by Tim Powers
“Hold it, Jenkins!” came a cry from the street. Thomas was up out of his chair in a second, suddenly alert. Very loud and close, six gunshots rattled the windowpanes. Thomas walked quickly to the kitchen door and pushed through it, hearing the front door slam open as he did. “Nobody move!” someone shouted in the dining room he’d just vacated. “This is the police.”
Out the back door, lad, Thomas told himself. He hurried past the sinks, quietly opened the screen door at the rear of the place, and slipped out into the alley. He picked his way quickly and cautiously through the shadows, and when he had slipped by the back ends of two dark buildings, and the city wall was a scant stone’s-throw ahead, he turned left again and followed a short, unpaved strip of dirt between two high walls back to the High Street sidewalk. Barely twenty seconds had elapsed since the six shots had been fired.
Thomas peered around the wall, back toward the front door of the Blind Moon. A half-dozen policemen loitered out front, a couple of them crouched over a body that lay motionless in the street. So much for poor old Jenkins, Thomas thought nervously, and the Collected Letters of J. Heinemann Strogoff He’ noticed that he was still holding the envelope Jenkins had given him, and he shoved it hastily into his back pocket.
After a few minutes three more officers stepped out of the Blind Moon. “Nobody in here’s got it,” one said.
“It’s not on him, either,” spoke up one who’d been hunched over the body. “We must have missed it at his place.” Lining up in formation, they trotted away south on Spring.
I’ve got to get back to the theatre, Thomas thought, so I can see what’s in this damned letter. Gladhand will probably be interested, whatever it is.
Thomas was prodding his phlegmatic horse down the southward side of the Spring Street bridge when one of the ubiquitous beggars called hoarsely to him, “Rufus!”
Thomas looked at the passersby, thinking that perhaps the beggar knew one of them.
“Rufus, goddamnit!” the beggar said, louder this time.
Thomas reluctantly turned his horse around and halted beside the ragged, slumped figure that had hailed him. This is probably a trap, he thought worriedly; I should move on and get this letter to Gladhand. Then he noticed, in the unsteady light from a street lamp, blood glistening on the beggar’s chest.
“You’re hurt,” he said, dismounting quickly from the horse.
The figure, whose face was shadowed under a wide cardboard hat, nodded matter-of-factly. “That’s an accurate statement,” the hoarse voice allowed.
I’ve seen that hat, Thomas realized. It’s Ben Corwin’s.
“Ben … ?” he said, pulling aside the hat; and then he froze. The face under its ragged brim, pale and beaded with sweat, was Spencer’s.
Thomas dropped to his knees. “Spencie!” he whispered urgently. “What happened? How bad are you hurt? Hang on, I’ll get you to the Bellamy—”
“No” Spencer seized Thomas’ wrist with a blood-sticky hand. “Listen. Don’t talk. I’ve been waiting here for a half hour, I don’t have a lot of time left. The cops are wise to you. They know Rufus Pennick the actor is Thomas the monk. I guess … one of those cops last night lived … remembered Albers’ guess. I don’t know.” He coughed violently and spat blood onto the sidewalk.
“Jesus, Spencer, let me—”
“Sh. Listen. They’ve got the Bellamy staked out, north south east and west. Waiting for you. I stole some … old things of Corwin’s and tried to sneak past them … put a sword through me, they did, but I got clear anyhow. Also—finally—Evelyn found out… why they’re looking for you. They know you were sky-fishing last Thursday night, and they suspect that you got, in the haul from the bird-man you caught, an android’s memory bank. For some reason everyone wants it very badly.”
“What android? I didn’t find any—”
“I don’t know what android. I can’t imagine why they should go to all this trouble.” He shuddered. “I don’t understand any of it.”
“Well, how bad are you hurt? Spence? Spence?” Thomas leaned over Spencer’s pale face, but could hear no breathing. “Spencer, answer me!”
He put his fingers to the young man’s throat, and could detect no pulse. “Oh no. “He slumped despairingly against the bars of the bridge-rail, and drove his fist savagely at one of the concrete pillars, which started his hand bleeding again. Tears of impotent, confused rage and grief coursed down his cheeks.
