The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “Well, if Tom told you, then you should do it,” TB said.

  “Damn right,” said Gladys. “But I want you to look after the place while I’m gone.”

  “Gladys, you live in an old ditch.”

  “It is a dry culvert. And I do not want anybody moving in on me while I’m gone. A place that nice is hard to come by.”

  “All I can do is go down there and check on it.”

  “If anybody comes along, you have to run them off.”

  “I’m not going to run anybody off.”

  “You have to. I’m depending on you.”

  “I’ll tell them the place is already taken,” TB said. “That’s about all I can promise.”

  “You tell them that it has a curse on it,” Gladys said. “And that I’ll put a curse onthem if I catch them in my house.”

  TB snorted back a laugh. “All right,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Water my hydrangea.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “It’s a plant. Just stick your finger in the dirt and don’t water it if it’s still moist.”

  “Stick my finger in the dirt?”

  “It’s clean fill!”

  “I’ll water it, then.”

  “Will you let me sleep here tonight?”

  “No, Gladys.”

  “I’m scared to go back there. Harold’s being mean.” Harold was the “devil” that sat on Gladys’s other shoulder. Tom spoke into one ear, and Harold into the other. People could ask Harold about money, and he would tell Gladys the answer if he felt like it.

  “You can’t stay here.” TB rose from his own seat and pulled Gladys up from the stool. She had a ripe smell when he was this close to her. “In fact, you have to go on now because I have to do something.” He guided her toward the door.

  “What do you have to do?” she said. She pulled loose of his hold and stood her ground. TB walked around her and opened the door. “Something,” he said. He pointed toward the twilight outside the doorway. “Go on home, Gladys. I’ll check in on your place tomorrow.”

  “I’m not leaving for two days,” she replied. “Check in on it day after tomorrow.”

  “Okay, then,” TB said. He motioned to the door. “You’ve got to go, Gladys, so I can get to what I need to do.”

  She walked to the door, turned around. “Day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be gone for a while. I’m trusting you, TB.”

  “You can trust me to look in on your place.”

  “And not steal anything.”

  “I can promise you that, too.”

  “All right, then. I’m trusting you.”

  “Good night, Gladys.”

  “Good night.” She finally left. After TB heard her make her way back to the swamp bank, he got up and closed the door behind her, which she’d neglected to do. Within minutes there was another knock. TB sighed and got up to answer it. He let Bob in.

  Bob pulled out a jar of a jellied liquid. It was Carbuncle moonshine, as thick as week-old piss and about as yellow. “Let’s drink,” he said, and set the bottle on TB’s table. “I come to get you drunk and get your mind off things.”

  “I won’t drink that swill,” TB said. Bob put the bottle to his mouth and swallowed two tremendous gulps. He handed the bottle to TB, shaking it in his face. TB took it.

  “Damn!” Bob said. “Hot damn!”

  “Gladys was right about you being crazy.”

  “She come around here tonight?”

  “She just left. Said she wanted me to look after her place.”

  “She ain’t going to see her aunt.”

  “Maybe she will.”

  “Like hell. Gladys never goes far from that ditch.”

  TB looked down at the moonshine. He looked away from it and, trying not to taste it, took a swig. He tasted it. It was like rusty paint thinner. Some barely active grist, too. TB couldn’t help analyzing it; that was the way he was built. Cleaning agents for sewer pipes. Good God. He took another before he could think about it.

  “You drink up.” Bob looked at him with a faintly jealous glare. TB handed the bottle back.

  “No, you.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Bob leaned back and poured the rest of the swill down his throat. He let out a yell when he was finished that startled TB, even though he was ready for it.

  “I want some beer to chase it with,” Bob said.

  “Beer would be good, but I don’t have any.”

  “Let’s go down to Ru June’s and shoot some pool.”

  “It’s too damn late.”

  “It’s early.”

