Apocalypse to Go

by Katharine Kerr

  “That’s what I thought, yeah.” Now that my mind had mostly cleared, I could remember some significant details. “Some evidence indicates that the kidnappers put a StopCollar on Sean. Is it possible that they’d own one?”

  Hendriks glanced at Spare14, who nodded a yes. “The black market here is quite robust. The Axeman would have the money to buy an item such as that.” Spare14 paused for a sigh. “Even the best police forces are vulnerable to corruption. And of course, the police force here is not one of the best. Some officer might well have stolen the equipment, in this case, if he had some desperate need for cash, and sold it to Chief Hafner’s rivals through a fence.”

  “And could a StopCollar produce the effect I felt?”

  “Possibly,” Hendriks said. “It depends on which type, the torus or the band. The flat band can amplify certain vibrations. Amplify them enough, and you’ll get distortions that the talented then perceive in various ways—sound, light, or in one case that I investigated, a persistent smell of rotted meat.”

  “These aren’t manifested phenomena, are they?”

  “No, no, just an activation of the appropriate center in the brain. The distortions fool the appropriate neurons into seeing or hearing.”

  I searched my memory and found Aunt Eileen’s dream of Sean wearing a “modern necklace.”

  “I think this could be the flat band.”

  “That would be a major setback,” Hendriks said. “Could the Axeman know that his hostages have a sister with talents?”

  “It’s real likely. The entire gang knows about me—Mike’s gang, that is, the BGs. One of them’s been ratting out all sorts of data.”

  “Then it’s likely the Axeman’s set up a defense against you. The BGs, hmm? Very small beer, that gang. Certainly not worth TWIXT’s time.”

  “I’d always hoped so, considering my little brother runs with them now and then.”

  “The world-walker? He’s a juvenile, correct?”

  “Yeah, not quite seventeen. And out of control.”

  “He’s not a bad kid.” Ari turned from the window. “Fatherless boys like Michael tend to go through a wild phase.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “but a wild phase with wild talents is a lot worse than some kid stealing a car or smoking dope.”

  “True. He’s buggered things up good and proper this time.”

  I winced in agreement. “Look, we know that a direct scan’s too dangerous, but I’m willing to try an LDRS.”

  “No,” Ari said.

  “Good idea,” Hendriks said simultaneously.

  “It’s up to O’Grady, I should think.”

  Spare14’s opinion won. While Ari glowered, I got out my crayons and a pad of paper from our luggage. I sat down on the floor near but not in front of the open window, put the pad in my lap, and spread the crayons out next to me. Spare14 and Hendriks moved out of my line of sight. Ari took a seat on the couch where he could keep an eye on me without being too distracting.

  When I thought of Michael, I picked up nothing but darkness and the faint sense that he was still alive—reassuring, but not useful when it came to finding him.

  “I think Mike’s asleep somewhere on this world level,” I said. “I’m concentrating on Sean now.”

  My hand darted into the spread of crayons and picked out burnt sienna. It sketched in what appeared to be part of a wooden wall, then tossed the burnt sienna back in favor of marigold. It scribbled over the wall, dropped the yellow, grabbed the black, and drew black spots on the yellow smears. I stopped the procedure, but I smiled. Oh, yes. Something—or rather someone—very directly connected to Miss Leopard-Thing was here on Interchange.

  “No go,” I said. “Someone is interfering.”

  I heard Spare14 sigh. He got up and walked into my field of view.

  “Do you have any idea who?” he said.

  “What do you know about leopard people?” I said. “Sapients evolved from leopards the way we are from apes, that is. Fairly civilized with metal tech and developed talents.”

  I thought Spare14 might choke. He stared at me openmouthed and narrow-eyed, made an odd couple of guttural sounds, then covered them with a cough. Hendriks laughed, one whoop of high amusement.

  “Very sharp, this psychic, so you might as well tell her.” Hendriks paused for a grin. “Sneak.”

  Spare14 pursed his lips and scowled at him, then smoothed out his expression.

