Uptown Local and Other Interventions

by Diane Duane

  UPTOWN LOCAL

  and Other Interventions

  Diane Duane

  http://www.dianeduane.com

  Uptown Local and Other Interventions

  Badfort Press ebook edition

  copyright Diane Duane 2011

  “Out of the Frying Pan…” originally appeared in Enchantment Place, edited by Denise Little, published by DAW Books, 2008.

  “Theobroma” originally appeared in Wizards Inc., edited by Denise Little, published by DAW Books, 2007.

  “The Fix” originally appeared in The Magic Toybox, edited by Denise Little, published by DAW Books, 2006

  “Herself” originally appeared in Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy, edited by Andrew Greeley, published by Tor Books, 2004

  “Hopper Painting” originally appeared in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick, published by DAW Books, 2003.

  “In The Company of Heroes” originally appeared in Past Imperfect, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, published by DAW Books, 2001

  “The Back Door” originally appeared in Dragon’s Eye, edited by Christopher Stasheff, published by Baen Books, July 1994

  “Uptown Local” originally appeared in Dragons and Dreams, edited by Jane Yolen, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, published by Harper & Row, 1986

  Foreword

  When you’re a novelist, it’s really fun to write short stories sometimes.

  The problem with novels is that when you start one, you’re stuck being committed to a single basic theme, or group of themes, for quite a while. No matter how quickly you write a book’s first draft, you will be at close quarters with it for at least a year or so of editing, revision, and going over various stages of copyedited manuscripts and page proofs—until you’re heartily sick of the thing, and more than glad to kiss it goodbye. (At which point, paradoxically, you’re expected to get all excited over it for the publicity stage.)

  Short story work, though, rarely entails such wholesale co-opting of your life. Normally it gets worked in between other projects. It can arise from a chance phone call, a whim, a purposeful commission from an editor who likes your work. In my case, short story work and /or ideas have tended to come in more or less from left field, and have usually been a welcome break from whatever other novel or film project has been running my life at that point in time.

  And since nothing in a storyteller’s life happens in a vacuum, the short work affects the novels in ways that sometimes catch the novelist by surprise. This strikes me as a good thing: it’s too easy for the prolonged labor that a book requires to leave a writer suffering from creative tunnel vision.

  The eleven stories in this collection have some interconnecting threads and themes. A lot of them are what one reviewer some time back—a kindly person who wasn’t above some gentle irony—described as “the usual life-affirming Duane stuff.” Yeah, well. Another thing that amused me a little when I started pulling this collection together is how often the stories veer toward Switzerland. Sometimes this was always intended from the start (as in “Bears” and “The Back Door”). Sometimes it happens by accident—I swear I didn’t see it happening in the middle of “Herself” until it was too late. (“Honest, officer, I was just driving along and all of a sudden Zürich jumped out in the road in front of me—!”) …The only thing I can say about this is that many people have a “home of the heart” that they return to whenever they can, and Switzerland is one of mine. Zürich in particular is a location it’s hard for me to avoid when I’m having fun—it’s probably the only city I know and like as well as I know and like New York. And since its airport is routinely a gateway to other destinations for me when I take a week or two away from home to write, Zürich’s presence underlies a lot of my work. Just so that you know what’s going on when it keeps popping up…

  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy these!

  …D.D. / February 2011

  For more than a decade and a half now my husband Peter Morwood and I have been working on a project that involves a very detailed look at a particular aspect of life in ancient Rome. In 2001 the project almost turned into a TV series that would have been truly massive (and which would probably have destroyed our marriage had it gone forward in the way the putative producers wanted. Fortunately we were spared that).

