Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  He stared at her. She had to turn away from the look in his eyes.

  “Maybe you’re not so screwy after all, angel. This could work. You head on down to the old stomping grounds and try to figure out what had Gabby and Santorelli so keen to shadow the mooks on this list. I’ll stick around up here and try to put a blanket on it.”

  He fished out his wallet and produced a diaphanous tissue of shimmering memories. It was folded like an origami crane. The bird became a flock when he tossed it at her. The memories unfolded, settling over her arms and shoulders like hungry sparrows.

  “We’re in this together, me and you. Yeah, I’m not thrilled about it, either. But this’ll go better if we back each other instead of turning over at the first sign of trouble.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  “Gosh, that’s reassuring. This partnership will be one for the record books, I can tell already. But promise you’ll go easy. You still need practice.”

  “Then it’s past time I had some. I’ll find a way to interact without hurting them.” The last words lodged in her throat and came out as a whisper.

  And once I figure out how to do that, I can talk to Martin. And eventually, I’ll figure out how to heal Ria. I’ll heal them both, or I’ll tear the whole goddamned system down in the attempt.

  9

  THE GOOD OLD DAYS

  There is a place on the California coast, near the ruins of the redwood groves, where the tireless surf batters storm-sculpted cliffs and the churning sea lobs the scents of salt and wrack atop a long sloping lawn fringed with tropical shrubs and flowering oleander. Here the wind and sea mask the thrum of solar precipitators and desalinators watering the grass. The reconditioned breeze wafts across a humble emerald expanse suitable for quiet, intimate pursuits like a game of croquet or landing a suborbital shuttle. It’s the kind of green that no longer happens naturally at these latitudes. The slope funnels the wind to where the lower grounds abut a wedding-cake tumble of arches and stucco terraces. From there, the wind sighs through marble balustrades to ruffle feathers in a topiary garden whose every subject is long extinct. A dozen walking paths lead from the garden to a shack with two hundred feet of colonnaded verandah fronting the sea. At the right time of year, the barks and coughs of rutting sea lions used to punctuate the susurration of the ocean breeze through lavender jacaranda blossoms. That came to an end after the great plankton die-off, when the marine food chain collapsed. It’s never cool, never a refreshing breeze, no matter the season, for the wind here takes its heat from the sea and the monkeys changed the sea long ago. The violent ocean is warmer than it used to be, ever since the North Pacific Current stopped funneling sub-Arctic water down the coast. (The monkeys really outdid themselves when they gummed up the thermohaline conveyor. But nowadays you can surf the California coast without wearing a wet suit. That has to count for something.) But by the time the wind reaches the house, the gardens have erased any suggestion of a dying world and left just a hint of tropical perfumery.

  It’s a real flossy place. I went there on a mission of destruction.

  There are essentially two ways to eradicate a memory fragment. Now, an amateur would leg it for the nearest singularity after scouring the local X-ray binaries for a suitable black hole. They’d slip inside the event horizon with the offending memory tucked into a shoe. To an outsider it would look harmless, guileless, just an innocent stroll through pretzel space-time. But if that shoe just happened to come untied, and if that fragment just happened to slip loose while the laces were tightened … Well, it wouldn’t be anybody’s fault if that memory went swirling into the churning Planckian foam.

  But a play like that is all flash, no style. Trust a nickel grabber to solve an epistemological problem through the radical application of astrophysics. It’s extreme, like renormalizing the fine-structure constant to swat a fly.

  But information can’t be destroyed. You know how it is—unitary Hamiltonians and all that noise. (Thus says the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. Another consequence of making life possible.) The monkey wise-heads like to flap their gums about information paradoxes, but there’s nothing confusing about it once you peek under the horizon to see how it all works under the hood. Leave it to the monkeys to overcomplicate something as straightforward as quantum gravity. Anyway, long story short, toss an offending memory down the well and all your dirty laundry will come back out etched in holographic perturbations of the event horizon surface area and whispered in the slow hiss of Hawking radiation.

