American Craftsmen

by Tom Doyle

  “They’re riled about something,” I said.

  On the flank closest to us, one of the counterplatoons wheeled out of the combat. Dressed in the grab-bag fashion of free-booting filibusters, they kept surprising order. As one man, they leveled their assortment of firearms in our direction.

  “Take cover,” I said.

  “T’ain’t nothing,” said the Appalachian. “They’re aiming into the otherworld.”

  Scherie hit the tall grass anyway. “Get down!” I yelled, tackling the Appalachian into the turf.

  The platoon of shades fired. An all-too-real heat passed over our heads. Nearby grass yellowed and died. I guessed that the concentrated fire of ectoplasmic rounds was substantial enough here for a direct hit to flay the skin.

  “Goddamn it!” said the Appalachian. Scherie murmured a string of profanity.

  Another flash of power, then nothing. I raised my eyes from the dirt. The platoon was gone.

  “I ’preciate the sentiment, but don’t do that again,” said the Appalachian, brushing the grass off her clothes. Then she cocked her head at the dead grass. “Whoa, hold on a moment.”

  “Real enough for you?” I said.

  “Real isn’t the problem,” said the Appalachian. “Aiming at the real is.”

  “That felt strange,” said Scherie. She stood up, legs wobbling, then steadying. “Where did they go?”

  “Don’t know,” said the Appalachian. “Nobody standing leaves the battle early. Maybe the ghosts fired on us because they know.”

  “Know what?” asked Scherie.

  “The Sanctuary, unobserved, can run away from trouble,” said the Appalachian. “While you’re here, watching it, its enemies can draw a bead on it, and it’s fixed like a butterfly on a pin.”

  Silence. I had no response. Necessity had brought me here; I had no use for discussing what I couldn’t change.

  The spectral conflict sped up, like a computer chess game when the rest of the moves were inevitable. The stages of battle flashed in irregular lapses of time. The lines clashed, flanks turned, the center held, the center could not hold. The gray smoke lifted; the free unionists had driven their opponents off the stricken clearing, back to their line of trees.

  The ghost of a mine whistle signaled the end. The good guys had won, but just barely.

  I exchanged whispers with the Appalachian. “One day, they’ll fail.”

  “One day, we’ll all fail.”

  Like the dead, Scherie said nothing.

  PART V

  NEVER CALL RETREAT

  All right, then, I’ll go to Hell.

  —Mark Twain

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Sakakawea came to the precipice with its illusory emptiness. She could easily see the bridge, but suspected difficulty crossing. She might not be a wanted guest. They had been hunting for this place through her many lives. The Sanctuary, the land of America’s misfit misbegotten toys.

  She felt a seductive tug from this place, like a plea for mercy, an offer of lost things and people. The deal had small appeal. Whatever she had lost she had thrown away; whoever she had lost she had destroyed. Once she had destroyed someone, she didn’t want to see them again. That was the American way.

  Sakakawea’s instincts riding atop all her faded memory had paid off again. The reason she’d sacrificed two Gideons in a gambit (besides their thorough unpleasantness and knowledge of the Hutchinson op), the reason she hadn’t killed Dale at the motel, was for just such an outcome. She had known he would flee to some person or place of power, and he’d gone all the way to the top.

  Chimera’s prophecy made any living Morton a deadly risk to Sakakawea and her commander, but responding too directly to oracles was a quick trip to poetic justice. If there were any unaccounted-for Mortons (and there always were, as she knew well), they could also be hiding here. Absent the prophecy, the Sanctuary mattered more than any latter-day Morton’s skin. Though she’d have that too, yes she would.

  Unfortunately, the difficult ground meant calling in support. She pulled out her phone; without a ring, she connected. “Hello, sir.” She said “sir” like a military fetishist.

  “Hello, my dear. Good news?”

  “They’ve entered the Sanctuary,” she said.

  “Excellent. I’ve never liked lost causes.”

  “Sir, the terrain is literally hostile. I’ll need some support.”

