by Emma Bull
He rubbed his forehead and finished the gesture by smoothing his hair. The copper fish chimed lightly. “She was in a state. Instead of opening a window, she broke the glass with a hammer, I guess.”
“In other words, she didn’t have to do that. Heck, I feel lots better.”
Mick’s front teeth met, sharply. “Look. There’s a limit to how much apologizing I’m going to do for Frances, but I’m not going to trash her for you, either. We went through hell together — and if that sounds like a cliche, it’s not. We were friends. If she’s nuts, I know why. And there’s nothing she’s done that I haven’t done, too.” He stood up, a series of precise movements. “I’m going for food. If you’re not here when I get back, I promise not to give a goddamn.” And he left.
The tea had cleared the foul taste out of my mouth, and had stopped my shaking. I could probably make my way out of the building now, and lose myself in the Night Fair. I remembered, suddenly, the thong from my hair that Frances had held outside the Underbridge. She’d found me then. But maybe she was done with me now that she’d gouged out knowledge and found I wasn’t what she wanted.
Oh, snakes and scorpions. Of course I couldn’t go. The archives were all the hostage anyone needed to hold me. Without them, what did I have to Deal, except fast talk and falsehood?
“Excuse me,” the pale thread of a voice came from the figure on the floor. “Can I borrow two pennies? The man with the ferryboat won’t take my I.O.U.”
She hadn’t moved, except to open her eyes. Those were fixed on me, large and black and smudged underneath with the driven weariness that, I now realized, had been there all night.
“You’re not going to die,” I said. It would be harder than that to squeeze sympathy out of me.
“Ah. That explains it. Though I can’t imagine why I’m not.”
“Because there’s a cure for overwork. More’s the pity.”
She closed her eyes at that. “Do you know, I think I agree?”
I stood up with a lurch and went to pour more water into my mug.
“For what it’s worth — which I suspect is not a lot — I’m sorry,” she added. “When I have a little more energy, I’ll endeavor to grovel, if you want.”
“Don’t put yourself out on my account.” I thought about going into another room. But it would have looked, and felt, like retreat. And there was the possibility, small but non-zero, that if I stayed I might be able to make her uncomfortable. I sat down again. “So, did you have a nice time? Did you get everything you wanted?”
“Out of you? No, since what I wanted was to find out you were Tom Worecski. Does it make you feel better, or worse, to know that you went through that for nothing?”
“Only from your point of view. It makes me feel better that I’m still alive.”
“Ah, yes. Everyone’s first desire. To stay alive.”
I suppose what happened was that we were both made uncomfortable. At any rate, the conversation faltered there.
It was she who broke the silence. “You were in Louisiana?”
At the word, I remembered: waking disoriented and empty of thought, chilly and stiff-limbed, to a steady sound I didn’t recognize. I’d struggled up on one elbow, discomfort in my eyes until I’d realized I could rub them with my fingers and the feeling would go away. Running water, that’s what the sound had been. I flinched and splashed my tea.
“I am sorry,” Frances said. “Whatever that was, it was probably my fault. Memory is like silt, sometimes. It may be a while before it settles.”
“No. I just — I didn’t know I remembered it.”
“What was it?”
“The first thing I ever… Coming up, the first time.”
She looked amused. “The first time for what?”
“No, the first time for anything. When I woke up.”
“It can’t have been the first time, you know,” she said. “You must be one of us, riding a cheval. You’ve mislaid your identity, but it may turn up.”
“You’re the one who went through my head with a crowbar. Didn’t you find it?”
She frowned. “No. Nothing older than a bunker down south.”
“How much of that did you sample?”
She winced; at my tone, I suppose; so I added in the same one, bright and pointy, “Not that I object. I just don’t want to bore you with things you already know.”
I must have reached the limits of her apologetic mood, because she said, “If you bore me, you’ll know. I’m going to get off the floor and sit in this chair. Unless you plan to shoot me if I do.”
And that, I swear, was the first time I remembered the rifle abandoned on the desk. In her hands it had been a malevolent, ticking presence. Out of them, it was a paperweight. Something had happened in the room, something I couldn’t fathom, that had made it unlikely that any of the three of us would shoot the others.
She settled into the slingshot chair like an old woman, and the leather creaked. “What happened to Mick, by the way?”
Had that last been too casual? Was she worried? If so, what about? “He’s gone to get supplies to restore your depleted self.”
Frances looked up at that. “Has he?” she said mildly. “If he has a yen to play Saint Theresa, he can lavish his talents on a more appreciative audience.”
“Since you’ve proven you can take care of yourself.”
“Given the state you were in when I made your acquaintance,” Frances said, “you should talk.”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. Your pal Mick left me lying in the sun.”
“And you warped. I understand. Tell me about Louisiana.”
“It’s very wet.”
“No, I mean waking up in Louisiana.” I stood up again. I was beginning to feel spring-loaded. I stalked to the sink, put my mug in it, and turned around. “Why in hell do you want to know?”
“Maybe I’ll be able to figure out who you are.”
“I know who I am.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Really.”
