Five hundred Scrutators stared back.
The trapdoor shot back with a thunk that shook the floor. Music hooted from the basement below and a glittering pipe organ rose smoothly into view. Chrome tubes snaked from a polished marble platform, knotted round each other like strands of intestine, then erupted into a fountain of blaring sound. Pedals squirmed; keys and stops snapped and jerked; oil oozed. I clapped my hands to my ears. There were no chords in the music, only dissonance set to a ragtime beat, and all of it arranged in the most minor of keys.
Seated at the organ was a man. He was dressed in a sharp white suit with black cuffs. His elbows popped like pistons; his black-spat shoes pounded the pedals; his back hunched and straightened, hunched and straightened. It was hard to tell if he was playing the organ, or the organ was playing him.
The man had no head, leastways not in the conventional sense. Instead, a giant silver coin sat spinning on end where his neck should have been. The coin was a blur, but every so often a face flashed past: noble nose, furrowed brow, beady eyes. Eyes that looked right at me.
The organ reached the top of its travel and locked into place. The coin-headed man sprinkled his fingers all the way up the keyboard in a final flourish and then the music stopped. Discordant echoes bounced around the movie house for what seemed like hours. When silence eventually fell, the man flipped up his coat tails and swiveled on his seat. His coin-head continued to spin, only now the face was plain to see, its gaze intense despite the blurry speed with which it was revolving.
“Welcome to Beyond,” said the Pennyman. His voice rang like wind-chimes and his lips moved like bad animation. “Have you brought me my heart’s one desire?”
116
"YOU DON’T BEAT around the bush,” I said. I was horribly aware of being stared at by five hundred pairs of mechanical eyes. It was easy to peg the Pennyman as the bad guy. But whose side were the robots on? And what in all the halls of Hades were they doing here?
“I have been trapped behind the gates of probability for a harsh and endless epoch,” the Pennyman replied. “Now you have brought me the key to my future horizon. Time may not exist, but it burns. This I tell you, gumshoe—it burns.”
“Where’s Zephyr?”
“The white of the black? The quid pro quo and the to of the fro? Tell me, gumshoe, is she the yin or the yang? Take care with your answer, for whatever she may be, that is surely what you are not.”
I peered past the organ and into the basement. “You got her tied up down there?”
“Time burns.” Cabochon light flashed off the Pennyman’s spinning head. “Do not test me with its flame. Deliver the key and the girl will fly once more.”
I reached into my coat pocket and closed my fingers round the compact. Every sinew in me wanted to bring it out, hand over the Glory right there and then, strike the deal, make my escape. Bitter experience told me it was unlikely to be that easy.
“In a minute.” I relaxed my grip on the compact and withdrew my hand. “First, I want to ask you a few questions.”
Beside me, the Scrutator drew in what passed for its breath. A split-second later, the five hundred seated robots echoed the hissing sound it made. I noticed that they weren’t looking at me any more. They were looking at my bronzed companion.
A flicker passed over the face of the Pennyman. A change of expression? A wobble in whatever force was turning that damn coin around on his neck? Impossible to say.
“Heads you ask, tails you die!” the Pennyman proclaimed.
The giant coin started spinning faster and faster, turning the Pennyman’s face into an inscrutable blur. The organ pipes trembled, and the Scrutators shook in their seats. Dust rained from the velvet ceiling.
Abruptly, the coin stopped spinning, exposing a single stationary face.
Heads.
117
"HEADS YOU ASK,” said the Pennyman. His silver face was a furious bas relief. “But what shall be the count? One? Two? Four? Eight? Choice begets choice, but where shall the questions end? Sixteen? Thirty-two? Sixty-four? I think not. So, thirty-two. Too many, too. Sixteen. Sweet for some but not for those who burn in the fires of attendance. Eight. All fingers, but where would we be without the thumbs? Four, then? Four? Shall it be four? What do you say, gumshoe? Is four a liberty or a limit? If you would question me, you must first answer me.”
