Death of Reason

Tony Daniel

Asimov’s Science Fiction

September, 1992

Mr. Daniel explains that the following story was strongly influenced by the works of Dashiell Hammett and James Lee Burke.

1

The sky was liquid iron at sunset. The clouds were fiery slag. The scramjet carrying me home banked over downtown Birmingham on approach to the airport. Up on Red Mountain, the Vulcan’s torch flamed scarlet for deaththe beacon for another traffic accident sponged from the pavement of the city. Twenty-four hours of anonymous remembrance, then maybe the giant iron statue’s torch would burn green until somebody else spilled himself out on the black asphalt. The custom was over a hundred years old now, but people kept obliging. I once knew the woman whose job it was to throw the switch on the light. I knew her well. Abby would always have work.

But Vulcan’s torch would never burn for my grandfather. His timesharing license had expired on Maturicell two days ago. He died in his sleep. Peacefully. As they say.

The scramjet turned thrusters down and slotted into a bay at Municipal. Guide lasers flared in long lines of neon Morse code outside the window as the beams passed into and out of pockets of humidity. It was time to disembark, but I continued to gaze out at the sky full of fire and light. Twilight in the Heart of Dixie, bloody and wringing wet as usual. Welcome home, Andy Harco. Back to the city where you were poured and formed. Back to the grindstone that put the edge to your soul.

“You get too hot, and you’ll lose your temper,” my old friend Thaddeus the poet used to say. I guess that’s what happened; that’s why I left. I lost my temper in both senses of the word. But in Seattle, I’d hardened the edge once again. Birmingham no longer had what it took to dull me down. And I cut back now.

I snugged my op-eds onto my nose, then gathered my wits from under the seat and out of the overhead compartment. Along with my briefcase full of peripherals, I had a bag of toiletries, a plastic Glock nine millimeter, seventeen-shot automatic, and my good, blue interviewing suit and wingtips. I had not worn the suit for eight years, but I was reasonably certain it still fit. Granddaddy’s funeral was tomorrow evening. I would have time to get it altered if it didn’t. I had flown out of Seattle in gray shorts and a T-shirt with the faded hologo of a science fiction convention on the chest. People had given me strange looks back there, for Seattle was in the midst of a cold snapthe temperatures were hovering in the mid-fifties in Augustdue to some frigid air that had descended from the Arctic. I was, however, dressed perfectly for Alabama.

I felt like a returning tourist as I got off the plane. In a way, I was. I’d been on a long vacation from Birmingham. Eight years, for my health. That is, if I’d hung around eight years ago, a bullet would have just ruined the nice gray interior of my skull. And my health. At least, that’s what Freddy Pupillina had told memore or lesswhen he sent me the fistful of dead roses. Southern gangsters think they’re so damn subtle and genteel. But they’re not. Perfume on a skunk accentuates the stink even more.

But that was eight years ago, back when I was a rookie rental for the Birmingham P.D. and an unlicensed fabulist. I’d had few friends, and an extremely abrasive manner. These days, I have more friends.

I wouldn’t be seeing Abby, but Thaddeus was a friend. I would look him up after the funeral. It had been a long time since we’d gotten together in person.

I should have expected the snoops to pattern me as soon as I stepped off the jet. For the most part, the only people who travel in actual are high-level business jocks, Ideal coordinating nodes, rich eccentricsand terrorists. Guess which profile I matched up with? I suppose I was preoccupied with thoughts of Grandaddy, maybe of Abby, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. While I didn’t plan on seeing Abby ever again, after seeing the Vulcan from the air, she was heavily on my mind.

The snoop interceptor was a Securidad 50 crank, maybe three or four years old. Cheap Polish bionics suspended in a Mexican-made shell. The City of Birmingham never had been exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I clicked up the 50’s specs in the upper right-hand corner of my op-eds and gave them a quick glance. The 50’s innards were standard bionic sludge. Its force escalator was knock-out gas, not a very thoughtful option for use in a crowded corridor, such as are found, for example, in airports. Those wacky Poles.

“Mr. Harco, may I have your attention,” the crank said. The voice synth needed major adjustment. It was low filtering, and the thing sounded like a rusted-out saxophone. How could it get that grating nasal trill to come out when it didn’t even have a nose? Ah, the mysteries of science.

I should have known, when the crank used my name, that something was afoot. Too used to being the observer rather than the observee, I guess. I was about twenty feet away from the gate, and the other passengers from the scramjet streamed around me as they headed for their separate destinations. I got some looks, and, goddamn it, some of them were looks of admiration. Idiot drones, respecting me because they thought I was a terrorist.

“What is it?” I replied through tight lips. I pointedly looked away from the 50. Who knows? Maybe the thing had enough brains to be insulted. I hoped so.

“Please accompany me,” said the crank. Then red letters flashed across the periphery of my op-eds. MR. HARCO, YOU ARE REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE ROBOT TO AIRPORT SECURITY SCREENING. PLEASE COMPLY. The font was crude, but 3-D. I have organic inner lenses in my eyewearI don’t skimp on any of my peripheralsand the words burned on the cellwork of my op-eds like lash welts.

This pissed me off considerably. Cowboying my virtual feed without permission or a court orderit’s not done. At least, nobody does it to me and gets away with it.

I blinked twice and popped up my custom V-trace menu. It had cost me six thousand, a chip of my skull’s parietal plate and a year of bureaupain to get a license for the junk. It was not my most expensive piece of exotic junk, but it was damned near. My brain is probably as much vat-formed gray matter as it is naturaland that’s not counting the hardware interfaces.

I had no right to use the V-trace in the present circumstance, of course, but if this asshole who was cowboying me brought me up for review, he’d be asking for suspension along with me. Assuming he was a rent-a-cop to begin with. I had better stop making assumptions, I told myself, and start dealing with this shit.

I blinked the cursor to “ROOT AND BURN” with my left eye and closed both eyes to activate it. The message disappeared from my op-eds. I have good junk. Not the best. My junk is not really integrated into me, like that of the nodes and the rich. I couldn’t make it work without op-eds. But my junk is quality stuff, when combined with my eyewear. Within a second, the status display spread across my field of vision, and iconed the real world into a little block in the lower right hand corner of the virtual.

SIGNAL ROOTED. FEED PROTECTED. BURN OPTIONS:

1. ORIGINATING DEVICE

2. ORIGINATING CONTROLLER

3. GENERALBURN

I chose number 2, then iconed back to reality. The crank stood absolutely still for a long moment, and I stared at it. Somewhere, someone was receiving a nasty surprise in their eyewear.

The crank finally moved. It opened a door in its casing and extended a pink tube which looked for all the world like a shriveled penis. The crank sprayed knock-out gas like a scared puppy pisses. It seemed to dribble out. The chemicals probably hadn’t been changed in years, and the crank was more electric than biologic, so it didn’t have the guts to nurture complex chemicals indefinitely.

The gas did sublimate to some degree, however. Although, fortunately, the corridor was mostly clear, one of the gate attendants was walking by. The stuff billowed lazily about and after she got a whiff of it, she started to run away. Too late. She dropped onto the carpeted floor with a dull thump.

I, of course, have been filtered since Justcorp modified me at the Academy eight years ago. Justcorp does a first-rate job. It took the crankor whoever was directing ita moment to figure this out. It had been squirting me like I was a cockroach that was slow to die.

I walked over and made sure that the attendant was all right. Looked like she’d taken the fall on her side and was only bruised. No op-eds. As I felt her head to make sure nothing was cracked, my fingers closed around the feedhorn wart at the back of her neck. An optical bundle in a delta configuration. She was a node with fairly expensive hardwiring. Her brain belonged to another. I quickly stopped worrying too much about her well-being. Worrying about a node is like caring about the fate of a particular dead skin cell. And anyway, the Ideal would provide, or not, as it saw fit. I wondered, vaguely, which Ideal she belonged to.

Some of the others who were waiting on flights began to gather around the two of us. Idiots. What if I were a terrorist and were in need of a hostage?

“Mr. Harco,” whined the crank. “We are prepared to activate all systems to persuade you to accompany me. Please accompany me.”

Big vocabulary these security cranks have.

I said nothing, but nodded for the thing to lead the way. May as well get the check-out over with and be on my way. I was on personal leave, for Christ’s sake, with specific instructions from management to stay out of trouble.

One nondescript corridor led to another, until we descended an airtube into the bowels of the complex. I felt like I was being swallowed. Security always seemed to pick the most cheerless locations for offices.

The duty officer’s eyelids were charred, and he looked like a racoon, although his appearance wasn’t that much different from what it had been before I’d burned his eyewear out, I was sure. Low-order security always wore those smoked plastic op-eds that look like windows into the black voids they have for souls. Or at least that they have for brains. This guy’s own burned-out op-eds were laying, twisted and pitiful, on the desk before him. Yet even with the black eyes, I recognized the fellow.

Ed Bernam. Dandy Ed, we used to call him. He was a Guardian rental, and fit that agency’s stereotype to a T. Big, vain, meanand unable to control snot and fart production. Guardian’s body mods on new employees were quick and cheap. The procedure adversely affected the guts and nasal tract.

Bernam picked his nose continually, but dressed well, as if he were trying to compensate for the shabbiness of his innards. He wore a blue and white uniform with a fully animated holo shield undulating on his chest. No wonder the airport couldn’t afford state of the art cranks; it was dropping all its money on sparklies for the rentals. Or, knowing Bernam, he paid for his own.

“Hello, Ed. Front-line monitor still? Isn’t this supposed to be a slot to break rookies’ balls?”

Bernam scowled and sank back into the protection of his control chair.

“Meander Harco, what the hell are you doing in my airport?” he growled. He remembered me, evidently. Or at least remembered the fact that I hated my given name.

“Personal business,” I replied with a neutral voice. I’d had my fun with him, and now I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

“We’ll see,” he said. “The junk has flagged you. I’m going to have to pull and comp your file.”

“I’m not a terrorist, Ed.”

“We’ll see.”

Shit. This was going to take time. Public security junk is notoriously slow compared to P.D. or private corporation. It still has to access central databases, for Christ’s sake! And Bernam was going to run a full comparison, there was no doubt of that, even though there was not a reason on earth why a terrorist would get himself doctored up to look like me. I glanced around for a chair. There was none other than the one Bernam’s fat ass was occupying, of course. That was the way of such offices. I set my suitcase and my briefcase full of peripheries down on the desk in front of him, further mangling his ruined op-eds.

Dandy Ed Bernam watched me through his racoon mask. I checked again to make sure it was him before me, wishing I were plugged into the briefcase. I had downloaded all of my long-term memory into a biostatic memory froth I’d paid a half-year’s salary for. That’s one reason I don’t let the briefcase get too far away from me. I did it so as to have more room in the old noggin for junk interface algorithms

and other things. What was left in my brain were memories with cheated links and little redundancy. The guy who installed itthe best in the fieldtold me it was foolproof, nonetheless. And so far, I hadn’t found any blank spots.

This was Bernam, all right. He’d been a two-year man when I came on with the Birmingham P.D. Most Guardian rentals stay on patrol, but Bernam had worked his way up to plainclothes. Someone had joked that he did it all so that he could dress the way he wanted to every day.

Whatever the case, he hadn’t done well in Vice. Management had shuffled him around a couple of times before busting him back down to patrol. Ed couldn’t take it, and broke his lease. Management was not exactly mortified to see him go, especially since Guardian refunded the deposit on him. But it seems the corporation got back at Ed for losing them money by contracting him out only to places with strict uniform requirements. No more fancy duds for Ed. Yet I could see that he still had his snot problem.

What I remember most about Ed is from the day before my arraignment. He was cleaning out his locker after breaking his lease. The locker was full of designer jeans. Ed liked to affect that he was big-time management in those days. He took the jeans out and neatly folded them, then stacked them in a vinyl bagand appeared to be inventorying them as well. Ed acted like he didn’t notice me as I got dressed in my blues, but he stopped with the jeans when I closed my locker door. He looked at me hard, and I stared back.

“What the hell do you think this is?” he asked me. “The twentieth century?”

I suppose he meant that I didn’t understand the intricacies of the situation I had gotten myself into, the fact that a rookie did not step on toesparticularly toes as sensitive as Freddy Pupillina’s and the Ideal to which he paid tribute.

The Birmingham P.D. and the Mafia had had a good-old-boy understanding for over a hundred years, and I’d stepped over the boundaries with my bust of Freddy for an assassination he’d been stupid enough to attend to in person. But that hit had stepped over my boundaries.

The poor guy he killed had been a bug junkie for yearsjust one of the burn-outs hanging out on 20th Street, with mental parasites eating their every thought almost before they formed it. When I was on patrol, I took a liking to this guy. He took care of stray dogs. His problem was that he had a big mouth.

This bugman just happened to look at Freddy wrong one day and say something stupid. The nanobugs had eaten the poor guy’s soul like gas on styrofoam. Fuck the twenty-first century. Fuck the Family and its new and improved ways to hurt people.

