Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “No, I work for a woman who provides stealth rides. The TUA fellow just booked a ride.”

  “Galvan? Yes, that seems logical, and I can check it. But you know about the TUA?”

  “Are you an agent of theirs?”

  “No.” Laquedem smiled. “The man found me in much the same way as you traced me through Supergirl, Mr. Woods. My peculiar legal record is very evident to certain kinds of searches. He asked for advice about handling a dangerously unreliable section chief of theirs, which I gave him, and which I believe he will disregard. Which may be profoundly unfortunate.” He reached to the side and took hold of both crutches in one big hand.

  “Good old Supergirl,” Vickery said shortly. “I hope you didn’t have to promise her more than sixty bucks.” He leaned back and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. “The TUA wants to kill me because of something a ghost said to me once; and they apparently wanted to kill the woman who disappeared this morning, probably for helping me get away from them.”

  “And for killing one of them,” guessed Laquedem, “unless she happened to kill someone else for some other reason, in the freeway current, recently. What did the ghost say to you?” The old man levered himself up out of his chair and fitted the pads of the crutches under his arms.

  An answer for an answer, Vickery thought. “It’s from Ovid, I discover. ‘O cruel Minos, thy dominion be, We’ll go through air, for sure the air is free.’”

  “That’s the Dryden translation.” Laquedem’s bushy eyebrows were raised. “Ooh, and they want to kill you for having heard it?” Laquedem stumped a few yards across the linoleum floor and shook his head, and Vickery saw that his shirt was buttoned down the back, and that he wore a black yarmulke. “They’re more deliberate, more aware, than I had supposed!”

  “What the hell is it?”

  The old man looked sideways at him, his glasses catching the light from the window. “I’ll tell you. And I can tell you how to come back again from the . . . afterworld.”

  “I truly hope you can, I’d hate to—” Vickery paused, staring at the old man wonderingly. “Are you the—you’re not—how old are you? Uh, no offense.”

  “Yes.” Isaac Laquedem’s smile was mirthless. “And I was already an old man when I did it on the Pasadena Freeway in 1960.”

  The old man’s gaze drifted toward the yellowed acoustic tile ceiling. “I took the name Isaac Laquedem in New York in the last century—sorry, the last but one—just because it’s the traditional name for the Wandering Jew, and then more recently the papers thought Liquidatem was clever, after I was accused of murdering that woman. But my earliest memories are of . . . the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. . . the procession of motorcars from London to Brighton . . . always the moving charges, you see, the induced current.”

  Vickery understood that these must be events that happened a long time ago, evidently in the 19th century; and, at least for this dizzying moment, he believed the old man. Time spent in the ghost currents is said to keep a person young, Hipple had said.

  “All this business,” Laquedem went on, freeing one hand from a crutch to wave in a circle, “making use of the current generated when multiple free wills move at a constant speed past stationary free wills, in order to see little way into the future or past—it was harmless enough, back in the days when you could only work for the few seconds a train was passing, or by driving a wagon down a crowded street; though even from the first there were canny protests against railroads, and there was the law that an automobile must be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag, which prevented any effects. That law pretty much ended with the convoy from London to Brighton in ’96.

  “But when the big roads came along, providing endless streams of steadily moving free wills, the supernatural current could be strong enough so that a man might open a conduit to a sort of—what you might call—place, that exists outside of here. A region, a . . . situation. Two times two might equal a million there, five times five might equal next Wednesday. It’s a state in which irrationally expanded possibility prevails, and so ghosts gather there, and when a conduit is open they can come through to here.” He pivoted on one crutch and scowled at Vickery. “Someone was bound to open it sooner or later!”

  Vickery nodded. “You opened it.”

  An elderly woman pushing a walker appeared in the doorway to the hall.

