by John Varley
It wouldn't have been my weapon of choice against Isambard C, but it was the weapon I had. My main problem was that, to use it, one had to be in close, and in close I knew he held all the high cards. I might not get more than one swipe at him. That swipe had to count.
So what I'd been doing was preparing a trap.
The chain knife barely buzzed as I poked it through the top of the air-duct pipe. I moved it left to right cutting an arc, then back, then over the top again, then forward. I ended with a half cylinder of thin plastic suitable for my purpose. I put my light and my head up through the hole I'd just made, but it was very close and black and I couldn't tell much. Maneuvering room was to his advantage, so I rejected the idea of simply standing up and stumbling away in the dark. Unless...
No, it was too risky. If I'd retraced the pipe, from the outside this time, maybe I could have found the section that he was in and sliced him up while he was trapped inside. But how would I know where he was? Again, I'd get one shot, and I'd be stabbing blindly. As soon as he knew I had a chain knife a lot of my advantage would be lost. My best shot seemed to be face-to-face, in close quarters.
I thought there was a good chance he didn't realize I knew about how his pistol worked. Maybe he was expecting to close the last yard or two while I clicked the trigger at him, uselessly. One can hope.
I knelt back down in the pipe and fitted the cutaway section over the big hole in the bottom of the pipe. It was a bit too large. Working with only very brief flickers of light from my knife, I trimmed off edges and corners until it was just slightly bigger than the descending shaft. I ran my hand over it, lightly tested its strength. I couldn't tell any difference in texture. The plastic bent only slightly, but it seemed sure that if I put my weight on it I'd buckle it, and plunge headfirst down into the pipe.
I'd done all I could do. I moved back a few feet, hunkered down, and waited. The trap was between us and it was pitch-black. But I was far from sure he wouldn't scent something wrong.
Thump sssh. Thump sssh.
What was making that noise? Dragging a broken leg? That would account for the sssh, but what about the thump?
I never found out, because I never saw him in motion down the tube.
There was the slightest new sound. Had he reached the trap? Could he feel it with his fingers? The noise of his movement stopped.
"Left... right, and... yes. Straight ahead," he said. My god, he was here. I still hunkered, drenched in sweat, not daring to breathe.
"Which way would you go, Sparky? I can smell you, I can smell your fear. I like that smell."
I prayed to all the Muses. No sneezes. No growling stomach.
"Which way would a coward go? Seems obvious, doesn't it? Turning left or right involves too many decisions. You'd go straight ahead.
Thump. And then a glorious sound: narrow-gauge plastic crumpling like a sheet of thick paper. I snapped on the light and saw him half in, half out of the down tube. His head and shoulders were in, and he had one hand on the edge of the pipe nearest to me. That, and his knees, were all that kept him from the plunge.
Without even thinking about it I slashed at his hand with the chain knife. Bzzzzt! The air filled with a fine pink mist, and half of his hand was lying there like a bundle of hard little sausages. At the same time I sidled over and jammed my foot down hard on the back of his neck. He slid down, held there poised for a moment with his knees straining to hold his body in a position too angled to fit into the tube, and then he started to slide. I shoved his ass with my shoe, to get him going.
Then he was gone.
I collapsed into a quivering hulk, sitting tailor fashion. I wiped my brow with the back of my hand, coming within an inch of slicing off my ear with the chain knife. I stopped the whirring of the chain, took a few deep breaths. I still had the light on, simply because I'd never been this afraid of the dark. I knew he had to be gone, but a part of me kept expecting him to leap out of the down tube and go for my throat. To reassure myself, I leaned over and played the light down the tube.
He was five feet away, head down. All I could see was his feet and part of his legs. But he was moving. He was moving up.
"Why won't you die?" I shouted at him. The sound of my own voice frightened me. It sounded very near to madness.
Like a bird might watch a snake, I stared in fascination at his slow progress. He was holding himself in position by forcing his shoulders, his elbows and hands—including the partial one I'd left him—his lower back and knees and feet against the inside of the tube. Then, in a rippling motion that reminded me of a caterpillar, he moved his feet up an inch, then his knees, then his elbows and back and hands. On the best day of my life I couldn't have done it. With the injuries he had sustained it was monstrous to think he could do it. But there he was.