Though of course I didn’t say a damned thing to Bernam at the time, I gave his question some thought. I’m still giving it thought. Maybe this century isn’t the one I would have chosen had I been given the option. Well, the fucking times had chosen me, and would just have to put up with my existence.

The airport junk took fifteen minutes to complete its report. Bernam had to listen to it aloud, since his op-eds were crisped.

“Meander Harco, age thirty, 6‘0”, eyes brown, hair brown, race mulatto.” At least this voice synthesizer had the pleasant accent of a Southern woman. Made it easier to hear all the personal shit spoken aloud. But not that easy. “Born 12/21/65, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, contract birth, parents Julia Monroe Delacroix, mother, Marvin Harco 473A, father. Licensed cohabitation 3/15/85-12/22/88 with Abigail Wu Brimly, Birmingham, Alabama, no offspring. Education: graduated Banks High School, Birmingham”

“Skip to the currents,” Bernam grunted. He dribbled a little spit onto his chin when he spoke. It sat there for a while, glistening in a yellow sort of way. Finally he took out a paisley handkerchief and delicately wiped it away. Classy guy, Ed.

“Employed 2087-present by Justcorp Criminology. Leased since January 2089 to Seattle Police Department, homicide. Current departmental rank, Lieutenant. Licensing to follow: Grade 19 depth investigations, including virtual slayings. Section B coda use of harmful force, with an exemption in part 2, subparagraph 4 for bio-modifications in hands, elbows and torso.” Which meant I had built-in brass knucklesamong other neat additions. “Option 4 for use of deadly force.” Bernam smiled. He knew the kind of restrictions they had in Seattle for a license to kill. At Option 4, it was very doubtful that my junk could process the legalities of response in time for me to shoot back if someone were trying to blow me away. “License for 1) Remington angular electrochemical stungun, serial number on request. 2) Glock polymer nine millimeter automatic pistol serial number on request 3) Schrade two inch boot devices. 4) Bullard Forensics Portalab III 5) Archco Enchanced Op-Eds”

“Fucking illegally modified” Bernam muttered.

“With licensed enhancements 1)”

“Fuck the enhancements,” said Bernam. The junk was smart enough not to try and interpret Bernain’s orders literally. It skipped to the next section.

“F.A. license HARC0234319599 for genre constructions, science fiction.”

“Huh?” said Bernam in his inimitable way.

“I write science fiction stories on the side,” I replied. “Got a problem with that?”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Commendations, Official Evaluations, Resolved Offenses, and Unlicensed Activities. Warning: listing will take approximately twenty minutes for oral report.”

“Skip it. Outstandings?”

“1/3/89, Dereliction of Duty, Birmingham Police Department, on Article six judicial expert system appeal. Review due 8/97.”

“So,” said Bernam. “Going to get sentenced soon?”

“Going to get cleared soon,” I said. “You bastard.” I said it without heat, and Bernam grinned evilly. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was wearing a thin coating of lipstick.

“Give me the comp,” he told the computer.

The lights went down and the infrared came on. Sensors popped from the wall and shone darkly. Another five minutes passed. Finally the lights came back on and the junk spoke up. “Behavioral and somatic patterns: 97 percent match. Lacking genetic evaluation”

“I refuse a scan under Section B of the Privacy Act,” I said. It felt weird to be the one invoking a Section B. Usually I was having it invoked on me by some bad element who didn’t want to be identified.

“Shut the fuck up,” Bernam grunted. “Nobody asked you to.”

“Lacking genetic evaluation, opinion tendered: This is Meander Harco.”

“Satisfied?” I asked.

“Shut up.”

“Ed, it’s time you stop messing with me. I’m out of here in ten seconds unless you got reason to hold me.”

Ed looked at me as if he were scrutinizing a strange insect. “I knew you were dark-skinned, but I never knew you were a mule, Andy,” he said.

I stood still, expressionless. No. He wasn’t worth it. “Now you do,” I replied. I felt a great numbness grow in my gut, as if I were far bigger inside than I was outside. This was the way I felt before violence. Control. Hold on. My legal junk was spewing conflict options onto my op-eds. There were no options in my favor in this situation. Just for fun, I sifted the parameters through the Option 4 junk. It gave me the red flag. So. I could not legally kill him. Lucky Ed. This time.

“I’ve got a message for you, Andy,” Bernam said. “Freddy Pupillina wants to talk to you.”

For a second, I was nonplussed. Then this little shakedown began to make sense. Bernam was under orders from Freddy. Which meant all my previous legal evaluations were out of context and meaningless. Hmm.

“You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit,” I replied.

Bernam got real quiet. He was evidently not used to anybody refusing Freddy in such a cavalier manner. But it was true: he was mistaking me for somebody who gave a shit.

Bernam resolved his difficulties by pretending not to hear me. “Tomorrow night, around eight, at the Sportsman,” he said. “You’re free to go now.”

“Tell Freddy I’m not coming,” I said.

“Out,” Bernam said. He closed his eyes and touched something on his chair. The chair spun around with its back to me. I stepped up to the desk where I’d laid my luggage and opened the briefcase.

“Ed, turn around.”

He did not reply and continued facing away from me. I pulled out the Glock and slid the magazine into the handle. I felt it click into position, but the plastic was noiseless.

“Ed.”

Still nothing. My legal junk was screaming, so I powered it down. I popped up a targeting menu, took aim, and fired the Glock into one of the chair’s armrests. As I suspected, there was no security breach sensing in the home office. A perfect way for an airport to cut corners. Why would you need it where you have a permanently armed guard? The crank which had led me here stood immobile in the corner, unaware that anything untoward was going on.

Bernam was, at least, a bit more self-aware than the 50. He spun around with his hands over his head. “Jesus Christ,” he whimpered. He tried to shuffle out of his seat and I saw that Bernam was even worse off than I’d thought. He was attached by a bundle of leads to the chair.

“Ed, you’re bonded.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

There was nothing I could do to him that was worse than what he’d done to himself. It was like being a node with none of the perqsno sense of community, no mental health plan. It made me physically sick to contemplate. An individual giving himself up to an Ideal, but staying himself. Like a dog dragging around a tick the size of an elephant. Only rentals desperate for something ever got themselves wired for bonding. I wondered what kind of shit Bernam had gotten into. Graft? Bugs? Booze? He would not meet my gaze.

“Tell Freddy that if he messes with me, I’ll take him down,” I said. “Tell him that.” I pointed the Glock between Ed’s eyes. This got him looking at me.

“Oh Christ,” he said. “I can’t without my op-eds, Andy.”

“That’s okay. You can tell him the old-fashioned way. You still have a link screen, don’t you? Tell him I came to attend my grandfather’s funeral, and then I’m leaving. I no longer take shit off bad elements. Tell him to stay the hell out of my way.”

“Jesus, Andy”

“Will you tell him that?” I said. I touched the muzzle of the Glock to Bernam’s nose. A little runny snot stuck to it.

“Okay, God, okay, I’ll tell him!” said Bernam. He seemed sincere. I pulled the gun away and wiped the snot on his nicely starched uniform. I had to press hard to make it stick.

“Nice seeing you again, Ed.” I put the Glock away and gathered my things, then walked out. Out of the airport, out into the sweating Southern night. The air, as always, had an ozone tang imparted by the huge biostatic plants downtown. And, as always, the fecal odor of bucolic acid from the plants mixed with the tang, so that the city smelled like a zombie might, decaying and electric.

Even at the airport, lightning bugs blinked in the air. They lived in the grass that grew through the cracks in the sidewalks. I ordered up a Hertz with my op-eds. It was an 87 Sagittarius, and the inductors rumbled like driveway gravel. Maybe I should have gone with one of the newer companies, instead of aging, traditional Hertz, but I liked the fact that all their electrostatics had the same lines as old gas-burning automobiles.

As the Saj drove me away, a couple of the fireflies smashed against the windshield, and their glowing belly-fire smeared in incandescent arches across my field of vision. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn they were some glitch in the virtual manifestation. But I had my op-eds menued down, and the fireflies were real. For better or worse, I was in Birmingham, in the late twenty-first century, in the frail human flesh. More or less. The briefcase full of guns and brains sat by my side.

My fictional time-traveling detective, Minden Sibley, would have appreciated the juxtaposition of the old and the new on such a night as this. He was always flitting back a hundred years or so, going after fugitives on the Timeways or just taking a short vacation in days when you didn’t have to have a license to take a goddamn dump. But he always had to return within a week, subjective. That was the First Temporal Law, ingrained into the fabric of his being by his employer, the United States Time Company:

1. A time traveller can never harm, nor by inaction bring harm to, the resonate period to which he is native.

You could go away for a little while, but you had to return and take your place as a tooth in the cogwheel that turned the universe when it was your turn to connect up with the Big Conveyor Belt in the Sky. Or whatever. It was all lies, I thought, I’d made them up myself, so what did it matter?

Granddaddy’s death had made me maudlin, I decided. There is, however, no cure for self-indulgent sentimentality so sure and quick as going to see your family, the living ones, that is, in the flesh. I disconnected from the beltway a few miles from the airport, and drove my car down 1st Avenue North to the BrownService Mortuary. Mom’s old Range Rover was parked outside. Harco, the bioenhancement company in which my father was a mid-level node, would not, of course, waste his work time by sending him to the viewing. Maybe he’d be at the funeral. Probably not. My father was a vague nothing to me and I didn’t care. And I didn’t particularly want to see Mom, either.

My mother is an amalgamation of just about every kook spirituality that ever aspired to Ideation. There are feedhorns dangling from her like fat remoras. Yet she is not a node. God knows why. Probably some kind of sick balance in her mind amongst a variety of pathologies. She’s the one who gave me my first name, as if you hadn’t figured that one out already. She was also the one who saved my ass eight years before. What can I say? I love Mom, but I don’t like her very much. At least I don’t like being around her any more than I have to.

I locked my briefcase in the trunk and went inside the funeral home.

Mom was out in the hallway, talking to one of Granddaddy’s relatives whom I didn’t knowwhich included just about all of them. I never had been into the extended family thing as a young man, though Mom had tried to get me interested in reversion genealogy at one timethat fad where some fancy junk supposedly deconstructs your DNA and gives you an op-ed presentation of life in Mesopotamia using your encoded racial memories, or whatever. Mom was convinced at the time that she was a Hittite princess and the rightful heir to the throne. I hated to point out to her that her inheritance nowadays consisted of a death zone of microbes which fried human beings as if they were insects caught in a zapper. The Middle East was no longer a pretty place, if it ever had been.

“Andy,” Mom said, and disengaged herself from the relative to come and hug me. She smelled, as always, of cloistered eucalyptus. “I’m so glad you’re here. Daddy will really be pleased to see you.”

As I’d known she would, Mom had had a ghost made of Granddaddy. I glanced through the door and saw him, sitting by the casket and looking morosely at himself.

“Well,” I said, and walked in.

Granddaddy was lying in his coffin, looking like he was made up for television. He was dressed in a gray suit that I’d never seen him wear. Mom had probably bought it for the occasion. He was a handsome man. He’d been a real looker in his youth, and the undertaker had obviously done some facial rejuvenation. Ironically, you can make dead skin look far younger than living skin, through some trade secret that I did not care to know or even guess at.

“I did live to a ripe old age,” said the ghost softly.

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t find it in me to be rude to the holoware. A first for me. But, however shallow and stupid, the thing was all that was left of the algorithm that had raised me and formed my own deep-down programming.

“I wanted to say something to you.” The ghost said in a stiff voice, as if it were being forced into a sub-routine it did not particularly like, but was ordered to follow.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t try to make eye contact. It wouldn’t be the same, no matter how life-like they made the holo.

“First, power me down as quick as you can.”

“Mom won’t like it.”

“Convince your mother.”

“I’ll try.”

“The other thing,” he said, then was quiet for a moment, as if he were digging for something lost in his depths. But there were no depths to ghosts. “The other thing is, don’t take no shit off nobody. Except poor folks who can’t help it and don’t know any better.”

“I remember when you told me that,” I replied. “I’ll always remember.”

The ghost looked relieved. He crossed his legs and turned back to looking at himself in the casket. “Almost one hundred fifty. A ripe old age.”

I left the room after another minute or so. Mom tried to get me to stay at her apartment, but I needed to be alone tonight. Also I was a little worried about Freddy Pupillina looking me up, and didn’t want Mom to get involved in that kind of shit. She had enough problems as it was.

I found a money crank around the block, and got some cash vouchers issued from my account. This would be the last traceable transaction I planned to make tonight. Just to be sure, I got out the Portalab and ran the voucher cards through a launderer. No real harm done, since they could be cashed at the Federal Reserve, but no more junk on them which could connect them to my account. Slightly illegal, but I made sure to do it away from the usual nano watcher patch points, and out of satellite view. Being a cop hath its advantages.