  But we were both still acutely aware of the stories that could be told in the Rome of the first century A.D. Here’s one of them. (By the way, for the curious, the sign in “Arno’s” is real: the original is in the remains of an ancient sports bar in Pompeii. There really is nothing new in the world…)

  The Fix

  The sand underfoot was burning hot and blinding to look at, glittering with jewel-dust and dust of gold: the only place it didn’t hurt to look at was where it was browned with blood. Above and all around him, the crowd roared so that he could hardly think…and the band behind him, blaring away, wasn’t helping either. Lucius tried to ignore it all. What was happening in front of him was far more important than the noise or the smell or his burning eyes.

  The murmillo gladiator in the red crest feinted at his opponent and cut hard. The white-crested Thracian sidestepped. That second blow should have landed, but it only sliced shoulder-padding as he dodged; the crowd screamed at the miss. Lucius could hear knights and senators in the ringside boxes shouting for the bookies to come and take new bets.

  “Go on,” Lucius shouted, “go on, don’t let him—” Red-crest was already moving forward, jabbing at the Thracian’s small shield, tempting him to use it to batter the murmillo’s shortsword out of his hand. The shield flickered up and around in a move that Lucius and his murmillo had been discussing for the past week—hoping it would happen, not daring to count on it. “Now!” Lucius yelled, and his murmillo struck. Not alongside the shield, but over it, at the Thracian’s left eye—

  The man ducked, but not enough, and his scream was drowned by that of the crowd. Shield went one way, curved sica saber the other, and he dropped to the glittering sand, blood gushing past fingers that clawed at his helmet’s faceplate—

  The band blew a fanfare as the umpire raised his fist, then extended the first two fingers. It was the signal that someone needed help; the medics came running. The Thracian’s coach yanked at the big bronze helmet’s fastenings and threw it aside, then swore…

  Lucius felt sorry for the guy, but not much. He’d noticed, a week back, that this particular Thracian’s helmet didn’t have the riveted-on plate over the leading eyehole that others had been adding. He liked to play to the highborn ringside ladies, to let them see his eyes….

  Too bad, Lucius thought, but you only play one game when you walk in here. “You okay?” His murmillo nodded, waiting for the umpire to get confirmation from the Imperial box. He got it, took the murmillo’s arm and held it up for the crowd to see.

  “The winner,” shouted the repeater-criers all around the arena, “the murmillo Cestinius, tyro, first victory with crown for technical merit…and the editor’s purse for the best new fighter of the Games!”

  The crowd roared again as the payoff crew came out with the murmillo’s winnings on a tray—only bags of coin at first, but as they started the victory lap, jewels and rings and other gewgaws thrown from the stands started to pile up on it too. The winnings came closer, and closer. Lucius glowed with pride. Finally. Finally. He reached out—

  And banged into cold rough brick, skinning his knuckles. His eyes flew open, and saw only darkness.

  Lucius groaned, his disappointment too great for words, and closed his eyes again. Almost. We almost got it. Oh, let me get back to sleep, and maybe this time…

&nb
sp; But the dream was gone, and it was dawn outside. This deep into Level One, there was no way to tell that by sight or hearing…but bitter necessity had long ago taught Lucius how to know the time without needing light to do it. He turned over in his sleeping-space, a narrow, airless, sloping-roofed tunnel of stone just barely longer than he was.

  Not far away, doors slammed and voices shouted under the arches and vaults of the long brick-walled arcades. Cattle lowed, their dark warm scent and the smell of manure mingling with other aromas—the bitter-musk big cat smell, and the scents of olive oil and hot metal, of bread baking and someone boiling honey. The work day had already begun.

  Lucius rolled over onto his hands and knees and wriggled backwards off his blanket. He groped to one side for the only things he owned, his household gods and his lamp, and wrapped them in the blanket before pushing the bundle up to the far end of the alcove. It was unlikely that anybody would steal the meager possessions of a nine-year-old slave, but there were always new people here, and you could never tell.