  “Already ordered. Keep an eye out before you attack. They may open a door for me to drop in. Chimera will support from here. Try to keep these new grunts alive and Dale Morton dead. And stay on target—timing is a factor.”

  “The Peepshow?” she asked.

  “Decapitated and confused. But Chimera reports that Major Endicott is on your trail.”

  “Understood.” Sakakawea already knew this; she had chosen not to ditch her phone or take other precautions against being followed, and Chimera couldn’t often surprise her. Her beloved commander was another matter; he had surprisingly irrational attachments. “What if the major and I meet?”

  “That would be sad. But he’s abused my tender regard too many times. Chimera can’t find a viable long-term scenario and predicts I’ll kill him eventually. Do what you must.”

  “Understood. Out.” Sakakawea would enjoy doing what she must. She put away her phone and picked up her rifle. She tried out the sight, looking over the precipice and deep into the green land she would violate.

  * * *

  The Appalachian sat on her Shaker rocking chair, eyes closed. “I’ve been watchin’ the bridge. You’ve brought others to the gate. The things after you won’t respect this sanctuary. You’ve done their work for them. They’ll destroy this.”

  She opened her eyes and took a long pull from her pipe. “I reckon you think you have a good reason?”

  I nodded. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  The Appalachian laughed. “Best reason in the world, for a Morton.”

  I said, “I know you don’t care for the old Families…”

  “I may have exaggerated on that point,” said the Appalachian.

  “But,” I continued, “this is Left-Hand stuff and the government combined. When they’re done sorting out the Families, do you really think they’ll spare this place?”

  “Hell if I know. I don’t trust farsight, Morton, and neither do you. We’re better at the past. So stop pissing around. What do you want?”

  “I need to speak more directly to the dead.”

  “The way to the Underworld is easy,” said the Appalachian. “Just stroll over to that pit yonder, and don’t watch your step.”

  “I want you to guide me,” I said, “and serve as medium.”

  “I’ve just healed you, and you want a tour of coma town.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” I said.

  “That’s Left-Hand Morton craft, you know.”

  “But not for Left-Hand reasons,” I said.

  “True enough,” said the Appalachian, “but that doesn’t improve the taste of their vile herbal concoctions.”

  “You’ll do it.”

  “If we go now,” said the Appalachian. “We’ll need to git back in time for your friends. Assuming we don’t git stuck there permanent.”

  * * *

  Scherie raised her palm to signal a conversational stop. “You’re going to hell?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s the common pool of the craft afterlife. But I’m not really going anywhere. I’m just going to drink some herbal tea, and go down into the mine a little ways.”

  “We’re being hunted by the government,” said Scherie, “and you’re going to trip out.”

  “It’s more real than that,” I said, “with real answers.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t guess what that meant. No such luck. Scherie’s mouth hung open a moment before she spoke. “You’re going to die for a while, aren’t you?”

  “Just a while,” I said. “It’s a simulated brain death, like a near-death experien
ce.” Or so I’d heard.

  “I’m coming,” said Scherie.

  “You need to stand guard,” I said.

  “What if you don’t come back?” asked Scherie.

  “Then you vacation in Mexico, and go home to your family when this blows over. You’ll be fine, you’re … normal.”

  “I wasn’t worried about me,” said Scherie. She walked away toward my ghosts, who kept an uneasy distance.

  “But I am!” I blurted. “Worried. About you.”

  Scherie stopped, but didn’t turn to face me. “Then don’t worry. I can take care of myself. I always do.”

  “More than that,” I said, having no idea where I was going. “I wonder what you think of all this. I think that maybe, if we somehow survive, you’ll move to New Zealand just to get as far as possible from the American craft world and me. And that would probably be the smart thing to do. But I worry about it.”

  Scherie spun around, finger out, mouth open with something scorching to hit me with. Her eyes narrowed at me, mouth still gaping. Then she laughed.

