She nodded so savagely she nearly unbalanced. “Damn right it make shense! Spesh’ly here. There hashn’t been an attempted break-in on thish shtreet in…well, shince I’ve been here. Early this century. And do you think my fucking inshurance comp’ny’ll let me do the same goddam thing? Bugger, they will! That’sh why I’m gon’ help you: I wanna see her ’shurance comp’ny get what they desherve for being so shenshible and decent.”
His brain kept trying to find the pattern in her intermittent slur; it was giving him a headache. She seemed most successful with sibilants spelled with a c. Could her tongue spell? “Of course. So you think it would be safe for me to just…pop next door, go round back, and try the door?”
“Long ash you don’t look furtive,” she said. “That’ll get you shot anywheres around here.”
“Oh, I won’t,” he assured her.
“You’re poor,” she said suddenly, as if challenging him to disagree.
“That’s right,” he said.
She snorted, fruitily, like a small horse. “You poor guys alwaysh got more intreshsting minds than the kind o’ jerksh I gotta hang out with. Why’sh that, you think?”
“We need to,” Wally explained.
She nodded as thoughtfully as if provisionally accepting his solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. “That soundsh right. Anybody on thish block wanted a break an’ enner done, they’d hire it done. Too damn rich to be intereshsting.”
He wanted, badly, to ask her how she had conceived the notion of both slurring and not slurring the sibilant in “interesting,” and whether it required practice or had come easily to her—but he knew it would constitute a digression, and in any case, artists are seldom able to explain their methods satisfactorily to the layman. “It hardly seems like break and enter if I don’t have to break anything, does it?”
She smiled her feral smile, tightening her face so much that for a moment he feared her eyeballs would pop out. “Far’sh I’m consherned, you can exshplore that ashpect of your artishtic vision once you’re inshide. I promish not to hear a thing. And the old Chink on the other shide’s deaf as a boot. Wing Wang Wong, or whatever her name ish.”
Now she was slurring c’s—and even an x! “I really appreciate your help,” he said. He was already backing away as he began the second syllable, out of the sheltered doorway and into the rain. This proved to be nice timing: her aborted lunge was unmistakable. “Goodbye, Liv, and thank you.”
“Good luck, Handsome.”
Wally had last been called handsome by a woman not Moira while auditioning for a part in a fannish play that was to have been performed at a small regional relaxacon, some eighteen years before—and he had not gotten the part. “Cuddly” he could aspire to; “handsome” exceeded even his fantasies. Nevertheless he was within ten steps of Carla Bernardo’s back door before he next remembered to be terrified again. There was something to be said for drunken myopia—and nymphomania, too, if it came to that.
His pulse quickened when he saw that the door was not, as advertised, actually ajar. Liv Here might—in fact, almost certainly did—suffer from that condition Moira called rectofossal ambiguity. (“Fossa” being Latin for “a hole in the ground.”) If he tried that door…was he going to trigger the alarm system Liv had assured him didn’t exist, and end up with his own rectum in a torsa (“sling”)?
Did he have any choice?
The door opened at his touch like a nymphomaniac’s legs, easily, thoroughly, and silently.
Wally stood there before the open door, absolutely motionless, in drizzling rain, for a full five minutes. He told himself he was listening, but the rain and his pulse would have drowned out anything short of a pistol being cocked next to his head. It took him nearly the whole first minute to realize that there was a radio playing in the house, a talkjock whose topic tonight seemed to be the old Canadian standby, “America: Threat or Menace?” If Wally had merely been a junkie with his whole body screaming for a fix, he’d have left. Only one thing finally had the power to drive him inside: the vision of Moira’s face when he reported back. He found that he wanted, very badly, to hear her say, “My hero!” so that he could say, “Aw, shucks.”
