Note: Today is for stories. I'm still working on the New York Magician stories, and there are more that aren't posted here; I include the one below to prove I'm not lying. The prior story is the first of a four-to-six story arc, of which three and a half are written.
My stories tend to a particular length (well, I should say story segments) because I mostly write them for E2, and they are of a good length to make a node there. I tend to break longer stories, as you can see, into segments of around that size. There is an added bonus that a node, or the story sizes I've been posting here, are right around the limit of what I can write in a sitting or a burst, and rather than let the words molder until there is 'enough' whatever that is, I tend to post them to let people beat on 'em.
There was a flash of black luminescence around my hand. The card was ice cold. I turned it quickly, a snap of the fingers, to see the front. Whatever was there was intent on not being seen. I could make out the card's shape, and the grubby off-white of dirty laminated surface, but every time I tried to focus in on the card itelf the blur that resided there reached up a little further into my forebrain, dug in its fists and squeezed.
I closed my eyes and pushed the card at the table. It left my hand, clearing my head immediately. I opened my eyes again to the more familiar blur of tears. "What-"
Brian's voice broke through. "You can hold the card. You, and only you, cannot read it."
I picked up the Desert Eagle. "Look, I came here looking for something, or someone."
"Yes." They both said it, in stereo. It was disconcerting. I had to fight down the urge to shoot one of them just to restore normalcy.
"There's someone downtown who shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be here at all. But he is, and he was called. Who called him?"
The other voice spoke. "You did."
"Bullshit. I can't call Others. I can hear and see them, that's all."
Brian's partner spoke again, looking down at the table's surface. "Doesn't change what happened. You called him. Perhaps not on your own. But you did." He looked up suddenly and stared at me through his blind eyes. "And now you know. That's all." He stood, far too quickly for his age, and Brian stood as well. I raised the pistol.
"Wait a damn-"
The room was empty. I jumped backwards reflexively, crashing to the floor as I tripped over some unknown piece of debris. The gun didn't go off (I don't take the safety off until I'm really ready to use it) and I kept hold of it, but at the cost of hitting the ground hard. I sat there for a second in the dimness, then stood up. The light had dimmed; the Coleman lantern was dark. I reached for it gingerly where it sat on the table, and my fingers tore through a thick coating of cobwebs. I pulled my hand back in surprise, then dug in my coat for my Maglite. The lantern was dusty, old, and the glass cracked. There were no mantles inside it.
The cards were gone, and the dust on the table's surface was thick and undisturbed.
"Oh, shit." I rubbed my head. "Shit, shit shit." Holstering the gun, I surveyed the room again. Nothing anywhere. The silence wasn't complete, not underneath the bones of New York, but it was much deeper than it had been some seconds ago. I couldn't figure out why what had just happened had the fright running up my spine; given what I dealt with on a daily basis, this was surely only somewhere middle of the road, but my sympathetic nervous system flatly refused to agree with me. The sweat was coming cold from my brow.
Then the noise started.
It was very faint, and very far off, but it was coming from the tunnel entrance opposite where I'd come in, and it could have been twenty feet or ten miles away. It was a regular metal-on-metal sound, though; nothing random and nothing soft. I twisted the Maglite to open up the field to the full width of the tunnel, pulled the Desert Eagle again, and moved into the tunnel, flashlight held out to my left. I was skirting the right wall, the light held approximately where it would have been in my left hand were I centered in the passage.
Gun in hand, I went to meet the noise.
Fifteen feet past the door, there was a metal grating from floor to ceiling. There was a huge round hole in the center of it, the bar edges flowing and melted at the hole’s periphery. I moved past it uneasily, into a lower tunnel which splashed around my boots. I hoped it was water, but my nose told me that if there was water down there, it wasn’t alone. The noise was rising in volume, coming from the darkness ahead. A regular thumping, or tapping, two beats then a pause, then again. Thump-thump.
After another fifty feet there was a flickering light ahead which took me some moments to realize was coming around a blind corner in the storm drain. I wasn’t positive, but it looked as if the tunnel turned right at least ninety degrees. I leaned against the right wall and raised the gun, watching the light and listening to the sound move closer to the corner.
The sound was regular enough to make concentration difficult. Thump-thump. I could only tell the source was still in motion from the movement of the light on the wall at the corner. Thump-thump. There was no way to determine precisely how close to the corner the other was, so I waited, sweating now in the chill gloom. Thump-thump.
The light, when it moved into my line of sight, was blinding. It came around the corner and stopped, and I lifted the gun. “Fucking freeze right there!”
Nothing happened for perhaps five seconds, then there was a booming laugh which reached out to me from behind the light (another Coleman, I could barely see, twin silk testicles of the mantles burning in their fragile ashen web of white gas). Then the lantern dimmed to the squeaking of its valve, and a voice no less enormous than the laugh said, in a rich Irish brogue, “Sure, and you’d be Michel, wouldn’t you, boy?”
The gun sagged downwards. I recovered enough to re-safety it. As I did so, the other figure moved towards me. In the lower light of the banked lantern, I could see a huge man, dressed in industrial coveralls and boots. In his left hand he held the lantern; in the right, a massive wrench, scraped in bright patterns where it had struck the concrete or stone of the tunnel.
I looked at him for a moment, then lowered the gun entirely. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Kevin, boy. I knew yer gran.”
He was almost up to me. I fumbled the gun back into its holster, and when I looked up there was a huge paw outstretched, which it would have been churlish not to shake.
So I did.
The lawsuits of 2006 and 2007 had almost been a disaster. It had taken all the dancing skills of several grizzled civil servants at GS scales astronomically higher than usually seen to make the threat to the Project go away, and none of the team in the lab really wanted to know what had finally been done. They liked sleeping at night. But here and now, that wasn't an issue; the last line of code had been nailed into place, the last tap had been threaded, and the last bit of fiber had been hotspliced in an AT&T switching facility a week prior over in Salt Lake City where the Pacific Cross traffic came through. The Director was here in the PuzzleBox for the ceremony.
"Er, basically, sir, we're ready." The lead tech smoothed his T-shirt nervously. The Director looked at him for a few moments, causing him to search his conscience, but before he could blurt out the actual details of that last trip to Vegas, the Director nodded and turned away to corral the few brass who were lurking near the door. The tech sighed quietly and went to gather up his own team.
When all the VIPs had been settled in chairs near the main monitoring station, the tech went over to them. "Gentlemen, ladies, thanks for coming. I'm Park, project lead, and this is the first operational test of Project Syene. The filtergrids are coming online now, and we'll be ready to take traffic into the main array in about five minutes."
The Director coughed politely. "Park, could you give my colleagues a one or two sentence explanation of how Syene will help us avoid any, er, unpleasantness like the recent legal troubles we had with the program?"
"Sure, sir. Let's see. The problem, as it was phrased by others, was that we were retaining and interpreting traffic from and to non-target individuals as well as known targets in order to perform proper traffic analysis. We had to, in order to do datamining on the contact patterns, since we couldn't do that in realtime. The call content, as well, had to be analyzed after the fact, so we were - it was argued" - he added hastily, thinking of his audience - "we were retaining intelligence on civilians illegally. Anyway. The difference here is that Syene is doing live pattern recognition and traffic analysis without data retention; it is actively eliminating traffic which it recognizes as 'normal' for the U.S. telecommunications system from the 'net' before it even begins to analyze the take. Then, it is using spintronic and quantum systems to perform nonlinear pattern analysis of the call data in realtime-"
"Okay, son, I see eyes glazing. Cut to the chase, please."
"Sorry, sir. In essence, it means we never save any data until it has been flagged as anomalous; we don't need to save it in order to analyse it. The pattern data from the call is retained in quantum state without the actual call data being available, so that its character can be compared later without the actual call information being held without warrant. This is possible because Syene has been, in essence, listening to everything our telecom system 'says' for the past year or so and knows what 'normal' sounds like, and she can filter out nearly all of that by simply ignoring what sounds familiar. What's left over - well, that's suspicious."
"Thanks, Park. You can get on with it."
"Thanks, sir." Park adjusted his earset and checked in with his team. They were watching data spool through the grid at rates that would have looked horrific if he hadn't been watching what Syene could do for six months now. "All clear, guys?"
The responses came back; all okay. The machinery was fine; the code was stable, and wonder of wonders, the qubits were deigning to remain in semi-existence.
"Okay, let's go live. Shunt the feed onto the grid."
There was a wash of green across the status board as telecom feeds poured into the dataspace of the Syene comparators. The green threads blossomed on the display, indicating trunk routings, calls, port connections; just as quickly, they blinked and vanished, indicating that Syene had identified them as familiar and blanked them from the incoming traffic. A very few threads began to appear in yellow, then even fewer in red on the second board, indicating traffic that was surviving the winnowing and being flagged as anomalous.
Park talked to his team for a half an hour, then turned to the watching officials. "It looks good. We've positively identified over 60% of the redflagged traffic as being encrypted at 2k-spin or higher levels, and not by us; of the rest, some is in clear but involving obvious nonsense sentence structures, likely code. Some few have been tagged by human analysts as likely mentally disturbed people on the telephone, and the numbers marked for greenlisting."
"Impressive, son." The Director looked pleased. "Very good. We're going to go upstairs. I'd like reports every shift, please."
"Yessir."
* * *
It settled into a routine, punctuated only by the normal breaks of man-made machinery that broke or discovered new modes of operation that its designers hadn't intended. New procedures were hastily written up, new recovery processes devised, and the flood of chatter went on. The PuzzleBox hummed with the talking.
The next week, Park came in to see two threads on the status board that were purple. He frowned and called over the chief ontologist. "Hayward, what the hell are those?"
The other scratched his head. "We dunno. Syene tagged 'em. We've had a listen, and it sounds like some sort of analog encoding system, but it's not one we know."
"Unknown encoding systems should be red."
"Yeah, I know. We're confused too. But it's definitely an unknown encoding system. We're pretty sure that it's just because it's an analog signal mod as opposed to a digital hash that's making it purple. There's a couple of signal proc gurus beating on it in their spare time."
"Okay. Let me know if anything breaks."
"Sure."
* * *
Another week passed.
* * *
There were nine purple threads, now. Park had given in and reported them to the Director, who had become intensely interested in them and asked Park for a source. Park had demurred, since all they knew so far was that the calls contained undecipherable noises, which (as far as he was concerned) wasn't really a crime. But he did work at the NSA, and he passed on the phone numbers. Because he worked at the NSA, nobody told him anything about the result, but the purple threads continued to accumulate.
"I bet it's an own goal." The Syene team had started bandying hypotheses about the purple people eaters back and forth over lunch in the lab. So far, an own goal - detection of a friendly intelligence agent's communications - was on top of the betting pool by a comfortable margin.
Park shook his head. "Nah. It's analog, man."
The other tech retorted "Yeah, but we can't crack it. It's sweet. Why couldn't that be Upstairs?" (Upstairs being the active crypto division).
"Look, Upstairs wouldn't go analog. It's too kludgey for them. Besides, can you imagine a U.S. agent being told he's taking analog tech into the field?" There were titters around the break room table. "Yeah. They'd quit on the spot. If it doesn't look slicker than a fucking iPod, they won't have anything to do with it."
"So what do you think it is?"
Park finished his coffee. "I think it's a little guy who's got Ops over here who's been extremely clever with limited resources. Maybe it's a Shack Special." Shack Specials were another intel community in-joke, the crypto and communications version of a 'MacGyver' - a functional modern cryptodevice that could be put together with parts available at Radio Shack.
In the ensuing laughter, they drifted back to work.
* * *
By week three, there were twenty-eight threads on the board, and Park had gotten a little obsessive. He had taken to listening to samples of the traffic on his iPod when wandering the building (since it couldn't leave the SCF) and twice his team had had to hunt him down only to find him sitting meditatively on the john, three thousand dollar government issue noise-cancelling analysis headphones on his ears and his building pager screaming in his shirt pocket.
