by Kim Newman
There were two uniformed guards outside the building. She closed her eyes and rethought them, blanking their memories and recreating them from the emptiness up. They didn’t need to be rounded characterisations, just functional bit parts. She cut corners, gave them short-term memories borrowed from a pair of marshals she had Dreamed for Neutrino Junction, and had them limit their thoughts to immediate matters. She dropped her face into their memories and wrapped some associations around it. Neither of them knew her well, but they would recognise her as the secretary of someone important in the administration. She knit a few complex feelings around her own image, made her attractive but out of their league. Made them envy the lucky swells who would be escorting her to nightclubs and restaurants, but also gave them a sense that she wasn’t stuck up, that she was a genuine person.
The irony of that wasn’t lost on her.
She confidently walked up the steps, smiling.
‘Evenin’, miss,’ said the senior guard. ‘Workin’ late?’
‘I’m afraid so. Had to drop a date.’ She gave him a mental image of Robert Preston waiting outside a nightclub with flowers and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
‘Cryin’ shame.’
‘The wheels of Gunmint grind on.’
He didn’t pick up her anachronism. ‘You said it.’
She was in. She wondered whether to wipe the guards again. No, she’d only have to go through the same rigmarole to get out.
If she thought about it, there’d be a private elevator to the Mayor’s office, and the key would be in her handbag.
She crossed the lobby, her heels clacking on the marbled floor, and took out her key. The elevator was waiting, of course. She pressed the only button, and the cage was drawn up into the heart of City Hall. She watched the floors go by, glimpsing the unfinished outlines of empty offices. Rows of typewriters under slipcases. Banks of filing cabinets. A few faceless mannequins at desks, waiting to be enlivened. Daine wasn’t bothering with fine detail here. No one was expected.
The office was what she had imagined. A large, badly painted portrait of Mayor Donlevy hung over the desk. He looked shifty, and the painter hadn’t known enough to disguise the bulge under his jacket which made his chain of office lie uneven. That was either a handgun or a wad of kickback dollars. The Mayor had a reputation in the City as the best politician money could buy. The floor around the wastepaper basket was littered with paper aeroplanes made out of urgent requests from various City officials. If the plane made it into the basket, the Mayor would authorise expenditure for whatever scheme was proposed. That’s why they had torn down the children’s hospital to make room for the miniature golf course. In his portrait, Donlevy was a fine figure of a man; without his wig, false teeth, heel lifts and corset, he would be a regular gnome. For a moment, Susan had an idea she knew what Truro Daine saw when he looked at anyone in the Gunmint.
The documents on the desk weren’t that revealing. There was a report from a private detective called Lloyd Nolan to the effect that James Stewart’s character was completely unblemished. He once took a swim late at night with a drunken socialite, but that had turned out to be entirely innocent and there was testimony from Cary Grant to prove it. And, although he had recently been known to talk to an invisible giant white rabbit and peek at his neighbours through binoculars, neither of these traits were deemed enough to blacken him in the eyes of the electors. The report had been scribbled on obscenely in an infants’-school hand, presumably by the Mayor himself. The top right-hand drawer of the desk contained the traditional little tin box and a pistol. She didn’t bother searching further.
The maps were in rolls on an architect’s easel in the corner of the office. She switched on an overhead lamp and unrolled them one by one. There were twenty-five, covering the entire city in fine detail. They were at rest just now, as if Daine were pausing in his expansion or had met some unforeseen check. After pushing the desk and all the other furniture to the walls, she spread out four maps on the floor, matching the edges and weighing down the corners with whatever came to hand – the wastepaper basket, the little tin box, the gun. That gave her a God’s-eye view of the centre of town. Then she laid down as many of the others as she could fit in the space. She Dreamed up a new hobby for the Mayor, collecting antique paperweights, and made good use of them. When there were still twenty square miles of maps left over after all the available floor was used up, she created a curtained alcove into which the jigsaw could extend.
