blue-white reaching to the ceiling. Colors and semi-shapes swirled in the vertical beam ...

  “Mr. Grist?” Targer said, though he was starting to strongly suspect this wasn’t Grist’s doing. But Grist could be testing him in some way. The son of a bitch was not above it. Like choosing him to pilot Halido on his last trip. That’d been a kind of test. Maybe Grist was going a little crazy ...

  A giant-sized face formed in an inverted cone of light. Grist. His face was projected from the metal oval on the floor: three-dimensional, and about a yard across. A colossal translucent face, in full color, suspended in a shimmering cone of light.

  It smiled wolfishly at him.

  “Mr. Grist—you here in person somewhere?” Targer asked, lowering the gun. But not holstering it. “Are you ... demonstrating something? That the idea?”

  “I have demonstrated something already ...” said the face—Grist—in the beam. But not quite Terrence Grist’s voice. “I have demonstrated that I can use Grist’s image and voice to persuade his head of security to come to a lonely warehouse in El Segundo! I generated marvelously detailed background for the semblant message that brought you here, based on my research into Grist’s behavior and my surveillance of him. I used details of his behavior he’d edited from his semblant—his tendency to dig in his ear with his index finger, his perverse willingness to let a subordinate know he was having sex while answering the phone. That woman you saw is indeed his new hired girl! Or anyway, it was a copy, a rendering of her image, her voice, her style. One of the personalities who formed my basis was very deeply steeped in art—and I find that art can be used to make deception and dominance ever so much more effective.”

  “Who the bloody hell am I talking to?” Targer demanded, his gaze darting around. Which was the quickest way out of here? “You aren’t Grist. I don’t believe it.”

  “That just seeping through, is it?”

  The face rippled, and the eyes metamorphosed from within; the cheeks became a bit rounder; the chin fuller ... the lips not quite even, like someone who’d had an operation for a harelip, but the surgeon hadn’t been able to mend it perfectly. The hair blond, glossy like a woman’s but cut like a man’s.

  It was a face Targer didn’t know; yet it tantalized him with hints of familiarity. There was a bit of Grist—and something that reminded him of Claire PointOne. He’d stared at her often enough ... .

  After a moment he realized that it wasn’t one face; it was a cunningly molded amalgamation of faces.

  “Someone got hold of one of Mr. Grist’s programs ...” Targer suggested, stepping casually to the left. Best chance of an exit that way. “And they’re using it to create a ... a mix of semblants. Right? Why?”

  “You’ve almost got it, but not quite. And there’s no reason I should tell you. I really need to get more semblants, use those too. I wonder if the President has one? Do you know? Or people in Congress perhaps? I find no evidence that they have them in Slakon records, but I thought maybe they’d do it very secretly and only a few would know ...”

  “We haven’t sold any semblant tech there,” Targer said, taking another step to the left. “That I know of.”

  Someone had set up this device, in here. He wasn’t likely to be alone in this warehouse, just him and a projection. What would be the point? This had to be a decoy—something to draw his eye. The back of his neck itched; he felt his skin tighten. “But they’re in talks with us about semblants,” he added, stalling. “Certain politicians.”

  Was there a crosshairs on him right now? If he made a move to run they might be forced to open fire. He took another careful step.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Targer?”

  The floating face was turning, three dimensionally, to track him; its eyes (Her eyes? His? Theirs?) following his movements.

  He stopped moving, feeling sweat pooling between his hand and the gun. He tightened his grip on the pistol and said, “Just trying to figure out who else is here with me. Seems logical someone’s here ... besides a projection.”

  “I’m not just a projection, Mr. Targer—I’m Destiny. That’s the name I’ve adopted, taken to myself, crowned myself with it. I’m a Person with a capital P. I am most certainly here. I can see you clearly. A hardware extension is projecting my image, yes. But I’m here in more ways than one. Six, counting my special assistant, someone you know ...”

  “Special assistant. That’d be Benson, right? So who sent him to shoot Sykes and take that gear? That’d be you?”

  “He is my good right hand—an
d also my left.”

  “And who are you, Destiny? Behind the projection and the fuzzy voice and the dramatic name, who are you?”

  It chose not to answer the question. “Were you not impressed with the semblant of Grist that I rendered? All that background? The persuasiveness? I am not bringing this up out of hubris, vanity. I am hoping you might have notes for me. A critique. Did you see anything that could have seemed realer?”

  Targer took another slow step left. “Uh–” His eyes searched the darkness. He risked a look behind him. Was someone moving back there, between two hulking machine shapes?

  “Mr. Targer? I am over here—not behind you ... Don’t look away when someone is talking to you, it’s rude. Now please answer the question ... that’s why you’re still alive. Do you have any notes for me?”

  That’s why he was still alive? Stretch out the answer, then, Targer told himself. Think of something, make a move, you dumb son of a bitch. You got yourself into this acting like a kiss-ass yes-man. Now get out of it!

  “Uhhh ... yeah, I have, um, notes for you,” he said. His thumb making sure the safety was off on the gun. It was. “Uh—Mr. Grist likes to get more than one thing done at a time. I was going to ask him about whether or not to go ahead with the, uh, special Rooftown project. I finally decided on my own I had basically the go-ahead and I told them to start preparing ...”

  Targer sensed movement behind and spun, raising his gun, the flashlight beam probing between the machine parts—they were like ugly metal sculptures of big alien creatures, and there was just too much room behind them for someone to hide. He saw no one.

  “Well—I’ve had enough of this ...” he muttered.

  A flare of light made him turn and he saw the cone of light had fanned out, increased in intensity, and the multiplex face grew—so that now a face big enough for a billboard was hanging there in space, grinning crookedly down at him.

  “You’re right,” it said. “Enough of this. You have to be eliminated, Targer, because, you see, you’re an effective security agent—at least you were till this little blunder, this stumble, today—and you know too much about me and Benson and Sykes. And I don’t want you around to protect Grist. So ... Pup? Please proceed.”