“All right. I don’t, particularly. But are you surprised that I’d rather be the palace eunuch than one of the great boogeymen of our age?”
“If we were only boogeymen,” she said, echoing my earlier words, “no one would care.” In the way she spoke, I heard again what she’d said to Dusty: Probably. I have a damnably long memory. Indeed. Nobody should have one that long.
“Have you ever done anything that Mick hasn’t?” I asked.
“Did he say that?”
“More or less.”
She laughed a little. Then she said, “He was mistaken.” She raised her eyes to mine. “But don’t tell him. He’ll find out eventually.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“The future is a land unmapped, from which no expedition has returned. I don’t think so. He had nothing to do with the Bang. Strange as it seems, he is, as these things go, a passable human being.”
“Are you going to kill me?” In spite of my conviction, it seemed reasonable to ask.
“I told you I was sorry. No. I’m not.”
“But you’re still going to get this Whatsisname.”
“Yes,” she said, “I am. In the best tradition of vigilantism, I’ve filled all the appointive offices myself: judge, jury, prosecutor, and she-who-pulls-the-trigger.”
“It’s a long time since the Big Bang,” I said uncertainly. I’d been almost at ease with her for a few minutes — or pleasurably uneasy, caught up in the heightened reality of verbal sparring. But her last declaration reminded me of the woman she’d been before she fell down.
“Sparrow, Tom Worecski is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. Does time wipe that clean? How much time? Does remorse? I don’t know if he’s sorry for murdering millions of people and making large areas of the Western Hemisphere uninhabitable, but tell me, how sorry ought he to be before I say, ‘Oh, never mind, I guess that makes it all right’?”
I stared at her, and she stared back. “Is that what I’m sup
posed to say when you apologize?” I asked.
She pressed her lips together. “Point to your side. But believe me, Tom has to die. And I have to do it. There’s no one else.”
“Chango, you could assemble a posse in five minutes if you told ’em what you wanted them for.”
“And shall I tell them how I come by my information? That I know Tom from way back, that we worked together, et cetera? No. There really is no one else.”
This time she didn’t sound as if she took pride in the fact. Or maybe the phrase meant something else, now. She sat staring at her strong hands crossed in her lap, as if images of the long, terrible, unchangeable past were shining up between her fingers.
I pumped the teakettle full of water and put it on the flame. Then I dumped the rest of the chamomile in my chipped enamel teapot and went back to the wing chair.
“Louisiana was wet,” I said. “And getting wetter.” I told the whole story without looking up. I had never told it to anyone. I’d been so careful never to even want to tell it that I’d mostly forgotten it myself. After all, no one else I knew remembered being born.
I’d heard the sound, rubbed my eyes, and recognized the hiss and bubble as running water before I’d seen anything. My vision had been slow to clear; the room revealed itself with each blink, each scrubbing pass with my fingers. The lighting was bluish and uneven. I was surrounded by metal boxes, large ones, with tops that caught the light: glass. I squinted past the reflections into the nearest one.
A dead, sunken face, a shaved head, a mummified naked body. There was a corpse in the box. There were eight boxes in the room, all alike. When, frightened, I turned my eyes away, I saw my own legs and feet, attached to the rest of me, bordered by a box with an open glass lid. I began to scream. I don’t know why; it was an instinct toward terror, a dread of being just like the eight dead things in the room. And of course I was, but for one small detail.
I scrabbled out of the box and fell, and learned that I couldn’t breathe in water. There was almost three feet of it on the floor. I dragged myself up the side of my resting place. On the walls above some of the coffin-boxes, red lights flashed. Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure. It babbled through my head. Later I knew I’d understood the purpose of the lights, but not then.
I had a sudden clear knowledge, like another instinct, of electrocution and the conductivity of water. I staggered clumsily through the flood (the strangeness of that came to me later: I was born knowing how to walk) to a door (sight of it, and the word springing into my head, door, and the understanding of what it did), which I pounded and pushed on. Finally I found a lever in the wall next to it, which turned.
The door crashed inward on its hinges. It and the water that had leaned on it for — years? — threw me back into the room. One of the mummies floated past me, upward; another followed it. The water had broken the boxes open.
And then, when I had to know it, I knew how to swim. I lurched toward the ceiling of that underwater enamel house, sucked air out of the rapidly diminishing space there, and kicked out against the pressure, toward the door.
I learned eventually that it was the water of Lake Pontchartrain I was struggling against. The place where I came up, under a full moon with mist rising white from the surface into the cooler air of a midsummer night, was Bayou St. John. Three weeks later a hurricane added it all to the New Orleans basin.
“How long ago was that?” Frances asked after a little space of quiet had settled between us.
“Fifteen — almost sixteen years, now.”
She leaned her head back and smiled. “Mmm. If I’m right, you’re eighty or more. If you’re right, you’ve barely reached the Golden Age of Skepticism. Either way, you hardly look it.”
I don’t know what I’d expected from the first person to hear that story, but I found Frances’s response oddly comforting. Just another bizarre, life-threatening adventure. How many of them had she had? I went to pour hot water into the teapot.
