Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  The ghost was jerked off its feet; its head went down and its feet came up, and then it was spinning in mid-air like a pinwheel, wailing. Its tongue had disappeared. Vickery watched in sick horror as it spun faster, until it was a blur, and then with a wail and a windy implosion it was gone.

  At the mouth of the alley Vickery had stepped aside to keep Ragotskie in his peripheral vision, and now that young man came puffing up to where he and Castine stood. He smelled sharply of sweat.

  The SUV rocked to a thumping, uneven halt, and the passenger side door opened cautiously.

  “Get in my car!” said Ragotskie, running toward his Audi.

  But a gun muzzle appeared in the gap between the SUV’s opening door and the windshield frame, and Vickery’s own gun was instantly in line and he fired at it—the hard pop was less loud out here on the street—and over the ringing in his ears he heard a hoarse bark of pain, and the gun clanked to the pavement.

  Vickery backed toward the Audi, keeping his gun leveled at the SUV’s windshield. “I’ll drive,” he said over his shoulder. “Ingrid can keep an eye on you in the back seat.”

  Vickery fired one more shot, squarely through the center of the windshield, then turned and hurried to the car. Ragotskie tossed him the keys over the roof.

  Vickery got in and started the engine. “Get down,” he snapped as Castine and Ragotskie piled into the back seat, and then he shifted to reverse and stamped on the gas pedal. Castine and Ragotskie were both flung against the back of the front seat, and then they were tossed back when the Audi’s rear bumper struck the SUV’s front left corner with a resounding crash. Pieces of red plastic skittered across the pavement.

  In the back seat, Ragotskie yelped, “My car!”

  Vickery shifted to low gear and floored the accelerator again. The Audi tore away from the Tahoe with a rattling clatter, and then it was speeding north. Vickery was hunched over the wheel, his teeth clenched, but there were no gunshots from behind.

  At Wilshire Boulevard he ran the stop sign and swerved between honking traffic to make a left turn. Glancing in the mirror, he didn’t see any vehicles following them. He shifted to drive.

  “You can straighten up,” he said. “Are your tags up to date on this? On the license plate?”

  “Of course,” said Ragotskie. He was sitting up now, blinking through his round glasses at the white high-rise apartment buildings rushing past. He turned to peer back toward the street they’d been on, then rubbed his eyes. “Are you guys some kind of pros? You shoot like . . . if you can see it, you can hit it.”

  Vickery thought of the intensive and continuous training he’d got while he was a Secret Service agent, which had required that all Protection Detail agents be able to hit one subject, and no others, in a shifting crowd; and he reflected that his more recent hours of shooting practice in the desert had maintained at least some of his skill.

  He didn’t answer Ragotskie. To Castine he said, “You still got that sock?”

  “Yes. I should pitch the filthy thing.”

  “Tuck it in your pocket.”

  “You could have killed them both,” she said in an accusing tone.

  Vickery slowed and made a right turn onto Western. “So could you,” he said. “I—killed a guy yesterday.” He glanced in the rear view mirror. “Ragotskie? That ghost back there said ‘I’m gonna be in your book, with your daughter.’ What did it mean?”

  “I don’t know. We took that gardening book from your apartment in February, and we were going to grab you too, but you disappeared. Listen, you’ve got to—”

  “And what do you mean—twins—imps—Ecuador?”

  “You’ve got to help me get my girlfriend away from them, her name is Agnes Loria, okay?” When neither Vickery nor Castine said anything, he exhaled audibly and took a deep breath, and Vickery guessed that it was difficult for him to tell secrets that he had been committed to keeping until recently. Finally, “Egregore, it means a group-mind,” Ragotskie said rapidly, “people pour their identities into it like . . . I don’t know, like different kinds of liquor in a Long Island Iced Tea, and it becomes a way-bigger entity, orders of orders of magnitude, independent of the people in it, just made out of them like a body is made of cells. Shit. It can live forever—new identities get absorbed and old members fall away like sloughed-off skin. And Agnes is—dammit—”

  Vickery caught a green arrow and turned left on Western, still watching the rear-view mirror.

  “Take it easy,” said Castine to Ragotskie. “You wanted to break up the pair of us, you said. And yes, something about twins.”

