by Tim Scott
I found myself on the ground outside and before I even had time to think, she was there, hauling me onto the back of a bike.
And then we were gone.
Crash suits hummed into place amid the roar of acceleration and the smell of oil as we choked up a tiny alley. The bike slewed around a bend, hemmed in by tall, gray concrete walls, then she flicked us upright and hit the throttle.
Suddenly, I had faith in this woman and realized she had the sort of confidence that could burn a path through a dark forest. I couldn’t be sure how many encyclopedias she had sold, but she could certainly handle a bike.
We leapt onto a freeway and I guessed we might be on the outskirts of Rap or Heavy Metal. It was just a feeling gleaned from the thrown-together buildings I could make out in the distance, because those weren’t zones I ever hung out in, and this freeway wasn’t especially distinct. The neon aura of the glow lamps shot past, one after the other, strobing in the blurred, vibrating darkness, and I felt the bike lurch and kick sideways as we rode a bend that must have been greased with oil.
The shock of the escape had touched a nerve inside of me, maybe because I hadn’t been properly awake, but the idea of dying now seemed real and cold and lonely. I had hoped that, in the moment of death, my life would all add up to something that would be realized in a flourish of understanding and peace. But this had made me see I could be wiped out in a flurry of trivia and my last thoughts might be confused and meaningless, and somehow that was more surprising than the idea of being consumed in a sheet of pain.
I tucked my head in closely to Caroline’s back just as the bike seared into a long, sweeping bend, and we galloped inexplicably into thick darkness. A whole swathe of glow lamps were out, and my lungs tightened as I wondered if this was some kind of trap set up by the Riders.
I glanced ahead over Caroline’s shoulder and saw a plasi-screen loom forward in the blackness, and on it a dark girl with bold, high cheekbones poked her finger at us and her easy, smooth voice filled the speakers in my crash suit: “Grr! Ha! Bang! Jonny X, time you took out a new sort of life insurance? Yes? Take out a policy with us today, you son of a bitch!”
The marketing people of that company had clearly been either up all night or having a very strange day when they thought that one up. The irony about life insurance didn’t escape me, but I was more taken by the fact my C-4 Charlie was broadcasting my existence loud and clear to anyone who cared to listen, and I felt a sickness in my stomach.
The Riders had traced me once with my C-4 Charlie, and I didn’t doubt they could do it again. Didn’t doubt that, even now, they probably were bearing down on us with their ludicrously oversized shotguns. I gripped the bike tighter with my thighs and stared at the ground, wondering why this woman had bothered to come after me. Did she really understand what she was getting into? Again, the leering image of the Rider with the ammunition round in his teeth plastered itself around my mind.
It had been a bad day, I thought. A very bad day, and I wanted a cigarette more than anything. But I never had managed to find the packet I had bought the night before, and I couldn’t see Caroline being keen on the idea of stopping off to get some. She jinked deftly between a couple of other bikes and inside my crash suit I rocked from side to side like a rag doll. I tried to get the thought of the satisfaction a cigarette would give me out of my head, and wondered again why the hell she had come after me. It couldn’t just be about trying to sell me those encyclopedias again, could it? I had never even heard of limpet sales-women, and I guessed there had to be more to it than that. But at least she was on my side and I was grateful. I’d had precious little go my way in the past twenty-four hours and whoever she was, she didn’t appear to want to kill me.
The way things were, I had to regard that as a bonus.
She throttled back after half an hour or so and slithered off the main freeway, powering down as we hit a deserted junction. The empty quiet was unnerving and unexpected. Shorn of our speed, I felt stupid and conspicuous, as if we stood out like the only piece of bread at an annual convention of wild ducks.
Plasi-screen signs flashed and I tried to take a bearing on where we were, but it wasn’t anywhere I knew offhand. It was probably outside the music zones, and people always said they lived “natural” out here.
