by Steven Brust
It was sweet of him, really. Oskar, of all people, to come after her. But his power, obvious in everything from his complexion and height, to his good shoes and the way he kept walking toward her, was all wrong for Irina’s operation. “Fuck off, Oskar,” she suggested.
Santi stepped around her. “Who’re you?” he asked Oskar.
“A friend of Sam’s.” Oskar’s focus slid from Irina’s face to Santi’s. For a hothead, Oskar moved with the eerie deliberation of a bomb squad.
“Oskar,” Irina said in a bright smile, “meet Santi, Sam’s best lieutenant.” The compliment worked; Santi straightened fractionally. It was too much to hope her gambit would bring his hand out to shake. “Santi, this is Oskar.” Irina wished she could explain Oskar as “my jealous boyfriend” with maybe a guilty giggle, and get him out of there, but she’d just blown that by flaunting her night with Frio. “I was just leaving,” Irina said, reaching into her bag to pay for the drinks.
“Not quite yet.” Oskar was picking up exactly zero of Irina’s cues. Or ignoring them. He probably couldn’t even see the guy behind him—Irina had just noticed him herself—the blocky bartender, circling around the other side. From behind Oskar, he gestured at the Oreo kid to get out, leave through the back door.
Irina did not want to get shot again. Not for fucking Oskar. But there she was, putting her body up against his in a hug, betting Santi wouldn’t shoot her just to drop Oskar. Not yet anyway. Not unless Oskar started talking. Everyone wants to shoot Oskar when he starts talking.
“I’d like to see Sam Kelly, please,” Oskar told Santi over Irina’s shoulder.
“Everyone would like to see Sam,” Irina said brightly. “Let’s go,” she hissed in Oskar’s ear.
“How you know Kelly?” Santi asked Oskar, so on alert Irina expected lights to start flashing. Surely Oskar was reading the flexion in Santi’s biceps as the slipping of pistol from pants.
“Santi doesn’t know where Sam is,” Irina told Oskar, turning to face Santi, pushing Oskar backward with her ass.
“Sam’s here, in this bar,” Oskar said. “Jimmy told Ren.”
“Obviously not.” Irina tried to catch Santi’s eyes, but he was looking over her shoulder at Oskar. Who was not fucking moving, no matter how Irina shoved at him. The bartender wouldn’t shoot them from behind without some sign from Santi. If Irina read it fast enough, maybe she could drag Oskar down in time.
“Santi—” Oskar was using his reasonable voice. “It’s Santi, right?” Oskar shifted Irina from in front of him to beside him, her back to the bar.
“Yeah,” Santi said, like he was deciding whether to hate Oskar for his size and beauty, or for his arrogance and stupidity.
“You know Frio, right?” Oskar did something with his shoulders, and sat on a barstool. He looked calm, not meek, not even humble, but somehow, Santi was ready to listen.
“Yeah,” Santi said.
Oskar could not go there. He was a stranger—a gorgeous, white, rich, tall stranger—coming into their bar to call out one of their own as the worst kind of wicked. As a traitor. They would shoot him and Irina both.
“Oskar,” she began, but he just kept going, like a bulldozer, like a SWAT tank.
“Frio’s smart, right?” Oskar asked, but he didn’t wait for Santi to answer. He rolled on like caissons, like Throwbots. “He’s tactical,” Oskar said. “And he’s a stone-cold fucking killer if he needs to be.” Oskar didn’t add “right” again, but he waited a second, his eyes on Santi’s. Santi was with him. Irina was too. But where the fuck was he going? “If you were Frio,” Oskar went on, “and you wanted to hide Sam, if Sam was in real trouble, where would you take him?”
Santi hunkered down, shifting from Ready to Set. “Why?” he asked Oskar.
Sweet suckling Satan, Santi knew the answer. If Jimmy was right, and he almost always was, if Sam was actually here, Santi had just figured out where; Irina saw it in the way the pinky and ring finger of his right hand curled. Had Oskar noticed?
No. Oskar was watching for something else, reading Santi’s face for what his “why” meant. Was it “why does Oskar want to know” or “why would Frio be hiding Sam”? And Irina knew Oskar was right to study it. Determining which question Santi was asking and answering it right would make the difference between getting shot, and getting the truth out of Santi.