  “Okay,” said Ragotskie. “Okay. The egregore will need, damn quick, a pair of Interface Message Processors, that’s IMPs, see, to let the various minds all work together as one network, and you two would have been perfect because you—what, died? And came back? And so you’re not exactly stuck in the discrete increments of now, like the rest of us. Harlowe says you’re FM radios in a world of AM. And you’d have worked like superconductor IMPs. But I managed to screw that up, even without killing you . . . uh, ma’am. So the egregore should have misfired, miscarried, and Agnes wouldn’t be able to sacrifice herself to the damned thing. She could come to her senses, see?”

  “But,” prompted Castine.

  “But he’s got these twin girls, his nieces, they’re schizophrenic or something, they fall in and out of each other’s minds all the time, and Agnes says they can get into other people’s minds too, make ’em do things—anyway their identities are a kind of open-ended relay—and so I guess they’ll do, as his IMPs.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring blindly at the buildings rushing past outside, then said, “Can I borrow some money? I went to a Versatel machine yesterday, and my accounts have been deleted. Harlowe’s a wizard with computer stuff, hacking and all that. I slept in this car last night, but I can’t do that again, now that they’ve obviously got some kind of tracker on the poor thing.”

  “So far you’ve told us about twenty bucks’ worth,” said Vickery. “If they’ve got these twins now, and don’t need Ingrid and me anymore—and it sounds like they don’t need you anymore either—why did those guys threaten us? Why has Harlowe offered Galvan five thousand bucks to hand us over to him?”

  “About you, I don’t know. Maybe he wants you on hand for backup in case the twins flip out. As for—”

  Castine shook her head. “They acted like they were ready to kill us right there in the alley.”

  “I think they would have,” agreed Vickery. The guy in the leather jacket, he thought, had seemed positively eager.

  “Okay,” said Ragotskie, “that’s true, so Harlowe must have decided you’re toxic in some way—”

  “Jeez,” muttered Castine, “I could make you a list.”

  “—and he’s determined to use the twins. Me,” Ragotskie went on, “I’m initiated but renegade now, so I guess they want to—take my blood pressure, as they’d say. Hah. That means—”

  “We know what it means,” said Castine.

  “How do we stop him from trying to kill us,” asked Vickery, “and how do I get my book back?” He turned left again on Olympic, past the monolithic Koreatown Galleria.

  “Your book! What the hell is it?” When Vickery didn’t reply, Ragotskie went on, “He—I don’t know, he keeps it locked away somewhere. But he wants to kill all three of us, now, see? We’re in this together!” He paused, and when he again got no response he went on, “If the egregore were to fail, then there wouldn’t be any point in killing any of us . . . except you, about Pratt, I guess.” He laughed briefly, unhappily. “And Agnes won’t be able to lose her self. We can get her away from them, safe, even if she doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “Get her away,” echoed Vickery, not looking away from the traffic ahead and keeping his voice level. “So how do we kill this egregore thing?”

  “Would we be okay if we just left town?” interjected Castine. “Fly to the east coast?” Vickery tilted his head and flicke
d a glance at the rear view mirror, but she avoided meeting his eye.

  Ragotskie’s answer was nearly a monotone: “When the egregore does come online, it’d find you. Strangers who were part of it would kill you.” Vickery heard him blow his nose, and hoped the young man had a handkerchief or Kleenex or something. Good thing Castine had taken the sock. “And,” Ragotskie went on, “it’s already started spontaneously gathering people into itself—Agnes calls it the black hole effect, when random people suddenly fall into it and start speaking our thoughts. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “So have we,” said Vickery, thinking of the girl on the bicycle yesterday at MacArthur Park.

  “It’s just a temporary possession now,” said Ragotskie, “like for a minute, and they’re just disoriented, after. But when the thing is actually born, it’ll be taking them permanently, like a worldful of dominoes falling, and when they’re down they won’t ever be getting up again—all their personalities and memories and skills will be dissolved, dispersed through the whole egregore thing. And God only knows what it’ll want to do. Harlowe says it’ll be God.” He laughed again, again not happily. “You should hear him talk about it. He’d convince you. He convinced me . . . until he convinced Agnes.”

