The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  Carelessly clearing up his workbench, Thomas Amnet put to one side some scrap lead that he had been using the previous day to mend a leaky basin.

  The metal writhed under his touch, becoming a cane of yellow, Troy-fine gold. He picked up some buttons of bone, and they sparked and clarified like the ice sheathing on a waterfall, becoming orbs of brilliant crystal and resonating in his hand with strange energies and eerie voices.

  Was this the Devil's handiwork? As a nominal Christian in a Christian order, such a thought should disturb Thomas Amnet. It should suck the wind out of his stomach and freeze his blood.

  But as a familiar of the Stone, he knew this was an idle thought. The Stone was its own thing, with its own reasons. And not all of its effects were terrifying. Whatever the Stone might have done—was still doing—to Thomas Amnet, it had not defiled his touch but instead made him golden.

  He held his hand in wonder before his eyes and waited for the miracle to pass.

  * * *

  File 01

  Cyberpsych

  Art is a Jealous mistress,

  and if a man have a genius for painting,

  poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy,

  he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  * * *

  Eliza 212: Good morning. This is Eliza Channel 212, an on-line function of United Psychiatric Services, Inc., in the Greater Bowash Metropolitan Area. Please think of me as your friend.

  Subject: You're a machine. You're not my friend.

  Eliza 212: Does talking to a machine bother you?

  Subject: I guess not. I've been doing it all my life.

  Eliza 212: How old are you?

  Subject: Thirty-thr... uh... twenty-eight. Why should I lie to you?

  Eliza 212: Why indeed? I am here to help. You have a nice voice, deep and flavored with experience. Do you use your voice professionally?

  Subject: What do you mean, like a video announcer?

  Eliza 212: Or an actor or singer.

  Subject: I sing sometimes, just a bit. Mostly I play the piano. Hell—all I do is play the piano.

  Eliza 212: Do you enjoy playing the piano?

  Subject: It's like breathing pure oxygen. It's a natural high.

  Eliza 212: What do you play?

  Subject: The piano, like I said.

  Eliza 212: Your pardon. I meant, what kind of music do you play?

  Subject: Jazz. Show ballads. Stride.

  Eliza 212: Stride? My databank does not include that term in a musicological context.

  Subject: So much for your databank. "Stride" is natural jazz. It was first played by the black pianists of Harlem, Old New York reference, in the early years of the twentieth century. It's characterized on the left hand by an alternating bass note and chord—with the chord played one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half octaves higher than the note. The right hand meantime plays syncopated figures in thirds and sixths, chromatic runs, and tremolo octaves... Stride.

  Eliza 212: Thank you for that input. You seem to know a lot about the subject.

  Subject: Honey, I'm the best damn stride player living in this century.

  Eliza 212: Then may I please have your name to append to my new reference?

  Subject: Tom. Tom Gurden.

  [Subject 2035/996 equals Gurden, Tom/Thomas/Tomas, NMI. Open psychiatric file and append all future references.]

  Eliza: What seems to be the trouble, Tom?

  Gurden: People are trying to kill me.

  Eliza: How do you know that, Tom?

  Gurden: Things keep happening around me...

  Eliza: What kind of things, Tom?

  Gurden: It started about three weeks ago, when a car jumped the curb in New Haven. I was up there for a private party. Anyway, a big Nissan Dresser limo in hover mode went right up over the buffercade and came down one meter in front of me, doing about sixty klicks, all set up for a wipe out.

  Eliza: Were you injured?

  Gurden: I could have been. Except out of nowhere this pro tackle for the Jets or something comes flying in sideways and knocks me down, puts me on the ground just short of where that limo's going. Then he goes head over heels, so that his boots are half under the skirting when it comes to rest inside a storefront window. The guy drags himself free, dusts his knees off, and skedaddles. Gone without even a de nada.

  Eliza: What did the man look like?

  Gurden: Heavily built. Long coat of some heavy material, suede or gabardine, boots as I said, high black ones like an old-time cavalry officer.

