Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

  Sanchez left, as Ari, I, and Spare14 did a few minutes later. We caught a cab and returned to Spare14’s office. By then the patrolman had gone, and the drops of Murphy’s blood had dried on the stairwell carpet. So had the pool of blood on the carpet of the inner room of the office. Spare14 looked at it, winced, and shut the door to hide the sight.

  “I’ll call one of those housekeeping services,” he remarked. “The kind that specializes in crime scene cleanup.”

  “You’re going to keep this office?” Ari said.

  Spare14 shrugged. “Moving may not do the slightest bit of good,” he said, “if my suspicions are correct. O’Grady, I got the impression that Murphy identified the assailant.”

  “She responded to an EI, yeah. Ash. The Axeman’s assistant in the Interchange kidnapping case. They escaped to Terra Six just as we moved in on them.”

  “I remember it all too well. Ash, was it? Another confirmation of my suspicions.” Spare14 sat down behind his desk and waved in the direction of other chairs. “Do sit down. I’ll brief you on my own authority. Nathan, my apologies for your interrupted examination, but frankly, at this rate it’s only going to be a formality. Your active duty credit tally must be rather high by now.”

  “I have the feeling it’s about to go higher,” Ari said.

  “You may well be right about that. O’Grady, did Murphy tell you how many orbs she was carrying?”

  “Three.” I held up three fingers. “One to get her here to Terra Four. The second to get us to Terra One. As for the third, I don’t know. Do you?”

  “It would have been for Terra Six.” Spare14 gave me a thin smile. “That’s where Murphy’s based. She’d need it to get home.”

  Ari muttered a sound something like “aha!”

  “Yeah, and that’s where Ash is based, too,” I said. “Coincidence? I don’t think so. Here’s my wild guess. Someone tipped Ash off. She knew that a world-walker was coming here with orbs worth stealing.”

  “Not so very wild a guess,” Spare14 said. “There’s something wrong at the TWIXT office on Terra Six. The last time I visited there, I felt some sort of imbalance, I suppose we might call it. To use your Agency’s terms, TWIXT stands on the side of Cosmic Order. The TWIXT office smelled of Chaos to me.” He paused for a frown into empty air. “O’Grady, you know that my own talents are weak. They’re not organic, not a part of me. I had to learn them. I was too uncertain to file a formal report. Those reports are serious matters. The entire staff would have been placed on administrative leave, and a full-scale investigation would have followed. The process is nothing to invoke lightly.”

  I didn’t need to be psychic to see what was coming.

  “So you want us to go take a look?” I said.

  “Yes, very much. I have a legitimate reason to send you. The Axeman, Ash’s old confederate, was last seen heading for Six. TWIXT has a warrant out on him.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I can recognize him. I’ve seen him in trance.”

  “Exactly. You’ll need clearance from your agency, of course. I understand that.”

  I considered what Y was going to say about the idea of my taking off for Terra Six. I also considered how much I disliked Ash. In our previous encounter, Ash had set up an attempt to murder someone I admired. If I’d not been on the scene, the intended victim would have been stabbed to death. Now the little bitch had nearly killed someone else. It occurred to me that Ash was entirely too fond of knives.

  “Er,” Spare14 said. “Do you think you can get clearance?”

  “No.” I saw no reason to lie. “I think Y will veto my participation, assuming, of course, that he knows about it.”

  “Damn!” Spare14 frowned at his desktop. “What a pity.”

  Ari chuckled. I suppose you can call the repressed morbid snort he makes a chuckle.

  “What is it, Nathan?” Spare14 looked up, annoyed.

  “Assuming he knows,” Ari said. “I doubt very much that O’Grady’s planning on telling him.”

  I smiled. Ari smiled. Spare14 smiled and reached for the trans-world router.

  “Let me just see how soon I can get another world-walker,” Spare14 said. “And you’ll need official clearance and a briefing on the situation on Six. It’s quite vexing. Tomorrow, I should think, would be the earliest you might go, but we’d best not get our hopes up. Nathan, I’ll send you a background file over our network. O’Grady, you’ll have access to it as well.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll file a report with the Agency, telling them that Ari’s examination has been postponed and moved. Which is, after all, perfectly true.”

  “Quite so,” Spare14 continued. “I should warn you both about something now. TWIXT may be dedicated to fighting Chaos, but working for them becomes utterly haphazard at times. We’re always short-staffed and underfunded. It usually seems that we live on the run. Situations change so very fast when one is dealing with a multiverse.”

  “I can believe that,” I said. “It’s the same with the Agency, though of course we’ve only got one messed-up planet to deal with.”

  Spare14 smiled at that. “As for this mission, it shouldn’t take you long to get a reading on the office. If I could sense something with my paltry talents, the aura field there must be extremely disturbed.”

  We returned home just after noon. While I called Annie to tell her that we’d be leaving some other day, Ari rooted around in our refrigerator for lunch. Since I was still battling a serious eating disorder, I viewed the rooting with trepidation. Ari could and would eat anything when he was hungry. I had trouble getting good food down, much less the things he served. But then, even a normal gorge would have risen when faced with toaster waffles crowned with tuna fish straight from the can, oil and all, or maple bars topped with crumbled chicken sausage.

