by Steven Brust
I pointed my knife at his stomach, and I would have eviscerated him right then if there hadn’t come a thump and a very peculiar sound from down the hall, which stopped me just long enough for another thought to grow. I said, “You’d like me to kill you, wouldn’t you? Because you’re afraid you’ll break. Well, sweat, asshole.” To Rose and Libby I said, “Watch him. If he tries anything, shoot him in the kneecap.” I went down the hall toward the noise.
Tom was down at the end of the hall, and the noise had been the work he was doing, trying to cover over the doorway so they couldn’t come around and get us from that direction. I poked my head out before he had it covered. It was quiet and the sun was setting once more. No one attacked me, or even looked at me, except for a few barnyard animals.
“Tom,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Hold off on that.”
“What?”
I told him what I wanted him to do. He looked at me like I was nuts. “Do it,” I said.
“If you say so.” We went outside. He raised his pistol and shot the goat cleanly through the head. It fell over and flopped, twice. I felt absurdly bad about having killed it. “Now what?” said Tom.
“Help me drag it inside.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to break Rudd.”
Together we dragged it into the kitchen, while occasional gunfire from the other room provided music to drag goats by. When we arrived in the kitchen, Rose said, “What is that?”
“A dead goat,” I told her.
“That’s what I thought it was.”
“Libby, do you have your medical supplies with you?”
She turned her head to the side. “I think it’s too late to save the goat.”
“If we’d wanted him saved,” I said, “we wouldn’t have killed him.”
“Whatever you say,” said Libby. “What do you want?”
“A needle and syringe. Since the Physician here is so worried about Hags disease, I thought maybe we could inspire him by giving him a twenty-five percent case.”
He stared. I stared back. “You do know that almost a quarter of all goats carry the Hags virus, don’t you? In them, of course, it isn’t fatal, but—you didn’t know that? My, my. Where could you be from that you don’t know that? Well, never mind. Tom, hold his arm still. Libby, draw some blood from the goat. Twenty cc’s should do it.”
“You’re lying,” said the Physician.
I shrugged. “If you wish.”
Libby drew the blood and brought the needle over. Tom held the Physician’s arm tight while I held him in place with an arm around his throat. He began to struggle. Libby stopped. “What is it?” I said. “We can’t hold him here forever.”
“Just a minute.” She went back to her kit, found a cotton wad, and put some alcohol on it. She came back and rubbed this on his forearm. “Now,” she said sweetly, “this may sting a little.”
“No!”
“Tell me what I want to know.”
“All right, you bastard. It’s Proxima, the fourth—”
“Libby, give him the needle. He’s lying.”
She took her time approaching him, and I got to watch his face. At first, he had been glaring at me, now he was watching the needle as it got closer and closer, and we had to work harder and harder to keep him pinned. The point of the needle touched his arm. He screamed a scream like Poe must have imagined, which degenerated into unintelligible whimpering. I said, “Where is Sugar Bear’s home base? Tell me quickly.”
“Oh God…”
“Tell me, you sonofabitch.”
“Charity,” he croaked. “Charity around Biscane.”
I blinked, not really believing he’d answered me. “Well, son of a bitch,” I said.
Libby said, “How do you know he’s telling the truth?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“If you say so.”
I turned to the Physician. “Okay, next question: How can we stop the missiles?” He shook his head. I repeated the question. He just sobbed.
I repeated it once more and he said, “You can’t. I can’t. They’re only an hour or two away, and the transmitting equipment is on the other side of the planet.”
“Can anyone else duplicate the transmitting equipment?”
“Not without the codes.”
“Where are the codes?”
“With the equipment.”
I closed my eyes and took two deep breaths. “All right. Libby, you’re a paramedic; you know hospitals.”
“Yeah.”
“Go get Eve and meet us at Feng’s. Be careful. Take a cab. Do you have money?”
“I’ve got money. But Billy, being a paramedic doesn’t have a lot to do with getting someone out of a hospital.”
“You’ll find a way.”
She smiled a bit, then held up her automag. “I’ll use finesse,” she said. She left out the back.
I said, “I still hear shooting, Rose, you and Tom go find out what’s going on with Jamie and Christian. Don’t get your head blown off. I have to think.”
They walked out of the room. I turned away. I heard the Physician leap from the chair, and my knife was in my hand as I turned, and I stabbed him in the heart as he was reaching for my throat. I think I broke one of his ribs doing it. He grabbed me, his eyes wide and on a level with mine, his breath in my face, his fingers gripping my arms painfully.
“Thanks for doing the expected,” I told him.
I owed him that for Rich. And Fred. And Souci. I would have told him that I’d made up all that stuff about the goat, but I didn’t think of it. For his part, he didn’t say anything. I let him fall, keeping a grip on the knife so it came free in my hand. He lay on the ground, curled up holding his chest. As he rolled over onto his stomach, I stabbed him in the kidney. Then I stabbed him again, and again. I remember my arm rising and falling, and I was detached, thinking this must have been how Libby felt, shooting Claude.