“You’re saying I can ask you four questions?”
“Now three. Next.”
I gave a silent groan. The oldest trick in the book, and I’d fallen for it. I took a breath. “Okay. Where’s Zephyr?”
“The girl is in the projection booth. Next.”
I threw a glance over my shoulder. High in the back wall of the cinema there was a glass window with dark machinery hulking behind. In the gloom, a shadow moved.
“I believe he wants you to believe this is going to be easy,” said the Scrutator. “I do not believe this is the case.”
“I believe you’re right,” I replied.
“Two questions remain,” said the Pennyman. “How perfectly encircled is the number of the binary beast.”
“I’ll take your word for that, pal. Here’s my next question: if you can choose anything into existence, why don’t you just opt for ‘escape’ and walk right out of here?”
A sudden stain tarnished the silver surface of the Pennyman’s motionless head. The furrows in his brow grew furrows of their own.
“Beyond is neither all nor nothing, neither here nor there. Not when, not then. Not before, not after, and never, ever now. To choose is to cause, and to follow, adopt and discard, and while Beyond reflects these all yet it is none itself. The forked lightning of choice fires its beacon through Beyond and makes shadows of its play, but in Beyond there can be no solitary collapse, no singular resolve, no settlement. In Beyond, the show knows only how to go on.”
I was about to ask what the hell the coin-headed freak was talking about when a hand grasped my wrist.
“Be careful, my friend,” said the Scrutator. Its voice echoed strangely. At first I figured it was the acoustics of this impossible cinema, then I realised all the other robots were repeating my companion’s words in a single, sibilant whisper. “You have only one question left.”
I glanced again at the projection booth window. It was all I could do not to dash up there, grab Zephyr and make a run for it. But run where?
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said to the Pennyman. “You’re telling me that here in this bubble you’ve created—this Beyond—the laws of chance that you live by don’t apply. You can conjure as many choices as you like—stay or go, sink or swim, fight or flight—but you can never actually come down on one side or the other. You can make choices, but you can’t make a choice. Here in Beyond, you’re powerless.”
The Pennyman’s face had turned to the color of ash. His full lips sneered. “Ask your last, gumshoe!”
“Have a care,” the Scrutator warned.
... care, echoed the Holodeon’s robot audience.
“There’s only one question left that matters.” I pulled the compact out of my pocket and held it up into the light. “What will you do when I give you the Glory?”
118
WITHOUT ANSWERING, THE Pennyman swiveled in his seat to face the organ again. While his body rotated, his coin-head gaze remained fixed on me. He thumbed a control, causing sparks to fly from a junction box on the wall and the big crimson curtains to roll back along their tracks, revealing a wide silver screen.
“Escape,” the Pennyman said. Silver flooded slowly through his face again.
“If you think I’m going to let you go back into the cosmos...” I began.
“Not back, but forward! Not behind, but ahead! The prize is not nostalgia but novelty!”
“Novelty? You tried that already, remember? You went looking for something new and left the cosmos behind. Look where it got you.”
“Not Beyond, but beyond.”
“Look, buddy, you can quit
playing with words. I don’t know much but I do know there ain’t nothing beyond Beyond...” I stopped. Something was tickling at the back of my neck.
The Pennyman’s coin-head started spinning again, slowly at first, then faster and faster. “In the silver there is a greatness where the chains of chance are not shackles but wings.”
I frowned. His words were like ants. Follow them individually and all you got was chaos. Step back and you suddenly saw a bigger picture.
The tickle on my neck bit down.
“The Big Picture!” I said. “Is that what this is all about?” “The asking is past. Chance is a curse. Choice is a torture. To ride and never rest, to seek and never find, to play and never pause—these things all are the ever-paired sum of my existence, and the duality of my doom. For all that I have done there is equally as much that I have not. My cup is as empty as it is full, half and both but also neither and all, and precisely never running over. Chance is choice, gumshoe, but I tell you this as one forever trapped in two—there is no choice in chance!”
