The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  They both look calm. Kitty is as scrubbed as a Rolls-Royce pulling up outside the Waldorf, while Carl is no longer the color of a ghost. In fact, Carl looks as happy as if he gets to clean up after the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre and maybe a horse stable too.

  I say to Kitty, "So you are clean?"

  "Definitely," she says. "I am sure now the spaceman puts germs on me, and I am also sure that Carl kills them dead with special soap." She holds up a bottle that is full of dirty brown water. "We have a few last germs here which I will use to fool the spacemen. I will take the germs out of New York so the spacemen will think I am on the move again. When I get to a new city, I will pour the germs down a sewer grate. The spacemen may track down the germs but they will never find me."

  "Give me the bottle," I say. "I can dump it, and you will stay safe."

  She lifts the bottle, and for a moment, I think she will pass it to me. Then Carl gives her a nudge, and Kitty lowers her hand. "No," she says, "I wish to do this myself. Because of me, many cupcake dolls are dead. This one time, I will clean up my own mess."

  "Oh." During the bath, Carl must give Kitty a lecture on personal cleanology. It is good that Kitty wants to make amends, but does she consider what the spacemen will do if they think she is living in a new town? They will shoot many of that town's citizens before they realize there has been a switcheroo. "So," I tell Kitty, "take the germs to Washington, D.C. Go to the building where Mr. J. Edgar Hoover works and empty your bottle on his stoop."

  She does not understand why I say this, and I do not think she will do it. However, I take her to the station and I put her on a train to Washington anyway. Kitty says she will be back as soon as she can, and there on the platform, she gives me the best lip-smack of my life. I almost fall over, and not because of my wounded leg. I am still as dizzy as a dachshund when the train chugs off.

  Beside me, Carl says, "Do not expect to see her again."

  I jump in surprise for I do not know Carl is there. He must leave his job early so he can watch Kitty go. Carl says, "She will meet guys on the train, and more guys in Washington. She may intend to come back to you, but she will keep getting sidetracked. It is not her fault. She cannot change for you or anyone else."

  "I know that," I say. "Why do you think I put her on the first train out? Kitty is a doll who gives a guy thoughts, even when he does not know what to do with them. It is not a clean sweep till she is gone."

  As I say this, my heart feels scoured with steel wool and maybe doused with Carl's strongest chemicals. However, I do not change my mind. A guy in my profession ought to steer away from messes, and Kitty is nothing but a mess wearing shoes.

  I tell Carl, "It is best to keep things clean. Speaking of which, it is a good job you have done washing Kitty off. I think no one else on Earth knows how to get rid of space germs. You are the perfect cleaner."

  Carl's eyes go narrow. "What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean I am lucky to have you. You are also lucky, Carl, because if you stick with me, you will have one tough cleaning job after another. New York has the finest messes in the universe."

  After a moment, Carl smiles. "You are right about that. It is no bad thing to work for someone who understands where you are coming from."

  Just then, a train pulls into the station. It contains a number of citizens in horn-rimmed glasses, as well as hound dogs with mournful dispositions. I put my arm around Carl's shoulders and we leave as quickly as my wounded leg will go.

  The End

  (With fond apologies, of course, to Damon Runyon)

  Copyright (C) 2011 by James Alan Gardner

  Art copyright (C) 2011 by Lars Leetaru

  Books by James Alan Gardner

  Expendable

  Commitment Hour

  Vigilant

  Hunted

  Ascending

  Trapped

  Radiant

  Lara Croft and the Man of Bronze

  Gravity Wells

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  Contents

  I. The Incident in Wherever-It-Was

  II. The World’s Edge

  III. Founding Day

  IV. On Big Witch

  V. The Peak

  I. The Incident in Wherever-It-Was

  Hello May.

  I haven’t written in a while and maybe it seems I only write when there’s bad news. Well, this is not the exception that proves the rule, if you know what I mean.

  I lost almost all my business cards. If you got my last letter, you’ll remember I sent you one of them, so that you can see what your prodigal kid brother’s up to these days and maybe be proud, maybe just a little. If you didn’t get my letter—and who knows these days?—then they had my name, “Professor” Harry Ransom, “Professor” like that, in what they call “quotes,” because I always say I’m nothing if not honest, as best I can be, and at least I never claim to be anything I’m not. There were lightning bolts printed on either side of my name. Those cost extra. Under my name it said Lightbringer, then Licensed and then By Appointment, which weren’t exactly true but didn’t mean anything either way, as I saw it, and then below that Inventor of the Ransom Process for &c &c, which is true. A dollar for fifty at Tally’s Printers on Tenth Avenue in Melville City, and I bought two hundred-fifty, and in consequence went hungry for a week, and so did good old never-complaining Carver, my assistant, who I’m sure I’ve mentioned before.

  Also I have lost my Apparatus, and my wagon, and Sasha (the horse), and just about everything else in the world I own except the white suit and my wits.

