String City

by Graham Edwards

  The Scrutator seemed about to protest. I waved it silent: there was no way I was leaving it behind. I reached in my pocket and brought out the Dimension Die. Two of its sides were white, four dark. Four rolls left. Four more narrow escapes at my fingertips.

  The spiders were close enough to see the blacks of their eyes.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” I said. “There’ll be a price.”

  “We’ll pay it!” said Zephyr.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I am willing to make an appropriate contribution to any fee that might be levied,” said the Scrutator.

  I tightened my hand on the die. “Put your arms round me.” My companions obeyed. Zephyr looked at me with that same terminal trust.

  “Wait,” said the Scrutator. It raised a finger, cocked its head. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?” I said, exasperated.

  The robot held its pose for a second, then relaxed. “It is of no consequence. I believe the time has come for us to depart.”

  “No kidding!”

  I rolled the die across the surface of the pyramid step. It bounced, spun, came down white side up. The white snapped to black, and the black ate us up.

  38

  THE DIMENSION DIE works by sucking on your intentions. You could say it’s a little like a vampire, only instead of blood it draws subconscious thoughts. Oftentimes it fixates on desires, which is why it works so well as an escape hatch: the place you really want to be is usually somewhere safe. Especially when there’s a spider army at your back.

  But your subconscious doesn’t just contain desires. There’s other stuff down there too. Stuff like dreams and secrets and unspoken guilt.

  Stuff like hunches.

  If it had just been down to desire, the die would have transported us back to my office. Instead we landed in the middle of a busy street. A klaxon blared—an omnibus was bearing down on us. Its eight mechanical legs were too much like a spider’s for my liking.

  I grabbed Zephyr and the Scrutator, hustled them on to the sidewalk a second before the omnibus turned us into groundmeal. Passers-by gave us a wide berth, but no special attention. In a city like this, you get used to strangers materialising at random.

  “Where are we?” said Zephyr.

  “It would appear that we have performed a translatative interbrane manoeuvre,” said the Scrutator, “resulting in our emergence on to the Street of Plenty in String City’s central financial district.”

  Zephyr looked up the street, down the street, at me. “It looks safe enough to me. But why did we end up here?”

  “Search me,” I replied. My feet were aching; my hands stung from where the web had slashed me. All I wanted was coffee and bourbon, preferably at the same time. Plus a chance to empty out my pounding head.

  “Why didn’t you flip us back to the office?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Don’t get snappy.”

  “I’m not snappy!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I rounded on her. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I almost got minced by one of my least favorite spiders, and all because you thought you wanted to play detective. A woman died, and we only got out because a goddam machine fancied itself as a hero—no offense, Scrutator...”

  “None has been taken,” said the Scrutator.

  “... and to cap it all I’ve wasted another roll of the die.”

  “‘Wasted’?” said Zephyr, folding her arms. She was getting cross too. I was too worked up to care.

  “The die’s a cheat. A cheap trick. It’s not something you can keep on doing, over and over again—it’s too convenient. The debt mounts up, and sooner or later it’s got to be cleared.”

  “We’re alive. That’s all I care about.”

  “As if all that’s not enough, I end up here, in a street full of banks and business exchanges, right across the street from the Birdhouse—which happens to be where I spent one of the most miserable days of my life—instead of back in my office where the chairs are soft and the liquor’s hard. You want more?”

  “What’s the Birdhouse? What do you mean, ‘miserable’?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “Is it some kind of aviary?”

  The Scrutator was pointing. “Miss, please direct your attention to the small building resembling a bunker situated in the center of that otherwise empty lot. That is the entrance to the Birdhouse, which is the popular name for String City’s largest underground security facility.”

  “That’s enough!” I said. “It’s time to go.”

  “So what happened to you in there?” said Zephyr.

  I was already walking away. I set a blinding pace and didn’t care if neither of them kept up. I held my mouth shut the rest of the walk back to the office. It was a long walk.

  At the door, I turned on Zephyr.

  “You got any stuff inside?” I said.

  “A few things. Why?”

  “Get it and go.”

  “What?”

  “You’re fired.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “But why?”

  “I haven’t given you enough reasons? Try this: because of you, my client got killed.”

  “Kisi Sunyana was just using you. I saw...”

  “I know what she was doing. Doesn’t mean she deserved to die.”

  “I know, but...”

  “Also, it means I don’t get paid.”

  “If I may propose a counter-argument,” said the Scrutator. “Regardless of the present condition of your client, the truth has been established. The case has been solved.”

  “Didn’t you hear me the first time?” I said. “There’s more things to life than just the truth.”

  “You would be surprised by the things I am able to hear. And yes, I am prepared to believe that your statement about truth may be correct. However, I also believe that you are not always right.”

  My head ached. I rubbed it. It went on aching. “You want to explain that?”

  “You have chosen to relieve yourself of the services of your assistant. This is a mistake. It is also... beneath you.”

  The robot had started shaking. Its clockwork whined like a scramjet. I thought its gears were going to blow out of its face. Exhausted as I was, I was fascinated.

