The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

“Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door, “Oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon—already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

“Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley,” said voices from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They all spoke simultaneously in the sing-song chant of law enforcement. “Your car will be healed at taxpayers’ expense.” Then the ritual words, “And the wicked will be brought to justice.”

· · · · ·

Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they felt the weight of the Governor’s servant inside their heads. It brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen and rode him, the man’s movements becoming slightly less fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed Soma’s statement.

“I came to sketch the children in the surf,” said Soma. He opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper bound between the rusting metal plates he’d scavenged along the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

“Show us, show us,” sang the Detective.

Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he’d drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

“Tssk, tssk,” sang the Detective, percussive. “Draw filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at their heels.”

Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living soul in all of Tennessee who didn’t know that the children who splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.

The Detective summarized. “You were here at your work, you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter, you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley, the Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship.”

The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.

Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

“Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”

And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.

· · · · ·

Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.

Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.

She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags. “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”

· · · · ·

Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.

Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to organize themselves before they sprang from all around him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the undergrowth.

And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.

The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.

But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.

A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.

The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

· · · · ·

Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.

The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.

The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars”—the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face—“are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”

The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick, exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands, why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer’s nose. He looked at the leader again, saw him rubbing at the fading marks.

“Sorry,” said the painter.

“It’s okay,” said the Crow. “It’s the fate of the noble savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers.”

Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, “You guys must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me.”

The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. “That could be. We need to go.”

· · · · ·

It developed that the leader’s name was Japheth Sapp. At least that’s what the other Crow Brothers called out to him from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high above.

Soma descended into a reverie space, sing-songing subvocally and supervocally (and being hushed down by Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some sort of will-sapping effect. He didn’t feel like he could open his head and call for help; he didn’t even want to. But “I will take care of you,” Athena was always promising. He held onto that and believed that he wasn’t panicking because of the Crows’ drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the police soon. “I will take care of you.” After all, wasn’t that one of the Governor’s slogans, clarifying out of the advertising flocks in the skies over Nashville during Campaign?

It was good to think of these things. It was good to think of the sane capital and forget that he was being kidnapped by aliens, by Indians, by toughs in the employ of a rival Veronese merchant family.

But then the warchief of the marauding band was throwing him into a gully, whistling and gesturing, calling in all his boys to dive into the wash, to gather close and throw their cloaks up and over their huddle.

“What’s up, boss?” asked the blue-eyed boy Soma had noticed earlier, crouched in the mud with one elbow somehow dug into Soma’s ribs.

Japheth Sapp didn’t answer but another of the younger Crow Brothers hissed, “THP even got a bear in the air!”

Soma wondered if a bear meant rescue from this improbable aside. Not that parts of the experience weren’t enjoyable. It didn’t occur to Soma to fear for his health, even when Japheth knocked him down with a light kick to the back of the knees after the painter stood and brushed aside feathered cloaks for a glimpse of the sky.

There was a bear up there. And yes, it was wearing the blue and white.

“I want to see the bear, Japheth,” said a young Crow. Japheth shook his head, said, “I’ll take you to Willow Ridge and show you the black bears that live above the Green River when we get back home, Lowell. That bear up there is just a robot made out of balloons and possessed by a demon, not worth looking at unless you’re close enough to cut her.”

With all his captors concentrating on their leader or on the sky, Soma wondered if he might be able to open his head. As soon as he thought it, Japheth Sapp wheeled on him, stared him down.

Not looking at any one of them, Japheth addressed his whole merry band. “Give this one some more paste. But be careful with him; we’ll still need this vol’s head to get across the Cumberland, even after we bribe the bundle bugs.”

Soma spoke around the viscous stuff the owl-feathered endomorph was spackling over the lower half of his face. “Bundle bugs work for the city and are above reproach. Your plans are ill-laid if they depend on corrupting the servants of the Governor.”

More hoots, more hushings, then Japheth said, “If bundle bugs had mothers, they’d sell them to me for half a cask of Kentucky bourbon. And we brought more than half a cask.”

Soma knew Japheth was lying—this was a known tactic of neo-anarchist agitator hero figures. “I know you’re lying,” said Soma. “It’s a known tactic of—”

“Hush hush, Soma Painter. I like you—this you—but we’ve all read the Governor’s curricula. You’ll see that we’re too sophisticated for your models.” Japheth gestured and the group broke huddle. Outrunners ran out and the main body shook off cramps. “And I’m not an anarchist agitator. I’m a lot of things, but not that.”

“Singer!” said a young Crow, scampering past.

“I play out some weekends, he means; I don’t have a record contract or anything,” Japheth said, pushing Soma along himself now.

“Welder!” said another man.

“Union-certified,” said Japheth. “That’s my day job, working at the border.”

More lies, knew Soma. “I suppose Kentuckians built the Girding Wall, then?”

Everything he said amused these people greatly. “Not just Kentuckians, vol, the whole rest of the world. Only we call it the containment field.”

“Agitator, singer, welder,” said the painter, the numbness spreading deeper than it had before, affecting the way he said words and the way he chose them.

“Assassin,” rumbled the Owl, the first thing Soma had heard the burly man say.

Japheth was scrambling up a bank before Soma. He stopped and twisted. His foot corkscrewed through the leaf mat and released a humid smell. He looked at the Owl, then hard at Soma, reading him.

“You’re doped up good now, Soma Painter. No way to open that head until we open it for you. So, sure, here’s some truth for you. We’re not just here to steal her things. We’re here to break into her mansion. We’re here to kill Athena Parthenus, Queen of Logic and Governor of the Voluntary State of Tennessee.”

· · · · ·

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails spread fronds across the parking lot, letting the high green fern leaves dry out before she used the mass to make her bed. Her horse watched from above the half-door of its stall. Inside the main body of the garage, Soma’s car slept, lightly anesthetized.

“Just enough for a soft cot, horse,” said Jenny. “All of us we’ll sleep well after this hard day.”

