All Tomorrow's Parties Page 26

  And is in another place, nothing up or down, but something spreading forever, wider than the yards of los projectos or any other space he has ever seen.

  But the one who shines is there, and beside her another, less clear.

  “This is Mister Laney,” she says, in the language of Silencio's mother. “You must help him. He needs to find a watch. This watch.” And she holds in her palm the watch Silencio had seen on the screen. It is a LeCoultre “Futurematic,” a back-winder, black dial, with wind reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its bid history, its number in today's auction. “Someone is taking it away, and you must follow it.”

  Silencio looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the face of the woman.

  “You must find it for him—”

  And the watch is gone, and she is gone, and the other with her, leaving Silencio in that place that is only wide, and without color or shape, and Silencio thinks he might cry now.

  But very far away, he feels it, the watch. He knows it, and it is there still, but only this distance, these gray fields of light. Gone again.

  No. There is the system: the system of all the watches. Similarities. Differences. The words. A coding. Nothing is lost within the system, and the Futurematic rises inside as though it were lifting through clear water. It is within his grasp.

  And gone again. Blankness.

  No. He wants it. He enters the system again.

  He crosses the gray fields, seeing only the Futurematic. Where it has gone…

  63. FUNICULAR

  RYDELL had had a certain amount of riot-control training in Knoxville and knew something, in theory anyway, about fires and natural disasters, but nothing had prepared him for the weirdness of clinging one-handed to the back of an ATV, while Elmore, the meshback Chevette's friend had somehow talked into driving, gunned it back toward Bryant Street through the bridge's upper level. Rydell had never seen a vehicle here before, aside from bicycles, and he suspected that under normal circumstances they wouldn't have been allowed to get very far.

  But these were not normal circumstances, nor was this in any way a normal place. People were boiling out of the upper parts of the squatter's community like ants out of a broken nest, and what struck Rydell about it now was the quiet with which they were doing it. These were not, in some sense, civilians, but hardened survivors used to living on their own in a community of similar people. There were a few people screaming, and probably running the wrong way, or in circles, but from the moving vantage point of the bucking, pitching ATV, it was hard to tell. Rydell's impression was mainly of determination; they'd decided that the place was burning, and they'd decided they were getting out. Most people seemed to be carrying something. A few were carrying small children, more carried household goods, and Rydell had seen at least three carrying guns.

  Elmore's style of getting through the crowd was straightforward; he'd gun it toward whoever was in his way, sounding an irritating little horn that Rydell suspected nobody was hearing anyway, and trust that people would get out of his way. Which they managed to do, some just barely, until the ATV's right back wheel clipped a stack of yellow plastic vegetable crates and brought that down on top of a couple of heavily tattooed characters in lederhosen and paint-splattered construction boots. Elmore had to hit the brakes then, and Rydell saw Chevette flip off; he couldn't grab her, because he had the chain gun in the hand nearest her and no way to put it down.

  Blocked by the pile of empty yellow crates, Elmore whipped it into reverse, pulled back about four feet, and popped it, plowing into the crates and the men in lederhosen, who promptly went lateral, swarming over the pile of crates and grabbing Elmore, who didn't look to Rydell like fighting material. “Get off him,” Chevette's girlfriend shouted, trying to keep from being pulled from the saddle with the driver. Rydell slung the chain gun up and put it in the face of one of the tattooed men. The guy blinked at it, looked Rydell in the eye, and started to go after him, but some cop reflex caused Rydell to bellow “LAPD! Get on the ground!”—which made absolutely no sense under the circumstances, but seemed to work. “This is a gun,” he added, and remembered Fontaine's advice that the chain gun was anything but directional.

  “You people are crazy,” snapped one of the tattooed men, bare-chested and elaborately inked, scrambling over the yellow crates, the light catching on a round steel stud in his lower lip. His partner was right behind him.