Eventually I became aware of the fact that he was no longer breathing. I chose not to administer CPR.
When I could see once more, Tom and Rose were back, staring at the body. I said, “Well?”
“It’s like back at Feng’s. There are six of them and we’re sort of shooting into each other’s general vicinity, and no one is hitting anyone.”
“Why haven’t they come around the back yet?”
“They’re in that living room, completely inside the house, and they can’t get back to the entryway without giving Jamie and Christian a good shot at them, so they’re pretty well pinned down.”
“Six of them,” I said. “Let me think for a minute. Can we go around and get them from behind?”
“I’m sure they’re watching for it. We’d take some losses, but we could do it—”
“Take some losses. Shit. All right. We’ll do something else. Rose, tell Christian and Jamie to be ready to back up, carefully, when they smell smoke. Then get your ass out of here. And bring your fiddle. Tom, go around to the front, get as close as you can without letting them shoot at you, spill kerosene all over the entryway, and light it. Then go outside and shoot anyone who tries to get out the front way.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll wait here for Christian and Jamie and Rose, in case there’s any trouble.”
“Take this, then,” said Rose, and handed me her derringer. I accepted it. I still doubted I could hit anything, but now I knew I could kill.
Tom went out the back door, Rose headed toward the front. I waited, holding the pistol ready. The Physician’s body was facedown, for which I was grateful.
I think it was forever, give or take a few minutes, before Rose returned. Christian and Jamie came backing into the kitchen about thirty seconds later. The cat came dashing out past our legs at about that time.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Rose picked up her fiddle and we headed out the back hallway. I began to smell smoke. Jamie said, “What’s to keep them fr
om following us?”
“We’ll wait just outside, and nail them as they come out.”
“Six of them? That’s a wide doorway. If they come out two at a time, shooting, they might get out.”
“So, they get out.”
“Then they kill us.”
The air was cool and smelled of freedom, just as it had the last time I’d found myself fleeing from this house. I said, “Come up with a better idea, asshole.”
“I got one,” said Jamie. He had the sawed-off shotgun in his left hand, the .357 in his right. He said, “Catch you later,” and ran back inside.
I cursed softly. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”
“Keeping them from coming after us,” said Christian.
“By himself?”
“The hallway’s narrow. He can hold them.”
“Sure. For how long?”
“Just until the house collapses. That can’t be too much longer.”
Rose screamed Jamie’s name, and, before we could stop her, followed him into the house. By this time we could see a red glow coming from the windows, and the yard was becoming warm. I heard what I think was a shotgun blast, followed closely by another. I started to follow Rose, but Christian hit me in the back of the head and I went down. I tried to get up and he knocked me down again. I might have tried to shoot him but the derringer went spinning away.
He said, “What do you want, motherfucker? Rose and Jamie, or the mission Feng set out to accomplish?”
“Fuck Feng,” I said. “Fuck the future. Fuck humanity. Fuck you.”
“Uh-huh.”
Another pair of shotgun blasts, this time followed by others. I stayed there on my hands and knees while the house burned, and there was more shooting, until the heat forced us to back away. I heard shots for a while longer, then sirens in the distance, and I will swear as long as I live that I heard the sound of a fiddle playing an Irish reel, just before the roof collapsed, sending sparks high into the air, and leaving only a very large, glowing ember where the house had been.
I must have found Rose’s derringer, because I was holding it in my hand when we arrived at Feng’s. Carrie let us in. “What happened?” she said.
Neither Christian nor I could answer. Tom said, “Why didn’t you go to the ship?”
“I thought I’d rather stay with you,” she said.
Tom nodded and sat down, his face empty of all emotion.
Carrie said, “May I?”
Tom looked at me. I shrugged, nodded, and looked away. “Yes,” said Tom.
“What happened?” repeated Carrie.
“It doesn’t matter.”
The door opened then, and Libby came in, escorting Eve. Eve looked tired and drugged, and her eyes were very red, but there were some signs of recognition on her face when she saw us. Libby sat her down in the booth nearest the door.
“How long do we have?” said Libby.
“Maybe a few minutes,” said Tom.
Christian came and put his arms around Libby. “I’m glad you made it,” he said.
“I’m glad you did. What happened to—no, never mind.”
Christian nodded. There was no reason to talk about it. I walked over to the door and opened it. Tom said, “What are you—”
“Shut up,” I said. I looked out at the street, which was pretty empty except for a pair of kids, two boys, maybe twelve, who were walking in front of Feng’s. I remembered them from the day we’d arrived in New Quebec, parking their bicycles outside of a bakery that was now a mass of bullet holes. I glanced at it, and saw that repair work had been begun on the windows. Pitiful. I said, “Hey, come here a minute.”
The kids looked at each other. “Pardonnez?” said one.
I gestured toward the inside. They looked suspicious, but, for whatever reason, came inside. As they did, an air-raid siren sounded from not far away. It sounded just like the ones back on Earth, and the one in Ibrium City, and the one in Jerrysport. They hadn’t changed at all. I shut and locked the door.
