Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Part of one, anyhow.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Matter of fact, it was pretty good.’

  ‘I bet you were a regular red-blooded All-American boy,’ Tom said. ‘Letting off cherry bombs at the Fourth of July parade, tying tin cans to a cat’s tail, making an outlaw’s hideout in the woods. All kinds of good old-fashioned fun.’

  Stone believed that Tom was taking a circuitous route to what he really wanted to discuss, and decided to go along with it.

  ‘One thing we did every spring was pick rocks out of Erwin Slominski’s cornfields after school,’ he said, remembering how he and the other kids had tramped over the previous year’s wheat stubble under the big Minnesota sky, following Erwin’s ancient John Deere, plucking rocks from the black dirt and tossing them into the trailer. ‘If you asked Erwin if a rock was big enough to pick, he’d say leave it, it’ll be bigger next year.’

  ‘Sounds too much like work. I’d’ve preferred hanging out in the drugstore, trying to be cool around the girls,’ Tom said.

  ‘We did some of that, too.’

  ‘Any girl in particular?’

  ‘There were one or two.’

  New Hamburg’s teenagers had spent most of every summer out at Lake Louise, where the boys hung out on the dock and pretended to ignore the girls lying in their swimsuits and tight shorts and T-shirts on towels and tablecloths spread on the grassy bank. Stone remembered trying not to stare too hard at Suzy Segler in her polka-dot bikini. Suzy Segler, with her cute pout and the little bounce she put in her walk. He remembered how he’d spent a whole hour outside Suzy’s parents’ house, working up the courage to ask her to the high school prom, remembered his amazement when she’d said yes. Remembered making out with her after the ball in the car he’d borrowed from his foster parents, the same car they would die in four years later. The smell of her perfume in the hot summer night. The deep-sea smell of her on his fingers.

  Tom tossed one of his rocks to Stone and said, ‘How’s your throwing arm?’

  Stone weighed the rock in his hand, looked at the big clapboard house, its black empty windows and sagging porch and steeply pitched roof. ‘It looks like plenty of kids beat us to this one.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe one of them was me.’

  ‘Is that why you came here, Tom? To check up on your doppel?’

  ‘There’s one on the second floor looks like it’s mostly intact. See it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Count of three.’

  They counted, threw. There was the brief music of glass falling in the darkness.

  ‘How about getting rid of your pistol,’ Tom said. He was aiming his .38 at Stone now.

  ‘What is this, Tom? You asked me to come here. And I came because I want to help you.’

  ‘Take your pistol out and toss it into the weeds. If you don’t, I’ll have to shoot you, just like you shot me that time.’

  Tom looked like a desperado who’d barely escaped a lynch mob, but he was holding the .38 rock-steady, his finger curled inside the trigger guard, the hammer cocked.

  ‘I’ll do it to show my trust in you,’ Stone said, and pitched his pistol a good way into the darkness beyond the car’s headlights. ‘I hope you’ll show me the same courtesy.’

  ‘Not to trust anyone, that’s the whole of the law. Turn around, assume the position. Hands flat on the roof, feet wide apart.’

  As Tom quickly and thoroughly frisked him, Stone said, ‘You still haven’t told me what you are doing here. Did you look up your family? Check out scenes from your lost childhood?’

  ‘Except it wasn’t really my childhood, was it? It was my doppel’s. Speaking of which, there’s something I want to show you. Get back in the car, you can drive me to the church.’

  They drove through the town. Tom hummed a tune, watching the Chevy’s reflection slide over the windows of a row of shops, watching houses go by, dark and quiet behind white picket fences and neatly manicured lawns. Stone thought of and suppressed a dozen questions. He wasn’t here to interrogate his old friend. He was here to listen. At the church, he cut the car’s motor and headlights and drifted to a halt under the row of young maples. A breeze rummaged in their dry leaves. Apart from a single light burning in an insomniac’s bedroom, the little town seemed to be fast asleep.

  Tom took a slug of bourbon and handed the bottle to Stone. ‘Remember those physics lectures we had to endure, back when we were young and innocent?’