  TB thought about it. The moonshine warmed his gut. He could feel it threatening to eat through his gut if he didn’t dilute it with something. There was nothing further to do about Jill. She would sleep, and at some time, she would die in her sleep. He ought to stay with her. He ought to face what he had done.

  “Let me get my coat.”

  The Carbuncle glowed blue-green when they emerged from the hoy. High above them, like the distant shore of an enormous lake, was the other side of the cylinder. TB had been there, and most of it was a fetid slough. Every few minutes a flare of swamp gas methane would erupt from the garbage on that side of the curve and flame into a white fireball. These fireballs were many feet across, but they looked like pinprick flashes from this distance. TB had been caught by one once. The escaping gas had capsized his little canoe, and being in the water had likely saved him from being burnt to a crisp. Yet there were people who live on that side, too—people who knew how to avoid the gas. Most of the time.

  Bob didn’t go the usual way to Ru June’s, but instead took a twisty series of passageways, some of them cut deep in the mountains of garbage, some of them actually tunneled under and through it. The Bob-ways, TB thought of them. At one point TB felt a drip from above and looked up to see gigantic stalactites formed of some damp and glowing gangrenous extrusion.

  “We’re right under the old Bendy,” Bob told him. “That there’s the settle from the bottom muck.”

  “What do you think it is?” TB said.

  “Spent medical grist, mostly,” Bob replied. “It ain’t worth a damn, and some of it’s diseased.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “This is a hell of a shortcut to Ru June’s, though.”

  And it was. They emerged not a hundred feet from the tavern. The lights of the place glowed dimly behind skin windows. They mounted the porch and went in through a screen of plastic strips that was supposed to keep out the flies.

  TB let his eyes adjust to the unaccustomed brightness inside. There was a good crowd tonight. Chen was at the bar playing dominoes with John Goodnite. The dominoes were grumbling incoherently, as dominoes did. Over by the pool table Tinny Him, Nolan, and Big Greg were watching Sister Mary the whore line up a shot. She sank a stripe. There were no numbers on the balls.

  Tinny Him slapped TB on the back, and Bob went straight for the bottle of whiskey that was standing on the wall shelf beside Big Greg.

  “Good old TB,” Tinny Him said. “Get you some whiskey.” He handed over a flask.

  Chen looked up from his dominoes. “You drinkmy whiskey,” he said, then returned to the game. TB took a long swallow off Tinny Him’s flask. It was far better stuff than Bob’s moonshine, so he took another.

  “That whore sure can pool a stick,” Nolan said, coming to stand beside them. “She’s beating up on Big Greg like he was a ugly hat.”

  TB had no idea what Nolan meant. His grist patch was going bad, and he was slowly sinking into incomprehensibility for any but himself. This didn’t seem to bother him, though.

  Bob was standing very close to Sister Mary and giving her advice on a shot until she reached over and without heat slapped him back into the wall. He remained there respectfully while she took her shot and sank another stripe. Big Greg whispered a curse and the whore smiled. Her teeth were black from chewing betel nut.

  TB thought about how much she charged and
how much he had saved up. He wondered if she would swap a poke for a few rats, but decided against asking. Sister Mary didn’t like to barter. She wanted keys or something pretty.

  Tinny Him offered TB the flask again, and he took it. “I got to talk to you,” Tinny Him said. “You got to help me with my mother.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She’s dead, is what.”

  “Dead.” TB drank more whiskey. “How long?”

  “Three months.”

  TB stood waiting. There had to be more.

  “She won’t let me bury her.”

  “What do you mean she won’t let you bury her? She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, mostly.” Tinny Him looked around, embarrassed, then went on in a low voice. “Her pellicle won’t die. It keeps creeping around the house. And it’s pulling her body around like a rag doll. I can’t get her away from it.”

  “You mean her body died, but her pellicle didn’t.”

  “Hell, yes, that’s what I mean.” Tinny Him took the flask back and finished it off. “Hell, TB, what am I going to do? She’s really stinking up the place, and every time I throw the old hag out, that grist drags her right back in. It knocks on the door all night long until I have to open it.”