Finally, the Director called him Upstairs. He went, half guilty and half indignant.
"Come in, son."
"Sir."
"Have a seat."
Park sat.
"Fine job on Syene, first of all. Thing's working a treat. Very low false positive rate; much much lower than the old Echelon take."
"Thank you, sir. Sir-"
"I know. I want to talk to you about the purple threads."
Park stared at his boss's boss's boss's boss, trying not to look as defiant as he felt. "Sir, what the hell is going on?"
"You're right, by the way. They are traffic."
"Well, of course they are, or Syene wouldn't flag them, sir."
"Of course. D'you know what purple signifies?"
"Analog signal, sir."
"Heh. Nope. You should've checked the code."
"Sir?"
"The display routines weren't written in your department. You made an assumption, son. Bad habit for an analyst. Purple means unknown."
"Of course it's unknown-"
"You're not getting it. Start over."
Park stopped, looked at the Director, and tried to think harder. Unknown. Syene had been listening to the U.S. telecom system for a year. Before that, it had been fed every single specification, every single frequency, every single linguistic text, every single voice sample, and every single tonal sample that the NSA owned from all its years of intercepting voice and data traffic.
Unknown.
"Oh, shit."
The director grinned, unexpectedly. "See? They told me you were smart."
Park had paled. "You're telling me those signals are...are..."
"You can say it."
"...alien?"
"Give that boy a prize."
"But they're coming from our own telecom system!"
"So? So do the signals the Iranian agents send. So do the signals the fucking British agents send. They're illegal aliens too."
"But who are they? And who are they calling? But most of all, what are we going to do about it?"
"I'm glad you asked." The director reached behind his back and pulled a folder out of a stack of precariously balanced similar folders, placed it on the desk, and opened it. "Welcome to Project Simon Says."
September 15, 2015 I began to smear. Not with a bang, nor even a whimper; with a splash. Walking down the hallway from the elevator to my front door, the drab tan carpet began to vibrate before my eyes for lack of a better word. Vision doubled. I shook my head, irritated; I remember removing my glasses and wiping them on my shirt before replacing them, but it didn't help. There were two versions of the carpet in my sight. Indeed, there were two slightly offset versions of the hallway. I touched my temples experimentally; no pain. I hadn't hit my head that I was aware. I hadn't been drinking (had I?) and I wasn't any more overworked than usual.
I continued on to the nondescript door of my rental apartment, unlocked the triple deadbolts, and let myelf in quietly. The apartment itself shimmered slightly, strange aura in my sight not lessening. I relocked the door and tossed the keys onto the hall table and moved into the kitchen to get myself a drink of water.
It didn't help. Aspirin didn't help. Meditation didn't help for the hour I devoted to emptying my brain of thought, despite the fast approaching finals week. I couldn't read, though; text swam before my misfiring eyes. No hope for it. I decided that at the very least, I might as well sleep; if sleep didn't help, I would visit the university health service in the morning.
Sleep came as easily as it always did to a postdoc.
The next morning brought a change, but not the one I was hoping for. The doubling of my vision was now more pronounced; there was a more noticeable separation between versions of what I was seeing.
While realizing that I would have to take a bus to the health center, since I certainly couldn't drive, I made a somewhat disturbing discovery.
Closing one eye didn't cure the double vision.
That was...unexpected, to say the least. I had been assuming that my problem arose from an inability to properly focus; that had happened to me before, usually as a result of exhaustion or eye fatigue from reading in the dark. Not this time, though. No matter which eye I looked out of, the doubled world looked back.
Brain?
This was starting to severely worry me. I did what I always do in such cases and called Kris. She was awake as she always was. In five years of research collaboration, I've never caught the woman asleep. I don't think she does sleep. I think she merely parks herself in front of a workstation or book and leans over slightly, body on powerdown, and keeps thinking, just without moving for an hour or two. Given her normal hyperkinetic habits, that would be more than enough to refuel. But as I said, I've never caught her at it.
"Kris? It's Mladic."
"Morning, Deech. What's up?"
"I'm having a problem."
"Is it the crystal phase emitters? I told you –"
"No. It's with me. I'm having trouble seeing."
"Um. Trouble like how?"
"I'm seeing double. And I can't make it go away."
"This isn't so good, Deech."
"I'm aware of that, hotness." I filled the kettle, phone held to my ear.
"I presume then, logically, you need a ride to health services."
"That would be nice, yeah."
"Okay. I'll be down in ten."
"Thanks." I put the water on for tea.
"No problem. See you." She rang off. I turned on the gas, shut off the phone, and bleakly watched the two blue crowns of flame waver gaily in my vision beneath the stained metal.
Kris arrived with her usual perfect timing, pulling me to the door just as the kettle sang. I danced over to it to let her in, running back to yank it off the flame and turn off the stove. She shut the door behind her and moved towards the kitchen door as I was pouring water into the two chipped mugs on the counter. "Deech, I –" She stopped, both vocally and literally, coming to a halt in the doorway. I looked up, kettle still held in my hands. Although slightly hashed by her doubled appearance, I could tell she had gone paper white and had moved to clutch the doorframe.
"Kris? What the hell's wrong?"
"Deech?"
"Yeah?" I put the kettle carefully back on the stove.
"Deech, you said you were seeing double?"
"Yeah, that's right. Miracle I haven't fucking burnt myself."
Her voice was faint. "Have...have you looked in a mirror?"
"No. Why?" I looked at her again. Her expression caused ice water to drizzle down my spine, and I turned and sprinted for the bathroom. She was right behind me.
The flourescent tubes in the bathroom took forever to illuminate as always. I stared over the sink at the cheap mirror, seeing a blurrily doubled reflection of myself. Something was wrong, though. Everything in the mirror was doubled, true enough, but my reflection...
My reflection was quadrupled. And it wasn't perfectly doubled. There were two pairs of me, slightly offset. I waved an arm; all four waved their arm, but the pairs waved their arms at just slightly different times.
Kris had come up behind me and was standing in the door. I pivoted to face her. "What the fuck is going on? Do you see four of me? Or two?"
"Two." Her voice was still weak, but getting stronger. She was sweating. So was I, now. "Two. Just barely. You look like a double exposure."
I waved my arm again. She choked off a scream. "Jesus Christ, Deech, you're not moving...you're not...not in synch! This is..."
I just sat down on the closed toilet and looked at her helplessly.
"...this is impossible," she finished lamely.
We stared at each other.
* * *
Picture a stream. Picture it frozen in winter. At the spring end is a geyser, arising from nothing, flash-frozen in an impossible origami state. Water made geometry and topographic madness. Here the stream came to be, is always coming to be. There is no before this point, as far as the stream is concerned. At the other end? Let's posit a cliff where the waters fall over, so far down they turn to mist in the air. Eventually, some reach an unseen sea; some evaporate into the air itself, and a precious few motes will return along the stream, settling back into the water.
It's winter. The stream is frozen solid. The air is dry. Nothing moves.
You're looking at time, and right now, it has ceased to pass.
* * *
We skipped the health service, suspecting they wouldn't be able to help me. Instead, we headed straight for campus and for work - for the Harmon Ajanti Advanced Physics Building, where both of us worked on our postdoc projects in the same laboratory. Due to the early hour, we managed to get from the parking lot through the halls to the lab without anyone seeing us, and Kris locked the door behind us as I sank gratefully into a desk chair. Things were not only doubled further apart now, there was an uneasy suggestion of two additional 'copies' of the world, faintly visible surrounding the two I could see clearly. "Kris, am I doubling?"
"What? Are you..." she turned. "Yeah, I think so. There's a faint glow around you that could be another set of...well, of you."
Against my will, I was fascinated. "Are those sets sitting in the chair?"
"Mostly. One just finished sitting down. Their upper bodies don't seem to be as well coordinated, but their hips are all pretty well matched to you."
"Uh. Are we going to even bother with the math, or go straight for the sci-fi?"
"I vote sci-fi."
"Me too. I think those are probability ghosts."
"Okay. Question. Why isn't your voice echoing?"
"Uh. Good one. Maybe they're not substantial enough to vibrate air. Can you touch them?"
She approached me, looking frightened, and moved a hand towards my face. A few centimeters from me, she snatched it back with a horrified look. "There's something there! I don't...whatever, I mean, there's something. It isn't stopping me, but I can feel it."
"Okay." I started scribbling on the chalkboard, watching as my now-four-selves did the same. "I can see four mes writing on four chalkboards. You can sort of see four mes but not the three other chalkboards, right?"
"Right."
"I could feel your hand when you touched my face."
"But I didn't touch your face."
"Yes you did. One of them. I think I'm the sum total sensoria of these four."
"Holy shit. That explains the double – er, quad? – vision."
"Right." I scribbled that fact down. "Soon to be eight. I can see more coming in, but they're still in between the four that exist, so it's just going to blur stuff, I think."
"Deech, do you think this...this has something to do with the Project?"
I swung to look at her. "It has to. Do you know anyone else working on temporal infodisplacement?"
"Of course not, but...oh, hell. What have we done?"
"Maybe it's 'what will we do?'"
"We need Doctor Ingram and Doctor Rendleman."
"Yeah. Call them."
She moved to her desk and dug up our advisors' home phone numbers. I heard her murmuring at her phone, then talking cajolingly at it while I stared at the blackboard, trying to make sense of it through increasingly multiplexed eyes.
* * *
Ice is a fluid, just like water or glass. It does flow. Extend the metaphor. Imagine that you, me, all of us are particles embedded in the stream, moving along in time. Our 'present' is a slice of the stream itself. When we travel in space, we move up and down, side to side in the stream while it carries us along. We can communicate by sending ripples in those same directions - but whenever we do that, those ripples (or ourselves as we travel) are carried inexorably downstream as it flows. This is true whether the stream is ice or water.
But suppose you wanted to leave a message for those behind you in the stream?
Suppose there was a way to set up a standing wave, a ripple in the stream, that produced constant interference patterns in the fluid of time as it rolled by?
* * *
"Mladic, what the hell is going on?" Professor Stuart Rendleman wasn't happy. No professor who has been 'summoned' by a student, even a post-doc, ever is, and he was no exception. He stormed into the lab, wearing a trenchcoat belted over what were apparently a T-shirt and jeans, and glared around until he found me at the blackboard, at which point he stopped, blanched, and dropped his lower jaw. Kris moved to meet him with a cup of coffee.
"Professor."
"Kris? What...what the hell..."
"We don't know."
"Is that Deech?"
"Yes. It's Deech."
I turned around. "Hi, Professor Rendleman."
"For God's sake, Deech, it's Stuart...what the hell's happened?"
"We don't know, but it looks like at some point we sort of succeed."
He wasn't stupid. His jaw dropped further before he remembered his coffee and drained the cup. "Oh, my God."
"Yep."
Kris brought him up to speed. I was up to thirty-two parallels now, and things were actually getting easier to see as they moved 'apart' from each other in time as well as space, leaving images clearer. The problem was that I was now seeing thing from thirty-two simultaneous slightly different points of view, and it was breaking my head. I sat down to avoid having to walk.
"What's happening?" Elfant Ingram had arrived. Stuart Rendleman grabbed him and started talking to him in low tones, trying to get him brought up to date. I was sitting in an armchair, the desk chair's rotating seat having proved too much freedom for me at this point. I was conscious of tears running down my cheeks. I could see most every part of the lab from some viewpoint as the myriad versions of me walked about, wrote on blackboards, sat in chairs, cried. One disturbing flickering darkness I took to mean I was asleep. Kris sat with the two faculty members, and there was a lot of gesticulating and pointing at figures on paper; once in a while, Ingram or Rendleman would point at the wall which our smaller lab shared with their experimental one.
