Epitaph in Rust

by Tim Powers

  Finally he burst through a tangle of oleander bushes, showering himself with dew, and saw its concrete bulk rising up out of a stand of junipers, the high white rim already lit by the sun. Thomas recalled reading that it was called the Hollywood Freeway only locally, and was known as Route Five to the hardy merchants who drove their donkey-borne cargoes along its ancient track from San Francisco to San Diego. There were even legends that it stretched further, north to Canada and south into Mexico.

  He climbed a young sapling, edged out along a bending branch, and then dropped onto the surprisingly wide concrete surface of the freeway.

  As soon as he stood up he felt leagues removed from the monastery. Worldly, adventurous-looking debris was scattered along the edge of the old highroad, and cast long, sharp shadows across the lanes—the charred remains of an overturned cart were fouled in the railing at one point, and donkey skeletons, broken wheels and rusted sections of machinery lay everywhere, as if strewn, Thomas thought, by some passing giant. He even found a rusty sword, its blade broken off a foot above the bell guard, and carried it with him until he noticed tiny bugs infesting the rotted leather grip.

  The heel strap on his left sandal had snapped sometime during his frantic exodus, and he was having difficulty now in walking. He put up with it for a while and then sat down, annoyed at the delay, to see if it could be tied up or something. His repair attempt only served to break the strap off entirely, and he was about to fling the wretched, mud-caked sandal away, and proceed barefoot, when he remembered seeing a three-inch length of wire among the loot he’d taken from the bird-man a few hours ago. He emptied his pocket—and stared for the first time at the plunder he’d risked his hands and possibly his life for: a cheap ring, several bottle caps, a few gum wrappers, some broken glass, eleven one-soli coins, and the wire.

  Good God, he thought, stunned with disappointment; buying breakfast will use up nearly my entire haul. I can’t afford to stay in Los Angeles even one day. What can I possibly do?

  Well, fix the sandal, for one thing, he told himself. And then use your wits. A young, well-educated man like yourself ought to be able to get by in the city. Did you see how I handled those dwarves?

  With a confidence born of naiveté and the cheery sunlight, he whistled as he twisted the wire onto his sandal, slipped it on, and then continued his southward trek.

  He had walked about half a mile when a rattling and creaking behind him made him stop and look back. A horse-drawn cart was coming along at a leisurely pace, and its white-bearded driver waved amiably to Thomas, who waved back and smiled.

  “Good morning, brother!” called the driver when he reined in beside Thomas. “It’s no trouble, I hope, that’s got you on foot?”

  “No trouble, no,” said Thomas, brushing the dark hair out of his eyes, “but it is slow travel. I’d be much obliged for a ride into Los Angeles.”

  “Sure, hop aboard. Careful of the box, there, it’s black powder.” Thomas climbed up onto the driver’s bench and sat back comfortably on the passenger’s side, glad to rest his legs. The bed of the cart was filled with wooden boxes over which a tarpaulin had been roped.

  “What’s your cargo?” asked Thomas, peering back at the boxes as the cart got under way.

  “Guns, lead and powder, brother,” replied the old man. The wrinkles around his eyes deepened, and Thomas knew he was grinning even though the bushy white beard hid his mouth. “I know you’re a good lad,” he added, “but do me the kindness of looking at the back-rest you’re leaning on.”

  Thomas stared at the old man, and then sat up and turned around. In the center of the passengers side of the back-rest was a metal-rimmed hole big enough to put his thumb into. The wood immediately around it was blackened as if by smoke.

  “Uh … what is that?” asked Thomas cautiously, not leaning back.

  “The barrel of a gun, son,” the driver told him with a dry chuckle. “Throws .50 calibre hollow-point slugs. Take it easy, I won’t shoot it. It’s just there so we can trust each other.”

  “Oh.” Thomas sat back gingerly. “Have you ever had to use it?” he asked after a while.

  “Oh, yeah.” The old man spat meditatively. “Going through Agoura last summer, a hitchhiker pulled a knife and said I was a war-monger and he was going to kill me so kids could play on the beaches, or something like that. It blew him right over Aeolus’ head,” he said, nodding at the horse.