  So I do it differently. Me? I head for an old-folks’ home. Because maybe you can’t destroy information, but you can damn sure louse it up. Why ruin my good clothes crawling under a barbed-wire fence when I could just as easily toss that dingus into the churning maw of dementia? Far easier to let it dissipate in the static of psychic entropy, and the end result is the same.

  This errand, I could have run anywhere. But given the freedom I chose to avoid the low-down places. Too depressing, and already my plate was piled high with cares aplenty. For once, Molly and I were working the same side of the street. Somebody had to brace the PI recipients, and somebody had to hang out his ear in the Pleroma. We’d agreed to work as partners, but I was lying to myself. Flametop was in deep over her head, while I wasn’t entirely new to this game. So I figured that made her my client.

  And protecting my client meant throwing a blanket over her connection to Gabriel. Which meant scuttling the memory fragment he’d locked in his Magisterial hidey-hole.

  This wasn’t the kind of place where any old bo could come wandering up on foot with a bindle over his shoulder. This place catered to the carriage trade. Anybody flush enough to dump their honored elders in this dive would arrive in style. Hydrogen fuel cells, maybe solar, maybe even simulated autonomy and a preprogrammed route to obviate the need for a driver. True GPS hadn’t been an option since the carnage in orbit, but true wealth meant making it look like you still lived in your own personal Golden Age.

  Nuts to all that. I scraped my face, changed my shirt, pinned on a new collar, then called a taxi from an ocean-side vacation burg a few miles down the coast. Sitting on a bench overlooking the sterile sea, I tried to ignore the death-stench of plankton while reshaping my face to remove evidence of my spat with the Cherubim. When you’re flush you don’t fight your own battles; you hire some lug to carry the shiners for you.

  That left just enough time for me to make the rounds of the tonier souvenir places across the street until I found one bent enough to do a little bartering. Took a bit of back and forth, and a mild application of glamour, but in the end we agreed that one silver feather was worth everything in the register and the safe—eight or nine yards. When the hackie arrived, I had him stop off at a bank, where I changed most of it for larger bills. I tucked wads of folded C-notes in my shoes.

  You should try it some time. It’s like walking on air.

  The approach to the home is a horseshoe drive paved in mosaic tiles with an attention to detail not seen since Herculaneum. An orderly taking a smoke break on the patio gave us a dead pan as we rolled up. His pal came down the steps to open the door for me, looking all the while like he’d bit into a lemon. I peeled off a few bills so the hackie would wait, and a few more so the orderlies would turn a blind eye to the heap leaking oil on the drive. On this errand, the name of the game was low profile. Could’ve used the old shine to cut a few corners here and there, but that ran the risk of leaving a trail of droolers, just as Molly had done to her squeeze. Somebody might notice if half the staff traded places with their patients. So I played it cool. It was important this visit ruffled no feathers, drew no attention to me and flametop. That meant playing by monkey rules and using old-fashioned apple polish to get inside. To anybody who took an interest in my visit, I was just another threadbare chiseler coming to brace grandma. Not a visitor from the Pleroma.

  The bird at the front desk gave me a visitor’s badge. I signed the register “Philo Vance.”

&nb
sp; After that I was free to take my leisure so long as I scrammed by dinnertime. On the inside, the joint was half retirement home and half booby hatch. It smelled of sepia-toned memories and chalky purgatives. Most of the residents were already a touch batty or they wouldn’t have been dumped here in the first place. My contribution would disappear in the noise. There was a chance the overlay wouldn’t take smoothly, leading to some hiccups while the modified psyche sorted itself out. But who’d notice one more seizure, one more nonsense reminiscence? If my mark started to squawk about eavesdropping on his parents, learning a blue word or two while they rolled in the hay, anyone bending an ear would chalk it up to dementia or nostalgia. Two words for the same thing.

  I wandered through a walnut-paneled solarium, past desultory games of checkers and chess, an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower, withered husks of human beings reading the paper or listening to late Twentieth Century music on bulky earbuds. The loudest voices came from the media room across the corridor, where a pair of betties watched a film so old it hadn’t been converted from 2-D. I drew some glances as I made the rounds, seeking a good mark; some of the residents still had enough spark behind the eyes to make me glad for the glare of sunlight on parquetry and wood polish, on the off chance anybody might have noticed my heiligenschein. That’s always a risk when monkeys have only frayed mooring lines tying them to the port of here-and-now.

