Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Tom was still in an exuberant and playful mood. He’d bought a tape cassette of one of Bob Dylan’s old albums at the service station where Linda had pumped fifteen gallons of expensive gasoline into the station wagon’s tank, had been singing snatches of the songs and beating time to the music as he watched traffic moving in the sunlight. Linda was quieter, her face masked by the amber sunglasses her father had purchased with the cassettes.

  Stone sat quietly in the back seat. He was still having trouble putting his thoughts together, but he decided that the first thing he needed to do was find out if this version of Tom Waverly could fill in the gaps in the story that the other version of Tom Waverly had told him in the Pottersville cemetery. The one who had been dying of radiation poisoning; the one who had shot himself.

  ‘You were working for this thing of Dick Knightly’s,’ Stone said. ‘For Operation GYPSY. Want to tell me exactly what you were doing for him?’

  ‘You have to get into this now, Adam? It’s a complicated story, and after all you’ve been through I’m not sure if you’ll be able to appreciate it properly.’

  ‘After all I’ve been through, I deserve to know what’s going on,’ Stone said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Knightly recruited you after SWIFT SWORD. What happened next?’

  ‘He tried to recruit me during SWIFT SWORD, which is why I wanted to try for a last chance at guts and glory, and we both know how that worked out. When the dust from that had settled, right after the Conduct Board had slapped my wrist, Knightly came back to me with his offer. He said that if I didn’t go work for him, he’d ring the gong, tell the Company how I’d neutralised General E. Everett McBride, and also tell them about the various little scams I had going to supplement my pension fund. The man knew just about everything, Adam. I had no choice.’

  ‘So you faked your own death and went to work for GYPSY.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Which kept going after Knightly was jailed, and suffered his stroke.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tom said again, and laughed.

  ‘Marsha Mason and Nathan Tate were working for it too. You were all working together.’

  ‘But I got out,’ Tom Waverly said.

  ‘And you stole something. What were you planning to do with it, before you got that phone call?’

  ‘Oh, you believe I got that phone call now?’

  Linda said, ‘He was told more or less what I was told in Pottersville, Mr Stone. He knew we were coming here, and he knew how to find us.’

  ‘You stole something that could change history,’ Stone said to Tom. ‘What is it? What does it do?’

  Tom Waverly turned in his seat and looked at Stone over the top of his sunglasses. ‘I call it the time key. It lets you use gates to travel into the past.’

  ‘Cut the bullshit, Tom. If you can’t give me straight answers, don’t expect me to help you.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘This is what GYPSY is all about. This is what Dr Barrie was working on. Officially, GYPSY is a clandestine research facility that’s developing portable Turing gates. Gates you can put on the back of a pickup truck and move anywhere. But that’s just a front for a black op. For Dr Barrie’s real research.’

  ‘Dr Barrie is working for GYPSY,’ Stone said. That much he could understand. ‘Is that why you were killing her doppels, Tom? Were you trying to draw attention to her?’

  ‘It won’t come to that, Adam. Not now.’

  Another evasion. Stone wondered if the man who’d shot and killed himself in Pottersville had been a doppel of Tom Waverly tutored in every aspect of the real Tom Waverly’s life. Or maybe Tom hadn’t killed himself in Pottersville after all. Maybe the whole thing had been a charade, a piece of live-action disinformation involving blood-filled squibs and a gun loaded with blanks, just like the movies. But that meant Freddy Layne, with his story about a lethal dose of radiation, had to be in on it, too . . .

  He said, ‘Let’s say I believe you stole something crucial to GYPSY, that possession of it gives you a way out of this thing you were blackmailed into working for. Why didn’t you take it to the Company, Tom? Why didn’t you turn yourself in? Why go to all this trouble to involve Linda and me?’

  ‘The Company believed that I was dead. And now I’m dead all over again, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way.’

  ‘You need a middleman - is that what this is about? Did you kill Dr Barrie’s doppels just to bring me into this?’

  ‘That’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer, I really do.’