  Lucius wriggled further back until he could kneel upright, and felt for his sponge-stick where he’d left it the night before. Around him, in tiny crawlways like his own, Lucius could hear grunts and groans as other slaves woke up. There were maybe thirty of them, young and old, who slept in this empty set of nooks between gates fifty and fifty-one. Like him, they were corporate slaves and didn’t have personal owners, just overseers. Not that an overseer can’t beat you as hard as dead as an owner, Lucius thought as he headed for the arch that led to the inner aisle. At least Mancipuer doesn’t do that much…

  A ten-cubit-high brick arch materialized from the gloom. Through it, the shallow dish of a tall bronze pedestal-lamp cast unsteady light from the twisted hemp wicks that hung over its edges. Lucius made his way around the great aisle and past the east-side brothel, where lights and noise told him that the whores were at their laundry. Beyond that was the arched tunnel connecting the aisle to the center ring. Lucius trotted through it.

  The pale marble floors were empty, but not for much longer. Shops and snack bars would open in the bare cubicles and, in a couple of hours, this whole place would be full of city people coming in early for a bath, a drink, a meal or a business meeting. Lucius passed the drink-seller’s, with its stand-up bar and deep vats to cool the wine. Next was the broad table of the custom tunic seller. And just beyond that…

  Lucius slowed down and stopped, as he did every day, whether anyone was there or not. He imagined what it would be like, later, when the stallholder set up shop.

  I wish, he thought. I wish… The items that Tullius Strabo laid out there just before the lunch break were almost the best things in the whole Colosseum—better than food, or wine, or a day without being slapped around. Especially the murmillo…

  But for a penniless slave, Strabo’s wares were as unobtainable as the Moon. Lucius sighed and headed on to the slaves’ bath and toilet between gates forty-six and forty-seven. He trotted into the toilet room—a plain stone place with a bench around three sides and holes cut through—and had a squat; then rinsed his sponge-stick in the little paved stream that ran in front of the benches, then hurried out and back the way he’d come.

  You could always smell the downstairs bakery a long time before you saw it. Tall, skinny Delia the baker worked there, in a flicker of lamps and an occasional hot glare as the oven opened. The first loaves and specialty rolls were already piled up on the counter. “Those for you,” Delia said, catching sight of Lucius and pointing. Those were the fennel sausage rolls his overseer liked, and he took two. “Tell your boss I need his tally sticks for this week!”

  “I will,” Lucius said, and ran off with the rolls. Mancipuer was always in a better mood when they got to him still warm.

  The place where the draft beasts were stabled was nearly an eighth of the way around the arena. There, in a pen mostly swept clean, Lucius found Mancipuer the beast-dresser amid a crowd of other slaves, gilding the horns of the first of a triple hitch of oxen. His back was hunched from some old injury, making him smaller than he really was: dark and hairy, he reminded Lucius of the big apes that the management sometimes brought in for expensive beast-shows. Right now Mancipuer was using a thick soft brush to dab shreds of gold leaf onto the ox’s right horn. One slave held a lamp over the work: another carried a pot of the gesso used to make the gold-leaf stick.

  Near the ox’s head stood a boy several years older than Lucius; tall, thin, dark, he frowned more easily than he smiled. Catharis had worked with Mancipuer for two years less than Lucius, but he equated age with seniority and never lost a chance to try to bully Lucius into thinking so. As Lucius came in, Catharis scowled. Lucius ignored him, slipping in behind the four other slaves straining at ropes in an effort to keep the ox in one place. It bellowed, answered deafeningly by the other two oxen tied to a railing nearby.

  “That my breakfast?” shouted Mancipuer over the noise, barely glancing up from his work.

  “Yes, sir,” Lucius said. He stopped just out of arm’s reach. The overseer’s temper was always uncertain early in the morning.

  “You’re late. I’d beat you, but I haven’t the time. Get me the horn bags.” He passed the brush to another of the slaves and held his hand out to Lucius for the roll.

  “Is it hot, master?” Catharis said.

  Lucius glowered at him as he went to get the muslin bags used to protect the newly gilded horns. Mancipuer bit off a chunk of roll and sausage. “Hot enough,” he said through the mouthful. “Delia ask you about the sticks again?”