  The sun had warmed the air and dried Thomas’ robe, and the even rocking of the old cart was making him sleepy. He was determined to resist it, though, and sat up straighter. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing at a marble shrine glittering in the new sunlight on a hill to the left.

  “That’s the old Odin Temple,” the driver told him. He glanced at Thomas. “You’re not from around here?”

  “Well, yes,” Thomas said. No harm in telling him part of it, he thought. “I’m from the Merignac monastery, though—I grew up there—so I haven’t learned much about the area. They’re cloisters, you know.”

  “Hm,” said the old man, nodding. “I knew they made wine and cheese, but I sure never knew they handled oysters.” Thomas didn’t try to explain. “So what’ll you do in L.A.? Work in one of Broadway missions?”

  “No,” said Thomas carelessly. “I figure I’ll wander down to San Pedro and sign aboard a tramp steamer. See a bit of the world.” He’d given his situation some thought, and this seemed the wisest course.

  They were well into Hollywood by now, and Thomas could see the crazily leaning roofs of houses sticking up like fantastic hats above the freeway rail. Barking dogs and screaming children could be heard from time to time, and rickety wooden stands had been set up along the edge of the freeway, selling everything from cool beer and tacos to horseshoes and axle-grease. Crows flapped lazily by or huddled in secretive groups along the rail.

  “Getting into civilization now,” the driver observed. “A tramp steamer, eh? Good job for a young man, if you’re tough. I was a deck hand on the Humboldt Queen back in—Jesus—forty-seven, I guess, when Randall Dowling was wiping out the Carmel pirates. Wild times, I tell you.”

  Thomas would have liked to hear more, but the old man had lapsed into silence. “What brings you and your guns into L.A.?” he asked.

  “Oh, I sell ‘em to the city government,” the driver said. “Mayor Pelias wants every one of his android cops to carry a real firearm, not just the traditional sword-and-stick. He’s the gunsmith’s patron saint.”

  “Android cops?” Thomas asked. “What do you mean?”

  “They didn’t tell you much in that monastery, did they?”

  The traffic—bicycles, rickshaws and many horse-drawn carts—had grown fairly thick, and suddenly broke into a disordered rout for the right-hand lane when someone began blowing strident blasts through a horn somewhere behind them. A hundred feet up the road a mounted merchant attempted to vault his panicky horse right over a slow-moving rickshaw, and a crew of roadside laborers had to rush in and clear away the wreckage and moaning bodies, and cut the throat of the crippled horse.

  “What in hell is going on?” Thomas cried. “Why’s everybody moving over:

  “Hear that horn?” the driver asked as he calmly worked his cart in between two beer wagons and set the hand brake. “That means a gas-car’s coming.”

  The blaap, blaap, blaap of the horn was very loud now. Thomas could see nothing to the rear because of the tall beer truck, and kept his eyes on the empty left lane.

  All at once it had appeared and sped past, and the racket of the horn was slowly diminishing ahead. Thomas had got only a quick glimpse of a big, blue-painted metal body, on thick rubber wheels, carrying a driver in the front, a passenger in the rear and a red-faced man in a makeshift chair on the roof, blowing like a maniac into a long brass trumpet.

  “Holy Mother of God,” said Thomas in an awed voice. “What did you say that was? A lascar?”

  “Gas-car,” the driver corrected, amused to see Thomas so imp
ressed by it. “That’ll be some city official, probably Albers from Toluca Lake. An emergency in town, I guess.”

  Traffic was slowly untangling itself and moving on now, and Thomas sat back thoughtfully. “Tell me about these android cops,” he said.

  “Oh yeah.” They were passing under the Sunset Boulevard bridge now, and Thomas stared curiously at the beggars in its shade who were calling to passing vehicles and coughing theatrically or waving crippled limbs to excite pity. “A few years ago,” the driver said, “Mayor Pelias decided that his police force was no good. He was paying them a lot, but nothing was getting done, you know? So he started brewing androids and using them on the police force. He caught a lot of criticism for it at the time—androids had only been used for roadwork and construction before that, and everybody said they weren’t near smart enough to be cops. But some scientist figured out how to implant a little box they call a PADMU in the androids’ heads, and it lets ‘em think and do things almost as well as a human cop, and more reliable. So pretty soon he converted entirely to android. Saves a whole lot of money, ‘cause androids are cheap to produce in quantity, and they don’t need a salary, and they eat grass and hay like cows.” The old man laughed. “You should see them grazing. A whole field full of naked guys on their hands and knees, eating grass.”

