The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

So much dissipation. Strained through a hundred bodies, a thousand incarnations. Virtual, meat and blood, grist. What the hell did C stand for? What was his name? It couldn’t possibly matter, or he would remember it. Wouldn’t he?

  A piece of string that crawls from a throat, and crawls into another mouth to be swallowed.

  I was once a man. My real name is Clare Runic.

  Real.

  Name.

  Hell, I was once a woman, too. Many men. Many women. Many other things made from data and grist. Things with blunted genders and sickles for brains. Small spaces. Spies must travel light. No room for the past. Spies don’t have real names.

  The truth is that it is unclear whether or not I was once Clare Runic, thought C, or whether I need to think that I was in order to complete this mission. Something is happening of which I am not fully aware.

  Across Washington Square, in the early morning light, a man was walking toward him. This man wore a coat shaped very like his own. But as the man drew closer, he saw that it was actually thelining of a coat like his. And then the man sat down next to him on the bench.

  The other man was C. He had met himself.

  “Did you come for the coat?” C asked himself.

  The other C smiled, shook his head.

  “Amés contacted you,” the other C said. “I was listening in.”

  “I thought that it was impossible to eavesdrop on banded gluon quantum-teleported messages.”

  “Did youreally think that?”

  “No,” said C. “I guess not really.”

  “He used a great deal of energy to make that transmission. Probably caused a brownout on Mercury. He won’t be able to contact you mind-to-mind using a secure method for another day. You met with Cureoak?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he give you the information?”

  “No.”

  “Good. All we need is half of an Earth day. The Harmony code can be released after noon today.”

  “Good, because if I don’t deliver it by midnight tonight, Amés is going to,” C tapped his temple with a finger, “check back in with me, in his pretty little way.”

  “That will not present a problem.”

  “Good.” The rising sun whitened the top of a nearby building, and both Cs watched the glow. After a moment, they both sighed simultaneously and got back to business.

  “Why do you need a half day?” C said.

  “For an escape,” said the other C.

  “Is it an important escape?”

  “Even with the Harmony code dominating all the other LAPs and Artificial Intelligences, Amés can’t take the outer system if this person escapes.”

  “Who is going to escape?”

  The other C smiled. “I could tell you that,” he said, “but then I’d have to shoot you. Let’s just say that it is a Large Array of Personalities that Amésmust control if he wants to rule all that he surveys.”

  “Hedoes wish to rule all he surveys,” C said, rubbing his head, remembering the pain of Amés’s voice inside his skull. “I can definitely vouch for that.”

  “We know this. There’s no doubt.”

  C glanced sidelong at the other C.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s in the box?”

  “The box is another matter entirely. It’s part of a larger operation, as far as I can tell. I don’t know what’s in the box.” The other C pulled a gun from the inner pocket of the liner. Did the liner have pockets before? He couldn’t remember. The gun was an old-fashioned revolver. “When you obtain and use the Cassady-13 information, shoot the box with this.”

  “Shoot the box?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I’m to have no knowledge of what shooting it will do?”

  The other C shook his head. “One shot will be enough, though I’ve put three bullets in the chambers.”

  “We like built-in redundancy, don’t we?”

  The other C let a thin wisp of a smile play over his features. His sea-green eyes seemed dimmed, as if a cloud had passed over the oceans inside them.

  “Not exactly.” He stood up, took off the coat liner and laid it on the bench beside C. “I’m ready,” he said.

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” C asked himself.

  “Because Amés would have found out if you’d left Mercury with the knowledge. He filtered you pretty fine to make sure you weren’t up to one of your spy tricks. You know how he hates those dirty spy tricks.”

  “And how he depends upon them,” C replied. He looked at the gun. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Entirely,” said the other C. He stepped away several paces.

  Without another word, C took aim with the gun and pulled the trigger. As usual, he made a good head shot. The other C crumpled to the ground in a pool of brains and blood. There was no grist yet created that could put this mess back together again. But just to make sure, C had his own grist outriders obliterate all traces of his former self. Soon the remains of the other C were just a lump in the grass.

  C shrugged out of his coat and put the liner back into it, then put the coat back on. He had been comfortable without the liner before, but the day had just grown a little colder.

  Lucre in Ace

  Later in the morning, C rang the buzzer on Cureoak’s door in Chelsea. Hecate Minim leaned out a window and saw that it was him. C counted to see that she was on the sixth floor.“What do you want?” she called down to him. “And how did you find us?”

  “Through your grist,” he replied. “Let me come up.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  C stood for a moment and could think of nothing to say. Finally, he answered, “For old time’s sake.”

  Hecate Minim ducked back inside. Nothing happened for a while, and then the door clicked open, as if a hand on the other side had unlocked it, then stepped away. He went inside, pushed the door shut behind him, and climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. There may have been an elevator, but he couldn’t find it.

  Cureoak was sitting in a recliner by the window. He smoked a Terra Nova, with the pack, and an old-fashioned plastic ashtray, beside him on a small table. The smoke from the Terra Nova turned in the sunlight and assumed the form of dragons and fairies before dissipating into the gloom of the ceiling. It was a special grist additive that did this, and was what made them expensive cigarettes.