“The rain shower you’re approaching is brought to you by Merryweather Hover-Umbrellas,” said a man on a screen with a smile so shiny he could have used it as an alternative source of renewable energy if they found a way to store it. “Merryweather,” the man bustled on. “If you haven’t got one of our Hover-Umbrellas you’re a loser!” Some other people appeared on other screens.
“Loser! Loser! You’re a loser, Jonny X.”
Frankly, this sort of thing wasn’t helpful.
A rain shower erupted right on cue, triggered by a local cloud machine that must have been somewhere about. Caroline throttled the bike away from the junction, picking her way through a series of small roads flanked by a mixture of small-time malls and bars that seemed to be mostly dead, and there was a strange, foreign peripheral feel to the place, as though it was outside of the normal run of life. The warm rain teemed down, and I found my crash suit had a big leak. I was soon soaked through, shaking the water out of my eyes to see anything at all. Being outside the music zones, the advertisers tended to feel more courageous about giving their customers a hard time; they probably didn’t even have a license to be drizzling rain on everything like that.
Caroline took a left down a small track by the side of a low one-story building just as the rain eased off, and we wound our way up through a series of hairpin bends that ushered in a crisp chill to the night air. It was mostly forest now, and I abruptly caught the sweet smell of the wet pine needles. It was reassuring something so sensual still existed.
My body temperature began to drop alarmingly as we climbed higher, and I hoped wherever we were going wasn’t much farther. Still, I wouldn’t have put it past this woman to carry on until we were in Michigan. The violent intensity of the Riders’ presence was dimming in my mind, or just being overwhelmed by the shouts of cold from my body.
But we did keep on going and it was interminable.
Climbing up through the trees on this tiny track, accelerating occasionally when it flattened out, then climbing again. What was I doing here? A thought sniped at me from left field that this whole thing could be something to do with the International Board for Random Events.
The International Board for Random Events (IBRE) came into being when experts became worried that computer models were on the verge of being too precise at predicting future events. So to safeguard world trade markets, the government had formed the IBRE, which was given carte blanche to create random events that no computer could predict. What these random events were and how they were generated was a fiercely guarded secret. I couldn’t see that they were behind this though. It was all too small-scale. Maybe the whole IBRE thing was a fabrication anyway, invented by someone to keep the traders’ minds at rest.
The bike wound around another hairpin and I glimpsed a pinprick of scarlet as the red fire of dawn slipped through the trees. It wasn’t hard to understand what the Aztecs had been on about worshipping the sun, because seeing the dawn always woke something in my soul. It was the one time of day I could believe almost anything was true, and I could have believed all kinds of things were true now, except my hands were full of the jagged burrs of frostbitten pain, which jabbed me away from dreaming.
8
Later, I slept.
I heard the engine cut out and forced my eyes open from a heavy, thought-drugged, soul-aching half sleep, and found the bike being rocked onto its stand.
The door to drowsiness still lay open in my head and half dreams flitted around like bats, caught in the light of my consciousness for a brief second, with the same bright candor that still pulsated from a memory of a theater show I had seen when I was small.
And then they were gone.
I
tried to focus; where were we? Poking out from among the pine trees was a small cabin with a turf roof and a deck that rode out from the side of the hill like the upturned palm of a hand.
“Come on,” hectored Caroline, hustling me off the bike. “Get inside. Hurry up.”
I crept painfully off the bike, forcing blood into the stiffness of my legs and around the bruises that had frozen rigidly, like leaves in pond ice. I hobbled up the wooden steps, suddenly aware again of the damp, honey-sweet smell of the wet pine needles that lay in rafts on the forest floor, and made my way through the flapping mosquito-mesh door, then the main door itself.
The cabin was stiff with cold. It hadn’t been used for a while, but a log fire was laid out ready in the hearth.