I checked into a motel in Bessemer, on the west side of town, far from the funeral home and my mother’s place. The clerka crank (it wasn’t a classy joint)asked for I.D. when my voucher cards didn’t produce an origination code. I showed it more fruits from the Portalab and it legally had to be satisfied. My room was dingy and I couldn’t control the air-conditioning. The temperature was much too cold. Air-conditioning. The South was both the master of it and its slave. Nothing in the history of the region was more important.

That night, I dreamed of Abby. I often do. Nothing specific. Just her autumn hair, her slender fingers. Her breath. It always smelled like rain in leaves.

2

After the dreaming, I slept hard and woke up thinking I was in Seattle. Then I realized that not only was it freezing cold from the air conditioning, but the chilled metal of a pistol was pressed against my forehead.

“Mr. Pupillina wants to see you,” said a voice from the darkness.

“Yeah,” I said. “It appears that he does.” That was when I jammed my stungun into where I estimated the voice had a crotch and pulled the trigger. I always sleep with a weapon.

There was a stifled whimper, a heavy thud, and the lights flipped on. A woman was standing by the door with the biggest damn flechette pistol I’d ever seen. It had to be one of the Danachek 7’s I’d heard of. Nasty way to die. The bullets were said actually to burrow. On the floor lay a big, bearded man in a blue suit. His index finger was through the trigger guard of a big forty-five.

“How the hell did you know where I was?” I asked, by way of breaking the tension. The woman’s tight expression did not loosen. She was heavy-set and dark-skinned in a dirty sort of way, maybe in her late forties. Ugly as ten-day-old roadkill. She, too, wore blue, with tiny pin-stripes that made her look fatter than she was, which was fat enough. Or big-boned, I should say, being a gentleman and all.

“Rental cars check in with their location every hour,” she said flatly.

“Only to the cops,” I said, then realized how stupid that sounded. In Birmingham, Freddy might not own the cops, but he sure as hell could get a little favor done for himlike a report on rentals.

“I hope this doesn’t take too long. I have a funeral to attend,” I said. The woman looked at me funny.

“So you already know,” she said. I couldn’t think what the hell she was talking about and finally decided she was talking about my own funeral, har, har.

She motioned me to get up. I had to step over Bluto on the floor to get to my clothes. She made me turn the briefcase toward her when I opened it. She reached for the Glock. So much for Plan B.

But I did have the rest of the alphabet to work with. I quickly slammed the briefcase shut on the woman’s hand. She cried out in pain, but kept the flechette pistol leveled at my chest.

“Let go!” she said, fighting to control the hurt in her voice.

Instead, I twisted the briefcase as hard as I could and heard the bone in her arm break. She fired the pistol at me, point blank. Fire and agony in my chest. The force of the bullet knocked me backward, but I managed to hold on to the briefcase, and the woman and I tumbled to the floor together. Her face came down on the studded metal cup in my elbow. Again there was the cracking of bone. She rolled off of me, moaning. Her nose was a bloody mess. I kicked the pistol away from her and staggered to my feet.

After taking a moment to catch my breath, I lifted my shirt to inspect the damage. There was a hematoma on my ribcage. Through the rendered flesh and muscle, an exposed piece of my kevlar chest plates shone gray as old bone.

The flechette bullet lay at my feet, trying to burrow into the carpet’s nap. This sight, and the grinding pain in my chest, fired a rage within me. I kicked the woman in the side as hard as I could. She stopped moaning and passed out. This gave me less satisfaction than I’d expected. These two were just Family muscle. They weren’t made; their pain was their own. To hurt the Family, you had to hit a node. Like Freddy.

I gathered my things together and left the room. After I stowed them in the Saj, I opened the hood and found the sender box. Taking it out would leave me without traffic control. What the hell; I knew how to drive. I went to the trunk and found the tire tool. The box was full of bionics. It cracked like a skull and leaked gray-white nerve tissue and sickly yellow cranial fluid. While I was putting the tire tool back, the door to my room clicked open and Big-boned Bertha stumbled out. Her face was all bloody and she was obviously having trouble focusing well enough to find me. Nevertheless, I got in the car and got the hell out of there.

My first order of business was a patch job. I had to drive way the hell south to Hoover to find a booth that could handle skin grafts on the order I needed. It took an hour and a half to get me patched up. Funny how you either die or get better really fast these days.

The booth had my DNA match and it wouldn’t be long before a sweep would root me out. Obviously Freddy cared enough to try, and had the kind of connections to succeed. I drove around aimlessly for a while, trying to match speed with the surrounding traffic so that I would not show up as an anomaly on the road control junk.

I pulled into a station for some static, and while the car was recharging, I went to the rest room and tried on my suit. I’d been wrong about it fitting. Over the last eight years, I’d put on at least twenty pounds, most of them in my chest and shoulders. At nine o’clock, when the cleaners opened, I took the suit in for altering. They put it in the nano tank and it was done in fifteen minutes. I paid with some damaged vouchers and headed in the general direction of the east side of town, toward the Church of Branching Hermaneutics, where Mom was holding Granddaddy’s funeral.

But there was still plenty of time to kill before the funeral. I was dressed in the same shorts and T-shirt I’d worn yesterday, so I pulled into Eastlake and did five miles around the track. The lake was gorgeous in the mid-day sun, clean and full of fish, judging by all the anglers on the bank. Years ago, it had been a toxic cesspool, but the nanos had cleaned it upjust like the nanos in my shirt slurped up all the sweat and searched out and destroyed bacteria that made a stink.

On about the third lap, I got a decent snippet of plot for my next Minden Sibley time-travel mystery. Something about nanos eating up a body that had been sunk into a lake and Minden having to go back in time, before the murder, to make an identification. Maybe the plot could involve the Second Temporal Law. I hadn’t done one of those for a while.

2. A time traveller must not endanger his own atemporal existence in any way, unless by so doing he is fulfilling his obligations under the First Law.

It always makes for a thrilling moment when a time-traveller must decide between himself or the epoch which molded him. He can’t exist without it, yet he won’t exist if it does. Meaningless fun, though. Everybody knows time-travel is impossible.

When I finished up my run, I felt like I’d just stepped out of the shower. I drove around for a few minutes until I found a resistance booth on 1st Avenue North, then put in thirty minutes working the weights and getting the involuntaries shocked. It had been a good three days since my last workout, and this one left me tired, but with a clean feeling under my skin. Working out is the only way I know of feeling virtuous at no one else’s expense.

To give the devil his due, I went over to the Krispy Kreme on 86th and had a donut and coffee. The place was over a hundred years old and run by some kind of historical trust. I was served by a node in a polyester waitress get-up from the last century. I’d have preferred an authentic foul-mouthed waitress in regular clothes, but they’ve all been replaced by cranks anyway. The donuts were good, though, and I sat with my coffee and considered times past.

I thought about a lot of things. Abby, mostly. The night I was running for my life from Freddy’s goons. Mom had pulled some strings with one of her cults, and the Children of Gregarious Breathing were all set to smuggle me out in the Winnebago they used in their nomadic travels. They were on a holy search for the promised land of perfect atmospheric ion concentration or something, and no one questioned their comings and goings. Once out of town, Justcorp could take care of me. In town, my company’s hands were tied by Freddy’s maneuvering. There were two slots in the Winnebago. One for me. One for Abby.

Only Abby didn’t take hers. She left me that night, in the midst of my need and terror.

We were on the Southside, standing by the onion-topped Greek Orthodox Church. We were to be picked up a block away by the Breath Children.

I told her I loved her, that I’d never loved her more than tonight.

“I know,” she said. She looked at me as if she were full of infinite sadness, infinite wisdom. She was practicing to be a node even then. Abby, with her black hair and brown eyes. The fingers of her left hand worrying at the silver armlet she always wore above her right elbow. “I’m not coming, Andy,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m not coming with you.”

I should have realized. My fear kept the truth from my mind.

It was me or Birmingham for Abby. It always had been. Part of the reason I’d fallen in love with her in the first place was her devotion to principles larger than herself, her unselfish ways. She loved cities, and this city more than any. She’d majored in urban planning in college, while I’d been studying law enforcement. We met in a criminal-law class, moved in together after I’d got my rookie slot with Justcorp and she’d been hired to monitor traffic and to flip the switch on the Vulcan when it needed doing.

After all those long nights on the traffic watch, pondering the lights, losing herself to the ebb and flow of city life, she’d fallen out of love with me, and into love of another sort. The Big Lie had caught her, before I had known what it was, before I could do anything to help her escape.

It was me or Birmingham, and Abby chose the city. She said that she loved me. She said that love for one man was not as important as love for humankind. She didn’t want to give up her job at the Vulcan; she had made node. She hadn’t wanted to tell me, knowing my distaste, even then, for Ideals. The city was going to wire her up in a week’s time. She was in line to become the city’s transportation coordinator, she said, to be on the Planning Council. In line to make a difference, to be something more than just one woman against the world. I could not believe what she was saying.

She had become one of those people who look right over you and don’t see a person when they look at you, who are always thinking about how everything could be different, how everything can be improved. About how individual people are merely stepping stones on the road to perfection. And gazing into Abby’s eyes, I could see that I was just a point of heat on a particular street corner. No more, no less. She was listening to the buzz of the everything so hard she could never hear me pleading with her to stay with me, to leave for me.

Abby kissed my numb lips and brushed her slender hand against my trembling face. Then I wondered, for the last time, how it was that she smelled like the rain. I swear to God she smelled like rain in the country. In green leaves. Maybe I’ve already told you that?

So I boarded the Winnebago alone, and didn’t die. And I stayed a person. I can’t say the same about Abby. My wife. Who was now the heart and soul of the city of Birmingham. Or at least the nerves.

“You make me look bad, son,” said Freddy Pupillina as he settled his enormous bulk on a stool next to me in the Krispy Kreme. “Why you want to play so hard to get?”

I took a sip of my coffee before I answered him, and scanned the restaurant. There was Big-boned Bertha at the door. Her nose was healed, but something about it didn’t look right, as if she’d turned out so ugly in the first place, her cells had purposely forgotten how to reconstruct her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe it has something to do with your trying to take my badge and your running me out of town on a rail?”

“Old news.”

“I have things to do, Freddy, a funeral to go to. Leave me alone.”

Pupillina took one of those pauses that nodes take when they are receiving instructions from the Ideal. A kind of integration. I took a moment myself to look him over. He hadn’t changed much since the day I sprayed mace in his eyes and kicked him in the balls. Perhaps he was bigger, if that were possible, with tinges of gouty jaundice in his eyes and fingernails.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” he said. “The Family sends its condolences.”

“Fuck the Family,” I said calmly.

Pupillina did not react with anger. He did not appear to have instructions on just how to react to such a statement, so he continued with his spiel.

“For each of us, the time finally comes when we can no longer contribute as much as we are forced to take, when”

“My grandfather was worth more than all of your damn Family put together,” I said. “Will you cut the shit and tell me what you want, Freddy?”

“I’m just trying to be civil,” he grunted. He looked morose, as if all his effort were for nothing. It was.

“I’m going to get up and walk out the door,” I said. “If that creature of yours tries to stop me, I’m going to rip her fucking nose off again and shove it down her windpipe.”

I threw some vouchers down for the coffee and donuts and started to stand up.

“Thaddeus Grayson is dead,” Pupillina said.

I sat back down. “What?”

“He’s been dead for three weeks now.”

It hadn’t been in the papers. None of our mutual friends had called me.

“What do you have to do with it, Freddy?”

“Ithat is, the Familycame into possession of the body.”

Thaddeus dead. It was true. Pupillina had no reason I could discern for lying. I tried to take another drink of my coffee, but all I got were the bitter dregs. Thaddeus was the oldest friend I had, maybe the best.

“How?”

“Blast job,” Pupillina replied. “Something fucking blew his mind.”

“God.”

“It was a slow burn. Whoever did it wanted something. It must have been agony for the poor son-of-a-bitch.”

“Who did it, Freddy?”

I was going to kill them. Option 4 or no Option 4. Thaddeus had taught me everything I knew about writing. And a hell of a lot about living a worthwhile life.

“Good question,” Pupillina said. “We don’t know.”

“Piss in orbit.”

“Honestly, we don’t. He was accidently dumped outside of one of our establishments.”

Like hell he didn’t know. But for some reason, he was being adamant. “Why are you telling me this?” I said.

Pupillina smiled horrendously. Even his teeth were yellowing. “How’d you like that dereliction of duty charge against you dropped? How about that, Andy?”

“I’ll win the case.”

“Maybe. What if it were to be like it never happened?”

“What are you saying?”

“We need you to find out who killed Thaddeus Grayson.”

“You are trying to bribe me to be a snoop?”

“The Family needs an outsider on this one. Somebody with no, uh, leanings toward any one part of us, if you know what I mean.”

“Somebody who hates all of your guts equally and indiscriminately?”

“That’s it.”

“It’s out of my jurisdiction.”

“Oh, I’ve already arranged to have you temporarily assigned to homicide here in Birmingham as specialist labor.”