  If you got my last letter you’ll be thinking, Not again. So am I, believe me, so am I. The strange thing is that when I think back on the incident what I first recall is those business cards sticking up in the mud in the tire tracks where they’d been scattered by those awful wings and how they looked like little white tombstones for the very tiny dead, all with my name on them, kind of funny in a way, only not really. I can picture that so clearly, but I can’t remember the name of the town at all. Memory’s strange, or at least mine is.

  This is where you’d cross your arms and say, Get to the point, Harry. Well, okay.

  I was putting on the usual show. I have told you about it before more than once and it was the same as those times, only in a new town and for a new bunch of Investors. The Apparatus was set up right in the middle of town and I had the white suit on and Carver was hunkered down the way he gets ready to work the pedals and the Demonstration was ready to commence. I have told you before that I don’t like to describe the Apparatus in writing, not because I don’t trust you, May, but because I don’t trust the mail. There are always snoops, in particular if the mail goes across Line Territories, as it must to get to you. And as I have confessed before, the status of my patents is questionable. So no more on that except to say that the sun had come out after a morning of rain and the Glass shone in it and so did the copper coils, everything shining like a premonition of that greater and perpetual Light that was to come next, was to come as soon as Carver threw the switch. Or so I hoped, the Apparatus not in fact being reliable always, or even often, as I have always been honest about, at least with you, May, at least with you.

  So I stood before the assembled citizenry of Wherever-It-Was and opened my arms wide and said: Ladies. And before I could get as far as Gentlemen there was a terrible roaring sound. Gentlemen, I said anyway. Behold. Then I shut up.

  A dirt road led in
to town, into to the heart of Whatever-They-Called-It. Up that road five or maybe six motor cars were approaching. They roared and threw up dust and smoked in the way of all the things of the Line. A moment later two of their Heavier-Than-Air Vessels appeared in the sky like they’d dropped from the clouds, and they circled, iron wings a-clatter, spyglasses keenly glinting. Same oily black smoke, always the same. The motor cars roared into the center of town and circled like wolves while the Vessels watched overhead.

  I have never liked to be upstaged.

  One of the motor cars crashed straight through my Apparatus, leaving broken glass and wire in its wake and the very expensive and rare acids and alkalis pooling in its tracks. The citizens of I-Don’t-Know-Where screamed, or threw themselves down in the mud in attitudes of surrender or maybe worship, or ran for the hills, which I guess is what I should have been doing but I didn’t seem to be able to move. All I could do was stand there and think, Not again.

  So every so often one of the motor cars stopped, and an Officer of the Line got out, black-uniformed and scowling, and some unlucky citizen got lifted roughly by his collar and got questions barked in his face. I don’t know about what. Out here on the western rim of the world, which is a war zone these days, you learn that there’s always some reason, there’s always about a thousand different ways anyone might have offended against the Authority the Line claims, so who knows what the citizens of Wherever might have done. Smuggling? Seditious publications? Or maybe they were harboring Agents of the you-know-what. Or maybe they’d done nothing at all. I saw some young people cuffed and shoved into the back of the cars and about a dozen women lined up against a wall weeping, and I guess I should have mentioned earlier that there was some shooting, too, and one or two of Wherever’s buildings were on fire. Also the beating iron wings of the Vessels had blown my business cards off the table where I’d arranged them, carefully, in a fan, and the wings had blown them off the table and into the mud, like I said, the tiny tombstones &c.

  May, I do not want to frighten or upset you. You’ll already have figured that your long-prodigal brother is not dead, nor in a Line jail. What happened next was that one of the Linesman Officers shouted You, yeah you, and he pointed, and I just about, well, it would be vulgar to write what I just about did, you know. And I guess he was pointing at a citizen of Wherever, not me, because he then wrestled him to the ground—the officer wrestled the civilian, I mean. That unfroze me. Sometimes when you pass an Electric jolt through a dead frog or bird it seems to come to life again for an instant. It was like that. I backed slowly away and did not start to run until out of sight. If you ever run afoul of the forces of the Line, and I pray that you and East Condon remain in the neutral zone forever, but if you do I recommend this approach. It has always worked for me.

  If you’re wondering what had happened to Mr. Carver, well, so was I.

  I stood, panting, heart pounding, sweating, alone in the hills outside of town.

  He stepped from behind a tree.

  I greeted him. “Mr. Carver.”

  His long black hair was wild and a little singed. Otherwise he was the same as ever.

  He gave me a curt nod, as if to say, See you’re not dead, then. As if to say, It goes on. Carver speaks very little, but his silences are expressive.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess. I don’t suppose you saved any of the…”

  He hadn’t, of course.

  “Let’s take stock.” I said this to Carver, and I’m saying it to you now, but I guess most of all I was saying it to myself, the first time and this time too, if you follow me.

  “So this is the third time something like this has happened. There was Kloan, a couple months back, and I’m counting Melville City too.”

  If you got my letters, May, you know what happened in Kloan and in Melville.