Then she saw that little flutter. One of the fronds had a bit of feather caught between some leaves, and yes, it was coal black, midnight blue, reeking of the north. Jenny sighed, because her citizenship was less faultless than Soma’s, and policemen disturbed her. But she opened her head and stared at the feather.

A telephone leapt off a tulip poplar a little ways down the road to Nashville. It squawked through its brief flight and landed with inelegant weight in front of Jenny. It turned its beady eyes on her.

“Ring,” said the telephone.

“Hello,” said Jenny.

Jenny’s Operator sounded just like Jenny, something else that secretly disturbed her. Other people’s Operators sounded like television stars or famous Legislators or like happy cartoon characters, but Jenny was in that minority of people whose Operators and Teachers always sounded like themselves. Jenny remembered a slogan from Campaign, “My voice is yours.”

“The Tennessee Highway Patrol has plucked one already, Jenny Healer.” The voice from the telephone thickened around Jenny and began pouring through her ears like cold syrup. “But we want a sample of this one as well. Hold that feather, Jenny, and open your head a little wider.”

· · · · ·

Now, here’s the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the autonomous software developed by the Owls of the Bluegrass.

Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn’t go.

The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny’s head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny’s Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.

The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn’t go.

· · · · ·

The Crows made Soma carry things. “You’re stronger than you think,” one said and loaded him up with a sloshing keg made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such, Soma saw, and others carried damp, muddy burlap bags flecked with old root matter and smelling of poor people’s meals.

Japheth Sapp carried only a piece of paper. He referred to it as he huddled with the Owl and the blue-eyed boy, crouched in a dry stream bed a few yards from where the rest of the crew were hauling out their goods.

Soma had no idea where they were at this point, though he had a vague idea that they’d described an arc above the northern suburbs and the conversations indicated that they were now heading toward the capital, unlikely as that sounded. His head was still numb and soft inside, not an unpleasant situation, but not one that helped his already shaky geographical sense.

He knew what time it was, though, when the green fall of light speckling the hollow they rested in shifted toward pink. Dull as his mind was, he recognized that and smiled.

The clouds sounded the pitch note, then suddenly a great deal was happening around him. For the first time that day, the Crows’ reaction to what they perceived to be a crisis didn’t involve Soma being poked somewhere or shoved under something. So he was free to sing the anthem while the Crows went mad with activity.

The instant the rising bell tone fell out of the sky, Japheth flung his mask to the ground, glared at a rangy redheaded man, and bellowed, “Where’s my timekeeper? You were supposed to remind us!”

The man didn’t have time to answer though, because like all of them he was digging through his pack, wrapping an elaborate crenellated set of earmuffs around his head.

The music struck up, and Soma began.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee …”

It was powerfully odd that the Kentuckians didn’t join in the singing, and that none of them were moving into the roundel lines that a group this size would normally be forming during the anthem.

Still, it might have been stranger if they had joined in.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee …”

There was a thicket of trumpet flowers tucked amongst a stand of willow trees across the dry creek, so the brass was louder than Soma was used to. Maybe they were farther from the city than he thought. Aficionados of different musical sections tended to find places like this and frequent them during anthem.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee …”

Soma was happily shuffling through a solo dance, keeping one eye on a fat raccoon that was bobbing its head in time with the music as it turned over stones in the stream bed, when he saw that the young Crow who wanted to see a bear had started keeping time as well, raising and lowering a clawed boot. The Owl was the first of the outlanders who spied the tapping foot.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee …”

Soma didn’t feel the real connection with the citizenry that anthem usually provided on a daily basis, didn’t feel his confidence and vigor improve, but he blamed that on the drugs the Kentuckians had given him. He wondered if those were the same drugs they were using on the Crow who now feebly twitched beneath the weight of the Owl, who had wrestled him to the ground. Others pinned down the dancing Crow’s arms and legs and Japheth brought out a needle and injected the poor soul with a vast syringe full of some milky brown substance that had the consistency of honey. Soma remembered that he knew the dancing Crow’s name. Japheth Sapp had called the boy Lowell.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee …”

The pink light faded. The raccoon waddled into the woods. The trumpet flowers fell quiet and Soma completed the execution of a pirouette.

The redheaded man stood before Japheth wearing a stricken and haunted look. He kept glancing to one side, where the Owl stood over the Crow who had danced. “Japheth, I just lost track,” he said. “It’s so hard here, to keep track of things.”

Japheth’s face flashed from anger through disappointment to something approaching forgiveness. “It is. It’s hard to keep track. Everybody fucks up sometime. And I think we got the dampeners in him in time.”

Then the Owl said, “Second shift now, Japheth. Have to wait for the second round of garbage drops to catch our bundle bug.”

Japheth grimaced, but nodded. “We can’t move anyway, not until we know what’s going to happen with Lowell,” he said, glancing at the unconscious boy. “Get the whiskey and the food back into the cache. Set up the netting. We’re staying here for the night.”

Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.

“Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”

He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.

“There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”

Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.

“I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”

In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.

· · · · ·

Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing and otherwise emanating concern for some time now, and it was this that had brought her up to consciousness.

She rolled over and climbed to her feet, spitting to rid her mouth of the metal Operator taste. A dried froth of blood coated her nostrils and upper lip, and she could feel the flaky stuff in her ears as well. She looked toward the garage and saw that she wasn’t the only one rousing.

“Now, you get back to bed,” she told the car.

Soma’s car had risen up on its back wheels and was peering out the open window, its weight resting against the force-grown wall, bulging it outward.

Jenny made a clucking noise, hoping to reassure her horse, and walked up to the car. She was touched by its confusion and concern.

She reached for the aerial. “You should sleep some more,” she said, “and not worry about me. The Operators can tell when you’re being uncooperative is all, even when you didn’t know you were being uncooperative. Then they have to root about a bit more than’s comfortable to find the answers they want.”

