Epitaph in Rust

by Tim Powers

  Thomas shook his head wonderingly. “How long was it before you bought the Bellamy Theatre? You must have worked in cellars and school auditoriums for a while …”

  “Hell no,” Gladhand smiled. “One thing I am not is poor. I had big accounts in a dozen banks between Santa Barbara and Laguna. Under various names, of course, and coded by my thumbprint. This current effort is exhausting my funds, I’ll admit, but the money has served its purpose.”

  “Where’d it all come from? Were you always rich?”

  “No. I embezzled the devil out of the city treasury, you see, during my term as mayor. Hah! Ever since my reign the city has been nearly broke, in spite of the taxes. I think Hancock found out about my books-juggling and imaginary committees and all, and paid somebody to throw that grenade at me because of it.” Gladhand sipped his whiskey. “Bourbon renewal, I call this,” he said, waving his glass. “One sip and the whole neighborhood looks better. Anyway—Hancock was an idealist, you see. Always horrified. Horrified when I had a drink or two in the office, horrified when I gave high-pay posts to pretty but otherwise unqualified young girls; hell, even horrified when I’d hang convicted murderers. So he had me removed from the picture and put an infallible’ android in my place (he was always at me about how Morally unfallen’ androids were). That was a real laugh. The new Pelias kept the capital punishment and broadened the qualifications for it. And his cops were always gunning down citizens for things like cheating a newspaper machine. Hancock killed himself four years later. Sic semper idealists.”

  Thomas rolled a mouthful of bourbon on his tongue and said nothing.

  “And there’ll be a place of honor for you in the new regime, Rufus,” Gladhand said. “A nice big office where you can write all the poetry you like. I’ll have the government printing office publish your works.”

  Thomas shook his head. “I can’t write poetry anymore.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No,” Thomas insisted. “It’s gone. I wrote a sonnet—iambic heptameter—this week, and I can see now that it was the last poem I’ll ever write. It isn’t just that my mind is dry for the moment—I know how that feels, and this isn’t it. It’s as if… as if part of my brain has been amputated.”

  Gladhand started to speak, and then didn’t. “Drink up,” he said after a pause. “This business has crippled both of us.”

  It had stopped raining for the moment, but an icy damp wind whipped at the oilcloth lashed over the two cannons that were being pulled behind the cart Thomas was in. The caravan that rattled swiftly down the three southbound lanes of the Hollywood Freeway carried no running lights, and Thomas, peering back over his shoulder, could only occasionally make out the black bulks of the following troop and ammunition carts.

  “Spring Street exit ahead,” barked Gaudete, who sat beside Thomas. “Give them two flashes to the right.”

  Thomas picked up a steaming dark-lantern from the floorboards and, leaning out on the right side of the cart, slid the lantern’s iron door open-and-shut, open-and-shut. There was a quick acknowledging flash from the wagon behind, and Thomas set the lantern down.

  Gaudete snapped a long lash over the heads of the four horses. His droopy black moustache was matted with scented oil that had run down from his hair during the rain, and he kept sucking at the ends of it. “What’s the time?” he snarled.

  Thomas glanced at the luminous face of the watch he’d been ordered to hold. “Five to twelve.”

  “Fine.”

  Thomas sat back and pulled his corduroy coat tighter about him, and he patted the bulge in his right pocket that was a .45 calibre seven-shot automatic pistol.

  The cart bounced up a ramp onto a narrow street paralleling the freeway, and the rearward-facing culverins bobbed their iron barrels up and down under the oilcloths as the rest of the caravan followed.

  A deep roar, and another, sounded ahead, and Thomas, straining his ears, caught the distant rattle of gunfire.

  “Gladhand’s started,” Gaudete observed grimly as he snapped his whip again.

  They slowed before making the right turn onto Spring Street, so as not to skid across the wet cobblestones. The sound of gunfire was much clearer now, and Thomas pulled the pistol out of his pocket and carried it in his right hand.

  After they crossed Temple Street Gaudete ran the horses up the curb on the right, so that the cannons in back faced, across a dark lawn, the tall structure a hundred yards away that was city hall. The six following carts drew up beside them and dozens of men with rifles began hopping out of them and lining up on the sidewalk.