  “There comes a time when a man has to consider the possibility that he may be taking the wrong direction in life. That he may be pushing against a door that’s just closed to him, and that’s all there is to it, and the harder he pushes the more he’ll hurt himself.”

  Carver grunted.

  “But not yet. I agree. Right now my thinking is, this is wartime, this is border country, this is what happens, it’s just bad luck is all. Easy come, easy go. Smile through adversity. Whatever other clichés come to mind. What do we have left?”

  Carver furrowed his brow and looked thoughtful.

  “The Apparatus is gone. Again. That’s one. Two, the wagon is down in what’s left of Wherever, and three so’s poor Sasha, and I don’t much want to go back, or at least not till this whole unpleasantness blows over. How about you? That’s the problem with running, is that you can’t go back. Speak up if you disagree; I run a democratic outfit here. So four, we have no food and no warm clothes, and five we have none of any goddamn son of a bitch thing else in the world.”

  Pardon the cursing, May. And Sasha was the horse, if you have forgotten.

  In my pockets I had my last three business cards, and some bits of wire and some notes for the Process, and a little over three dollars. I had two crisp green bills backed by the Bank of Melville, and one crumpled red Tri-City bill, which aren’t worth much out here. Carver never carries money.

  “Stick with me, I said, I’ll make you rich.” I made myself smile, like I am making myself smile now. “I never said it would happen any time soon. But it will happen.”

  Maybe.

  May, I knew that once the shock wore off I would start feeling just awful about the people of that town, and how I can’t even remember their names or even the name of the town, and here it comes. I’m still not Religious, but if you still are I wouldn’t object if you prayed for them & for all those who suffer in this stupid War. Anyway, that’s enough for now.

  Your brother,

  “Professor” Harry Ransom, Lightbringer, &c.

  II. The World’s Edge

  Dear Sue,

  I guess if you get this letter it means May will have got the other one, because I have mailed neither of them yet and will mail them together if I ever get a chance to mail them at all. Ask her to share her letter and share this one with her. I know you will anyway. Hope you all are well. Your kid brother Harry is not doing too badly. Keep smiling, that’s what they say, isn’t it?

  How is he writing to us, you’ll be thinking, if he is up in the hills with nothing in the world but three dollars in his pockets and mud on his shoes and the few tools and scraps of wire Carver wears all the time? You’re right. I like to think I’m smart, but I know you are the shrewd one, really. I got to somewhere. I am writing these letters from a room in the World’s Edge Hotel in a town called Disorder. It’s about four days south or maybe north, but in either case not west or east from the town of Wherever-It-Was. I have told you already how directions get confused out on the rim of the world, or maybe I told May. You would hate it. In any case I do not plan to tell you about what it was like to walk here in the heat with nothing except to say that when I am finally rich and famous I will have earned it fair and square.

  I have entered into a business arrangement with the owner. He will give me room and board free for two weeks while I work. There is a great deal your brother can do in two weeks. I am not out of the game yet, and tomorrow is a new morning with new Light. Good night.

  Yours,

  Harry

  Okay Jess. I know Sue and May will share the other letters with you. Do not share this with them. I ask as your brother. You know how Sue can be judgmental and May is Religious, or at least she was when I left town, anyway, and anyway I do not want to tell them the situation, but I must tell someone because I am both guilty and pleased with myself and cannot sleep and not only because Carver is snoring in the next room so loudly it is bothersome, like an Engine. Remember you always covered for me when I was in trouble when we were kids, Jess. Anyway this is the situation.

  I am staying in the World’s Edge Hotel. It is big, and empty, and full of shadows and dust and heaps of furniture,
and up on the walls are some ugly dead animals and a few trophies stolen from the Hill Folk, mostly stone spears and some flat rocks carved with spirals and triangles and the like. It probably all meant something very important to the Hill Folk, but when you put it here it is just Stuff. The place is maybe ten years old but looks much older, almost like a Ruin. Conditions out here take their toll. When I walked in the door, the owner—I guessed he was the owner and guessed right—the owner was down on all floors scrubbing the four. I did not mean to write it like that, Jess, but I like it. It is very late and I am tired and a little woozy.

  The windows were shuttered and it was dark, though it was only the middle of the afternoon outside, and sunny. There was no one there but the owner and a fat pale woman who was leaning against the bar and stared with a puzzled and you might say wounded expression at Nothing, like she was waiting for her date to come back from an absence of a length she could not explain or ever forgive.

  Anyway there was a bell by the door, and I rang it.

  Very loudly I said, “Mr. Carver,” and “Fetch my bags,” and I pressed a dollar bill into Carver’s hand, in such a way that the owner, who was up on his knees now in what was a kind of prayer-like attitude and looking at me with interest, could see what I was doing. Carver went off into the street and I came inside. You know I have always loved Light, but for once I was glad of the shadows because after four days on the road from Wherever I knew I looked like a bum, or a refugee.