Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust

by Tim Powers

  Pat seemed tense, and he patted her hand reassuringly. “But Albers is dead now,” he told her, “and you and Spencer and Gladhand are the only ones that know I’m Thomas. So I’m safe again.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. Then she shook her head, and Thomas noticed in her eyes an expression of hopelessness he’d never seen there before. “Oh, but for how long, Rufus? How long will you be safe? And what can conceivably become of us?”

  Thomas put his arm around her shoulders. “It isn’t that bad,” he said softly. “They aren’t omnipotent. And I’ll tell you what’s to become of us—we’ll get married when all this political foolishness is over with.”

  She buried her face in his shoulder and said nothing.

  Thomas stroked her fine hair and stared thoughtfully at the vista of rooftops stretching away as far as he could see to the south. I wonder what would have happened if I’d reached San Pedro, he thought. He tried to picture himself dashing about the deck of a steamer, stripped to the waist and tanned the color of an old penny—but the absence of Pat from the daydream made it unconvincing.

  After a while, four gunshots sounded a few streets away, and Pat jumped. “God, that’s a recurrent sound these days,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Thomas agreed. “And you never find out who was shooting, or being shot at.”

  Pat stood up and stretched. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Some of us girls are going out for ice cream this afternoon.”

  “Ice cream?” Thomas didn’t know what that was.

  “Yeah. I’ll see you later. Rufus,” she said gravely, “I love you. Do you believe that?”

  He looked at her intently. “Yes.”

  “Good. See you later.” She loped to the stairway door and disappeared. Thomas carried his chair away from the edge into the shadow of a beach umbrella, and sat down and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  Deductions in Room Four

  THE RAYS OF THE late afternoon sun, slanting under the rim of the umbrella, glared against his eyelids and woke him up. He got to his feet and rubbed his eyes, feeling disoriented and apprehensive.

  The only person in the greenroom, he found when he’d shambled down the stairs, was Gladhand, who was drinking scotch. Thomas dropped himself into one of the chairs.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked.

  “Spencer and Jeff and Lambert are off on a bit of official business,” Gladhand said. “You’re exempt from all that till your hand heals. Most of the girls went off to eat snacks somewhere. I’m sitting here drinking.”

  Thomas nodded. “If it’s all right with you, sir, I think I’ll go have a solitary beer or two at the Blind Moon.”

  “Sounds like a valid course. Here.” He reached into a pocket and handed Thomas a ten-soli bill.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The girls took that ridiculous car, but I believe you’ll find at least one horse out back.”

  Thomas left the building by the rear entrance, and did indeed find a horse in one of the stalls—a sturdy creature of indeterminate breed that winked at him when he patted its nose. He saddled the beast with only moderate difficulty, mounted it, led it out of the back lot and rode slowly east on Second for a block and then turned left onto Spring. The horse seemed as lazy as Thomas, and clopped along at an easy pace.

  Only a few people were out, sitting against buildings or slouching along the old sidewalks. The slightly cooler wind of evening carried smells of frying meat and spicy sauces, and Thomas realized most citizens were inside having dinner. As a matter of fact, he told himself, a bowl of chili at the Blind Moon might be a good thing.

  Soon after he crossed the bridge over the freeway, the city wall loomed ahead; and in its long shadow, dwarfed between two neighboring structures, stood the little building that was the Blind Moon of Los Angeles. Its narrow windows were already casting streaks of light across the darkening pavement as Thomas tied his horse to the post out front.

  He pushed open the swinging door and crossed directly to the bar. “A pitcher of draft beer, please, and a bowl of chili,” he said to the girl who was washing glasses.

  “Coming right up, sport,” she said. “Where you sitting?”

  “Uh, back there,” Thomas pointed to a table against the wall, then crossed to it and sat down. On the wall across from him was the photograph of Negri and Jean. They’re both dead now, he thought. In less than a week that picture has become very old.

  “Cheer up, pal,” the barmaid said, walking up to his table. “Your beer and chili have arrived.”

  I suppose that’s as good an excuse as any for cheering up, he thought. “Thank you.”

  He gulped the beer, holding his breath, until his throat stung, and then set the glass down and let the alcohol relax him. God, I’m tired, he thought. When do they call time-out for rest around here?

  He refilled his glass—awkwardly, for he used his left hand. When he’d filled it, someone sat down across from him and held forward an empty glass. “You owe me one,” came a hoarse voice.

  Thomas looked up, and smiled in recognition, “Uh, Jenkins, right? The scholar from Berkeley.”

  “That’s right,” the old man whispered with a jerky nod. “Listen, I’ve got to leave town.”

  “Oh? That’s not as easy as it used to be, I hear,” Thomas remarked as he filled the man’s glass. “Why are you leaving? You finish your research?”

  “You could say so.” Jenkins grinned mirthlessly and reached into an inner pocket of his coat. “You know Spencer, don’t you? Of course. I talked his girlfriend into getting me a copy of the key to the city archives.”

  Thomas looked at him with more respect. “Let nobody deny you’re a true scholar, Jenkins,” he said. “Did you find this…” he racked his memory, “…Strogoff letter you wanted?”

  The old man looked near to tears. “I did. Here,” he said, pulling an envelope out of his coat. “Hold it for me. It’s too big for me to… it’s just too big for me. I’ve got to get out of the city, and then I’ll send you an address to which you can mail it. I’ll pay you well for helping me, of course.”

  Thomas turned it over; a new seal held the flap closed. “You’ve read it,” he said.

  “Yes. I wish I hadn’t. Don’t you read it, please. Just hold it for me. Will you give me your word that you’ll do as I say? I’ll pay you five hundred solis for mailing it to me unopened.”

  Thomas considered it. “Okay,” he said finally, “I give you my word.” Five hundred solis is five hundred solis, he reflected.

  “As an actor and friend of Spencer’s?”

  “As those things, yes.”

  Jenkins clasped Thomas’ shoulder. “God bless you, boy,” he said. “I was afraid I’d have to try and leave the city with it on me; and if they’d found it at the gate, well—” he blinked. “God bless you. I’ll dedicate the book to you.”

  “Thanks.” Thomas watched, half mystified and half amused, as the old man stood up, wiped his wet eyes with a coat-tail and scurried toward the front door. Poor old bastard, Thomas thought. All upset over a letter some philosopher wrote ten years ago. And look, he never even touched his beer! Thomas poured it back into the pitcher as the door swung shut after the old scholar.

  “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 Hi
gh 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. “Spence!” 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 difficulty 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 intrinsi
c 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?