Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

  Slavery. Profit. The words floated up from my subconscious and refused to leave. During a previous visit to SanFran, I’d come to suspect the Axeman’s criminal gang of abducting children to sell on some sort of black market here on Terra Three. What if he sold them elsewhere? I leaned back on the couch, put down the report, and Scanned the aura field. What did happen to those people that the Axeman took from SanFran in particular and California Three in general? A village up in the Sierra, huh? That would be on or near the border with the Kingdom, which had taken over the old state of Nevada. The mountains of the Sierra are high and wild, full of rocky little passes and hidden valleys, too long a border for the California National Guard to patrol.

  I don’t know what emotion was showing on my face, but I realized that both men had started watching me.

  “What is it, O’Grady?” Jan said.

  “A line of speculation,” I said. “A pretty high probability, but still, speculation at this stage. Ari, don’t the materials for IEDs cost money?”

  “Yes,” Ari said. “High nitrogen fertilizer like McVeigh used on Four is cheap, but the equipment to set off the device can be expensive.”

  “And the terrorists who infiltrate California have to have expenses, travel money, and so on. Fake IDs, too.” I thought for a moment. “The government of the Kingdom keeps denying that they finance these people.”

  “The people who finance terrorism always deny it,” Ari said. “They usually disguise their contributions as charity.”

  “Or else they run drugs and stuff to get the money,” I continued, “like the CIA in Nicaragua.”

  “True. That does happen.”

  “Slavery’s profitable in the Kingdom. What if the terrorists buy slaves cheap from the Axeman and then resell them to finance their little adventures?”

  They both gaped at me but not in disbelief.

  “The trans-world crime of the century,” Jan said at last. “Several centuries, actually, assuming it’s true.”

  “Talk about cutting bread from both ends of the loaf!” I said. “He takes money for getting the people to Six, steals whatever jewelry, currency, and other goods they’ve brought with them, and then sells the people themselves for a nice wholesale price. If, of course, my speculation’s correct. It just came floating in from the aura field.”

  “I wonder how Trotter’s murder might figure into this?” Ari was gazing into the distance as he thought things through. “The stolen orbs play a role, certainly. The attack on the TWIXT building on Six—he could have been an accessory and then have known too much once the attack failed. Or he might even have been getting cold feet at the scale of the violence.”

  “Accessory to the Axeman or to the terrorists?” Jan asked.

  “Why not both?” I said.

  “No reason,” Jan said. “If, as you say, this is all true.”

  “Quite,” Ari said. “We need evidence. This madam down at Peri’s. She must have some information as to the supposed terms of the Axeman’s offer. How much, what he’ll do for that amount, and so on. We also need to know if anyone’s ever returned from one of these jaunts or sent for a family member. If no one ever has, that’s another reason to suspect the slavery angle.”

  “You’re already involved with the cases on Terra Six.” Jan sighed with great drama. “I suppose that leaves me to go down to this top-flight whorehouse in the line of duty.”

  “Be careful of what Kerenskya says about that,” I said.

  This time his sigh was genuine. “I do need to be careful,” Jan said. “She thinks I need seasoning.”

  “So Spare14 told us, “Ari said. “Too prone to hasty action. I’ve got a problem that way myself, I’m afraid.”

  “Oddly enough, there’s a Dutch idiom about that.” Jan paused for a grin. “But it means the opposite of what Kerenskya has in mind. Too much seasoning—peper in iemands reet stoppen. Pepper up his arse, I think we could translate it.”

  While we waited for Willa, reports and messages flew back and forth over the trans-world router from Ari and Jan on one end and Spare14 and HQ on the others. Since I was sitting only a few feet away, they were forced to share the intel with me, or at least, some of it. I suspected them of transferring classified information directly to Ari’s laptop back in our safe on Terra Four, but I decided that I could get it out of him later in private rather than making a fuss right there and then. I was beginning to chafe at my “observer only” status—seriously, as Michael would have said. To use my psychic talents accurately, I need anchors in the real world of evidence and fact.

  “HQ are quite interested in your theory.” Ari did tell me that much. “It jibes with some observations JaMarcus Spivey had made earlier about the terrorist attacks on Six. The perpetrators seem quite well funded, for one thing. Besides that, the California National Guard have captured several cells of the alleged terrorists. Often they have weapons which shouldn’t be available on Terra Six, some advanced night scope rifles from Five, for example.”

  “So orbs and level-hopping are factors,” I said.

  “Most definitely. Which points in the direction of the Axeman’s gang.” Ari considered for a moment. “The slavery hypothesis strikes me as correct, but we badly want another source of information.”

  “What about Major Grace?” I said. “Y’know, at the Mission House. She knows us as CBI agents. We can be honest with her.”

  “Not terribly honest. There’s the question of deviant world levels.”

  “Ari, half the people in SanFran know the multiverse exists. Besides, she has to come from another level herself. Don’t you remember the poster in the hall? Jesus’ sister Sophia, the light of the world? That’s not standard Christian doctrine here any more than it is on Four.”

  “Right.” Ari glanced at his watch. “We have time to go see if we can speak with her. Willa won’t be here for several hours.”