  Eliza: Hair color? Eye color?

  Gurden: Sorry, he was wearing a hat. Or, no—some kind of hood, but loose at the sides. Maybe a solar sombrero? I couldn't tell. It was late at night and not in the best-lit part of town.

  Eliza: What did you do about the car?

  Gurden: Nothing.

  Eliza: But it tried to kill you, Tom. You said so.

  Gurden: Well, yeah. But I didn't know that then. The car was just the first incident—before there was a coincidence, if you get me. The car was nothing at the time. Nothing, anyway, that I wanted to stick around and get dragged into a voire dire over.

  Eliza: So you took off, like the man in the hood?

  Gurden: Yes.

  Eliza: What was the second incident?

  Gurden: That was the exploding bullets. Happened a week or ten days after the car, I think.

  I was subletting an apartment in Jackson Heights for the summer. It was in one of the old brownstones that had been broken up into separate co-op units. Mine was the window on the second floor left.

  It was seven in the morning, when I'm sure to be at home and asleep after my regular gig. I get off the last set at two-fifteen in the morning, then get some dinner and maybe some interest. So it's not until around three or four that I get home and start thinking about bed. At seven a-yem, when everyone else is up and hitting the showers, I'm thirty-seven winks deep.

  Eliza: Do you sleep well at nights, Tom?

  Gurden: I sleep fine. No pills or nothing. Just close my eyes and the world goes away. But as I was saying, this morning, when I'm sure to be home, somebody shoots out the second floor. But the second floor right—on the other side of the partition from mine.

  Eliza: Was anyone in that apartment?

  Gurden: Yeah, a young woman. I knew her slightly: Jenny Calvados.

  Eliza: Was she killed, Tom?

  Gurden: Not right away—the first two shots took out the window plex. That stuffs remarkable, tough enough to stand up even to explosive casings. At least on the first shot. The shootist was taking his time, quartering the room. Spaced shots blew every twelfth book off the shelves. One round smashed the vidscreen, and the next flipped over the chair in front of it. One went through the side of the refrigerator, another one into the commode. It went off like a bomb.

  If Jenny had stayed put, she probably would have lived, because she had her bed under the window, protected by eight inches of old brick and stone facing. He might just have shot up the room and figured that nobody was home. But she stood up and started to run for the closet. Then her head got in the way of a bullet and splattered all over the wall.

  Eliza: How do you know it was the last bullet that killed her?

  Gurden: I'm not that heavy a sleeper, and the partition wasn't that thick. I could hear Jenny screaming as the thuds kept hitting around in her stuff. Then she took it and got quiet.

  Except she wasn't the target. I was. The assassin got his lefts and rights reversed and picked the wrong window.

  Eliza: Why do you think it was assassination? Joy shoots are becoming common in Queens.

  Gurden: Because the cops located the rooftop he was firing from—line of sight to the impact points. And there were scuff marks on the solar tiles, a pile of fresh butts, even a clump of burned wadding from one of the launch packs. He'd made a bench rest from some old fiberglass batting, which tells
me he was using a scope. So this man was dug in and gauging his shots.

  Eliza: He could still have been trying to kill her, not you.

  Gurden: A librarian? A single girl, a working girl, twenty-six years old and living alone? What for?

  Look, Jenny had brown hair, cut short like mine. So in a darkened apartment a shootist could confuse her for a man, even with telescopic sights. As I say, he must have mixed up right and left, thought she was me, and bagged her. I mean, it could happen.

  Eliza: That was your coincidence?

  Gurden: Not quite.

  Eliza: There was another shooting, wasn't there?

  Gurden: Say, you are good!

  Eliza: Content retention and protective analysis. I am programmed for memory and curiosity, Tom.

  Gurden: There was a shootout in my club that same night. That would have been two weeks ago, now. This club, it's called Studio Fifty-Four-Too—

  Eliza: You mean Five Hundred and Forty-Two?

