Helmuth One peered down at me. "What is that?"
I patted it. "Coast Guard weapon, a spitter."
"May I try it?"
"Sure." I traded places with him, glad to be up in the breeze. My boat was a mess. The mainmast had been shattered by a direct hit, waist-high. The starboard rail was chewed to splinters, forward, and near misses had gouged up my nice teak foredeck. The bilge pump coughed out irregular spews of water; evidently, we weren't in danger of sinking.
"Are you all right?" Belle called from the water.
"Yes . . . looks all clear. Come on—" I was interrupted by the spitter, a scream like a large animal dying slowly.
I unshipped a pair of binoculars to check his marksmanship. It was excellent. He was shooting at the floating bodies. What a spitter did to one was terrible to see.
"Jesus Christ, Helmuth. What do you do for fun when you don't have dead people to play with?"
"Some of them may yet live," he said neutrally.
At least one did. Wearing a life jacket, she had been floating face down but suddenly began treading water. She was holding an automatic pistol in both hands. She looked exactly like Belle and Maxine.
I couldn't say anything; couldn't take my eyes off her. She fired two rounds and I felt them slap into the hull beneath me. I heard Helmuth curse and suddenly her shoulders dissolved in a spray of meat and bone and her head fell into the water.
My knees buckled and I sat down suddenly. "You see?" Helmuth shouted. "You see?"
"I saw." In fact, I would never stop seeing it.
Helmuth Two, it turned out, had been hit in the side of the neck, but it was a big neck and he survived. Maxine called a helicopter, which came out piloted by Helmuth Three.
After an hour or so, Helmuth Four joined us in a large speedboat loaded down with gasoline, thermite and shark chum. He also had a little electrical gadget that made sharks feel hungry whether they actually were or not.
By that time, we had transferred the gold and a few more important things from my boat onto the helicopter. We chummed the area thoroughly and, as the water began to boil with sharks, towed both hulks out to deep water, where they burned brightly and sank.
The Helmuths spent the next day sprinkling the island with money and threats, while Maxine got to know Belle and me better, locked behind the heavily guarded door of the honeymoon suite of the quaint old Sheraton that overlooked the marina. She made us a job offer—a life offer, really—and we accepted without hesitation. That was six years ago.
Sometimes I do miss our old life—the sea, the freedom, the friendly island, the lazy idyls with Belle. Sometimes I even miss New York's hustle and excitement, and the fierce independence of my life there. I'm still a mean son of a bitch, but I never get to prove it.
We do travel sometimes, but with extreme caution. The clone that Helmuth ripped apart in the placid cove might have been Belle's own daughter, since the Mafia had plenty of opportunities to collect cells from her body. It's immaterial. If they could make one, they could make an army of them.
Like our private army of Helmuths and Lamberts and Delias. I'm chief of security, among other things, and the work is interesting, most of it at a console as good as the one I had in Manhattan. No violence since that one afternoon six years ago, not yet. I did have to learn German, though, which is a kind of violence, at least to a brain as old as mine.
We haven't made any secret of the fact that Belle is Maxine's clone. The official story is that Frciulein Kraus had a clone made of herself, for "companionship." This started a fad among the wealthy, being the first new sexual diversion since the invention of the vibrator.
Belle and Maxine take pains to dress alike and speak alike, and have even unconsciously assimilated each other's mannerisms. Most of the nonclone employees, and the
occasional guests, can't tell them apart. Even I sometimes confuse them, at a distance.
Close up, which happens happily often, there's no problem. Belle has a way of looking at me that Maxine could never duplicate. And Maxine is literally a trifle prettier: You can't beat a real navel.
PAST MAGIC
Ian R. MacLeod
British writer Ian R. MacLeod has been one of the hottest new writers of the nineties to date, and, as the decade progresses, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity. MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories in the first year of the nineties in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various "Best of the Year" anthologies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different Best of the Year anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. He has just sold his first novel, The Great Wheel, and is at work on another. Upcoming is his first short-story collection. MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England.
In the haunting story that follows, he demonstrates that not only can't you Go Home Again, sometimes it's much better not even to try . . .
The aíryort was a different world.
Claire grabbed a bag, then kissed my cheek. She smelt both fresh and autumnal, the way she always had. Nothing else had changed: I'd seen the whole island as the jet turned to land. Brown hills in the photoflash sunlight, sea torn white at the headlands.
We hurried past camera eyes, racial imagers, HIV sensors, orientation sniffers, robot guns. Feeling crumpled and dirty in my best and only jacket, I followed Claire across the hot tarmac between the palm trees. She asked about the mainland as though it was something distant. And then about the weather. Wanting to forget the closed-in heat of my flat and the kids with armalites who had stopped the bus twice on the way to the airport, I told her Liverpool was fine, just like here. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. I couldn't even begin to pretend.
It was good to see all those open-top cars again, vintage Jags and Mercs that looked even better than when they left the showroom. And Claire as brown as ever, her hair like brass and cornfields, with not a worry about the ravenous sun. I'd read the adverts for lasers and scans in the in-flight magazine. And if you needed to ask the price, don't.