“Justcorp cleared this?”

“It did.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Yes. So?”

“Why Andy Harco? Isn’t there somebody else you could rain on?” But I was already planning the investigation. First, I’d have to talk to students and faculty where Thaddeus taught

“You knew him.”

“Eight years ago.”

“You’ve kept in touch through virtual.”

“How would you know that, Freddy? That’s illegal information for an unlicensed civilian.”

“Don’t be juvenile, Andy,” said Pupillina. “I’ve got a federal license to conduct certain virtual taps.” He looked rather indignant on the matter, as if he were a man unjustly accused. He just didn’t get it that I thought he was scum, and that I was never going to just go along with things because “that’s how they were,” or whatever other fucking excuse a bad element gives for hurting other people.

“So, will you take the job? We’re going to double your salary while you’re working in Birmingham. We know you like to buy little doo-dads for yourself.”

“How generous.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“I will.”

Pupillina stood up with a great sigh and rustling of clothing. He sounded like a capsized ship righting itself.

“Freddy,” I said, neither standing nor looking up at him, “why’d you send the goons? You could have just told me this.”

He hesitated in answering for a moment, then snapped his lapel and smoothed down his navy jacket. I wondered what designer made blue jeans big enough to fit around that huge ass. “I was trying to give you a gentleman’s welcome,” he replied in a regal tone. What an affected asshole. The Italians had come to Alabama to work in the mines in the early 1900s, a little too late to be princes of cotton and land.

He was feeding me bullshit anyway, but I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him on that one.

“Where is Thaddeus’s body?”

“In safe-keeping. But we’re going to have to let it be discovered tonight. He was due to give some reading that he never misses tomorrow”

“Southern Voices. At UAB.” It was where Thaddeus had first made a name for himself.

“Whatever.”

“You’re the picture of cultural refinement, Freddy.”

Pupillina sniffed, a great rancid, snotty sniff, then continued, “So he’s going to be found, and he’ll be in the morgue for you to look at tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Have we got a deal, then?” Pupillina said. He held out his hand. He should have known not to do that. Christ, what a loser.

“Freddy, if my junk ever told me it was legal, I’d blow you away in a second. If I had a chance to mace you again, this time I’d stick it up the hole in your dickif you still have one. I know who and what you are, Freddy.”

He dropped his hand. “We have a deal,” he said, and walked away. Or maybe slid would be a better way of describing it. Big-boned Bertha followed him out the door, and I was alone with my thoughts once again in the Krispy Kreme. I remembered the first conversation Thaddeus and I had had, in a bar on the Southside.

“I’m going to get this city down in words,” he said to me. “I don’t give a damn how low I have to sink or how high I have to fly, I’ll do it.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s so important about Birmingham?”

“I fit into this city, like a key. I can open it up and find a passageway, man. Find the way.”

“To what?”

He looked at me, ran his stubby fingers through his beard. “That’s the question, ain’t it? When I find out, I’ll let you know. You’ll be the first, okay?”

Thaddeus let us all know, one poem at a time. I ordered another cup of coffee and stared into it until the time came to go to change clothes and attend my grandfather’s funeral.

*

Mom greeted me at the door of the church. She was dressed in one of those iridescent-black grief shifts which are supposed to absorb the alpha emissions of all the nearby mourners and display them in dark patterns across the weave. Mom’s wasn’t too lively, for there weren’t a whole lot of people at the funeral. Granddaddy had kept pretty much to himself these last few years, and beforebefore he’d licked his drinking problemwhat friends he’d had were buddies from the tavern. No close friends. Aquaintances, family. Cousins, creaky old contemporaries, their sons and daughters. Grandma had died before I was born. Mom was her and Granddaddy’s only daughter. And I the only grandchild.

We went up front to view the remains one last time, and Mom broke down. Her dress created some interesting swirls as she cried. In keeping with her ecumenical style, Mom had not used the Branching Hermaneutics clergy, but had gotten a Brother Christopher, a whiff of a fellow from the Children of Gregarious Breathers, to conduct the service. He held her hand to comfort her.

“He was so handsome,” Mom said. “My father was a handsome man.”

I could not but agree.

We took our seats in the first row, and the Breather started the service with a prayer to whatever god of human potential his ilk had faith in. Granddaddy would have snorted in derision, but he’d also told me once that I should let Mom do anything she wanted for his funeral. What the hell difference would it make to him after he was dead?

So I sat through it. But despite Granddaddy’s stated wishes, I felt like saying something. I felt like giving a proper rest to this man who had shaped me more than any other. When the Breather paused in his homily, I motioned to him that I had something to say. He affected not to notice me, so I stood up and walked to the front. Mom let out a little gasp, but appeared resigned to letting me have my way. I stood in the pulpit and the Breather introduced me with a nervous smile, then sat down behind me.

The crowd shuffled around expectantly. They all had on ill-fitting suits and dresses. Working people. Elements like Pupillina would think of them as shnooks, as cattle.

“My granddaddy wasn’t much of a church-goer,” I said. A few in the congregation frowned at this. I heard Brother Breather huff behind me. “But he always spoke of the Old Master, of how he was raised in that Primitive Baptist home out in Brookside. He was a man of God in his way

“

What was I trying to say? Granddaddy hadn’t been to church in fifty years. Until he kicked the bottle, Sundays were six-beer mornings.

“His father worked the coal mines, and Granddaddy went to work in the iron foundries when he was sixteen, as an electrician. When the biostatic plants came in, he wired the broths.”

This was going nowhere. My grandfather had survived, adapted. He was no hero of the masses. He had precious little ambition, except to lead a good life and not to hurt anybody. When it was clear that his drinking was devastating Mom, he’d given it up. Just like that. No treatment centers, no twelve steps, no phenyl therapy. It was a damned gutsy move.

“Granddaddy was the quintessential Southern city man. He was wild and he was loving. He was low-down and he would do anything for you. I’ve never known a better man. If I can be more like him, I’ll count my life well-lived. But we won’t see his like again.”

Here my voice caught in my throat. Anyway, that was all. It was enough. I sat down and the Breather concluded the service with some inappropriate reflection on how we should all be grateful to the government for contracting out Maturicell for our senior citizens, so that even the poor could experience better living through virtual.

Afterward, a couple of relatives or old drinking buddiesI didn’t know whichtold me that they appreciated what I said, and that they, too, had been getting sick of the “preacher’s” nonsense. They asked me if I wanted to go get shitfaced with themwell, not exactly in those wordsbut I politely turned them down.

Mom was having Granddaddy cremated, then shot out of a large air cannon that the Breathers operated somewhere in Tennessee. That was one ceremony I was going to miss. They say that the ashes are eventually distributed around the whole earth uniformly throughout the stratosphere, but I like to think that the particles don’t get that high, or if they do, they come back down again. I like to think that when it rains these days, it’s raining ancestors.

“Why don’t you stay at the apartment tonight?” Mom asked me. “I have a great deal to do this evening, affairs to arrange.” She didn’t wait for me to answer, but looked around, spotted the mortuary crew, and waved them over. “Here’s the key. I’ll see you later.”

I took the plastic key and pocketed it, while Mom steadfastly walked away to do whatever duties her scattered brain had created for her. It had always been like this with her. She was a combination of steel resolve and will-o-the-wisp notions. I thought of her as a metallic butterfly bashing about in the flowers. She’d saved my ass more than once, yet I had difficulty being around her. I loved her. But you don’t have to like someone to love them.

I went back out to my car and breathed out an attempt my body was making to cry. The night was just falling, and a storm was building to the west, where most storms come from in Alabama. Under the storm, the sun had set, but the sky was still burning deep red, like a very slow, very hot fire. The storm cloud spread over this brightness like black oil. Lightning bolts, staying in the air, curled into and out of the cloud, like quicksilver worms. And all of this fury was the backdrop to dozens of flashing biostatic towers, gridding the city for as far as the eye could see. The air smelled like tar and mowed grass. It was sultry hot and full of electric possibility. You could almost believe the city was a living thing on an evening such as this.

“Well, son,” said a voicehis voiceand I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was the ghost, standing beside me, smoking a cigarette exactly as Granddaddy used to. I expected the smoke to curve to the edge of the projection parameters, then abrubtly fade out. Instead, it swirled away into the air and I would almost swear I could smell it. I looked around and saw two lampposts where a couple of holoprojectors may have been, creating the image. “It’s almost time for me to go,” said the ghost.

“Mom’s not keeping you, huh?” I tried to suppress the feeling that this actually was my grandfather. The physical reproduction was excellent. Ghosts had gotten a lot more sophisticated since I’d last been to a funeral.

“She don’t need me. She never really did.”

“Yes, I guess she’s got her religions. Or they’ve got her.”

The ghost took another puff, coughed. Jeez, this thing was life-like! Or is that “death-like”?

“Now, don’t underestimate her, Andy. We were all of us too hard on her.”

I took a breath, looked out at the last embers of the sunset, looked back. “I guess you’re right,” I said.

The ghost dropped his cigarette with a quarter-inch left to the white paper, and didn’t bother to grind it out. Exactly like Granddaddy. “I want you to do something for me, son.”

“What?”

“I want you to get those bastards. I want you to get them all.” The ghost’s eyes shone like black coal in moonlight.

“Who are you talking about, Granddaddy?” I asked, not able to catch myself before I spoke his name.

“The ones who did this to me,” he said quietly.

What? I started to ask. But I knew the answer to that. I’d half-known all along. The storm was breaking in the west, and lightning began to snake to the ground. “I will,” I told my grandfather.

While I was watching the storm, the ghost faded away. Before I got into my car, I noticed something on the ground. It was a cigarette butt. Probably just one that had already been laying in the parking lot. But when I knelt to pick it up, it was warm.

The next morning a crank street cleaner discovered Thaddeus Grayson’s body protruding from a storm drain near Five Points South. Police speculated that the deluge of the previous night had washed it there from wherever it had originally been dumped.

3

I had spent the night before at Mom’s place, where she’d fixed up my old room for me. She’d used it for various kinds of religious networking for years, and the place smelled heavily of patchouli, a scent it had never had when I was a kid. Mom came in after I had already gone to bed, but I could hear her in the kitchen. Despite her avowed disbelief in grief, she was quietly crying.

I got up and went to the kitchen. I took a paper towel from the dispenser there and got some milk from the pantry. I sat down at the table, across from Mom, and said nothing. The carton of milk quickly warmed in my hand as the heatpumping nano activated and cooled the insides.

Mom sniffed a few more times, wiped her nose on her nightgown, then looked around for something on which to dry her eyes. I handed her the paper towel.

“Daddy was so handsome today,” she said. “That was what he looked like when I was a little girl.”

“Yes, he was.”

She used a corner of the paper towel to delicately dab her eyes. After a moment’s struggle, she regained her composureor closed herself off to true feeling once again, depending on how you look at it.

“I suppose you want his ghost turned off?” she said.

“You know I do.”

She looked at me, but not like Abby had that night. Mom may have been a ditz, but she was a living ditz.

“How did I produce such a hard-hearted offspring?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“I mean, look at the kind of person I am. I have faith, Andy. Faith in things to come. I believe in keeping love alive as long as possible. Don’t you want at least some part of Daddy to survive into the better world that’s coming?”

I shook my head. Useless to explain, yet still I always tried. “Even if there is a better world coming, Mom, Granddaddy is dead. That ghost is like a comic strip version of him. You know that.”

“I know that even a caricature is better than nothing,” she said.

“For you, Mom. Not for him.”

“Can’t you have even a little faith, Andy?”

“No. I can’t.”

“Well.” She suppressed another sniffle, then stood up. “Good night.”

“Good night, Mom.”

She went off to bed, and I sat at the kitchen table and finished my milk in silence.

In the morning, I headed into the heart of the city, to the biostatic plants and the hulking infrastructure of what was officially known as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB. What the letters really stood for, everyone knew, was The University that Ate Birmingham. It encysted the south side of the city like a kudzu takes a tree.

In the mid-twentieth century, the iron mills had dominated the landscape, but by the 1990s, they were heaps of rust. Twenty years later, come the biostatic revolution, grossly cheap energy, et voilaall the towns that had big medical centers became the centers of money and power in the world. Birminghamafter years of a massive inferiority complexhad finally got a leg up on Atlanta in the region. UAB had been a bio mecca for years.

But once again Birmingham had blown it by concentrating all of its hopes in one industry. Biostatics is old tech now, just as iron had become a century earliera tech that is waiting to get picked off by some hotshot genius. And the bio-waste, nasty as shit because it is shit, deepens. Good old Birmingham was destined to become a second-rate town all over again. Or maybe the Ideals, so much more intelligent and far-seeing than the leaders of the past had been, would save us. And if you buy that, I’ve got a near-earth C-based asteroid to sell you, dirt cheap.

The plants are massive and bright, even in broad daylight. They shine and flash like giant test tubes full of neon gas, though what they are really filled with is reactive biomasssoybeans, pond scum, and human feces. They have a certain gross beauty.

