Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust

by Tim Powers

  A few minutes later he blinked awake, then went to sleep again, reassured to find his bourbon sitting nearby and his weary head resting comfortably in Skooney’s lap.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Last Night of the World

  THE SMELL OF COFFEE woke him. It was still dark, but people were padding about and muttering to each other. He looked up and saw that Skooney was still sleeping, so he sat up gently. Streaks of dim gray light were filtering in around the plywood on the windows, and the air carried a damp chill—plainly, he thought, the heat spell is over.

  Skooney yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Coffee,” she said. “I believe someone has made coffee. Good morning, Rufus.” She stood up. “Shall I get you a cup?”

  Thomas got to his feet, wincing a little at the aches and stiffnesses in him. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  They joined the group of people gathered around a huge iron pot, and Lambert ladled coffee into two cups for them. “Trail coffee,” he said. “For the theft of which Prometheus was chained to a rock in the Newport Harbor.”

  It was hot, thick and strong, and had to be drunk black for lack of anything to put in it, so they gingerly carried the cups back to their place by the wall and sat down to drink it slowly. Thomas was shivering, and Skooney borrowed a shirt from someone for him.

  Gladhand, propped on his crutches, poled his way to the bar and sat down on one of the stools. “Okay, gang,” he said loudly, “settle yourselves somewhere and listen close. Pat Pearl, as you may already know, was a spy, an android.” There were a few exclamations of surprise, but most of the actors nodded grimly. Skooney just listened, and Thomas was grateful for that. “I had planned to mount our attack on city hall next Saturday; that’s why our opening night was rescheduled to this coming Wednesday. But under these present circumstances, I have moved the date up—our attack will take place tonight, at midnight.”

  There were raised eyebrows, and a few deep breaths expelled, but no one spoke.

  “I have hired,” Gladhand went on, “a hundred Riverside mercenaries under Captain Adam Stimpson. They’re camped not five miles from here, in the Alhambra hills. They’ll dynamite a section of the city wall just north of Whittier Boulevard, and enter the city that way. Our own forces within the city now number about five hundred, and four hundred of these will join Stimpson’s army at Whittier and Alameda, and proceed north. The rest of our men will pick up guns and ammunition from a gun-runner near the City College over by Vermont. These will then proceed southeast and attack city hall from the rear while the main force, under Stimpson, attacks from the front. I have,” he said with a note of great pride, “four cannons, culverins, two four-pounders and two nine-pounders. Stimpson will have the nines, the rear force the fours.”

  “All this is happening tonight?” Jeff finally said. “I had no idea you had this much organized.”

  Gladhand smiled. “I’ve never been one to keep people informed about my activities,” he said. “Keep the cards close to the vest, I say. So I want no one to leave this building today. Alice is on the roof with a rifle now, to be sure that order is obeyed. If we are harboring any more spies—I don’t think we are—they won’t be able to pass this information on until it’s stale. In the back there,” he went on, nodding over everyone’s heads, “you’ll notice Lambert tacking up papers. These are lists of the various troop assignments; check where you’re to go, and who with, sometime this morning. So, until tonight, talk, eat, oil your weapons, and sleep. All the liquor will be locked up at noon, though rum will be available just before the fight for those who want it.” He hopped down from the bar-stool and thumped off to the kitchen.

  At the bottom of Thomas’ cup the coffee was thick as mud, but he drank all of it that could be tapped out. Skooney had set the last half of hers aside.

  “Today’s… Saturday, right?” Thomas asked. She nodded. “A week and two days ago,” he went on, “I was pumping a vat of Pinot Noir at the Merignac monastery.”

  “Pumping a vat?” Skooney echoed.

  “Yeah. The grape skins float on the surface in a thick layer, and you have to pump the wine from below over them again and again until it’s dark enough. The skins are what give it the red color.”

  “Oh.” She thought about it for a while. “You were a monk?”

  “Sort of. An apprentice monk.”

  “Not a student from Berkeley?”

  “No. I made that up.”

  A muted hissing swept over the building and Thomas realized it was raining. “It’s been a hell of a week,” he said. “And now rain.”

  Someone had found the furnace, and after clinking around in its works for ten minutes got it lit and filled it with pulled-down strips of the wall paneling. Thomas stretched out along the wall base and went to sleep again.

  Gladhand was thumbing the cork into the bourbon bottle when Thomas shambled up, rubbing his eyes. “Did I wait too long?” Thomas asked.

  “Well, yes. It’s twelve-oh-one. But go ahead, have a cup for medicinal purposes.” Thomas picked up a paper cup and held it out while Gladhand poured whiskey into it. “Sit down, Thomas; there are things to discuss.” Gladhand poured himself a cup and sipped it reflectively.

  “It’s like a chess game,” the theatre manager said, half to himself. “You study the situation, the strengths, weaknesses, ignorances; then you construct a plan and begin to put it into effect—but even as you move, the situation changes under your feet. Your opponent can disappear and be replaced. You can be replaced. Politics is a very slippery arena.”

  “Uh, no doubt, sir,” Thomas said, mystified by all this.

  “Have you looked at the assignment lists yet?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “You’re to be in the smaller force that attacks from the rear. A man named Naxos Gaudete is leading that group. Spencer was to have been his lieutenant—kind of all-around errand-runner, in other words—and I’m thinking you might do as a replacement.”

  “What would I have to do? I mean, I don’t—”

  “Nothing difficult. Just fetch things, carry a few boxes perhaps, relay messages. You won’t even be in the actual fighting—wouldn’t be anyway, with your trigger finger gone.”

  “I see. Well, sure; just so Gaudete doesn’t expect me to know how to load cannons or anything.”

  “Splendid. By this time tomorrow, God willing, Joe Pelias—the real one—will be smoking a cigar in the mayor’s office.”

  “Does he know the date’s been moved up? Where is he, anyway?”

  Gladhand sighed. “You’re looking at him,” he said softly.

  Thomas blinked. “Am I?”

  “Yes. Ten years ago, when that grenade blew my legs nearly off, two friends loaded my bleeding wreckage into a baker’s cart and drove me deep into the city. I had an ex-wife living down on Central, and she grudgingly nursed me back to health while Hancock’s damned android began taking over my… job, my life. When I’d healed, as much as I was ever to do, the android was well-entrenched in city hall; so I decided to wait, and organize an underground resistance army that I could use, when the time came, to restore me to the mayor’s office. So I grew a beard, shaved my head and had the roots killed, and became Nathan Gladhand, theatre manager.”

  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 so
mebody 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 st
reet.

  “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.