Once in the house, however, he simply doffed his rain gear and got to work. He lost some time and some shin skin to his reluctance to turn on any lights—successfully establishing by way of consolation, however, that anyone else in the building was dead or deaf, and that a human heart can’t actually explode. He also managed to silence the talkjock, at least locally. But once he penetrated to rooms with no exterior windows, where he felt safe turning lights on, things picked up quickly. Not only did he locate the computer in the second room he tried, and not only was it a make and model and operating system he was reasonably comfortable with, its security encryption program yielded to him even more skittishly than the door had.
As he had guessed, “Carla Bernardo” had characteristically been a hair too cute for her own good: the password that cracked her shields was “Tammy Lynn.” It was an obvious choice, if you had some experience at what hackers and crackers called “social engineering”—and if you realized “Carla” had made up her name by reverse-combining those of the notorious, recently sentenced Canadian monsters Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. The first of the young girls they had raped and murdered together—a few weeks before their wedding—was Karla’s fifteen-year-old sister Tammy.
Wally didn’t even bother to read a thing: just fired up the modem and uploaded everything he could decrypt to one of his own hard drives back home. It came to something over fifty megabytes. Then he scanned the stuff which had not been encrypted, and uploaded some of those files to a separate folder at home. He could see Moira smiling, in his mind’s eye, and grinned back at the screen.
When he was satisfied he had every byte he could locate and wanted, he reformatted Carla’s whole hard drive three times—wiping it irrecoverably—and entertained himself as it churned by thumbing through the Japanese pornographic comic book collection he found in a drawer. She had some better ones than he and Moira did.
Finally the computer chirped for the third time and drew him back from a particularly absorbing manga. He nearly left, then, but things had gone so well thus far, he was in the mood for a little adventure. So he searched Carla’s office, finding nothing of lasting interest, and then her bathroom, learning only that she was not a natural blonde, and then her bedroom, where he found behind the false back of a bottom dresser drawer a lockbox whose combination was the same as her computer password. Its contents caused Wally to leap to his feet and dance the Monkey, for the first time in twenty years. A little work before a full-length mirror distributed these things about his person so well that even a sharper observer than Liv might not have noticed Wally was a bit more cuddly than usual.
On his way out, he stopped by Carla’s office again, stole three of the manga, and added them to the swag, tucking them inside his belt in the back, under his shirt.
He recovered his rain poncho and left by the back door again—leaving it ajar—and returned to the street around the opposite side of the building from the one by which he’d entered. By the time Liv saw him and began cawing, he was within twenty steps of his car. Even walking carefully so as not to spill his pornography, he was able to make a clean getaway.
Halfway home, stopped at a traffic light on Broadway, he found himself unable to suppress an impulse to beat his fists on the steering wheel and howl with animal glee. He glanced to his left and saw a pedestrian staring at him from the sidewalk. “Vancouver,” he cried happily through his rain-streaked window.
The pedestrian smiled, nodded, and waved.
The light changed and the mighty hunter went home to his mate.
Who literally greeted him with open arms. And open nostrils.
“My hero!” she cried.
“Aw, shucks, ma’am.” Wally knew he was grinning the uncontrolled grin, the one that made him look goofy, but he couldn’t help it. He had successfully carried out
his first burglary, and he had passed his sniff test, and he had just heard and spoken two of his very favorite clichés—and the best was yet to come.
Moira hugged him tightly, putting english on it. “Really, Wally, you did great. I’ve been going through some of what you sent, making a start, anyway, and there’s—what?”
He had disengaged from the hug just far enough to silence her with an upraised finger. “Go to the meditation room,” he said, “and wait for me there.”
She frowned, studied him carefully, and one eyebrow lifted slightly in alarm. “Wally, that’s the goofy grin. Am I gonna like this?”
“Want to see another grin just like it? Bring a hand mirror to the meditation room and wait for me there.”
“Hey, where’s your coat?”
“Read on,” he suggested.
She sighed. “Should I put on music?”
He shook his head. “There’ll be plenty. Trust me.”
She looked exasperated. “That’s the trouble. I do.”