Irina really did not want to get shot.
Also, she didn’t want Oskar getting shot. He had come after her. He was here, taking risks with her, because maybe, after all, Oskar trusted her the way Phil did. Maybe more than any other Incrementalist, Oskar understood there was only this one world they all had to keep coming back to. And it was only each other left here waiting. That was why Irina had taken the spike all those hundreds of years ago. That was why she joined up with all this madness in the first place—to be a part of something forever. To have people, the same people, with her. She’d lost so many.
The Incrementalists were hers and she was theirs and she stood by them. You stand by your people. That’s what you do. Even if they’re wrong. Celeste had been wrong—hell, Celeste had been crazy and mean and wrong—and Irina had stood by her. Irina had let fucking Phil fucking shoot her rather than betray Celeste’s plan to them. And Santi, she recognized, would shoot them all before he gave up Sam. That was the wildness burning in his teeth. Loyalty. Same as her.
“Don’t tell us,” Irina said. “Send someone to ask Sam if he wants to see us. We’ll wait.”
Santi’s steady glare flickered. Irina pushed it. “Or we can leave,” she promised. “Oskar and I will walk out the door right now if you tell us. But I think Sam would want to know we’re here.” Irina almost had him. “Oskar and I want to do whatever Sam wants us to.”
“She’s right,” Oskar said, and Irina wanted to hug him.
“We work for Sam too,” she said.
Santi spoke over his shoulder in a patter of staccato Spanish, and Irina saw the red of the Angry Birds move from one side of the back hall to the other—out of the bathroom and into some other shadow. She waited, listening to the trudge of the kid’s big sneakers on the stairs, only a couple of steps, fading into the quiet of distance.
Irina waited, hearing only silence from below, then the flat snap of gunfire.
* * *
While Jimmy grazed and Phil ate, Ren tried to be as much of a comfort to Jane as Jane had been in the hospital waiting room, with about as much success. So when Jimmy opened his eyes and announced he’d seeded Sam’s switches as a set of halberds in his armory, Ren suggested he enlist Jane in the work of cooking up switches while she and Phil grazed. Having something to do for Sam would help Jane, even if it didn’t do a thing for Sam. Jimmy would warm up with someone to radiate upon and Jane could certainly use the affection.
Ren closed her eyes, and from the gooey vastness of her Garden, filtered away everything that wasn’t Jimmy in Tucson today. His armory blossomed around her in the exuberant fronds and stalks of a Cotswold cottage garden. Ren strolled moss-grouted cobbles through sunbeams bright with dew and the whir of bees to a bushy stand of pure white foxgloves. She put her face close to the topmost bloom and sniffed. The scent was springtime and powdered honey, but didn’t tell her anything. She sniffed again, and breathed in hot chocolate steam through a nose still frozen from the ski slopes. The switch wasn’t quite the smell but the sensation—the enveloping, slightly intrusive warmth, sweet and stinging. Sam’s switch for “home.”
She saw the pastel clouds and sky on the cover of Frankl’s book as the mingled blue and white of longing.
She tasted hubris in warm sake mugs, Sam drinking too much “tea” before his first sushi dinner, and ending up flushed and giddy when he had wanted to be impressive on his first date with Jane.
Line-dried beach towels smelling of sun and ocean prickled Ren’s cheek with independence. She heard friendship as a twenty-sided die on a vinyl tabletop. The intimate press of Jane’s spine against Sam’s side as he lay on his back was a
switch for something deeper than joy or peace. Ren recognized the sensation although she and Phil slept spooned on their sides, or back against back. If that switch ever shorted out in them like it had in Jane and Sam, Ren thought she’d probably be as willing as Sam was to take a new spike and leave the burnt circuit of love behind. Jesus. And Jane had volunteered him.