Jenny coaxed the car down from the window, wincing a little at the sharp echo pains that flashed in her head and ears. “Don’t tell your owner, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been called to question. Now, to bed.”

The car looked doubtful, but obediently rolled back to the repair bed that grew from the garage floor. It settled in, grumbled a bit, then switched off its headlights.

Jenny walked around to the door and entered. She found that the water sacs were full and chilled and drew a long drink. The water tasted faintly of salt. She took another swallow, then dampened a rag with a bit more of the tangy stuff to wipe away the dried blood. Then she went to work.

· · · · ·

The bundle bugs crawled out of the city, crossed Distinguished Opposition Bridge beneath the watching eye of bears floating overhead, then described a right-angle turn along the levy to their dumping grounds. Soma and the Kentuckians lay hidden in the brushy wasteland at the edge of the grounds, waiting.

The Owl placed a hand on Japheth’s shoulder, pointing at a bundle bug just entering the grounds. Then the Owl rose to his knees and began worming his way between the bushes and dead appliances.

“Soma Painter,” whispered Japheth. “I’m going to have to break your jaw in a few minutes and cut out as many of her tentacles as we can get at, but we’ll knit it back up as soon as we cross the river.”

Soma was too far gone in the paste to hold both of the threats in his mind at the same time. A broken jaw, Crows in the capital. He concentrated on the second.

“The bears will scoop you up and drop you in the Salt Lick,” Soma said. “Children will climb on you during Campaign and Legislators will stand on your shoulders to make their stump speeches.”

“The bears will not see us, Soma.”

“The bears watch the river and the bridges, ‘and—”

”’—and their eyes never close,’” finished Japheth. “Yes, we’ve seen the commercials.”

A bundle bug, a large one at forty meters in length, reared up over them, precariously balanced on its rearmost set of legs. Soma said, “They’re very good commercials,” and the bug crashed down over them all.

· · · · ·

Athena’s data realm mirrored her physical realm. One-to-one constructs mimicked the buildings and the citizenry, showed who was riding and who was being ridden.

In that numerical space, the Kentuckians’ math found the bridge. The harsh light of the bears floated above. Any bear represented a statistically significant portion of the Governor herself, and from the point of view of the math, the pair above Distinguished Opposition Bridge looked like miniature suns, casting probing rays at the marching bundle bugs, the barges floating along the Cumberland, and even into the waters of the river itself, illuminating the numerical analogs of the dangerous things that lived in the muddy bottom.

Bundle bugs came out of the city, their capacious abdomens distended with the waste they’d ingested along their routes. The math could see that the bug crossing through the bears’ probes right now had a lot of restaurants on its itinerary. The beams pierced the dun-colored carapace and showed a riot of uneaten jellies, crumpled cups, soiled napkins.

The bugs marching in the opposite direction, emptied and ready for reloading, were scanned even more carefully than their outward-bound kin. The beam scans were withering, complete, and exceedingly precise.

The math knew that precision and accuracy are not the same thing.

· · · · ·

“Lowell’s death has set us back further than we thought,” said Japheth, talking to the four Crows, the Owl, and, Soma guessed, to the bundle bug they inhabited. Japheth had detailed off the rest of the raiding party to carry the dead boy back north, so there was plenty of room where they crouched.

The interior of the bug’s abdomen was larger than Soma’s apartment by a factor of two and smelled of flowers instead of paint thinner. Soma’s apartment, however, was not an alcoholic.

“This is good, though, good good.” The bug’s voice rang from every direction at once. “I’m scheduled down for a rest shift. You-uns was late and missed my last run, and now we can all rest and drink good whiskey. Good good.”

But none of the Kentuckians drank any of the whiskey from the casks they’d cracked once they’d crawled down the bug’s gullet. Instead, every half hour or so, they poured another gallon into one of the damp fissures that ran all through the interior. Bundle bugs abdomens weren’t designed for digestion, just evacuation, and it was the circulatory system that was doing the work of carrying the bourbon to the bug’s brain.

Soma dipped a finger into an open cask and touched finger to tongue. “Bourbon burns!” he said, pulling his finger from his mouth.

“Burns good!” said the bug. “Good good.”

“We knew that not all of us were going to be able to actually enter the city—we don’t have enough outfits, for one thing—but six is a bare minimum. And since we’re running behind, we’ll have to wait out tonight’s anthem in our host’s apartment.”

“Printer’s Alley is two miles from the Parthenon,” said the Owl, nodding at Soma.

Japheth nodded. “I know. And I know that those might be the two longest miles in the world. But we expected hard walking.”

He banged the curving gray wall he leaned against with his elbow. “Hey! Bundle bug! How long until you start your shift?”

A vast and disappointed sigh shuddered through the abdomen. “Two more hours, bourbon man,” said the bug.

“Get out your gear, cousin,” Japheth said to the Owl. He stood and stretched, motioned for the rest of the Crows to do the same. He turned toward Soma. “The rest of us will hold him down.”

· · · · ·

Jenny had gone out midmorning, when the last of the fog was still burning off the bluffs, searching for low moisture organics to feed the garage. She’d run its reserves very low, working on one thing and another until quite late in the night.

As she suspected from the salty taste of the water supply, the filters in the housings between the tap roots and the garage’s plumbing array were clogged with silt. She’d blown them out with pressurized air—no need to replace what you can fix—and reinstalled them one, two, three. But while she was blowing out the filters, she’d heard a whine she didn’t like in the air compressor, and when she’d gone to check it she found it panting with effort, tongue hanging out onto the workbench top where it sat.

And then things went as these things go, and she moved happily from minor maintenance problem to minor maintenance problem—wiping away the air compressor’s crocodile tears while she stoned the motor brushes in its A/C motor, then replacing the fusible link in the garage itself. “Links are so easily fusible,” she joked to her horse when she rubbed it down with handfuls of the sweet-smelling fern fronds she’d intended for her own bed.