  Castine too may have been thinking of the girl on the bicycle. “What,” she asked hesitantly, “becomes of the people who get taken by it?”

  “They’ll be like . . . just the egregore’s fingers, or toes,” said Ragotskie. “Or eyes or ears, anything, fingernails. Bloodstream, really. They’ll probably wear out pretty quick—Harlowe says the big entity probably won’t waste a lot of attention on getting each of its seven billion members to eat or sleep. Though it will want them to reproduce a lot, so there’s new cells to replace the ones that drop out of it.”

  “Drop out of it meaning die,” said Vickery. He slowed to a stop for a red light at Harvard. The signs on all the nearby buildings seemed to be in Korean.

  “Or just, you know, wander around,” said Ragotskie, “too crazy and malnourished to be any further use to it. But yeah, die, probably, pretty quick.”

  Castine’s voice shivered as she said, “So how do we kill it?”

  “A guy tried to start an egregore in the ’60s,” said Ragotskie, swaying as the car started forward again. “Some kind of hippie rock musician, I think. Harlowe doesn’t like to talk about that, though he had Taitz and Foster question a bunch of old folks who were around then, and offer them money if they hear of anybody lately looking into it. He won’t say who the hippie was, but he’s using at least some of the guy’s methods.”

  Vickery tensed as Ragotskie’s hand waved over the passenger seat, but he was just pointing at the floor. “Down there’s an envelope, some stuff I stole and printed out on Sunday, day before yesterday, at Harlowe’s office on Sepulveda. A coloring book the hippie had printed up in 1966, and a couple of copies of a coloring book Harlowe published and distributed last year, in Spanish and English, with a picture in it reprinted from the 1966 one. Uh—don’t stare at the picture for more than a few seconds, okay? Concentrating on it is the initiation, that’s why the picture’s so detailed—it takes a person at least a minute of focusing on it, to color it all in.” Ragotskie inhaled with an audible shudder. “And,” he went on, “I printed out a file of Harlowe’s, where he wrote some stuff about that old egregore, though he doesn’t give the hippie leader’s name or any traceable details.”

  Vickery lifted one hand from the wheel and spread his fingers.

  “Right, okay,” said Ragotskie, “the thing is, something went bad wrong for the hippie’s egregore. This was in 1968. When he tried to quicken it, launch it, cut the umbilical cord, some people reportedly got shot or went nuts, and the whole program crashed on him. It got hushed up, nobody called the cops and everybody who was there said afterward that they were someplace else, far away. So—you two seem pretty smart—figure out what went wrong in ’68, and make it happen again now.”

  “Which will save your Agnes from emptying her mind into the worldwide soup,” said Vickery.

  “Right, but you still need to help me get her away. You help me, I help you.”

  “How do you help us?” asked Vickery. He had driven back past Irolo now, and was looking for a section of empty curb.

  “Well, shit, man, I just told you a lot of stuff, and I’m giving you that file, and—there’s more I could tell you.”

  After a few seconds, Vickery said, “Okay, we’ll try. Where’s this office of Harlowe’s on Sepulveda?”

  “I don’t remember the street number, but it’s at Sepulveda and Venice, out by the Santa Monica airport, a little office building with a sign that says ChakraSys, sys with a y. And he’s, uh, got a boat at a local marina. I—” Vickery saw him shake his head; “—tracked Agnes there last night, with Waze. I drove away before anybody could see me.”

  “Waves?” said Castine.

  Vickery noticed belatedly that he had lost his Dodgers cap at some point. “Waze,” he said impatiently, “it’s an app that navigates traffic.” To Ragotskie he said, “What’s the name of the boat, and where’s the marina?”

  “Excuse me,” put in Castine.

  “I don’t remember—right now,” said Ragotskie. His voice was flat with defiance. “And he’ll have cleaned out the office on Sepulveda, since I went rogue, but I can still establish contact with them. You help me, and I’ll help you. Agnes.”

  Vickery looked at him in the rear view mirror. Ragotskie’s weak mouth was set firmly for once. Vickery found himself reluctantly admiring the young man.

  “Okay,” said Vickery finally. “You got a phone?”

