METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Bashar smiled. “‘Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.’”

  “Book of Matthew,” Crown said with a heavy sigh. “I cannot recall chapter and verse anymore.”

  “Matthew 10:16.” He added diffidently, “Not that I’ve ever been a believer, but it’s good advice.”

  Crown nodded. “You needed serpents … I only knew you as doves.”

  “No one knows us as anything but doves. Sometimes we must bite back.”

  A dusty, hacking laugh. “And doves don’t have teeth.”

  “No. But bulls do.”

  Lightbull has not only teeth but orbital assets, Mindy thought, remaining quiet.

  “Set the serpents on bulls,” Crown said.

  Nodding in return, Bashar replied, “It would be a long, slow war even so.”

  Crown closed his eyes a while. The guard stirred, glanced at Mindy, then held her place. Bashar was silent as any worshipper at an altar. Mindy continued to keep her own counsel.

  Finally, Crown spoke again. “The majority of my funds … will flow to J. Appleseed … on my death. Use them well.”

  “Lightbull may not be our enemy,” Bashar pointed out.

  “They may not be our friends.” Crown shuddered. “I have spent my life … trying to buy back the past. I’d like to pay for the future, instead.”

  Bashar reached out and touched Crown’s hand. “I wish I had known you earlier in life.”

  “I am glad I did not … meet you later.” Crown laughed again. “It would have been a one-way … conversation.”

  “We go,” said Bashar.

  Wordless, Mindy followed the old Green out of the room, out of the suite, out of the hospital, and onto the well-paved, well-lit, well-patrolled streets of Marquam Hill and the OHSU complex.

  The night had come on rain, so the few lights of Portland were misty glimmers. Even the city smelled like forest, out here. She was conscious of Mt. Hood looming a hundred kilometers distant, four corpses moldering in the forests at the mountain’s skirts, her Unimog their funerary offering.

  “Bull cults,” she said.

  “Secret schools.” Bashar looked her over. “Like secret cities, but harder to find.”

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I have business in the Midwest. I will find a train going east. You have answers in the bombings, but they are useless to Cascadia LEC.”

  “I’m not sure I have answers. Just questions.”

  “Welcome to life,” he said.

  “Before you go …” Mindy found herself suddenly very shy. “I’d like you to meet someone. You have time?”

  “Can it wait?” he asked, not unkindly.

  That meant Bashar would be back, that she might see him again. And Dad had all the time in the world. Every minute was the same to him, from now until death. “Sure. It can wait.”

  She watched Bashar walk away into the rain. Eventually a guard came by to ask her what she was doing. Mindy flashed her badge and told him to call Cascadia LEC for a pickup.

  * * *

  Mexico City (NetPressWorx, 05/04/2073):

  Major data exchange shut down by mysterious mold, seven hospitalized. Federal bioterrorism units investigating as industrial sabotage. Spokesmen deny any breaches of data or network security.

  * * *

  We began in light, so shall we end in light

  “I wish to write a note,” Crown said.

  “I am ready to take it down.” Hubbard. Kornbluth was dealing with the legal and business matters associated with Protocol Leopold, and Heinlein was researching some final options.

  “No, a note. On paper. With a pen.”

  “To whom?”

  “I shall address it.” Crown added, “This is a lost art.”

  Most of the machines had been disconnected, and his room was quiet as ever it had been. Outside the window the late moon rose past the pointed bulk of Mt. Hood.

  Crown stared a while before adding, “They will be here long after we are all dust.”

  “I’m sorry?” Hubbard was being very polite.

  The woman security agent, whose name Crown could not recall, entered the room carrying a folder. “Classic paper, sir.” She also offered him a fountain pen.

  “Where did you get these?” he asked.

  “Kornbluth asked us hours ago to locate writing material.” Her voice was puzzled.

  Someone is getting psychic in their old age, Crown thought, before correcting himself. He was the only old one here. “Thank you,” he remembered to say, before staring out the window again and wondering who walked free under the summer night.