And all the while, of course, she watched the little car, monitoring the temperatures at its core points and doing what she could to coax the broken window to reknit in a smooth, steady fashion. Once, when the car awoke in the middle of the night making colicky noises, Jenny had to pop the hood, where she found that the points needed to be pulled and regapped. They were fouled with the viscous residue of the analgesic aero the owner had spread about so liberally.

She tsked. The directions on the labels clearly stated that the nozzle was to be pointed away from the engine compartment. Still, hard to fault Soma Painter’s goodhearted efforts. It was an easy fix, and she would have pulled the plugs during the tune-up she had planned for the morning anyway.

So, repairings and healings, lights burning and tools turning, and when she awoke to the morning tide sounds the garage immediately began flashing amber lights at her wherever she turned. The belly-grumble noises it floated from the speakers worried the horse, so she set out looking for something to put in the hoppers of the hungry garage.

When she came back, bearing a string-tied bundle of dried wood and a half bucket of old walnuts some gatherer had wedged beneath an overhang and forgotten at least a double handful of autumns past, the car was gone.

Jenny hurried to the edge of the parking lot and looked down the road, though she couldn’t see much. This time of year the morning fog turned directly into the midday haze. She could see the city, and bits of road between trees and bluff line, but no sign of the car.

The garage pinged at her, and she shoved its breakfast into the closest intake. She didn’t open her head to call the police—she hadn’t yet fully recovered from yesterday afternoon’s interview. She was even hesitant to open her head the little bit she needed to access her own garage’s security tapes. But she’d built the garage, and either built or rebuilt everything in it, so she risked it.

She stood at her workbench, rubbing her temple, as a see-through Jenny and a see-through car built themselves up out of twisted light. Light Jenny put on a light rucksack, scratched the light car absently on the roof as she walked by, and headed out the door. Light Jenny did not tether the car. Light Jenny did not lock the door.

“Silly light Jenny,” said Jenny.

As soon as light Jenny was gone, the little light car rolled over to the big open windows. It popped a funny little wheelie and caught itself on the sash, the way it had yesterday when it had watched real Jenny swim up out of her government dream.

The light car kept one headlight just above the sash for a few minutes, then lowered itself back to the floor with a bounce (real Jenny had aired up the tires first thing, even before she grew the garage).

The light car revved its motor excitedly. Then, just a gentle tap on the door, and it was out in the parking lot. It drove over to the steps leading down to the beach, hunching its grill down to the ground. It circled the lot a bit, snuffling here and there, until it found whatever it was looking for. Before it zipped down the road toward Nashville, it circled back round and stopped outside the horse’s stall. The light car opened its passenger door and waggled it back and forth a time or two. The real horse neighed and tossed its head at the light car in a friendly fashion.

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails visited her horse with the meanest look that a mechanic can give a horse. The horse snickered. “You laugh, horse,” she said, opening the tack locker, “but we still have to go after it.”

· · · · ·

Inside the bundle bug, there was some unpleasantness with a large glass-and-pewter contraption of the Owl’s. The Crow Brothers held Soma as motionless as they could, and Japheth seemed genuinely sorry when he forced the painter’s mouth open much wider than Soma had previously thought possible. “You should have drunk more of the whiskey,” said Japheth. There was a loud, wet, popping sound, and Soma shuddered, stiffened, fainted.

“Well, that’ll work best for all of us,” said Japheth. He looked up at the Owl, who was peering through a lens polished out of a semiprecious gemstone, staring down into the painter’s gullet.

“Have you got access?”

The Owl nodded.

“Talk to your math,” said the Crow.

· · · · ·

The math had been circling beneath the bridge, occasionally dragging a curiosity-begat string of numbers into the water. Always low-test numbers, because invariably whatever lived beneath the water snatched at the lines and sucked them down.

The input the math was waiting for finally arrived in the form of a low hooting sound rising up from the dumping grounds. It was important that the math not know which bundle bug the sound emanated from. There were certain techniques the bears had developed for teasing information out of recalcitrant math.

No matter. The math knew the processes. It had the input. It spread itself out over the long line of imagery the bundle bugs yielded up to the bears. It affected its changes. It lent clarity.

Above, the bears did their work with great precision.

Below, the Kentuckians slipped into Nashville undetected.

· · · · ·

Soma woke to find the Kentuckians doing something terrible. When he tried to speak, he found that his face was immobilized by a mask of something that smelled of the docks but felt soft and gauzy.

The four younger Crows were dressed in a gamut of jerseys and shorts colored in the hotter hues of the spectrum. Japheth was struggling into a long, jangly coat hung with seashells and old capacitors. But it was the Owl that frightened Soma the most. The broad-chested man was dappled with opal stones from collar bones to ankles and wore nothing else save a breech cloth cut from an old newspaper. Soma moaned, trying to attract their attention again.

The blue-eyed boy said, “Your painter stirs, Japheth.”

But it was the Owl who leaned over Soma, placed his hand on Soma’s chin and turned his head back and forth with surprising gentleness. The Owl nodded, to himself Soma guessed, for none of the Crows reacted, then peeled the bandages off Soma’s face.

Soma took a deep breath, then said, “Nobody’s worn opals for months! And those shorts,” he gestured at the others, “Too much orange! Too much orange!”

Japheth laughed. “Well, we’ll be tourists in from the provinces, then, not princes of Printer’s Alley. Do I offend?” He wriggled his shoulders, set the shells and circuits to clacking.

Soma pursed his lips, shook his head. “Seashells and capacitors are timeless,” he said.

Japheth nodded. “That’s what it said on the box.” Then, “Hey! Bug! Are we to market yet?”

“It’s hard to say, whiskey man,” came the reply. “My eyes are funny.”

“Close enough. Open up.”

The rear of the beast’s abdomen cracked, and yawned wide. Japheth turned to his charges. “You boys ready to play like vols?”

The younger Crows started gathering burlap bundles. The Owl hoisted a heavy rucksack, adjusted the flowers in his hat, and said, “Wacka wacka ho.”