“Here now!” intruded a flat, quacking voice. “What’s going on?”
Thomas wearily lifted his head and saw, through the blurring of his tears, the stern face of an android policeman gazing down at him. The creature held a nightstick at the ready, and twitched it at Thomas. “What’s going on?” it repeated.
Thomas leaped at the android with a snarl, and his fingers were at the thing’s eyes even as the nightstick cracked down across his ribs. The sheer maniacal force of his attack knocked the officer over backwards, and Thomas was on its chest as soon as it hit the pavement. His fingers were locked in its hair, and he pounded the moaning head against the curb again and again and again, until muscle fatigue rendered his arms incapable of continuing, and the thing’s head looked like an egg that some over-zealous cook had cracked with sadly excessive force.
Thomas stood up on unsteady legs. A crowd had gathered, he noticed, and now regarded him with an air of fearful, timid approval. Thomas wiped his hands to rid himself of a few clinging shreds of hair, and then ran.
When he stopped, completely winded but exorcised of the berserk fury that had possessed him earlier, he was in front of a box-like old two-storey building; on a lamp-lit sign out front were painted the words ROOMS FOR RENT. There’s the hand of Providence at work, he thought as he staggered up the walk and knocked at the front door. After a minute an old woman opened it.
“Yeah?” she growled. “I got a big knife here, so don’t try anything.”
“All I want … is a room,” Thomas panted. “How much for a room for the night?”
She looked him up and down through suspicion-narrowed eyes. “Twenty solis.”
Thomas pulled out the ten-soli bill Gladhand had given him. “Ten’s all I have,” he said.
“Ten’ll have to do, then,” she said grudgingly as she snatched it from his hand. “You get room four. Round back.” She made as if to close the door.
“Wait a minute. Isn’t there a key?”
“No.” The door slammed, and he heard the rattle of a chain being drawn across it.
He shrugged, and went “round back” to find room four. It proved to be a narrow, low-ceilinged cubicle that Thomas suspected had been designed as a closet. It possessed a wide range of disagreeable organic odors, and when he struck a match to the nearly exhausted oil lamp, Thomas saw that some madman had painted the warped walls in patches of bright green and orange. He closed the door and shot the cheap, nailed-on bolt.
The bed was a pile of old curtains, strewn with greasy oyster shells. God help me, Thomas thought—when I hit the skids I don’t mess around. If this isn’t the absolute pit of creation, I hope I never see what is.
He pulled the crumpled envelope out of his pocket and sat down gingerly on the floor. The seal had broken already, and he lifted the flap and unfolded the ten-year-old letter:
12 January 2179
Lawrence D. Hancock
Major-domo, City of Los Angeles
Dear Mr. Hancock:
I was deeply shocked to hear of the grenade attack Thursday last upon Joseph Fowler Pelias, the mayor of your city. I was, though, sir, even more shocked to see the telecast of the “recovered mayor” delivering a speech from a hospital bed on Saturday morning.
I, Mr. Hancock, am the inventor of the artificial constructs known as “androids,” and I have done more work with and upon them, I suppose, than any man. Did you, sir, really expect me—or anyone else who had dealt with them—to fail to recognize this “recovered” Pelias for the construct that it is? Those twitches about the eyes, the diff
iculty in pronouncing nasals and voiced fricatives, the long pauses between switched ideas—the very pallor, mottled around the temples—branded that creature as a newly surfaced android fake, not ten hours out of the vat.
I do not know, and will not speculate about, your motives in this matter; whether you have made this gross switch out of concern for your city or for the advancement of your personal career. It doesn’t matter: your deed must be undone. Announce that complications developed; pneumonia set in; a stray bit of shrapnel reached the heart; hell, man, tell them assassins climbed in through the hospital window and hid vipers among his blankets; but get rid of that android.
You must realize that androids, though they can with the aid of PADMUs think rationally and behave according to pre-set priorities, have no intrinsic moral sense. They cannot distinguish right from wrong, any more than a color-blind man can distinguish red from green. An android’s actions will reflect only the morals of the person who prepared its PADMU; and don’t assume the creatures can’t prepare PADMUs for their fellows.