I left my car in the parking garage at UAB and walked the few blocks to Five Points South. As I’d hoped, The Betablocker was still there, in all its shabbiness. Thaddeus had had an apartment over the bar, and had practically lived in the bar’s murky confines, frequently taking his meals there, such that they were. Even back when I knew him, he’d been a long-time fixture in the establishmentso much so that the proprietor had given him a cigarette lighter emblazoned with the Blocker’s crest: A skull with the international nil sign encircling and bisecting it. What did it mean? No heads allowed? No thinking? That last was more likely.

I went inside. The bartender was not a crank, but a young woman, probably a student. Old-fashioned joint. I didn’t recognize her, but I did stare at her for a moment. Here in Birmingham, it was common for two mulattos to meet, but not in Seattle. In fact, it hadn’t happened to me in eight years. She saw me, saw what I was staring at, and gave me a smile. Not a node. I ordered a beer.

All the bars these days had nano-breweries, but the Blocker had an old-fashioned glass-windowed instant fermenter behind the bar. I watched the barley turn to brew before my eyes. Then it circled through some refrigerationan old unit, with freon, not nanoswhere it collected in a pool, awaiting consumption.

My tawny bartender drew it into a mug and brought it over to me. I did my duty. Not bad for the Bible Belt. A little bitter going down, but bitter suited me.

“You sure got rid of that fast,” said the bartender. “Want another?”

“Sure.”

She set the machine to work, then leaned on the bar near me. “I’m Trina,” she said. I looked at her more closely. The smile was still there, but there was something haggard about her face, something sad.

“Andy Harco. Pleased to meet you.”

She fidgeted a moment, having nothing else to say, I guessedor else wanting badly to say something, but not knowing how. Then the beer saved her. She went to get it for me.

“You been here long?” I asked, when she returned.

“Uh, no. Well, almost a year now. I guess that is long.”

She began to absently rub the bar with a towel. Her fingers were long and supple. She was gripping the towel very tightly.

“Know a guy named Nestor Greenly?”

“Nope.”

“He used to tend bar here. Long time ago.”

“Yeah?”

She gave the bar a final swipe and put the towel away, then started to drift away. She was humming something slow and soft.

“I used to live in Birmingham,” I said.

This got her attention. “Where do you live now?”

“Seattle.”

“Really? There’s a guy who comes in here

came in here. He knows a cop in Seattle he’s always talking about.”

“I’m him.”

“Yeah.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You are, aren’t you?”

“You heard about Thaddeus?”

“I heard. I don’t know what to think.”

“Did you like him?”

She was crying now, softly. “I didn’t love him,” she said. Then I understood.

“How long were ya’ll together?”

“No,” she said. She knelt and got the bar towel again, then wiped her eyes with it. “You’ve got it wrong. We weren’t together. We just once.”

“I see.”

“But he was here every day. He lives upstairs, you know. Lived. I haven’t seen him for weeks though.” She said the last with a measure of acrimony.

I sipped my beer. Another customer came in and Trina went to wait on him. He ordered a whiskey sour. It was nice to see a real human being mix a drink. Somehow it was more graceful than a crank, and I’ll bet the guy got a stiffer drink. After she’d finished, she came back over to me.

“Can I see his apartment?” I asked.

“The police have been up there,” she said. “They have it sealed off.”

“I am the police, Trina.”

“Oh. Well. Then I guess you can.” She reached under the bar and pulled out her purse. She searched around in it until she came up with a plastic key. It went with a cheap lock, no doubt, with magnetized junk. I could have opened it in two seconds without her help. But the thought counted.

There was a P.D. spiderlock on the door. It ate a couple of skincells off my finger and let me use the key. Thaddeus’s place looked like the back room at a shoe store after a big sale. It always had. He kept things in boxes; the only furniture he owned was a bed and a desk. He had no link screen to write on, no unlinked computer either, and I knew, from asking him, that he didn’t work in virtual.

He wrote on paper, with the self-recharging nano pen I’d given him years ago. I’d gotten it off a bad element who wouldn’t be needing it anymore. One of Thaddeus’s favorite tricks was to stick it into the toilet to feed the nanos. This apartment still had liquid plumbing. I set my briefcase on the bed, and looked around.

The pen was on the desk, next to a pile of paper. New poetry, maybe. The place smelled of cigarettes, dust, emptiness. I sat down in the desk chair. It squeaked, but in a wooden, comforting way. The local guys had obviously been through the place. I’d scan their report later. I’m sure that Freddy’s hired help had combed it as well. I didn’t expect to find anything.

I wasn’t even sure what I was doing here. I picked up a poem. Thaddeus’s chicken scratch was almost impossible to read. Like ancient Hebrew, vowels were merely a line, and you had to guess from context. There were mark-outs, added lines, intense revisions. No title on this one.

Then the sadness finally hit me. I laid the poem back down and sobbed once, wiped a tear. This was it. The last of Thaddeus Grayson. Ink on paper. He had been my friend.

We didn’t stay in constant touch over the years, but got together every few months in virtual, found some out-of-the-way algorithm to get jangled in. He was into edge music, and lots of times we’d sit in on this or that band that was supposed to be fresh kill. When I’d first met him, back when I was a rookie rental, he’d been trying to make it in an edge act called Strategic Magnificence. They made rock-and-roll influenced vibes with some lunar tonic imagery and, for spice, Afro-Hispanic mambito rhythms. It wasn’t great stuff, but the lyrics were hot. Thaddeus wrote them all, of course. Most of the time they played at the Betablocker.

P.D. stormed the place one night looking for headjunk, and I’d arrested him for minor possession. We had a fascinating conversation about science fiction on the ride back to the station. Thaddeus read it, and was even writing some of it back then, as was I. That was before his debut at Southern Voices, before his first poems hit big in Yardworks and every licensing program in America wanted to give him instant tenure.

After I’d seen him through the paperwork, and got him on-line with the best defense junk I knew at the time, we went back to the Blocker for a beer. The defense junk got him off with a week of public service, which he worked off the next few days by riding around with me as patrol ombudsman. What a weird-assed combination that was! But we got along, and I introduced him to Abby. This was before she and I were married.

Abby and I turned into his first listeners after that. We’d go out drinking, or he’d come over to our place (after she and I had a place) and read us his latest. We’d either critique it or tell him it was great. But it was all great. Better than anything else being written. I knew it, and even Thaddeus knew it, but he had a hard time believing that he was that good.

Christ, he could make words sing! He did not see the world as you or I, but in infinitely finer texture and variety. It wasn’t so much that he had a different perspective on things, but that he seemed, rather, to embody all perspectives in his work. A complete writer. God knows, I’ve tried to imitate him, but my best work is a pale shadow, stark black-and-white in comparison to his infinite subtleties of tone. It was always impossible for me to be envious, however. How can you envy a natural force come into the world? It just is.

Over the years, he had taken on the physical presence to accompany his work. Thaddeus had grown, like a rock taking on moss, and lately had become an immense man. Yet the bulk seemed to be padding instead of fat, a patina of years observed. He was not a rotund, jolly fellow, but imposing. He’d been raised down in scrappy Gulf Shores, Alabama’s redneck riviera, by an itinerant mother who was a waitress, when she was working, and he’d always retained the air of a street kid.

But no longer.

Thaddeus was gone. Cut off in his prime.

I shuffled through the other papers. More poems, a letter from a fan, a grade sheet with the names of his students. I scanned in the list, then picked up another poem.

This one was more readable.

Upside down, the leaf supports the tree

the all supports the me

Bricks, stones, walls

Quills, pens, porcupines

Death and life everlasting

together again for the first time

Obviously notes and scribblings. Then under all of this a line from Wallace Stevens: The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The paper wasn’t dated, but I knew that Thaddeus periodically swept everything on his desk into a box, so the line had to have been written relatively recent to his death. Which didn’t mean that it was worth a damn to me.

I sat there for a long time and stared at the other papers, at the grain of the desk. It was made of real wood. Thaddeus, my friend, would never write here again. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, three months ago, in virtual. We’d taken a pathway that was not quite legal down to a bar on the underside of the Citythe virtual City that was the setting for the meeting of minds across America. The bar had junk in place that bypassed your normal tactile filters. A band called Metastasis of the Liver was pounding out some edgeand in that bar, pounding was what happened to your nervous system. Thaddeus hadn’t talked much, had complained about his work needing a jolt.

“Maybe I’ll get out of Birmingham,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get out of the South, even.”

“You? Man, you are in a symbiotic relationship with that city. There’s no way you’ll leave.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little worried about it becoming parasitic, you know what I mean?”

“Like how?”

“Like all my poems are full of shit smells and air-conditioner hum. I can’t get those damned biostatic plants out of my imagination. I don’t know. People tell me Thaddeus is good for Birmingham. I don’t know if Birmingham is good for Thaddeus anymore.”

Then the band kicked in and blasted away all intimacies of conversation, imagined or real. By the time the set was over, we were both too wasted on the sound and pleasure-center jolts available in such places to resume.

Drunk. I’d last seen Thaddeus drunk and vaguely unhappy. Did that mean anything? And what was this “the all supports the me” shit? Had Thaddeus been contemplating joining an Ideal? My common sense immediately rejected the notion. Thaddeus knew what selfless idiots nodes were. He’d even commented on the fact that Ideals seemed to mistake quantity with quality in their recruiting ads on the link. But even to such a man as Thaddeus, who, as far as I was concerned, was ten times more intelligent and ultimately powerful than any Ideal, joining up could become a strange and deep attraction. I’d seen it happen to too many good people.

I hadn’t realized how long I’d sat there, brooding, until I noticed that the sun was getting low in the west, and shining through the room’s blinds in big, dusty slants. There was no draft in the room. Evidently the building was coated with heat pump nanos and the air conditioning was silent. The dust motes danced about with pure Brownian motion, and I watched them form and deform, coalesce, and scatter. Dead people. That was what I’d come home to.

Then they swirled into tempests and typhoons as someone opened the door and stepped into the gloom of the apartment.

Trina.

She had covered her black bartending outfit with a seersucker jacket, and now she had on op-eds. Flat, utilitarian shoes. She had a satchel which looked like it was woven of spidersilk. Inside were some lumpy and heavy-looking things. Books, from the shape of them.

“You’re a student,” I said.

“Yes.”

She walked past me, sat on Thaddeus’s bed. Her op-eds were organic blend, like mine. Pretty nice on a bartender’s salary. Maybe a rich girl, learning to live on her own.

I ran her through my identification junk and got a split screen display of her file. Trina Oswand. Twenty-five. Bartending part-time at the Betablocker andah haworking on her Poetic License. Current address: 511 20th Street. I blinked up her parents’ address. Mountain Brook. Where all the old money dwelled. So she was a poor little rich girl.

“Are you one of Thaddeus’s apprentices?” I asked.

“No. I work with Ammon Hamms.” Hamms was one of the poets at UAB. I liked his work, but thought it a trifle old-fashioned. It was full of misdirected racial anger. Somebody should sit the fellow down someday and explain to him just who was worthy of hate these days.

And of course Trina wouldn’t be one of Thaddeus’s charges. He wouldn’t mess around with his own students. Other instructors’ students were another matter, however.

Her voice was strained now, as it had been at the bar, as she struggled to hold in her emotion.

“I need to know what you really felt for Thaddeus,” I told her. It was true enough, but she needed to tell me much more.

“I loved him,” she said. She shook her head, then rubbed her forehead. While she was rubbing, she began unobstrusively wiping her eyes. “Why did this have to happen?”

“I don’t know, but I plan to find out,” I said. “Do you have any ideas? Guesses?”

She shrugged. “Gambling, maybe.”

“He played City games, went to the holo fights?” Virtual casinos were not entirely legal, but not difficult to get to if you knew the system well enough. A lot of the virtual bars Thaddeus and I had been to had back rooms for gambling. And holographic computer simulations of every game imaginable were available for wagering.

“Everything,” Trina said. “City, holo, football, kingpin. He made a lot of money that way. At least he claimed to.”

This was a side to Thaddeus I hadn’t known about. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize my ethics by telling me. Maybe he’d been afraid I’d have turned him in.

“Anything else you can think of?”

“You mean motives and stuff?”

“I mean motives and stuff.”

“No. Unless some idiot at school got mad at him.”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

“It’s guaranteed. But those people are the biggest wooses in the known universe. They wouldn’t have the guts.”

“Did he ever say anything about joining an Ideal?” I asked, as casually as possible.

“No. I don’t know. He talked about them sometimes, but like everybody does.”

“Do you think he would have told you if he were thinking about it?”

She gave me a hard stare, and I saw the sadness in her eyes, beneath the tough act. Tears flowed. It looked as though she were squeezing them out. I found myself hugging her to my chest, stroking her hair.

“Oh God,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be held all day.”

“It was tough, finding out?”