There were a few cookies, bought maybe a week ago in the mall market, in a tin on the shelf. They weren’t fresh, but they had refused to go stale, either. I carried the tin, along with the teapot and my other mug, over to the desk and set them on the corner nearest her. She looked at the two mugs and said, “Entertain often?”
“I only have an extra for when I’m too lazy to wash the first one. If you were me, would you have a lot of close friends?”
“In my own fashion, I’m under the same constraints. And you’re right, I don’t. It’s a furtive little life, but it’s all mine.” She chewed carefully. “Better already. Butter and sugar, in sufficient quantity, will cure anything.” She ate and worked on her tea as if that were all she could concentrate on, and maybe it was. I’d done my talking; I was prepared to sit, and watch, and see what happened.
At last she set the cup down and slid her hands over her face. “Thank you. God, I’m tired.” She closed her eyes, and I wondered if she meant to fall asleep there. Then she said, “If we’d been left to our own devices, I think none of the Horsemen would have willingly been within a hundred miles of each other. As predators go, we were more like tigers than wolves. Forcing us together like that just made us worse.”
“That gave you a taste for the furtive life?” I asked.
I expected her to ignore me, or, more likely, to turn one of her phrases that sounded impressive and gave away nothing. Instead, she said, “Christ, no. If it gave me a taste for anything… no, only a distaste. For myself, among other things.” She sighed and tipped her head back against the chair. It was harder to see her expression now. “What a damned waste of human potential it all was.”
“Turning Central America into an archipelago wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for you?”
“Is that the proper ambition of humankind? We had — we were like gods.” She gave a gasp of uncomfortable-sounding laughter. “We were like gods. Think of Zeus: He could turn himself into a shower of gold, and all he wanted to do was to cheat on his wife. We played savage practical jokes, ruined lives, and wreaked vengeance. That was our contribution to society.”
“Why did they keep you?”
“Who?”
“The army. Or whoever.”
“Why did they keep the stealth bomber? I’m sorry,” she said when I shook my head. “You don’t know what the stealth bomber was. Or you don’t remember. I suppose they’d spent too much money on us. Though, to be fair, we did exactly what we were meant to do, as long as we felt like it.”
“Which was?” I knew, in a vague way; but something told me that Frances discussing the past was a rare commodity. It seemed a shame to let her stop now, when, if she kept on, she might get to… something I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear.
She drew her feet up in the chair, folded her arms over her knees, and propped her chin on her crossed wrists. “Objective,” she said crisply. My experience of lecturing professors was all from actors on video, but she reminded me of those. “To provide lousy intelligence and advice to El Presidente de la Republica Banana. Old-fashioned method: feed fake dispatches and phony coded orders to his intelligence staff, and hope they don’t realize it was too easy to get. Newfangled method: mount a Horseman on his Jefe de Seguridad, maybe another on his Secretary of State. Not only do you get hand delivery of your bogus information; you also get a highly placed double agent with an impenetrable cover. Que bueno, si? And that, of course, was only one of our many uses.”
“Did it work?”
Her grin was feral. “Sometimes. And before you ask, we’ll leave the exceptions decently buried, thank you. Since they ranged from the deeply shameful to the utterly horrific.”
“Why didn’t you just take the presidentes over and declare peace?”
“It may be,” she said, looking insufferably patient, “that you are fifteen, after all. Because the cabinet, the generals, and the God-damned janitorial staff would have blown El Presidente’s brains out and declared a change of government. Do you th
ink a nation wages war because of one person in a big leather chair in a nice office?”
“Having never lived in a nation,” I said, “I wouldn’t know.”
Frances turned her face away, as if I’d slapped her. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. A wretched anthill of peaceful, productive, useful life with hardly any invigorating biting and scratching. Where people flossed once a day and mowed the lawn on Sundays.”
I watched her, and said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
One emphatic black eyebrow went up, and her straight mouth crimped with irony at the corners. “Thank you, I feel ever so much better. I suppose my sense of social responsibility makes up in vigor what it lacked in timeliness.”
“Could you have stopped them then?”
She paused to think about it. “Yes. Which is why I’m so assiduously stopping them now. Have been stopping them. It’s my penance. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord Is With Thee would be easier, but it seems a shame to waste all that good marksmanship.”
My hands closed over the arms of the wing chair. “You mean, it’s not just this Tom Whatsisname. You’re hunting them all down.”
“Have hunted. Past tense. I’m nearly done.”
“All the Horsemen?”
“God, no. Besides, the populace at large has mostly taken care of that. I only wanted the refined gathering that thought, for their various reasons, that lobbing one in would be a good idea. The populace did take care of one of them, as it turned out. I dispatched four more.” She spread her hard, browned fingers in the air between us. “And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand. Well, not specifically this hand.” Then, suddenly: “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”
I swallowed, with an effort, and said, “That I’m sharing a room with someone whose life’s work has been to find people and murder them? Why would you think that?”
“Whatever you’re good at, it’s not sarcasm. They were four people who had never done a decent thing in the world and never would. They were the highest accomplishment of a subset of humanity who gloried in degradation and cruelty, who saw everyone — even each other — as lab rats and Judas goats.”