  C sat down in a rocker across from him. Hecate Minim brought them both coffee. It was hot and the milk was fresh—the first good coffee he’d had since his return to Earth. She did not sit with them, but at the dining-room table nearby, where she fingered receipts displayed across its surface within the grist, comparing profits to loss. A Mandala 90 dangled from her lips. She ashed it onto the table, which absorbed it and incorporated the ashes into its display.

  “I have to release the children,” C said to Cureoak.

  Cureoak took a drag, looked out the window at the day.

  “Whynow ?” he said. “Why not three hundred years ago?”

  C sipped his coffee.

  “There is no other copy of you,” C said. “I lied. I had to buy time. It is all rather complicated.” He rocked once. Twice. “Amés has a copy ofme . He had me duped before I left Mercury.”

  For the first time, Cureoak looked at him. “I’m sorry, Clare,” he said.

  “If I don’t use Cassady-13, he’s going to loop my copy in virtual.”

  C was trembling at the thought. Coffee sloshed over his cup and onto his wrist, so he set the cup down and held it in his lap with both hands. He stopped rocking.

  “What did you do that makes you so afraid?”

  “Something I didn’t do.”

  “What?”

  “Save the children when the city turned to bone.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Cureoak said, and ran his hand through his thin hair. He rubbed his face and took another toke from his cigarette. “But you froze the Harmony code. You set back that old bastard’s plans by three hundred years.”

&n
bsp; “Long enough,” C said, “to give the rest of us a chance against him.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “No, I’m not sure about anything. But I have information that leads me to believe that it’s long enough. There have been some advances. People have got a chance against him now.”

  “And you expect me to trust you?” Cureoak leaned forward. “You told me never to trust anybody.”

  “I locked the bone-change down with a code key. I attached the code key to a cipher, and gave the text of that cipher to the only man I knew I could absolutely trust, whose loyalty I could be sure of.”

  “I’ll never understand why you gave it to me and not to the old drunkard,” Cureoak said.

  “Have you ever considered,” said C, “that the very fact that you possessed the key was the reason you didn’t kill yourself with drink just like him?”

  Cureoak leaned back in his chair. He rubbed his thighs and belly.He likes to feel his reality in the world, C thought.He reminds himself of it every day.

  “Yes, yes,” Cureoak said. “Of course that is true. That and the love of his daughter. My daughter.”

  Hecate Minim looked up from what she was doing at the table. “Papa?” she said. “Is this true? All the nonsense about this Cassady-13?”

  “Yes.”

  Hecate turned to C. “What will happen to him if he gives the key to you?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Director Amés won’t have him killed out of vindictiveness?”

  “No. He gave me his word he would not.”

  “What does that mean, coming from a tyrant?”

  “Amés considers his word sacred. He is styling himself as an emperor, not a dictator. Honor is everything with him.”

  “And you would stake my father’s life on this?”

  “I’m staking my life on it. My other life, back on Mercury, where the copy is stored.”

  “And what will happen to everybody else?” Cureoak said. He took a long drag and finished off his cigarette. When he breathed out, a great dragon with fiery eyes formed in front of Cureoak’s face. For an instant, C thought it might stay there, come to life, and rip them all to pieces. But then it dissipated and was only smoke.

  “I’m not certain,” C said.

  They were silent for a moment. C gazed at the walls of Cureoak’s living room. They had once been white, but were now browned to a darker shade by years of cigarette smoke. Centuries, perhaps. There were fine cracks everywhere, and C had the distinct sense that the entire building was held together by nothing but paint.

  Along one wall, tucked under a crown molding that was separating from it, was a line of dried red roses, hung upside down. Perhaps it was a ritual between Hecate and her father to exchange them. Perhaps only one of them brought them for the other. There were various possible permutations. He counted twenty-three roses.

  “I believe,” said C, “that Amés contains the seed to his own destruction within himself.”

  “So you transformed New York and killed a million people,” said Hecate Minim. “But now you think it was a big mistake and things would have worked out all right in any case?”

  “Most people got away.”

  “But not the children at school that day. Their parents couldn’t get to them in time.”

  “The children aren’t dead.”

  “What do you mean? Of course they are. Dead children are practically the religion of this city. And the business, too.” Hecate Minim seemed suddenly close to tears. But she was not looking at C. She was looking at her own hands, as if they were dirty. As if she were as bad as he was.

  “The children are . . . archived,” C said gently. “In the grist.”

  “What are you saying? If you undo the bone-change, then the children will all come back to life?”

  “Yes. That is what I think will happen.”

  “Most of their parents are long dead or else changed into something else.”

  “They will be orphans,” said Cureoak. “Thousands of orphans.”

  Silence in the apartment for a moment. The air thick in the room. Smoke and dust and years.

  “Remember how New York used to be?” said C.

  “Chaos city,” Cureoak said. “All things counter, original, spare, and strange.”