"Will you never stop?"
"Never."
"Give up. Call it a day. Go get cleaned up and lick your wounds. Please, just slide down the pipe and we can both go home for a while. Somebody's going to find us in here."
"That's your problem."
I thought it was at least partly his problem, but I guess if he just didn't give a damn, it wasn't.
He kicked off his shoes. I heard them clatter a long way down the tube. Now his feet got better traction; he moved up an inch and a half at a time.
He got within my range, so I reached down and stabbed the sole of his right foot with the chain knife. Not only did it not bother him in the least, he kicked at the knife, losing a part of the foot but almost knocking the knife out of my hand. And still he came up.
That's when I got my silly idea, squatting there on the edge and watching him rise slowly up the tube, like heartburn. I snapped the chain knife back into its slot and opened out the ice-pick blade. I pulled the ice pick free of its socket. You were supposed to seat the blade into a different part of the handle to chip ice, but I didn't want to risk losing my weapon again, so I reached down just with the pick blade. I drew the tip slowly, slowly across the bottom of his foot.
He jerked like a mackerel on a hook.
"Stop that!" he shouted. It was the first time his voice had shown any emotion.
Oh-ho!
I drew the tip of the pick lightly over the other sole.
"Don't ever do that again!" he snarled.
"Izzy. You're ticklish!" I could feel the big grin on my face. Unable to stop myself, I laughed aloud. Never had I felt such a blessed relief of tension. I reached down and diddled him with my fingertips. He jerked again, and loosened his grip on the inside of the tube, slid down about a foot and a half to where I could no longer reach him.
"I'm starting back up," he said, after a moment, his voice cold and emotionless again, yet with vast anger bubbling just below the surface. "If you ever do that again to me, I will give you one entire week more of life."
"Don't you have that backward?"
"I said what I meant. You have no conception of how much pain I can put into those seven days. You'll beg me for death."
I thought I probably would, too. In fact, I'd beg for it as soon as he got down to serious work.
"Does that mean if I surrender to you now, I get a quick death?"
"I didn't say that." He started inching his way up again. It was a little harder now, since his maimed foot was oozing blood and making the pipe slippery. If only I had a bucket of soapy water, I thought.
But I didn't. So when he was in range, I tickled both his feet and he dropped down again.
"This is called a Mexican standoff," I told him. At least I think that's what it's called. I wonder why? "You can't get up here, and I can't leave or you'll be up and out in just a minute or two."
"I can wait," he said, confidently. And he probably could. Someone in the Charonese Mafia must have something pretty powerful on someone in the Oberoni government. Or maybe a jail term simply didn't scare him.
But I didn't intend to wait around.
I unrolled a big wad of toilet paper. Activated the lighter accessory
on my knife, and lit the wad. It flared up very quickly, singeing my fingers before I could drop it down on him. It fell right on the seat of his pants, burning merrily. Let's all sing: "Chestnuts roasting..."
He never cried out, never threatened me. He began to wiggle and squirm with amazing energy, not making a sound. He managed to get one hand to the right spot, slipping down a few more inches, and batted at the burning wad. Smoke billowed up around me, making my eyes tear. I endured it heroically. After all, tragedy is when my eyes hurt. Comedy is when your testicles are being cooked.
The fireball fell past him, but his pants were burning. And that wasn't the worst of his problems, because I dropped another flaming depth charge on him, this one lodging briefly against his body until he pressed his back against the pipe to smother it.
Distantly, I heard an alarm go off. Smoke detector, most likely. Which meant it was really time to get out of here. I had dropped half a dozen fireballs on him, and he was blazing fitfully from head to toe. I saw him start to slide. He picked up speed and then he was gone in the smoke. Had he gone to the bottom? How could I know? I didn't know where the bottom was. He was deeper down than he'd been, though, which I guess was as good as I could hope for. When he got the fires out, it should take him a while to inch himself back up the pipe. I hoped it was enough time for me to escape.