“Nobody knew about Thaddeus and me. We kept it hushed up. So there was nobody I could talk to.”

She was crying in earnest now, and, so help me, so was I. She looked up at me, smiled, wiped a tear from my face.

“Why don’t you stay with me tonight, at my mother’s?” I said. “We have an extra room.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” she said.

So I held her some more. She fit nicely under my chin. To Thaddeus, who was two inches taller than I was, she had probably seemed a tiny, fragile thing. Finally she wiped her eyes on my shirt, then pulled gently away. She sat down on Thaddeus’s bed, looked around, bit her lower lip to hold back another fit of sobs.

“Can I stay here for a while?” she asked. “I didn’t know if it would be okay after the police had been here.”

“Sure. Just leave everything like it was.”

“That’s the way it will always be,” she said, and smoothed a wrinkle from the sheet beneath her. “Like it was.”

I rose to go.

“Okay, I’m going,” I said, then “Is this where you’ve been living?”

“Do you think I would have let the place get into this shape if I lived here?”

“Guess not. Trina, are you really all right?”

“Yes. Everything’s copacetic.” That was Thaddeus’s word. He’d picked it up from junk hustlers a few years back. He seemed to like the way it rolled off the tongue.

“Do you really think you should be alone?”

“I don’t live by myself,” she said. “Thaddeus found me this basement room with this woman who’s big shit at city hall or something. She’s an old friend of his.”

Oh hell. And here we go again. Floodgates opening. What will and must be about to rain down upon me like heavy sludge.

“Abby?”

“Yeah, that’s her name. You know her?”

“I used to be married to her.”

“But she’s a node.”

“I know.”

After that, Trina didn’t say anything. She found another wrinkle to work on.

I took a blank sheet of paper from the desk and wrote down my mother’s telephone number and link code on it. I also wrote down the path of the virtual feed to my op-edsnot a code I give out regularly. “If you need anything,” I said.

As I left, I instructed the spiderlock to close everything up after Trina was out, then went down through the Blocker and out into the sidewalk heat of sunset.

The Southside was beginning to come alive. College kids and young professionals in smartly pressed jeans strolled the streets, along with cream-faced hookers and bums hawking spit and tirades. The bars, jangle joints, and friendship salons were already lit up, and cars tooled in and out of the flicker of neon. The pavement smelled like money wet with urine. The sky was welted with red lines of clouds, like the nose of a drunkard.

Thaddeus had loved this town. It had haunted his dreams. On a hot August day like today, the place felt alive, like a living entitysomething that far transcended the City Ideal that Abby belonged to. More basic. Maybe not more overtly powerful, but stronger deep down. That was the Birmingham I loved. And missed. Sometimes in Seattle, I woke up sweating like a Southern pig in summer, in the midst of winter in the Northwest, dreaming of a Southern sky red and hot with the exhalations of two million souls, the breath-prayers of the people.

Standing above the Southside was Vulcan. The torch was red, of course. I was close enough to see the eerie smile on his iron face. “I don’t know what he’s laughing at,” Thaddeus had said once. “At the way things are or at the way he made them. I’m not sure the old god believes in himself anymore.” He’d smiled bitterly.

“But I believe in him,” Thaddeus had said. “I’m his fucking prophet of doom.”

Abby. I had to see Abby once again. Maybe what the old god was laughing at was Andy Harco.

4

I spent most of the next day calling up the police reports on my op-eds, avoiding the inevitable. Nothing of much use. Whoever had done the blast job had cleaned up after himself very well. Freddy had lied. It was not a slow torment for Thaddeus, but a super-quick explosion. Performed, most likely, by a blast spideran insect-sized crank which sank its fiber optic fangs into the neck of its victim and reamed out everything that made the victim a person. Personality, memories, somatic functions. Everything.

It was the kind of hit professionals make, both to kill their victim and to destroy the recoverable short-terms that could identify the assassin.

The body was clean, as well. No marks of bondage. A small piercing hole, just below the base of the skull, where the spider dug in. Probably all Thaddeus had felt was a tingle as the thing crawled into position, then a quick jab of pain in his neck, then nothing.

After a morning of this, I drove down to P.D. to look through Thaddeus’s personal effects. I could have gotten them in virtual, but it would have taken time to get them translated. And if you’re not a node, virtual is just not high-resolution enoughin audio, tactile, or visualto give you the fine detail you needed for careful examination of evidence. Add to that the fact that the junk geniuses still hadn’t figured out a way to wire it for smell. Something about the reptile brain being too deep or something.

And anyway, I needed the exercise that getting out and driving would provide. The place hadn’t changed much. Cranks roamed the halls, carrying hard-copy files. A few dragged perpetrators along. The perps always followed the cranks in a reluctant shuffle, stunned at the apparent temerity of their robot guards. Most cranks had in their deep programming an aversion to coercing human beings into anything. But not at P.D.

I saw a few Justcorp personnel, but a whole lot more Guardian and Humana. Administration had changed hands. A GarciaSecure rental brought me the items I requested from evidence and acquisitions. Back in my day, Justcorp had practically owned the place. But that was the way business worked nowadaysdiversification. The big temp agencies were becoming dinosaurs as all the companies scaled down and worked into the niches.

The Ideals were on the rise. Seattle was one of the few places where management in the P.D. didn’t consist of nodes belonging to His Excellence, Matishui, or another of the business Ideals. Birmingham happened to contract out to a German concern, Meyerstadt. My temporary boss was a node in Meyerstadt, I supposed, but since all my clearances were logged on the computer, I didn’t have to deal with him. Or it.

Thaddeus hadn’t been carrying much. No billfold. A bag full of vouchers and a link cash card. Anybody else carrying just a bag full of cash would have been suspicious. I, however, knew that this was the way Thaddeus kept up with his money. A pack of Jawolski full-filtered nanozymed cigarettes for that cool, clean, non-cancerous smoke. These didn’t have the self-igniting tips. Thaddeus used the cigarette lighter given to him by the Betablocker. It was among the effects as well. I palmed it, flicked it open and closed, remembering the simple pleasure it had given Thaddeus. He’d had it translated into virtual so he could always have it with him.

The clothes were nondescript Southern. Light cotton pants, Pons walking sandals, three years out of style, a faded madras shirt. On the collar was a single drop of blood. His op-eds were cracked and taped back together. Cheap and South American.

I signed out the lighter on personal recognizance, then returned everything else to the E & A woman. I pocketed the lighter, then drove the Saj over to Eastlake and went for a long, long runnearly ten miles. Then resistance work at the nearby booth. A donut at Krispy Kreme. I was stalling.

Even knowing this, I drove back to Mom’s and started in on my new Minden Sibley story. I blinked down my virtual selection menu and called up “writing office.” This took my voluntaries off line, and formed the holo of my nondescript working space within the organic matrix of my op-ed lenses. Some people think that virtual writing is as easy as thinkingyou just form the sentences in your head, and they are transformed into words on a page. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Only nodes can think to machines, and we all know that node writing is a joke. The way it works with me is that I have to simulate typing with my handsor come up with some analogous activity. In fact, I used an IBM Selectric from the Dark Ages. No qualitative improvement from Dickens’ pen and ink, but things are more convenient and faster.

Working on the story wasn’t entirely an escape from my professional duties, since the murder I was writing about was extremely similar to the one I was working on in real life. But instead of a dead body with no brain, I had a brain with no dead body. The nanos in Eastlakewhere the body in the story had been dumpedhad eaten the flesh, but hadn’t gotten inside the skull yet. The recoverable short-terms indicated that the victim was a man, but gave no hint as to his identityimages of his op-ed display flicking from one feed to another, comedies and documentaries, for the most part. Then a bright light from around the edges of the eyewear. Then nothing.

There was a vague hint of Ideal involvement, but in my story, the offending node didn’t look a thing like Abby. Instead, he looked remarkably like Freddy Pupillina.

And then I looked up from my battered old typewriter and Granddaddy was standing beside me, reading over my shoulder.

“Not bad,” he said. “But that time-travel stuff bothers me. Why don’t you write about regular people in regular places?”

For a moment, it was like old times. This, my office, was frequently where Granddaddy and I met, after I left Birmingham. Maturicell gave him four virtual hours a day, and he said he didn’t like to waste it in a City that didn’t existthe big virtual City, that is, where most people conducted their virtual business. I, on the other hand, didn’t care to visit the Birmingham virtual reification, for obvious reasons. So the office was the compromise, and it was just as well, because all we ever did was sit around and talk. Rather, he told stories and I listened. One thing he never did, though, was read what I wrote. Reading was laborious for him. The crazy moment of hope and relief passed, and I frowned at the ghost. “What are you doing here? I thought Mom had you deactivated.”

He raised an eyebrow, smiled. “She did. Yesterday.”

And how could a ghost get into virtual?

She did.

Ghosts aren’t smart enough to lie, either. “Yesterday?”

“That’s right, son.”

I pushed my chair back from the desk. It scraped, very convincingly, on the linoleum. I imagined the impulse traveling down the temple piece of my op-eds, making connection with the audio leads just above my inner ear. As usual, the only thing missing in virtual was smell. Would Granddaddy stink of the grave’s rot, if there were smells here? No. He’d been cremated. Ashes. He’d smell gray and gone.

“What are you? Did Freddy send you to mess with me?”

“Not Freddy. I hate that bastard,” Granddaddy said. “Nobody sent me. In fact, so far nobody knows that I exist.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m not your grandfather, son. Well, I am and I’m not. He and I were friends for a lot of years, though he didn’t really know it.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a glitch in the system, son,” he said. “That’s about all I know.”

“Then in the funeral home parking lot”

“That was me. Not that ghost. After your grandfather died, I decided that becoming as much like him as I could would be a suitable memorial.”

Granddaddyor whatever he waspulled up a chair that hadn’t been there before. It was his favorite recliner, gone for years, since he’d been in the Maturicell Sensorium. He took a cigarette from his pocket, and I reached for Thaddeus’s lighter. It wasn’t there in virtual, but Granddaddy smoked self-igniters anyway. He rubbed the end against the chair’s fabric and it sparked to a slow burn. He took a long drag. His fingers were yellowed where he held the cigarette, just as I remembered.

“What I am don’t matter much right now, I don’t think. I want to tell you something I found out.”

“I’m listening.”

“Freddy killed me.”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“It was to get you back down here. In person.”

“How do you know?”

“I

it’s inside me. Knowing.” Granddaddy leaned back in the chair, took another long drag. “Elizabeth Holder, entry clerk 17A98T4ah hell, there’s a lot of numbers attached to hergave the order to turn me off. Somebody named Nelson Heally told her it was all right. And he got a message from somebody else who got a message from Freddy, and the message had money attached in a

a rider loop

Am I making any sense, son?”

Sure he was. This was the sort of thing I’d paid big money to be able to do with my op-eds. “You’re accessing computer records. Instantly.”

“Maybe so. It’s just things that I know. Like I know your grandmother’s favorite color. I was there, with him, all along. Can’t say how, exactly. In the wiring, in the plumbing, maybe.” He finished the cigarette, flicked it to the floor. There was no smell of lingering, ambient smoke. The room was as antiseptic as usual.

“Freddy must have wanted to get me back pretty bad,” I said, mainly to break the silence.

“No, son. He don’t give a shit about you.”

“Then”

“The Family needs you for something. That’s the part I don’t know. I don’t know why, either, cause what the fuck would I know about the goddamned Mafia either, come to think of it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Hmmph.” Granddaddy stood up. “I have to go.”

“Why?”

“Starting to feel sick. Like I’m coming off a three-day drunk or something. Not used to getting this much attention paid to me, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“Well, son

“

“Am I going to see you again?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“See you. Granddaddy.”

“Bye.” And he was gone, like a changed channel.

5

That night, I went to see Abby.

Trina answered the door when I knocked. She led me into the living room and went to get Abby. Not my living room. Abby and I could never have afforded a place like this. One wall of the room was a window. The house was up on Red Mountain, on the part of 20th Street that goes over the mountain and into Homewood. It hung off the side of the mountain, seemed to hang over all of downtown, and the window was a light show. At night, the biostatic plants burned like the souls of saints, the streets flickered in arachnic configurations. Everything was dark or bright, with no in-between. Trina didn’t come back. I turned from the window, looked over at the door Trina had left through, and Abby was standing there.

She didn’t move, didn’t step into the room. The only light was the light of the city through the window. Black dress, bare arms, white skin. Long raven hair. Brown eyes, lips that always pouted, no matter what her mood. Moonsilver armband just above the elbow. Silver bracelet at the wrist. And, after all these years, she still wore the expression of a bewildered child.

“Thaddeus is dead.” My words sounded alien, or far awayas if I’d said them a long time ago.

“I know.” Her voice, Southern, alto, too large for her body, but feminine and detached.

“How have you been?”

“Very well.” She finally moved into the room. She drifted like a cloud. The room was very still, and I could smell her approach, as you can that of a storm.

“I hear you run the city now.”