  “I never thought I’d say it,” C replied. “But I miss that.”

  Cureoak held the smoking cigarette butt in his left hand, looked at the forms assumed by the last of the smoke.

  “And the hippos were boiled in their tanks,” he said in a low clear voice. His nonsense words blew the smoke away.

  Cureoak blinked. Blinked again.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes. It’s still there, all right. Goddamn, that is complicated and crazy. I could never have remembered it without the grist.”

  Jack Cureoak stood up from the chair by the window and came over to touch C’s shoulder. Pellicle met pellicle. Grist met grist. He leaned over and kissed his old friend’s cheek.

  “Set the children free,” he whispered into C’s ear.

  C’s mind bloomed with the Cassady-13 code key.

  In Cruel Arc

  They went to Columbia University, where it all began, to start changing the city back from the bone. The ivory gates shown like bloody teeth in the afternoon sun. The school grounds were empty. Nobody lived this far north in Manhattan, even though the subway still came here, responding to its secret subterranean predilections.C set down his brown paper package on the ground beside him. He programmed the grist on the palms of his hands with the key.

  Making the change would be the work of but a moment.

  “Remember when you and I and Mamery used to have those long talks about what the world would be like after the grist was truly distributed everywhere?” said C, holding his coded hands in the air. “Now grist is all we are.”

  Cureoak leaned against the gate and shook another Terra Nova until it lit. “We are dark and sweet and lustrous,” he said. “We are coffee made with rain.” It was the first lines of a poem fromDesolate Traveler . A benediction, C thought.

  C knelt and touched his hands to Broadway.

  “Good-bye, Mamery,” he whispered.

  Instantly, the city began to change back from the bone.

  Instantly, the Harmony code came away, swarmed about, seeking control.

  But control of what? There wasn’t anybody worth ruling on Earth anymore.

  It uplinked to the Met, assessed all of three hundred years in a microsecond. And like a great reverse tornado, swirled through the grist of Earth’s surface, to the enormous cable coming in at the North Pole, and migrated into space, into the Met. Back across space, carrying its new freedom, the ability to shut down the bone-change, as a vanguard. Back to its creator and the absolute security of the fortress Amés had made of the planet Mercury. Within minutes, Amés had what he wanted to rule his world.

  Far, far away, in the asteroid belt, a strange man was riding a spaceship that looked like a cloud to a moon of Neptune, and out of Amés’s clutches. That man would be Amés’s downfall. That was the plan. Or part of it. There would be a bloody war to fight. And other changes, more complex, more subtle.

  One of the several copies of C—the oldest existing copy—knew all about this and understood what it meant. Was it all an elaborate plot to save humanity? Or had she really done it because of the children? She was standing there beside C when he changed the city back. She was standing next to C and the man who thought she was his daughter, and though she knew all that had been set into motion, she still did not understand the turnings of her own heart. Was it punishment or redemption she sought?

  All I know is that these men are my brothers, still and always, Hecate Minim thought. That is the one thing that has survived all the transformations, all the dark deeds, and all the changes—all the ways that time can spell a human being. I am my brother’s keeper. It is what there is to do while you are alive.

  Lunar Circe

  In o
ld New York, the sun set and the children opened their eyes to twilight. It could have been later in the same day that they went to school. But it wasn’t. It was much later than that.

  Clue in Carr

  While the city changed back into itself, the three of them walked down to the Hudson River at 116th Street, down to the park grounds where Cureoak had stabbed Mamery to death three hundred years before. Weeds had grown up since then.“I still remember,” Cureoak said. “But it fades. Itdoes fade.”

  “She would have wanted to die if she had known what she would become,” C said. “I always believed that.”

  “I wish that I could know that for certain.”

  “I wish that I could have broughtmyself to do it,” said C. “I’ve done it so much since then. When I felt it was called for.”

  “Yes, yes.” Cureoak rubbed his face and his stomach. He leaned on his cane. “Not the same, though,” he said. “Mamery was the woman you loved. I couldn’t stand watching the way you were dying with her. It was the only way to keep both of you from dying.”

  “Everything would have been different if I had killed her instead of you having killed her.”

  “Do you think so, really?” said Cureoak. “That I would have turned into the spy and you would be the poet?”

  “That the other you might not have died of drink,” said C. “And I would have liked to have been a poet.”

  “I’m alive,” said Cureoak. “And you might be a poet, yet.”

  C smiled, shook his head. “I have one more thing to do, and then I have to go.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Cureoak said, laughing. And then he stopped laughing suddenly. He rubbed his eyes. They had begun to tear up.

  “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

  “Don’t worry,” said C. “There’s more where I came from.”

  Lucien Carr

  He asked Cureoak to leave him there and to go home. In the end they compromised, and Hecate Minim remained while Cureoak waited for her at the gates of the university. The two men parted with no words.Cureoak stood looking at C for a long while. He finally touched C’s shoulder. All there was to say was in the grist. After a moment of contact, he took away his hand and walked from the river, up the hill and into the city.