Kris came over. "Deech?"
"Yeah. (yeah.) (yes?) (Hi, Kris.) (I love you, Kris.) (I know, Kris.) (Uh-huh?)"
"They think it's some experiment they have on the books for next week. Something they're working on next door for the government."
"What?" (Government?) (Next door?) (They're what?) (What?)"
I noticed that in seven of the many Krises I could see, tears were coming down her cheeks as well. In one laboratory, the chair was empty. In one faint view, I sat in an empty parking lot. "They've been working on some form of temporal signaling. I don't know."
"I do. I've been doing the math for it, I think. I didn't know it was experimental. (-t was at that phase.) (-t they had hardware.) (-the government was backing that.)"
In most of my eyesight, Ingram and Rendleman came over, figures flowing through the overlain scenery. "Deech? We have a hypothesis."
"I'd love to hear this. (-ear it.) (-eally?) (-fucking better!) (-hear this.)"
Ingram spoke for them in most of the versions. "Next week, we were scheduled to expend a fairly huge quantity of energy trying to cause a ripple in the timestream in the form of a standing wave. We were going to use a synthetic diamond core, compressed in a grav stream."
"And? (And?) (So?) (...?)"
They looked at each other, seconds apart, across all the various worlds. "It seems clear, now, that something went wrong. I mean, will go wrong. Or that we'll change our minds. Or..." Rendleman waved his hands helplessly. "The hope was that in the days prior to the experiment the instrumentation next door would detect ripples from the experiment, moving backwards in time. Apparently, though, rather than the diamond core, the experiment happens - but to you."
Silence.
I looked at them. "You mean your machine hits me with whatever the hell you're doing over there?" The words were a cacophony in my multiple outrages, but the feelings were the same.
"We don't know! We certainly don't intend it! But one minute." Ingram jumped up, ran out the door in most of the variants. In two or three, Rendleman did. In one I could see, neither did, but continued to stare at me. After a few moments, they began to filter back in. Ingram held out something to me; I took it. It was heavy and crystalline. "That's the diamond core we're to use. It appears completely unaffected. It's not multiplexed. You are. Ergo, something happens, and you're the focus."
"Why am I seeing multiples?"
Kris spoke up unexpectedly. "Harmonics."
I turned to her, waved at her to go on.
"There's some form of energy in you, that exists outside the time stream. It's manifesting in waves. You're vibrating for lack of a better word. The other versions you're seeing are harmonics of the four-dimensional you that normally exists - the you1 for lack of a better term. As you approach the critical point in the timestream where the disruption happens - where the energy is injected - the vibration is getting stronger. You're seeing more divergence in the harmonics, and additional 'frequencies' are becoming visible."
It made an uncomfortable amount of sense. "But what the hell do I do?"
Rendleman broke in, mostly. "There's a possibility. If we can modify the monitoring gear next door, we can try to discover the...well, the frequency, I suppose, that you're resonating at. If we can do that, we can try to charge you with a similar but inverse amount of energy. That isn't what I'd recommend, though; I'd recommend trying to produce another object, say, the core, which is resonating at the same frequency but out of phase with you, and then you would carry it on your person, although physical separation wouldn't matter much. If we injected it correctly, your resonant frequencies would cancel, mostly. As you (and the core) get farther, temporally, from your respective points of injection, the effect should fade, much as it came on."
I looked at him. "Do you really think this will work?"
His face fell, slightly. "I really don't know. But I honestly can't think of anything else to try, and I don't know how long you can stay sane living like that."
"I can't argue that. What do we do?"
The two faculty stood. "We move next door, for starters. Kris, get some food into him."
* * *
Take a piton. Form it out of diamond. Perfect diamond. Place it in the middle of a perfectly straight section of stream, where the water has frozen into an infinitely long cylindrical jewel. Touch the tip of it magically to the middle of the cylinder, never mind how. In your other hand, take a glass hammer of painful simplicity. Put an infinitely thin paper covering over the business end. Lay the face against the piton's end once to get your feel for its lie; then draw back, cord your muscles, and in one mighty swing, bring it crashing down.
In the milliseconds before the hammer shatters into microfine dust, it will transmit force through the paper, into the piton's head, down the haft, and into the point. That force will ring into the structure of the timestream with the fury and glory of an infinite number of crowning notes at the end of an infinite number of Chorales; triumph and math and love and loss in the belling laugh of destruction as the fabric of existence sings of it.
Imagine the exact center of your skull is resting underneath the piton's tip.
* * *
It wasn't quite as easy as they promised. For one thing, the math raised a difficulty almost immediately. Kris walked them through it, my own brain being far too busy trying to remember what a single life and point of view had been like to perform calculations, and her having helped me with most of my math since diffy-qs she was the only one who could read my notes anyhow. "Look. No, look! the core just won't work, I'm telling you. You need something that's not only closer to his mass, but closer to his chemical makeup. Otherwise, you'll never be able to get the same resonant frequency out of it. Not with the gear we have here; not without rebuilding the injectors entirely. I understand it's better if you have a transmissive referent for the entanglement phasing, but – No, of course we can compensate, that's what I'm telling you, but if the subject is too far off in terms of density, resonant frequency, or even Mohs number, you're going to have to put in so much compensatory equivalent pseudomass that –"
God bless Kris.
That's how I came to a brief moment of clarity a day later and watched them strap her into a chair inside a machine that looked almost, but not quite, entirely like every sci-fi goth freak's worst S&M nightmare. Oiled cables led to sharp pointy electrodes, restraint devices prevented her from moving so that her mass was oriented precisely where the math said it should be, and the table held her chair with her cranium directly below the final accelerator segment of the phased soliton cascade.
"Kris? What are you doing?" My voice was weak. I was croaking, probably because I hadn't been able to keep down liquids in the past few hours.
"Shut up Deech. Everything's going to be all right." She was lying, in every single reality. Her tears gave her away. Ingram and Rendleman were crying, too, but grimly. Kris had managed a smile, for me. I tried to stand, found that I had been tied into the chair at the side of the laboratory.
"I can't move."
"I know. You'd only hurt yourself. You haven't been walking very well, Deech, there's so many of you. S'funny, I only needed one, all this time..."
"Kris, you're babbling." I tried to get up to hear her better through the noise of the motor generators spooling up, but couldn't move.
"Ssshhhh, Deech. Be there in a second."
"KRIS!"
Ingram and Rendleman had retreated behind a glasteel shield. Ingram was carrying a standard lab trigger box. They looked at each other. Rendleman looked up. "Kris...?"
"FUCKING WELL DO IT!"
Rendleman nodded to Ingram. (Ingram nodded to Rendleman.) (Ingram nodded to me.) (Rendleman nodded to Ingram.)
Ingram pressed the button. The generators screamed.
Eternity rang with the shattering of a glass hammer.
Everything went dark as the lights went out. There was a flickering moan, and then they slowly started to come up again. I heard a KA-CHUNK as the chair restraints released. I stood, staggered slightly, moved towards the table. My dizziness vanished as I reached it.
"KRIS!"
I tore the restraint web aside. She was lying in the chair, a smile half on her face, eyes closed. I squeezed my eyes together, forcing tears out between then, reached out, picked up her limp body and pressed her head into my shoulder. "Oh, God, Kris..."
She moved against me. I jerked back to look into her eyes.
There was only one of her.
only one-
"uhhhhhhh."
"Kris?"
Her eyes opened. She smiled weakly. "Hi Deech."
I sobbed and hugged her. She hugged me back. "Hey. Hey, man, it's okay. I'm okay."
I let her go long enough for both of us to get to our feet. We looked at each other. She cocked her head. "From the fact that I'm not seeing double, I'd guess either nothing happened, or, if you're no longer seeing double, I'd say it worked."
I looked around. "Holy shit, I think you're right. Wait, so you mean, you were-"
"Yeah, I worked it out. You needed a person, not a rock."
"God."
"Hey, where's Rendleman and Ingram?"
"They're over-" They weren't. The Glasteel shield was there, but no-one stood behind it. The lights were on, but they were still dim. "What the hell?"
Kris looked around. "Something's wrong."
"Uh-" I did too. "Yeah." The lab looked the same, save the dim light. But something was different. I went over to the door, opened it, jerked back. Ingram and Rendleman were standing outside, sort of. Both were frozen in mid-run, apparently, heading away from the laboratory. I walked over to them. "What's with them?"
Kris came over, looked at them carefully. "They're not moving."
"No."
She looked at me. "Wait, that's wrong. We're not moving."
"I don't get it."
"Come here." She walked back into the lab, looked around. "Aha." She pointed at the motor generators. They were stopped, and at the main breaker panel, a glob of intolerable brightness was resting around one of the fuse blocks. "Look at that."
"What is that?"
"I think it's exploding."
"But it's..." I ran down. "You mean, it's exploding, but not at the moment."
"Right. Time's not moving. For us."
I looked around again. "I don't see our bodies anywhere. So we're actually here and moving."
"I think we screwed up. I think we didn't destructively cancel the resonant frequency. I think we constructively amplified it. I think it threw us right out of the timestream."
"Whoa."
"Yeah."
We looked at each other. Then, slowly, I began to grin. She looked at me in slight disbelief. "What?"
"If we're not in the timestream, that means we should theoretically be able to move along it before re-entry."
Her face lit up. "Omigod."
"Yeah. When do you want to have dinner?"
I left Hapy with Msamaki, the latter excitedly asking questions and drawing in ever-replenishing spillage on the polished surface of the bar in his curiosity. I don’t think the man saw me leave. The other - I have no idea.
New York was waking fully up. It was Saturday, meaning it took me only twice as long as it should have to get back downtown to my apartment. I took off my hastily-donned clothes and redressed in my day-to-day outfit - a soft gray turtleneck underneath the bandolier, a set of gray slacks, crepe-soled dress shoes. The Burberry went back on atop it all, and various weapons about my person. Then I headed downtown.
I do have a day job, contrary to what it probably looks like. My day job involves managing my own and other peoples’ money, which I do using a variety of dirty tricks. The primary one is to have good employees. The second and infrequently utilized set involves talisman magic, but even so, it’s better to have subordinates who know what they’re doing. Wibert and Sharansky is a small money management firm, with offices in the World Financial Center - nine people, including staff. I carded myself in.
One of the reasons I’m free to wander around the City on mysterious errands of my own is my desk. Kharan Sharansky, my partner and the actual brains behind most of the money moving that happens at our firm, had come in the day I’d had it delivered, then shaken his head twice with finality. “Michel, you must be joking.”
“Why?” I was busily opening and closing the myriad small drawers and compartments in the thing. I’d spent a month and a half finding it, two months fighting importers to get hold of it, and two interminable weeks locked in combat with the World Financial Center administrative staff over a freight elevator slot to get it moved in. The thing was massive.
“Where the hell did you get that thing?”
I looked up, holding a small drawer which I’d pulled out entirely. There was a secret compartment behind the end cap of the drawer and a completely separate one underneath the bottom plate, and this was only one of - I counted - sixteen drawers in the desk. “I got it in Saint Petersburg. It was in the back room of a bookstore on Nekrasova, around the corner from 4 Liteiny Prospekt.”
Sharansky had glared at me. “Don’t fuck with me, Wibert. I know what that address is.”
“That’s why I told you. The bookstore owner claimed his grandfather had been building staff at number 4. This was supposedly the Chief of Station NKVD’s desk.”
Kharan crossed his arms. “That wasn’t my point. My point is that it’s huge and I can’t see you behind it.”
“So?”
“So clients won’t be able to either. They’re not going to be comfortable.”
I laughed. “This wasn’t a desk intended to make people comfortable, Kharan. Quite the reverse.”