The use of androids as policemen is dubious; the idea of one holding a high political office is as ridiculous as it is terrifying.
Therefore, Mr. Hancock, I am forced to issue to you a threat: if this false “Pelias” is not officially declared dead, and disposed of, within twenty-four hours of your receipt of this letter, I will share my observations with the press.
Yours for more rational uses of science,
J. Heinemann Strogoff
Hmm, Thomas thought. And Jenkins said Strogoff died a day or so after writing this letter? I think I know why, and by whose order.
So Mayor Pelias has been, for the last ten years, an android. I wonder what the real Pelias was like. Wait a minute—then what was this “stroke” he allegedly suffered a week ago, after Gladhand’s bombs blew the floor out of his chambers? Perhaps the android was totally destroyed in the explosion, and this stroke story is a stall to buy time until those androids we saw in the vats reach maturation, and one of them is chosen to serve as a replacement. A replacement of a replacement.
When were Gladhand’s bombs detonated? Thursday morning, very early. One ten minutes after the other.
And when, Thomas asked himself excitedly, was I sky-fishing? Late the following night.
And what was it Spencer said the police suspect I found in the bird-man’s pouch? An android’s memory bank.
Thomas began to perceive, dimly, a pattern.
Let us postulate, he said to himself, that the first bomb damaged the Pelias-android’s head, and that technicians immediately went to work repairing the PADMU or whatever. The second bomb, let’s say, blew the windows out while the android’s head was disassembled like an old alarm clock. What if … what if a roving bird-man flew in through the broken window, snatched up the memory bank (doubtless a bright, glittery object) and flew back out into the pre-dawn darkness before anyone could stop it? Let’s also say, just to explain as much as possible, that something desperately important was in that memory bank, some vital knowledge. What would the government do?
Why, they’d check the bird-men taken in the city nets the next night, and if the memory bank didn’t show up there, they’d find out if anyone was sky-fishing that night. And if they found out someone was, they’d lose no time, spare no expense, in tracking that person down …
That’s it, Thomas thought. That is certainly it. The only problem is that I didn’t happen to find an android memory bank in the damned creature’s pouch. The police, Albers, everybody, have been wasting their time.
Maybe, though, I could bluff them by pretending to have found it … ?
One thing is certain—I’ve got to get back to the Bellamy Theatre and get this information to Gladhand.
He left room four after blowing out the lamp, and descended the outside stairs to the ground. The Santa Ana wind was still sighing through the city, and carried now the voice of a woman a street or so away who was singing “Bill Bailey.” Thomas made his way to the street and read a signpost at the corner. Frank Court I’m on, he saw, and here’s Fourth Street. So they’ve got the Bellamy staked out, have they? Let’s see—I’ll go west to Hill Street, north to Beverly, and then see if I can’t sneak in from the back somehow.
God, what a weary night it’s been, and looks like continuing to be.
When he reached the roof of the four-storey Castello Bank on Beverly Boulevard, Thomas painfully flexed his nine fingers and brushed flakes of rust off on his shirt. Stepping away from the fire escape, he padded across the moonlit roof to the southern side, and looked longingly across a fifteen-foot gap at the Bellamy Theatre, its dark massiveness relieved here and there by the yellow glow of a window. The alley directly below, Thomas saw as he peered down cautiously, was shrouded in total darkness—but he could imagine the android sentries that crouched, watchful and patient, in those deep shadows.
He gently broke off a bit of brick from the banks roof-wall, and flung it down the alley to his left, in the direction of the theatre’s stables. After three seconds it clicked against pavement—and several sets of quick footsteps converged on the spot where it had hit. There were a few muttered words and then silence once again.
Thomas pulled his head back and worried for a while. Maybe, he thought crazily, I could break a lock, descend into this bank and find a rope and a few gallons of gasoline. Then I’d just pour the gasoline down on those blasted cops, fling a match (which I’ll also have to find) after the gasoline, and then swing across to the Bellamy roof on the rope.
Sure, he nodded bitterly—and even if you could do all that, the other policemen on guard would know what happened, and would just burst into the theatre and drag you out. No, lad; this calls for something more subtle.