  Rydell jumped down and found Chevette struggling to extricate herself from what seemed to be a pile of squashed eggplant. As he was turning back to the ATV, he saw a woman with a crew cut and serious biceps tackle Elmore, who went over into the crates.

  “Where's Tessa?”

  “I don't know,” said Rydell, taking Chevette's hand. “Come on.” As soon as they were away from the ATV, which in any case wasn't going anywhere, Rydell began to get the idea that something was seriously wrong here. While most of the way from Fontaine's, people had been running toward Bryant, now he saw they were running back, and now you could see the fear. “I think it's burning there, by the ramp,” Rydell said. You could see the smoke now, and Rydell noticed how quickly it was thickening.

  “Where's Tessa?”

  “Lost her.”

  A young girl came running, screaming, with her shirt on fire, from the direction of the city. Rydell tripped her, handed Chevette the chain gun, and bent to roll the girl over, smothering the flames. The girl just kept screaming, and then she was up and running, though Rydell saw that her shirt had been extinguished. He took the chain gun back from Chevette. “We don't want to try that way,” he said. He didn't want to think about what might be happening there, if the crowd was trying to force its way through flame. “Come on, let's try this.” He tugged her through the doorway of a café, deserted, cups of coffee on the tables, music playing calmly, steam rising from a pot of soup on a hotplate behind the counter. He pulled her behind the counter, and into the tight little kitchen, but found that while there were windows, they'd been barred against thieves with elaborately welded grids of rebar. “Shit,” he said, leaning to peer through the salt-crusted pane, trying to estimate the drop here, in case they could find a way.

  Now it was her turn to grab him, pull him out, but she pulled him out into the path of a fresh batch of panicked bridge people, fleeing whatever was happening toward Bryant. They both went down, and Rydell saw the chain gun drop through a hole sawn in the deck to admit a bundle of sewage-tubing. He braced for an explosion when the thing hit bottom, but none came.

  “Look,” Chevette said, getting to her feet, pointing, “we're at the foot of Skinner's tower. Let's try to get up there.”

  “There's no way off that,” Rydell protested, his side killing him as he got up.

  “There's nothing to burn, either,” she said, “once you're past the 'ponics operation.”

  “Smoke'll get us.”

  “You don't know that,” she said, “but down here it'll get us for sure.” She looked at him. “I'm sorry, Rydell.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was trying to make all this your fault.”

  “I sure hope it's not,” he said.

  “How've you been?”

  Rydell grinned, in spite of everything, that she'd ask him this now.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  She hesitated. “Me too.” Then she grabbed his hand again, heading for the plastic around the foot of the cable tower. It looked as though people had cut their way out. Chevette stepped through a five-foot slit. Rydell ducked to follow her. Into warm jungle air and the smell of chemical fertilizer. But there was smoke here too, swirling under the glare of the grow lights. Chevette started coughing. Shadows of people fleeing raced across the translucent plastic. Chevette went to a ladder and started climbing. Rydell groaned.

  “What?” She stopped and looked down.

  “Nothing,” he said, starting up after her, biting his lip each time he had to raise his arms.

  In the distance he could hear siren
s, a weird, rising cacophony that blended together, wove in and out, like a concert performed by robot wolves. He wondered if it had sounded like that in the minutes after the Little Big One.

  He really didn't know how much of this ladder he could manage. It was metal, stuck to the wall with that super-goop they used here, and he looked up and saw Chevette's plastic-cleated feet vanish through a triangular opening.

  And he realized he was smiling, because that really was her and those really were her feet, and she'd said she'd missed him. The rest of the way didn't seem so hard, but when he got up and through, sitting on the edge for a breather, he saw that she'd started climbing up the slanted girder, hanging on to either side of the blunt-toothed track that the little car, which he could make out up at the top, ran on.

  “Jesus,” Rydell said, imagining himself having to follow her.