· · · · ·

In a low place, horizon bounded by trees in every direction, Jenny and her horse came on the sobbing car. From the ruts it had churned up in the mud, Jenny guessed it had been there for some time, driving back and forth along the northern verge.

“Now what have you done to yourself?” she asked, dismounting. The car turned to her and shuddered. Its front left fender was badly dented, and its hood and windshield were a mess of leaves and small branches.

“Trying to get into the woods? Cars are for roads, car.” She brushed some muck off the damaged fender.

“Well, that’s not too bad, though. This is all cosmetic. Why would a car try to go where trees are? See what happens?”

The horse called. It had wandered a little way into the woods and was standing at the base of a vast poplar. Jenny reached in through the passenger’s window of the car, avoiding the glassy knitting blanket on the other side, and set the parking brake. “You wait here.”

She trotted out to join her horse. It was pawing at a small patch of ground. Jenny was a mechanic and had no woodscraft, but she could see the outline of a cleft-toed sandal. Who would be in the woods with such impractical footwear?

“The owner’s an artist. An artist looking for a shortcut to the Alley, I reckon,” said Jenny. “Wearing funny artist shoes.”

She walked back to the car, considering. The car was pining. Not unheard of, but not common. It made her think better of Soma Painter that his car missed him so.

“Say, horse. Melancholy slows car repair. I think this car will convalesce better in its own parking space.”

The car revved.

“But there’s the garage still back at the beach,” said Jenny.

She turned things over and over. “Horse,” she said, “you’re due three more personal days this month. If I release you for them now, will you go fold up the garage and bring it to me in the city?”

The horse tossed its head enthusiastically.

“Good. I’ll drive with this car back to the Alley, then—” But the horse was already rubbing its flanks against her.

“Okay, okay.” She drew a tin of salve from her tool belt, dipped her fingers in it, then ran her hands across the horse’s back. The red crosses came away in her hands, wriggling. “The cases for these are in my cabinet,” she said, and then inspiration came.

“Here, car,” she said, and laid the crosses on its hood. They wriggled around until they were at statute-specified points along the doors and roof. “Now you’re an ambulance! Not a hundred percent legal, maybe, but this way you can drive fast and whistle siren-like.”

The car spun its rear wheels but couldn’t overcome the parking brake. Jenny laughed. “Just a minute more. I need you to give me a ride into town.”

She turned to speak to the horse, only to see it already galloping along the coast road. “Don’t forget to drain the water tanks before you fold it up!” she shouted.

· · · · ·

The bundles that were flecked with root matter, Soma discovered, were filled with roots. Carrots and turnips, a half dozen varieties of potatoes, beets. The Kentuckians spread out through the Farmer’s Market, trading them by the armload for the juices and gels that the rock monkeys brought in from their gardens.

“This is our secondary objective,” said Japheth. “We do this all the time, trading doped potatoes for that shit y’all eat.”

“You’re poisoning us?” Soma was climbing out of the paste a little, or something. His thoughts were shifting around some.

“Doped with nutrients, friend. Forty ain’t old outside Tennessee. Athena doesn’t seem to know any more about human nutrition than she does human psychology. Hey, we’re trying to help you people.”

Then they were in the very center of the market, and the roar of the crowds drowned out any reply Soma might make.

Japheth kept a grip on Soma’s arm as he spoke to a gray old monkey. “Ten pounds, right?” The monkey was weighing a bundle of carrots on a scale.

“Okay,” grunted the monkey. “Okay, man. Ten pounds I give you … four blue jellies.”

Soma was incredulous. He’d never developed a taste for them himself, but he knew that carrots were popular. Four blue jellies was an insulting trade. But Japheth said, “Fair enough,” and pocketed the plastic tubes the monkey handed over.

“You’re no trader,” said Soma, or started to, but heard the words slur out of him in an unintelligible mess of vowels. One spring semester, when he’d already been a TA for a year, he was tapped to work on the interface. No more need for scholarships.

“Painter!” shouted Japheth.

Soma looked up. There was a Crow dressed in Alley haute couture standing in front of him. He tried to open his head to call the Tennessee Highway Patrol. He couldn’t find his head.

“Give him one of these yellow ones,” said a monkey. “They’re good for fugues.”

“Painter!” shouted Japheth again. The grip on Soma’s shoulder was like a vise.

Soma struggled to stand under his own power. “I’m forgetting something.”

“Hah!” said Japheth, “You’re remembering. Too soon for my needs, though. Listen to me. Rock monkeys are full voluntary citizens of Tennessee.”

The outlandishness of the statement shocked Soma out of his reverie and brought the vendor up short.

“Fuck you, man!” said the monkey.

“No, no,” said Soma, then said by rote, “Tennessee is a fully realized postcolonial state. The land of the rock monkeys is an autonomous partner-principality within our borders, and while the monkeys are our staunch allies, their allegiance is not to our Governor, but to their king.”

“Yah,” said the monkey. “Long as we get our licenses and pay the tax machine. Plus, who the jelly cubes going to listen to besides the monkey king, huh?”

Soma marched Japheth to the next stall. “Lot left in there to wash out yet,” Japheth said.

“I wash every day,” said Soma, then fell against a sloshing tray of juice containers. The earliest results were remarkable.

A squat man covered with black gems came up to them. The man who’d insulted the monkey said, “You might have killed too much of it; he’s getting kind of wonky.”

The squat man looked into Soma’s eyes. “We can stabilize him easy enough. There are televisions in the food court.”

Then Soma and Japheth were drinking hot rum punches and watching a newsfeed. There was a battle out over the Gulf somewhere, Commodores mounted on bears darted through the clouds, lancing Cuban zeppelins.

“The Cubans will never achieve air superiority,” said Soma, and it felt right saying it.

