by Jack Dann
While all stood aghast and paralyzed, Darger seized Surplus by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway, slamming the door shut as he did.
They had not run twenty paces down the hall when the door to the Office of Protocol exploded outward, sending flaming splinters of wood down the hallway.
Satanic laughter boomed behind them.
Glancing over his shoulder, Darger saw the burning dwarf, now blackened to a cinder, emerge from a room engulfed in flames, capering and dancing. The modem, though disconnected, was now tucked under one arm, as if it were exceedingly valuable to him. His eyes were round and white and lidless. Seeing them, he gave chase.
"Aubrey!" Surplus cried. "We are headed the wrong way!"
It was true. They were running deeper into the Labyrinth, toward its heart, rather than outward. But it was impossible to turn back now. They plunged through scattering crowds of nobles and servitors, trailing fire and supernatural terror in their wake.
The scampering grotesque set fire to the carpets with every footfall. A wave of flame tracked him down the hall, incinerating tapestries and wallpaper and wood trim. No matter how they dodged, it ran straight toward them. Clearly, in the programmatic literalness of its kind, the demon from the web had determined that having early seen them, it must early kill them as well.
Darger and Surplus raced through dining rooms and salons, along balconies and down servants' passages. To no avail. Dogged by their hyper-natural nemesis, they found themselves running down a passage, straight toward two massive bronze doors, one of which had been left just barely ajar. So fearful were they that they hardly noticed the guards.
"Hold, sirs!"
The mustachioed master of apes stood before the doorway, his baboons straining against their leashes. His eyes widened with recognition. "By gad, it's you!" he cried in astonishment.
"Lemme kill 'em!" one of the baboons cried. "The lousy bastards!" The others growled agreement.
Surplus would have tried to reason with them, but when he started to slow his pace, Darger put a broad hand on his back and shoved. "Dive!" he commanded. So of necessity the dog of rationality had to bow to the man of action. He tobaggoned wildly across the polished marble floor between two baboons, straight at the master of apes, and then between his legs.
The man stumbled, dropping the leashes as he did.
The baboons screamed and attacked.
For an instant, all five apes were upon Darger, seizing his limbs, snapping at his face and neck. Then the burning dwarf arrived, and, finding his target obstructed, seized the nearest baboon. The animal shrieked as its uniform burst into flames.
As one, the other baboons abandoned their original quarry to fight this newcomer who had dared attack one of their own.
In a trice, Darger leaped over the fallen master of apes, and was through the door. He and Surplus threw their shoulders against its metal surface and pushed. He had one brief glimpse of the fight, with the baboons aflame, and their master's body flying through the air. Then the door slammed shut. Internal bars and bolts, operated by smoothly oiled mechanisms, automatically latched themselves.
For the moment, they were safe.
Surplus slumped against the smooth bronze, and wearily asked, "Where did you get that modem?"
"From a dealer of antiquities." Darger wiped his brow with his kerchief. "It was transparently worthless. Whoever would dream it could be repaired?"
Outside, the screaming ceased. There was a very brief silence. Then the creature flung itself against one of the metal doors. It rang with the impact.
A delicate girlish voice wearily said, "What is this noise?"
They turned in surprise and found themselves looking up at the enormous corpus of Queen Gloriana. She lay upon her pallet, swaddled in satin and lace, and abandoned by all, save her valiant (though doomed) guardian apes. A pervasive yeasty smell emanated from her flesh. Within the tremendous folds of chins by the dozens and scores was a small human face. Its mouth moved delicately and asked, "What is trying to get in?"
The door rang again. One of its great hinges gave.
Darger bowed. "I fear, madame, it is your death."
"Indeed?" Blue eyes opened wide and, unexpectedly, Gloriana laughed. "If so, that is excellent good news. I have been praying for death an extremely long time."
"Can any of God's creations truly pray for death and mean it?" asked Darger, who had his philosophical side. "I have known unhappiness myself, yet even so life is precious to me."