Walking gingerly, so as not to disturb the maps, she trod across the City, as her make-believe monster had done earlier. She carried the Mayor’s swivel chair, put it down over City Hall, and sat in it. As she had expected, the map was vague around the edges. In places, blocks were only pencilled in. There were even areas marked ‘unknown territory’, tropical jungles in the heart of concrete and clay. She gripped the arms of her chair and relaxed a little, eyes closed. She spread herself out, descending through her body into the chair, then seeping through the map, feeling the contours of the City, spreading out like spilled water seeping into the paper.
The rough-sketched areas were an easy start. She simply sucked them blank, feeling the change through the paper, distantly aware of that part of the City being snapped out of existence as a string is snapped unknotted by a skilled conjurer. There was white on the paper, but in the City a black hole would have appeared. Take out the externals, and the darkness floods back in. She ringed the City with darkness, then crept inward, collapsing main streets and buildings as she contracted her mind, filtering the Dream through her own consciousness, ironing it out. Wherever her mind roamed, she left Nothing behind her.
It would have been easier to delete the file from the outside, but that would have mindwiped Daine, Tunney and herself. So she had to do it the slow way. She had also considered that Vaclav Trefusis would eventually get tired enough to stretch his authority and pull the plug anyway, listing his Dreamers as acceptable losses. To put that off, she needed to make headway that would be noticed in the real world.
Chinatown went, and the waterfront. Poverty Row faded. Paramount Plazas disappeared. Darkness crawled through the suburbs like a flood of black ink, washing away the empty shells of uninteresting houses. Buildings thinned like ghosts, became transparent climbing-frame constructions, and fell in on themselves. Characters were deleted, at first in twos and threes, then wholesale. Some struggled against her, but few held out for more than a moment or two. Soon, she would be alone in the Nothing, with Daine and Tunney. Then they could settle things.
Her mind was checked. Not by a character, but by a building. An insignificant building. An abandoned warehouse at 99 River Street. Susan thought all abandoned warehouses in the City were hide-outs, but this one wasn’t even that. There had been a shoot-out there once, there were bullet pocks in the walls, but it had been a very brief scene, and no one had bothered to return. Two of the interior walls were painted canvas, and the others only more substantial so they could support the catwalks necessary for the fight. A coastguard hero called Ralph Byrd had slugged and shot it out with a gang of Bela Lugosi’s thugs, and escaped from certain death by buzzsaw. That had been a long time ago. Nobody remembered.
But the building was diamond hard in Susan’s mind. She couldn’t think her way around it. The drab walls superimposed over the plush wallpapering of the Mayor’s office. Her map-covered floor was still beneath her, but the office was now the shadow, the warehouse the substance. As it faded away, the portrait of Mayor Donlevy winked at her. She strained at the walls, but couldn’t project her consciousness beyond them. She tried to stand up, but she was tied to the chair at her wrists and ankles. Live snakes stood in for ropes, constricting viciously. The chair began to revolve, slowly at first. She took in all of the warehouse. The maps beneath the castors churned and tore. Paperweights rolled away. The chair spun faster. Susan was whipped by her own hair. The 360-degree panorama blurred, and Susan was trapped inside her own skull. The warehouse walls blended i
nto each other like a painting drenched with turpentine. She shut her eyes but could still feel the spinning. The snakes multiplied, swarming over her, binding her more tightly to the chair. She heard funfair music in the distance. ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay’ played on a calliope organ.
Suddenly, the spinning stopped and the serpents were gone. Susan was thrown out of her chair and, although she put out an arm to break the fall, landed heavily on a floor. Underneath the maps she felt the bare concrete of the warehouse, not the thick carpet of the Mayor’s office. The heel of her right hand was damp and gritted, and her wrist might be sprained. She made the pain go away and thought the grit out of her hand, smoothing over the abrasions. It was like making a hole in the water. She glimpsed smooth skin, but the blood and dirt flooded back in. Concentrating, she tried again. It was no better. Indeed, when the bruises came back they were larger, more ragged. Now three of her fingers were broken and stuck out at strange angles. Painfully she straightened them out and healed the hand again. This time the hurt didn’t come back. But she was wearing a white glove with lines down the back. She had three thick fingers. It didn’t feel wrong.