  After a while, a nurse came to finish unhooking him, disapproval written in the pinching of his face. Crown ignored the man and began to write.

  * * *

  Mindy sat amid the odors of ketchup and coffee with her datamat in the old diner she favored, ignoring her plate of cultured turkey and sweet potatoes in favor of an ever-deepening spiral of research. Franklin hadn’t been happy with her expense report on the Cascadiopolis investigation, and even less happy with her field report.

  “Yes, it was political,” he’d admitted when she pushed. “A tip from high up. Some Edgewater boys, I suspect.”

  She’d tried to resign then, but he wouldn’t take her badge from her. “Take a few days,” he’d said.

  So Mindy did what she always did. She visited her dad, ate bad food, and stared at old files. Time off wasn’t much different from time on. Sooner or later, she’d go over the wall, go Green, but Bashar had been right. The world needed people like her. At least for a while yet.

  The datamat told her more than she could ever want to know about bulls and fire, Mithras and Minoan Crete. Conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts. She could sift data with the best of them. Someday she’d see the pattern.

  Someday she’d see the bull dancers.

  For now, it was enough to know without proof.

  * * *

  Private correspondence hand-written with fountain pen on parchment from the mid-20th, undated, unsigned, archives of the J. Appleseed Foundation:

  The lesson I missed until the very end was that not only did money not matter now, but money had never mattered. The Pandora’s box of the Industrial and Information Revolutions has become a shattered piggy bank. Hope is the rarest of currencies. I give you my hoard, for I shall not need it where I go next.

  * * *

  “I may be some time,” will be his epitaph

  Crown walked under the sun, for what he knew was the last time in his life. He’d already emancipated the expert systems, buying them citizenship in the virtual state of net.free, which honored AI rights to Kornbluth’s satisfaction. The Gold Man lurched, something misfiring slightly in its left leg, but still he walked.

  Mt. St. Helens was long recovered from its late twentieth century mishap. The forest around him was almost a hundred years old. Young, by the standards of the deep woods, but enough for tall trees and elk and hidden glades filled with lavender flowers and orange butterflies and the bright sounds and scents of summer. Hidden somewhere nearby was Ciudad St. Helens, but that didn’t matter now.

  He breathed as deeply as he could, and didn’t worry so much about his body.

  Eventually, even with the prototype Gold Man exoskeleton doing all the work, it was time to sit down. He chose the spot with care, within a stand of lodgepole pines that offered both a pretty view of the mountain and invisibility from overflights. The air smelled of freedom and loam, and so he followed the scent down into the darkness beneath the earth, dreaming for the last time of bleeding bulls and fires tall in the night.

  ***

  A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves

  Charity Oxham crouched behind a rusting car and cursed the rain that ran down the back of her neck. She adjusted the strap on the ops goggles she wore and blinked through the data as it scrolled by.

  The rain wasn’t the only thing she cursed t
onight.

  She glanced toward Hemming where he hunkered down beside her. Like her, he clutched a Colt Stinger in his hands and muttered beneath his breath as the sounds of the gunshot reverberated through the dilapidated neighborhood.

  “This was supposed to be a simple bag and tag,” she whispered. “Ellis said so.”

  Hemming chuckled, tipping his head so that the rain trickled off his ball cap. Beneath the visor, his eyes glowed green behind his own goggles. “Nothing’s simple with Ellis.”

  She and her squad were here to pick up one Terrence Ichabod on a handful of warrants that D.C.’s finest had outsourced to Edgewater as a part of its move towards efficiency best practices. Deputized Eddies helped out with patrols, with relatively minor enforcement issues and with outstanding warrants.

  Only this one had gone badly. Ichabod wasn’t alone. And worse: He and his friends were decidedly up to no good.

  And armed.

  Another shot rang out.

