Irontown Blues

by John Varley

  Nessus? I had to think a moment. My solography is about average. I can name the planets and major moons and twenty or so of the minor planets, and maybe a dozen of Jupiter’s moons, but after that things get a little hazy. Here on nice, cozy Luna we don’t spend a lot of time thinking of the actual complexity of the Sol system, the constantly changing dance of the rocks and ice that orbit our sun. But they’re out there, and many of them are inhabited. So we have comets, asteroids, trojans, TNOs, cubewanos, plutinos, sednoids, and kuiperiods. Some of those classifications overlap. Some of them have things worth mining.

  Nessus is a centaur. That’s a type of minor planet that orbits between Jupiter and Neptune. In this case, I’d call it extremely minor, since it’s only about forty miles across. Apparently a major battle was fought over it.

  “So shoulder arms, you dweebs. Lay on, you stupid Macduffs, and fuck the one who first cries ‘hold, enough!’”

  I just had time to register that Ugly apparently had enough of an education to know a rough form of Shakespeare. And then the mirror wall vanished.

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t roll up or slide to the side, it didn’t fall forward or backward, it didn’t sink into the floor. It didn’t crumple like a sheet of aluminum foil. No, it was like it had been a soap bubble that had popped, soundlessly. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that, compared to that wall, a soap bubble was as thick and hard as a walnut shell.

  It was my first sight of a null field. The quantum boys and girls get into heated arguments over whether the thickness of a field is comparable to the Planck length (whatever that is) or if it has no third dimension at all. The jury is still very much out.

  There was a soft whoosh, and my ears popped. We instinctively fear that sensation. It might mean a blowout is happening. I caught my breath, and so did several of the people around me. But it turned out it was just the pressure equalizing from the two sides of the field. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that the mirror surface was a field, nor that it actually ceased to exist when it was turned off. And I still don’t know how the CC managed to turn it off. No one does, for sure, but the leading theory is that it was a traitor among the Heinleiners.

  Ugly shouted out a command, and we surged forward.

  * * *

  —

  I said earlier that there was no sign as we entered into the depths of Hell. Come to think of it, there was one. It was a tattered banner strung from one side of the widening corridor to the other. It said:

  MALL CLOSING!

  EVERYTHING MUST GO!

  UP TO 80% OFF SELECTED ITEMS!

  That’s the first thing we encountered: an abandoned neighborhood mall. It was medium-sized, say two or three hundred stores. It was probably a hundred years old and showing its age. There was a thick layer of dust over everything, showing that the filtration system had gone bad a long time ago, but the air was warm and breathable. There were puddles on the floor, and the steady sound of dripping water. The only light was the legal minimum, from fixtures high in the ceiling. Down below, everything was in perpetual gloom.

  We glimpsed our first Heinleiners. What we mostly saw was their retreating backs.

  They kept us moving, at a jog-trot. We quickstepped through two more malls like that one, gradually seeing some signs of human occupation, but only the fleeing backs of the humans. Then the last corridor opened out into a large space. What used to be called a megamall, before habitats many miles long and deep like the one I lived in were built. The funny thing is, this space felt bigger, probably because my brain can’t really comprehend just how big the city is. But here, the space was of a size that hovered somewhere between enormous and gargantuan.

  At first I couldn’t make much sense of it. We are used to a certain order in our habitats. They are planned, laid out logically, according to certain zoning regulations. You can’t open a hot-dog stand in a residential neighborhood, for instance. When you do find a place where you can open your stand, you need permits. You have to allow visits from the health inspector. You need to pay your business air tax.

  I’ve never felt that our society is too regimented, too regulated, but I know some do. And the champion malcontents were now all around us.

  My mind gradually put together what I was seeing. Big parts of the space were filled with large shipping containers, both the rectangular and the cylindrical kind. They were stacked as if put together by a demented child with a twisted set of Lego bricks. The ends of some of them hung out beyond the main stack and had windows and doors cut into them and stairs or ladders or just knotted ropes hanging from them.

  I realized these were homes. People were living in these discarded box-cars.

  Some of them were painted in a wild assortment of colors, either abstract patterns or murals. I saw one mural that might have been done by a not-too-talented kindergartner, and another that most citizens would be proud to have adorning a public building. A third showed very explicit sexual acts. I assumed that one was the residence of a sex worker.

  Below many of the windows were window boxes bursting with flowers or vegetables, each with a growlight suspended over it. In the distance I could see what looked like about an acre of caramel-corn growing. Right in the center of town. No zoning laws at all.

  One occupant had actually strung a line between his window and another box across the way, and laundry was hanging from it. It reminded me of black-and-white photos of tenement neighborhoods in Old New York.

  The first impression was definitely of a slum. But in the few moments I had before the fan hit the shit, I revised that. It actually looked pretty nice. There were shops all around the periphery, selling just about anything you could want. There were little cubbyhole restaurants. There were food trucks, including one selling hot dogs! It was the fact that it was all so jumbled up that threw me. After the carefully planned cities I had known all my life, this anarchy took some getting used to.