  “I’d better go, Annie,” I told my second-in-command. “Ari’s starting to cook something.”

  “You do have smoke alarms, don’t you?” Annie said.

  “God, you’re optimistic today! Yeah, don’t worry. I made sure of that.”

  Ari managed to make grilled cheese sandwiches without causing a disaster, and I managed to eat one of them, a successful meal all round by our standards. When he doused some leftover potato salad with catsup, right in the cardboard carton, I retreated into the living room and picked up my e-mail.

  At my non-Agency address, Shira Flowertree had replied. When Ari had told me that his mother wasn’t one for maternal gushing, he hadn’t been kidding.

  “I’m glad you and my Ari are happy,” Shira said. “I’m doubly glad that you work in law enforcement yourself. No doubt you two understand each other. And I do hope you have some self-defense training. You’ll need it. If he ever becomes truly angry with you, and he doubtless will at some point, never ever turn your back on him. He can be quite dangerous. I blame his experiences in the Israeli army. He had a temper as a child, but it never got out of hand.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. I was merely surprised that his mother would see it and admit it. She went on to say that she had a good friend who had a video conferencing setup she could use, provided I didn’t want to talk early in the morning. I told her not to worry, that early mornings there meant the middle of the night in my time zone.

  I was about to switch over to TranceWeb when I felt something watching me. I swiveled around in my chair and found a small silver cephalopod sitting on the coffee table. I banished it with a Chaos ward and got back to work.

  Filing my weaseling update to the Agency brought me a crisis of conscience. In the psychic universe there are two main principles, Chaos and Order. Too much Order means social stagnation and the death of every creative process. Too much Chaos means social violence and suffering, usually physical. Eventually, each situation turns into its opposite in an eternal ugly dance of extremes—unless the two merge in the right proportions, and Harmony results. Each conscious individual, whether human or alien, shares the nature of both principles and has the capacity to
choose to work for Harmony. Unfortunately, few make that choice.

  I knew that my essential nature held an excess of Chaos, but I’d chosen to strive toward Harmony by embracing Order. So what was I doing lying to my superior at the Agency? I put the question to Ari when he returned to the living room after glutting himself on leftovers.

  “If you want to call off the trip,” he said, “I’ll just ring Spare14 and tell him so. He’s asking you for a tremendous favor, after all.”

  “I don’t want to call it off. That’s the problem. Something’s pushing me to go along. Or pulling me, I guess I should say. There’s something there I ought to see.”

  “If it’s some sort of corrupt individual, and if that individual’s connected to the Axeman and Ash, then you’ll certainly be serving Harmony by helping root them out.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it? But—”

  “The problem lies with Y, not you,” Ari continued unabated. “From what you’ve told me, he’s being entirely too rigid. Too Orderly, I suppose you’d say. His position, his authority, the regulations, fear of change—all of that rot is what’s motivating him.”

  “You have a touch of Chaos yourself, don’t you?”

  “No. I simply have too much respect for the Order principle to see it misused. He’s overdoing it, rather, and for the wrong reasons.”

  Every now and then Ari surprised me with his insight.

  “You know,” I said. “You’ve just given me a good idea.”

  I sent Y an e-mail over TranceWeb, stating that Ari’s higher-ups had rescheduled his examination, and that I’d be going with him to Terra Six rather than Terra One when the time came. I admitted that there were possible complications that might keep me there longer than either the Agency or I wanted.

  “The intel Spare14 shared with me,” I wrote in the e-mail, “indicates that the Chaos masters may have established a base of sorts on the deviant level of Terra Six. At the very least, they have introduced a spy or corrupted a local. We should explore this possibility in case it leads back to the Peacock Angel cult, and I have reason to suspect it will. Their main method does seem to be infiltration. I understand your reservations about TWIXT, but in this case, their concerns may have dovetailed with ours. Since you expressedly asked me to investigate the Peacock Angel phenomenon, I feel duty-bound to follow this lead.”

  The “duty-bound” line of thought came from Ari’s insight. Y had indeed asked me to find out if Chaos masters controlled the Peacock Angel bunch—some months before, but he’d asked. The phrasing worked. Permission came back in twenty minutes.

  “But be very careful,” Y finished up. “Remember that you have observer status only.”

  I assured him that I would and thanked him as well.

  All that remained was waiting until Spare14 could get a TWIXT world-walker to transport us. I briefly thought of suggesting my brother Michael, who could use my father’s orbs, but I ruled that out. He’d already displayed too much of a taste for Chaotic venturing around the multiverse to encourage him. And my father would never have agreed to work with the police in general and with TWIXT in particular, because he’d spent thirteen years in prison after being arrested by the self-same Spare14. His crime? Transporting fellow IRA members across world lines to escape from a deeply oppressive imperial Britain on Terra Five. Know who Oswald Mosley was? The leader of the Black Shirts, a violent Fascist group in the 1930s. On Five, he’d won.