  “You’ve got a problem.”

  “Damn right, I’ve got a problem. She was good old mum, but I’m starting to hate her right now, let me tell you.”

  TB sighed. “Maybe I can do something,” he said. “But not tonight.”

  “You could come around tomorrow. My gal’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “I might just.”

  “You got to help me, TB. Everybody knows you got a sweet touch with the grist.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” TB said. He drifted over to the bar, leaving Tinny Him watching the pool game. He told Chen he wanted a cold beer, and Chen got it for him from a freezer box. It was a good way to chill the burning that was starting up in his stomach. He sat down on a stool at the bar and drank the beer. Chen’s bar was tiled in beaten-out snap-metal ads, all dead now and their days of roaming the corridors, sacs, bolsas, glands, and cylinders of the Met long done. Most of the advertisements were for products that he had never heard of, but the one his beer was sitting on he recognized. It was a recruiting pitch for the civil service, and there was Amés back before he was Big Cheese of the System, when he was Governor of Mercury. The snap-metal had paused in the middle of Amés’s pitch for the Met’s finest to come to Mercury and become part of the New Hierarchy. The snap-metal Amés was caught with the big mouth on his big face wide open. The bottom of TB’s beer glass fit almost perfectly in the round O of it.

  TB took a drink and set the glass back down. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut the hell up, why don’t you?”

  Chen looked up from his dominoes, which immediately started grumbling among themselves when they felt that he wasn’t paying attention to them. “You talking to me?” he said.

  TB grinned and shook his head. “I might tell you to shut up, but you don’t say much in the first place.”

  Ru June’s got more crowded as what passed for night in the Carbuncle wore on. The garbage pickers, the rat hunters, and the sump farmers drifted in. Most of them were men, but there were a few women, and a few indeterminate shambling masses of rags. Somebody tried to sell him a spent coil of luciferin tubing. It was mottled along its length where it had caught a plague. He nodded while the tube monger tried to convince him that it was rechargeable but refused to barter, and the man moved on after Chen gave him a hard stare. TB ordered another beer and fished three metal keys out of his pocket. This was the unit of currency in the Carbuncle. Two were broken. One looked like it was real brass and might go to something. He put the keys on the bar, and Chen quickly slid them away into a strongbox.

  Bob came over and slapped TB on his back. “Why don’t you get you some whiskey?” he said. He pulled up his shirt to show TB another flask of rotgut moonshine stuck under the string that held up his trousers.

  “Let me finish this beer and I might.”

  “Big Greg said somebody was asking after you.”

  “Gladys was, but she found me.”

  “It was a shaman priest.”

  “A what?”

  “One of them Greentree ones.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “They got a church or something over in Bagtown. Sometimes they come all the way out here. Big Greg said he was doing something funny with rocks.”

  “With rocks?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “Big Greg said it was something funny with rocks, is all I know. Hey, why areyou looking funny all of a sudden?”

  “I know that priest.”

  “Now how could that be?”

  “I know him. I wonder what he wants.”

  “What all men want,” said Bob. “Whiskey and something to poke. Or just whiskey sometimes. But always at least whiskey.” He reached over the bar and felt around down behind it. “What have I got my hand on, Chen?”

  Chen glanced over. “My goddamn scattergun,” he said.

  Bob felt some more and pulled out a battered fiddle. “Where’s my bow?”

  “Right there beside it,” Chen replied. Bob got the bow. He shook it a bit, and its grist rosined it up. Bob stood beside TB with his back to the bar. He pulled a long note off the fiddle, holding it to his chest. Then, without pause, he moved straight into a complicated reel. Bob punctuated the music with a few shouts right in TB’s ear.

  “Goddamn it, Bob, you’re loud,” he said after Bob was finished.

  “Got to dance,” Bob said. “Clear me a way!” he shouted to the room. A little clearing formed in the middle of the room, and Bob fiddled his way to it, then played and stomped his feet in syncopation.

