by Tim Powers
The soliton old man, hardly visible in the bright overhead light, was still nodding in one of the chairs at the table.
The blonde woman was slapping the wall, and then a white-painted cabinet, but when Moore looked toward her she grabbed the knob on one of the cabinet drawers and yanked it open.
“You need to come over here,” she said, “and look in the drawer.”
After the things he’d seen in the high corners of the parlor, Moore was cautious; he leaned over and peered into the drawer – but it contained only a stack of typing paper, a felt tip laundry-marking pen, and half a dozen yo-yos.
As he watched, she reached past him and snatched out a sheet of paper and the laundry marker; and it occurred to him that she hadn’t been able to see the contents of the drawer until he was looking at them.
I don’t have any vision, his guardian angel had said. No retinas. I have to use yours.
The woman had stepped away from the cabinet now. “I was prepared, see,” she said, loudly enough to be heard out on Jones Street, “for my stupid students killing me. I knew they might. We were all working to learn how to transcend time, but I got there first, and they were afraid of what I would do. So boom-boom-boom for Mistress Moore. But I had already set up the Demon, and I had xeroxed my chain mail and put it in addressed envelopes. Bales of them, the stamps cost me a fortune. I came back strong. And I’m going to merge with you now and get a real body again. You accepted the proposal – you said ‘Yes, that’s correct’ – you didn’t put out another bet this time to chase me away.”
The cap flew off the laundry marker, and then she slapped the paper down on the table next to the Wild Turkey bottle. “Watch me!” she said, and when he looked at the piece of paper, she began vigorously writing on it. Soon she had written PAT in big sprawling letters and was embarked on MOORE.
She straightened up when it was finished. “Now,” she said, her black eyes glittering with hunger, “you cut your hand and write with your blood, tracing over the letters. Our name is us, and we’ll merge. Smooth as silk through a goose.”
Moore slowly dug the pocketknife out of his pants pocket. “This is new,” he said. “You didn’t do this name-in-blood business when you tried to take me in the car.”
She waved one big hand dismissively. “I thought I could sneak up on you. You resisted me, though – you’d probably have tried to resist me even in your sleep. But since you’re accepting the inevitable now, we can do a proper contract, in ink and blood. Cut, cut!”
“Okay,” he said, and unfolded the short blade and cut a nick in his right forefinger. “You’ve made a new bet now, though, and it’s to me.” Blood was dripping from the cut, and he dragged his finger over the P in her crude signature.
He had to pause halfway through and probe again with the blade-tip to get more freely flowing blood; and as he was painfully tracing the R in MOORE, he began to feel another will helping to push his finger along, and he heard a faint drone like a radio carrier-wave starting up in his head. Somewhere he was crouched on his toes on a narrow, outward-tilting ledge with no handholds anywhere, with vast volumes of emptiness below him – and his toes were sliding –
So he added quickly, “And I raise back at you.”
By touch alone, looking up at the high ceiling, he pulled the mushroom out of his shirt pocket and popped it into his mouth and bit down on it. Check-and-raise, he thought. Sandbagged. Then he lowered his eyes, and in an instant her gaze was locked onto his.
“What happened?” she demanded, and Moore could hear the three syllables of it chug in his own throat. “What did you do?”
“Amanita,” said the smoky old man at the table. His voice sounded like nothing organic – more like sandpaper on metal. “It was time to eat the mushroom.”
Moore had resolutely chewed the thing up, his teeth grating on bits of dirt. It had the cold-water taste of ordinary mushrooms, and as he forced himself to swallow it he forlornly hoped, in spite of all his bravura thoughts about the 101 freeway, that it might be the lanei rather than the deadly phalloides.
“He ate a mushroom?” the woman demanded of the old man. “You never told me about any mushroom! Is it a poisonous mushroom?”
“I don’t know,” came the rasping voice again. “It’s either poisonous or not, though, I remember that much.”
