The Legislator stopped and let out a bellowing noise. Fetid steam began rising from it. Japheth took Soma by the hand and pulled him along, through chaos. One of the Commodores, the first to fall, was motionless on the ground, two or three Legislators making their way along its length. The two who’d fought lay locked in one another’s grasp, barely moving and glowing hotter and hotter. The only standing Commodore, eyes like red suns, seemed to be staring just behind them.
As it began to sweep its gaze closer, Soma heard Japheth say, “We got closer than I would have bet.”
Then Soma’s car, mysteriously covered with red crosses and wailing at the top of its voice, came to a sliding, crunching stop in the salt in front of them.
Soma didn’t hesitate, but threw open the closest rear door and pulled Japheth in behind him. When the three of them—painter, Crow, Owl—were stuffed into the rear door, Soma shouted, “Up those stairs, car!”
In the front seat, there was a woman whose eyes seemed as large as saucers.
commodores faulting headless people in the lick protocols compel reeling in, strengthening, temporarily abandoning telepresence locate an asset with a head asset with a head located
Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails was trying not to go crazy. Something was pounding at her head, even though she hadn’t tried to open it herself. Yesterday, she had been working a remote repair job on the beach, fixing a smashed window. Tonight, she was hurtling across the Great Salt Lick, Legislators and bears and Commodores acting in ways she’d never seen or heard of.
Jenny herself acting in ways she’d never heard of. Why didn’t she just pull the emergency brake, roll out of the car, wait for the THP? Why did she just hold on tighter and pull down the sunscreen so she could use the mirror to look into the backseat?
It was three men. She hadn’t been sure at first. One appeared to be unconscious and was dressed in some strange getup, a helmet of some kind completely encasing his head. She didn’t know the man in the capacitor jacket, who was craning his head out the window, trying to see something above them. The other one though, she recognized.
“Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”
The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”
Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design—by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.
But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him—Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky—jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.
“It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.
Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the backseat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.
“These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”
“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.
Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.
“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.
The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.
“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.
The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.
Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.
The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.
“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.
breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in
Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.
Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture—armed and armored—attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.
Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.
Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.
Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor. He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place.
Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.
Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.
“Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”
The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.
Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.
“Why?” shouted Soma.
But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japhet
h with relentless fury.
Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.
“there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”
Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.
Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”
Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.
“My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.
All of the same arguments.
All of the same arguments.
Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.
Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.
“you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”
But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product, not a builder.
Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb—the knife, the eraser, the threat—looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.
A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.
The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.
And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.
North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.
At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.
Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”
Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”
But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.
The Border State
Chapter One
Look down on the Liberty Hills of Kentucky where they spring up north of the traitorous, twisting Green River. Look down on untended fields and tumbledown houses; look for a clean pavement line stretching along a ridgetop, a road punctuated by empty churches and empty stores.
See twin bicyclists, working hard. The gold of their jerseys matches the springing hawkweed crowding the lowland fields, the blue of their shorts is a half-dozen shades deeper than the cloudless sky.
Here is the brother, Michael, a sprinter. His legs are sculpted pistons, bunched muscles that push and demand, exhort and explode. Michael is an unsubtle cyclist, capable of terrifying speed along the flats, of finishing spurts that demoralize other riders and electrify the Viewers at Home.
Here is the sister, Maggie, a climber. She dances—this is the parlance of commentators—she dances on the pedals. She is a bird with strengths hidden and unhidden, with secret discipline and public fire. She breathes metronomically; she pedals in perfect circles.
This day above the Green, they trained for a race they might not ride. They awaited trustworthy word but had given up hope of anything but an unremarkable day in the saddle.
Then Michael killed a telephone.
The twins had dropped off Sandford Ridge when the telephone found them. They’d left the open ridgeline and begun a steep descent through the green tunnel of the Ginnie Hill Road. The roof of the tunnel was tulip poplar and catalpa; the floor was crumbling pavement thinly scabbed over yellow gravel. The walls were the hillside and the hollow, dense with hydrangea and the red blossoms of trumpet creeper.