The Pennyman’s head was back to being a blur. His face smeared round and round, again and again and again, but his bright eyes were as clearly defined as the truth of his words. And filled suddenly with tears.
Something fluttered out from behind one of the furled curtains: a bright blue bird, tiny wings buzzing like a swarm of bees. I opened my coat and unfolded the cage of ribs I’d brought with me from my office cellar. I set it on the carpet and watched as the two birds bumped beaks through the bones. The instant they touched, their feathers merged. Deliciosa’s ribcage shattered, and a single kingfisher flew up through the broken light of the cabochons.
“You haven’t been powerless here, have you?” I said. “You used the kingfisher as a go-between. You had it planting pennies on sidewalks from one side of the cosmos to the other, and whenever folk picked them up, their lives changed. Sometimes for the good, mostly for the bad. But always with one purpose: to set you free.”
“The metabird navigates the web of Arachne,” the Pennyman agreed. “When the spider wove her web my way, I saw advantage to be taken, and choice to be made.”
“You messed with the lives of millions of people! Billions, for all I know!” I glanced again at the projection booth. “You messed with her.”
“The girl was the one. And you were the two. Together you chose, and now here you both are with my heart’s one desire.”
“Choice be damned! You’re a trickster!”
“And you are a gumshoe. We are all what we all are.” He struck a terrible chord on the organ. The horrible dissonance made my guts rotate, and brought a new revelation.
“Minor key,” I said. “The music you’ve been playing, it’s been traveling out along Arachne’s string, all this time. An undertone for the cosmos. No wonder String City’s in the state it is.”
The Pennyman peeled his fingers from the keyboard. The dreadful reverberations died slowly to silence. I pressed my hands to my face, dragged them away.
“So will you really go there?” I went on, nodding at the projection screen. “If I give you the Glory, will you really turn your back on the cosmos and escape to this next place, whatever it is, this novelty. Will you really leave us all alone?”
“The screen is bigger on the other side. Why would I not fill myself into its void?”
The Scrutator nudged me in the ribs. “I am having difficulty parsing your conversation with the Pennyman. Nevertheless I fear treachery.”
... treachery, whispered the rest of the robots.
I flipped open the compact. It was still in standby mode, with nine minutes remaining on the display—all the life my doppelganger had left.
“You ever heard of the Big Picture?” I asked the robot.
The Scrutator shook its head. So did the others. All five hundred of them.
“It’s a myth,” I went on. “Or a metaphor. Probably both. The Big Picture is... oh, it’s what some people mean when talk about a ‘higher power’ or ‘the workings of the world’.” My wife...” I faltered.
“Laura?” my mechanical friend prompted.
... Laura, echoed the rest of the Scrutators.
“Laura, right.” I swallowed what felt like a boulder down into my throat. “Laura believed in it. She believed in it because she said she’d seen it. She’d seen the Big Picture in this book she’d had since she was a child. The story was simple enough. There’s this little girl whose curiosity keeps getting her into trouble. Like, she climbs the neighbor’s fence to peer over and falls into a bramble bush. She tries to find out how the garbage disposal works and ends up in the drain. You get the idea?”
“I understand the narrative concept.”
“So, this little girl’s parents—her name is Laura, by the way, which is one of the reasons why Laura, my Laura, liked the book so much—her parents figure she needs a hobby to put a lid on her adventuring. So they buy her a telescope. Laura loves this thing so much that she starts adding extra lenses to it, so every night she uses it she sees more and more stars and planets, and starts seeing deeper and deeper into the cosmos. Anyway, the last picture in the book folds out to show Laura adding the biggest lens ever to the telescope, and what she sees when she looks through the viewfinder is this huge backdrop filled with all the other scenes from earlier in the book—the fence and the drain and everything—plus hundreds more besides, scenes from her future even, with her all grown up and with a little girl of her own, and the little girl has her own book, and her own telescope. This final big picture is like a giant colorful jigsaw of her whole complete life, everything about her, everything about...”