Moore was dizzy with the first twinges of comprehension of what he had done. “Fifty-fifty chance,” he said tightly. “The Death Cap Amanita looks just like another one that’s harmless, both grow locally. I picked this one today, and I don’t know which it was. If it’s the poison one, we won’t know for about twenty-four hours, maybe longer.”
The drone in Moore’s head grew suddenly louder, then faded until it was imperceptible. “You’re telling the truth,” she said. She flung out an arm toward the back porch, and for a moment her bony forefinger was a foot long. “Go vomit it up, now!”
He twitched, like someone mistaking the green left-turn arrow for the green light. No, he told himself, clenching his fists to conceal any trembling. Fifty-fifty is better than zero. You’ve clocked the odds and placed your bet. Trust yourself.
“No good,” he said. “The smallest particle will do the job, if it’s the poisonous one. Enough’s probably been absorbed already. That’s why I chose it.” This was a bluff, or a guess, anyway, but this time she didn’t scan his mind.
He was tense, but a grin was twitching at his lips. He nodded toward the old man and asked her, “Who is the lost sultan, anyway?”
“Soliton,” she snapped. “He’s you, you – dumb-brain.” She stamped one foot, shaking the house. “How can I take you now? And I can’t wait twenty-four hours just to see if I can take you!”
“Me? How is he me?”
“My name’s Pat Moore,” said the gray silhouette at the table.
“Ghosts are solitons,” she said impatiently, “waves that keep moving all-in-a-piece after the living push has stopped. Forward or backward doesn’t matter to them.”
“I’m from the future,” said the soliton, perhaps grinning.
Moore stared at the indistinct thing, and he had to repress an urge to run over there and tear it apart, try to set fire to it, stuff it in a drawer. And he realized that the sudden chill on his forehead wasn’t from fright, as he had at first assumed, but from profound embarrassment at the thing’s presence here.
“I’ve blown it all on you,” the blonde woman said, perhaps to herself even though her voice boomed in the tall kitchen. “I don’t have the… sounds like ‘courses’ … I don’t have the energy reserves to go after another living Pat Moore now. You were perfect, Pat Moore squared – why did you have to be a die-hard suicide fan?”
Moore actually laughed at that – and she glared at him in the same instant that he was punched backward off his feet by the hardest invisible blow yet.
He sat down hard and slid, and his back collided with the stove; and then, though he could still see the walls and the old man’s smoky legs under the table across the room and the glittering rippled glass of the windows, he was somewhere else. He could feel the square tiles under his palms, but in this other place he had no body.
In the now-remote kitchen, the blonde woman said, “Drape him,” and the soliton got up and drifted across the floor toward Moore, shrinking as it came so that its face was on a level with Moore’s.
Its face was indistinct – pouches under the empty eyes, drink-wrinkles spilling diagonally across the cheekbones, petulant lines around the mouth – and Moore did not try to recognize himself in it.
The force that had knocked Moore down was holding him pressed against the floor and the stove, unable to crawl away, and all he could do was hold his breath as the soliton ghost swept over him like a spiderweb.
You’ve got a girl in your pocket, came the thing’s raspy old voice in his ear.
Get away from me, Moore thought, nearly gagging.
Who get away from who?
“I can get another living Pat Moo
re,” the blonde woman was saying, “if I never wasted any effort on you in the first place, if there was never a you for me to notice.” He heard her take a deep breath. “I can do this.”
Her knee touched his cheek, slamming his head against the oven door. She was leaning over the top of the stove, banging blindly at the burners and the knobs, and then Moore heard the triple click of one of the knobs turning, and the faint thump of the flame coming on. He peered up and saw that she was holding the sheet of paper with the ink and blood on it, and then he could smell the paper burning.
Moore became aware that there was still the faintest drone in his head only a moment before it ceased.
“Up,” she said, and the ghost was a net surrounding Moore, lifting him up off the floor and through the intangible roof and far away from the rainy shadowed hills of San Francisco.