  ‘If you want me to help you out, Tom, you’re going to have to be straight with me.’

  ‘I’m not playing any kind of game. I don’t know why Eileen Barrie’s doppels were killed because it wasn’t anything to with me. I haven’t harmed a hair on any one of their heads, swear to God.’

  ‘It won’t happen,’ Linda said.

  ‘Not in this universe, honey. Not if we can help it, eh?’

  ‘Not anywhere, if I can help it.’

  There was a space of silence. The last song on the tape, a lament for lost love, played out. Tom popped out the cassette and put it back in its case, then read a couple of sentences from the liner notes.

  ‘Listen to this, Adam. He could be speaking directly to us. “Dylan’s Redemption Songs! If he can do it we can do it. America can do it.” Think we can do it, Adam?’

  ‘That depends on what we’re trying to do. And who we’re doing it for.’

  ‘You don’t trust me. I understand that. But you’re going to have to learn to trust me before this thing is through. Listen: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Also, “A new world is only a new mind.” Ain’t it the truth? If you make enough of a difference, affect enough observers, make enough resonance in the General Quantum Field, you definitely get a whole new universe.’

  ‘Are you doing it for yourself, Tom, or for America?’

  ‘I’m a patriot. Always have been, always will be. Do you doubt that as well?’

  ‘You’re talking about time travel and looking for messages in found text, Tom. And after all that’s gone down in the past couple of days, you can’t blame me for harbouring one or two doubts.’

  ‘Someone once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But I reckon they’re the unconscious legislators, tapping into the background hum of the General Quantum Field, what used to be called the group unconsciousness. They don’t know where their babble comes from, and as long as they can grab a few lines that echo in eternity they don’t care. This guy who wrote the liner notes - Allen Ginsberg. You remember him, Adam? That crazy mission of yours right here in this very sheaf, back in 1973?’

  ‘I remember that I was a lot younger than I am now, and also a lot more arrogant.’

  ‘Adam is partial to this particular sheaf, honey,’ Tom told his daughter. ‘It was one of the first the Company infiltrated. We both worked undercover here in 1969, and he came back a few years later. The President was in all kinds of political trouble, there was an energy crisis and a good chance that nuclear war could have broken out over a situation in the Middle East, and the Cluster decided that it was a hinge-point. Adam was in charge of a team that was working toward starting up a civil war.’

  ‘But in the end it didn’t work out,’ Stone said. ‘And I’m glad that it didn’t, because the locals resolved everything for themselves.’

  ‘We had a seminar about it during the trainee programme,’ Linda said.

  ‘And doesn’t that make you feel old?’ Tom Waverly said. ‘Plenty of people in the Company think we missed a chance, back then.’

  ‘This version of America doesn’t need our help now, and it didn’t need our help back in 1973 either,’ Stone said. ‘It was already a power in the world, on its way to becoming the power, but the Cluster came up with a plan to bring it under our influence anyway, and we were so full of ourselves we tried to carry it through.’

  He and Tom hadn’t seen each other for mo
re than three years, he thought, and they were picking up right where they’d left off.

  ‘You have to admit it was a pretty neat plan,’ Tom said. ‘Cause a civil war right in the middle of that trouble their President was having, come in and help stop what we’d started . . .’

  ‘A neat plan? There would have been civil war all right. Breakdown of law and order, tens of thousands of deaths, all the trouble of policing a post-revolutionary America, and for what? Another version of the Stars and Stripes flying alongside all the other versions outside every Pan-American Alliance Assembly Building in every sheaf? Another version of America forced to buy into the idea that the Real is the centre of the multiverse?’

  ‘I said that it was a neat plan, Adam. I didn’t say that it was a good plan. Remember our argument just before SWIFT SWORD was about to kick off? I was on the side of the Free Americans. I wanted to help them any way I could, and you said nothing good would come of it because they were as bad as the Communists they wanted to overthrow. Remember that?’

  ‘You supported expansionism. So did Dick Knightly.’