  “Wow,” Thomas said. He was quiet for the rest of the ride, wondering what sort of world it was for which he’d traded the quiet halls and familiar disciplines of the Merignac monastery.

  Just inside the high city wall they pulled over to let a Customs officer check the cargo for contraband liquor (“Fusel oil in the Oregon vodka,” the officer explained), and Thomas hopped down from the bench and walked around to the driver’s side.

  “Thanks for the lift,” he told him. “It would have taken me till noon to get here on foot.”

  “Yeah, it would have,” the old man agreed. “What’s your name, anyhow?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Well, Thomas, I’m John St. Coutras.” He stuck out his hand, and Thomas stepped up on the rear brake pedal and extended his own hand to St. Coutras. Immediately there was a deep boom, the cart lurched, the horse neighed and reared and the Customs officer dropped his clipboard. A cloud of raspy gray smoke hung in the air, and in the ensuing silence Thomas could hear bits of stone pattering to the pavement on the other side of the courtyard.

  “You stepped on the rear brake pedal, I believe,” St. Coutras said.

  “Uh … yes.” They completed the delayed handshake. Smoke, Thomas noticed, was dribbling upward from the hole in the passenger’s back-rest. “That’s how you shoot it, huh?”

  St. Coutras nodded.

  “What the hell have you got? A cannon?” brayed the Customs man, who had by this time found his voice. “You bastards aware that shooting firearms inside the walls is a felony? Hah? Jesus, I’ll—”

  “It was an accidental discharge,” St. Coutras explained calmly, “which is just a misdemeanor. But here,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “let me pay for the wall repair.” He handed the officer several coins.

  “Well, all right, then,” the man muttered, shambling back to his little plywood office. “Can’t have that sort of thing, you know; I’ll let you off with a warning this time …”

  “Gee, I’m sorry about that,” Thomas said. “I’d pay you back, but—”

  “Forget it, Thomas. It’s good community relations to give Customs men money.”

  “Oh. Well … thanks again for the ride.” Thomas waved, and then walked through an arch out of the shadowed courtyard into the full sunlight of Western Avenue.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Day in the City

  The waiter, after giving Thomas a long, doubtful look, led him down the aisle to a narrow booth at the back of the restaurant.

  “There you are, sir,” he said. “Would you care for coffee?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said, “and a ham and swiss cheese and bell pepper omelette, and sourdough toast, and fried potatoes with onions, and a big glass of very cold beer.”

  The waiter slowly wrote it all down on a pad and then stared at Thomas, plainly doubtful about the young man’s finances, but intimidated by the monk’s robe.

  “I can afford it,” said Thomas haughtily. He waved the man away.

  As soon as the waiter walked off Thomas dipped into his water glass the first finger of his left hand, which he had gashed deeply the night before. He wiped the dried blood off with his napkin. Looks all right, he decided. It’ll leave a scar, but I guess it’s clean.

  Most of the restaurant’s booths were empty, which struck Thomas as an odd state of affairs at roughly eight o’clock in the morning on such a nice day. I hope there’s nothing wrong with the food, he thought.

  A tiny, leaded-glass window was set in the wall next to his left ear, and he hunched around in his seat to be able to see outside. There was a congested line of vehicles moving north on Western; out of the city, Thomas realized. The carts all seemed to be filled with chairs and mattresses, and he saw men pulling several of them, strapped into harnesses that were meant for horses. A policeman was walking down the line, and the people in the carts were pulling sheaves of papers from their pockets and letting him look at them. Sometimes he would keep the papers and make some person move his cart out of the line and return into the city. Thomas remembered that St. Coutras had said all the cops were androids, and he tried to look more closely at this one, but the wavy window glass prevented him from seeing anything clearly,

  Six young men were walking rapidly up the Western sidewalk, holding long sticks. They sprinted the last hundred feet to the policeman and clubbed him to the ground from behind. For a full twenty seconds they crouched above the uniformed body, raining savage, full-arm blows; then they ran away in different directions. Thomas had expected the people in the traffic line to say or do something, but they had just watched the beating disinterestedly. After a few minutes another policeman appeared and began calmly checking their papers.