He was aware that his body was still in the house, still slumped against the stove in the kitchen, but his soul, indistinguishable now from his ghost, was in some vast region where in front and behind had no meaning, where the once-apparent dichotomy between here and there was a discarded optical illusion, where comprehension was total but didn’t depend on light or sight or perspective, and where even ago and to come were just compass points; everything was in stasis, for motion had been left far behind with sequential time.
He knew that the long braids or vapor trails that he encompassed and which surrounded him were lifelines, stretching from births in that direction to deaths in the other – some linked to others for varying intervals, some curving alone through the non-sky – but they were more like long electrical arcs than anything substantial; they were stretched across time and space, but at the same time they were coils too infinitesimally small to be perceived, if his perception had been by means of sight; and they were electrons in standing waves surrounding an unimaginable nucleus, which also surrounded them – the universe, apprehended here in its full volume of past and future, was one enormous and eternal atom.
But he could feel the tiles of the kitchen floor beneath his fingertips. He dragged one hand up his hip to the side-pocket of his jacket, and his fingers slipped inside and touched the triangular lens.
No, said the soliton ghost, a separate thing again.
Moore was still huddled on the floor, still touching the lens – but now he and his ghost were sitting on the other side of the room at the kitchen table too, and the ghost was holding a deck of cards in one hand and spinning cards out with the other. The ghost stopped when two cards lay in front of each of them. The Wild Turkey bottle was gone, and the glow from the ceiling lamp was a dimmer yellow than it had been.
“Hold ’Em,” the ghost rasped. “Your whole lifeline is the buy-in, and I’m going to take it away from you. You’ve got a tall stack there, birth to now, but I won’t go all-in on you right away. I bet our first seven years – Fudgsicles, our dad flying kites in the spring sunsets, the star decals in constellations on our bedroom ceiling, our mom reading the Narnia books out loud to us. Push ’em out.” The air in the kitchen was summery with the pink candy smell of Bazooka gum.
Hold ’Em, thought Moore. I’ll raise.
Trish killed herself, he projected at his ghost, rather than live with us anymore. Drove her Granada over the embankment off the 101. The police said she was doing ninety, with no touch of the brake. Again he smelled spilled gasoline –
– and so, apparently did his opponent; the pouchy-faced old ghost flickered, but came back into focus. “I make it more,” said the ghost, “the next seven. Bicycles, the Albert Payson Terhune books, hiking with Joe and Ken in the oil fields, the Valentine from Teresa Thompson. Push ’em out, or forfeit.”
Neither of them had looked at their cards, and Moore hoped the game wouldn’t proceed to the eventual arbitrary showdown – he hoped that the frail ghost wouldn’t be able to keep sustaining raises.
I can’t hold anything, his guardian angel had said.
It hurt Moore, but he projected another raise at the ghost: When we admitted we had deleted her poetry files deliberately, she said, “You’re not a nice man” She was drunk, and we laughed at her when she said it, but one day after she was gone we remembered it, and then we had to pull over to the side of the road because we couldn’t see through the tears to drive.
The ghost was just a smoky sketch of a midget or a monkey now, and Moore doubted it had enough substance even to deal cards. In a faint birdlike voice it said, “The next seven. College, and our old motorcycle, and – ”
And Trish at twenty, Moore finished, grinding his teeth and thinking about the mushroom dissolving in his stomach. We talked her into taking her first drink. Pink gin, Tanqueray with Angostura bitters. And we were pleased when she said, “Where has this been all my life?”
“All my life,” whispered the ghost, and then it flicked away like a reflection in a dropped mirror.
The blonde woman was sitting there instead. “What did you have?” she boomed, nodding toward his cards.
“The winning hand,” said Moore. He touched his two face-down cards. “The pot’s mine – the raises got too high for him.” The cards blurred away like fragments left over from a dream.
Then he hunched forward and gripped the edge of the table, for the timeless vertiginous gulf, the infinite atom of the lifelines, was a sudden pressure from outside the world, and this artificial scene had momentarily lost its depth of field.