“Here,” called Caroline, throwing a thick gray blanket at me. “Take off those wet things and use this till I get you some clothes.” She struck a match and the smell of burnt sulfur drifted around the room on a thin wisp of smoke. The flames in the fire nibbled, then snapped at the twigs, crunching the paper hungrily as it came to life. I ditched my clothes, leaving them in a heavy, damp pool on the floor, and it felt like shedding the last vestiges of my past as I wrapped myself in the blanket, pinning it securely into place, and stared at her.
“My C-4 Charlie will have them buzzing up here before too long,” I said. “And they are surprisingly dangerous people.”
“It’s OK. I cloned your C-4 Charlie while we were on the bike and sent it to a thousand different places.” She handed me some coffee. “They won’t know you’re here.”
“Oh, OK,” I said, not exactly understanding what she was on about but feeling that any explanation might not make things much clearer, anyway. “Where are we? What is this place?”
Then it struck me.
This cabin seemed familiar. No, it was more than that, and yet I couldn’t place it. A shard of a memory had dented the surface of my consciousness, and the ripples fanned out through me, but my head was too full of other stuff. Too stirred up by old events that didn’t mean anything and pointless people from the past who had swamped who I was, so I couldn’t find jack shit in my head. “Have I ever been here before?” I added lamely, saying it simply because I felt it.
“Shouldn’t think so. It’s a safe house. They don’t generally make the holiday rental market,” she answered, tilting her head to one side with a searching stare. The same look she’d given me when we first met, and again that feeling as though she was testing me, seeing if I understood what she was saying behind the words, but I was way out of my league here. I was floundering like a new kid on his first day at school.
“Why does an encyclopedia saleswoman need a safe house?” I said, feeling the bizarreness of the sentence in my mouth and listening to the words enter the room as though they were being spoken by someone else.
She shrugged. “People come after me sometimes. It’s a high-risk business. You wouldn’t believe the hoods I have to deal with.”
“Really?” My head spun. “You sell encyclopedias. It can’t be that high-risk, can it?”
“You are way out of touch. It’s on the front line these days.”
“Is it? Well then, why not work in a store in a mall and sell them there instead?”
“Come on,” she replied. “Do I look like that sort? Those store kids are just amateurs.” I stared at her in confusion.
“Do I know you at all?” I said, almost involuntarily.
“No.” She answered quickly. “’Course not. But I know you. Married to a Sarah X eight years ago, no children, but one cat—”
“Whooa!” I said, holding my hand up. “You’re out-of-date. We separated quite a while ago. Officially we’re married, but that’s it.”
She paused. “Oh. Company records a mile or two away from reality, as ever. One day, one of their mistakes is going to be serious for someone in the field. You know about RMPs?” I nodded.
“Yeah, so do they. So. Do. They. That’s all they seem to do.” RMPs were a new teenage craze. You popped one in and it stimulated a random three-second memory that was lodged in your head with an almost real-life intensity, as though someone had suddenly shined a torch on one piece of highly colorful hieroglyphics in a lost, dark, ancient Egyptian tomb. It was the sort of thing the young jet set did after dinner parties, or kids messed about with when they were meant to be working. You were only supposed to do a couple every twenty-four hours. People who’d swallowed a whole packet had had their heads fried in a weird explosion of memories that came at them so fast and with such intensity, it seemed as though they were trying to exist in several distinct realities all at the same time. Their brains just couldn’t deal with it.
“Tell me, have I missed the bit where you explain to me why you blow up an old hospital and take me to a safe house in the middle of nowhere? And are you sure I don’t know you from somewhere? Perhaps a long time ago?” I added, after a pause. “A party or something? I’ve a friend called Mat C21. You know him?”
There was silence for longer than there should have been as we looked at each other, and it was an easier silence than by rights it should have been. Somehow—and inexplicably—I felt calmness slide through me, and a flare of something deeper.
“Here we are,” she said, finally handing me a volume. “In here are all the answers you could ever need. Have a good look through. That’s just a few of the A’s, but you’ll find color pictures and diagrams detailing clearly and concisely all aspects of the universe and more.”