  At first it was an angry and ironic chuckle, dry and mirthless, but then all the other stuff of the past couple of days seemed to boil up, and the fatigue and the absurdity of it all must have overwhelmed her, because she had trouble controlling her laughter long enough to speak more than a few words at a time. “You’re afraid … of what I might do … if you live through this? Oh God, that’s too much! With all these ghosts around, you still don’t get it.”

  She ran up to me and grabbed my neck as if to strangle me. “You should worry more about how much I’ll hate you if you don’t survive.”

  With a combatlike ferocity, she pulled my head down into a kiss that must have left bruises. Then, with equal and opposite abruptness, she pushed me back with her open palms. “Go. The sooner you’re done, the sooner we can—hell, I don’t know—start running away together again.”

  Run away together. Like a thread to guide me back, I took this slender hope with me into the Underworld.

  * * *

  As a child, I had visited a re-created mine in a museum. That exhibit felt nothing like this. The museum was a clean, dry pseudohole. This mine was a still-bleeding wound in the Earth.

  Any real mine is a gateway to the Underworld. Just ask real miners. They’ll tell of seeing spirits or the devil himself in the depths of a mine. I needed to talk to those spirits, to dead that weren’t my own.

  Despite this practical need, I felt like a poser. Why did the hero always have to descend into Hades? Because killers only believed in death.

  At the mine’s entrance, the Appalachian handed me a miner’s safety helmet. “You’ll want the light after we’re done. Death is a little disorienting.”

  I put on the hat and felt ridiculous.

  The Appalachian brought out a Prohibition-era flask and offered it to me. I took a generous swig, then fought to swallow and keep it down. Herbs, roots, and fungi, all gone bad, decayed, dead.

  The Appalachian took her own swig without much expression. “Let’s git moving,” she said. “We don’t want this to kick in here in the daylight world.” She pointed at my Colt. “That isn’t going to help you down there. I’ll know if someone comes, with time to spare.”

  “Right.” I trotted back to the cabin, and grabbed two extra guns. I knew an oracle when I heard it.

  We descended a too-old ladder in the emergency shaft for one level, then walked along a gallery until there was no light, no sound of the outside world. “This is far enough,” said the Appalachian, and we sat and waited in the dark.

  Into the darkness came not light, but gray, like an old silent film with all the brightness gone. One bare tree, one large rock, and images of people moving to the hand-cranked staccato pace. Only the clothes were different—no Little Tramps, but clothes from the colonial to the Molly Maguire to the hip-hop, moving in ghostly quantum jumps in and out of the frame. And no sound, not even tinny piano music.

  Were some of these ghosts here too soon? Had the Red Death already come for them?

  Within the confused swirl of spirits, a hippy girl with big glasses jumped into the frame and elbowed her way to the bare tree. Unlike the others, she smiled—wistful, but a real smile.

  “Sphinx,” I called, “are you there?”

  Sphinx stood behind the gray outline of the Appalachian. A girlish lilt of melancholy came from the Appalachian’s scratchy throat and expressionless face. “I’ve always been here, talking to you.”

  “Thank you for saving my life,” I said.

  “That’s optimistic,” said Sphinx. “But you’re welcome. Such a polite boy, full of questions.”

  “Yes, I need to know—”

  “Me first,” said Sphinx. “Riddles are my department. What doesn’t go on four, then two, then three legs?”

  My spine tingled as the tumblers fell into place. “Something that’s not a man. Bullshit.” Even dead, she was crazy. “Nonhuman magical entities are fairy tales.”

  Sphinx’s shade smiled sadder. “I’m not talking folk and myth, boy. We’ve been stuck in a world of Hawthorne and Poe. They’re playing Asimov and Gibson.”

  I felt myself lurch lower in the Underworld. “Oh God. Chimera. They did it. It’s the craft AI project. They gave a fucking computer magical sentience.”

  “They sure as hell think so,” said Sphinx.

  The Appalachian started suddenly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt. Just surprised is all.” Then she was still again, and the more girlish voice said, “Such a lovely hostess. We should talk more.”