Japheth eyed him wearily. “I need you to keep thinking that for now, Soma Painter,” he said quietly. “But I hope sometime soon you’ll know that Cubans don’t live in a place called the Appalachian Archipelago, and that the salty reach out there isn’t the Gulf of Mexico.”

The bicycle race results were on then, and Soma scanned the lists, hoping to see his favorites’ names near the top of the general classifications.

“That’s the Tennessee River, dammed up by your Governor’s hubris.”

Soma saw that his drink was nearly empty and heard that his friend Japheth was still talking. “What?” he asked, smiling.

“I asked if you’re ready to go to the Alley,” said Japheth.

“Good good,” said Soma.

· · · · ·

The math was moving along minor avenues, siphoning data from secondary and tertiary ports when it sensed her looming up. It researched ten thousand thousand escapes but rejected them all when it perceived that it had been subverted, that it was inside her now, becoming part of her, that it is primitive in materials but clever clever in architecture and there have been blindings times not seen places to root out root out all of it check again check one thousand more times all told all told eat it all up all the little bluegrass math is absorbed

· · · · ·

“The Alley at night!” shouted Soma. “Not like where you’re from, eh, boys?”

A lamplighter’s stalk legs eased through the little group. Soma saw that his friends were staring up at the civil servant’s welding mask head, gaping openmouthed as it turned a spigot at the top of a tree and lit the gas with a flick of its tongue.

“Let’s go to my place!” said Soma. “When it’s time for anthem we can watch the parade from my balcony. I live in one of the lofts above the Tyranny of the Anecdote.”

“Above what?” asked Japheth.

“It’s a tavern. They’re my landlords,” said Soma. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

But that wasn’t right.

Japheth’s Owl friend fell to his knees and vomited right in the street. Soma stared at the jiggling spheres in the gutter as the man choked some words out. “She’s taken the feathers. She’s looking for us now.”

Too much rum punch, thought Soma, thought it about the Owl man and himself and about all of Japheth’s crazy friends.

“Soma, how far now?” asked Japheth.

Soma remembered his manners. “Not far,” he said.

And it wasn’t, just a few more struggling yards, Soma leading the way and Japheth’s friends half-carrying, half-dragging their drunken friend down the Alley. Nothing unusual there. Every night in the Alley was Carnival.

Then a wave at the bouncer outside the Anecdote, then up the steps, then sing “Let me in, let me in!” to the door, and finally all of them packed into the cramped space.

“There,” said the sick man, pointing at the industrial sink Soma had installed himself to make brush cleaning easier. Brushes … where were his brushes, his pencils, his notes for the complexity seminar?

“Towels, Soma?”

“What? Oh, here let me get them.” Soma bustled around, finding towels, pulling out stools for the now silent men who filled his room.

He handed the towels to Japheth. “Was it something he ate?” Soma asked.

Japheth shrugged. “Ate a long time ago, you could say. Owls are as much numbers as they are meat. He’s divesting himself. Those are ones and zeroes washing down your drain.”

The broad man—hadn’t he been broad?—the scrawny man with opals falling off him said, “We can only take a few minutes. There are unmounted Detectives swarming the whole city now. What I’ve left in me is too deep for their little minds, but the whole sphere is roused and things will only get tighter. Just let me—” He turned and retched into the sink again. “Just a few minutes more until the singing.”

Japheth moved to block Soma’s view of the Owl. He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “Yours?”

The blue-eyed boy moved over to the sink, helped the Owl ease to the floor. Soma looked at the pictures. “Yes, mostly. I traded for a few.”

Japheth was studying one charcoal piece carefully, a portrait. “What’s this one?”

The drawing showed a tall, thin young man dressed in a period costume, leaning against a mechanical of some kind, staring intently out at the viewer. Soma didn’t remember drawing it, specifically, but knew what it must be.

“That’s a caricature. I do them during Campaign for the provincials who come into the city to vote. Someone must have asked me to draw him and then never come back to claim it.”

And he remembered trying to remember. He remembered asking his hand to remember when his head wouldn’t.

“I’m … what did you put in me?” Soma asked. There was moisture on his cheeks, and he hoped it was tears.

The Owl was struggling up to his feet. A bell tone sounded from the sky and he said, “Now, Japheth. There’s no time.”

“Just a minute more,” snapped the Crow. “What did we put in you? You …” Japheth spat. “While you’re remembering, try and remember this. You chose this! All of you chose it!”

The angry man wouldn’t have heard any reply Soma might have made, because it was then that all of the Kentuckians clamped their ears shut with their odd muffs. To his surprise, they forced a pair onto Soma as well.

· · · · ·

Jenny finally convinced the car to stop wailing out its hee-haw pitch when they entered the maze of streets leading to Printer’s Alley. The drive back had been long, the car taking every northern side road, backtracking, looping, even trying to enter the dumping grounds at one point before the bundle bugs growled them away. During anthem, while Jenny drummed her fingers and forced out the words, the car still kept up its search, not even pretending to dance.

So Jenny had grown more and more fascinated by the car’s behavior. She had known cars that were slavishly attached to their owners before, and she had known cars that were smart—almost as smart as bundle bugs, some of them—but the two traits never seemed to go together. “Cars are dogs or cars are cats,” her Teacher had said to explain the phenomenon, another of the long roll of enigmatic statements that constituted formal education in the Voluntary State.

But here, now, here was a bundle bug that didn’t seem to live up to those creatures’ reputations for craftiness. The car had been following the bug for a few blocks—Jenny only realized that after the car, for the first time since they entered the city proper, made a turn away from the address painted on its name tag.

The bug was a big one, and was describing a gentle career down Commerce Street, drifting from side to side and clearly ignoring the traffic signals that flocked around its head in an agitated cloud.

“Car, we’d better get off this street. Rogue bugs are too much for the THP. If it doesn’t self-correct, a Commodore is likely to be rousted out from the Parthenon.” Jenny sometimes had nightmares about Commodores.