She stood up and thought herself back into the Mayor’s office. The scene changed. She was on the foredeck of a sailing ship, rolling in a heavy wind. It was night, and raining. Sheets and sails flapped unmanned, and the wheel spun out of control. She was alone. Looking down, she saw an oilcloth suit and rough hands. She felt a wire wool of beard on her chin, and realised she was seeing the world two-dimensionally. There was a patch over one eye. One of her legs ended in a carved wooden peg. Something squawked and bit her ear, then flapped demonically off her shoulder.
As if by instinct, she took the wheel and wrestled the ship under control.
‘Avast, ye swabs,’ she shouted, astonished by the hoarseness of her voice, ‘belay yeselves an’ man the mizzen-mast. ’Tis a stormy course for Far Tortuga we’re sailin’ an’ the cap’n’ll not rest easy at the bottom of the sea ’til the treasure be ours!’
‘I beg your pardon.’
Suddenly she was swaying, and the ground was still. She was looking at a man in an evening clothe. It was Orin Tredway. She was in her own body again, but wearing a wet sou’wester with her best floorlength, belly-slit dress. They were backstage at the Rodney Award ceremony. That pompous skitch John Yeovil had just finished reading out the Best Dream nominations. Orin was looking at her as a Neanderthal might look at homo sapiens after a lecture on Darwinism. She was sure he was going to kill her.
‘And the winner is…’
Susan swept the sou’wester off her head and threw it away. Orin got wet but grinned.
‘Susan Bishopric, for The Parking Lottery.’
The applause was thunderous. Orin looked sick and hugged and kissed her. She broke away before he could get a stranglehold and made her way to the podium, hitching up her dress and putting on her very best smile for the tridvid sages. She had forgotten her memorised thank-you speech, but knew she could improvise. People in the audience shook her hand, the applause swelled, the band played ‘If You Knew Susie’, her mother burst into tears, the other nominees popped drugs, and Susan had to fight to keep control of her bladder.
She climbed to the podium, picked up the surprisingly heavy statuette and leaned forwards to accept Yeovil’s peck on the cheek, hoping she wouldn’t flinch in three dimensions all over the world at his lizard’s touch. But she saw something unexpected in his usually frozen face, a trace of horror. There was someone standing behind him, glaring evilly at her. She hugged the Rodney to her breast, fearful lest they take it away from her.
‘Who… who are you?’ Yeovil gasped. The figure came forwards. It took Susan seconds to recognise the oval face, the pale eyes, the quiet smile.
‘Yes, who are you?’ said the real Susan Bishopric, taking the Rodney she deserved.
As she felt the statuette being pulled from her grip, Susan saw her naked, burly, hairy, scarred arm. The evening gown hung strangely on her one-legged pirate’s body. Everything went flat again.
The crowds were laughing now, and booing. Things were thrown. Susan’s wooden leg splintered through a hole in the stage and stuck fast. She bent to avoid a thrown object. A Rodney crashed into the Dreaming Face symbol behind the podium. Another smashed on the floor. All the other winners were throwing their Rodneys at her. One statuette hit the stage at a crouch and ran off, his hands modestly covering his genitals.
The real Susan Bishopric raised her deserved award and swung it at her head.
She ducked, and the decks were rolling again. A swarthy fellow with ringlets was taking a slash at her with a heavy cutlass. She parried with a weapon that turned out to be a medieval axe. Iron clanged against steel. The pirate was Orin Tredway, aged, bearded and with one ear raggedly sawn off. Despite her wooden leg, she was able to fend him off easily. He wasn’t up to the fancy footwork required for duelling on the high seas. Finally, with contemptuous ease, she lured him under the t’gallant and hacked at a shroud which parted, dumping a heavy chunk of rigging on the miscast Orin. An undisciplined cheer went up from the crew members who had been watching the fight.
‘Well, keel-haul me fer a Spanisher,’ Susan exclaimed, ‘ye’re as scurvy a shipment o’ cut-throats as any that e’er sailed the Main. Take this mutinous dog, hang him up from the yard arm, stripe him with the cat, douse him with salt, and when he comes to, flog him some more.’