“Michel-”
I held up a hand. “No, you’re right. I understand. But, seriously, so what? Clients don’t need to see me unless they want to do so, specifically. In that case, I have that side table over there by the window.” I pointed. “With a coffee service. That’s what it’s for. This desk is for me.”
Kharan had thrown up his hands and gone away. After that, I had been pleased to note that seeing clients in person wasn’t really part of my job description anymore. Since sixty-eight percent of the assets under management were mine, that made little difference in terms of my actual position in the firm, and meant that nobody expected me to be in the office to Deal With Things.
I like my desk.
Sitting there, I looked out North towards the hazy shape of the George Washington Bridge, lost in the distance some ten miles upstream. There was a McAllister tugboat on the river, shepherding a concrete barge up the middle channel, and three or four private sail yachts visible, their sails angling to catch sunlight up the Manhattan side near the marinas.
The river looked back at me, placidly. I scowled at it.
Reaching into my bandolier, I pulled out the spearhead and spun it on the desktop in front of me. Then I pulled a sterile lancet out of another bandolier pocket, unwrapped it and pricked my finger to squeeze the resulting drop of blood onto the spearhead. It stopped spinning instantly, a crackling sensation reaching up off the desk and up my arm, electric cold and acoustic fire crawling into my torso. I opened my hand, palm spread downwards, over the spearhead.
“Who sent Hapy here?”
The bit of stone spun indecisively, then coasted to a stop. I poked it, and it spun with no resistance. Damn it.
“All right.” I thought. “Who called Hapy here?”
The stone spun up of its own accord, but wobbled around a few times. Closer, but not quite.
“What called Hapy here? Where is it?”
This time the spearhead swiveled to stop, rock-solid, pointing just west of north. Uptown.
I dropped it back into the bandolier with a tight smile, opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a mapping GPS receiver, dropped it in my pocket and swung back out of the office.
* *
Although it doesn’t look like it when you walk it, Manhattan isn’t flat. There are ridges and hills, not all of which have been smashed flat by urban development into names on a map. Murray Hill, Turtle Bay - even in the older parts of the City, if you look up the cross blocks carefully you’ll notice you see sky or earth, not horizon, and a lot closer than you might think. Central Park retains some few preserved ripples.
The west side rail yards and the west side rail tunnel is a hidden piece of that topography. It’s nearly always a surprise for non-natives to approach the upper west side’s Hudson River shoreline and suddenly realize that they are more than a hundred feet above sea level, but it’s true; by Ninety-Sixth and Riverside, the Parkway is thirty feet up and it isn’t even atop the rail tunnel. Riverside Park is, and it’s squatting quietly on top of a massive space that has housed entire sub-cities of inhabitants, sharing their volume intermittently with the blasting thunder of Diesel locomotives when the line was running.
Today there was no sound of anyone present. I broke through stagnant construction barriers in the rail yards above Fifty-Seventh, passing beneath the eye of the enormous Trump development that loomed just east of the flat space, and followed the spearhead underground to the north.
It wasn’t dark in here, there being numerous gratings facing the river, but it wasn’t bright. I walked uptown at a regular pace, noting the unchanging direction of the Spearhead’s pointer. Some thirty blocks later, the empty gravel expanse of the tunnels was interrupted by a mass of plywood and debris on the eastern side, formed into what looked like a maze of cubicles. The outer ones had windows cut into them, looking out onto the tracks - a squatter’s paradise. There were no people visible, though, and no sounds other than the ever-present noises of the city’s belly. I stopped for a moment and listened; nothing. Pulling out the Desert Eagle, I held it and my focused palm ready and felt for the pointer. It was angling right, pulling me into the maze.
Damn.
I took a moment and pulled energy out of the pocket watch, enfolding myself in muffling waves. I couldn’t make myself invisible, and there wasn’t enough traffic here to truly take eyes away from me, but I could certainly blend into the surroundings well enough in my tan and gray outfit. The pistol, matte gray finish already swallowing light, had its own permanent link to the watch, making it incredibly difficult to see unless one knew it was there. I held it out in front of me, invisibility waved before me as a shield, and stepped into the maze.
Ten minutes later I was lost. The tunnels were some hundred yards behind me, and I was moving inside an ancient and formidably large storm drain somewhere underneath what must have been West End Avenue by that point. There were still intermittent structures breaking up the lines of sight, all abandoned; the rail lines had re-opened some two years before, and the squatters of the tunnels had all been evicted. Some had left everything they owned, apparently - arcane and bizarre collections of the City’s detritus stretched out in all directions. One cube was stacked from floor to ceiling with obsolete but beautiful soda water dispensers, the old refillable kind in bright green and blue glass with metal siphons; stacked in wooden carriers, there must have been a thousand of them. Hammer Beverages, read most of the wooden boxes. All were empty.
A pile of typewriters greeted me around the next corner, Underwoods and Smith-Coronas, IBMs and the odd late-model electronic Panasonic or Canon. The manuals were in all conditions, those on the top of the pile in relatively good shape with those further down rusted into undifferentiated masses. I threaded my way through the museum of obsessive collecting, flowers of years on New York streets, and continued.
The spearhead gave me only a few moments’ warning, twisting slightly in its compartment as I turned to follow a passageway. I froze, immediately, at the sound of voices in the next corridor Westward - then moved again, around the corner towards a slight pale flicker of bright white light and the hissing of a Coleman lantern. Mutterings were coming from the room ahead, shadows moving across the lamp. I listened again, then reached out with more than ears; twistings were coming from there, too, the telltale feeling of work on higher planes reaching out to touch my tools. I stepped through the final doorway into a pool of gaslight.
There were two figures seated there, staring intently at their cards, laid out on a ruined wooden tabletop. The cards were from the standard Western deck, but there was more than one deck in play, judging from the duplicates, and the pattern was unknown to me. I moved closer to the lamp, gun trained on the two of them. They ignored me. Both were dressed in rags, appropriate to the surroundings; both were men, older, in a condition that would surprise you not at all if you met them sleeping in a subway station.
But they were not demented. Nor were they drugged. They were silently moving the cards around on the table, in a pattern which I realized looked something roughly like Manhattan. There must have been a couple of hundred cards. One of them turned and looked directly at me, then snorted and turned back, moving a six of Clubs three inches to the right - or Westwards, if the map held true. I just stared.
“It’s the boy.” The other spoke without looking at me, voice as rough as his skin and clothes.
“Mmmm.” The first tapped another card, this one face down, then withdrew his hand and looked over the arrangement.
The second looked up, also directly into my eye, through shields and gloom and past the brilliance of the lamp. I saw the rheum and milky color of his blindness, then, and lowered the gun but not my flash hand. “Hello, fathers.”
“Polite, he is, at least.”
I moved closer, into the light. “May I sit?”
The one who’d first looked at me turned again. I noted that he was wearing a New York Mets cap, incongruously clean; his compatriot was bareheaded. “Sit.”
I looked about, located a chair from a pile of several, and pulled it up to the table, then sat. I watched them quietly for a few minutes as they slowly and carefully shuffled cards around the table; from the closer distance I could see a rough chalk outline drawn around the cards that, indeed, resembled Manhattan’s shoreline. In the center of the island was a rectangle of leaves and grass, where the park would be. I couldn’t determine any other pattern in what they were doing; the cards moved, some slightly and some rapidly, either inches or yards. Some were face up, and some face down.
There was power on the table, but I was unable to determine its purpose.
The Mets fan placed a final card on the map, somewhere in East Harlem, and turned to me. “Ask.”
I frowned. “Are you moving cards to determine change? Or are you tracing change with them?”
“Is there a difference?”
“There is to me, father.”
The bareheaded wizard nodded. “You’re a tool user, boy. The flow is there. Can you feel the flow?”
I reached a palm out over the table. The Mets fan hissed once, but didn’t interfere. I spread my hands, reaching for the tendrils of energy that moved and built around my tools when I used them, but there was nothing. Still, I could tell the space above the table was far from empty. “No.”
“That’s good.”
I turned to him, surprised. “Why good?”
The Mets fan answered me, his voice gone harsh. “Because you may leave this place, then, boy.”
I looked from one to the other. “You can't leave? Either of you?” Both shook their heads. “Why not?”
The Mets fan spoke. “My name is Brian. I’ve been here eighteen years. Since the power came. It brought me here, back when the tunnels were bad, son, real bad. It’s been good, and bad, and now there’s no-one, but we stay. The power keeps us here. If we move, the balance breaks. We’re all that keeps it in check.” He reached out and flipped a card, apparently at random. The nine of diamonds, near Times Square.
I looked carefully across the table. “What is the balance?”
“The balance is what you see. All the Gifted, all the Others, they’re all here. They come, and go, but within Manhattan Island, we watch and balance. That’s our task.”
“All of us? We’re all there?”
Brian reached out and flipped a card just East of Times Square. The Queen of Spades. “Do you know her?”
“Who?” I looked at the card. It was a Bicycle, the plastic worn.
“Touch.”
I placed my finger on the card, face up on the table, and there it was-
The drink was too strong for him, far too strong, but he’d been sneering at her for an hour or more and there was nothing for it. Three swallows and he’d fall, if he was lucky; if he persisted, tried to prove his strength and took the fourth, then the growths would start in his throat and lungs, and he would waste and wrinkle as his life poured itself into the twisted seeds that took his blood. The Water of Death into the martini glass, just a drop, placed on the bar, and watch for his sneering smile. The smile of the human who thinks he’s found the answer, just like all the rest.
Four swallows, little sheep, just four-
I pulled my finger off the card instinctively. I was sweating, suddenly, my flash hand curled into a tight fist at my side and the pistol lying on its side on the table where I’d placed it instinctively when I touched the card. Baba Yaga’s thoughts were not just cold and hard, not just earthen and rotten, not just warm and lush, but completely and utterly wrong; they felt of crystalline age and swam with memories a thousandfold too complex for my brain.
“Where-” My voice cracked. I swallowed (one swallow) and tried again, forcing spittle into my mouth. “Where is my card?”
Brian looked at me, then reached out and plucked a pasteboard Hoyle from the table and held it out, the back to me. I looked at the pattern, then at him. “Can I-”
“You can, but will you?”
I reached out and took the card.
The screams woke me before my alarm clock did. I was out of bed before I really knew what was happening, the Desert Eagle in both hands, muzzle questing around my bedroom, but there was nobody there. I blinked five or six times, then realized how damn cold it was and how stupid I looked in my jockeys holding the enormous pistol, then decided I didn’t care when the scream ripped through the apartment again. The gun twitched towards the bedroom door of its own accord, and I ghosted over next to the entryway. After a breath or two, I opened it with my left hand, softly, then swung out into my small hallway.
Nothing.
A quick but tense check of my entire apartment showing nobody there except me, now sweating despite the chill in the two glimpses I’d gotten in the mirrors in my bathroom and in my living room. I returned to my bedroom, pulled on clothes and hardware hurriedly, and then returned to the kitchen with the pistol holstered under my Burberry. Another scream rent the air around me, making me wince; it sounded like the screamer was in the same damn room as I was.
Hold it.
I live in a small apartment below the meatpacking district, in the west end of Greenwich Village, in a building that was built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Whatever else I and the other residents have to say about its upkeep (and we have lots, mostly during co-op meetings) the walls of the building are solid and thick - one of the reasons that repairs cost so much to do properly. There was no way someone screaming from another apartment, or even the hallway outside, could have sounded that clear.
I closed my eyes and did what I could to stop my talent, shutting down my senses. I stopped Listening and waited.
Nothing happened for several minutes. I grimaced and Listened again. Ten seconds later, another scream assaulted my head but, I now knew, not my ears. Someone, or something, was in serious agony, and they weren’t screaming where normal people could hear.