  Later that day Ari received the background file on Terra Six that Spare14 had promised us. He printed it out and brought me the copy rather than risk forwarding it to me digitally. I suppose that if I had had his skill with computers, I might have been able to obtain routing information or some such thing from an e-mail. I didn’t and couldn’t, but Ari liked to keep his paranoia well-fed and exercised. I appreciated getting the file in whatever shape or form. Ari handed me the stack of paper in a cold silence. Each page had a header announcing that the information was restricted material.

  “Jeez, do you look sour!” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, sure! You don’t really want to give me this, do you?”

  “Since Spare14 authorized your access, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Wait a minute! I know why you look so sullen. I don’t have to offer you some kind of weird bondage sex just to get a look at it.”

  He blushed scarlet. I’d hit it in one. I smiled. He continued blushing.

  “Oh, very well,” he said eventually. “I’ll admit to being disappointed.” Slowly his color returned to normal. “But of course, should you feel like rewarding me for being so honest …”

  “I’ll read the file first, and then I’ll see what I feel like.”

  “I’ll be in working with my laptop if you should want to seduce me.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “At the kitchen table.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “With the handcuffs ready. Just in case you’re in the mood for those.”

  I felt the level of my Qi rising. He was watching me with an innocent smile.

  “Or if you’re not,” Ari continued, “I’m sure I can think of something else you might like. A silk scarf around your wrists? Kinder than the cuffs. Just as—” he paused and smiled. “Controlling.”

  I began to perceive the Qi as heat, a spread of warmth through my body. I certainly enjoyed making love with Ari in all the ordinary ways, but whenever he took control of me in bed, I felt safe from the Chaotic side of my nature. It gave me tremendous freedom to let go and revel in what he was doing to me. He knew it, too, damn him! I laid the stack of papers down on the coffee table.

  “I could put on those black stockings,” I said.

  “Please do,” he said. “I’ll fetch the scarf and meet you in the bedroom.”

  When I stood up, he caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. The Qi blazed into sheer unadulterated lust.

  CHAPTER 4

  EVENTUALLY, SOME WHILE AND a short nap later, we got out of bed. While Ari ordered pizza for dinner, I started reading the file. The information made me glad we’d had our fun before I saw the grim situation ahead of us. I might have been depressed into abstinence.

  Terra Six is a member of our local cluster of deviant levels, but one where the vast majority of its inhabitants have no idea that the universe is really a multiverse—the same situation, in other words, as here on our own Terra Four. By the way, the numbers of the levels mean very little, a naming convenience only, not a hierarchy, not even an expression of closeness or distance. Our entire local cluster within the multiverse had deviated around 1919, our time, during one of the great fractal generation events that produces gates and worlds.1

  On Terra Six, among many other events, the United States fell apart during the Great Depression. When Wall Street-backed Fascists assassinated President Roosevelt, no one else emerged to unify the country. California and Oregon formed a new California Republic. Washington state joined Canada. The New England and Atlantic states put together the Republic of America, and the Deep South returned to the Confederacy—without Texas, which became a republic and a member of OPEC. The vast middle of the country now belonged to the Fundamentalist-dominated Kingdom of Christ.

  The Kingdom hated California, that bastion of ecology and devilish ideas like the equality of women, and their preacher-leaders did more than give sermons against it. The TWIXT report concluded with a discussion of various acts of terrorism against the Republic. Every Californian assumed the Kingdom lay behind them all. Evidence existed to back up this belief. Most recently, the terrorists had attacked San Francisco. They’d tried to bomb General Hospital and its women’s health clinic—preying on those they saw as weak, as terrorists always do. On a tip, the police were waiting and arrested four operatives.

  Some days prior to the issuance of the report I was reading, the terrorists—in revenge—had set off a number of bombs in the Emporium, a huge department store
on Market Street. A lot of people, mostly women, had died in the explosions and fires.

  “These people are crazy,” I said to Ari. “Why blow up a department store?”

  “It’s not as well guarded as a bank or civic building, I should think. We’ve had bombings in shopping areas and restaurants at home. Anywhere the terrorists can cause pain and chaos will do them nicely.”

  When Ari talked about “we” or “home” in this way, he invariably meant Israel.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s what terrorism is all about, pain and chaos. Bastards!”

  I could remember the Terra Four version of the Emporium, which had changed hands and no longer existed as such here. I’d gone there often as a child with my mother or Aunt Eileen. In the basement the store carried merchandise that seemed to my child-self to date from the Dark Ages, things like boxes of little white cotton gloves or stays for mending corsets. When the terrorists bombed the building on Terra Six, the upper floors would have collapsed into that basement and the store’s beautiful baroque dome come crashing down on top of the ruins. The thought made me shiver.

  We’d just finished eating when I had a reason to shiver again. Maureen called me, and she sounded exhausted.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” I said. “I was wondering how the lawyer’s appointment went.”

  “Lousy. That’s why I didn’t call you last night. I needed to think things through.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He told us not to get the restraining order. He says they make the situation worse.”

  “What?”

  “He says they put you in more danger. The police don’t really do much, and then the guy just gets angrier and more determined to hurt you. Some of them take it as a challenge, he says. Or a way to rebel against authority. He had loads of cases to tell us about. The police really won’t act until he tries to beat you up or kill you, and then it’s usually too late.”