The two kids looked at each other and made for the door, but it could not be opened from the inside. They stared at us fearfully, but no one had any spare energy to try to reassure them.
I walked over toward the bar to have a drink, but the missile hit just at that moment, knocking me over. It was about as hard as the place had ever been hit, and the picture of Feng fell from its place and landed on the floor next to me. The glass that covered it shattered as the room shook and spun and I went down, and somewhere I heard the whine of a generator and Carrie screaming. I saw Tom holding her. The room tilted and a table or something hit me in the back of the head.
I found I was staring at the Chinese cowboy with the big, drooping mustache and the stupid grin.
I hate your guts, you know, I told it just before everything went dark.
Epilogue
So fill to me the parting glass.
Good night, and joy be with you all.
“The Parting Glass,”
Traditional
What can I say?
Two boys ripped from their homes, traumatized, but saved from the flames. They may never believe what happened, will almost certainly never understand, but at least they are alive. That was important to me. If you cannot understand this, I’m sorry.
I stood up amid the dust of the restaurant and looked around at those who were looking around at me and at each other. Libby in particular was watching me closely as she picked herself up. She had good reason. There was a thing called wonder in the air.
My memories seemed sharp and clear, and there was no fuzziness of my senses, after the first seconds of wakefulness. It might have been because we’d arrived at the Unit’s home base, which might be significant to whoever wanted to study time travel. Not me. I wanted nothing to do with it, ever again. Jamie, my brother, Rose, my sister, dead now, forever gone, not even dust, not even—
“Anyone hurt?” I said.
No one was. I stepped over to a window, looked out, nodded. I walked back and noticed the broken picture. I ground it into the floor because I felt like it. I went into the bathroom, pulled the d-cleaner out of my wallet, and rubbed it on my face. The rest would wait, but I wanted my face back. When the pink was out, I took the skin-stick off and let my cheeks, eyes, and forehead resume their natural shape. That was enough for now.
When I came out of the bathroom, Libby was sitting at a table drinking from a bottle of Dom Perignon that she’d saved from the Earth. She said, “Would you like a glass, Feng?”
“Call me Billy,” I said. “And no, thanks. I don’t feel like celebrating just yet.”
Tom, Carrie, and Christian stared at me. Libby said, “I thought they were going to figure it out there, when Jamie walked in while you were telling me to get the guns.”
I nodded. “Me, too. You did a good job handling those questions about time travel and stuff, although you slipped once.”
“I did? When?”
“They were asking about nexus points and you looked at me.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “One slip in that length of time is nothing. I’m sorry about Fred.”
She looked away. “Yeah. Me too.”
I studied the floor. Presently she said, “How did you know Rudd would go for that bluff, and that he was telling the truth?”
“It dawned on me that he was my counterpart—that is, he’d been sent from the future to stop me. Well, in my future—here—we’ve licked Hags disease with carbon-based nano machines which, um, skip it. If they were doing this because they were afraid of Hags disease, then they didn’t know much about the disease, so I figured I could fake it. Besides, I’d bluffed him once before. And I knew because I recognized the name of the planet, and that made sense, too.”
She nodded and returned to her champagne. “Sissy water,” Rich had called it. But Rich was gone, along with Fred, and Rose, and Jamie, who had probably gone the way he would have wanted to, both guns bla
zing in a last stand.
What a crock.
Eve looked beyond stunned. I think she was. Christian was beyond interest. Carrie was confused. Tom’s mouth still hadn’t closed, but I didn’t feel like starting any explanations just then.
Libby said, “Was it hard, keeping everyone in the dark about who you were?”
It came to me that she was keeping me talking so I wouldn’t dwell on Rose and Jamie. That was like her. I said, “No, I had to.”
Tom’s mouth finally closed. Then he said, “You mean all this time—”
“I recruited Rich, Libby, Fred, and Eve before the war, then spent all the time in London reading newspapers to find the cause for the thing. After we got here, which was our first breather since London, I gave up and set Eve to the job.”
“But what did you do?”
“Directed the work, tried to keep us alive while Fred tracked down the saboteurs and Eve and Rich tried to guess who was doing what, and why. It wasn’t until something Jamie said that I realized our enemy was likely to be whoever was behind the wars. That was really the first clue. I wish Jamie could know—” I stopped, shook my head, and looked away until I was under control.
“Wow,” said Tom.
I laughed.
A few of them lived. Some may regret it now, some later, but they lived.
All of the universe, it seemed, had conspired to beat me into the ground, and yet I lived, and with me were five friends, plus two living reminders of New Quebec. And I had what the Committee wanted, needed. Tragedy is more real than the life that gives it birth, but I laugh in its face because there are two children from New Quebec who will hate me forever.
The door of Feng’s opened, and I breathed the sharp, tangy air of Cicero once more. It was at this moment that I felt the sharpest, real sense of loss for New Quebec.
“Welcome back, Richard,” said Carla.
“Thanks. Call me Billy.”
“Did you—”
“The enemy,” I said, “has one home world. It’s Charity. Hit them there and it’s all over.”