  “Get out!” roared Laquedem, and she muttered a rude word at him and retreated. Turning back toward Vickery, he said, “Yes, I opened it, God help me. I opened the . . . floodgates, and the Pasadena Freeway began to overlap with the Labyrinth. And as other LA freeways have spread out, and the gypsies and the TUA have made more and more use of the current, the overlap has become more extensive—the two worlds, as it were, have got closer to each other. Ghosts come right across now without even being summoned, even entities whose births never happened to occur, and all the souls who die in the freeway fields here go across the other way.” He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Sometimes even living people go across the other way!”

  “So I’ve seen,” sighed Vickery, “so I’ve seen.”

  He looked up at the old man. “Last night I met a ghost who came across to this side. Do they . . . stay here?”

  “No, poor creatures—not unless they subsume themselves into some organic thing like the knobs on those metronomes. There’s a fellow out on Mulholland who paints Dorian Gray pictures of them, which is supposed to give them a sort of anchor here, in exchange for any secrets they may remember—but even so they slip back.”

  Vickery nodded and shifted in his chair. “Just as well. Now by Labyrinth, you mean—”

  “I mean the Labyrinth, the contradiction that Daedalus the Artificer built to contain the, the force that’s personified in mythology as the Minotaur!” Laquedem swung back to his chair, leaned the crutches against the wall and sat down. “It wasn’t Poseidon in the form of a lustful bull from the sea that begot the Minotaur on Minos’ wife, and she didn’t climb into any damned artificial cow to consummate it, as the myth says—a vulgar bit of revisionist misdirection!—no, she got into what we’d now call a sensory deprivation chamber, and invited chaos to manifest itself there, though her. And it did, in ancient Crete. Daedalus managed to contain it in the insane world of the Labyrinth, which is arguably the Minotaur’s own self folded back on itself, but that world is still out there, outside of our reality, and I connected it to ours—and then one day I fell into it myself!”

  “What’s it like, over there?” Vickery asked, a bit hoarsely. “In the Labyrinth, the freeway afterworld?”

  What has Ingrid got herself into? he thought. What has she got me into?

  “Oh, it’s . . . confusing,” said Laquedem softly. “It seems to be an endless loop of highway, as I recall, through a desert under a dark sky, but distances and directions aren’t constant. And there’s some kind of clanking, smoking factory, away from the highway . . . almost impossible to get to, you can’t walk in a straight line, you can hardly walk at all, you can hardly think at all . . .” He shook his head, clearly reluctant to revisit the memory. “It’s nonsensical. It has all the logic and coherence of a bad fever dream.”

  “How did you come back?”

  “How?” Laquedem focused on him, and said, more strongly, “Do you know how Theseus found his way out of the Labyrinth that Daedalus built?”

  “Who? Theseus? Oh—sure, that girl gave him a ball of string, and he unrolled it as he went in, so he could follow it back out.”

  “Yes, string. But all the earliest Greek representations of the Labyrinth show it as unicursal—that is, a continuous coiled path, with no forks or divisions. So why would he need a string?”

  Vickery just spread his hands and widened his eyes.

  “It was a string that Ariadne gave him,” Laquedem said, “but it was a string with beads on it.” Vickery was irrationally about to ask if it was a rosary, but the old man went on, “It was a string abacus.”

 
“Okay.” The idea reminded Vickery of something, but he just stared and waited for an explanation.

  “Yeah. Natural math.” Laquedem shifted in his chair. “The thing is, boy, free will is supernatural; plain materialism has no room for it. A materialist would say that an atom has to go where Newtonian mechanics and quantum probability dictate, even if that atom is part of your hand—but if you decide to let a telephone just go on ringing, say, instead of reaching your hand out to answer it—or if you decide instead to pick it up—then you choose where that atom goes. Your decision overrides those physical dictates, you violate the default workings of the natural world. Every thinking human is a turbulent little pocket of supernatural freedom-from-causality, working against the constant resistance of an otherwise mathematically determinist world.”

  “I’m, uh, sure you’re right. But what I—”

  “Shut up. The Labyrinth is not a mathematically determinist world. With nothing rational to push against, the supernatural boils and sloshes everywhere, and individual free wills lose their boundaries, lose their places, and slip with no traction.”