I got my keys, made sure my bandolier was tight around my chest, and headed down onto the street.
Seven blocks later, I knew I was in trouble. I’d convinced Bobbi-Bobbi’s spearhead to Hunt for the source of the screams, and the piece of stone had led me seven blocks, to where I stood just off Hudson street and looked hard at a building that dripped 1960s from every inch of its utilitarian earth-tone faux-brick facade.
The police and I get along just fine, with one major caveat. I do everything in my power to make sure that they have no idea I exist. Oh, sure, Michel Wibert exists; I have a driver’s license, passport, all the various pieces of policeman tranquilizing paper that society has manifested over the years. One thing he doesn’t have, though, is a gun permit. Have you ever even looked at the requirements for getting a carry permit in Manhattan? Unless you’re a police officer or some Federal equivalent thereof, trust me, it’s a much easier proposition to march down to Washington D.C. and ask for an end-user certificate for this nice two-kilogram lump of plutonium-239 you have in your bedstand and want to sell overseas.
There’s no place at all to apply for permits to carry magic talismans. You just have to hope nobody sees you use them; at least, nobody who will report it and be believed.
As I stood there looking indecisively at the front of the police station, there was another scream. I winced, shook my head, and went inside. The entry hall was only moderately crowded, reflecting early morning in the Village. I ignored the familiar pulse of heat from my pocket watch as I passed through the metal detector posts just inside the door, heading for the corridor out of the lobby. There was another, stronger wave of warmth as the desk sergeant glanced my way and the Djinn’s shadow flexed from inside the watch to cover all of me rather than just the weapons under my coat.
I’d never been in this station before, but New York’s Finest weren’t all that imaginative and neither were their architects. Just off the lobby I found the wire-caged staircase up and took it two flights, past the community services floor to the realm of the actual police and pushed through a grimy double door whose windows bore a large NYPD shield. The bullpen was almost empty, most of the detectives on duty obviously out on the street, but the doors to the interrogation room corridor were closed.
I sighed, turned up my collar and hunched through the doors. Nobody even looked my way. The first room was closed, and I looked through the one-way mirror in the door before entering.
People assume that humans can’t hurt gods, or demons, or mythforms. They’re wrong. We can. It’s not easy, and it’s not always true - most of the othersiders walking New York aren’t bothered by whatever us smaller folks might do. But not all gods are created equal, and where one person can’t do much directed harm, people can cause all manner of pain.
There were two people in the room behind the mirror. They were sitting on the side of the table near the door, facing the solitary figure in the chair on the other side. He was slumped to one side in the straight-backed wooden seat, and despite the poor angle I could see numerous wire leads snaking out from beneath his open shirt collar, connecting to a cart which sat next to him. I winced involuntarily. He was small, with features that would have been recognizable to anyone in the Cradle of Civilization and in our modern world served only to mark him.
As I watched through the window, he shuddered and the piercing shriek echoed in my skull again. The two cops in the room beyond showed no sign of having heard, although one was shaking his head wearily. I felt my face hardening. Schooling it to relax, I pushed open the door and walked in.
There were four interrogators in the room, not just the two I’d seen. Two were leaning against the wall to either side of the door, doing their best to look threatening. I managed not to sneer at the overkill, but it was difficult. Everybody turned to look at me as I came in; the Djinn’s shadow couldn’t do anything about doors moving.
“Who the hell are you?” That had to be the ranking cop. He was in his mid forties, which probably meant Detective Lieutenant. The other man at the table with him, I realized, wasn’t a cop at all. His suit pegged him as Federal, matching one of the two door lurkers. Ah, the joys of interagency cooperation. I ignored the question and looked at their subject. He was slumping further in the grip of the leads. Yep. Lie detector. Technological disbelief, in its most concentrated form.
“I said who the hell are you?” The cop stood up. The Feds merely looked interested, no doubt happy to have the cop look discomfited on his turf.
“I’m a neighbor. Get that thing off him.”
“What?” The demand was so flat the cop wasn’t even angered, just confused, for the moment.
“Get that thing off him.” I waved at the lie detector.
The Fed sitting at the table cocked his head interestedly. “Excuse me, but did you say who the hell you were?”
“No. I’m a neighbor.”
“A neighbor. How did you get in here?”
I grinned nastily at him. Damn, I was angrier than I had thought. “Bad call. See, asking how I got in here in front of the suspect admits that I shouldn’t be here and that I made it in here anyway.”
The Fed and the cop near the door, in a striking display of cooperation, had glanced at each other and begun drifting in behind me. I stepped forward to the other side of the table, putting it between myself and the four officials, and moved to the side of the figure in the chair. He looked up at me, his eyes almost blank. He was drooling slightly.
“Don’t touch him!” The cop, who hadn’t blocked my movement deeper into the room, reached across the table, but he was too late. I ripped the electrical pads from the slight figure’s chest and ribcage, eliciting a slight moan, and tossed them over the cart. At that , the cop who had been near the door came around the table and made a grab for my arm, there was a flash of golden light, and it all went pear-shaped.
When the dust had cleared, I was still standing. The four official types were slumped against one wall, out cold, and the Egyptian in the chair (for he was Egyptian, I knew) was watching me through hooded eyes, curious but weak. “Who are you?”
“Like I told them. I’m a neighbor. Welcome to New York. Sorry about the reception committee.” I helped him to his feet, wincing as he shuddered in pain at stretching muscles wrung taut by spasms.
“A neighbor. Who do you serve?”
We moved out into the hall. “My bartender. One moment.” I swung open the next door, and sure enough there was an observation room looking through a mirror into the room we’d just left. We hobbled in and I made my companion lean against a wall while I found the operating VCR. I rested my left hand on it and felt the Djinn’s shadow flood out into the machine in a rush of power, then took up his weight again and guided him downstairs. We made our way past the lobby with no more than a brief misdirection on my part (the watch was warm in its bandolier pocket, now) and then out onto the street. I hailed a cab on Hudson and we climbed in. “The Brasserie.”
On the way uptown, I turned to my companion. He was breathing hard, but visibly recovering from his ordeal. “Are you well?”
“I shall be. What was that terrible device?”
“A polygraph. Give them grace, they didn’t intend you harm. It does no hurt to humans.”
“A lie detector.”
“Yes. It is a technology based on disbelief.”
He shuddered again and turned to look out the window as the grey buildings flowed by. We rode in silence until the cliffs of midtown drew to a halt outside the cab. I paid and ushered him out of the car into the restaurant. Although I expected at least a question, he seemed too weary to care; when we slid into two empty seats at the long bar which curved its way through the basement space of the Brasserie, he slumped forward. I waited, not disturbing him; eventually, one of the bartenders noticed us and nodded. I nodded back and waited.
When he arrived, he offered me an elegantly inclined eyebrow. “Bourbon. A.H. Hirsch if you have it,” I stated. “And if Msamaki is here, tell him France wants to see him.” I put a twenty down on the bar. “Run the tab.”
The tender nodded again, respectful of the tip. I took my hand off of it, and he performed the bartender magic of making it vanish without bringing his hands near it. “For your friend, sir?”
“He’ll order when we see you again.”
“Very good.” He slid off. I like The Brasserie for two reasons. One, it’s open twenty-four hours a day. Two, and as a consequence, the staff is actually fairly competent if you know how to find the right ones.
My companion’s shoulders shook. It looked as if he was weeping, but I didn’t ask or interfere. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later, my drink appeared, a walking dead bourbon from a time long past; I sipped it appreciatively and let it relax my shoulders.
“I don’t know why I am here.” His voice was unremarkable, even muffled by his forearms. In fact, most of him could have been described as unremarkable, sitting there. I sipped again and looked at the figure which had screamed its agony into New York’s nightmares.
“What is the last thing you recall?”
He lifted his face from his crosed arms and blinked at me. He had, indeed, been weeping. “I was standing on the banks. There was new growth. I remember birds.”
I was distracted by someone approaching behind the bar. I turned, but it was Msamaki, whom I had expected. His face opened as he recognized me. “France. It is good to see you.”
“And you, Maki. I need your help.”
“What can I do for you?” Msamaki looked good, standing before me in the Brasserie’s slightly overdone uniform. I had helped him past some overly aggressive minor Djinn when he arrived, immigrating from the town of Bani Suef. In the ten years since, I had consulted him a handful of times when I needed help with Egyptian lore, as I was fairly sure I did now. I nodded to my companion.
“Him.”
Msamaki looked over the other carefully, frowning slightly, and offered “Ahlan wa sahlan.”
My rescuee looked up briefly and shook his head. Msamaki tried again, his face more interested. “Em hotep nefer?”
The other’s eyes brightened slightly, and he nodded. Msamaki sucked in his breath and looked carefully at the figure, then reached under the bar and pulled out a glass. Without looking, he waved the bar wand over it and placed it in front of the other, who sat up and took it with a short bow of thanks.
As he picked it up, it slopped over the side. I stared at it, because Maki had only filled it halfway. On the way to his lips, it spilled several cups. After he placed it on the bar, water slowly and quietly began to well up over the rim and spread down the surface. I lifted my arms off the countertop. Maki swept the glass off the counter and clasped the other’s hands in both of his, pulled them to his mouth and kissed the man’s clenched fist.
Well, that answered one of my questions.
I let them talk urgently in what definitely wasn’t modern Arabic for several minutes. In fact, I let them talk until I’d finished my Hirsch, at which point my patience ran dry as well. I wiggled my glass at Maki, who noticed only after I poked him in the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, France.” He took my glass and dashed off back to the back wall where the bottles were, returning momentarily with a generous pour of bourbon.
“Maki, what’s going on?”
“Where did you find him?” The excitement was setting off warning bells in my head. I frowned at the bartender.
“Never mind that right now. Who is he?”
“This is Hapy.”
I mulled that over and tried to pull a reference out of the mess that is my head. “Hapy. Hapy. Wait. On the banks...” I turned to look at the nondescript man on the stool next to me. “God of the Nile?”
“Yes!” Msamaki hissed, blazingly excited but trying to keep his voice down. “God of the Nile! Fertility and produce, bringer of life to the valley.”
I looked at the slight figure, who bowed his head. Something was bothering me. Something old.
“Maki, the Nile was linked to fertility because...” I trailed off, looking at the little man and then the remaining puddle on the bar in horror. Msamaki finished for me, oblivious to my expression.
“Because it would overflow regularly and fertilize the valley, yes. Why?”
I sat there at the bar in Midtown Manhattan, snug between two rivers, and looked at him.
It took a few seconds for him to turn his gaze to me and notice, and then he blanched.
“Oh, shit.”
The screams woke me before my alarm clock did. I was out of bed before I really knew what was happening, the Desert Eagle in both hands, muzzle questing around my bedroom, but there was nobody there. I blinked five or six times, then realized how damn cold it was and how stupid I looked in my jockeys holding the enormous pistol, then decided I didn’t care when the scream ripped through the apartment again. The gun twitched towards the bedroom door of its own accord, and I ghosted over next to the entryway. After a breath or two, I opened it with my left hand, softly, then swung out into my small hallway.
Nothing.
A quick but tense check of my entire apartment showing nobody there except me, now sweating despite the chill in the two glimpses I’d gotten in the mirrors in my bathroom and in my living room. I returned to my bedroom, pulled on clothes and hardware hurriedly, and then returned to the kitchen with the pistol holstered under my Burberry. Another scream rent the air around me, making me wince; it sounded like the screamer was in the same damn room as I was.
Hold it.
I live in a small apartment below the meatpacking district, in the west end of Greenwich Village, in a building that was built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Whatever else I and the other residents have to say about its upkeep (and we have lots, mostly during co-op meetings) the walls of the building are solid and thick - one of the reasons that repairs cost so much to do properly. There was no way someone screaming from another apartment, or even the hallway outside, could have sounded that clear.