“I’m not being deliberately difficult, honest to God,” I said. “I just really don’t want any encyclopedias, and can you please tell me what is going on here? My house got ripped off, some Riders kidnap me, then you come after me and try and sell me a set of old-fashioned books. What is all this?”
“I’m really sorry about your house, that’s a bummer. I’m sure it is, but I don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that these are a treasured collection you can enjoy at your leisure to discover the mysteries of the universe and even share with your wife. Perhaps your wife loves you a lot more than you realize.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Jonny X, the bottom line is I’m a limpet saleswoman and I’m remarkably tenacious. I have to be. My neck is on the line every time I go for a kill.”
“A kill?” I repeated.
“A sale. We call them ‘kills.’ Forgive me. I forgot you’re a civilian. Now, I don’t usually have the trouble I’ve had with you, but it’s all part of the job and that’s cool. I live with that. But your twenty-four hours is nearly up and I am going to get mountains of grief from my boss if we don’t complete real soon, so I’d appreciate it if you would have a look through, then I’m sure you’ll want to do a deal and we’ll all be happy.” She handed me the volume, nodded, smiled, then slipped out the front door, clacking it shut behind her.
“What?” I said out loud, quietly shaking my head and sitting down.
It was coffee in the mug. One sugar with just a tiny amount of milk, exactly as I take it. Even when I explain to people how I like my coffee, they get it all wrong, but this was perfect. I couldn’t even begin to think how she had come to get it right by chance, unless her research people had their good moments too.
But this woman was still a confusing enigma. Surely she wasn’t a limpet encyclopedia saleswoman. There was no such thing, was there? Though to be honest, I had heard of selling fads that were pretty strange; there had been one for Wise Head Golf Clubs. These were golf clubs that adjusted the angle of the golf club head a moment before you hit the ball so that all your shots always went straight. They called it the “power of the nuclear bomb” for some ludicrous reason, which made no sense to anyone except some advertising marketing men. Anyway, they had programmed loads of golf balls to follow people who visited certain golf courses. The only way to get rid of them was to say “A wise head makes a wise player,” but you had to say it about fifty times to get rid of all the balls. I think in the e
nd someone went and burned the factory down and the company didn’t get much sympathy from the judge, who was a bit of a player himself.
I’d never played golf in my life; I guess I’d never seen any evidence to suggest that it wasn’t a hugely pointless and dull game best left to middle-aged men who thought they had something to prove or needed to get away from their wives. Or both.
Maybe these encyclopedias were being sold with a similar sort of fervor; but as I leafed through this volume, pleasant though it was, it did seem like a gigantic, cumbersome dinosaur from another age. A bit like the way the Two-Tone Zone now insisted everyone wear a hat and a suit in all of their bars, or they got an on-the-spot fine.
I sat down, flicked through, and saw it was pretty much as I had expected: a lot of stuff beginning with “A,” coupled with simple, tidy explanations and neat line drawings. Surely there was more to these encyclopedias than that? Surely, for her to go to all this trouble, there had to be more in here than this childish-looking content? I laid the book randomly open at a picture of an Aeolian harp and tried to see deeper. I really did not need a set of encyclopedias, however much this woman tried to sell them. That was it. End of story. Still, it was better to be here than with those Riders by a factor of about six trillion.
The image of them jogged something in my memory, which seemed to be thawing out from the damp cold, and I eased myself up and walked stiffly over to the shelves. I ran my finger along the acres of smart volumes until I came to the P’s, pulled the book down and sat flicking through the pages until I found it. “Pestilence.”
“‘Pestilence—an epidemic disease causing a high mortality rate,’” I read out loud. Well, I hadn’t been far off. Maybe the Riders would be interested in a set. I scanned down the page where it ran on about pestilence. “‘One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse alluded to in the Bible, in the Book of Revelation. The others being Famine, War, and Death.’” I smiled ruefully.