  “The fighting’s still around front, on the Main Street side,” Gaudete said, climbing down to the pavement. “Quick, some of you, get these cannons trained so that they bracket the building.”

  Thomas climbed down and watched as several men, the backs of their rain-wet sealskin jackets glistening in the lamplight, unchained the cannon carriages and pulled off the covers. Four of them slipped handspikes into iron rings in the carriage trails; they laboriously lifted them and rolled the cannons forward, swung the barrels into the correct positions and carefully lowered the trails to the pavement. “All set, cap’n,” gasped one of the men.

  “Good. Hop up there, Rufus, and fetch me that big box from under the seat.”

  Thomas climbed back up into the cart and slid a heavy wooden box over the lip of the seat-rail to hands waiting to receive it. Gaudete supervised the prying-up of the lid and lifted out a four-pound iron ball from which dangled a heavy chain.

  “This’ll mow their lawn for them,” he grinned. The men standing around grinned too, though they didn’t understand. “We can shoot from here,” Gaudete said. “The curbs will stop the recoil. Just be sure none of you stand behind them. Okay, load!”

  Another box was brought forward and ripped open, and a cloth bag full of powder was thrown into the muzzle of each cannon and shoved home with a rammer, followed by a wooden disk rammed in on top.

  “Okay, now,” Gaudete said, “load this chain shot; one ball in each cannon.” The men were lifting Gaudete’s unorthodox ammunition—two cannon balls connected by about thirty feet of heavy chain—out of the box when with a blinding, shadow-etching flash of lightning, the rain began again.

  “Quick!” Gaudete screeched as the thunder was echoing away. “Cover the touch-holes! Get that shot loaded!”

  From the driver’s bench Thomas watched the frantic work as sheets of rain thrashed onto the pavement; and then he noticed that the street surface was alive with tiny, wriggling creatures. They were in the cart, too, and he bent down and picked one up. It was a frog. More were falling every second, dropping with the rain to shatter and die on the cobblestones. The street, the sidewalks, the whole landscape, was covered with tiny dying frogs.

  The men noticed it, and were uneasy; the two carrying the shot had paused and were blinking up at the sky.

  “Load, you bastards!” Gaudete howled, waving a pistol, “or I’ll see the color of your livers!”

  In the next glaring flash of lightning Thomas saw, starkly clear in black and white, the two cannons pointing just to either side of city hall, their rain-glittered muzzles connected by a drooping length of chain. Wedges were now being pounded in under the breeches so that the muzzles were only a little raised from absolute horizontal.

  “Okay!” yelled Gaudete. “Twenty of you run to the fighting, trade a few shots, let ’em see you, and then run back here with them chasing you. Halfway across the lawn you drop flat, and we’ll touch off both these cannons simultaneously, with the chain stretched between the cannon balls.

  That’ll cut most of them in half. Then the rest of us will charge in and finish them.”

  Gaudete designated twenty men and sent them forward through the rain. They skidded and slipped, on the new pavement of perishing frogs, and made slow progress.

  “Damn, why can’t they hurry?” fretted Gaudete, twisting the ends of his moustache. Two more cannon blasts cracked a block or so away and
were followed by a fast drum-solo of gunshots.

  Thomas sat on the driver’s bench of the lead cart, shivering and brushing frogs off his wet clothes. He hefted his pistol nervously. I don’t like this, he thought—there’s death in the air. It feels like the last night of the world.

  “Ha!” Gaudete stiffened and pointed. “I see them!”

  Thomas stared into the blackness, but could make out nothing. Then a white whiplash of lightning lit the lawn like a football stadium, and Thomas saw seventeen men running before a tide of pursuing androids.

  “Gunners ready?” yelped Gaudete.

  “Ready!” called the two gunners, huddled over the breeches to keep their slow-matches lit and the vent primes dry. Frogs bounced unnoticed from their hats and shoulders onto the street.

  “They’re down! Fire!”