Her buggy was all dust and dents. And the kid was sitting on the back seat, wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt, sucking carton juice through a straw. Seeing her was an instant shock, far bigger than anything I'd imagined.
Claire said, "Well, this is Tony," in the same easy voice she'd used for the weather as she tossed my bags into the boot.
"Howdy doody," the little girl said. Her lips were purple from the black-currant juice she was drinking. "Are you really my daddy?"
It was all too quick. I had expected some sort of preparation. To be led down corridors . . . fanfares and trumpets. Instead, I was standing in the pouring sunlight of the airport compound. Staring into the face of my dead daughter.
She looked just like Steph, precisely six years old and even sweeter, just like the little girl I used to hold in my arms and take fishing in the white boat on days without end. She glanced at me in that oblique way I remembered Steph always reserved for strangers. All those kiddie questions in one look. Who are you? Why are you here? Can we play?
Claire shouted "Let's get going!" and jumped into the buggy as though she'd never seen thirty-five.
"Yeah!" the kid said. She blew bubbles into the carton. "Let's ride em, Mummeee!"
Off in a cloud of summer dust . . . and back on the Isle of Man. The place where Claire and I had laughed and loved, then fought and wept. The place where Steph, the real Steph, had been born, lived, died. The swimming pools of the big houses winked all the way along the coast. Then we turned inland along the hot white road to Port Erin . . . the shapes of the hills . . . the loose stone walls. It was difficult for me to keep my distance from the past. Claire. Steph. Me. Why pretend? It might as well be ten years before when we were married and for a while everything was sweet and real.
Here's the fairy bridge.
"Cren Ash Tou!!" We all shouted without thinking. Hello to the fairies.
In the days when tourists were allowed to visit the Isle of Man, this was part of the package. Fairy bridges, fairy postcards, stone circles, fat tomes about Manx folklore. Manannan was the original Lord of Man. He greeted King Arthur when the boat took him from the Last Battle. He strode the hills and bit out the cliffs at Cronk ny Irree Laa in anguish at his vanished son. He hid the hills in cloud.
Manannan never quite went away. I used to read every word I could find and share it with Steph after she was tucked up at night from her bath. The island still possessed magic, but now it was sharp as the sunlight, practised in the clinics by men and women in druidic white, discreetly advertised in-flight to those with the necessary clearances. Switching life off and on, changing this and that, making the most of the monied Manx air.
We turned up the juddering drive that led to Kellaugh and I saw that no one had ever got around to fixing the gate. Claire stopped the buggy in the courtyard near the shade of the cypress trees. Like the buggy, Kellaugh was a statement of I-don't-care money, big and rambling with white walls peeling in the sun, old bits and new bits, views everywhere of the wonderful coastline like expensive pictures casually left to hang.
Steph jumped out of the buggy and shot inside through the bleached double doors.
I looked at Claire.
"She really is Steph," she said, "but she can't remember anything. She's had lessons and deep therapy, but it's still only been six months. You're a stranger, Tony. Just give it time."
Feeling as though I was walking over glass, I said, "She's a sweet, pretty kid, Claire. But she can't be Steph."
"You'll see." She tried to make it sound happy, but there was power and darkness there, something that made me afraid. When she smiled, her eyes webbed with wrinkles even the money couldn't hide.
Fergus came out grinning to help with the bags. We said "Hi." Claire kissed him and he kissed her back inside his big arms. I watched for a moment in silence, wondering what was left between them.
Claire gave me the room that had once been my study. She could have offered me the annexe where I would have had some independence and a bathroom to myself, but she told me she wanted me here in the house with her and Fergus, close to Steph. There was a bed where my desk used to be, but still the ragged Persian carpet, the slate fireplace and the smell of the house that I loved . . . dark and sweet, like damp and biscuit tins.
Claire watched as I took my vox from the bag, the box into which I muttered my thoughts. Nowadays, it was hardly more than a private diary. I remembered how she had given it to me one Christmas here at Kellaugh when the fires were crackling and the foghorn moaned. A new tool to help me with my writing. It was still the best, even ten years on.
"Remember that old computer you had for your stories," she said, touching my arm.
"I always was useless at typing."
"I got it out again, for Steph. She loves old things, old toys. And I found those shoot-em-up games we used to buy her at that funny shop in Castletown: She tries, but the old Steph still has all the highest scores."
Old Steph, new Steph . . .
I was holding the vox, trailing the little wires that fitted to my throat. The red standby light was on. Waiting for the words.
Fergus was working in the new part of the house, all timber and glass; in the big room that hung over the rocks and the sea. He'd passed the test of time, had Fergus. Ten years with Claire now, and I had only managed eight. But then they had never married or had kids, and maybe that was the secret.
He gave me a whisky and I sat and watched him paint. Fergus seemed the same, even if his pictures had lost their edge. The gravelly voice went with the Gauloise he smoked one after another. I hadn't smelt cigarette smoke like that in years. He would probably have been dead on the mainland, but here they scanned and treated you inch by inch for tumours as regularly as you could pay.