The crew nodded at her and yelled in bloodthirsty assent. They wore animal heads. Not masks, but heads, still bloody and stretched out of proportion by the human heads beneath. Human eyes peered out through the empty sockets of beasts. Then there was a shift as the ship crested a wave and fell twenty feet or more. The crew fell, although Susan kept on her feet (foot, rather). When they stood up, they were animals, cramped by their human clothes. They ran about in a panic, those that could climb taking to the rigging, those that could swim going over the side. A hog in a headscarf squealed as she cleaved its skull with her axe.
Then they were gone. She was alone on the ship again, surrounded by wind-whipped ropes and treacherously swinging booms. She held up her axe to ward off a murderously diving spar, and split it in twain. Secured to the sail, the broken wood swung on, wrenching her weapon away with it. The greased and oiled ends of her hair and beard were alight, burning slowly.
She tried to think of her name, but it wouldn’t come to her. Suddenly, she had a new set of memories, crowding in on her own. Sea battles and voyages and plunder and buried treasure and king’s pardons and kidnapped wenches. She remembered the great white whale that had taken her leg, and the pistol ball that had claimed her eye, and a hundred other wounds and scars beside. The girl who could Dream was remote, a fantastical character.
He knew who he was. A pirate who might have been a Susan in his Dreams.
He looked down, and saw the planks beneath his shoe and stump turn transparent. He saw through the cabins, the holds and the ballast bilges. The keel stayed solid for a few moments, then clouded and became clear as glass. Beneath the phantom ship, dark waters churned, sharks and poison jellyfish boiling in the depths. Then he began to sink, passing slowly through the deck, feeling it slide up through his body. It caught on his chin as he tilted his head up and drew in a breath of salted air. He fell sharply through the space of the cabin, and was sinking again through its floor. He tried to hold a sea chest, but his hands passed through it as through something slightly thicker than water. It kept its shape, but offered no resistance. Then he was in the hold, chilly waters around his knees as he sank through the bottom of the boat itself. The cold crept up his body as he clutched fruitlessly at the insubstantial wood. He wriggled, trying to keep his head above the hull, but felt the currents tugging at him. His soaked clothes pulled him down. His head sank through the rough, barnacled wood. The boat was gone completely, and he was tossed this way and that in the water. He exploded through the surface, gasping for air, and saw his phantom ship drawing away, already beyond swimmi
ng distance, shivering like a reflection in rippled water. His head hissed as the burning ends of his rat-tails went out. Then he was underwater again, fighting for the surface.
The sharks came…
Soaking wet, and with a bloody stump where her right arm had been, Susan found herself in the cabin of an airship.
‘Don’t just stand there, you bove,’ snapped a slim woman in a black catsuit. ‘Give me a hand. The pygmies are hang-gliding at us in swarms.’
It was Vanessa Vail.
Darts shot through the steel-mesh and canvas wall of the cabin. Vanessa’s leg was porcupined.
Susan stepped forwards and fell over. Her wooden leg had come off. With only an arm and a leg, she crab-crawled across the deck. She felt her breasts scraping against the floor. She was in her own body again – although with the pirate’s disabilities – and in her ruined evening dress. Her stumps were leaking.
Vanessa was staggering, the poison going to her head.
‘Take the console, or we’ll go down. We’re over Maple White Land, the dinosaurs will rip us to bits.’
The heroine stretched her lovely, lithe body and fell. Even unconscious, she was gorgeous. She had passed out with no pain, and was dignified in disarray. Susan cursed her creation. Fighting the agony in her shoulder and the itch in the fingers she didn’t have any more, she pulled herself towards the console. The terminal coronet flapped loose. She got a hold of it and thrust her head up into it. Her nervous system melshed with the dirigible’s, which wasn’t such a good idea since two of the four motors suddenly cut out and the right-side viewcam blanked. Susan felt like a fat white whale surrounded by sharks. The pygmies turned and danced in the air, unloosing a cloud of stinging darts. The gasbag was multiply holed, and there was a jungle escarpment coming up. Susan had a choice: crash into the cliffs, or strain herself up over onto the plateau and wind up as tyrannosaur munchies.