  Charity poked her head up over the fender of the car. She had her squad marked now in overview mode and could see them positioned around the junk-strewn yard that surrounded Ichabod’s shack.

  She clicked her tongue, opening her mic. “Carter, Murphy,” she whispered. “Do we have confirmation on what they’re packing?”

  Carter’s voice reached her first. “One each Remington .12 gauge pump action.”

  “Three each 9mm Glocks,” Murphy added.

  “Fuck,” Hemming said.

  “I’m calling it,” Charity said. She didn’t want to. The last thing she wanted was to interrupt Ellis’s dinner, but she could already hear the sirens. Another click and she pulled up his wireless.

  He picked up on the first ring. “What is it, Oxham?”

  “Shots fired,” she said. “Local’s been dispatched.”

  She heard background noise—glasses and cutlery clinking. She also heard the anger in his voice though she could tell that he was trying to hold it back. “We can’t lose this contract. Take him down.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll call local off. You bring him in, Oxham. I don’t care what it takes.”

  “Are you authorizing lethal engage—” The line clicked and she swallowed the rest of the question. Of course he was. He just didn’t want to be on record as saying so.

  She patched voice in to the rest of her squad. “Okay, boys,” she said. “Ellis is calling off the heat; we’re it.”

  Charity clutched the Stinger. It was sleek and dark, surprisingly light in her hands. Colt had made quite a comeback with the first in its nonlethal line of handguns. Edgewater’s own track record during the Baker-Dansforth Riots and a half dozen other local police actions had helped nudge industry forward in this regard and though the pistol’s range was for shit, the cluster of needles it delivered could drop a linebacker at full run in twenty seconds.

  Twenty seconds, though, was an eternity of exposure when three Glocks and a Remington were involved. Charity holstered the Stinger and reached for the small Walther 9mm strapped to her ankle, working the action. “Change up, boys,” she said into her throat mic. “We’re authorized lethal.”

  She listened for acknowledgment. When she had it, she peeked over the fender of the car and slid the safety off. “What do you think?” she asked Hemming.

  He poked his head around the rear bumper and pulled back quickly as another blast thundered from the shack, buckshot tearing at the metal. “I think they’re not very good at this.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Carter, let’s make ‘em cry. We’ll cover.”

  “You’d better,” he said.

  She was vaguely aware of the green ghost of him moving through the debris of the yard in the left eyepiece of the goggles even as she sighted down on a darkened window through her right. She squeezed off a shot, feeling the pistol push her hand back even as she eased its muzzle down once, twice, three times. She listened to the music of shattering glass and the thudding drum beat of bullets on wood.

  Even as she fired, she heard Hemming and Murphy doing the same and tracked Carter’s movement in the goggles. When he reached an engine block within seven meters, he went prone, popped top and arced the gas canister through a broken window.

  “It’s in,” he said, drawing his own pistol.

  She heard the hiss of the gas and counted slowly, waiting for the chokes and coughs that meant she might bring this around without any casualties. What she heard next, though, convinced her otherwise.

  Laughter. It was muted by the masks they wore, but laughter nonetheless.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Eyes inside, Carter.”

  “On it.” She watched him through the goggle as he fished another canister out of his cargo pocket. He glanced beyond the engine block as he pulled the pin on the Sony cam-mite. Inside the house, a pistol cracked and Carter jerked his head back. “I’m gonna need some help here,” he said.

  They laid down cover while he waited. Then on a silent count of three, Carter popped up and tossed the cam-mite through the broken window. There was a dull whumping sound and a flash of light. Before both had faded, Charity had spun away from her overhead view and pulled up the cam feed. Grainy images coalesced as thousands of microscopic lenses focused.