Late afternoon, and the sky was starting to darken. The windows were open on complex steel latches that took the edge off the heat and let in the sound of the waves.
"It's good you're here," he said, wiping his hands on a rag. "You don't know how badly Claire needed to get Steph back. It wasn't grief, not after ten years. It just . . . went on, into something else."
"The grief never goes," I said.
Fergus looked uncomfortable for a moment, then asked, "Is it really as bad as they say on the mainland?"
I sipped my whisky and pondered that for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to know. I could remember what it used to be like when I was a kid, watching the news of Beirut. Part of you understood . . . you just tried not to imagine. Living in it, on the mainland, you got to sleep through the sniper fire and didn't think twice about taking an umbrella to keep the sun off when you queued for the standpipes. I told him about my writing instead, an easier lie because I'd had more practice.
"Haven't seen much work from you lately," he said. "Claire still keeps an eye out . . ." He lit a Gauloise and blew. "I can still manage to paint, but whispering into that vox, getting second-guessed, having half-shaped bits of syllables turned into something neat . . . it must be frightening. Like staring straight into silence."
The evening deepened. Fergus poured himself a big whisky, then another, rapidly catching up on—and then overtaking—me. He was amiable, and we were soon talking easily. But I couldn't help remembering the Fergus of old, the Fergus who would contradict anything and everything, the Fergus who would happily settle an intellectual argument with a fist fight. I'd known him even before I met Claire. Introduced them, in fact. And he had come over to the Isle of Man and stayed in the annexe for a while just as I had done and the pattern started to repeat itself. The new for the old, and somehow no one ever blamed Claire for the way it happened.
"You left too soon after Steph died," he said. "You thought it was Claire and Fergus you were leaving behind, but really it was Claire alone. She has the money, the power. The likes of you and I will always be strangers here. But Claire belongs."
"Then why do you stay?"
He shrugged. "Where else is there to go?"
We stood at the window. The patio lay below and at the side of the house, steps winding down to the little quay. A good place to be. Steph was sitting on the old swing chair, gently rocking, trying to keep her feet off the slabs to stop the ants climbing over her toes. She must have sensed our movement. She looked up. Fathomless blue eyes in the fathomless blue twilight. She looked up and saw us. Her face didn't flicker.
After the lobster and the wine on that first evening, after Fergus had ambled outside to smoke, Claire took my hand across the white linen and said she knew how difficult this was for me. But this was what she wanted, she wanted it because it was right. It was losing Steph that had been wrong. I should have done this, oh, years ago. I never wanted another child, just Steph. You have to be here with us Tony because the real Steph is so much a part of you.
I could only nod. The fire was in Claire's eyes. She looked marvellous with the candlelight and the wine. Fergus was right; Claire had the power of the island. She was charming, beautiful . . . someone you could wake up with
a thousand mornings and still fear . . . and never understand. I realized that this was what had driven me to write when I was with her, striving to put the unknown into words . . . and striving to be what she wanted. Striving, and ultimately failing, pushing myself into loneliness and silence.
Different images of Claire were flickering behind my eyes. The Claire I remembered, the Claire I thought I knew. How pink and pale she had been that first day in the hospital holding Steph wrapped in white. And then the Claire who called people in from the companies she owned, not that she really cared for business, but just to keep an eye on things. Claire making a suggestion here, insisting on a course of action pursued, disposals and mergers, compromises and aggressions, moving dots on a map of the world, changing lives in places I couldn't even pronounce. And al
though it abrogated a great many things, I couldn't help remembering how it felt when we made love. Everything. Her nails across my back. Her scent. Her power. For her, she used to say it was like a fire. The fire that was in her eyes now, across the candlelight and the empty glasses.
I dreamed again that night that Steph and I were out fishing in the white boat. The dream grew worse every time, knowing what would happen. The wind was picking up and Manannan had hidden the island under cloud. The waves were big and cold and lazy, slopping over the gunwales. I looked at Steph. Her skin was white. She was already dead. But she opened her mouth on dream power alone and the whole Irish Sea flooded out.
Next day Claire took me around all the old places on the island with Steph. The sun was blinding but she told me not to worry and promised to pay for a scan. Just as she had paid for everything else. With Island money, the money that kept all the old attractions going even though there were no tourists left to see them. The steam railway . . . the horse drawn tramcars along the front at Douglas . . . even the big water wheel up at Laxey. Everything was shimmering and clear, cupped in the inescapable heat. Dusty roads snaked up to fenced white clinics, Swiss names on the signboards. I did my best to chat to Steph and act like a friend, or at least be someone she might get to know. But it was hard to make contact through the walls of her sweet indifference. I was just another boring adult . . . and I couldn't help wondering why I had come here, and what would have happened had I tried to say no.
In the evening we took the path beyond the Chasms towards Spanish Head. The air was breathlessly alive with the sound and the smell of the sea, and the great cliffs were white with gulls. Glancing back as we climbed among the shivering grass and sea pinks, I started to tell Steph how the headland got its name from a shipwreck caught up on a storm after the Armada. But she nodded so seriously and strained the corners of her eyes that I couldn't find the words.
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