  ‘I used to support expansionism, yeah, but I wasn’t as fanatical about it as the Old Man. Why I quit GYPSY? Why I didn’t even want to join up in the first place? It’s because I didn’t like what it was planning to do. It’s because, I guess, I was coming round to your way of thinking.’

  ‘GYPSY is planning covert action to destabilise sheaves, isn’t it?’ Stone said. ‘Sheaves like this one.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Linda said. ‘It’s planning to destabilise our own history by changing the past.’

  Stone laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came bubbling out of him.

  ‘He isn’t ready for this,’ Tom said.

  ‘Show him the time key,’ Linda said. ‘Tell him everything.’

  ‘Maybe we better wait until White Sands. He’ll have to believe it then.’

  ‘Fuck it,’ Linda said, and swerved across two lanes and braked on the hard shoulder, the station wagon rocking on its shocks as a tractor-trailer went past in a rush of wind and a howling horn-blast. She switched off the motor and said, ‘We aren’t going another inch until we get this straightened out. Mr Stone, I want you to listen to what my father has to say. Don’t ask any questions: just listen. And while you’re listening, remember that my father killed himself a few days ago right in front of your eyes, and here he is again. And he isn’t a doppel or some other kind of impostor. He really is my father. Dad, you show Mr Stone the time key and explain how it works. No games. No smoke and mirrors. Just the plain truth.’

  Tom Waverly reached inside his denim jacket and pulled out a padded envelope folded around the shape inside it. ‘This is what Eileen Barrie was working on,’ he said, and tossed the envelope into Stone’s lap.

  Stone picked it up. He could feel something flat and hard inside. It was about the size and weight of a cell phone.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Tom said.

  Linda turned in her seat to watch as Stone reached inside the envelope and drew out a pale green, foggily translucent oblong. It felt cold and then suddenly warm. Little coloured lights flickered inside it and he had the sudden dizzy feeling that the thing was opening into a void miles deep, that baleful stars burning way down inside it were turning to look at him.

  Linda said, ‘Mr Stone? Are you all right?’

  Stone was familiar with fear. He knew from long experience that in a tight spot fear could be your friend, that fear’s little squirts of adrenalin could heighten your senses, bristle your hair, divert blood from vulnerable limbs to the centre of your body, pump you up for fight or flight. This, though, wasn’t fear. This was terror: the bowel-squeezing, scrotum-tightening, mind-freezing terror of a man-ape facing a leopard on the primaeval African veldt. And terror didn’t make you want to fight or flee. Terror took you by the scruff of your neck and shut you down. Terror made you ready to give up your life. You went limp in its jaws; you no longer cared that you were about to be carried off and disembowelled.

  Stone’s grip on the hard little oblong convulsively tightened. It felt slick and soft and disgusting, as if the rotting hand of someone long dead yet still animate had crept into his. He tried to free himself, but his fingers were cramped around it and his gaze was locked on its vertiginous depths, and then a black headache spiked straight through his skull and wiped him clean.

  11

  It was dark when Stone woke, and the station wagon was quiet and still. Tom Waverly leaned in through the open door, bending over him, helping him to sit up. The car was parked outside a two-storey motel. Crickets were trilling to each other in the humid night air, louder than the hum of traffic on a road beyond a thin screen of poplars.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Somewhere outside Indianapolis,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s get you into the room. We’re safe enough here, and you’ll feel a whole lot better after a good night’s sleep.’

  Stone allowed himself to be helped out of the car. ‘Where’s Linda?’

  ‘Gone to get some food at a Chinese place across the highway. How do you feel?’

  ‘I could use a shower and two or three bottles of painkiller.’

  Stone took the shower cold and then hot, as hot as he could stand it, and began to feel vaguely human again. He began to remember what had happened, too - the translucent green oblong coming alive after he pulled it from the envelope, the void opening up and swallowing him whole - but was unable to make any sense of it.