I broke off. I was breathing hard. I could feel a bead of sweat stroking my brow.
“... everything?” said the Scrutator.
... everything, whispered its brothers.
“Right,” I replied. “Everything about everything.”
“The Big Picture?”
“The Big Picture.”
... Picture.
The Scrutator tapped its fingers against its cheek. “Does it exist?”
“Nobody knows, not for sure. But if it does, then it’s what sits behind everything we know and most of what we don’t. If the one God really is out there, looking at the Big Picture would be like looking on his face. As for stepping into it, I guess that would be like...”
I’ve always thought my reflexes were quick, but I never saw the Pennyman move. Never saw him leap from the organ seat and snatch the compact from my hand. All I saw was the flash of silver as his spinning head raced up the cinema aisle on top of his pistoning shoulders, accompanied by five hundred flashes of bronze as the seated Scrutators turned to watch him run.
“After him!” I yelled.
I reached the door at the back of the auditorium just as it swung shut in my face. I kicked it aside, took the stairs two at a time. At the top, another door was flapping back and forth. I shouldered through and into the projection booth: a cramped black box of a room that stank of cheap engine oil. Taking up most of the booth was a gigantic movie projector—a cast metal monster slick with grease and studded with dials and wheels. Film reels sprouted like giant mouse ears; deep inside, a motor idled throatily.
I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was Zephyr. She was in the far corner of the booth, standing at a bench, her face lit by the baleful glow of the projector’s badly shuttered lamp housing. On the bench was an ancient Moviola editing machine. Strips of celluloid film dangled from her finger, and at her feet lay the remains of the zoetrope she’d brought here, its glass sphere shattered to shards. Her eyes were hollow.
“He said he could make it real,” she said, holding up the pieces of film. “He said the zoetrope was just a trick and he could give me my life, my real life, and if I spliced it together just right, me and Raymond, we could... we could...”
“He was right about the zoetrope being a trick,” I told her, my heart breaking a little as I said it. “But he lied about the rest.�
� I hesitated. “I guess I lied too. Raymond’s gone. I’m sorry.”
Zephyr’s lips thinned and her cheeks turned red, just as if I’d slapped her. She opened her fingers and the celluloid strips slithered to the floor. I could see they were blank, and I wondered what enchantments he’d convinced her to see on them.
The Pennyman appeared from behind the projector and clawed open the lamp housing. Light flared. His pale fingers closed on the bare bulb and yanked it from its socket. In the sudden darkness I heard the slam of the booth’s door shutting, the loud click of the lock.
I held my hands up in front of my face and saw nothing.
“Zephyr?”
There was no reply.
I heard another click, this one very small and very slight.
A button.
The room lit up again, a thousand times brighter than before. Zephyr threw her hands over her face; so did I. Peering through my fingers, I watched as the Pennyman placed the compact on the projector. The timer was ticking again. Eight minutes and fifty-two seconds.
“He looks just like you!” crowed the Pennyman. “Ah me, but the wonder of twins!”
I turned and saw the doppelganger standing behind me, looking dazed. I willed him to move, but of course his hands were still clamped on the Glory. He was as frozen now as he’d been in the crater.
I was about to move myself but the Pennyman was lightning-fast. Strong too. Reaching past me, he lifted my lookalike and crammed him bodily into the projector’s lamp housing. At first I didn’t think the doppelganger would fit into the round glass vial, but the Pennyman did something wiggy with the local dimensions and with a “pop” the doppelganger snapped into place. He squatted there unblinking, staring out at me like a toad in a test tube.
Then the Glory—perhaps sensing the perfect habitat—slipped through the doppelganger’s fingers and locked itself into the base of the lamp socket, where it blazed even brighter than before. Released from his stasis, the doppelganger popped free from the vial like a cork and flew across the booth to land with a thump in the far corner. Even before he hit the deck, the Pennyman had slammed the lamp housing shut and reached for the lever that would start the projector.
String City Page 32