  “Come on, TB,” Sister Mary said. “You’re going to dance with me.” She took his arm, and he let her lead him away from the bar. He didn’t know what she wanted him to do, but she hooked her arm through his and spun him around and around until he thought he was going to spew out his guts. While he was catching his breath and getting back some measure of balance, the whore climbed up on a table and began swishing her dress to Bob’s mad fiddling. TB watched her, glad for the respite.

  The whole room seemed to sway—not in very good rhythm—to the music. Between songs, Bob took hits off his moonshine and passed it up to Sister Mary, who remained on the tabletop, dancing and working several men who stood about her into a frenzy to see up her swishing dress.

  Chen was working a crowded bar, his domino game abandoned. He scowled at the interruption, but quickly poured drinks all around.

  “Get you some whiskey! Get you some whiskey!” Bob called out over and over again. After a moment, TB realized it was the name of the song he was playing.

  Somebody thrust a bottle into TB’s hand. He took a drink without thinking, and whatever was inside it slid down his gullet in a gel.

  Drinking grist.It was purple in the bottle and glowed faintly. He took another slug, and somebody else grabbed the stuff away from him. Down in his gut, he felt the grist activating. Instantly, he understood its coded purpose. Old Seventy-Five. Take you on a ride on a comet down into the sun.

  Go on, TB told the grist. I got nothing to lose.

  Enter and win!It said to him.Enter and win! But the contest was long expired.

  No, thank you.

  What do you want the most?

  It was a preprogrammed question, of course. This was not the same grist as that which had advertised the contest. Somebody had brewed up a mix. And hadn’t paid much attention to the melding. There was something else in there, something different. Military grist, maybe. One step away from sentience.

  What the hell. Down she goes.

  What do you want the most?

  To be drunker than I’ve ever been before.

  Drunker than this?

  Oh, yeah.


  All right.

  A night like no other!Visions of a naked couple in a Ganymede resort bath, drinking Old Seventy-Five from bottles with long straws.Live the dream! Enter and win!

  I said no.

  The little trance dispersed.

  What do you want the most?

  Bob was up on the table with Sister Mary. How could they both fit? Bob was playing and dancing with her. He leaned back over the reeling crowd and the whore held him at arm’s length, the fiddle between them. They spun round and round in a circle, Bob wildly sawing at his instrument and Sister Mary’s mouth gleaming blackly as she smiled a maniacal full-toothed smile.

  Someone bumped into TB and pushed him into somebody else. He staggered over to a corner to wait for Ru June’s to stop spinning. After a while, he realized that Bob and Sister Mary weren’t going to; the crowd in the tavern wasn’t; the chair, tables, and walls were only going to go on and on spinning and now lurching at him as if they were swelling up, engorging, distending toward him. Wanting something from him when all he had to give was nothing anymore.

  TB edged his way past it all to the door. He slid around the edge of the doorframe as if he were sneaking out. The plastic strips beat against him, but he pushed through them and stumbled his way off the porch. He went a hundred feet or so before he stepped in a soft place in the ground and keeled over. He landed with his back down.

  Above him the swamp gas flares were flashing arrhythmically. The stench of the whole world—something he hardly ever noticed anymore—hit him at once and completely. Nothing was right. Everything was out of kilter.

  There was a twist in his gut. Ben down there thrashing about. But I’m Ben. I’m Thaddeus. We finally have become one. What a pretty thing to contemplate. A man with another man thrust through him, crossways in the fourth dimension. A tesseracted cross, with a groaning man upon it, crucified to himself. But you couldn’t see all that because it was in the fourth dimension.

  Enough to turn a man to drink.

  I have to turn over so I don’t choke when I throw up.

  I’m going to throw up.

  He turned over and his stomach wanted to vomit, but the grist gel wasn’t going to be expelled, and he dry-heaved for several minutes until his body gave up on it.