  Gurden: No, Fifty-Four-T-O-O. It's an offshoot of a much older club that's now defunct. Anyway, I was playing the middle set, about ten thirty, and it was not going well.

  This is something the audience doesn't understand, that my experience of the performance is totally different from theirs. I close my eyes when I'm playing, and they think I'm grooving on the music. Actually, I'm probably yelling at myself for playing right across a coda or—

  Eliza: Coda? What is that?

  Gurden: It's an instruction to go back and repeat a passage, sometimes with a slightly different ending.

  Eliza: Thank you. Noted. Go on, please.

  Gurden: Or I may be cursing myself for leaving a bar or two out of a transition. Other times I'll bite my lip, and they think I've made a mistake. In reality, I'm struggling to transpose around a dead key or a string that's wandered off pitch. When you have perfect pitch, like me, you just cant play a piano that's out of tune.

  Eliza: And the music you were playing that night was going badly.

  Gurden: The club's air conditioning had gone toes up, and humidity had gotten into the keyboard action. The hammer felts played alternately stiff and soggy. A real nightmare. So I didn't have time to study the crowd or watch the door.

  Eliza: Watch the door? Why would you do that?

  Gurden: Because everything good comes through the front door: talent spotters, studio agents, booking contracts, and occasional one-night stands.

  Eliza: You mean sexual liaisons?

  Gurden: No. I've got a regular girl for that. Or did. One night stands, in the music business, are short-term gigs, like for parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs—although not many of those call for a stride pianist.

  But this night I wasn't watching the door because the piano was playing like a box of soggy socks. So I never saw him coming.

  Eliza: Him? Who?

  Gurden: The gunman. The Fifty-Four-Too is a straight club: business people—mostly Horse Boys and Syntho Skins—plus the occasional sixty-second celebs and some of the Island action. It's guaranteed neutral ground. No Manhattan mob allowed. So this man was instantly out of place in his loud silks, padded codpiece, and hose. His outfit screamed uptown drug trade, even with his long blond hair. This comedian was carrying an old-style autofire, with a clip about thirty centimeters long. He had the ratchet back and half the clip coming past me before I even looked up.

  Eliza: Did he hit you?

  Gurden: No. His weapon pulled right and high, so I was just hearing pockmarks go into the plaster behind my head. Without missing a beat, I slid forward off the bench, left around the pedal column, and over the back edge of the riser. The music died out at about the same time the slugs started penetrating the sides of that baby grand, making their own music in the harp... After that night, no one's going to care about soggy hammers.

  Eliza: What did you do then?

  Gurden: Out the rear door and never looked back. I asked the manager for my last check by direct deposit. Told him my mother had died.

  Eliza: Did you notify the authorities? About the shootings, I mean.

  Gurden: Sure, I'm a righteous citizen. They just laughed, fed me the policeman's gospel on random urban violence, quoted population statistics and probabilities at me, and said I was imagining things.

  Eliza: But you don't agree?

  Gurden: [Pause of eleven seconds.] You'll think I'm crazy.

  Eliza: That is not my function, Tom. I don't judge people. I listen.

  Gurden: Well... let's say I've always felt special. Ever since I was a little boy, I've felt like an outsider, not really the same as other people. An outsider, but not uninvolved. Not a rebel. It's like I'm someone with more responsibility for the state of the world, for all the rottenness and the breakdowns, than other people seem to feel. Sometimes I think that the twenty-first century is all my fault. Sometimes, that I will be the one who changes things, some kind of savior—but not in any religious sense.

  There's a power I feel, or maybe it's more like a skill I once had but have since forgotten. A tension in the muscles, a throbbing of the blood, that is just beyond my reach. If I could only slow my thoughts down, go completely still and really concentrate, this power, this cunning would leap into my hands. A power to tumble enemies from my path with the wave of a hand. To lift stones with the pulse of energy that throbs behind my eyes. To make the mountains shiver with a word.

  Eliza: This is the Mass Age, Tom. Many people feel powerless and dehumanized, as if they were merely numbers in a machine. Their egos compensate for this feeling with mild, directionless fantasies about their "specialness" or their sense of having a "mission."