  “He’s right, I’m afraid,” Spare14 said. “Very well. They exist on one of the rather more puzzling world levels, Terra Two.”

  “Puzzling how?”

  “Two should be very close to One, according to the formula our scientists have developed. But it’s extraordinarily different. The solar system there—Venus is quite pleasant, with large oceans, not the hellhole it is in every other version we know. It has a large moon like Earth’s, which I gather does partly explain the better climate.”

  “Oceans, huh? Warm? Covering a large part of the planet?”

  “I see that I might as well admit that it’s Javert’s home world.”

  I smiled; he smiled.

  “Now, as to your question,” Spare14 continued, “the leopard people dominate the Earth on Terra Two. Their actual species name is pardus sapiens. Some people call them ‘Spotties,’ but that’s a racial slur, really. The proper common name for them is Maculates.”

  “As opposed to Immaculate, huh? But then there was only one of those, and she lived a long time ago.”

  The men stared at me in bewilderment.

  “It’s a joke,” I said. “Never mind. Do go on.”

  “Very well.” Spare14 paused to clear his throat with what I considered unnecessary drama. “Terra Two is the only world level of our local cluster in which they exist. There are other anomalies in that solar system, but I’d really prefer not to go into those.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “But I have need to know about the Maculates. They’ve contacted me several times now.”

  Spare14 shut his eyes for a moment, as if he were engaging in silent prayer. “You might have mentioned them before this.”

  “You made it clear that certain kinds of information were off-limits. I saw no reason to share intel one-way.”

  “My apologies. I should have been more forthcoming.”

  “Especially since she knew about them all along, eh?” Hendriks said.

  Spare14 shot him an evil glance, then walked back to his desk to sit down. While I told him about my contacts with the Maculates—I left out the effect on my love life—I put away the crayons and the pad of paper, then sat down next to Ari.

  “So,” I finished up. “I wonder if the guy is working with Storm Blue. I’m pretty sure he’s the person I saw in the visions. I don’t see why he’d interfere with my LDRS if he weren’t hiding the gang’s HQ.”

  Hendriks and Ari nodded.

  “So,” I said, “we can conclude that he must have some psychic talents.”

  “Most Maculates do.” Spare14 drummed his fingers on his desktop and thought for several minutes before he went on. “Well, if you can’t find your brother by psychic means, then I suppose we’ll have to fall back on gathering information in more usual ways.”

  “How far away is Major Grace’s mission?” Ari said. “I suspect she knows a great deal about what goes on in this city.”

  “You could well be right.” Spare14 drummed his fingers on the desk again while he thought. “It’s not far at all, just down on Sackamenna Street. Eight or nine blocks, perhaps. O’Grady, are you well enough to make the walk?”

  “Sure, if it’s safe.”

  “It should be. We’re on the edge of the respectable districts, where the Chief’s mistress was never well known.”

  “You know,” I said, “who could really help us is the BGs, but their camp is way away from here, over in the Excelsior district—well, whatever it’s called here. Southeast side of town.”

  “We really can’t risk that. Transportation is such a problem
with the lack of vehicles.”

  “Couldn’t we go back to Four and then reenter through the Houlihan gate?” Ari said.

  “That could present fatal problems if Storm Blue’s waiting. We cannot just shoot our way through. On the other hand, if we could determine that the gate’s not being watched—let me just run this by the liaison captain.”

  “In any event,” Hendriks put in, “we’d have to wait for another world-walker to become available.”

  “Javert’s is here, surely?” Ari said.

  “He is, but there are regulations,” Hendriks said. “He can’t possibly leave Javert unattended. Bringing his tank with us would be impossible.”

  Spare14 took a digital tablet, some brand called a Dasher5, out of his trans-dimensional drawer. I noticed that he left the drawer open and wondered if he had some kind of world-transversing router in it. I figured it would be rude to ask. When he finished, he locked the tablet into that particular drawer, then unlocked the drawer below. He took out two sleek squares of black plastic, about two inches on a side and maybe half an inch thick. On one side sat two rows of tiny buttons; on the other, a screen area.