  The place smelled good, and I realized I was pretty hungry. Not far from me was a place called Aunt Hazel’s Ice Cream Emporium and While-U-Wait Surgery Shoppe. After we had wrapped all this up, I figured I’d have a triple scoop of something.

  Sitting at a table outside Aunt Hazel’s were a man and a pregnant woman. Sitting at the woman’s feet was a dog with a jaw so massive you wondered how he could open it.

  It was an English bulldog and his name was Winston.

  The woman was Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the News Nipple.

  Something raced by me, something small and pretty fast. I thought it was a dog at first, but it wasn’t. It was a horse, no more than six inches high. I didn’t know they made them that small. In fact, they don’t, except in Heinlein Town. The horselet was a product of the illegal gene tinkering we were supposedly there to stop.

  I heard the voice of a sergeant—not one of ours—who called out from the far side of the mall.

  “Everybody freeze, and nobody will get hurt.”

  I hefted my laser, wishing I hadn’t won the lottery to get the privilege of carrying it. I’d have preferred just a handgun . . .

  . . . just like the ones that I noticed the three civilians closest to me were packing, in holsters on their belts. Hey, nobody told us . . .

  It looked like we had at least achieved the element of surprise. None of the armed people I could see drew down on us. Which, of course, was the smart thing to do when confronted with a few hundred people dressed in combat gear, all with guns leveled at you.

  My fellow invaders moved forward smartly, relieving the stunned citizens of their weaponry. For those first few minutes it seemed like things were going okay.

  Over at the ice cream parlor, I saw that some sort of ruckus was happening. One of us, a regular cop and her sergeant, didn’t seem to be working on the same team. The sergeant started toward Hildy Johnson, and the man she was with—a teenager, I no
w saw—moved between them. Without breaking stride the sergeant swung his rifle butt against the kid’s jaw. I could hear it crack from a hundred feet away.

  That wasn’t what it was supposed to be at all. I didn’t think I could do anything about it at the moment, but I intended to get the big ape’s name and serial number and report him to the police board.

  The woman cop seemed to agree with me. She had words with the sergeant, but ended up snapping one end of a pair of handcuffs over Johnson’s wrist. That was when Johnson decided to resist. She pulled away, but this woman knew how to subdue a rowdy. She twisted Johnson’s arm and bent her over the table where she had been sitting. Johnson ended up with her face in the remains of an ice-cream sundae.

  Suddenly the bulldog came up from under the table, flying through the air like a squat rocket, and clamped those incredible jaws onto the policewoman’s arm. She screamed as loudly as I’ve ever heard anyone scream. The sergeant had turned away to deal with something else. Now he turned again and came at the woman and the bulldog with his sidearm drawn. I figured the dog had breathed his last.

  That’s when the sergeant’s chest exploded.

  Something powerful enough to pierce his armor had blown through his chest. There was another shot through the chest, then most of his head disappeared in a shower of metallic skull, brains, and the red mist of blood.

  I’m not ashamed to say that my first reaction was to throw myself to the ground and look for something to crawl under. Others around me, both cops and local citizens, were doing the same thing. There was nothing close, so I scrambled on hands and knees across the floor, feeling as if my own spine would be severed by a bullet any moment.

  I don’t think it was more than a few seconds until I reached a big concrete planter with a palm tree growing in it. Looking back at where I had been, I was amazed at how far I’d come. If they held Olympic crawling races, I figure I would have earned the gold.

  I wanted to keep my head down more than anything, but it seemed wiser to keep abreast of developing threats, so I risked popping up a few times. I saw people sprinting across the open mall, but every time I looked, there were fewer and fewer of them as they found places to shelter. I could see dozens, then hundreds more sergeants and bobbies pouring in from all sides of the mall. Our contingent hadn’t been the only group, and I knew there were others who would be following behind my company. The idea had been to flood the place with overwhelming force, run everybody in, book them, then sort it all out. It should have worked, and with any other group of people, I’m sure it would have.

  I heard bullets hitting all over the place. Then I saw a bobby go down, shot through the shoulder. He screamed in pain, then either died or passed out. I never found out which. We lost eighty-six bobbies that day, and he could very well have been one of them.

  Most of the gunfire seemed to be coming from up high. People were turning their homes into sniper’s nests. I saw at least three of them, and there were probably more.

  I barely had time to register that when Uglier went down, missing most of her left leg. She was clearly made of sterner stuff than the wounded bobby, or me for that matter. She never made a sound but spun around as she fell and sprayed bullets in the direction the shot had come from. Then she dragged herself to shelter behind an overturned table and proceeded to calmly pull a tourniquet tight around the stump of her leg. I mean, sure, it would be replaced if she lived, but how does someone endure that level of pain and still operate?

  I had never felt all that much camaraderie with any of the sergeants, but dammit, she was in my unit, and I figured I ought to try and do something about it.

  I looked around, then up, and saw someone high in the stacked maze, leaning out a window and aiming a large rifle downward. It looked to be about where the shot had come from.