  When he came out of the steamed-up bathroom with a towel knotted around his waist, carrying his clothes and his shoulder holster and pistol, he found Tom and Linda sitting on one of the beds, eating Chinese food from white cartons. Linda stared at the bruises that covered Stone’s torso and asked if he was okay.

  ‘I guess I passed out. No big deal.’

  ‘You took out the key and you had a minor fit,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘Maybe you pressed the wrong combination of switches and made it mad at you. It’s a tricky little gadget. The people who worked on it found that out the hard way.’

  ‘The drugs Walter’s goons gave me did a number on my head,’ Stone said. ‘I’m okay now.’

  Tom studied him. ‘How about some Chinese food? Best medicine in the world. We have Kung Pao chicken, we have deep-fried squid, beef with green peppers, noodles, fully-loaded fried rice. All of it good.’

  Linda said, ‘Don’t you think we should find him a doctor?’

  ‘You want a doctor, Adam?’

  ‘No, no doctor.’

  ‘See, honey? He doesn’t need a doctor.’

  ‘I want to talk about this thing you stole,’ Stone said.

  Stone refused Linda’s offer of a carton of fried rice and sat on one of the beds, the towel still knotted around his waist and his suit jacket draped around his shoulders. Tom straddled a chair next to him and said, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything from A to B and back again.’

  ‘It has a long technical name I can never be bothered to remember, which is why I call it the time key. It has a quantum computer in it - we’re pretty sure it’s a self-aware quantum computer. And I guess it took an instant dislike to you.’

  ‘It’s some kind of weapon, isn’t it?’

  Tom Waverly shook his head. ‘It works Turing gates.’

  ‘What do you mean, it works Turing gates?’

  ‘It works them so you can travel into the past.’

  Linda said quickly, ‘It’s true, Mr Stone. You have to believe him.’

  ‘I’m trying my best.’

  Tom said, ‘Someone phoned me, told me to look out for you and Linda. The man who made that call was the same guy who killed himself in Pottersville. He was a future version of me, Adam. Or at least, he’s a possible future version. Call him Tom Waverly Two. Somewhere in the near future, TW Two got himself a fatal dose of radiation. He knew he was dying, and he used the time key to travel into his recent past to try to change things around. He killed a bunch of Eileen Barrie’s
doppels to stir things up, he got you and Linda involved, and then he killed himself. But in the middle of all that, he also called me, too. I’d just stolen the time key and run out on GYPSY, and I was lying low right here in the Nixon sheaf. I’d smoked my trail, made it to a safe house I set up a while back. No one knew where I was. No one but TW Two, that is, because my present was his past. He knew what I’d done and where I was hiding out because he had already done it. He told me what had happened to him: what would happen to me, if things weren’t fixed. He said that you and Linda would be checking the old dead drop in a few days. From what Linda told me, he went on to the American Bund sheaf, got some medical attention from Freddy Layne’s doctor, and killed two more of Eileen Barrie’s doppels. And then you caught up with him at Pottersville, and he killed himself.’

  ‘Maybe I can believe he was a doppel. But this talk about the future—’

  ‘It’s where he came from, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘He travelled from his present, our future, into his past, our present. Just before he killed himself in Pottersville, he told me to find his apartment in the American Bund’s version of New York, and to make sure that you came along. He said that he’d hidden something there, that I would know where to look for it, and you would know what it meant. He told me that it would lead to something he had stolen from Operation GYPSY, that it could change history, explain why he’d done what he’d done, and clear his name. He also said - and this is what I didn’t tell you at the time - that I would meet him again. He was very emphatic about that. He said that he had travelled into his own past. He said that no matter what happened, I would meet him again.’

  Stone said, ‘And you believed him? That’s why you came here?’

  Linda shook her head. ‘I believed that he had stolen something. I believed that if I found it, it would help explain where he’d been the past three years, and why he killed those women. I believed it would clear his name. As for the stuff about him coming from the future, and me meeting up with him again . . . He was seriously ill. He was dying. And I thought that it had made him delusional. But it turned out that I was wrong. He was telling the truth all along. We followed the trail he left, and it all worked out.’