  A cloud had moved across the sun, and the dining room dimmed.

  “And,” Vickery reminded him patiently, “I want to go there and get somebody out.”

  “Are you fit?” The old man squinted at him. “No use trying it if you’ve got a bad heart, or even bad eyes. And it requires some muscle to move around on that ground, in that air. And you’d better be solidly sane, at least to start with.”

  All in good functional order, thought Vickery, except for a vasectomy I got when I was twenty-three. And came to profoundly regret.

  He shied away from thoughts of his wife’s suicide and said, as lightly as he could, “Sound in mind and body.”

  “Okay.” Laquedem sighed. “I’ll tell you how, if you promise to bring something real back from there. It’s important.”

  “Something real.” Vickery forced himself to pay attention. “Are there real things there? And can you bring them out?”

  “Yes, a few. Hyper-real things, in fact. The total chaotic randomness of that place has to generate patches of accidental order here and there, like if you keep shuffling a million decks of cards, one of them sometime will happen to come out in precise sequence. And when it happens there, it’s a . . . degree of contrasting preciseness that’s never generated here, in this world.” The old man’s mouth tightened and he seemed to suppress a shudder.

  For several seconds then he was silent.

  Vickery was about to speak, but the old man was talking again. “Parts of the highway there are real in that intense way, and that’s easier than the other choice. And I did bring something back, in 1960, but I carried it away from the omphalos. It began to wreck my health,” he said with a nod toward the crutches, “and I foolishly got rid of it.”

  Vickery nodded, remembering what Hipple had said yesterday about an object that supposedly repelled ghosts: It’s supposed to have been a brass capital letter L, as big as a chair—some fellow brought it through the omphalos, the story goes, in 1960, from the other side . . .

  “The highway is asphalt,” Laquedem went on, “and it’s crumbling at the edges, or was fifty-seven years ago, anyway. Pick up a piece of it and bring it back with you, and bury that piece in the dirt at the omphalos. That’s where you’ll come out, into this world again, the 43rd Street exit on the Pasadena freeway.” He squinted at Vickery. “You understand? Bury it there.”

  “What will that do?”

  “What do you care? You’ll be out by then.”

  “Okay,” Vickery said, and took a deep breath. “How do I go there, and how do I come back?”

  The old man sat back, collecting his thoughts for a moment, and then began speaking.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Vickery had lost his phone on the slope above Emerald Street when the TUA assassin had pointed a rifle at Castine, and he stood now in front of one of the few pay-phones left in Los Angeles, outside a liquor store on La Brea.

  It’s essential that you travel with some organic object that has a ghost subsumed into it, Laquedem had eventually told him. It’s the catalyst, the sourdough bread starter, the crystal in the saturate solution. Vickery had gathered that the old man meant the thing that directs the change.

  After the loss of Galvan’s car, Vickery didn’t want to risk going to the Galvan commissary kitchen to fetch one of the inhabited metronomes, so he tapped into the phone’s keypad the number of the only other place he knew of where ghost-hosting objects could be found.

  When Hipple’s voice answered, Vickery said, “Hello, Jack. Sebastian Vickery here.”

  “My boy!” said Hipple. “I assume you’re interested!”

  Vickery blinked. “Uh—in what?”

  “Didn’t you get my text? Check your phone.”

  “I don’t have it with me right now. Interested in what?”

  “I thought of a good ghost-repeller you should have. I’ve got it right here.”

  “Oh? That’s good, I’ll want that, but right now I’d like to buy one of your inhabited pipes.”

  “Well, sure, your credit’s good. Not for one of my Castellos, but I could let you have a solidly inhabited corncob. Are you in the area?”