  Thomas turned back to his table, frowning and upset. Do androids feel pain? he wondered. The replacement cop didn’t seem bothered by his predecessor’s fate, Thomas thought—why should I be? Haven’t I got enough problems without having to worry about the well-being of some creature that was brewed in a vat?

  At that moment his beer arrived, followed closely by the food he’d ordered. He felt a little queasy about eating until he took a long sip of the cold beer, and then his hunger returned in force. He wolfed the food and washed it down with another glass of beer.

  When he finished he had forgotten the unfortunate android and was leaning back, feeling comfortable and wondering whether or not to buy a cigar. After a while the waiter appeared.

  “What do I owe you?” asked Thomas, reaching into his pocket. “Forty solis.”

  Thomas smiled. “No, really.”

  “Forty solis,” the waiter repeated slowly, moving to block Thomas’ exit from the booth.

  Thomas’ smile disappeared. “Forty solis for one breakfast?” he gasped. “Since when? Brother William told me you can get a good dinner for ten.”

  “Brother William hasn’t been to town for a while, apparently,” the waiter growled. “The Los Angeles soli has been dropping ever since last summer.” He grabbed Thomas by the collar. “Listen, brother—if you are a monk, which I doubt; where’s your rosary?—you’re lucky we’ll take solis at all, after Thursday morning. Most shops are closed, won’t take any currency till they see where it stands. Now trot out forty solis or we’ll be using your lousy hide to wash dishes with tonight.”

  “Oh, all right then!” Thomas said indignantly, pushing the waiter’s arm away. “Here.” He reached into his pocket again with his right hand, and with his left picked up his water glass and splashed its contents into the waiter’s face. While the man’s eyes were closed Thomas punched him in the stomach and then grabbed him by the hair and pulled his dripping face down hard onto his breakfast plate. Bits of egg flew, and the waiter yel
led in pain.

  Thomas shoved him aside and dashed up the aisle. The cashier, a blond girl in a frilly apron, stepped into his path but then stepped back again when he roared fiercely and waved his arms at her.

  His escape looked good until two burly, unshaven men in stained T-shirts and aprons appeared from the kitchen and stood in front of the door. “Grab the bastard!” yelled the waiter, who, blood running down his chin, now advanced on Thomas from behind.

  “Oh, Jesus,” moaned Thomas in fright.

  A well-to-do family filled a booth by a window nearby; there was an older gentleman, his stocky wife, three children and, under the table, a poodle in a powder-blue dog sweater. They all watched Thomas with polite interest, as if he’d just announced that he was going to do a few juggling tricks.

  “I’m sorry, I really am,” Thomas yelled, and picked up their dog with both hands, raised it over his head and pitched it through the window. Taking a flying leap and setting his sandaled foot firmly in a plate of sausages on their table, he dove head-first through the jagged-edged casement. When he rolled to his feet on the glass-strewn sidewalk outside he saw the dog huddled against the wall, terrified but apparently saved from injury by the idiotic sweater.

  “Your dog’s okay!” Thomas yelled back through the window. He felt bad about having done that. The two big men in aprons rounded the corner of the building, one armed with a long fork and the other with a spatula. Thomas turned and ran down the block, jogging sharply right on a street called Sierra Vista and then left into a nameless alley. It led him eventually to another big street, and he followed it south, only walking briskly now that the vengeful cooks had been left far behind.

  Anton Delmotte sipped at his tomato juice and shuddered.

  His boss, sitting across the table from him, looked up. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked unsympathetically. “Did my breakfast disagree with you?”

  “Oh, no, Bob.” Delmotte twisted his wrinkled face into an ingratiating smile. “The breakfast was tip-top. As always.”