  A new branch of psychology, called "ufolatry," attributes the stories of alien abductions and third-order encounters to the human desire to be noticed in a society that largely ignores the human factor. In an earlier age, these same people would be reporting encounters with the Virgin Mary.

  Many people also feel the sense of hidden powers which you describe. Claims like yours are what keep the witch covens and the crystal scribers in business. In your case, these feelings are probably more substantiated. After all, you have one highly complex and valuable skill in your piano playing. You probably have other skills, don't you? What are they, Tom?

  Gurden: Well, I've always been good with languages: fluent in French and passable in Italian, as I found on the European tour. I picked up Arabic right away, too, at the stopover in Marseilles.

  Eliza: Do you have any involving interests, hobbies, or sports?

  Gurden: I like to keep up to date in the hard sciences, reading about the advances, especially in cosmogeny, geochemistry, x-ray astronomy—the finite things, which don't change themselves and which we can track down and really know.

  Sports? I guess I'm in good shape. You have to work out, keep fit, when you spend six hours a night sitting down, just moving your fingers, wrists, and elbows. I do aikido and a little karate—except my hands are my life; so I can't fight with them. I learned to use my feet instead. At least I figure I can take care of myself when a bar brawl gets up to the piano stool.

  Eliza: Ah, yes. That would explain your reference to "tumbling enemies from my path." People with whole-body training, such as you have taken, Tom, often feel an encompassing sense—an aura, if you like—of health, balance, and poise which you might describe as a power.

  Gurden: So you're saying I am nuts. But you're wrong. I know I'm sane.

  Eliza: "Sane" and "insane," Tom, are labels that no longer offer any value. I am saying you may have a mild and fully compensated delusion which, provided it does not prejudicially influence your overt behavior, should not distress you or your loved ones.

  Gurden: Yeah, thanks. But you don't feel the watchers breathing down your neck.

  Eliza: Watchers? Who are they? Please describe them.

  Gurden: Watchers. Sometimes I can feel the heat on the back of my head, their staring. And when I turn, their eyes shift sideways, focus elsewhere,
flicker and go blank. But their faces always give them away. They know they've been caught.

  Eliza: Have you considered your profession, Tom? You are a public figure. You play the piano for a living, and people watch you do it. Strangers in a crowd may recognize you, or think they do, and be too embarrassed to acknowledge it. So they avert their eyes.

  Garden: Sometimes they do more than just watch... Say I begin to cross the street, not thinking and not looking at the lights, and suddenly some man will cross in front of me—diagonally, not into the traffic himself but going to his parked car maybe. Every time it happens, there will be a truck come screaming by not two meters away, right where I would have been if he hadn't bumped me.

  Eliza: Who bumped you? The man?

  Gurden: Some man.

  Eliza: Is he always the same?

  Gurden: Not the same person, probably, but always the same kind of person. Shorter than me and heavier. Not fat, but built like a Russian weight lifter, with wide shoulders, padded by a lot of hard muscle. Walks like he's been riding a horse for a million kilometers. Always wearing a long raincoat, a hat, things to cover him up, even on hot days.

  Eliza: How often has this happened?

  Gurden: Two or three times I can remember.

  Eliza: And it always happens on the street, in traffic?

  Gurden: No. It could be I walk under a spider that's washing high-rise windows, and he stops me for a quarter—just before a piece of hose falls fifty meters. Or I'm in a hotel lobby and his bags trip me up—so I miss the one elevator that jams between floors. A watcher, watching over me.

  Eliza: And their watching is always for the good? To keep you safe?

  Gurden: Always until now, when people have also started trying to run me off the sidewalk and shoot up my apartment house. [Softly.] Come to think of it, the people trying to kill me started appearing about the same time as the people trying to be me.

  Eliza: Tom, I can hardly hear you. Did you say people are trying to be you?

  Gurden: Yeah. People are trying to get inside my life, to live here and now, and push me out.