Thomas sat down, resting his back against a ten-foot antenna that dated from the lost days of television. The sky was a glittering, infinite gallery of stars, dominated but not overwhelmed by the crescent moon overhead. To the north, Thomas noticed, the dark ramparts of the storm-clouds had swollen considerably. He raised his maimed hand and was chilled to see how ragged and mutable it looked against the eternal ranks of stars in the cathedral of the sky. I don’t want to cover the moon with my hand, he thought—I’m afraid the light would shine through the flesh, as if it were just an accumulation of cobwebs.
Objects were moving, flying, high in the air. The bird-men, the halfwit tax collectors, Thomas realized, winging their way north, back up Laurel Canyon to their nests; carrying in their pouches whatever trash they’ve found attractive today.
That’s the solution, by God, Thomas thought, leaping to his feet. I’ll fly across to the Bellamy roof. Put my life in the hands of the god of winds. He set about rocking the tall antenna loose from its moorings, and after a few minutes a bolt snapped and the pole was leaning on him. He tore it free from a section of tarpaper that had been tacked around its base, and then laid it down and began unbuttoning his shirt.
I’ll just stretch my shirt over the horizontal cross-prongs on the antenna, and then grip the pole firmly and leap off the wall—the roof of the theatre is one storey below me, and I’ll silently glide across onto it. Or else I’ll fall, and drink the cold claret of hell tonight with Spencer, Jean, Gardener Jenkins and poor Robert Negri.
When he’d knotted the shirt securely across the metal rods, he strode bravely to the edge of the roof, stepped up onto the coping, raised the antenna over his head—and paused. He thought, What if I fall but don’t die? It’s only four storeys, after all; I might just wind up in some hideous interrogation chamber with two shattered legs.
With a snarl of impatience and despair, he whirled in a circle on the coping bricks and flung his antenna glider away from him. It crashed into the alley below in the same area his pebble had landed in, and this time the footsteps that went to investigate were not quiet. By God, Thomas thought suddenly, that’s a diversion. Now’s your chance, lad, if there’ll ever be one. Do it quick, without thinking.
He leaped back down
onto the bank roof, loped halfway across it, then turned around; he took a deep breath and ran for the edge of the roof, digging in with his toes to muster every possible bit of speed. At the last moment he leaped with one leg, kicked off from the coping with the other, and hurled himself forward through the warm night air.
He hit, with a wrenching jolt, the edge of the Bellamy roof, and managed to crook his skinned fingers over the top before he would have fallen. There was no air in his lungs, and the muscles that could have drawn some in were in shock. Blood poured from Thomas’ nose, and ran ticklingly down his neck.
Hop up, lad! screamed the small section of his mind that was still working. Swing up over this parapet before one of those androids glances up! No, he thought. I’ve done as much as could be expected of anyone. I’ll drop, try to land on my head. He tried to release his grip, but his body resisted his decision and clung more tightly.
I guess, he thought, tears mixing with the blood on his face, I guess I can’t rest even now. He slowly pulled himself up, swung one leaden leg over the coping, and dropped heavily onto the surface of the Bellamy roof.
“A big antenna with a shirt on it,” a voice echoed up from the alley. “Nobody around.”
“I don’t like it. Trot up that fire escape and take a look at the theatre roof.”
“Okay, sir.”
Thomas now heard footsteps clanging rapidly up a fire escape. This isn’t fair! he thought. I never noticed an alley-side fire escape on this building. He rolled to his feet and limped over to the stairway door.
It was locked. And the banging footsteps were much higher, and mounting fast.
The deck is stacked against me, he thought despairingly. He’ll be up over the edge of the roof in eight seconds. I’ve got to do something decisive, fast.
A wide-mouthed brick chimney poked its yard height out of the roof only a few feet away, and Thomas crossed to it and peered desperately into its inky depths. Then he heard, much clearer now, the android’s boots rattling the bolts of the last length of ladder—and Thomas extended his arms in front of himself and dove headfirst into the chimney shaft, trying to slow his fall by pressing his legs outward against the walls.