  “Hendriks, I assume you have yours,” Spare14 said. “O’Grady, Nathan, these are how we at TWIXT keep in touch.”

  As Spare14 explained how the communicators worked, I realized that linking up with TWIXT would bring the Agency benefits far beyond police support. They had technology to offer as well as information.

  “One last thing,” Spare14 handed Ari something that looked like a leather card case. “Some proper ID, though of course it’s not for TWIXT itself. The California Bureau of Investigation issues these to our agents. I had one made for you because I know I can trust you to use it judiciously. It’s valid on several world levels.”

  Once we left the office, Ari took up the rear guard while Hendriks walked a few steps ahead of Spare14 and me. He set a pace slow enough for our two gunmen to keep an eye on everything that was happening around us.

  We walked down the alley to Grant Avenue, where I received a genuine shock. Chinatown did not exist in this SanFran. Grant continued downhill as an ordinary street, narrow, dirty, cluttered with brick buildings and the occasional wooden flat-front house. Here and there as we walked along I saw a business run by persons of Chinese descent—an herbal medicine store, a restaurant—but these commercial ventures were few and housed in ordinary architecture, not the wonderful Asian styles and bright colors I knew from my home world. Spare14 noticed my surprise.

  “The main wave of Chinese immigration never happened here,” he told me. “The disaster that created Interchange caused horrific loss of life in Asia. They say that the death rate reached ninety percent.”

  Even back in those days, that figure meant millions of deaths. For a moment I felt so sick that I could barely speak. “That’s really terrible! What caused the disaster, anyway?”

  “No one’s sure. The scientists on One do know that an enormous burst of radiation was responsible. It stripped off part of the ozone layer and ionized the atmosphere by something called an electromagnetic pulse. Do you know what that is?”

  “Only kind of.” I remembered my vision, which matched this explanation. “But a nuclear war would produce that kind of pulse, right? Which is probably why the people here think there was a war.”

  “Exactly. There would have been enormous lightning bolts, all sorts of magnetic disturbances, and a rise in the level of background radiation.”

  “But what caused the original burst of radiation, I mean the thing behind the pulse?”

  “No one knows, though of course there are theories. The current best hypothesis is an abnormally large solar flare, although, if I understand this correctly, such a natural phenomenon should have happened on all the closely-bound levels, not just the one.” Spare14 shrugged. “Well, TWIXT has a research team working on the problem. I certainly don’t have the scientific education to understand it.”

  We left Grant and turned down Sackamenna. On the corner of that street and Joice stood a coffeehouse, where Hendriks and Spare14 decided to wait. The Salvation Army workers might get suspicious, Spare14 feared, if Ari and I arrived with an escort. Our destination stood right across Sackamenna, close enough for Hendriks to keep a watch on it through the shop’s front window.

  Major Grace’s mission turned out to be headquartered in the building I knew as the Donaldina Cameron House. At home, it functioned as a museum and tribute to its founder, the formidable Presbyterian reformer who had rescued young Chinese girls from lives of forced prostitution. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese immigration was strictly limited by travesties of justice called the “exclusion laws,” but pimps and other dealers in human misery always know the angles. Apparently, Cameron’s doppelgänger had rescued girls from the same situation here on Terra Three, at least up until the disaster, because a bronze plaque on the front door commemorated her work.

  The cubical brick building must have had a fierce karma of its own to attract Major Grace and her unit. It looked like a fortress, painted a stone gray, with small windows covered on the lower floors with iron grates. At the front door a tall, muscled young man with a shaved head and a maroon-and-black military-style uniform looked us over.

  “Major Grace asked me to bring her down.” Ari jerked a thumb in my direction. “She’s been sick.”

  “Okay. The doctor’s set up right at the end of this hall.” The guard gave us a genuine smile. “You’re in luck. He just opened up, and there’s no line yet. Welcome to Mission House.”