  The first thing she saw was the chair. Wooden and plain, it sat in the middle of the room and on it lay a crate she recognized immediately. It was open, it was empty, and she felt her stomach lurch. “Boys,” she said, “we have a bigger prob—”

  Before Charity could finish, the night lit up around her and the noise of the first grenade choked out all other sound but the high pitched ringing in her ears. A second explosion went off somewhere near Murphy but even it seemed muffled in comparison. The staccato burst of gunfire that followed barely registered. She forced herself to breathe and scrolled through the datastream. Carter was gone. Murphy was screaming and thrashing about. Hemming was putting rounds into the house with methodic intent.

  “Fall back,” she shouted into her throat mic, raising her own pistol to cover their retreat while she spun up the emergency dispatch officer.

  When it was all said and done, at the end of a long night and surrounded by a crowd of local enforcement, federal agents and frantic media, she’d lost two good men and Edgewater’s contract for the D.C. Wilds. When Ellis approached her after they’d finally carried Ichabod and his men out of the house, she didn’t even bother to ask what he wanted.

  She put her guns and her badge into his outstretched hand, told him to go fuck himself, and waited near the ambulance for the next round of questions about what exactly had gone wrong.

  * * *

  Sunday mornings were the hardest, George Applebaum thought as he closed the Bible on his pulpit. He looked up at his congregation and faked the smile once again, amazed at how much more tired it made him with each passing service. He raised his hands high in a benediction that had become his trademark over the years. “Now,” he said around that forced smile, “go out and be God’s children where you live.”

  That was the cue. Soft music started up and he made his escape from the pulpit, leaving the platform quickly and slipping past the congregation to take his place at the door. This part was the worst. This was not a carefully crafted sermon where he could pick his words and line them up with the person he was slowly becoming. Here at the door, he had to look them in the eye and say things to them that he no longer believed.

  He shook hands as people slowly left. On a good Sunday, it would be at least an hour. On a bad one, closer to ninety minutes. It just depended on who was sick that week or who had lost their job or exactly which passage of scripture had them perplexed or what television program or book ought to be boycotted. And he stood, he smiled, he nodded, and sometimes he even prayed right there with them.

  But he didn’t believe a word of it anymore. And he couldn’t really even pinpoint a time when he stopped, just moments of awareness along the way.

  Today, he thought, would be a bad one. There were visitors this
week. And visitors always meant more time.

  The first was a couple from Los Angeles. They were simple and he moved them along with less hypocrisy than he’d expected. But the second was a group of young men that approached him together though he could’ve sworn they’d sat apart. He recognized them from the service earlier—each had followed his references carefully in tattered leather bibles of their own. He’d marked them instantly as hardcore.

  “Brother Applebaum,” one of the men said, extending a calloused hand. “Brother Frost at Wahkiakum Bible Temple and Holiness Seminary sends us with his greetings in the name of the Lord.”

  Billy Frost. He’d not talked to Billy in years. They’d met at Southwestern Bible in their first year and had worked revivals and street corners together while they earned their Masters in Divinity. Those were the eager, early, hungry years. But Frost’s convictions had drilled deeper into an extremism that Applebaum couldn’t fathom even then … let alone now … and though the man pastored his own church just a few hours away, he’d not seen him more than a handful of times in twenty years. He blinked time away and found his smile. “It’s nice to meet you boys. What’s Brother Frost been up to?”

  The tallest of the four seemed to be their spokesman. He grinned. “You know Brother Frost. He’s just preaching up a storm.” His face flushed a little. “He told us you were a quiet one but that we ought to listen real good.”

  Applebaum nodded. “He was always the rowdy one. I hope you enjoyed yourselves today.”

  They all nodded. “We did. We’ll be back. We’re staying in town for a few weeks before we go on our mission trip.”

  The light in the young man’s eyes struck something in Applebaum and he wanted to ask more. But the four were moving off, walking with their heads held high, young men with confident purpose.

  I was that way once. Now, they were gone, out the doors and into a Sunday afternoon as the next in line approached.

  Normally, he’d have forgotten those young men within a week. But they stayed with him and for the next three Sundays they shook his hand in the foyer after intently listening to his every word.