I stood up in the place I'd removed the section of pipe, my knees popping loudly. I played the light around this small, crowded space, looking for the egress. I saw nothing but pipes of blue, white, copper, and red, wires in hundreds of colors, and some sort of foamy stuff I couldn't identify. It was all haphazard, seemingly without plan. Few people know of this other world behind their ceilings and walls. I'd been in places like this before, but the experience granted me little advantage, since without a blueprint there was little means of telling what was what or what was on the other side of a wall.
Well, there was bound to be a way to access this space. I'd just have to go find it. The distant sound of the alarm provided the urgency.
I did identify one pipe. It was copper, about an inch in width, and printed all along the side were the words EMERGENCY SPRINKLER SYSTEM, over and over. Where were you when I needed you?
I leaned over to pick up my suitcase and his hand fastened on my wrist.
There is no way to transliterate the scream I let fly. Spell it any way you want, scream it aloud, and then magnify it by ten. And boost it an octave. Many a woman could never have uttered that scream.
There he was, at my feet as I swept the light over him, a vision from hell, streaked with blood that had run up his face, patches of hair still glowing embers. Most of one side of his face was burned black, cracking, sloughing off. Even the eye was roasted. None of it seemed to bother him. With maniacal concentration he tried to bring his other, maimed hand around to lever himself out of the hole. His good hand gripped like steel.
Bzzzzzzzz zzzzzt!
Once more vaporized flesh and bone became a pink mist in the air. Completely by reflex I had reached down and lopped off his hand at the wrist. He began to slide, then steadied himself somehow, began to lift himself up with his stump and his ruined right hand. I tried to bring the chain knife down to his head, thrust it into his brains, see how he liked that, but his flailing arm hit my hand, almost made me lose the knife again. He was still too quick; I couldn't risk a neck slice.
Bzzz uuuzzz uuuz. The knife met some resistance as I passed the blade through the copper pipe of the sprinkler. Water gushed from one severed end, and I tugged at the malleable metal, pulled it out and down, aimed it at the face of the beast.
With a roar of rage, he slipped an inch, three inches, a foot, and then lost his grip entirely. I shined the light down through the torrent, saw him clinging to a crosspipe opening about ten feet down. That's how he got himself turned around, I imagined. And climbing the inside of the down duct must have been a lot easier with his head up. Now he clung, slipped, and down he went, like a log flume ride, past another opening, and another, and then I couldn't see him anymore.
Another alarm was ringing now, set off by my sabotage of the emergency system. Gotta go, gotta go right now.
Then I saw the pieces of him still lying at my feet. I kicked the severed hand over the edge. Maybe it would hit him on the head. Another piece was four entire fingers barely connected by the first knuckles. Over it went, too. The last piece was his severed right thumb and it was about to join its brother digits when I paused, thought it over a second, then picked it up and shoved it into my pocket.
Never can tell when a spare thumb might come in handy.
I picked up my suitcase, stepped out of the pipe and onto the foamy stuff covering the floor, and promptly broke through it, falling ass over end to the floor of a hallway full of hurrying people.
Only one child seemed to have noticed my pratfall, and he thought it was pretty darn funny. Everybody else was looking for the fire exit. I got up, tried to regain my dignity, and joined the throng. A crowd felt like exactly the right place to be. You can lose yourself in a crowd.
I went through the stairway door and started down. So the second floor wasn't good enough for me? If I'd been a little lower I'd probably already be out.
Those tricky Oberoni. I'd gone down one flight of the spiral stairway when yet another alarm sounded. Then a voice:
"Everyone on the fire stairs, sit down, now!" And everyone did, except for one goofy looking fellow who looked as if he'd already been through fire, flood, pestilence, and plague. I'm speaking of myself.
The little boy tugged at my pants. Sweet of him, considering he could have had another good laugh if he'd just let me alone. I sat, and the stairs all collapsed. We started to slide down an endless spiral.
You had to admire them. The folding stairway probably came from a funhouse, but it sure got us out fast. Other people leaped in from other floors, until pretty soon we were jam-packed, some upside down, some tumbling head over heels. Still I think there would have been more chance of injury if they'd let us walk out.