  “Go away,” I said. “Both of you. Just go away and leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Zephyr. She tried to take my hand. I snatched it away, but she grabbed it and held on. “Look—I was angry, okay? When you wouldn’t let me work on the case, it made me feel like I was invisible, like you refused to see me for who I was. So I decided to … I don’t know—”

  “Prove yourself?”

  “Yes! And I was wrong, it all went wrong and... but the Scrutator’s right, we did get to the truth. Isn’t that what this job’s all about? A case like this, maybe it was always going to end in a mess. At least we got out alive, all three of us. And maybe Kisi Sunyana got no more than she deserved.” She stopped, bit her lip.

  The sky picked that moment to throw us some rain. The fretwork on the Scrutator’s face closed up. Zephyr stood there waiting for me to open the door, getting wetter and wetter until she looked just as bedraggled as she had the first time we’d met.

  I put the key in the latch, turned it.

  “You’d better come in, before you catch your death.” I looked at the robot. “You too, else you’ll rust.”

  “I am robustly proofed against all forms of oxidisation,” said the Scrutator proudly.

  We all went inside.

  39

  "THE BIRDHOUSE IS where they keep something very special,” I said. My coat was off, my feet were on the desk. There was bourbon in the glass and the glass was in my hand. “It’s a vault, like the Scrutator said. I got wrapped up in a case there once, fell in love, fought some zombies, got trapped in a labyrinth with a monster as big as a moon.”

  “Just a regular day
in String City?” said Zephyr. She was reclined on the couch, head propped on her hand, steaming as she dried. The Scrutator was ticking quietly on the other side of the room.

  “Funny girl. After all that, I faced an even worse monster and lost my best friend and escaped. It’s a long story—maybe I’ll tell it you sometime.”

  “You won’t get the chance. You fired me, remember?”

  “Case like that,” I went on, “you never forget it. The memory works in you like a splinter, never gives up. It grows. You get to thinking it’s more important than it really is—the most important thing ever, maybe. But it’s only a memory.”

  Zephyr stared at me through her weeping mascara. “That’s not really what you think, is it?”

  “I guess not. When we turned up at the Birdhouse just now my first thought was, ‘Hey, that’s a coincidence’. I told myself some cosmic thorn must have snagged us as we flew past and just dumped us there. Chance in a million. Only that can’t be right. Because there was something else.”

  “What?”

  I gulped down the bourbon. My hand was shaking. “That first time at the Birdhouse, I met a hooded man, only he wasn’t really a man. He was a Fool.”

  “You mean like an idiot?”

  “No, I don’t mean that at all. I’ll tell you all about Fools another day, but here’s the thing: the day the casino blew up, I saw a hooded man outside my office. And the cyclops, Steropes, said he saw one too. Factor all that in, it’s too much to be coincidence. So, I got to thinking there was some other reason we’d ended up back at the Birdhouse today. Something like, oh, I don’t know...”

  “What?”

  “Fate,” I said quietly.

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “Depends on the weather. Anyhow, ‘fate’ isn’t quite right either. I think the Dimension Die found something in my head and used it to redirect us.”

  “What do you think it found?”

  “A hunch. Biggest hunch I ever had. One that’s been creeping up on me these past weeks. It must have been waiting until I was wide open just now, flying between the branes out of the jaws of death, just waiting so it could drop me in the middle of exactly where I needed to be.”

  “The banking district?”

  “Yes. No.” I rubbed my face. I wanted to sleep. “Hell, I don’t know. I feel I should understand, but I don’t. I feel it, but I can’t explain it. You know when you wake up from a dream, only the dream’s gone? Or you see someone you know and can’t remember their name...”

  “... but it’s on the tip of your tongue?”

  “Right. All I know is, something’s brewing, and it ain’t coffee.”

  “If I may correct you,” said the Scrutator, “The coffee has in fact brewed. Would you like me to pour you a cup?”

  “Why not?” I stretched the ache out of my arms. The day was a country mile from over—I needed something to keep me awake.

  The Scrutator brought us both paper cups, stood back to watch us drink.

  “Hey,” said Zephyr, “That’s not half bad.”

  “Where’d you learn to make coffee like that?” I said. It was more than just good: it was the best coffee I’d ever tasted.

  “I have never performed the operation before,” said the Scrutator, “but it would appear to be a straightforward chemical process. I trust I have combined the ingredients in a satisfactory way?”

  “I’ll say!” said Zephyr. “Pour me another, Bronzey. Hey, do you actually have a name? There’s a lot of you guys, right? You can’t all be called ‘Scrutator’.”

  “My given name is pronounceable only in machine code. ‘Bronzey’ is a satisfactory alternative.”

  “Okay—Bronzey it is. What do you think, boss?”

  “I think you should ask the robot why it’s rifling through your filing cabinet,” I replied.

  “Forgive me,” said the Scrutator. “Efficient as your system of record-keeping appears to be, I have taken the liberty of punching code-slots in the corners of your paperwork.”

  “Code-slots?” said Zephyr.

  “The slots will enable me to read, index and cross-refer any report against any other report in a matter of seconds. It will greatly improve the speed at which your business can process information.”