Ren didn’t even try to keep the tears from running down her cheeks. Sam might make a better Incrementalist than she was. He’d been willing to give up on love and home in the name of justice and rebellion, and Ren wasn’t even sure she’d taken the spike out of altruism. Sam thought the Hourlies had cost him Jane’s love, but Ren knew it hadn’t. Jane loved Sam enough to make the same sacrifice. But that was a countermeddle—trying to make things better by making them worse. They could do more good together. Ren might have become an Incrementalist out of some selfish, Celeste-programmed desire to love Phil, but the world was better—albeit just incrementally—with their love in it.
Ren opened her eyes. Phil wasn’t in the living room with her anymore, but she could see him and Jimmy with Jane and Daniel in the kitchen. Susi, now resting comfortably on Ren’s feet, was also watching Phil. “What music did Sam listen to?” Jimmy was asking Jane. “Were there particular songs he associated with certain times or feelings? Did he have a road trip mix or one for working out?”
“He has playlists on his phone,” Jane said.
“That won’t help,” Jimmy explained. “He won’t have written the song titles. God, but I miss the cassette tape. Daniel, don’t forget to keep those tissues directly in the smoke.”
“Got it!” Daniel’s cheerful voice sounded achingly young.
Phil chuckled and the sound, so very much Phil, felt warmer than matzo balls to Ren. She stood up.
“What?” Daniel asked Phil.
“The irony, is all. For the first time in, I don’t know, fifty years? we could really use Matt. And he just arranged for himself not to be here.”
“I—” Daniel, still catching the smell of marijuana in a Kleenex, cleared his throat. “I could—” he said, and Ren found she couldn’t blame Kate for thinking he would have made a good Second for Phil. They had the same, long-boned grace of horses—no, colts. She smiled at him as she walked into the kitchen.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Phil told Daniel. “I am me again right away, more or less, in Matsu’s body because Matsu was an Incrementalist, right?” He looked at Jimmy, who nodded.
“Has anyone started on the hot chocolate?” Ren asked. “I thought I’d use the Starbucks cup you made for that health care meddlework,” she told Phil. It was an elegant bit of engineering that concealed a chemical heating pad in the cup and had a small atomizer nozzle in the lid, with an air bladder glued into the hollow at the bottom.
“But we do need Matsu back,” Ramon said from the table where he was alphabetizing Phil’s Tupperware of perfume samples. “He is our pattern shaman. And I’m worried the way he went into stub may make his less stable. I’d like to get him spiked into a new Second quickly. And no matter what Irina says—and I do think she makes some excellent points—we really can’t spike Matsu into Sam’s body. He’s in poor physical condition and well past the age—”
Jane glared at him over the table. “You can’t have him.” A slow wave went through her rigid body and she softened. “I changed my mind, I guess,” she said, mostly to Ren.
Phil caught Ren’s eye, but she shrugged. She hadn’t done anything to meddle Jane into fierceness for Sam. The danger he was in had made her that way. Ren understood the feeling.
“I meant no offense,” Ramon said. “Matsu is a fighter, which is another reason why we could use him right now, but even if we started the ritual this minute, he couldn’t get to the bar in time to do any good.”
“Is there anything I can do that would help?” Daniel stood rigid as a tent pole.
Jimmy turned to him with a grunt that was half laugh. “Well, if seeing how the sausage gets made hasn’t dissuaded you—”
“No,” Daniel said. “It’s even cooler than Kate made it sound.”
“I’ll call Kate again,” Ramon said, and stepped onto the patio with his phone.
* * *
Sunday nights were always a bit of a panic at Kate’s house—she knew they shouldn’t be, but there you are—so when the phone rang at almost midnight, and a young woman identified herself as Ramon, it took Kate a minute to make sense of it all, even though she’d talked to Ramon in his new Second just that morning.
“How’s our patient?” she asked.
“Patient?” Ramon repeated, which made Kate feel better about her own confusion. “Oh, Frio, yes. He’s fine, I think. Or he should be, physically.”
“You know it’s almost midnight here, right?” Kate asked, hoping this wasn’t another medical emergency. Homewrecker’s sister had called half an hour ago, and he was upstairs packing for the drive back to Maine, back to his mom’s bedside. Kate hadn’t even needed to suggest it this time. Now he understood.
“Yes, I know,” Ramon said. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t call if it weren’t important.”
“I know that about you.” Kate poured herself half a glass of B&B one-handed, missing the kind of heavy, curly-corded phones you could hold between your ear and shoulder. “What can I do?”