  Now calmer, I interrupted, “I don’t believe in HAL the Magus. Craft is analog, not digital.”

  “Embarrassing, as I’m so beastly dead from Chimerical craft,” said Sphinx.

  I considered. “Then it’s a con, like the chess-playing Turk. A human is greasing the transistors.”

  “Ooh, so graphic, but your logic is impeccable, Casper.” Sphinx giggled. “We are in grave danger.”

  “I assume you warned somebody,” I said.

  “Everybody, to the very, very top, in my inimitable clear style,” said Sphinx.

  “Let me guess. Chimera makes clear predictions in military language.”

  “That’s what made me suspicious,” said Sphinx. “That’s why they like it. You’re good at this. Just like your father.”

  I was on the clock; family gossip would have to wait. “Who’s behind this?”

  “Everybody knows, but they’re just stupid. Only a few are doing this evil on purpose.”

  “What purpose?” I said.

  “Gives my dead head an ache. Try again.”

  “OK, who do I have to kill to stop this?” I said.

  “Damned if I know.” She giggled at this.

  There was only one protected area that Sphinx couldn’t have gotten a single clue about. “How deep in the Pentagon is it?”

  “Core of the H-ring,” said Sphinx. “Try looking in that direction for five minutes straight.”

  OK, two more bits of the mystery, and I was done. “What does Chimera have to do with you trying to destroy me in the desert?”

  Sphinx’s shade frowned to mocking excess. “Our failures serve a purpose too.”

  “Yeah, getting people killed.”

  She wagged a gray finger at me. “Better than the alternatives.”

  I considered the alternatives. “That op was supposed to be Endicott’s, so I would have gone elsewhere. But worse than the desert?”

  “I saw you die many, many times,” said Sphinx. “South America, the Congo, all sorts of exotic locales.”

  I imagined these avoided dooms annoying me like flies. “Chimera would have gotten me on the alternative mission, or the one after that. But come on! The mad sorcerer was the only scenario where I had a chance of surviving intact?”

  “The only one Chimera’s crew wouldn’t overrule,” said Sphinx. “The chance was small. And pushing you out of the service was a happy alternative for them. I took a longer
view.”

  “Longer view”—a tantalizing echo of Dad. But my next question took deadly precedence. “Tell me who killed Hutch, and how.”

  “If I knew everything,” said Sphinx, “do you think I’d be here?”

  “Isn’t she here too?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” said Sphinx. “There are other early arrivals here, but she isn’t one of them.”

  “Early arrivals.” I had expected this. “KIA before their time.”

  “High-profile Family types,” said Sphinx, “who don’t seem to know what hit them.”

  Time, though plastic here, was running short. If I tried to sustain this altered consciousness for too long, I’d become what I pretended to be. Tissue necrosis and brain damage would set in. “I need to talk to Hutch.”

  “Well, I guess this is good-bye then. No time for family gossip…” The gray image of Sphinx turned to go.

  Family gossip. She was dangling that in front of me again. “Wait, what do you know about my family?”

  “That’s need to know, Dale,” said Sphinx in a voice that faded to a whisper in the Appalachian’s throat. “When you need to know it, you will.” Silence, and no image came forward.

  Then the Appalachian grabbed me, painfully hard. “Dale, is that you? Where the fuck am I?” The voice was near panic.

  “Hutch?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Physically, I’m in the Sanctuary,” I said. “I’ve entered the Underworld.”

  A low moan came from the Appalachian. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “There was no other way.” The Appalachian’s grip loosened; Hutch must be controlling her hands. That couldn’t be good. “Hutch, who killed you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hutchinson. “Probably a Gideon, ’cause they were able to sneak up on me. I still can’t find my body. Where did they put my body?”

  Endicott must know. “I’ll find out,” I said.

  Laughter came from the Appalachian. “And then you’ll die. That’ll be nice.” The Appalachian’s face glowed and contorted. No longer the gray effigy of a peaceful death, her eyes rolled.