I closed my eyes and did what I could to stop my talent, shutting down my senses. I stopped Listening and waited.
Nothing happened for several minutes. I grimaced and Listened again. Ten seconds later, another scream assaulted my head but, I now knew, not my ears. Someone, or something, was in serious agony, and they weren’t screaming where normal people could hear.
I got my keys, made sure my bandolier was tight around my chest, and headed down onto the street.
Seven blocks later, I knew I was in trouble. I’d convinced Bobbi-Bobbi’s spearhead to Hunt for the source of the screams, and the piece of stone had led me seven blocks, to where I stood just off Hudson street and looked hard at a building that dripped 1960s from every inch of its utilitarian earth-tone faux-brick facade.
The police and I get along just fine, with one major caveat. I do everything in my power to make sure that they have no idea I exist. Oh, sure, Michel Wibert exists; I have a driver’s license, passport, all the various pieces of policeman tranquilizing paper that society has manifested over the years. One thing he doesn’t have, though, is a gun permit. Have you ever even looked at the requirements for getting a carry permit in Manhattan? Unless you’re a police officer or some Federal equivalent thereof, trust me, it’s a much easier proposition to march down to Washington D.C. and ask for an end-user certificate for this nice two-kilogram lump of plutonium-239 you have in your bedstand and want to sell overseas.
There’s no place at all to apply for permits to carry magic talismans. You just have to hope nobody sees you use them; at least, nobody who will report it and be believed.
As I stood there looking indecisively at the front of the police station, there was another scream. I winced, shook my head, and went inside. The entry hall was only moderately crowded, reflecting early morning in the Village. I ignored the familiar pulse of heat from my pocket watch as I passed through the metal detector posts just inside the door, heading for the corridor out of the lobby. There was another, stronger wave of warmth as the desk sergeant glanced my way and the Djinn’s shadow flexed from inside the watch to cover all of me rather than just the weapons under my coat.
I’d never been in this station before, but New York’s Finest weren’t all that imaginative and neither were their architects. Just off the lobby I found the wire-caged staircase up and took it two flights, past the community services floor to the realm of the actual police and pushed through a grimy double door whose windows bore a large NYPD shield. The bullpen was almost empty, most of the detectives on duty obviously out on the street, but the doors to the interrogation room corridor were closed.
I sighed, turned up my collar and hunched through the doors. Nobody even looked my way. The first room was closed, and I looked through the one-way mirror in the door before entering.
People assume that humans can’t hurt gods, or demons, or mythforms. They’re wrong. We can. It’s not easy, and it’s not always true - most of the othersiders walking New York aren’t bothered by whatever us smaller folks might do. But not all gods are created equal, and where one person can’t do much directed harm, people can cause all manner of pain.
There were two people in the room behind the mirror. They were sitting on the side of the table near the door, facing the solitary figure in the chair on the other side. He was slumped to one side in the straight-backed wooden seat, and despite the poor angle I could see numerous wire leads snaking out from beneath his open shirt collar, connecting to a cart which sat next to him. I winced involuntarily. He was small, with features that would have been recognizable to anyone in the Cradle of Civilization and in our modern world served only to mark him.
As I watched through the window, he shuddered and the piercing shriek echoed in my skull again. The two cops in the room beyond showed no sign of having heard, although one was shaking his head wearily. I felt my face hardening. Schooling it to relax, I pushed open the door and walked in.
There were four interrogators in the room, not just the two I’d seen. Two were leaning against the wall to either side of the door, doing their best to look threatening. I managed not to sneer at the overkill, but it was difficult. Everybody turned to look at me as I came in; the Djinn’s shadow couldn’t do anything about doors moving.
“Who the hell are you?” That had to be the ranking cop. He was in his mid forties, which probably meant Detective Lieutenant. The other man at the table with him, I realized, wasn’t a cop at all. His suit pegged him as Federal, matching one of the two door lurkers. Ah, the joys of interagency cooperation. I ignored the question and looked at their subject. He was slumping further in the grip of the leads. Yep. Lie detector. Technological disbelief, in its most concentrated form.
“I said who the hell are you?” The cop stood up. The Feds merely looked interested, no doubt happy to have the cop look discomfited on his turf.
“I’m a neighbor. Get that thing off him.”
“What?” The demand was so flat the cop wasn’t even angered, just confused, for the moment.
“Get that thing off him.” I waved at the lie detector.
The Fed sitting at the table cocked his head interestedly. “Excuse me, but did you say who the hell you were?”
“No. I’m a neighbor.”
“A neighbor. How did you get in here?”
I grinned nastily at him. Damn, I was angrier than I had thought. “Bad call. See, asking how I got in here in front of the suspect admits that I shouldn’t be here and that I made it in here anyway.”
The Fed and the cop near the door, in a striking display of cooperation, had glanced at each other and begun drifting in behind me. I stepped forward to the other side of the table, putting it between myself and the four officials, and moved to the side of the figure in the chair. He looked up at me, his eyes almost blank. He was drooling slightly.
“Don’t touch him!” The cop, who hadn’t blocked my movement deeper into the room, reached across the table, but he was too late. I ripped the electrical pads from the slight figure’s chest and ribcage, eliciting a slight moan, and tossed them over the cart. At that , the cop who had been near the door came around the table and made a grab for my arm, there was a flash of golden light, and it all went pear-shaped.
When the dust had cleared, I was still standing. The four official types were slumped against one wall, out cold, and the Egyptian in the chair (for he was Egyptian, I knew) was watching me through hooded eyes, curious but weak. “Who are you?”
“Like I told them. I’m a neighbor. Welcome to New York. Sorry about the reception committee.” I helped him to his feet, wincing as he shuddered in pain at stretching muscles wrung taut by spasms.
“A neighbor. Who do you serve?”
We moved out into the hall. “My bartender. One moment.” I swung open the next door, and sure enough there was an observation room looking through a mirror into the room we’d just left. We hobbled in and I made my companion lean against a wall while I found the operating VCR. I rested my left hand on it and felt the Djinn’s shadow flood out into the machine in a rush of power, then took up his weight again and guided him downstairs. We made our way past the lobby with no more than a brief misdirection on my part (the watch was warm in its bandolier pocket, now) and then out onto the street. I hailed a cab on Hudson and we climbed in. “The Brasserie.”
On the way uptown, I turned to my companion. He was breathing hard, but visibly recovering from his ordeal. “Are you well?”
“I shall be. What was that terrible device?”
“A polygraph. Give them grace, they didn’t intend you harm. It does no hurt to humans.”
“A lie detector.”
“Yes. It is a technology based on disbelief.”
He shuddered again and turned to look out the window as the grey buildings flowed by. We rode in silence until the cliffs of midtown drew to a halt outside the cab. I paid and ushered him out of the car into the restaurant. Although I expected at least a question, he seemed too weary to care; when we slid into two empty seats at the long bar which curved its way through the basement space of the Brasserie, he slumped forward. I waited, not disturbing him; eventually, one of the bartenders noticed us and nodded. I nodded back and waited.
When he arrived, he offered me an elegantly inclined eyebrow. “Bourbon. A.H. Hirsch if you have it,” I stated. “And if Msamaki is here, tell him France wants to see him.” I put a twenty down on the bar. “Run the tab.”
The tender nodded again, respectful of the tip. I took my hand off of it, and he performed the bartender magic of making it vanish without bringing his hands near it. “For your friend, sir?”
“He’ll order when we see you again.”
“Very good.” He slid off. I like The Brasserie for two reasons. One, it’s open twenty-four hours a day. Two, and as a consequence, the staff is actually fairly competent if you know how to find the right ones.
My companion’s shoulders shook. It looked as if he was weeping, but I didn’t ask or interfere. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later, my drink appeared, a walking dead bourbon from a time long past; I sipped it appreciatively and let it relax my shoulders.
“I don’t know why I am here.” His voice was unremarkable, even muffled by his forearms. In fact, most of him could have been described as unremarkable, sitting there. I sipped again and looked at the figure which had screamed its agony into New York’s nightmares.
“What is the last thing you recall?”
He lifted his face from his crosed arms and blinked at me. He had, indeed, been weeping. “I was standing on the banks. There was new growth. I remember birds.”
I was distracted by someone approaching behind the bar. I turned, but it was Msamaki, whom I had expected. His face opened as he recognized me. “France. It is good to see you.”
“And you, Maki. I need your help.”
“What can I do for you?” Msamaki looked good, standing before me in the Brasserie’s slightly overdone uniform. I had helped him past some overly aggressive minor Djinn when he arrived, immigrating from the town of Bani Suef. In the ten years since, I had consulted him a handful of times when I needed help with Egyptian lore, as I was fairly sure I did now. I nodded to my companion.
“Him.”
Msamaki looked over the other carefully, frowning slightly, and offered “Ahlan wa sahlan.”
My rescuee looked up briefly and shook his head. Msamaki tried again, his face more interested. “Em hotep nefer?”
The other’s eyes brightened slightly, and he nodded. Msamaki sucked in his breath and looked carefully at the figure, then reached under the bar and pulled out a glass. Without looking, he waved the bar wand over it and placed it in front of the other, who sat up and took it with a short bow of thanks.
As he picked it up, it slopped over the side. I stared at it, because Maki had only filled it halfway. On the way to his lips, it spilled several cups. After he placed it on the bar, water slowly and quietly began to well up over the rim and spread down the surface. I lifted my arms off the countertop. Maki swept the glass off the counter and clasped the other’s hands in both of his, pulled them to his mouth and kissed the man’s clenched fist.
Well, that answered one of my questions.
I let them talk urgently in what definitely wasn’t modern Arabic for several minutes. In fact, I let them talk until I’d finished my Hirsch, at which point my patience ran dry as well. I wiggled my glass at Maki, who noticed only after I poked him in the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, France.” He took my glass and dashed off back to the back wall where the bottles were, returning momentarily with a generous pour of bourbon.
“Maki, what’s going on?”
“Where did you find him?” The excitement was setting off warning bells in my head. I frowned at the bartender.
“Never mind that right now. Who is he?”
“This is Hapy.”
I mulled that over and tried to pull a reference out of the mess that is my head. “Hapy. Hapy. Wait. On the banks...” I turned to look at the nondescript man on the stool next to me. “God of the Nile?”
“Yes!” Msamaki hissed, blazingly excited but trying to keep his voice down. “God of the Nile! Fertility and produce, bringer of life to the valley.”
I looked at the slight figure, who bowed his head. Something was bothering me. Something old.
“Maki, the Nile was linked to fertility because...” I trailed off, looking at the little man and then the remaining puddle on the bar in horror. Msamaki finished for me, oblivious to my expression.
“Because it would overflow regularly and fertilize the valley, yes. Why?”
I sat there at the bar in Midtown Manhattan, snug between two rivers, and looked at him.
It took a few seconds for him to turn his gaze to me and notice, and then he blanched.
“Oh, shit.”
I nodded to the four or five kids sitting around on crates there as I went inside. One of them knew my face and nodded back. As I went in, he was muttering to his companions, something which I assumed and devoutly hoped was the patois equivalent of 'he's cool.'
The interior of the shop was just as it always was. Not so much cluttered as intricately packed in three dimensions with junk - at least, objects that I would label junk, but which were likely treasures to someone, somewhere. The entirety of the airspace that was left was redolent with what I was sure was incredibly high-grade weed, well-aerosolized by the enormous bong that reached from floor to ceiling at the back behind the counter.