  Thomas was standing up on the bench to see better at the moment the gunners touched match to prime. There was a deafening, stomach-shaking roar followed instantly by a high-pitched screech like a million fencing foils whipped through the air, and then the cart beneath his boots was wrenched violently out from under him and flung in broken, spinning pieces for a dozen yards down the street.

  He hit the ground hard on his hip, but rolled quickly to his feet, his gun ready. His first thought was that the androids had set up a cannon of their own somewhere north on Spring, and their first shot had struck the cart.

  Then he saw the appalling carnage that was sprayed and strewn everywhere; blood was splashed as if from buckets across the nearby building fronts, and bits of men were steaming on the street and sidewalk, mingling now with the frogs that still rained out of the night sky. Nearly half of the eighty men who’d been standing by, ten seconds earlier, were frightfully, messily dead.

  The others, mystified as to what weapon had so devastated their companions, and already disturbed by the rain of frogs, ran away north and south on Spring Street, flinging down their rifles.

  The androids, completely unharmed, made short work of the seventeen who’d flung themselves flat on the lawn.

  I see, Thomas thought. He stood on the fouled pavement, rain running from the sleeves of his dangling arms and from the barrel of the gun that hung in his limp right hand. I see. One cannon went off just a little before the other …

  And here come the androids.

  As the police troops bore rapidly down on him across the lawn, Thomas walked listlessly to the largest section of the wrecked cart and lay down behind it. He patted his pockets: two spare clips. I can, conceivably, get twenty-one of them before they get me. He thumbed off the safety catch and, raising the pistol, got one of the foremost androids in his sights, and fired.

  The open windows let in the morning sunlight, a cool breeze, and the sound of shovels grating on cobblestones as Gladhand, still dressed in his old sweater of the night before, was wheeled along the bright-tiled hallway. He looked tired, but joked with the nurses who escorted him, and hefted a paper-wrapped parcel in his lap.

  “Here we are,” smiled one of the nurses, looking a little haggard herself. “Number twelve.”

  They steered Gladhand’s wheelchair through the doorway into the narrow but cheerfully painted room. Sitting up in the bed by the window was Thomas. His left arm was bandaged and trussed in a sling.

  “Have you smoked a cigar in your office yet?” Thomas asked.

  “No, but that’s on the agenda. How are you?”

  “I give up, how am I?”

  Gladhand grimaced and wobbled one hand in the air in an it-could-be-worse gesture. “The nerves of your left hand are dead, cut by a sword you apparently parried with the inside of your elbow. The nerves may grow back—I think I read about that happening somewhere—but until they do, your left hand is paralyzed.”

  Thomas nodded dully. “Well, that’s …” He could think of no appropriate way to finish the sentence.

  “That’s the bad news, my boy.” Gladhand said. “The good news is this: I have selected you to be the new major-domo of this weary old city of the angels. You can help us prepare for Alvarez. I was going to appoint Gaudete, but he chopped himself in half with that incredibly foolish cannon trick.”

  “What exactly happened there?”

  “Only one of his cannons went off, so instead of sending the chain flying at the androids, it whipped like a rotary weed-cutter and ripped all the men standing nearby to bits.”

  “I see. Where’d the frogs come from?”

  Gladhand chuckled. “Apparently there were tornadoes over the Ravenna swamps when the Santa Ana winds collided with the cold current from up north. The twisters sucked up the frogs—it seems there were an incredible number of them this year—and the storm’s wind-currents carried them here. It scared the devil out of the androids.” Gladhand searched his pockets fruitlessly for a cigar. “Oh well. I’ll send out for some. That was a full-scale retreat that came charging at you—and that’s doubtless how you survived; they were more interested in getting the hell away than in killing you, though you did singlehandedly manage to kill ten of them before this sword-cut distracted you. Our guns were pounding them to dust out front, but it was the frogs that broke their spirit. Androids fear what they can’t understand.”

  “Well, that’s silly of them,” Thomas said dryly. “What have you got there?”

  Gladhand happily stripped the strings and paper off the object, and held it up.

  It was a head, and after the first few seconds of shock Thomas recognized it. “That’s who the stone head in the theatre basement was of,” he said.