  “Welcome” set the tone of the pale dusty-rose foyer. A floral display of oddly misshapen irises and ferns sat on a small table just inside the door. As we walked on down the long corridor, we saw framed colored prints of what I thought at first were standard religious paintings—Abraham and Isaac, Jesus healing the blind man, the parting of the Red Sea, Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount.

  At the end of the hall, on the wall beside a staircase up, a four-foot-high oval print, matted in pale green, displayed a woman with strong features and wavy black hair. She wore long robes, elaborately embroidered in bright colors, and a necklace of silver coins. A white glow streamed out from behind her head. The caption called her, “Jesus’ sister, Sophia, the Light of the Earth.” I whistled under my breath in surprise.

  “I wonder if these people come from this world level.” I kept my voice soft. “Terra Three should have the same beliefs that our Four does. The two didn’t separate till 1919, according to that printout you gave me, anyway.”

  “This poster indicates a different belief, certainly,” Ari said. “Even I know that your Jesus didn’t have a sister.”

  “Not one that counted for anything, anyway. These people must be Gnostics.”

  The doctor’s office turned out to be a plain square room, painted pale blue and furnished with two chairs, a rickety-looking oblong table, and a wooden dresser. On top of the dresser the doctor had spread a blue-and-white-checked dish towel and set out various supplies: bandages, swabs, and an old-fashioned apparatus for taking blood pressure with a rubber bulb and a metal dial. I saw no digital anything anywhere. He was a youngish white guy with blond hair and a thick mustache. On his white coat he wore a hand-lettered name tag that said only Dr. Dave.

  “So,” Dr. Dave said to me. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know if anything is,” I said. “Major Grace wanted me to see you. She saw me when I was coming down from some crap a john put in my drink.”

  “Here. Sit down.” He became all business.

  I took one chair; he pulled up the other and sat close. Ari leaned against the wall by the door and watched with his arms folded over his chest. The doctor stared into my eyes.

  “No more dilation,” he said. “Do you have any idea what the drug was?”

  My memories of Sean’s wild teenage years returned to help me fashion a good lie. “It made my heart beat real fast, and I heard this roaring in my ears. I kept seein
g weird stuff, but it wasn’t glory seeds. I didn’t puke or nothing.”

  “Okay, some kind of hallucinogen laced with strychnine. What was he trying to do, get out of paying you?”

  “Just that, yeah. Didn’t work, though. I wasn’t that stoned.”

  “Good.” He scowled. “Men like that—” He looked Ari’s way. “Next time check out the customer better, will you?”

  “I shall, yes.” Ari peeled himself off the wall and managed to look guilt stricken. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t work him over.”

  “That wouldn’t have solved—well, I take that back,” Dr. Dave said. “It would have made him think before he pulled this stunt again.” He considered Ari for a moment. “You must be from Jamaica.”

  “Yes. Kingston, actually.”

  Dr. Dave nodded, then turned back to me. “Let me take your vital signs. You’ll be okay, but for crying out loud, maybe you could think of another way to earn your living?”

  “I dunno, and what does it matter? I’ll be dead soon enough.”

  “You can’t know that.” Dave smiled at me. “You might be one of the lifers. They’re getting more and more common. What if you had thirty years ahead of you? What then?”

  I arranged an idiot stare: eyes narrow, mouth half-open. “Never thought of that,” I said. “I dunno.”

  “One last question. Why the bronze stuff all over you?”

  “Some johns like it darker, that’s all.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged as if to say “whatever.” “Let’s see how your heart’s doing now.”

  He did a pretty thorough job of checking me over with the limited equipment he had available, listening to my heart rate and lungs with a stethoscope, taking my blood pressure. He’d just finished when a skinny young Black girl, dressed in a baggy maroon tunic, appeared in the doorway of the office.

  “Major Grace wants to see you guys,” she said to Ari through a wad of chewing gum.

  “She does? Where is she?”

  “Upstairs.” The girl blew a gum bubble, then retracted it. “The office door is open.”

  She turned and trotted out again. The doctor watched her go, then glanced my way.