  “Stay there,” she said, over her shoulder, “I'll try to bring it down for you.” Rydell watched her climb, worried about grease, but she just kept going, and soon she was there, climbing into the car, which from here looked like one of the waste bins out behind Lucky Dragon, but smaller.

  Rydell heard an electric engine whine. With a creak, the little car, Chevette in it, started down.

  He got to his feet and the smoke caught in his lungs, his side stabbing him each time he coughed.

  “Somebody's been up here,” she said, when she reached the bottom. “The grease shows it. I was up here earlier, looking around, and there was dust on it.”

  “Somebody probably lives here,” Rydell said, looking around at the dark flimsy walls that sheathed the tower twelve feet up from the platform he stood on. He climbed into the car, and she pushed a button. The car groaned, creaked, and started up the girder.

  The first thing Rydell wasn't prepared for, as they cleared the screening wall, was the extent of the fire. It looked as though the end by Bryant was completely aflame, huge clouds of black smoke billowing up into the night sky. Through that he could see the lights of emergency vehicles, dozens of them, it looked like, and above the creaking of the cog wheel he could still hear the concert of wailing sirens. “Jesus,” he said. He looked in the other direction, toward Treasure, and that was burning too, though it didn't seem as intense, but maybe that was just distance.

  “You got a flashlight?” Chevette asked.

  He unzipped his Lucky Dragon fanny pack and fished out a little Lucky Dragon disposable he'd helped himself to back in LA. Chevette twisted it on and started up the ladder that led to the hole in the floor of the little tower-top cube she'd lived in when Rydell had met her. Just a square opening there, and he saw her shine the light into it. “It's open,” she said, not too loud, and that made Rydell start up after her.

  When he climbed through, into the single room, she was shining the light around. There was nothing here, just some garbage. There was a round hole in one wall, where Rydell remembered there had been an old stained-glass window before.

  He saw the expression on her face in the glow from the flashlight. “It's really not here anymore,” she said, as if she didn't quite believe herself. “I guess I thought it would still be here.”

  “Nobody lives here now,” Rydell said, not sure why he had.

  “Roof hatch is open too,” Chevette said, shining the light up.

  Rydell went to the old ladder bolted to the wall and started up, feeling damp splintery wood against his palms. He was starting to get the idea this might have been a very bad idea, climbing up here, because if the whole bridge were going to burn, they probably weren't going to make it. He knew the smoke was as dangerous as the fire, and he wasn't sure she understood that.

  And the second thing he wasn't prepared for, as he stuck his head up through the hatch, was the barrel of a gun thrust into his ear.

  His buddy with the scarf.

  64. TAG

  AND as Harwood recedes, and the rest of it as well, amid this spreading cold, and Laney feels, as at a very great distance, his legs spasming within their tangle of sleeping-bags and candy wrappers, Rci Toci is there, and passes him this sigil, clockface, round seal, the twelve hours of day, twelve of night, black lacquer and golden numerals, and he places it on the space that Harwood occupied.

  And sees it drawn in, drawn infinitely away, into that place where Harwood is going; drawn by the mechanism of inversion itself, and then it is gone.

  And Laney is going too, though not with Harwood.

  “Gotcha,” Laney says, to the dark in his fetid box, down amid the subsonic sighing of commuter trains and the constant clatter of passing feet.

  And finds himself in Florida sunlight, upon the broad concrete steps leading up to the bland entrance to a federal orphanage.

  A girl named Jennifer is there, his age exactly, in a blue denim skirt and a white T-shirt, her black bangs straight and glossy, and she is walking, heel to toe, heel to toe, arms outstretched for balance, as if along a tightrope, down the very edge of the topmost step.

  Balancing so seriously.

  As if, were she to fall, she might fall forever.

  And Laney smiles, to see her, remembering the orphanage's smells: jelly sandwiches, disinfectant, modeling clay, clean sheets…

  And the cold is everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at last.