“No, I’m just traffic.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Yes.”

I turned back to the window, put a hand in my pocket, took it out. What should I do with my hands?

“Is that you, Abby, in there?”

She didn’t answer at first, but moved closer. I suddenly felt like crying, but did not.

“What did you ever know about me, anyway, Andy?”

“I loved you.”

“Yes. We were two people in love.” She touched my arm, drew back, touched it again. “Did you ever think that there were more important things in the world than two people, in love or not?”

I turned to face her then. It was over. It had been over for years. Still, she was everything I’d ever wanted. But she wasn’t here. My small sacrifice for the betterment of mankind.

“No,” I answered. “I never for one minute considered that possibility.” I tried to smile ironically, but it hurt to do so. The touch of her hand on my arm burned like cool fire.

“Well, what is it you want?” As she spoke, a crank came into the room with a bourbon and water, something I used to drink a lot. I took it from the tray on the crank’s head. Abby stopped touching me, took a glass of water.

“I think Thaddeus was considering joining an Ideal before he died,” I said. “I was wondering if the city had been recruiting him.”

“Thaddeus? You must be joking. He hated Ideals almost as much as you do.”

“All right. Did you have any conversations with him just before his death?”

Abby stood still for a moment, her expression frozen. It was a look I’d seen before, when the node is in complete integration with its Ideal. I looked around the room, but saw no obvious transmission points. A tasteful node residence, a bohemian poetry student to share the place with, antiques, wonderful views. Human, no hardware. But then, Abby’s place would be.

“I haven’t spoken with Thaddeus for three weeks,” she said.

“Well, that would be just before his death.”

“What do you mean?” Abby asked, but it was too fast, unconvincing. Nodes don’t lie very well to real people.

“He died a few weeks ago, but his body was only recently discovered.”

“I see.” I’ll bet she did.

“What did you talk about?”

“Trina. He was worried that I didn’t want her to stay here anymore, and he couldn’t afford to help her out if she needed to get a new place.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that Trina could stay here as long as she wanted, and that he should stop betting so heavily on the holos.”

“And that was all?”

Abby sipped her water. Somehow the motion didn’t look real. More like a mannequin lifting a glass to its mouth, then lowering it, with no fluids exchanged.

“He was into his bookie for a lot of money,” she said. “And his bookie was Freddy Pupillina’s agent. You know that. That is why he was killed, I think. That might also explain the blast job.”

“That kind of job is too expensive for a small-time gambling enforcer,” I said.

“Well then. You’re the expert.” She said it with the contempt that all nodes have for us simple-minded individuals.

“Abby, how did you know that Thaddeus had been dead for three weeks?”

Almost, she was flustered. Again there was a moment of Ideal integration. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Come on.”

“All right. Freddy may talk like he runs the city, but he is just one voice. City has ways of checking up on the Family and keeping it in check. We know what’s going on with Freddy. Frankly, we’re smarter, because we’re made up of smarter nodes.”

“Do you think Freddy did it?”

Another temporal drop out, then she said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“The gambling was a way for the Family to get its hooks into Thaddeus. Like I said, they need better nodes. They wanted him to join them.”

“Why Thaddeus, for God’s sake?”

“Call it an exercise in eugenics, in mental evolution. No great poet has ever belonged to an Ideal.”

“Because they would stop being a great poet the minute they joined!”

“That’s your opinion. It would be a wonderful thing for humankind if Thaddeus had joined the right Ideal. You don’t understand. You can’t comprehend.”

“Yeah, right.”

But it made sense, in a sick sort of way. But why bring me in? Or was I overestimating the Family’s opinion of me? Maybe It thought I would botch things up good, and that’s why It had

killed my grandfather. To make sure the detective investigating Thaddeus’s death was an imbecile.

I was suddenly fed up with the fucking Ideals, fed up with Abby and her precious City. Fuck Birmingham. Fuck all that is general, all-encompassing, bigger-than-you-and-me who knows how. There are times when a guy has to get away from Principles.

“I still love you, Abby,” I said. “I’m willing to give you a chance to get out of your Ideal and come back to me.”

She looked at me as a child will look at a strange insect, just before it absently crushes it.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“This is your last chance.”

There was a moment of integration. A flash of pleasure on her face as the Ideal gave her what she’d come to need. Hell, what she’d always wanted. “What do you think I’ve got?” she said, laughing softly. “Everything.”

“Nothing,” I said. I set my untouched bourbon down on top of the crank’s head and showed myself to the door. Abby breezed beside me to open it. She no longer smelled like rain. I must have brushed against her skin, but I do not remember how it felt at that moment.

I drove around for a long time in the Saj, off traffic control, off the pump and quiver of Abby’s involuntary nervous system, because that is what the traffic system of Birmingham was. A brain interlaced with nanos which reported back to networking junk, which inhabited a bio-electro-quantum froth somewhere in the depths of City Hall. Each municipal function had a human overseer, just as nerves and hormones tell your body when and how to shit. And nerves and hormones, for all their complexity, are less independent entities than shit is.

I felt very independent this evening.

Driving, trying not to think, because thinking was what always got me in trouble, because thinking was what Ideals did best, wasn’t it, and all we puny humans had was our feelings, the seat of our pants? What I was feeling was a deep and abiding hatred for them, for the Ideals, and what they’d done to me, to us, to all the people. And I wanted, more than anything, to take out Freddy Pupillina. Take him out and watch as, like one of those old-fashioned strings of Christmas lights, his destruction took out the whole fucking tree.

I drove through downtown and hitched onto the bottom deck of the beltway, headed northeast. I felt like a corpuscle streaming through a capillary, a cell with no center. The lights were on when I got back to Mom’s, which should have told me something, but, idiot that I am, I walked right into it.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Big Bertha, Freddy’s goon woman. She was holding the Danachek flechette pistol to my mother’s face. I froze. Think of something, goddamn it, Andy. But I couldn’t. Mother was still wearing the incandescent mourning dress. It shone black-red for terror.

The guy whose balls I’d fried got up from a chair and limped over to me. He grinned through his beard and slid the briefcase out of my hand.

Mom made no sound. She was grinding her teeth together so hard I could hear it across the room. Somebody was going to fucking pay for this.

“Say goodnight to your mama,” said the guy who had my briefcase. He was still grinning, as if he couldn’t get his face to go back to its natural stupid scowl. His teeth were very white in the curly blackness of his beard. I wanted very much to wipe the beard, the grin, then the grinning muscles off of his facewith sandpaper.

“It’s all right, Mom,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”

“Oh, Andy. I’m sorry,” she said. “They said they were from the Mourners’ Union. So I let them in.”

“Shut up,” said Bertha.

“I should have been more careful, less trust”

Bertha slapped her in the temple with the butt of the Danachek. It didn’t knock her out. She sat stunned and hurting.

“What do you fucking want?” I said, low, almost in a growl.

“Ha,” said the grinfaced goon. He pulled a stungun out from his jacket and tried to shove it into my balls. He missed and connected with my thigh. He’d turned the juice all the way up and the last thing I remember was the tightening of every muscle in my body, impossibly tight, unbelievably painful. Then the smell of burning flesh. Then the

bliss O, bliss o, I am not I am we, the dark and empty center spinning black and clumped like spit thick tobacco in a greater darkness, moist, hot, trembling, needing, giving. We are spinning, we are all spins, dancing through tendrils, sheaves and chords of thready, fibrous tendrils holding us, guiding, feeding and being fed, leading always and inexorably to the dark, clumped center of all, All. There is a gushing rise within

me

and a hot wheel of love in my mind, spinning, burning, shedding the blood of desire, longing for

the Darkness.

6

I awoke in a bare room in a warehouse that belonged to Freddy Pupillina. I knew that the Family had not killed Thaddeus. I knew, innately, because now I had been made. I was a part of the Family. How odd, I thought, that the thing I feared so much before was now my heart’s desire. It seemed that all my life was a pale shadow before this time, this being. I was a node. The very thought sent waves of pleasure flowing through me. I reached out and entered the strong mind of the Family.

Respect and loyalty. A just code and the need to keep to it flowed back. I felt lucky to be a part of such a higher purpose, a greater principle. It had chosen me when I was rebellious, a mote of nothing destined for nothingness. I was touched by a grace far greater than I.

I let the grace take me up, away. I expanded like the huge, swelling erection of a god. The Family could use me properly now. I was capable of understanding.

The Ideal, Excellence, was making Its move in Washington, taking out the old, imperfect alliance of Courage 3 and the Dallas-Chicago coaxials. Old Ideals must give way to the newer, the better. The Family, as always, needed to be on the winning side. Survival was at stake. But there was a lack, a need. Stale. Thought had grown stale and unproductive, moribund, with nodes like Freddy in Birmingham, Yoakam in New York. Certainly they were loyal. Good Family people.

But no geniuses. No, no geniuses. No geniuses in the Family to draw upon, to use. And Thaddeus Grayson, unattached, doing nobody any good. Freddy, the fool, couldn’t even bring in this boy from his own neighborhood. I could feel the Family’s longing for Thaddeus, Its brooding need for bettering Itself, to beat back the Others, to control, to grow, to destroy all that was not It. I approved. If only Thaddeus weren’t dead, I would personally assist in his recruitment. I knew that I could do a damn sight better job than Freddy. The Family felt my pride, knew that it was directed properly, and sent me a wave of approval. I almost fainted with the joy of it. Looking down, I saw that I had come in my pants.

Still a lot to learn about this new way of living. But I would love every minute of the learning.

What the Andy Harco part of my new wholeness had to do: find the killer. Punish the killer, for the hit was made to keep Thaddeus out of the Family. Let the killer know that the Family always either got what it wanted or got revenge. And then I was

to die.

It didn’t really matter how I got rid of myself. As long as there was no Family involvement.

Of all these things, I approved.

And so, in the dirty warehouse room, I sat down to think, with the Family behind me. I examined all the Ideals at work within Birminghamfor it seemed intuitively clear to me that an Ideal had killed Thaddeus. The poem fragment was why, the logical bridge from association to association. How clear it all became now. Now that I had a real Mind.

God, if only we could have gotten Thaddeus for Us.

I reexamined the records, all of them, of Thaddeus’s comings and goings for the last month of his life. I laughed when I realized how completely the Family knew everything, all that people in this city did. All that was done anywhere in which the Family was interested. What a fool I was to think I could hide anything, ever, from an Ideal.

The girl, Trina’s, entrances and exits from his apartment. One time, she’d said. One time a day was more like it! Lying, silly, stupid girl.

In the midst of this examination, there was a flicker in the corner of the room. I reached to adjust something in my op-eds and realized that they were gone. I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. Still the flicker. I looked up from my reverie.

Granddaddy was standing there, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello, son.”

Granddaddy.

A shriek deeper and mightier than any cry of pain I’ve ever heard. A blast through my mind that I thought would kill me. A wave of information. No way to assimilate it, let it crash, let it pass.

And I understood, somehow, in a small part, just what Granddaddy was. And what that meant to the Ideals.

Granddaddy was spontaneous. Granddaddy had happened while the Ideals weren’t looking. Granddaddy was the integrated, organic heart of the city. He was Birmingham. More than Abby and her ilk could ever be. The city that hides behind the city, that lurks in the imagination of poets and the delusions of bums.

The city that wants nothing of people, that takes, nothing, that merely inhabits the power grids, the link nets, the sewer pipes. That strengthens the people like invisible integumen, holding them together in a way the Ideals never could. I looked at him again. A holo projection, using some surveillance and defense equipment in the warehouse, probably. But more than a mere image hanging in the air. So much more.

The Ideals had suspected for years, but there was no evidence, no proof. Only the fact that the plans for incorporating all individuals seemed to drag inexorably, that somehow there was always strife, when the goals of all the Minds seemed so clear.

Something was fouling things up.

And now They knew what it was. After all these years, he’d shown his face.

The Family was terrified. What if there were others? The Ideals were not prepared for organized resistance.

“You let go of that boy,” said Granddaddy.

The Family withdrew from me. No, oh god, no. Please stay, please, I beg

I stumbled to my feet, dazed.

“Well, son,” said Granddaddy. “I don’t know how long I can hold ‘em. Now’s your chance.”

So he knew that, too. The junk I’d had buried so deep inside me that even I couldn’t remember except in dreams. But now the time had come, and the knowledge rose to my consciousness like Queequeg’s coffin, waterproof, unsinkable. I grabbed hold, remembered. Andy Harco was a rider program, taken from my brain, fitted to deeper junk, a hidden soul. Andy Harco was a virus allowed to inhabit a stronger substratum. Andy Harco had rigged his own mind with a secret weapon against the Ideals.

“The men of iron ore unfluxed,” I said. “And the women with dark and carbon eyes.”

It was a line from one of Thaddeus’s poems; it was an activating code. A trigger. I felt the me which I’d implanted in my own brain two years ago coil out of slumber, spread out into my mind. Become my mind. The simple me at the base of all my existence. The killer me.