He went back to the car, recovered his coat, and carried it inside in his arms. He locked the door behind him and made sure the phone machine was armed before joining Moira in the meditation room. He found her there, sitting on her zafu, measuring her breath. She had not fetched a mirror. Again he made sure the door was sealed behind him, then dropped into tailor’s seat opposite her, setting his bundle down between them. Declining to feed him any more straight-lines, she waited serenely.
He adopted his Panel Moderator voice. “Having stolen all the really important items—that is, the data—of which you were just about to deliver a preliminary summary that I am, I promise you, most eager to hear—I turned my attention briefly, before I took my leave, to mere material things.”
She kept waiting, but her lips seemed to tighten ever so slightly.
He nodded as if she had said something. “I hear you. You’re thinking: no matter how lavish or fine they may be, I don’t want any of the possessions of those people in my house. I felt much the same way when I began my search. Doubtless you’re wondering why I’m going around Robin Hood’s barn like this, why I’ve got what I found bundled up in my coat. If I’d left it all where I had it stashed when I left the place, you’d have felt most of it as soon as you hugged me a minute ago, and then there might have been trouble. I thought it would be better all around if we did this here. Are you ready?”
She took one more deep breath and nodded.
He unwrapped his booty.
He let her have five seconds to absorb the basic gist of the contents, and then placed his fingers in his ears, and in a loud clear voice, provided inventory details. “The Canadian is forty-seven thousand five hundred in used nonserial fifties. The American is thirty-five thousand in new nonserial twenties. The handgun is a Glock nine millimeter, fully loaded; there was no extra ammo. The comics are great. The passports are all—” That was as far as he got.
One of several reasons Moira had been in more or less constant demand for fan theatricals over the past few decades was her scream. It might have made a Hammer Films alumnus weep with nostalgia, or won a nod from Coltrane—evoking all the stark despairing terror of a virgin accosted by the Ripper on her wedding night, yet delivered by a vocal instrument with the raw pneumatic power of a Sophie Tucker or a Mama Cass. At the previous year’s Worldcon Hugo ceremonies, where she had performed for two thousand pros and fans in an immense hall, the tech crew had not found it necessary or even advisable to mike her. The effect in a small soundproof room was impressive. Even with his fingers deep in his ears and his palms cupped over them, Wally paid for his fun. He had expected to, and paid up like a man. But then he made a very bad mistake: he took his fingers out of his ears—just as she did it again.
Shortly he managed to pry his eyelids open again, but he kept on seeing paisley swirls and neon mandalas. Gradually, as in one of those tests for color-blindness, some of them resolved into Moira’s face. The lips were moving. He waved and gestured to indicate the transmission was unsuccessful, but they kept moving. He closed his eyes to conserve processing power and concentrated. White noise slowly arrived from the far end of the universe, rose to the level of static—then, as with the visual data, some of it coalesced into a parody of Moira’s voice.
“—alize what this means? This is wonderful. This is horrible. It couldn’t be better, and it couldn’t be worse. Who’s writing this mess, Wally? What did we ever do to deserve this? Stop grinning, dammit!”
He hadn’t realized he still was. He made it go away with a massive effort, and his hearing improved slightly. “You understand why I did this here?” he asked. His voice sounded to him flanged, distorted, like John Lennon in “I Am the Walrus,” a comparison that irritated him.
She nodded impatiently. “Of course. Everyone on the block would be dialing 911 right now if we weren’t in a soundproof room. But Jesus, Wally, the way you set it up I thought it was gonna be something good.”
What in Finagle’s name did he have to do to please this woman? “This isn’t good? One: sitting right there on the floor is on the close order of ninety-five percent of what we got taken for; I did the math. As far as I can tell it’s all real and it all spends. Two: it’s enough—as of now, VanCon can happen after all, and we even got some of our own money back! Three: that means hereinafter, I can be assured that my motives in continuing to stalk these bastards are at least eighty percent pure personal vengeance; I don’t know about you, but that gives me a lot of spiritual satisfaction.” His hearing was improving; by now he sounded like Lennon in “Strawberry Fields.” (The first half.) “And four: now we each have a gun, and neither can be traced to us. Tell me the downside, because I don’t—oh wait, I get you. Here we are in the middle of a manhunt, and we have a convention to run again. Okay, so we give up sleeping on alternate days, instead of every third—”
She cut him off. “What would have happened if we’d gone on the Net this morning and announced exactly what had happened to us? That we got taken, and VanCon was vaporware?”