"Look at me!" Far up to one side of the body, a tiny arm—though truly no tinier than any woman's arm—waved feebly. "I am not God's creation, but Man's. Who would trade ten minutes of their own life for a century of mine? Who, having mine, would not trade it all for death?"
A second hinge popped. The doors began to shiver. Their metal surfaces radiated heat.
"Darger, we must leave!" Surplus cried. "There is a time for learned conversation, but it is not now."
"Your friend is right," Gloriana said. "There is a small archway hidden behind yon tapestry. Go through it. Place your hand on the left wall and run. If you turn whichever way you must to keep from letting go of the wall, it will lead you outside. You are both rogues, I see, and doubtless deserve punishment, yet I can find nothing in my heart for you but friendship."
"Madame . . ." Darger began, deeply moved.
"Go! My bridegroom enters."
The door began to fall inward. With a final cry of "Farewell!" from Darger and "Come on!" from Surplus, they sped away.
By the time they had found their way out side, all of Buckingham Labyrinth was in flames. The demon, however, did not emerge from the flames, encouraging them to believe that when the modem it carried finally melted down, it had been forced to return to that unholy realm from whence it came.
The sky was red with flames as the sloop set sail for Calais. Leaning against the rail, watching, Surplus shook his head. "What a terrible sight! I cannot help feeling, in part, responsible."
"Come! Come!" Darger said. "This dyspepsia ill becomes you. We are both rich fellows, now! The Lady Pamela's diamonds will maintain us lavishly for years to come. As for London, this is far from the first fire it has had to endure. Nor will it be the last. Life is short, and so, while we live, let us be jolly!"
"These are strange words for a melancholiac," Surplus said wonderingly.
"In triumph, my mind turns its face to the sun. Dwell not on the past, dear friend, but on the future that lies glittering before us."
"The necklace is worthless," Surplus said. "Now that I have the leisure to examine it, free of the distracting flesh of Lady Pamela, I see that these are not diamonds, but mere imitations." He made to cast the necklace into the Thames.
Before he could, though, Darger snatched away the stones from him and studied them closely. Then he threw back his head and laughed. "The biters bit! Well, it may be paste, but it looks valuable still. We shall find good use for it in Paris."
"We are going to Paris?"
"We are partners, are we not? Remember that antique wisdom that whenever a door closes, another opens? For every city that burns, another beckons. To France, then, and adventure! After which, Italy, the Vatican Empire, Austro-Hungary, perhaps even Russia! Never forget that you have yet to present your credentials to the Duke of Muscovy."
"Very well," Surplus said. "But when we do, I'll pick out the modem."
A SCRAPING AT THE BONES
Algis Budrys
As the icy and elegant shocker that follows ably demonstrates, the nature of crime changes as society changes, with new social conditions calling forth new crimes, as well as new and strange motivations for committing some very old ones . . . .
Algis Budrys published his first SF story in 1952, and quickly established himself as one of the finest writers of his generation. His most famous novel is probably Rogue Moon, one of the classic SF novels of the sixties. His other books include Who?, The Falling Torch, and Some Will Not Die, as well as the criti
cally acclaimed Michaelmas—one of the best SF novels of the seventies—and the collection Blood and Burning. Budrys is also one of SF's most astute critics—his reviews and columns of writing advice appeared for years in Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Locus; his Galaxy review columns were collected in Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf. His most recent books are the novel Hard Landing and, as editor, the Writers of the Future anthologies.
The wastes processing foreman was doughy and soft: looking at his greenish pallor and watching the convulsed workings at the corners of his mouth, Ned Brosmer wondered what would happen if the man lost hold of himself and began puking. Would it all come up—first the stomach, and then the very nearly similar material of the limbs, and then the pelvis and torso and ears, until finally the empty royal blue slick-finish coverall would be lying at his feet under a heap of something like oatmeal? "It's in there, Officer," the foreman was saying with a relinquishing gesture toward the open inspection plate, the wave of his arm ending with his hand in front of his mouth.
"All right," Brosmer said. "I'll look.