  We walked downhill under a swirling yellow sky. Major Grace’s mission stood at the corner of Sackamenna Street and Joice Alley, a grim, cubical building painted fortress-gray. Wrought iron grates covered its ground-floor windows. A beefy young man in a black-and-maroon military-style uniform stood in front of the closed door, but when he saw me and Ari, he smiled and stepped aside. I recognized him from an earlier visit to SanFran on Three, during which Ari and I had saved Major Grace’s life.

  “Good to see you again, Agent Nathan,” the guy said. “We’re being more careful these days.”

  “Good,” Ari said. “We’d all hate to lose the Major.”

  The guard opened the door and bowed us inside to the pleasant, rose-pink foyer. We walked on down the long hallway, decorated with various religious-themed posters in the usual brightly-colored, overly glossy style. Right beside a stairway hung the framed poster of Sophia that I remembered, a woman in Middle Eastern dress with a strong, handsome face. An aureole of light streamed around her.

  Major Grace, the leader of this mission to the poor, had an office near the head of the stairs. When we knocked on the door, she opened it herself, a tall, square-shouldered woman dressed in a severely cut black-and-maroon dress. Her gray hair was escaping in wisps from the black headscarf she wore like a medieval wimple.

  “Well!” she said and smiled. “Eric and Rose, or should I say, our two CBI agents! I’m afraid I’ll always think of you two as Eric and Rose. You really did fool me, you know. Come in. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  We followed her into her office, a yellow room with a big oak desk, an old-fashioned swiveling office chair behind it, a filing cabinet, and two plain chairs for guests. She waved at us to sit down and returned to her own chair.

  “What brings you here?” Major Grace asked.

  “We’re looking for information,” Ari said, “concerning a criminal case. I believe I remember that you keep a red ledger with notes on people who’ve disappeared in odd circumstances. We have a theory about what might have happened to
them.”

  “I do, yes.” Major Grace opened a desk drawer and brought out the leather-bound book. “I’d certainly like to get to the bottom of this.”

  “What we’re wondering,” I put in, “is how many of the disappearances can be related to the gang run by the Axeman.”

  “The Storm Blue gang? You know, it’s odd. For a long time most of the missing persons I heard about did seem to have some connection with them, but just recently—not long after you arrested the men who tried to kill me, in fact—that changed. Almost no one has disappeared, and those that have tend to be eventually found floating in the Bay.”

  Ari and I exchanged a glance, which Major Grace acknowledged with a wry smile. “Here.” She slid the red ledger across the desk. “I’ll want that back, but there’s no reason why you can’t have it for a day or two.”

  “Thank you very much.” Ari picked up the book. “There could be a pattern here that might prove useful.”

  “I hope so. I’d very much like to see a permanent stop put to that sort of thing. May I ask what exactly you think happened to them?”

  “We think,” I said, “that the Axeman took money from these people to get them to a different world level, off of this one, that is, and then sold them into slavery on a world where one of the governments is trying to reinstate the laws of the Old Testament.”

  Major Grace stared at me, her mouth slack. Her SPP registered surprise but not skepticism.

  “Yes,” I said, “we do know about the multiverse. We didn’t originate on Three. I guess you didn’t, either, huh?”

  Major Grace smiled, took a deep breath, and said, “What makes you think we come from elsewhere?”

  “The Sophia poster in the hallway,” I said. “On my home world level and on this one, Jesus doesn’t have a sister. Or so the doctrines say. For all I know, he does, and the doctrines are wrong.”

  “I’d say they’re wrong. I didn’t realize how glaring the difference would be. She’s my favorite figure in the gospels, and I just couldn’t bear to leave her behind.”

  If those gospels featured Sophia, then her religion had a different set of books than my church did. Curiosity ate at me. I wanted to ask her for details—where they came from, who they were, what they were doing on Interchange—but she was too valuable an ally to risk alienating. Besides, their mission was giving a chance at life and health to the poorest of the poor in SanFran. I couldn’t risk driving them away by prying into their secrets.

  “We’re certainly not going to report this to anyone,” I said. “Besides, the CBI doesn’t know where we come from, either. I doubt if they care.”

  “That’s reassuring. Thank you.” Major Grace leaned back in her chair and frowned in thought. “Sold into slavery,” she said eventually. “How horrible! You know, this might explain something. One very sad case. Excuse me a moment.”

  Major Grace got up and walked out into the hallway. I heard her calling down to someone on the floor below to ask if they’d bring Sarah up to her office. She came back and sat down.

  “Someone I think you should talk with,” she said.

  In a few minutes a very pregnant young woman, blonde, blue-eyed, who would have been pretty if her eyes hadn’t looked out so starkly on the world, walked into the office. She held her hands just under her swollen belly to support it. I guessed her age as about twenty even though she had deep lines on either side of her mouth, the sort of thing you expect to see on a much older woman. Ari stood up and helped her into the chair. She neither smiled nor said thank you, just looked straight ahead. Ari leaned against the nearest wall next to a poster of the Ten Commandments.