“We have had some unusual developments here.” Ramon cleared his new throat like his old one, and it sounded weird. “Phil’s stub is now in Matsu, and Matsu is in stub.”
“Holy cow,” Kate said. She’d been headed upstairs, but turned right back around. “Good gracious. Okay, how did that happen? How’s Phil?”
“He seems fine.”
“Thank god.” Kate topped off her snifter. “Tell him I said, ‘How’s the head?’”
“Yes, of course. Kate, Matsu’s transition into stub absent the physical death of his Second raises some concerns about how fully integrated Phil can be while Matsu remains in stub.”
“Really?” Kate said, stopping halfway up the stairs again. Wrecker was packing in the bedroom; she’d be in his way, and he in hers. “You’re worried about that?” she asked Ramon. “You? With your purely computational theory of mind?”
“We have all agreed it would be best to have Matsu back as quickly as possible, and since Daniel’s here and willing, I—”
“Wait. What?” Kate sat down on the steps. “Daniel’s in Tucson? With Ren?”
“Yes.”
“When did he … How … That little bugger.” Kate sat down on the step. “He got their address from the memory I was trying to bore him with.”
“Kate?”
“So he’s there. And Phil doesn’t need a Second. Matsu does. So you’re phoning because you want to spike Matsu into Dan?”
“That’s right.”
“Tonight? With no dust ritual for Matsu, and not even a post to the forum.”
“We feel the circumstances warrant—”
Kate’s mind spun. Daniel was too young, and Matsu needed an athlete’s body. Daniel might have permanent nerve damage in his right leg from the fire. He needed several more grafts, and Matsu won’t thank anyone for signing him up for that. But—
Kate didn’t have two husbands because she was greedy. She wasn’t hoarding men, she just … she had liked having Daniel around.
“Kate?” Wrecker stood in the doorway to the den with his leather overnight bag and a face like a sinkhole. “Mom died.”
Kate had just a tiny moment of not wanting to put the phone down.
“I have to go,” she told Ramon. “Do what you need to.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Alter the Entire Political Landscape
Oskar had promised Ren nobody would get shot. Now he was running toward the sound of gunfire, down the back stairs of the Crazy Horse Saloon. The stairs weren’t entirely happy with his weight, but they held, and Oskar descended into a basement that was moldy and sweaty, full of pallets loaded with liquor boxes. Frio sat, leaning against a stack of Canad
ian Club, holding his leg, a 9 mm in his hand. There was a pool of blood beneath him, and blood on his other hand where he held the leg. Sam faced him, standing three feet away, slightly hunched over, arms a little in front of him, eyes wide. They both turned as Oskar and Irina came down the stairs, and Frio pointed the pistol at Oskar one-handed, but kept his finger off the trigger. Oskar stopped, trapping Irina behind him.
“You have to help him!” Sam stammered, looking from Oskar to Irina. “It’s my fault.” Sam staggered and sat down. “It’s my fault again.”
“Where’s your weapon, Sam?” Irina’s voice was shockingly calm for someone whose most recent Second had been shot to death.
“He didn’t shoot me.” Frio kept the pistol steady. “It’s just a ricochet.”
“So it’s not bleeding?”
“It was my fault,” Sam said again.
Oskar found self-flagellation repulsive. He turned back to Frio. “You were aiming for Sam?”
“If I’d been aiming, he’d be dead.”
Oskar remembered the grouping—three shots directly through the heart from behind. Frio wasn’t bragging.
* * *
I know Phil recorded feeling the first one in the back of his neck, but that isn’t where they hit. I can’t explain it.
—Oskar
* * *
“Frio, baby.” Irina pitched her voice somewhere between Mae West and Cleopatra. “Let us help you?”
Frio grunted and lowered the piece. Irina slithered around Oskar to kneel at Frio’s side.
“Any danger that cops will respond to a ‘shots fired’ call and complicate things?” Oskar came the rest of the way down the stairs.
Frio shook his head. “Not down here,” he said. “They want us killing our own.”
“Except you’re one of theirs.” Irina kept her voice gentle. It was almost a question.