Down here, many levels below the dwelling units that clambered skyward in the complex shape of Panorama Tower, it was all pumps and tubing and worklights. The particular duct from which the smell came was four feet in diameter, and was painted an ivory white. Coded red decal symbols identified it as the north tower branch feed to the central waste macerator.
The hatch was a three-by-two plate, swung back and up; an extension light dangled over it, swaying from the cord as the constant air currents within the duct came gusting out. "Are we going to get flooded?" Brosmer asked, and the foreman shook his head violently.
"Hell, no!" he said. "We got this branch shut off back there, where the tube comes straight down from upstairs and makes that bend, see? There's this surge tank there, like you got to have, and you can use that big valve to block everything between it and here."
"Got you," Brosmer said. "Would a body pass through that valve?"
"No way. Jam it, maybe. But most likely it would just stay in the tank until the next time we cleaned it out."
"So it probably went into the duct right through this hatch."
"That would figure, yeah. Somebody came down here and put it in."
"Or it's suicide."
"You're kidding! Who would want to drown himself in—"
"I was kidding," Brosmer said. He had taken a respirator from his kit bag and was putting it on. His voice sounded remote in his ears, as if he were on dope. He sighed and looked into the duct.
The air flow was backing up from the hydrolizing tanks beyond the macerator, whistling against the torn edges of the thin metal blade that terminated the duct. The blade was designed to rotate at high rpm; it had shattered against something in the body, which had been passing feet-first through it without incident up to that point. Brosmer clenched his teeth, grasped one of the shoulders, and turned it over. A white male, middle-aged, hair gray, eyes brown, several post-mortem abrasions and superficial lacerations, and the apparently fatal puncture wound in the upper right-hand quadrant of the thorax. Made with a thin, long, sharp weapon, Brosmer decided, for he had seen the exit wound below the left shoulder blade. It wouldn't have bled very much; whatever rags had mopped up the spill had probably preceded the corpse down the duct, and were on their way to the farmers by now. And—Brosmer looked more closely. Right. A stainless steel replacement ball and Teflon socket for the original left hip joint. That was what had stopped the blade.
Brosmer drew his head and shoulders back out of the inspection hatchway. "Recognize him, Mr. Johnson?" he said to the foreman. "Take a good look. Sorry." He kept himself out of the way and put a hand on Johnson's elbow to urge him forward.
Johnson craned briefly, then stepped back. "No—I don't know him."
"He's just about got to live in this unit," Brosmer said.
"I don't see none of them. They're up there and I'm down here. There's thousands of them and three guys in my crew and me. That's the way they want it, and that's the way I want it. This is a different kind of place down here."
"OK," Brosmer said. No matter what, the longest delay in making an identification would be a routine four-hour turnaround time for the Social Security print files in Omaha; sooner if anybody wanted to rush it. He stripped off his examining gloves and dropped them in a waste can. "Somebody'll be along to pick it up."
"Is this all?" the foreman asked.
Brosmer looked at him with the appearance of great wisdom. "You mean, where's the sergeant and the lieutenant and the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City? Well, the sergeant's tied up collating officers' reports, and the lieutenant's in a conference with some sergeants. There'll be a photographer with the meat wagon crew. You see," he explained patiently, "this isn't a stage set; this is real. We don't need a lot of mouths full of dialogue to establish the plot."
"You're all the cop we're going to get on this case?"
"I'm 3-D and in color, Mr. Johnson. You can even feel me, if you don't get personal. That's good enough for an unidentified male found in a sewer."
"Well, you sure as hell look young to me, to be handling something like this all by yourself."
"That's right, I do," Brosmer said, packing away his respirator. "You've got my card. Call me if anybody starts asking you questions about the plumbing. I'm getting out of here. I hate dismal places." He turned back once: "Don't tell anybody about this, or I'll bust your ass to someplace where they use buckets."
At the lobby level, Brosmer walked through one Kasuba environment after another, eschewing their invitations to energy or lassitude, until he had reached the lobby area. He rang Building Management.