  My drilling laser was on the ground a few feet away from me. I didn’t remember dropping it. To get it back, I would have to expose myself, or part of myself, anyway. I looked around the windows above me and didn’t see anyone, and stuck my right foot out. I managed to hook my bootheel over the strap and, after losing it twice, pulled it back behind the planter with me. I popped my head up again and looked around quickly.

  Others were pouring bullets into a window on the fifth or sixth level of the maze, shattering the hard plastic wall. I guessed that’s where most of the shots had been coming from, and leveled my laser at it and hit the firing button.

  The green beam of light sliced through the gun smoke and kept right on slicing, through the plastic and right into the walls beyond. Something inside exploded, and bright orange flames erupted from the remains of the window.

  I didn’t like that much. The damn laser was not the right weapon for this fight. It was way too powerful. I had assumed it was mostly there as a show of strength, and as I said before, I had never expected to use it.

  There was no way of telling just how far that damn thing had penetrated, or if any innocent civilians had been in the way. I didn’t like the idea that I might have killed someone who had nothing to do with this fight . . . but I will admit that I was a lot less concerned about the possibility than I had been ten minutes ago. Combat does that to you.

  Ten minutes? Is that all the time it had been? I checked my time display and, close enough, it had been only eleven. At that point, I had just five minutes more to go in what I’ve come to think of as my first life.

  thirteen

  “You be a good dog while I’m away,” I said to Sherlock. I scratched behind his ears, and he let his tongue hang out as he enjoyed it. I briefly wished I could be as carefree and content with life as a dog. Sherlock was a special dog, a supersmart dog, but in the end he was a dog, after all. How worried could he be about a trip to the outskirts of Irontown?

  “You stay here and hold down the fort, old friend.” He looked up adoringly at me. I know he understood that I had told him to stay and to guard the place, as if it needed guarding.

  I arranged with downstairs to bring him food if I was away longer than I intended. I didn’t really like leaving Sherlock behind, but I felt this trip might be dangerous, it might be confrontational, and I didn’t know for sure how he might react if he saw me threatened. I couldn’t have him biting people. Maybe I was doing him an injustice, but I wanted to err on the side of caution.

  Besides, between what Mom had told me and what I had learned from the girl who called herself Pumpkin, I at last had something to go on. It was a long way from what you might call solid, but it was something.

  * * *

  —

  But a bit before that . . .

  When I returned to the restaurant, I asked the owner if I could talk to Pumpkin for a while. He was reluctant but became a lot more cooperative when I slipped him a sawbuck.

  “You get ten minutes,” he said.

  Sherlock followed me into the kitchen.

  I could tell at once that Pumpkin was not the spiciest pepper in the hot and sour soup. She was the owner’s daughter and had worked there as long as she could remember. She did all sorts of work in the kitchen that could have easily been done by robots, and she was proud of this. I would never have told her it was because she was cheaper, in the end, than a machine. She was happy in her work. If she liked to spend her days cutting up celery and washing woks, that was fine with me.

  I learned most of this in the first few minutes of my questioning, and none of it was the result of questions. She was one of those persons who chatters incessantly, and once she got started, it was hard to steer her in the direction you wanted her to go. She liked to talk about herself, and I got an earful of her pretty boring life story.

  Like any cop, I can listen to someone I’m interrogating for a long time, knowing that people often say a lot more than they intend to. With Pumpkin, that would not be a problem. There was nothing in her life she felt like she needed to hide. She had no deep, dark secrets.


  Sherlock was curled up under a prep table chasing dream rabbits by the time I nudged her in the direction of Mary Smith. I showed her my composite picture, and she brightened at once.

  “Oh, yes, Delphine! Our new cook! She is my friend for months and months.”

  “Just months?”

  “Oh, yes! Baba hired her months ago. She is a very good cook. Her moo shu bronto is much better than the old cook made. Also her twice-cooked lizard with garlic sauce. And her—”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “And it’s a funny thing. She came through the air grate just like you did. I was scared! She told me not to tell anyone about . . .”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. I had the feeling she had never been able to keep a secret in her whole life.

  “Oh, I did it again. Pumpkin, why can’t you keep your mouth shut?” She actually smacked herself on the cheek and looked very sad.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I have something to give her. She won’t mind that you let it slip.”

  Pumpkin brightened at once. I doubted she could remain worried about anything for very long unless it was right there in front of her.

  “Do you know where she lives?” I asked again. “Do you know her whole name?”

  She made a gesture twirling her finger around the side of her head, which I took to mean something like, “Information flies in one ear and out the other.” But she took me to a terminal and looked up her employment application.

  Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes. Oh, terrific. A Presleyite and a Westerosian, with para-leprosy.

  There was an address. It was not actually in Irontown—there are no real addresses in Irontown, you have to know somebody who can tell you how to get there—but it was within walking distance.

  “What do you think, Sherlock?” I asked him. “You think we’ll find her there?”

  The dog sprang to his feet and looked up at me with his tongue hanging out. Sherlock knows many, many words, but there are a handful that he likes more than others. Find is one of them. He was all set to get on her trail. If only I had a piece of her clothing to give him.