  65. OPEN AIR

  FONTAINE, wielding the ax now, reflects that he has lived quite a long time and yet this experience is new: to lift the heavy head above his own and bring it down against the shop's rear wall, the plywood booming. He's a little surprised at how it simply bounces off, but with his next swing he's reversed the head, so that the sharp, four-inch spike, rather than the blade, contacts the wall, and this digs most satisfyingly in, and on a third blow penetrates, and he redoubles his efforts.

  “Need us some air,” he says, as much to himself as to the two seated on his bunk, the gray-haired man and the boy with his head down, lost in the helmet again. To look at these two, you'd think there was no problem, that the bridge wasn't burning.

  Where'd that hologram girl go?

  Still, this chopping is getting somewhere, though his arms are already aching. Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger.

  No idea what he'll do when he's got it big enough, but he likes to keep busy.

  And this is the way it always is, for Fontaine, when he knows that things are bad, very bad indeed, and very likely over. He likes to keep busy.

  66. BULKLIFT

  CHEVETTE climbs through the hatch in the roof of Skinner's room to find Rydell kneeling there in his Lucky Dragon security bib, but the critical factor here is the man from the bar, the one who shot Carson, who's got a gun pressed into Rydell's ear and is watching her, and smiling.

  He's not much older than she is, she thinks, with his black buzz cut and his black leather coat, his scarf wrapped just so, casual but you know he takes time with it, and she wonders how it is people get this way, that they'll stick a gun in someone's ear and you know they'll use it. And why does it seem that Rydell finds people like that, or do they find him?

  And behind him she can see a plume of water arcing higher than the bridge, and knows that that must be from a fireboat, because she's seen one used when a pier on the Embarcadero burned.

  God, it's strange up here, now, with the night sky all smoke, the flames, lights of the city swimming and dimmed as the smoke rolls. Little glowing red worms are falling, winking out, all around her, and the smell of burning. She knows she doesn't want Rydell hurt but she isn't afraid. She just isn't now, she doesn't know why.

  Something on the roof beside her and she sees that it's a glider up on its own little frame, staked to the asphalt-coated wooden roof with bright sharp spikes.

  And other things piled beside it: black nylon bags, what she takes to be bedding. Like someone's ready to camp here, if they need to, and she understands the buzz-cut boy wanted to be covered, if he had to stay, to hide. And it comes to her that probably he's responsible for the burning of the bridge, and how many dead
already, and he's just smiling there, like he's glad to see her, his gun in Rydell's ear.

  Rydell looks sad. So sad now.

  “You killed Carson,” she heard herself say.

  “Who?”

  “Carson. In the bar.”

  “He was doing a pretty good job putting your lights out.”

  “He was an asshole,” she said, “but you didn't have to kill him.”

  “Fortunately,” he said, “it isn't about who's an asshole. If it were, our work would never be done.”

  “Can you fly this?” Pointing at the glider.

  “Absolutely. I'm going to take this gun out of your ear now,” he said to Rydell. He did. She saw Rydell's eyes move; he was looking at her. The boy with the buzz cut hit him in the head with the gun. Rydell toppled over. Lay there like a big broken doll. One of the glowing red worms fell on his stupid pink bib, burned a black mark. “I'm going to leave you here,” he said. He pointed the gun at one of Rydell's legs. “Kneecap,” he said.

  “Don't,” she said.

  He smiled. “Lay down over there. By the edge. On your stomach.” The gun never moved.

  She did as she was told.

  “Put your hands behind your head.”

  She did.

  “Stay that way.

  She could watch him out of the corner of her eye, moving toward the glider. The black fabric of its simple triangular wing was catching a breeze now, thrumming with it.

  She saw him duck under the kite-like wing and come up within the carbon-fiber framework extending beneath it. There was a control-bar there; she'd seen people fly these on Real One.

  He still had the gun in his hand but it wasn't pointed at Rydell.

  She could smell the asphalt caked on the roof. She remembered spreading it with Skinner on a hot windless day, how they heated the hard bucket of tar with a propane-ring.