  Stone took a small sip, just enough to taste, passed the bottle back. ‘Did you really bring me all the way out here to talk about the old days?’

  Tom smiled his gaunt, ghastly smile. ‘Be patient, Adam. I’m giving you what I can.’

  ‘So this is going somewhere.’

  ‘Sure it is. What was the name of the guy who tried his best to initiate us into the mysteries of quantum physics? It’s been on the tip of my tongue the last two days, bugging the hell out of me.’

  ‘Professor Lehman. Fred Lehman. I was thinking about those physics lectures the other day. About how you derailed Fred Lehman with that remark about the cat.’

  Tom said that he didn’t remember. After Stone told him the story, he smiled and said, ‘I had a smart mouth, didn’t I? Always the class clown.’

  ‘You liked to stir things up.’

  ‘I was full of piss and vinegar back then, eager to prove how fucking good I was. There was this cat in one of the orphanages where I spent my childhood. This old stray that wandered into the basement and was tolerated because she kept down the mice. I was one of the kids who looked out for her. We’d bring her milk, scraps of meat. She got pregnant about half a dozen times, and each time the super would deal with the kittens. He always told us he’d found homes for them, but I reckon he tossed them in the furnace. The cat would search for them for a week or so, nosing around in every corner, and then she’d seem to forget.’

  Tom was looking through the windshield at the church spire, pale as its own ghost against the night sky.

  ‘The last time she got pregnant, she was pretty old for a cat. Something went wrong when she gave birth. She dragged herself under a pile of broken furniture, and that’s where I found her a couple of days later. She was dead, and there were three dead kittens and one just barely alive, trying to get milk from its mother. We tried to nurse it, but it died too . . . Maybe that’s what I remembered when Prof Lehman started talking about that thought experiment, the cat in the box that was half alive, half dead. Maybe I was wondering if that poor old cat had been in the same either/or state until I collapsed it by finding her. That if I hadn’t gone looking for her, she might in some sense still be alive.’

  ‘As I remember it,’ Stone said, ‘being dead or alive isn’t an intrinsic property of a cat’s elemental quantum constituents, the atoms and electrons and everything else. If you tried to combine the quantum state of a dead cat with the quantum state of a live cat, the dead half would be free to evolve into other dead states, and the live half would be free to evolve into other live states. They’d both evolve away from each other. They’d decohere, just like daughter sheaves split by some significant change.’

  Tom Waverly hacked into his fist, then drank from the half-pint of Four Roses. It was almost empty now. ‘You always had something of the geek about you, Adam. If I’m honest, that earnest literalmindedness of yours used to drive me fucking nuts sometimes, but I admit that lately I’ve been missing it. For maybe five minutes here and there, anyway.’

  ‘I guess we aren’t here to talk about quantum states.’

  ‘The thing I want to show you? It’s in the cemetery.’

  It was over in the far corner, a grave so new that it still lacked a marker. Wreaths and bunches of wilted flowers covered a mound of raw dirt that hadn’t yet settled. Tom Waverly stood on one side of it, told Stone to stand on the other.

  ‘In case you get a dumb idea about trying to wrestle the gun away from me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, Tom.’

&n
bsp; Stone was pretty sure that he knew whose grave this was. A coldness had crept over his entire skin.

  ‘I guess me and the poor schmuck lying here in his grave began to evolve away from each other a long time ago,’ Tom said. ‘We definitely have our differences now. He’s exploring all the different ways of being dead, and I’m still trying out different ways of being alive. Trouble is, I’m running out of options.’

  He was a shadow in the shadowy dark. The glow of the streetlights seemed very far away, another country.