  There was better hunting to be had on the verandah. Most of the folks out here sat alone, watching the gardens and the sea. The moist breeze hit me in the face like an overzealous saleslady at a department store perfume counter. I ambled to where a bald man with a waxed mustache dozed in a wheelchair with a tartan blanket over his lap. If not for the Ramones concert t-shirt and the ink on his arms, he might have been a transplant from a retirement home circa 1955. I took a seat in a rattan chair at his elbow and reached for my wallet.

  “Hiya, Pop,” I whispered.

  One eye snapped open. It sized me up before retreating under a pink fleshy eyelid.

  “You’re not a relative,” he mumbled.

  “You’re not dozing,” I said.

  “I’m contemplating a long life,” he said. “You’re not in it.”

  “You gonna rat me out?”

  “To whom?” The papery skin on his hands pulled taut when he gestured at a female orderly pushing a wheelchair along a gravel causeway from the topiaries. She wore white like the other staff, but culottes instead of slacks, and black stockings under the culottes. “She makes extra cash with special sponge baths. Needs the money because her boyfriend gave her the clap.” Another gesture, this time at a muscular orderly lifting a snoring lady from a squeaking wooden swing. “He keeps a list of our valuables. Hasn’t used it yet, but he’s patient. He doesn’t have a buyer.”

  “I know a place down the road that might be suitable. Maybe he and I can make a deal.”

  “You’re not helping your case.”

  “Your friends in white know how much you eavesdrop?”

  His fingers trembled as though he were flicking away a housefly. He punctuated it with a harrumph that might have been a snort or a snore. “They’re typical of the rest. Animals. Spoiled and decadent babes.”

  “Everyone in this joint strikes me that way.”

  Again the eye snapped open. It glistened under a mild case of conjunctivitis. He made eye contact, then flinched away. Whatever he saw there, he recovered well. “Feh,” he said from the corner of his mouth. “You’re too young to remember a time before it all went to shit, before every night looked like the Fourth of July.”

  I crossed myself. “On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

  He frowned at that. But the beefy orderly lumbered over before he could respond. “Ready to go inside, Mr. Kivinen?”

  “I’ll stay a while.” Another flick of the papery hands. “This is my great-nephew, Dakota. A dull and feckless lad, but he’ll wheel me inside when I’m ready.”

  The ox gave me a curt nod and went inside. He looked relieved.

  “He doesn’t seem too torn up about it.”

  “He’s hoping you’ll change my diaper, too.” Silence fell over our conversation like a broken kite. Kivinen chuckled. “Relax. I can’t walk but I can still crap like a man.”

  I liked him. But I like my own skin even more. And this darb had more going on behind the eyes than most monkeys in their prime. He was no use to me. That hotcha nurse and her cohort were likely to notice if wise old Kivinen suddenly started talking about himself as though he were a six-year-old girl. Which wouldn’t do my client any favors.

  “You didn’t rat me out,” I said.

  “You’re too interesting to toss aside just yet.”

  “Maybe so, but I still have to make my rounds.”

  “What’s your game? Talking rich, lonely, addle-brained retirees into signing over their power of attorney?”

  “Nah. I’m not on the market for a butter-and-egg man. I’m here to share some memories.”

  “I’ve had a long life. You can have some of mine.”

  “You wouldn’t like what I’m selling.” I stood. “Thanks, Kivinen. It’s been swell.”

  He said, “Wheel me inside. Spare me the indignity of eating my words before that lumbering brute, and I’ll help you find what you need.” I knew a square deal when I heard one. Kivinen was the real cream.

  “I’m looking for somebody on the way out. A real screwball.”