  “Yes, sir.” Lucius handed the bags to Mancipuer.

  “I’ll get them when we’re done here. Drop them off on your way to the draper’s. I need some cheap silk for the lunchtime routine with the lion.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lucius said. He stood aside while the ox was led away and a second one brought in. “What routine?”

  “Joke execution.” Mancipuer finished his roll. “False-front cage; lion in back, chicken in front.” He shrugged. “And thirty ells of silk to hide the chicken. Wicked waste, if you ask me. But what the Master wants…”

  “He gets.” The Master of the Games wasn’t about to come down and explain his reasoning to them. “What color silk, sir?”

  “They want crimson. Small chance, this time of year. But see how close you can get. Milla had some pinkish stuff.” He turned his attention to the new ox. “Catharis, give Lucius the gold leaf. You breathe too hard, it goes all over the place. Go pull a rope.”

  Furious at the reprimand, Catharis managed to kick Lucius’s leg as he went by. Lucius just gritted his teeth and ignored it. As usual, gilding the whole ox-team seemed to take forever and it was mid-morning before they were done. The arcaded central ring was starting to fill as people made for the bookies or the wine shops, did some early shopping, or visited the baths to freshen up before the games began.

  Mancipuer straightened and eased the kinks from his back. “Lucius, those tallies are on the second shelf,” he said. “Drop them off with Delia, then get that silk.”

  “Yes, sir!” Lucius snatched up the tally-sticks and ran from the gilding-pen, glad of the excuse to get away. He dropped the tallies at the bakery and then went through the tunnel toward the outermost ring.

  Here the better class of snack bars and shops were located—ones with higher ceilings and arched doors, all faced in marble to match the paving of the outer plaza and the stairs that accessed the stands. Patrons in tunics and togas were already leaning over the tables of the stand-up wine bars, intently studying parchments written with the day’s fight schedule, and arguing over handicaps and betting systems. Lucius wondered how it must feel to have so much money that you could afford to bet it and not get it back. Then he sighed and turned right toward gate twenty-three, bursting out into the bright hot sun of morning.

  Even this early the heat was brutal, and the light was blinding. Lucius turned his back on the Sun and rubbed his eyes, looking up at the white-shining mass of the
Colosseum, as immense and bright as a snow-mountain. It was hard sometimes to connect the external white-and-gold glory to the dark life under the stands, a life lived in caves and tunnels, scurrying around under the pavement like frantic ants in service of this hot, bright world astir with excitement and light and color. Very soon now the bowl of the Colosseum would fill with spectators, and the sound of their voices would overflow the edges like a huge beast’s roar. The place would come alive, and the music would start, and the men who made it all happen, the fighters, would parade in. They would give everyone who sat in the place a single purpose: to be part of the fight, part of the glory, by backing a winner.

  Lucius turned away and headed across the hot plaza toward the Forum. Work left him little time to see the games, though he lived to hear every scrap of news about them, and could recite the stats of nearly every first-string fighter who walked out on the sand. He’d stolen time enough to see perhaps twenty fights since he started paying attention to them three years ago. It was annoying to be at liberty right now, because there would be no major fights until after the lunch break, when the crowds had had time to get enough wine in them to improve the bookies’ odds. There were three fights this afternoon that he’d have liked to see: two pairs of professionals who hadn’t fought since early spring, and the third—

  A shadow flickered over him and Lucius looked up, expecting to see a bird. Instead a strange twisting shape came floating slowly down: something red. It was a veil.

  Probably somebody up there dropped it, he thought, glancing back up at the Colosseum. A breeze pushed the veil slightly sideways as it fell, and Lucius realized it was going to land on the eternally muddy road where the animal-carts came up. Lucius could tell from the sheen and gleam of the veil as it turned in the hot sun that it wasn’t the cheap kind of silk that he’d been sent for, but something expensive, blown off of some rich lady up there.