  “I can be, and a corncob’s fine, I’m not going to smoke it. I—”

  The back end of a big Corona Beer delivery truck stuck a few yards out from an alley to his right, and a little girl in overalls and a straw hat now stepped out from behind it into the sunlight. She appeared to be about ten years old, and, though he had not got a good look at her this morning, he was sure it was the same girl who had been standing in the parking lot at Blessed Sacrament church, only a few blocks away from here.

  The girl was again staring straight at him, and now she solemnly shook her head. A moment later she had stepped back into the shadows behind the truck.

  “—I’ll come by, uh, soon, within the half hour,” Vickery went on while he considered the girl’s warning.

  He thought of a test. Holding the phone away, he said, to no one, “What?” then into the phone he added, “Oh, right, and we’ll want more raisins and peanuts—I’ll be bringing Miss Castine again.”

  There was a pause, and then Hipple said, “Oh? Oh, yes indeed, by all means, lovely girl, yes. Raisins and peanuts, I’ve got you covered.”

  I bet you do, Vickery thought, with a shiver. The pause and then the too-hearty reply, along with the little girl’s warning, had told him what he wanted to know.

  He hung up the phone and glanced toward the beer truck. He strode to the corner of the truck, but there was no little girl to be seen in the alley; he sidled down the pavement between the truck and a brick wall, and peered around the truck’s bumper, and then crouched to look under the truck, but the girl was gone. Vickery was certain that any nearby security camera would show that she had never been there at all.

  His chest felt coldly hollow. A ghost, he thought.

  A ghost who warned me that Hipple is aware of the day’s big event and was pretending not to be.

  He has sold me out at last, almost certainly to the TUA. I’ve got no choice now but to swipe a metronome from the commissary.

  Vickery got back on the motorcycle and rode up to Sunset and turned right, toward Normandie.

  As he rode past the tall Renaissance front face of the Blessed Sacrament church, he reflected that it was only about four hours since he had driven Galvan’s stealth Taurus into the church’s back parking lot, and first seen the little girl in overalls, and it seemed to him now that Los Angeles was closing in around him; and soon, if he went through with his plan, he would pop right out of it through a hole in reality.

  He wished he hadn’t lost Galvan’s iPad—he’d have liked to look up the Dryden translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Somewhere in the Labyrinth, according to Laquedem, Ovid’s epic poem must somehow be coherently remembered; and the TUA must know about the Labyrinth connection or they would not have wanted to kill Vickery just
because he’d heard a couple of lines and might go on to investigate the source.

  He slowed for a red light and looked to his right, at several people strolling up to a Rite Aid drugstore; and for a moment he fiercely envied them the ordinary worries of mundane life.

  The light turned green, and he looked ahead.

  Once he got hold of a metronome, he told himself, the rest of the endeavor should be manageable—string ten beads loosely along a cord knotted at both ends, fetch the Chevy Blazer from the storage unit, drink enough of the bourbon he stored there to be drunk, and then get on the 110 freeway. It would be best, Laquedem had told him, to exit this world at the same point where your friend did. There should be ripples between the worlds there for hours, at least. And bring back something real!

  Manageable? he thought now, unhappily. I don’t want to take all the risks of driving drunk—what becomes of me if I get arrested? What if, God forbid, I kill some other driver?—and then deliberately driving straight into a freeway retaining wall!—and then, if it even works, jumping straight out of this world into some kind of antique Greek hell, for God’s sake.

  What I want is—something I should admit is impossible. Ingrid Castine, back.

  But maybe Laquedem’s crazy proposal would work. Maybe I would find myself on that nonexistent offramp, and be able to find her; and maybe a pair of string abacuses really would hew a path for the two of us out of the Labyrinth, back to this real world. Laquedem did it, it seems. Follow the math out, the old man had told him; make two and two tangibly be four, and nothing else, and then make three and three be empirically six.

  And yesterday Hipple had advised, It might help to recite the multiplication tables in a loud voice; math is deterministic.

  Castine had driven away that ghost last night by loudly squaring its claimed age, and then subtracting that number from itself. Don’t take my word for it, she had told the thing. Think, do the math yourself. Nothing.