  ‘He died two weeks ago. A traffic accident, according to the local newspaper. They gave it the front page, gave him a nice obituary, too. He had a job selling farm machinery, he was married to the same woman for twenty-two years, he had three kids. He was in the Rotary Club, he was on the school board, he served a term as a selectman, organising scrap drives, paper drives, rubber drives. They got to be very big on recycling and making-do here, in the long economic slump after their nuclear war, and now there’s the war in Texas. If the Real wants to make this America a power in its own history, it has its work cut out. Anyway, he was a solid John Q. Public citizen. And a couple of weeks ago he’s driving along one of the back roads to visit some farm, his brakes fail at the top of a steep grade, and he hits a tree at about sixty miles an hour. Flies through the windshield, that’s all she wrote.’

  Stone said, ‘I have the feeling that you’re going to tell me it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘The wreck is out back in the local garage. I snuck in two nights ago, took a look at it. The brake lines had been cut, fucking local cops didn’t even bother to check. I guess they found out about him from the voters’ register, or maybe from his army service. He spent three years helping clean up around the edges of San Diego - the Soviets hit the naval dockyards there with two big bombs. Maybe they’re killing them all off. All my doppels in all the sheaves. Poetic justice, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Because you’re killing off the doppels of Eileen Barrie?’

  ‘Now we’re getting down to it.’

  Tom Waverly’s face was no more than a pale blur floating in the near dark, but Stone could hear the smile in his voice.

  Stone said, ‘Did you start off by killing the Real version?’

  ‘I’ll have to take the Fifth on that.’

  ‘But you knew her, didn’t you? That’s where it began.’

  ‘Again, I’m not about to incriminate myself.’

  ‘I came here to help you, Tom, any way I can. Maybe you don’t know it, but the locals have a shoot-on-sight policy because you killed that cop. Turns out he wasn’t just any cop. He was also the nephew of the mayor of New York.’

  ‘Oops.’

  ‘It isn’t funny.’

  ‘I guess not. What did Welch tell you to offer me?’

  ‘He told me to bring you in alive. After that, I guess it’s between you and Ralph Kohler.’

  ‘I bet. How about you, Adam? Do you have any say in my . . . disposition?’

  ‘I retired, Tom. I came here because you asked for me.’

  ‘I don’t recall asking you to bring my daughter with you.’

  ‘When I shook off the tail, I gave her the choice to stay behind. She wanted to come along with me because she wanted to see you, Tom. Because she hasn’t seen you for more than three years, and she thought you were dead.’

  Tom Waverly cocked his head, suddenly alert as a car went past in the distance. ‘And you let her come along out of the kindness of your heart. Not because you thought she might help you talk me into giving myself up. No, it’s okay. You don’t have to explain. I’m kind of glad you did it, Adam. You and Linda . . . maybe it’ll work out better this way.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay here. You can come back with me. You can come in, Tom. You talk it over with me, or with whoever you want.’

  ‘The poor schmuck in this grave, you think he had a good life?’

  ‘From what you told me, it sounds like he did.’

  ‘How about me? You think I did good? You and me, do you think we did good? That we lived good lives, doing what we did?’

  ‘I think that we served our country as best we could.’

  ‘I bet you still think that Jimmy fucking Carter is right. That we shouldn’t have meddled in the politics of other sheaves. That we’ve created more problems than we’ve solved. I used to think that was so much bullshit, Christ knows I did. I really believed that we were working for freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all the rest of that good American horsepuckey. Now . . . now, it looks like I was just as much a schmuck as this poor guy. We were supposed to be protecting places like this. American families in little American towns, there’s no better way of living, right? We wanted everyone in the world, hell, in the entire multiverse, to be able to enjoy it. We wanted to give our freedom, our way of life, to every counterpart of America we could find. And you know what? Most of them hate us for it. They envy what we have, and when we try to give it to them, they hate us for our presumption. People back in the Real, ordinary people living their quiet lives in quiet little American towns exactly like this, except they’re a little more prosperous and much less radioactive, you think if they knew about everything that’s been done in their name, they’d still believe we were heroes? The Company received a big black eye after the Church Committee published its findings, but we both know that its public report didn’t reveal one-tenth of what it found in the dungeons. At the time, by the way, I thought you were a fucking fool for going up in front of the committee and speaking out the way you did instead of taking the Fifth. But now, I can’t help thinking that you were right to do it. And Carter, he may be a weak president who probably won’t win another term, but I reckon now that he was right too, when he tried to put a stop to the endless expansion, the endless wars and post-war insurrections . . .’ Tom Waverly shook his head, said, ‘If I poured some bourbon on my doppel’s grave, you think it would make him rise from the dead?’