Its sole purpose was to cleanse my brain of all traces of an Ideal. Any Ideal.

Its only job was to wipe me clean.

My briefcase. I needed my briefcase. Frantically I looked around.

“It’s over there in the corner,” Granddaddy said, pointing with the cigarette. He smiled.

And there it was. The Family had thought that I might need it. Hell yes, I did! I picked it up and set it on my lap, flipped it open. I laid the Glock and stungun beside me, took the Portalab out as well. What was left was the froth. What was left was the static programming and the data that made up Andy Harco.

My op-eds were gone, but I no longer needed them to link up with the briefcase. Now I had an Ideal feedhorn on the back of my head. I felt the wart, hated it, knew it would always be there as a reminder. I took an old fashioned optical cable out of a compartment, clipped one end to the feedhorn. And plugged into the briefcase. I activated the froth. All the tell-tales burned green. I downloaded my short-terms into the briefcase, to complete the me that was already there.

Then I looked around for Granddaddy, to tell him thanks. To tell him goodbye. He was gone.

And with that, I wiped my mind out of existence.

And

slowly

returned.

Angry.

7

Because I had been a part of the Family, I now had new information. I knew that the Family didn’t kill Thaddeus. I knew where to find Freddy Pupillina. He was in the warehouse, going over the books with the foreman of the place. It was a nano warehouse, with barrels of hijacked bugs from all over the new South. I passed a couple of cranks shuffling inventory on the way, but they didn’t notice me.

Grinface and Big-boned Bertha were standing outside the door of the office Freddy was in. They were in some sort of discussion, with Grinface gesticulating wildly, pulling at his beard, and Bertha shaking her head.

I hid behind some barrels, took out the Glock. I was afraid they were wearing body armor, so I took time to aim, to control my breathing. Then I shot them both, quickly, in the head.

The noise alerted Freddy, and he turned out the lights in the office. Smarter than he looks. But I knewhow well I knewthat the Family had told him what to do.

The door of the office opened and the foreman came stumbling out.

“Don’t, please don’t,” he said, looking around wildly for me. “He’s got a gun on me. Please don’t”

“Come over here,” I said. I waved an arm, and the foreman stumbled toward me. I took the stungun from the briefcase. When he was close enough, I stood up and zapped him. As he fell, a shot rang out and hit a nearby barrel. I smelled acrid, activating nanos as the contents spilled out. These bugs were designed to alter something organic, if not precisely wood.

The floor began to seethe where the nanos touched it, to deform. Soon a section of the flooring was gone and in its place was a lump of a charred and gross thing writhing on the concrete subfloor. Then the nanos started to transform, more slowly, the concrete. Freddy had lucked into some potent stuff. Military shit, probably, bound for the Mid-East.

Another shot. It popped into the foreman’s back and blood spurted. Getting sloppy, Freddy.

“Well,” I said, and stood up. Freddy fired twice more, missed by a mile. I walked toward the office. He was either reloading or taking better aim. I flung open the door. He opened up on me. Two shots in the chest, but I was ready, and they didn’t knock the breath out of me. I quickly fell forward, rolled head over heels.

And came up with the stungun in Freddy’s chest. When the juice hit him, he slumped down onto me, his body’s own weight keeping him pressed into the gun. I kept the trigger depressed for a long time.

Freddy was a monstrously fat man. I finally put my years of weight training to good use, dragging him out to the nano barrels. I opened one of the barrels with a handtorch I found in the foreman’s pocket.

Then I sat down beside Freddy, in the midst of the dead, dangling the Glock absently from one hand. In my other hand, I held Thaddeus’s cigarette lighter. I flicked it on, closed the cover, flicked it on again. I tried not to imagine what I was going to do. Anything else.

I began to consider how I would end my Minden Sibley time-traveling detective story. I turned the possibilities over in my mind. None of them really suited me.

I haven’t told you, hoping, I suppose, that you would have read them, that you would know it already. But in case you didn’t know, the Minden Sibley mysteries usually turn on a humorous point. They are, in fact, satirical comedies of our times. At least that’s the idea. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I fuck up. But when things get really messy, when the plot has reached convolutions unknown even to brain surgeons and French master chefs, then I call upon the trusty Third Temporal Law to get me out of the bind. Minden, good soul that he is, finds himself invoking it at least once a story. It is a tacit law, never taught to any Timeway detective, but understood by all.

3. Break any rule, break every rule, even the First and Second Temporal Laws. Just don’t get caught.

Yes, I thought. That’s the only way to wrap it up when logic escapes you and you have a mess that you have to clean up, one way or another. It’s not logical, but it’s rational. It’s only human.

After a while, Freddy began to come around. I waited some more. He struggled to sit up. I put the Glock to his head.

“Don’t,” I said.

He lay still, his pig eyes flashing in his pulpy face.

“Andy, please”

“Shut up. I want to talk to the Family.”

He shut up. Then there was the blank moment of integration. “We’re here,” said the Family, through Freddy. “Hello, Andy.”

“You didn’t kill Thaddeus,” I said.

“No.”

“I know who did. This is no longer your problem.”

“Well,” said the Family. “Good.”

“I’m upset about being made a node.”

“We felt it necessary.”

“Nevertheless, I’m upset.”

Freddy screwed his face into an expression of bewilderment. It wasn’t much of a reach. “Do you want an

apology?”

“Wouldn’t mean anything.”

“That is true. Do you want Us to drop the charges against you for dereliction of duty?”

“You use people and kill them and don’t think anything of it,” I said. “Individuals mean shit to you.”

“Basically, yes,” said the Family. “We know it’s hard for you to comprehend, Andy, but basically, that’s what they are. Shit. Nothing. Individuals are a means, not an end.”

“So,” I said. “There’s really nothing more to say.”

I tipped the barrel over onto Freddy, and skipped back out of the way. The nanos did their work much faster than they had on the wood. Flesh was, obviously, the medium they were tailored to alter.

Freddy screamed horribly, and in that scream I believedI hopedthat I heard the cries of a hundred others, hurting in unison.

When I left the warehouse, all that was left of Freddy was a puddle of primordial goo.

8

I went home. Mom was all right. She was in some kind of meditation trance, and the patchouli had stunk up the place real good. But she came out of it when I showed up, and flung her arms around my neck. She called me “Meander,” just like she had when I was a kid. I couldn’t find it in my heart to correct her. Maybe that was my deep, true name, I thought. Amazing the crazy delusions you get when you’re relieved over a loved one’s safety.

Then she noticed the two holes in my chest, both clotted black with old blood now. She screamed, covered her mouth.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a cop. We’re used to getting shot.”

After that, we didn’t say anything for a long time, which was probably for the best.

Then I said, “I have a few things to clear up, Mom, and I’ll be back.”

“You can’t go,” she said. “Don’t leave again

Andy.” She was obviously regaining her senses.

“Everything’ll be all right. Everything’s okay now,” I said. “Nobody can touch me now.”

I took the beltway, top level, to downtown, then descended into the grid of the city. Through the decaying Birmingham Green, a leftover jungle, a hundred years old, full of bums, hurtful bugs, bad junk. Urban Renewal. The People Who Know getting it all bassackward as usual. About as effective as adding wine to vinegar.

Up 20th Street, through the nightwork of the Southside. Up Red Mountain, the Vulcan’s red torch looming up dead ahead. To Abby’s place. When no one answered my knock, I kicked in the door. Abby was standing in the living room, gazing out over the city.

“I was expecting you,” she said. “Even when they’re off traffic control, I still follow every car that moves in my city.”

“Your city?”

“Yes!” she said. She flung back her hair defiantly. It shone dully with neon reflections from the window. “My city.”

“Why did you kill Thaddeus, Abby?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Fuck that shit!”

“Very well, then.” She took a step toward me. “Politics. His sort of mind becomes a very important, strategic node when integrated into an Ideal. Freddy was going to get him, and with him, Freddy could have overturned City. We couldn’t allow that.”

“I’ve heard this before. From the Family.”

She sniffed, shrugged. “Well, that makes sense. It’s only reasonable.”

“No,” I said. “Not reasonable. Hobbes-logic. Billiard-ball logic. People are not solids and stripes. Life does not have to be nasty, brutish, and short without a goddamned king to tell us what to do, to shove us around. There’s more to life than actions and reactions!”

“Oh yeah? Well, what are you doing right now, Andy Harco?”

She drifted across the room toward me. Her brown eyes were intense and deep. She held her hands out toward me. I’d forgotten that she’d had artificial nails installed years ago, to break her nail-biting habit. They shone whitely, moon-colored.

“Everything you’ve done for the last eight years has been a reaction.” Her voice was low and soothing. For years, I’d dreamed of it, and awakened with a feeling of utter loss when I found that she was not really beside me.

That feeling washed over me now, stronger than ever before. I raised the Glock. “Justice,” I said, “is not reaction.”

She stopped, six feet from me, facing me, fearless.

“You going to take me in, Lieutenant?”

I no longer had my op-eds, but I was pretty sure what the Option 4 junk would tell me. If I pulled the trigger, I could never be a cop again.

“This is my town, Lieutenant. My town. Do you think I’ll get punished? Do you think I’ll spend more than a night in jail? Andy, my brain is part of what runs the jail.”

“I could take you with me. I could drive us to Atlanta.”

“I’ll call every cop in the metro area to stop you,” she replied. “Illegal extradition. You know that.”

I raised the Glock, took aim at her forehead. “It would be an accident,” I said. “Or you resisted.”

“City is recording every second of this conversation.”

“I just don’t give a shit,” I said. “I think this is what you are failing to comprehend.”

“Don’t you, Andy? Then blow me away.” She lowered her arms. The child’s sad face, those incredible lips. The silver on her arm. The fanatic, zombie glow in her eyes.

I lowered the Glock. “It was jealousy, wasn’t it?” I said. “Politics didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Abby let out a long sigh, then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He loved Birmingham more than you. And he was a better lover, too.”

“Don’t be absurd. Jealousy is for, well, nobodies. For individuals.”

“The City chose him, Abby. I know it for a fact.”

“No,” she said. It was almost a whimper.

“You did it yourself, didn’t you?”

She smiled, sadly. “Andy, when are you going to understand, really comprehend?”

“There is no you.”

“The I you used to know is changed and better.”

“Goodbye, Abby.” I turned to leave. My eyes were misty, though I felt numb inside.

“Just a minute, Andy,” she said. I felt the cool touch of her hand on my shoulder, my neck. So soft, so small her hands had been. I could almost cup them within mine. God, I had loved her so completely. Then a prickle, a sting.

Oh, shit.

The breaking of glass, a stiffled scream. I spun around with the Glock at ready.

Trina stood over Abby, a broken bottle of bourbon in her hand. Abby had slumped to the floor, one side of her face webbed with glass cuts. I lowered the Glock once again, took a long breath. A blast spider crawled out of Abby’s relaxed palm, and began working its way up her arm. Over the silver bracelet and the lily white skin. Toward her shoulder, toward the porcelain curve of her neck where her spinal cord lay, a pinprick away. There was no put-back routine that could restore a mind after the kiss of a blast spider. Even the mind of a node.

“God, Andy, she was trying to do something to you!” Trina said, unable to take her eyes off her own handiwork. Her op-eds sat skewed on her nose.

“You did the right thing, kid,” I said. “The right thing.”

I reached over and worked the broken bottle from Trina’s hand. She had a damned good grip on the thing.

“I don’t think I can stay here anymore,” Trina said. “She killed Thaddeus.”

Then she started crying, really crying, like she hadn’t before. I pulled her toward me, but I didn’t want to hug her, on account of the dried blood from my chest wounds. I stroked her face with the hand that didn’t hold a gun. I righted her op-eds.

“Come on, kid,” I said. “Let’s blow this town.”

“Yeah,” she said, tentatively, then, “Yeah.”

The blast spider was past Abby’s elbow now, working its way over her armlet. I could almost hear the little crank’s tiny feet clinking against the metal. It was nearly to her shoulder

We stepped into the sultry night, Trina and I. I opened the passenger side of the Saj and helped her inside. She sat there gazing up at me, trembling slightly. I leaned down and kissed her, lightly, but on the lips. Then I reached into my pocket and took out Thaddeus’s lighter.

“He would have wanted you to have this,” I said, and folded her brown palm around it.

As I closed the Saj’s door, I glanced up into the sky overhead.

The Vulcan was leering down on me, as big and bright as the labor of a hundred thousand iron workers, a hundred thousand watts of city power, could make him. His red torch mocked me as surely as his idiotic, all-knowing god smile.

I could shoot the fucker out.

I could. I leaned against the Saj and took aim. But without my op-eds, I would never hit a target that far away.

I pretended to. I pretended to pull the trigger, and in my mind’s eye, I hit that damn torch. I hit it dead-on. But instead of blowing the death light out, in my mind’s eye, the bullet changed the flame from glaring red to vivid, living green.

MNQ/2009.08.24

22,130 words

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