And invaders. Invaders choked those woods, too, escaped ornamentals from the Orient and from Tennessee. “Things steal in,” the twins’ father would have said, if he’d ever returned from the mission trip that should have seen him home two years ago.
Maggie heard it ringing first. Descending is the other side of the climbing coin and she rode at ease on this little drop. She watched the fierce grip of her brother’s hands on his brake hoods, willing him to relax and let the bike find its own line through the rough pavement, just as she had dragged him up the steep climb to the top with silent, subtle cues. On a normal day, Michael would repay her in the long flat south of Pellyton by shifting into his highest gear and accelerating to the edge of her ability to follow, making her a better sprinter the way she made him a better climber.
On a normal day; not a day when a voice above, jolly and calming, said, “Person to person for Michael or Margaret Hammersmith. This is a person to person call.”
Michael, always a twitch away from braking on any downward grade, locked his rear calipers and fought his bucking and shuddering bike to a halt. Maggie was forced to brake as well, following him as closely as she was. She threw her hips back over the rear of her saddle and pulled on the handlebars, curved around her cursing brother, and came to an elegant halt, kicking her feet from the clipless pedals just before her balance fled.
She looked back up the hill and saw that Michael was doing the same. The telephone had landed in the road behind him and was preening the orange feathers over its fat breast. It raised its head, stared them down with bulbous eyes, and said again, “Person to person for Michael or Margaret Hammersmith. This is a person to person call.”
Michael leapt free of his bike and launched himself across the few yards that separated him from the phone. His first kick caught the creature from Tennessee mid-sentence.
“Person to person . . .” And the tone changed from jolly cartoon to stern authority. “Assault on public property is a crime. Notification has been sent.”
Before it could repeat itself again, Michael landed another kick, this time cracking his stiff-soled shoe hard against its chitinous snout. It staggered, but did not fall. It began a short hopping retreat up the hill, but Maggie saw that the kick that had silenced the telephone had been the one to fully tear away the thin scrim of her brother’s self-control.
So she did not watch him finish the telephone, just heard him kick for what he saw as their unrealized potential, kick for what he saw as their poverty, kick for what he saw as their abandonment. She wondered how he would excuse himself—patriotism, maybe, or parsimony.
Michael scuffed his cleats across the broken pavement when he’d finished, sloughing off any bits of the foreign thing that might cling to his shoes.
“That’ll save us a few dollars come tax time.” Michael said this between heaving breaths. “The Revenue Cabinet applies the bounty on these thing
s as a credit.” He was apologizing to her.
Maggie was digging through the pouch lashed beneath her saddle. The kit from the health department was tucked inside it with her tire levers and spare inner tube.
She murmured, “Good, that’s good,” as she read the tiny print on the side of the foil package. She looked up at him. “Did you get any on you?”
“Any what? The blood?” Michael looked over his tanned arms, made an awkward effort of checking the exposed skin on the fronts and backs of his legs. “Do they even call it blood when it’s that color?”
“Never mind,” she said, having read further. “You’re still standing up and you seem to know who you are. As much as you ever do anyway.” She smiled. She was forgiving him.
She ripped open the packet with her teeth and pulled out a tightly folded square of gauze. She walked up the hill to the rapidly desiccating corpse and with a flick of her wrist tossed the gauze onto the mess of orange feathers and writhing muck.
The gauze flowed over the telephone’s body smoothly, weaving and webbing, sending out tendrils where bits of the thing’s blood were crawling toward the more hospitable ground at road’s edge. In a few minutes, the gauze changed shades from white to green, and a faint cinnamon smell rose up.
Michael was running his fingers over the rear brake pads of his machine when she walked back to him. “Not a lot left to these pads,” and he was rueful and grinning, checking his status.
Maggie patted him on the head as she walked to where her own bike lay. While he stood watching her, she quickly mounted and popped her cleats into her pedals with a loud click. “If you can catch me you can have mine,” she called over her shoulder. “I never use them!”
Telling the Map Page 15