There was an older man lounging there with a hookah tube hanging lazily from his mouth while he talked rapidly to a younger woman who was in front of the counter, apparently haggling over some small piece of merchandise. I blinked at him, both because of the smoke and because I'd never seen anybody who was stoned talk that fast. While I was trying to decide if that meant he wasn't stoned, or if it meant he was just an instinctive haggler to such a degree that the drug didn't touch his flow, he noticed me standing there in the half-light and waved me forward. Without stopping his patter, he lifted up the counter gate and passed me through. I stepped by with a nod of thanks, and he slapped my shoulder as I turned down the narrow staircase that was mostly hidden behind hangings on the back wall.
A deceptively long flight down, I came out into the small vestibule I remembered. The door was closed. I knocked once. A voice came through the solid metal surface. "What?"
"Here to see Alan."
"Who dat?"
"Downtown France."
A peephole slid open to reveal a pair of eyes which focused on my face beneath the single bulb, then crinkled in what was likely a grin. "Yah, mon. Stand back, now."
I stepped back up the stairs a pace while the door made chunking noises and then opened outwards, then stepped through. The enormous man guarding it clasped hands with me and pulled me into a hug which nearly broke my spine. "Michel, brah, 'tis you an' all."
"Ow. Damn, Demaine, you're too big to do that." I hugged him back before reclaiming my hand. "Your dad here?"
Demaine turned to secure the door behind me. "Yah mon. Him in back, go right t'rough."
I did that. The back room was much larger, the edges of it set in shadow, with a desk in the very center brightly illuminated by halogen desklamps at the corners of its ruthlessly empty surface. Behind it sat an older Jamaican man, his eyes bright behind cheap spectacles. As I came in, he rose, his face sliding into shadow as it rose above the lamps. "Ah, France. Is good t' see you uptown." We shook hands and he gestured me to a chair across the desk from him; we both sat.
"Hello, Alan. I hope you're well."
"As well as can be, now. You got needs?"
"I do. First, though, is Demaine all right?"
"Tis good of you t'ask. He is. Nobody come knockin' for him, not since you talk to de rider for us."
"I'm glad. If they haven't spoken to you by now, they likely won't."
"You credit always good here, France, for that work." Teeth flashed white in the darkness. "You one of mine, now, ever an' ever."
"Thanks, Alan. I don't need credit right now, though. I need your help, but it's cash on the desk."
Alan laughed, rubbed his hands together. "Cash always a friend too, France. Always. You tell Alan what you need."
I grinned at him. "First of all, your help." I reached into my bandolier. Alan watched interestedly as I pulled out the stone spearhead and placed it carefully in the middle of the desk. "I got this from a friend. I need to know if you can tell me anything about it."
Alan picked up the spearhead and turned it over in his hands. He touched it to the center of his forehead, then jerked it away with a hiss. "Oh, mon! This hot. Ver' ver' hot, brother. All manner power in here."
I sat back. "I know. I just don't know how to use it."
"Ahhhh." He reached out and stretched one of the lamps up higher, creating a larger pool of light. Holding the spearhead before his left eye, he rotated it carefully, his right eye closed to a slit and his left open as wide as it would go. I could almost see the loupe that he didn't need screwed into his eye socket as he looked at it. "This not from the loa."
"Nope." Alan was familiar with the Jamaican voodoo pantheon; too familiar. He'd been a reasonably successful dealer until he hit upon the notion of asking them for help with his business. Unfortunately for him, one of them had agreed - and the price had been his son. He'd tried everything, bringing all manner of bokkors from Jamaica to intercede for him, but none had managed the trick. I'd met him in the course of his desperate last attempt to trade himself for his son, at a makeshift altar in Central Park. I'd been following the loa he was calling, and it had led me to his crude summoning. When he'd offered the trade, the loa had laughed and said it had no reason to accept.
I'd given it one. It was a bargain I hadn't liked at the time, and still didn't - but it had agreed, and dropped its claim on Demaine. I lost one day a year, usually ending up with massive hangovers and enormous credit card bills, and Alan welcomed me where I would normally have been shunned. The loa made out well on the deal, as a single day of a willing and wealthy horse was apparently worth more than the month a year of a sullen and unwilling slave. So far, it had always been careful not to run me afoul of the law, presumably to avoid ruining its playground. It's a good thing I didn't care about my reputation, though. It had been five years since our bargain, and there were five more years to run.
"Michel, you have tried touch, yah?"
I nodded at him. "Doesn't respond."
"Yah. Thought not enough. Touch not enough. This a weapon, mon. It respond to only one thing."
I slapped myself on the forehead. "Oh, for- of course."
He grinned. "You brave enough, white man?"
I gave him a dirty look, and pulled my Swiss army knife out of my pocket. He put the spearhead back down on the desk. I extended the pen blade and pricked my left thumb, then squeezed a drop of blood onto the surface of the spearhead. There was a crackling WHOOM somewhere behind my forehead, and I felt the power force its way into me. The spearhead quivered on the desk and lifted slightly into the air to hover before my face, spinning slowly. Alan whistled softly. I looked at it. "Now what?"
"Think about something, Michel. Think about something that not here."
I frowned, and formed an image of Demaine. The spearhead shuddered and then spun to point at the door. "Ahhhhh." I reached out and plucked it from the air. Power crackled into my finger. "That's...nice."
"That a serious mojo."
Still holding it, I thought about Baba Yaga. It trembled in my hand, but I held it firmly. I shuddered at a wave of dizziness, and my eyes were drawn inexorably to the wall - the downtown wall. I forced my gaze back to Alan and let my arm rise and point; when I followed it, it was pointing at exactly the same spot. "South."
"Now you know, France."
"Thanks, Alan." I tucked the spearhead into the bandolier and tightened the pocket around it. I sat with my eyes closed for a few minutes, flexing not-muscles, until I could close down the conduit of power that reached from me to the spearhead, and think of objects without the overriding directional cue. Then I opened my eyes.
"You got what you need, France? That don' cost you nothin'."
I laughed. "Not yet, Alan. I need some hardware, too."
Alan laughed again, and reached under the desk. The lights came on around the room's edges, outlining racks along the walls. Weapons, enough to outfit at least a regiment of Marines, were neatly hung around the room. "It Red Tag day always, France, for you. You take what you need."
I dropped a bundle of hundred-dollar bills on the desk, stood up, and shook Alan's hand. He shook his head, but I pushed the bills across to him. "Cash on the desk, Alan. Someday I'll need that credit, maybe. But until I need it, cash on the desk."
He grinned again.
I left the head shop with a twin to my Desert Eagle, a silenced Beretta, ammunition and spare magazines for both, a hideaway Derringer in an ankle holster, an extendable baton, two pairs of handcuffs and a ring of handcuff keys and four stun grenades in a brown paper bag.
On the way out, I nodded to the boys still sitting outside. Three of them grinned at me, and I patted my coat and grinned back. All four laughed.
Then I walked to the Six train and rode it back down to the Village, trying not to clank as I went.
There were nine people at the grave site besides myself and the priest, who shook my hand last and walked away to give me time and space for a family goodbye. I waited until he was out of sight around the trees before raising my head to the surrounding woods. "You can come out now."
Dozens of shapes, some nearly human and some entirely not, emerged from the shadows. Some walked. Some drifted. Some simply weren't and then were, a moment later. Those I had known were there but had been unable to point to came to the graveside with me to pay their respects to my grandmother.
I had had no idea how many of the New York dispossessed knew her. As I moved in their circles, toes dipping in the pools of myth and immortality, I had come to understand that she was a Power among them. Perhaps not one of control, or retribution, or of wealth; but a Power nonetheless, whose presence they would miss.
The tall, ice-faced woman knelt before the grave, quickly, and did something with her hands before standing and walking past me. She spared me one glance of her sapphire eyes, but they flickered once with the persona behind them, something rare and gifted only to me on this afternoon in our shared loss.
A nondescript man with a cellular telephone headset and Middle Eastern features came forward to look at the tombstone. I didn't recognize him, but when he turned to leave, he nodded to me, once, and was careful not to touch me. I bowed to him them, and when our eyes met again I placed my right hand to my breast and the hard shape there. He smiled once, pleased, and hurried off.
There were dark shapes near the ground that sniffed about her grave and then scurried away without looking back. A glowing form hovered over the open cut hole for a moment before floating upwards and out of sight despite a moment when I could have sworn that it was looking at me. And so it went, the gods and demons of New York paying, if not tribute, at least acknowledgement to the passing of a human who had known them.
When the last of them had gone and the graveyard was quiet, I shoveled earth thrice on the coffin and went home.
In my apartment, the same small one near the Hudson where she'd raised me, I looked at the desk in front of me and the objects arrayed there. A pocket watch, gold and white and ornate; a crystal vial, and a stone spear point. The three of them, free of their leather prison, represented the most powerful of the talismans I had collected in my years of negotiating and conversing with the powers of New York. Two of them I knew intimately. The third, the spear point of Bobbi-Bobbi, I had little idea how to use. My talent could feel the power in it, crackling, different from the smooth ripples of the vial or the glow of the watch, but I had had no luck in releasing it or bringing it forth by demand.
The doorbell chimed once. I rose wearily and went to answer it.
On the other side of the fisheye lens was the Middle Eastern man I'd seen at the funeral. I gaped for a moment, surprised, then turned the locks and opened the door. He looked up at me, having been examining the lintel. "You have protection here," he said in an unfamiliar accent.
"I do."
"That is good. May I come in?"
I looked at him carefully, then said "Please wait here a moment." He nodded. I closed the door and went back to my office, scooping up the talismans and placing them in my bandolier - save the pocket watch. With that in hand, I returned to the door. I opened it and opened my hand, the watch lying on my palm with the face up.
The man looked at it and smiled again. "Ah."
"Please pardon my caution. This is my home."
"I understand." He reached out, very carefully, and touched the watch's face without touching me, then withdrew his hand. The watch gleamed brighter in the dim incandescents of the elevator lobby for a moment, then pulsed a deep and brilliant gold, light flooding from it to wash down the crevices and holes of the old building.
I bowed and stood back to let the Djinn inside.
We sat facing each other across the scarred kitchen table where Nan and I had had our lessons those years ago. He removed the headset from his left ear and placed it deliberately on the table, pressing a button on it to still its bright blue blinking, before looking me in the eye. "What do you know of Irem Zhat al-Imad?" he asked me.
This wasn't what I had expected. "Irem of the Pillars?"
"Yes."
I frowned. "I've read of it. Please excuse my ignorance if this is incorrect. It was supposedly a city built in the Rhub al-Qali, the Empty Quarter of the Desert, by the Djinn. They built it at the behest of the lord of a giant race. It's a myth; no-one - that is, no mortal - has seen Irem."
The Djinn nodded. "Some of that is even true." He looked around my kitchen, then at his headset on the table. I had the sudden feeling he was trying to avoid continuing.
"Old One, do you have something to tell me?" I asked him quietly.
He looked up, the eyes in his vessel's head dripping orange flame down onto the floor. It hissed and vanished without harming anything. His face bore a rictus grin. "Yes, Michel. I need your help."
That was new. "If I can help you, Old One, I will." I looked into the silently flickering eyes as I said it, wondering idly if the man sitting across from me had a family and if so what they thought he was doing at the moment. Sitting in my kitchen discussing lost mythical cities probably wasn't it. "May I ask you to do something?"
"What?"
"If you have a story to tell me, I would ask you to visit me and release this man."
The Djinn slumped. The eyes faded back to normal. "That was my intention, if you would allow it."
I reached across the table and laid my hand palm up on its surface. "What shall I tell him?"
"He is a taxi driver. Tell him he has delivered his package to you and he will leave. His cab is parked downstairs." The Djinn didn't move for a moment. "It has been a very, very long time, Michel, since I had a body."
"What will serve you more at this time, a body or your power?"
"My power." He laid his hand on mine.
There was a flash of soundless noise, of dark light. I felt his fingers clench reflexively around my own for a moment, and then release. I opened my eyes from the squint they had assumed to see the man across my table look around, confused, and snatch up his headset. "Where am I? Who are you?" He stood, quickly.