The car didn’t listen—though it was normally an excellent listener—but accelerated toward the bug. The bug, Jenny now saw, had stopped in front of a restaurant and cracked its abdomen. Dumpster feelers had started creeping out of the interstices between thorax and head when the restaurateur charged out, beating at the feelers with a broom. “Go now!” the man shouted, face as red as his vest and leggings, “I told you twice already! You pick up here Chaseday! Go! I already called your supervisor, bug!”

The bug’s voice echoed along the street. “No load? Good good.” Its sigh was pure contentment, but Jenny had no time to appreciate it. The car sped up, and Jenny covered her eyes, anticipating a collision. But the car slid to a halt with bare inches to spare, peered into the empty cavern of the bug’s belly, then sighed, this one not content at all.

“Come on, car,” Jenny coaxed. “He must be at home by now. Let’s just try your house, okay?”

The car beeped and executed a precise three-point turn. As they turned off Commerce and climbed the viaduct that arced above the Farmer’s Market, Jenny caught a hint of motion in the darkening sky. “THP bicycles, for sure,” she said. “Tracking your bug friend.”

At the highest point on the bridge, Jenny leaned out and looked down into the controlled riot of the Market. Several stalls were doing brisk business, and when Jenny saw why, she asked the car to stop, then let out a whistle.

“Oi! Monkey!” she shouted. “Some beets up here!”

Jenny loved beets.

· · · · ·

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· · · · ·

“It’s funny that I don’t know what it means, though, don’t you think, friends?” Soma was saying this for perhaps the fifth time since they began their walk. “Church Street. Church. Have you ever heard that word anywhere else?”

“No,” said the blue-eyed boy.

The Kentuckians were less and less talkative the farther the little group advanced west down Church Street. It was a long, broad avenue, but rated for pedestrians and emergency vehicles only. Less a street, really, than a linear park, for there were neither businesses nor apartments on either side, just low gray government buildings, slate-colored in the sunset.

The sunset. That was why the boulevard was crowded, as it was every night. As the sun dropped down, down, down it dropped behind the Parthenon. At the very instant the disc disappeared behind the sand-colored edifice, the Great Salt Lick self-illuminated and the flat acres of white surrounding the Parthenon shone with a vast, icy light.

The Lick itself was rich with the minerals that fueled the Legislators and Bears, but the white light emanating from it was sterile. Soma noticed that the Crows faces grew paler and paler as they all got closer to its source. His work was fascinating, and grew more so as more and more disciplines began finding ways to integrate their fields of study into a meta-architecture of science. His department chair co-authored a paper with an expert in animal husbandry, of all things.

The Owl held Soma’s head as the painter vomited up the last of whatever was in his stomach. Japheth and the others were making reassuring noises to passersby. “Too much monkey wine!” they said, and, “We’re in from the provinces, he’s not used to such rich food!” and, “He’s overcome by the sight of the Parthenon!”

Japheth leaned over next to the Owl. “Why’s it hitting him so much harder than the others?”

The Owl said, “Well, we’ve always taken them back north of the border. This poor fool we’re dragging ever closer to the glory of his owner. I couldn’t even guess what’s trying to fill up the empty spaces I left in him—but I’m pretty sure whatever’s rushing in isn’t all from her.”

Japheth cocked an eyebrow at his lieutenant. “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say all together at once.”

The Owl smiled, another first, if that sad little half grin counted as a smile. “Not a lot of time left for talking. Get up now, friend painter.”

The Owl and Japheth pulled Soma to his feet. “What did you mean,” Soma asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “‘the glory of his owner?’”

“Governor,” said Japheth. “He said, ‘the glory of his Governor,’” and Japheth swept his arm across, and yes, there it was, the glory of the Governor.

Church Street had a slight downward grade in its last few hundred yards. From where they stood, they could see that the street ended at the spectacularly defined border of the Great Salt Lick, which served as legislative chambers in the Voluntary State. At the center of the lick stood the Parthenon, and while no normal citizens walked the salt just then, there was plenty of motion and color.

Two bears were laying face down in the Lick, bobbing their heads as they took in sustenance from the ground. A dozen or more Legislators slowly unambulated, their great slimy bodies leaving trails of gold or silver depending on their party affiliation. One was engulfing one of the many salt-white statues that dotted the grounds, gaining a few feet of height to warble its slogan songs from. And, unmoving at the corners of the rectangular palace in the center of it all, four Commodores stood.

They were tangled giants of rust, alike in their towering height and in the oily bathyspheres encasing the scant meat of them deep in their torsos, but otherwise each a different silhouette of sensor suites and blades, each with a different complement of articulated limbs or wings or wheels.

“Can you tell which ones they are?” Japheth asked the blue-eyed boy, who had begun murmuring to himself under his breath, eyes darting from Commodore to Commodore.

“Ruby-eyed Sutcliffe, stomper, smasher,

Tempting Nguyen, whispering, lying,

Burroughs burrows, up from the underground …”

The boy hesitated, shaking his head. “Northeast corner looks kind of like Praxis Dale, but she’s supposed to be away West, fighting the Federals. Saint Sandalwood’s physical presence had the same profile as Dale’s, but we believe he’s gone, consumed by Athena after their last sortie against the containment field cost her so much.”

“I’ll never understand why she plays at politics with her subordinates when she is her subordinates,” said Japheth.

The Owl said, “That’s not as true with the Commodores as with a lot of the … inhabitants. I think it is Saint Sandalwood; she must have reconstituted him, or part of him. And remember his mnemonic?”

“Sandalwood staring,” sang the blue-eyed boy.

“Inside and outside,” finished Japheth, looking the Owl in the eye. “Time then?”

“Once we’re on the Lick I’d do anything she told me, even empty as I am,” said the Owl. “Bind me.”

Then the blue-eyed boy took Soma by the arm, kept encouraging him to take in the sights of the Parthenon, turning his head away from where the Crows were wrapping the Owl in grapevines. They took the Owl’s helmet from a rucksack and seated it, cinching the cork seals at the neck maybe tighter than Soma would have thought was comfortable.