  “Well … they’re both copies of the same original, let’s say. Actually,” he said, peering at the thing, “our bombs a week ago don’t seem to have done all that much harm; just a crushed-in section here in the back … and a few evidences of surgery where they were trying to fix the PADMU. And now he’ll never get his memory bank back.” Gladhand set the head unceremoniously on the floor.

  “Later today I’ll show you your office,” Gladhand continued. “I’ll think you’ll be impressed. There’s a mahogany desk so big you could sublet half of it as an apartment. It has a well-stocked bar, a walk-in humidor in case you should ever take up smoking, a hand-carved—”

  “I get the picture,” interrupted Thomas with a smile.

  “Yeah, just bide your time here for a few days, and then LA. will embark on a whole new era, with you and me at the tiller and helm.” Gladhand nodded to the nurse, who promptly took hold of the handles of the wheelchair. “I’ll see you later,” he said. “Right now I have about a million things to do, and the first one is get some cigars. Nurse, if you’ll be so good as to propel me out.”

  “Mr. Gladhand,” Thomas said. “You’ve forgotten your head.”

  “Oh yes! Thank you. I want to hang it somewhere appropriate; maybe I’ll put it on the shoulders of old Johnny Bush-head.”

  The mayor picked up the head, rewrapped it, and waved as the nurse wheeled him out of the room.

  Thomas lay back down in the bed and shut his eyes. Nurses were constantly hurrying by in the hall, asking each other in clipped tones about sulfa drugs, doctors, blood counts and leg splints, but Thomas was soon asleep.

  In a dream he stood again on the high Merignac tower, clutching his broken fishing pole, and watched helplessly as the girl-faced bird creature dwindled to a distant speck in the vast sky.

  A visitor arrived late in the afternoon. Thomas awoke with a start when she nudged his leg.

  “Wha … ?” he muttered, blinking. “Oh. Hi, Skooney.”

  “Hi, Rufus.” She sat down on the bed. “I hear you’ve been getting into trouble again.”

  “Yeah, that’s the facts of the case, all right. This left hand, what’s left of it, is paralyzed.”

  “Gladhand says he doesn’t see why that should prevent you from playing Touchstone.”

  Thomas blinked. “You mean he still intends to do the play?”

  “Oh sure. He’s planning on making it grander than ever now. Even thinking of blockin
g off some boulevard and performing it outdoors.”

  Thomas nodded vaguely, and after a moment pounded his good fist into the mattress. “This is hard to say, Skooney, but … I’ve got to say it. I’m not going to do the play. Wait a minute, let me finish. I’m not taking the major-domo post, either. I’m …” He shrugged. “I’m leaving the city.”

  Skooney bit her lip. “Why?”

  He waved his hand uncertainly. “I haven’t done well here. No, I haven’t. I’ve lost my hand, my best friend, and the girl I was in love with. The city has a bad taste for me.”

  Skooney shifted uncomfortably. “I,” she began, “I thought maybe you and I had some sort of possibility.”

  “So did I, Skooney. But I’ve lost something here.”

  “You think you’ll find it somewhere else.”

  “No. But I don’t want to stay here with its grave. I believe I’ll continue my interrupted trip to San Pedro. Sign aboard a tramp steamer, like I intended to from the start.”

  “What do you know about that kind of life?”

  “Nothing. That’s what it has going for it.”

  “Oh. Well,” said Skooney, standing up, “that leaves me with nothing to say. Does Gladhand—Pelias—know?”

  “No. I only made up my mind a little while ago.”

  “You want me to tell him?”

  “Yeah, why don’t—no, I guess I’d better.”

  Skooney lingered in the doorway. “When are you going to leave?”

  “The doctors say they’ll release me in two days. That’s Tuesday. I guess I’ll go then.”

  “You’re … absolutely set on doing this?”

  Thomas stared down at his bandaged and slung arm. “Yes,” he said. When he looked up a moment later, Skooney was gone.

  Gladhand visited Thomas three more times, though Skooney stayed away. Tuesday afternoon, when the doctors said he could go, Thomas found Jeff waiting for him in front of the hospital.

  “Hi, Jeff,” said Thomas, pleased to see someone he knew.