I stood as well, digging in my pocket for a bill. I held it out to him. "Thanks for the delivery." He looked at me, face wild for a moment. I worked to hold my face pleasant and slightly curious, the five dollars extended. He looked around again, then took it automatically.
"Uh. You're welcome. Package...?"
"Yes. I'd hoped you'd get this to me within the hour, and all set, plenty of time. Thank you." I walked around the table towards the door. He followed, still looking around himself with a confused look but willing to be led. I nodded to him and ushered him out without touching him before locking the door and returning to the living room and seating myself on the sofa. There was a mirror on the wall opposite, a tall thin one that might have passed for decoration. I faced it.
"Old one?"
In the mirror, I nodded, my eyes glowing slightly. "Yes."
"Why don't you tell me what this is about?"
So I settled back onto my couch and listened to the tale.
* * *
The streets of Manhattan channel the flows of humanity, gutters of intellect and emotion on the feast of interaction that is urban life. Walking east towards Central Park from the One/Nine train I reached out with what senses I have and those I have stolen, but feel nothing out of the ordinary.
The Djinn's story has brought me here. He is gone, into a random commuter in the Fourteenth Street Subway Station without a backwards glance, merely an assurance in my head that he will know to find me if I am successful. I reached a hand into my coat to touch the talismans for reassurance, feel their energy slick and warm near me. Bobbi-Bobbi's arrowhead crackled strangely.
I pass the Museum of Natural History, settled in for the night in its small but comfortable block of parkland. The new Planetarium building was a riot of glass and light on the north side, drawing my eye as I walked on towards Central Park.
The Park itself was dark, but not completely. Not the lethal anarchy of even ten years ago, Central Park now held strollers, the curious, the amorous, and even tourists. I slipped into the interior, heading for the eastern side of the Reservoir, where the Djinn had said to look. Still nothing to feel, nothing to See or Hear.
But perhaps a half-kilometer short of my goal, all that changed.
I stopped short, there on the paved ribbon of the Park Drive, looking eastwards into the gloom. There was a presence there, somewhere a distance off, in the direction I was heading. I'd never felt its like, but it was muted, somehow. A muffled basso drone of power.
I continued on, reaching the Reservoir, and circled it until I reached the closed and locked access point, iron door solidly shut in masonry stone. A maintenance access only.
The pocket watch flared, once, beneath my coat. There was a groaning shriek of metal and the door opened to let me slip inside and struggle to pull it shut. No-one notices me inside my shield of ripples, the vial holding me invisible, but the sound might have gotten out. I hadn't thought of that. A few moments of waiting brought no response, however. I turned, pulled a mini Mag-Lite from my coat, flicked it on and headed down the narrow steel stairs.
The pumping station wasn't quiet. I can't imagine it would ever be; its silence would imply New York's death, the water stopped. A constant moaning roar pervaded the space, which is lit somewhat indifferently. Gigantic shapes of piping, valves and locks huddle at the bottom of the space, much taller than a person, creating valleys and hummocks of shadow and steel. I let myself out of the access stairway and look around. There was an operator's booth visible down the gallery, some fifty meters distant, lighted much more brightly than this sullen open space. I did't see anyone in it, but if they're there, they wouldn't see me out here in the dimness. I stepped to the middle of the room and look around myself at the pipes.
Then I Looked at them.
In my gaze, they changed. Sharply defined edges vanished; straight lines wavered. The ranks of industrial machined forms shimmered in my vision, settling into a row of gigantic squared stone shapes, no two alike, with the steel pipe visible at their heads and feet where it disappeared into the wall.
Sarcophagi, for what I could tell. The thought is chilling, more so than the billions of calories of heat energy stolen into cold water rushing through the chamber. I climb up on the middle of the seven visible shapes and examine the top. There are strange runes there, carved into the metal, which I can't read. At one end, the shape is higher. I caught a glint of reflection there and moved to that end, balancing carefully atop the shape which part of my mind still saw as a giant pipe. There was a portal there, some form of glass or crystal, set in the smooth surface.
I really, really didn't want to look. But I had no choice. The Djinn had charged me with a task, and I'd accepted, although I still wasn't sure why. I lifted the Mag-Lite to the window and shined the small beam through it.
Whatever was within was gray, and green, and filled the sarcophagus, unmoving. Water was rushing past it, bubbles indicating the speed of its passage and that whatever else this was, it was a pipe, still. I twisted the Mag-Lite's head to widen the beam.
An enormous head, perhaps a meter and a half in diameter, looked up at me above a mass of what could only be tentacles. My chest contracted in purely involuntary response, and I'm quite certain I would have screamed had I not been too terrified to move a muscle. I was only released from my terror when there was a flash of color as the shape beneath me opened bright yellow eyes the size of dinner plates.
I fainted.
Irem Zhat al-Imad means `Irem of the Pillars.' It's an ancient city of myth, lost in the deepest deserts of Araby, inside The Empty Quarter. Some say that `pillars' in this case doesn't mean pillars, literally, but is a metaphor for the Old Ones - ancient gods who are singularly unconcerned with the fate of mankind itself, being so far above Man in terms of their power than to them Man is nothing more than a slight pest, or infestation of the world that they are interested in. Some legends say that other gods united to banish them or imprison them so as to make the world a place safe for lesser deities to play in, and, coincidentally, for man as well.
Only one of those Old Ones had anything resembling tentacles. It had various names, but most seemed to center on the arab word `Khadulu' or `abandoner.' It was the most powerful of the beings left physically on our world - one who could open gateways to the Great Old Ones, and in whose power the fate of our world rested.
His name was corrupted many times. Only one thing was constant, in the various descriptions of him among the various tellers of myths and keepers of lore - Cthulhu didn't care much about Men, among whose number was I.
I awoke at the base of the pipe I'd been kneeling on. My head, right arm and left side ached sharply, indicating that they'd probably taken a hit on my way down. My gun was digging painfully into my ribs. There was a burning feeling on my chest.
I struggled to my feet and looked around. A pool of dim light indicated the Mag-Lite; I collected it (dented but unbroken) and pocketed it again. This surely didn't look like any form of Empty Quarter, but the Djinn had said that didn't matter. "The Rhub al-Qali is as much a place of the mind as of the world, Michel. It exists, or co-exists, with your own. It cannot be found on its own. It can only be found when it overlaps with yours, much as I can only be addressed when I overlap with Mankind."
Well.
The image of those enormous eyes filled my head, and I shuddered. The Djinn hadn't told me what I would find, here. He'd hinted there might be `gods' but for sure hadn't mentioned anything like that. Time to be elsewhere.
MICHEL.
Have you ever heard a thunderbolt voice your name? I hadn't either. Until right then. I clapped my hands over my ears reflexively, realizing even as I did so that it would make no difference. "Fuck!"
MICHEL, FACE ME.
I looked longingly off towards the staircase. Then I reached a hand inside my jacket, cuffed away the sweat of terror with my other arm, and turned back to climb the pipe. It was easier the second time, knowing what I was about, and although I wanted to be absolutely anywhere else, I found myself looking down at the transparent portion again. There was a soft light behind it now, and the great gray-green face was there, eyes open. They tracked me as I came in view. There was nothing visible that resembled a mouth. If the rest of this fucker was in scale, he was probably around seven meters tall. I was uncomfortably aware, all of a sudden, that his presence in the pipe was possibly entirely voluntary, and hoped like hell that my discovering him didn't change that.
YOU KNOW WHO I AM.
I nodded. "I thought you were in the Pacific, somewhere. If you existed."
NO. I AM IN THE ABYSS.
"You're not in this damn water pipe?"
I AM ALSO IN THE PIPE. YOU HAVE A MESSAGE FOR ME.
I nodded again. "Uh, yes. I was charged to bring this message to you. Do I need to say it?"
IF YOU DO NOT SPEAK THE MESSAGE, YOU HAVE NOT FULFILLED YOUR CHARGE.
I thought furiously. Hopefully, that didn't mean it could kill me after I finished speaking. Hell, be realistic, I told myself - it can kill you anytime it wants. I turned my gaze downwards again. "Very well. I was sent by Azif. He wishes you to know he has not broken allegiance, and he remains in this place where he awaits your call."
YOU HAVE FULFILLED YOUR CHARGE, MICHEL. The great yellow eyes flared into brightness, briefly. I noticed that they had vertical pupils of greenish black, although not quite catlike. GO AND TELL HIM THAT I HEAR AND UNDERSTAND.
I bowed slightly. "I will." Wanting now more than ever to be gone, I turned away from the face and began to kneel in preparation to sliding down off the pipe. Before I could do so, the portal glowed briefly again.
FOR YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S SAKE, the voice tolled in my head, and my chest flared into pain. I cried out, sliding off the pipe. When I reached the ground, I frantically tore my coat open and pulled out the pocket watch, source of the burning. Its leather pouch was blackened around it, but by the time I retrieved it, it was cool again. The face was no longer white, however. Instead, the hands rested on a perfectly clear starscape, twinkling slightly. I brought it to my face and turned it, realizing that I could see past the watch's edge, as if it was a portal to deepest space. I swallowed once and placed it carefully back in the bandolier.
Then I ran like hell.
I made it to a wine bar on Columbus Avenue and was on my fifth drink when a hand fell on my shoulder. I snarled "What!" as I turned to find a woman standing there with her purse held defensively before her, wearing a leather jacket and middling-expensive jewelry.
She withdrew her hand and looked confused. "I'm sorry. Do I know you?"
Hello, Michel.
I looked at her, the anger draining. "No, I don't think so. Sorry." She nodded nervously and drew back, looking around herself in confusion. I watched her leave the bar, trying to hide her frightened gaze up at the street sign, before turning back to the mirror behind the tender and looking into my flame-flickering eyes there.
"You didn't tell me."
"I didn't tell you many things."
"You didn't tell me HE existed, for Christ's sake."
"Would you have gone?"
"No." I sighed and finished my drink. My reflection cocked his head.
"What did he say?"
I looked back. "I want answers first. What the hell was that about? All the legends say his purpose is to bring about the return of the Great Old Ones, and damn any of us who happen to still be around."
"Yes, they say that."
"Then what the hell are you reporting in to him for, if not for that? Doesn't the legend say you were the first masters of Earth, and will be the last?"
The Djinn raised my eyebrows. "Your knowledge is extensive."
"Don't shine me on. I can fucking read." I waved at the bartender for another drink. "And answer the question."
"I cannot."
"If you can't, then you don't get an answer either."
"Michel, you took the charge. You swore you would. You know you cannot withhold the information."
Shit.
I rubbed my face with my hands. "Look, answer me this then. Am I doing something that will end up contributing to the death or harm of humans?"
My reflection cocked his head, eyes flaming brighter. "I would be lying if I said no."
"I knew it. Fuck." I told the Djinn what had happened. His face blazed with excitement and he nodded in the mirror.
"Ah, he was there. Yes. Yes! It will be, then. It will be."
"Whenever you're finished being mysterious, just fuck right off. I agreed to help you because I believe in talking, and that's what you wanted to do. I didn't know you were going to carry out some ancient evil that affects my race, and I don't want any more part of it."
The Djinn leaned forward in the mirror, a disconcerting sight since I hadn't. "Michel, I will go, but let me ask you this question, and please think about it in days to come. What makes you think one such as He, and one such as I, wish you ill? What makes you think, that if we were undertaking something which concerned you so little that your deaths would not be of importance to us, that He would be manifesting inside New York City public works, or that I would be using a human agent to converse with Him?"
Then my hand reached out of its own accord and brushed a man walking behind me on his way to the door. He blinked, then his eyes refocused and he continued on his way, turning his head once to wink at me.
Shit.