  “Sarah,” the Major said. “These are two law officers from Sackamenna. The California Bureau of Investigation. They might know something about your missing husband.”

  Sarah turned her head very slowly and looked at me. “Is he dead?” she said.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “We’re hoping to find out. Did he make some kind of a deal with the Axeman?”

  She nodded and turned her sad eyes back to Major Grace.

  “Would you like me to tell them?” the Major said.

  Sarah nodded again.

  “The Axeman promised to take Sarah and her husband to another world, a better one than this,” Major Grace said. “They didn’t have enough money for his fees, even after they sold everything they owned. So Joshua went first, because the Axeman promised that after a couple of months of work, he’d come back for Sarah. He never did. It was right after he left that she realized she was pregnant, so that would have been seven months ago. Then the Axeman disappeared. Sarah went to the police, who thought she was crazy. She lived on the streets for a while, but fortunately, one of our members found her and brought her here. I assured her that she wasn’t crazy, that there were indeed other worlds.”

  “Abandoned,” Sarah whispered. “Bad enough.”

  “Do you think Joshua meant to abandon you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Unless he’s dead.”

  “I doubt if either’s true.” Ari peeled himself off the wall and came around so that Sarah could see him. “We think the Axeman sold him into slavery on this supposedly better world. I’m sure he’d come back for you if he could.”

  She looked at him. Two tears ran down her cheeks, that was all, just two. She was too depressed to even cry, I figured.

  “He was all I had,” she whispered. “And they took him.”

  “We’ll do our best to find him,” I said. “But it would be cruel to hold out a lot of hope.”

  She nodded, got up from the chair, and turned and walked out of the office without a word.

  “I am having very bad thoughts,” Major Grace said, “about the Axeman, that is, at this moment. May God forgive me, but I really wish him ill.”

  “You’re not alone,” I said. “You can trust me on that.”

  We returned to the TWIXT office and gave Jan the red ledger to study. He promised to send us any information he gleaned from it. He also agreed that Sarah’s story sounded like just the sort of evidence we needed.

  “The Axeman is a thorough bastard,” Jan remarked. “Let’s hope we track him down.”

  “Just so,” Ari said. “And by the way, that ledger should go back to the Major when you’re done.”

  Willa arrived shortly after. While she sat down and rested for “a few minutes, and God knows I deserve it,” as she put it, Ari and I took our suitcase into the apartment’s narrow bedroom and changed our clothes for Six. He had his navy blue pinstriped suit, and I’d brought my glen plaid pants and jacket. As I zipped up the trousers, I remarked that they were getting tight.

  “Not tight,” Ari said. “They’re beginning to fit you. You’re too used to wearing clothes that hang on you.”

  “I didn’t think they were that bad.”

  “That’s part of the eating disorder, isn’t it? Wearing everything much too large so people can’t see how thin you are?”

  He was right, damn him! He smiled, caught me by the shoulders, and kissed me.

  “I can’t see your ribs anymore,” he said. “It’s much sexier that way.”

  “Okay. So there are compensations.”

  And, I figured, I wouldn’t have to buy new clothes for another ten pounds. On my salary, this was good news. We returned the suitcase with our old clothes to Spare14’s office via the desk drawer. Here in Jan’s office I had a better look at the process than I’d gotten before. Jan opened the drawer, which appeared to have an ordinary wooden bottom like any other desk drawer. He turned the suitcase to insert the narrow end first, then slowly pushed it in—and through. I couldn’t quite see any part of it disappear, but at the same time, I couldn’t see the whole suitcase, either. Watching the process left me feeling so disoriented that I was sorry I’d peeked.

  I’d also been wondering how we’d get out to the beach and the trans-world gate to Terra Six. It turned out that Jan had a car of sorts in the former nightclub downstairs, very much of sorts as
was usual in SanFran, a patchwork of parts from a WWI Packard and pieces of a Duesenberg that had survived the disaster on Interchange. The Axeman and his gang had trashed the place when the nightclub’s owners had refused to pay protection money, and they’d done it so thoroughly that the landlord couldn’t afford to make the repairs. Since no one wanted to rent the mess left on the ground floor of the building, Jan had persuaded the landlord to let him park the car inside for a small monthly fee. It had double entrance doors large enough to drive through.

  The car started with a crank, but it started. We all piled in and headed out down to Geary, which would take us on reasonably level terrain all the way out to Ocean Beach. The Richmond district on Terra Three is a dismal, half-populated place of squatters’ cottages and tumbledown houses. Only on Geary do you find shops and decent-looking homes. Just a few blocks to the south the sand dunes and weeds still rule between dirt tracks named as streets in a misbegotten hope of better days.

  We were aiming for the area known back home as Sutro Heights. In SanFran, people just called it “the old Sutro place,” the remains of a millionaire’s once luxurious mansion and gardens. In our world the gardens have been turned into a tidy little park just off 48th Avenue, but in SanFran on Interchange they exist as a jumble of weeds, trees, briars, and broken statuary that covers twice the area the park does at home. When we reached the edge of this miniature wilderness, Jan let us out of the car, but before he drove away, I received a full-strength ASTA, an automatic warning of a threat to our survival.