  “Provided I keep you around to scan the slots?” I said.

  “The presence of a Scrutator will allow the system to operate at maximum efficiency.”

  I finished my coffee. Damn, it was good!

  “What do you think, Zephyr?” I said. “You’re the one who set the system up. Are you ready to hand it over to a machine?”

  She shrugged. “Since you fired me, you’ll be wanting someone else to do your filing.”

  “Right,” I said. “Scrutator—you’re hired.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the Scrutator. “I am glad to be relieved of the responsibility of running my own business. It was an interesting experience, but not one for which I am well adapted. I am first and foremost a public servant.”

  “Well, I ain’t the public, and you ain’t my servant. You’ll get a fair wage and a share of the profit. If we make any.”

  Zephyr stood up, smoothed out her damp clothes. “I’ll be off,” she said. “Good luck, Bronzey. I think you’re going to need it.”

  “Hold up,” I said as she opened the door. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my apartment,” she said. “I’ll collect my things, move on. Without a job I won’t make the rent at the end of the month. As landlords go, Tony Marscapone’s a good sort but he won’t let me live there for nothing.”

  “I know,” I said. “So I’ll say it again: where are you going?”

  She stood in the doorway. The rain gusted in, soaking her all over again. Her face made a quizzical shape. “What are you talking about?”

  I picked a case folder off the desk.

  “Got an interesting one here. Someone’s hawking pirate movies out of Harry’s Holodeon. Harry reckons it’s the projectionist. Sounds open and shut. A great case to cut your teeth on.”

  “Cut my... you mean I’m not fired after all?”

  “Sounds like.”

  The quizzical look turned to fireworks. Any last doubt I was doing the right thing went away as she turned on the sparkiest smile you ever saw. She threw herself across the desk, wrapped her arms round my neck, planted a hot, damp kiss full on my lips.

  “Thank you! Oh, thank you! I won’t let you down, I promise! I really won’t!”

  “Okay, doll,” I said. “You convinced me. You want to stop dripping on the paperwork?”

  She climbed down, still popping that grin, then kissed the Scrutator on the cheek. Its gears revved; it smoked a little.

  “You know something?” she said with her arm draped around the robot’s neck. “I think we’re going to make one hell of a team!”

  The Last Dance

  40

  THE CASE OF the movie pirate looked like a great way for Zephyr to properly learn the ropes. Plus I’d get to show her the Hot Hub. The girl had been with me over a week, but she was still a stranger in town. Time for a little orientation. You want to learn what makes a town tick—really tick—you need to see how the residents let off steam. You want steam in String City, hit the Hot Hub.

  “So, how far is it?” said Zephyr.

  I’d rigged the Feynman globe to project a map of the city on the wall. I traced the route with my finger.

  “Some miles,” I said. “We could take a cab, but it eats into the overhead.”

  “What about the dimensions?”

  “Still a no-go.”

  I’d hoped the storm in the strings would blow itself out. But every time I dipped my head into the dimensions I just saw it getting worse. I hadn’t realised how much I’d relied on stringwalking as a way of getting around. Like the man said, you don’t miss it ’til it’s gone.

  “Then we’ll have to walk,” said Zephyr.

  “Guess we got no choice.”

  “
There’s always that dice thing.”

  “Strictly emergency use only. I told you that.”

  “I don’t know why you make such a big deal about walking. I thought being a gumshoe was all about pounding the streets. If you ask me, all that folding yourself in and out of the cosmic string or whatever it is—all that hopping across the dimensions in the blink of an eye—I think it’s made you lazy.”

  “More to it than blinking an eye, honey.”

  “Don’t be pedantic. You know what I mean.”

  I stared morosely at the map. “It sure is a long way.”

  “Then we’d better make a start.”

  The Scrutator looked up from its desk. The movement made me jump. After ten years solo I suddenly had two assistants and it took some getting used to. The office felt crowded: three desks instead of one; two filing cabinets—one even had files in it, alphabetised and everything. There was barely room for the couch.

  “If I might interject, sir,” said the Scrutator. “Only this morning I retrieved my automobile from its parking place near the wharf. It is currently garaged at the Marscapone building at the other end of this very street. If you wish me to, I will recalibrate the vehicle’s insurance status to enable its use as a company vehicle.”

  “You’ll drive us?” I said.

  “You have divined my intention with admirable ease, sir,” said the Scrutator. “I will be ready to undertake the mission in approximately eleven point eight three minutes.”

  It stood up, a tall bronzed machine in the mould of a man. The night before I’d found a can of wax in the cellar. The robot had spent the whole night buffing. Now it gleamed.

  I surveyed the office again, tried to imagine it from a client’s perspective. To my surprise it looked pretty good—borderline professional, just as long as you ignored the stains on the carpet. Neat desks, the globe looking fancy in the corner, a bookshelf stacked with all the detective’s essentials. The rich smell of hot java. And the three of us. The private investigator and his faithful assistants: the shining robot with all the facts at its mechanical fingertips; the trainee investigator who looked like a waif and behaved like a bull terrier.