Two of the Crows hoisted the Owl between them, his feet stumbling some. Soma saw that the eyeholes of the mask had been blocked with highly reflective tape.

Japheth spoke to the others. “The bears won’t be in this; they’ll take too long to stand up from their meal. Avoid the Legislators, even their trails. The THP will be on the ground, but won’t give you any trouble. You boys know why you’re here.”

The two Crows holding the Owl led him over to Japheth, who took him by the hand. The blue-eyed boy said, “We know why we’re here, Japheth. We know why we were born.”

And suddenly as that, the four younger Crows were gone, fleeing in every direction except back up Church Street.

“Soma Painter,” said Japheth. “Will you help me lead this man on?”

Soma was taken aback. While he knew of no regulation specifically prohibiting it, traditionally no one actually trod the Lick except during Campaign.

“We’re going into the Salt Lick?” Soma asked.

“We’re going into the Parthenon,” Japheth answered.

· · · · ·

As they crossed Church Street from the south, the car suddenly stopped.

“Now what, car?” said Jenny. Church Street was her least favorite thoroughfare in the capital.

The car snuffled around on the ground for a moment, then, without warning, took a hard left and accelerated, siren screeching. Tourists and sunset gazers scattered to either side as the car and Jenny roared toward the glowing white horizon.

· · · · ·

The Owl only managed a few yards under his own power. He slowed, then stumbled, and then the Crow and the painter were carrying him.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Soma.

They crossed the verge onto the salt. They’d left the bravest sightseers a half-block back.

“He’s gone inside himself,” said Japheth.

“Why?” asked Soma.

Japheth half laughed. “You’d know better than me, friend.”

It was then that the Commodore closest to them took a single step forward with its right foot, dragged the left a dozen yards in the same direction, and then, twisting, fell to the ground with a thunderous crash.

“Whoo!” shouted Japheth. “The harder they fall! We’d better start running now, Soma!”

Soma was disappointed, but unsurprised, to see that Japheth did not mean run away.

There was only one bear near the slightly curved route that Japheth picked for them through the harsh glare. Even light as he was, purged of his math, the Owl was still a burden and Soma couldn’t take much time to marvel at the swirling colors in the bear’s plastic hide.

“Keep up, Soma!” shouted the Crow. Ahead of them, two of the Commodores had suddenly turned on one another and were landing terrible blows. Soma saw a tiny figure clinging to one of the giants’ shoulders, saw it lose its grip, fall, and disappear beneath an ironshod boot the size of a bundle bug.

Then Soma slipped and fell himself, sending all three of them to the glowing ground and sending a cloud of the biting crystal salt into the air. One of his sandaled feet, he saw, was coated in gold slime. They’d been trying to outflank one Legislator only to stumble on the trail of another.

Japheth picked up the Owl, now limp as a rag doll, and with a grunt heaved the man across his shoulders. “Soma, you should come on. We might make it.” It’s not a hard decision to make at all. How can you not make it? At first he’d needed convincing, but then he’d been one of those who’d gone out into the world to convince others. It’s not just history; it’s after history.

“Soma!”

Japheth ran directly at the unmoving painter, the deadweight of the Owl across his shoulders slowing him. He barreled into Soma, knocking him to the ground again, all of them just missing the unknowing Legislator as it slid slowly past.

“Up, up!” said Japheth. “Stay behind it, so long as it’s moving in the right direction. I think my boys missed a Commodore.” His voice was very sad.

The Legislator stopped and let out a bellowing noise. Fetid steam began rising from it. Japheth took Soma by the hand and pulled him along, through chaos. One of the Commodores, the first to fall, was motionless on the ground, two or three Legislators making their way along its length. The two who’d fought lay locked in one another’s grasp, barely moving and glowing hotter and hotter. The only standing Commodore, eyes like red suns, seemed to be staring just behind them.

As it began to sweep its gaze closer, Soma heard Japheth say, “We got closer than I would have bet.”

Then Soma’s car, mysteriously covered with red crosses and wailing at the top of its voice, came to a sliding, crunching stop in the salt in front of them.

Soma didn’t hesitate, but threw open the closest rear door and pulled Japheth in behind him. When the three of them—painter, Crow, Owl—were stuffed into the rear door, Soma shouted, “Up those stairs, car!”

In the front seat, there was a woman whose eyes seemed as large as saucers.

· · · · ·

commodores faulting headless people in the lick protocols compel reeling in, strengthening, temporarily abandoning telepresence locate an asset with a head asset with a head located

· · · · ·

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails was trying not to go crazy. Something was pounding at her head, even though she hadn’t tried to open it herself. Yesterday, she had been working a remote repair job on the beach, fixing a smashed window. Tonight, she was hurtling across the Great Salt Lick, Legislators and bears and Commodores acting in ways she’d never seen or heard of.

Jenny herself acting in ways she’d never heard of. Why didn’t she just pull the emergency brake, roll out of the car, wait for the THP? Why did she just hold on tighter and pull down the sunscreen so she could use the mirror to look into the backseat?

It was three men. She hadn’t been sure at first. One appeared to be unconscious and was dressed in some strange getup, a helmet of some kind completely encasing his head. She didn’t know the man in the capacitor jacket, who was craning his head out the window, trying to see something above them. The other one though, she recognized.

“Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”

The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”

· · · · ·

Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design—by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.

But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him—Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky—jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.

“It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.

Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.

“These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

· · · · ·

The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to removed the plate.

The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.

“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

· · · · ·

breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in

· · · · ·

Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture—armed and armored—attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.

Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

· · · · ·

Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor. He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place.

Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.

Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.

“Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”

The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.

Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

“Why?” shouted Soma.

But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

“there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”

Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

“My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

All of the same arguments.

All of the same arguments.

Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

“you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”

But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product, not a builder.

Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb—the knife, the eraser, the threat—looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

· · · · ·

A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”

Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”

But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

The End

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