He frowned. If this was a sequitur, the connection escaped him. “Well…put it this way: the only upside would have been that we’d never have heard another live filksong in our lives.”
She nodded. “Total humiliation, and lifelong expulsion from the councils of fandom. Possibly even total excommunication from fandom itself. We’d have had to have plastic surgery and change all our ID to ever see another huckster room.”
“And your point is…?”
“Obviously that’s unthinkable. But what would happen if we went on the Net right now, and truthfully reported events as of this minute? VanCon’s still on, but here’s why it almost didn’t happen?”
He flinched slightly, and then made himself think about it dispassionately. If she wanted to be Socrates, he could bat around a theoretical proposition as well as Phaedrus. “Uh…let’s see…still total humiliation, for sure…but probably no banishment. It’d be just too much fun to have us around to laugh at. Best guess, I’d say we’d be making significant progress toward living it down in—I don’t know, ten years? Twelve? A couple of fannish generations, call it, before we’d ever be given anything but scutwork to do again. Long after we died, they’d still be telling neos about us. And the neos would be laughing. Except for the occasional sweet one who would pity us.”
She reached out and took his hand. “Wally?” she said. His hearing was now nominal; nonetheless her voice sounded strained. “Those two jerks are still out there someplace, with new names and maybe new faces. We’re looking for them, granted, but we don’t even really know for certain they’re still in Canada, much less in the Lower Mainland. They’re experienced, professional vampires, and they’ve just learned how nice fans taste, and perhaps you’ll join me in flattering ourselves that they are very fucking good.” She had his complete attention; Moira rarely used that word. “Answer me this, honey: how important is it that fandom be warned?”
Wally screamed. Not in the same league with one of hers�
��but it was closer to his ears.
That postponed the first real quarrel they’d had in months for another several minutes.
It escalated, when it finally came, to yet another iteration of The Quarrel. Their version, that is, of the one all couples lucky enough to have the privilege will write together and perfect over the years granted them: the basic chord structure over which they would improvise The Dozens together, every time fate lashed them into song. It was no more interesting than any other couple’s quarrel, full of You’re Always and You Never and If You’d Just Once; its chief function was to allow them each to say things of which they would later be intellectually and/or emotionally ashamed—an instinctive human response to crisis so primitive it makes fight-or-flight look like an intelligent advance. By now they knew where each other’s vulnerable places were, and were reasonably confident they could take each other’s best shot. (Pity the singles and loners, who must make do with bar fights or politics.)
As in postmodern music—indeed, postmodern art of most kinds—communication was subordinated to personal expression; the results were thus unlistenable for anyone but the artists, and will not be recorded here. When this set had had time to seep into long-term memory storage, each would forget most of what they had said, and remember most of what the other had said, but they would process it differently. Wally would be deeply scarred by the very worst of her barbs—but would almost never consciously think of them again until the next jam session, and thus would take decades to deal with them. Moira, on the other hand, would replay his cruelest words over and over in her head daily for several weeks, until she had worn them smooth, then string them with the others on a secret necklace she could finger whenever it suited her to be depressed.
Fortunately for them, they both suffered from a chronic condition that might be called stupidity fatigue. Even driven by fear, frustration and shame, half an hour away from rationality was about the maximum either Wally or Moira were built to tolerate. This session followed their basic pattern: two extended solos, a spirited duet, a reprise of the theme, and then a smooth segue into their trademark ending. Wally always won the putative argument, whatever it happened to be, and then discovered his prize was a barren, blasted desert, and scrambled to apologize and surrender. This allowed her to apologize and accept his surrender, and at last they were free to return, tired but oddly refreshed, to whatever their actual problem was.
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