At the bottom we landed on a rotating disk that quickly spun us off onto soft, sweet-smelling grass. I lay there just a moment, savoring my escape, then someone grabbed my arm and helped me up and rushed me away from the area, where more guests were arriving every minute. It was all as orderly and efficient as the baggage delivery in a spaceport, but faster.
"Are you injured?" It was a young emergency worker. I knew it because of the large red cross on his tunic.
"I'm fine. A little disoriented."
"If you'll move along over there, we have forms you can fill out for any damages you have incurred. We hope this little crisis is over soon, and that you can continue enjoying your stay at the Othello."
"Thank you. I've had a wonderful time already."
I walked toward the table, then right past it, and on down the street and into the park and down to a train station and onto a car which took me far, far from Mr. Isambard Comfort.
* * *
You've heard that old expression, to follow one to the ends of the earth. I'm sure Comfort would try, if we were on Earth, but as most people know, Earth has no ends, being a big sphere like most places in the system. Oberon does have ends, though. Four of them. And that's where I was.
All the ends are called Edge City. If you must distinguish them, they are numbered eleven, one, five, and seven, from that old familiar clock face. In a few more years they will have evolved into ten, two, four, and eight, and a few years after that Oberon will lose a major tourist attraction as the edges meet at three and nine. But by then the second wheel should be well under way.
I thought I was at Edge City Eleven. I wasn't quite sure. It's easy for an off-worlder to get turned around. Surprising, since the system is so logical, unlike the warrens of Luna, where most things just growed. But there it is. I might really be at One. It didn't matter much, at the moment.
It was three days after all the excitement at the Othello. I had spent the time laying low,
covering what tracks I might have left, and monitoring the progress of the case of Mr. Isambard Comfort, off-worlder, in the lively tabloid press of Oberon.
The off-worlder angle was being played for all it was worth. Most people look with suspicion on people from Somewhere Else. Race isn't much of an issue anymore, what with all the years of intermarrying, hybridizing. You seldom see someone who is really black or really white. Religious differences can still stir up trouble, but nothing like what used to go on in the old days on Earth. Sex is no longer the source of much discrimination, with sex changing in either direction or even frequent trips back and forth across the gender line. That left national origin, and not only do most people harbor some sort of prejudice about that, very few are even ashamed about it. Luckily, it is more in the nature of a sports rivalry than anything that is likely to lead to a shooting war. Plenty of fistfights, few murders.
Comfort was not only an off-worlder, he was Charonese. Make a list of folks to be viewed with suspicion, Charonese would lead it every time, distantly followed by Plutonians, then fill in the blank with the nearest neighbor you didn't care for. With Oberoni, it was the Mirandans. Can't trust those goddamn Mirandans, no sir. I mean, look at the way they dress! Their cuisine stinks, they don't wash frequently enough, they don't clean up after themselves, their cities are a filthy disgrace. They're stupid! Did you hear about the Mirandan expedition to the sun? They're not afraid they'll be burned up, because they'll be landing at night! And a million other similar ancient jokes. Ah, but the Charonese! There was a miserable bunch of lepers. Of course, in the case of the Charonese, it was my belief that they'd really earned it.
That a Charonese had had the gall to torture a citizen of Oberon almost to death, the perversity to assassinate a compatriot and throw her body out the window, the shocking insensibility to cause a major panic in one of Oberon's finest hotels, and the stupidity to get caught, minus both hands and a large part of one foot... well, it was just too wonderful for an Oberoni editor to believe. New headlines every day! Shameful revelations! Interviews with each and every guest and staff member of the Othello, with the police investigating the case, with the fire crews and emergency medical techs. And rumors galore! A Charonese terror squadron on the way from the outer worlds to break Comfort free from prison! Local satanists picketing for Comfort's release! Riots breaking out when Citizens for Decency picketed the satanists! The true story of the battle to the death between Comfort and the mysterious third Charonese, and the manhunt for same! Was he dead (some say, eaten by a mysterious domestic Charonese cabal), or alive and in hiding?