  ‘I think it would be a waste of good bourbon.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’ Tom took a last swig and threw the bottle away with a stiff-armed toss. Saying, as it thumped on grass somewhere in the dark, ‘There are other ways of bringing back the dead - if this works out you’ll see what I mean soon enough. Besides, in some other sheaf, the poor schmuck is still alive. He missed that tree, or the fucker supposed to cut his brakes had a heart attack on the way, or I didn’t start this thing, or they caught me early and disposed of me. We made a difference? Maybe in a dozen or so sheaves, but what’s that in the face of infinity? You might as well try to raise the sea level by taking a piss in the ocean.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tom.’

  ‘Suppose I told you that there are people in the Company doing things far worse than anything the Church Committee ever accused us of?’

  ‘Let me bring you in, Tom. You can talk about everything then.’

  ‘I took a big enough risk luring you out here. You and Linda. I asked her, what do people in the Company say when they discover she’s the daughter of Tom Waverly? Know what she said? If they’re smiling, she tells them that she’s very proud; if they aren’t smiling, she tells them it’s none of their business. And if they push it, she tells them to go to hell.’

  ‘From what I’ve seen, she has the makings of a good officer.’

  ‘Help her out, Adam. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘Is this something to do with what you guys were talking about, back in the motel room?’

  ‘You want to know why I’ve been killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels? It isn’t because of what she did to me, although that was bad enough. What it is, I’m trying to make a difference. I’m trying to save myself from myself. I’m trying to make sure that when you lift the lid on that dumb box Prof Lehman told us about, the cat’ll be alive and well. Are you afraid, Adam?’

  ‘Of you? A little.’

  ‘I’ve killed eighteen people for the Company. Sometimes I was close enough to feel their las
t breath on my face. And I’ve killed other people too. After I got you back from Jack Walker and his grim little band of ecowarriors, I killed General E. Everett McBride. Poisoned his whiskey with ricin. The fucker went out a lot more quickly than some of the teenage girls he raped and murdered.’

  In the quiet dark of the cemetery, Tom Waverly was calling up all his ghosts. Stone, afraid that his friend was looking for judgement or had already passed judgement on himself, said, ‘I’ll help Linda any way I can, Tom. And I can help you, too, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘Knightly found out about McBride, he also found out about a little something I had going on the side, and he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Either I went to work for him, or I’d be hung out to dry. All the people I killed, it was the one who deserved it most, General E. Everett fucking McBride, rapist, murderer, self-righteous scum of the earth, who fucked me up. Want to know why I killed Nathan Tate? Because he’d gone over to the dark side. He was one of them. And God help me, I was one of them too.’ Tom looked at Stone across the grave of his doppel. ‘Know why I wanted you to come here? Because this is all your fault. Because, back when SWIFT SWORD kicked off, you shouldn’t have stopped me. You should have let me go out in a blaze of glory.’

  Stone understood. ‘You were running away from Knightly.’

  ‘You got to ease your conscience in front of the Church Committee, ’ Tom said, bitterness colouring his voice for the first time. ‘You got to retire. I got Knightly, telling me I could work for him or spend the rest of my life in jail.’

  ‘You staged a disappearance because you were working for Knightly on some black op within the Company, something the DCI doesn’t know about. And you carried on working for this black op after Knightly was indicted, and had his stroke.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And Eileen Barrie was part of this thing too.’

  ‘I wish I could tell you everything, Adam. But if I do it might not work out the way it’s supposed to. Besides, I believe we’ve run out of time. Listen.’

  Stone heard it: the faint wail of a siren twisting somewhere in the night. ‘I guess Linda woke up.’