  A sea breeze redolent of dead plankton and flowering oleander tickled my nape while I pushed his chair toward the nearest pair of French doors. But he nixed the solarium. We passed two more doors along that long verandah, his wheels beating a monotonous tattoo against the planks, until he brought me to a narrower door. Took a bit of elbow grease to nudge his wheelchair over the threshold without sending him for a tumble. The room on the other side greeted us with tall oak bookcases, deep leather armchairs flanked by Tiffany lamps, and funereal silence. A man with mottled gray skin and a bad toupee dozed over an antique reader displaying the Financial Times. His turkey wattle quivered in time to his snores. Give this room a butler and hang a few plaques on the walls, and it might have been a London society club two centuries past.

  Kivinen twisted a lip at the snoozer. “Christ,” he said. “How I despise that ignoramus.”

  “He trouble for you?”

  “Styles himself a Nikkei raider. But he made his fortune the old-fashioned way. He won the lottery.”

  “It’s better to be lucky than good,” I said.

  “His luck left him long ago. They keep him inside because he gets worked up every time he sees a flash of space junk. He’s lucid from time to time, but mostly he seems to think we’re living thirty years in the past.”

  Sounded perfect. Already on the way out, but some good would come of his decline. He’d be doing flametop a solid, even if he never realized it.

  “That’s swell. He’ll do.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Thought you hated him.”

  “I do,” Kivinen said. “But I’d always hoped it would be me to end him.”

  What can I say. I liked the old guy.

  “I’m a student of human nature,” I said, truthfully, “and want to share a few experiences. That’s all. I won’t lay a finger and I won’t disturb one hair.”

  Kivinen indicated his assent with another flick of those papery hands. “That’s a shame,” he said. He wheeled himself away without another word. Guess he wasn’t the sentimental type. That suited me. I’m not a fan of the long good-bye.

  I pulled a chair next to the snoozer, settled in, and pulled out my wallet again. “Hiya, Pop.”

  The geezer jerked awake. He blinked a few times, as though the world were something uncomfortable caught in the corner of his eye. Drool glistened at the corner of his mouth; he smeared it along the back of his hand. Then he saw me. The eye contact lasted less than a moment, but I got what I needed.

  “You were telling me about the fireworks,” I said
, “before you drifted off.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a voice stronger than wet tissue paper. A musky smell, and a tightness around his flat eyes, told me he was a little worried. He had no idea who I was, but didn’t want to admit it to himself for fear it meant he was losing his marbles. He forged ahead with the world’s most unconvincing lie. “I was waiting for you to stop interrupting.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  What is it with old guys like him and Kivinen? Do they spend half the day sitting before the mirror in search of the perfect harrumph?

  “We were at a concert, Jennifer and me, on the night the sky changed. The night the war started. She didn’t want to go; we’d had a contractor to the house—this was in the days before you could unroll a couple strips of solar panels on your roof and call it done—but I insisted, and we hadn’t been to Red Rock since before the ice sheets had slid into the sea. You’re too young to remember. It was all bad news back then, first when the seas rose and all those people had to flee, nothing on the news but vacant cities and drug-resistant malaria. And then it really went to hell…”

  I have to admit, there was a lot of history locked away in that screwball head of his. It was jumbled but good, though, and picking out the valuable parts made as much sense as trying to pull the egg yolk from an omelet. But he’d built up a good head of steam and didn’t need cues from me to forge ahead. I nodded while slipping out Molly’s memory fragment.

  “We got there at dusk,” he droned, “and the first stars had come out. Venus, too, real bright, low in the sky where it was still purple and pink. Couldn’t see much during the concert, though, and they had lights in the parking lot that washed out everything, so it wasn’t until we were on the road, must have been well after midnight when Jennifer first saw it. You never hear it anymore but that was a common name back then, Jennifer. I went to school with three or four Jennifers. She said she’d just seen a shooting star, but I didn’t because I had my eyes on the road. And then she saw another, and another, and then she begged me to pull over, so I did. This was back in the days when you had to drive your own car, no alternative to it like today. And so we stopped on the verge and got out and sure enough the sky was crisscrossed with little streaks of silver and red and tiny flashes of light like sunset at Disneyworld but from a thousand miles away, that’s what she said it looked like, and she never found out she was more or less right, but it was real fireworks and real rockets, not just for show. Never did find out who shot first—”