“I can twist your thread out, even without his help,” she told him. She frowned, and a vein stood out on her curved forehead, and the kitchen table resumed its cubic dimensions and the light brightened. “Even dead, I’m more potent than you are.”
She whirled her massive right arm up from below the table and clanked down her elbow, with her forearm upright; her hand was open.
Put me behind her, Pat, said the Pat Moore ghost’s remembered voice in his ear.
He made himself feel the floor tiles under his hand and the stove at his back, and then he pulled the triangular lens out of his pocket; when he held it up to his eye he was able to see himself and the blonde woman at the table across the room, and the Pat Moore ghost was visible upside down behind the woman. He rotated the glass a quarter turn, and she was now upright.
He moved the lens away and blinked, and then he was gripping the edge of the table and looking across it at the blonde woman, and at her hand only a foot away from his face. The fingerprints were like comb-tracks in clay. Peripherally he could see the slim Pat Moore ghost, still in the purple dress, standing behind her.
“Arm-wrestling?” he said, raising his eyebrows. He didn’t want to let go of the table, or even move – this localized perspective seemed very frail.
The woman only glared at him out of her irisless eyes. At last he leaned back in the chair and unclamped the fingers of his right hand from the table-edge; and then he shrugged and raised his right arm and set his elbow beside hers. With her free hand she picked up his pocketknife and hefted it. “When this thing hits the floor, we start.” She clasped his hand, and his fingers were numbed as if from a hard impact.
Her free hand jerked, and the knife was glittering in a fantastic parabola through the air, and though he was braced all the way through his torso from his firmly planted feet, when the knife clanged against the tiles the massive power of her arm hit his palm like a falling tree.
Sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his arm was steadily bending backward – and the whole world was rotating too, narrowing, tilting away from him to spill him, all the bets he and his ghost had made, into zero.
In the car the Pat Moore ghost had told him, She can bend somebody at right angles to everything, which means you’re gone without a trace.
We’re not sitting at the kitchen table, he told himself; we’re still dispersed in that vaster comprehension of the universe.
And if she rotates me ninety degrees, he was suddenly certain, I’m gone.
And then the frail Pat Moore ghost leaned in from behind the woman, and clasped her diaph
anous hand around Moore’s; and together they were Pat Moore squared, their lifelines linked still by their marriage, and he could feel her strong pulse in supporting counterpoint to his own.
His forearm moved like a counterclockwise second hand in front of his squinting eyes as the opposing pressure steadily weakened. The woman’s face seemed in his straining sight to be a rubber mask with a frantic animal trapped inside it, and when only inches separated the back of her hand from the formica tabletop, the resistance faded to nothing, and his hand was left poised empty in the air.
The world rocked back to solidity with such abruptness that he would have fallen down if he hadn’t been sitting on the floor against the stove.
Over the sudden pressure release ringing in his ears, he heard a scurrying across the tiles on the other side of the room, and a thumping on the hardwood planks in the parlor.
The Pat Moore ghost still stood across the room, beside the table; and the Wild Turkey bottle was on the table, and he was sure it had been there all along.
He reached out slowly and picked up his pocketknife. It was so cold that it stung his hand.
“Cut it,” said the ghost of his wife.
“I can’t cut it,” he said. Barring hallucinations, his body had hardly moved for the past five or ten minutes, but he was panting. “You’ll die.”
“I’m dead already, Pat. This –” She waved a hand from her shoulder to her knee “ – isn’t any good. I should be gone.” She smiled. “I think that was the lanei mushroom.”
He knew she was guessing. “I’ll know tomorrow.”
He got to his feet, still holding the knife. The blade, he saw, was still folded out.
“Forgive me,” he said awkwardly. “For everything.”
She smiled, and it was almost a familiar smile. “I forgave you in midair. And you forgive me too.”
“If you ever did anything wrong, yes.”
“Oh, I did. I don’t think you noticed. Cut it.”
He walked back across the room to the arch that led into the parlor, and he paused when he was beside her.