  “Yes, but I took the battery out of it. They could GPS me if it was working.” He exhaled through clenched teeth. “And I gotta ditch this car. Well, you already bashed it up, didn’t you?”

  Vickery glanced at Ragotskie in the mirror. “I’m going to drop you off here, pretty quick.” Ragotskie began to protest in a panicky tone, but Vickery talked over him: “I’ll give you five hundred bucks. Take the bike off the roof of this, and get yourself a burner phone and meet us tonight at . . . ” Vickery paused to think about it. “Okay, go to where Estes Street dead ends against the north side of the 10 freeway, right? There’s a thrift store and a closed bowling alley there, and behind them is a dirt slope that leads up to the freeway shoulder. Go up the slope, and there’s a clearing among the shoulder trees—probably a couple of chairs, cigarette butts, beer cans. If there are a few guys there, just tell them that you’re supposed to meet a kid named Santiago, can you remember all that?”

  Ragotskie repeated the instructions haltingly. “Is that a freeway gypsy nest? Harlowe said they’re dangerous.”

  “If Santiago is still around, they won’t mess with you. They’ll assume you’re connected. And if they say he isn’t around anymore, just—wing it. It’d be a good idea to bring a lot of sandwiches and beer, too, share ’em around. Good sandwiches, not the little triangles in plastic boxes.”

  “Out of my five hundred?” Getting no reply, Ragotskie went on, “Meet you there when?”

  “I can’t be sure. Be there by sundown, and wait for us.”

  “What if this Santiago kid is there? Who is he?”

  “Oh hell, tell him you’re both to wait there for us. He’s a sort of freelance courier and watcher.”

  “And thief,” added Castine.

  “Sometimes. Anyway, he knows us.” Vickery swung the car to a vacant curb space and put it in park. He hiked up to reach into his pocket, and peeled off five hundred dollars bills and passed them to Ragotskie. “Now get out.”

  Ragotskie’s eyes were big behind the round lenses. “You’ll be there for sure?”

  “Unless we run into trouble.”

  Ragotskie opened his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He unbuckled the straps on his bicycle and carefully lifted it down onto the pavement, and spent a few seconds anxiously looking it over. Apparently satisfied that it hadn't sustained any damage when Vickery
had backed the car into Harlowe's SUV, he hiked it around so that it was facing back the way they'd come, then swung one leg over it and took hold of the hand grips.

  He bent down to peer through the open door at Vickery. “I do know where your book is!” he said loudly. “Trade! Agnes for the book! Be there!” And then he was pedaling rapidly away down the sidewalk. In the side mirror, Vickery saw him disappear around the corner of some office building.

  Vickery waited for a gap in traffic, then swung the car into the right lane.

  “You just let him go,” observed Castine.

  “Sure. We’ve got to get away from this car, and I don’t want him knowing about our Saturn. At that freeway nest we can sneak up from the shoulder side, make sure he’s alone.”

  Castine nodded. “He might try to re-establish himself with Harlowe—or his Agnes!—by turning us over to Harlowe.”

  “He doesn’t know which way he’s facing,” agreed Vickery. “He may work with us, but he’s no ally.”

  “He mentioned twin girls,” said Castine, “and a boat.”

  “And two girls holding hands on a boat seemed to send that old-house vision to us this morning, and ran us off the road. What do you bet it was the same two girls?”

  “A lot,” said Castine. “And it connects this Harlowe person’s group with that awful house.”

  “Maybe. Probably.” He glanced at the manila envelope on the floor by her feet. “We might as well drive by Harlowe’s office on Sepulveda, once we’re back in the Saturn. We’ve got time before we meet Supergirl.”

  “Then dinner, I hope. And not some hot dog stand.”

  “I think we’ll be going to the Central Library on Fifth, and Philippe’s is right by there. Great French dip sandwiches.”

  “I’m ready for that. Don’t crash us before we get there.”

  Taitz and Foster had found their way to a Lavanderia, and in the steamy, fluorescent-lit interior, over the noise of the washers and dryers and the Spanish-language chat of the customers, Taitz had got Harlowe on his cell phone. He was holding it in his left hand; his right was wrapped in a now-blood-blotted towel he had bought for five dollars from a woman at one of the dryers. The place was fragrant with laundry detergent and bleach.