"Please state your business," the hologram said, and then caught itself. "Oh, it's you, Officer." Her lips took on fullness, but her eyes widened with something other than love. "I'll put you through to Mr. Vermeil." She faded, to be replaced by a naively interesting sculpture that rotated gently under lights, and with the sound of Japanese wind chimes, which in turn yielded to a representation of a man in body-fitting burgundy crushed velvet. It seemed to Brosmer it was a little soon in the evening for that, but perhaps the manager was an early riser.
"Yes, Officer?" Vermeil said busily, not having bothered to put down his frappe.
"There'll be a mortuary truck to get the body, so you'll want to alert your perimeter security people," Brosmer said. "A police photographer will take ID shots; you'll be expected to look at them, in case you can identify the victim. It's almost a sure thing he's one of your residents."
"Good heavens, Officer, I don't know every Tom, Dick and Harry who lives here! Why on Earth should I?"
"Nobody ever calls you up about anything? You know, there was a time when tenants hammered on pipes for more heat, or had their dripping faucets fixed by the super. And the manager came around every month to collect the rent. They've got to be in touch with you now and then."
"I don't remember them, Officer. The bank evicts them if their credit goes, and Central Services has the building maintenance contract. They can hammer all they want to on their . . . pipes, did you say? Why, yes, Officer, there was a time when pipes brought on the heat, wasn't there?" He smirked.
"Vermeil, when the photographer calls you up and shows you the pictures, look at them. And remember it's a sworn admissible communication, whatever you tell him. I'll be in touch when I need you." Brosmer rang off. He went to the lobby doors and flashed his buzzer at the sensing devices. The inner doors opened, and he stepped into the lock. "NYPD shield number 062-26-8729," he said perfunctorily. "One man going out."
There was a pause, and the intervening sound of wind chimes. Then the outer doors opened. He stepped into the raw air, grimacing, and walked toward the transit station, keeping clear of low walls and shrubbery. Above him, the brownish precast concrete settings clambered heavenward to frame waterfalls of reflectorized glass. As he walked, he rang a police channel and talked to his sergeant, telling him the story.
"What do you think, Ned?" the sergeant asked when he had all the data.
"I think somebody knows in his heart he got away with it. Thinks our victim's a bag of nutrient for the rutabaga. I'm going to get that sucker."
"Why do you suppose he wanted to obliterate the body? How'd he know how plumbing works?"
"What are you, Sarge—an old fire horse? Those are my questions."
"All right. You gonna be home?"
"Ten minutes transit time first. Thereafter."
"Good. I'll call you on a landline as soon as we have a working collation."
"I'll be there when I'm needed."
"Say hello to Dorrie for me."
"Should I give any particular name?"
Once on the train, he punched his destination on the coder in his armrest. When the straps went around him, the back of his mind thought of Dorrie. The train took off as soon as his interlock was made, and the front of his mind busied itself reviewing the people in the other seats. There were two or three persons with lunchbucket faces: technicians. The rest were pimps and whores. All of us personal servants make up the subway-riding public, he thought.
In the middle of his mind, he pondered an individual who could stuff a stripped corpse into the Jakes, but was too overwhelmed by his or her accomplishment to cut down through an old orthopedic scar and just check to see what might lie behind it. An amateur. But then, professionals just left 'em lying. There weren't any more feckless people. Everyone was numbered. When they died, there was a hole in the credit banks, the dwelling occupancy budget, the place where ongoing supermarket billings might be. There were no unmarked graves: IBM's tombstone punches represented more substance than the incidental flesh could ever show.
Please note, he told the place where he stored his experience: With the lower limbs absent, the free-floating position is face down.
He lived in Riverscene Heights. In the lobby lock, he said, "City civil servant," which put him in the system's admissible tenant class, and then gave his Society Security number. "One man coming in," he said for the voiceprint. In the motionless elevator, he gave his apartment number. In this building, the systems played music during intervals. When he had been properly scanned, the elevator unlocked and took him to his floor. He got out and walked down Hall 114, which also recognized him, and came to Door 11489, which let him in. Dorrie moved toward him out of the forefront of a crowd of dancers.
