Irontown Blues

by John Varley

  “But you said it’s not over.”

  “No. We found out a long time ago that the CC had started to reassemble itself. We don’t know much about the good CC, or if it’s even out there. But the bad CC started growing less than a year after the Glitch. And it remembers everything. And it’s crazier than ever.

  “And it’s pissed off.”

  * * *

  —

  Well, that was a little hard to swallow. What was it doing? Just biding its time until the next Glitch?

  “Something like that,” she agreed. “But here’s where you come in. The resurrected CC is operating just under the radar of the citizens outside. We can only observe it carefully, without alerting it to what we are doing. You can’t imagine how hard that is. We have to do everything indirectly. We have to disguise all our actions as something else.

  “See, I wanted to just invite you to come see me, but that was impossible. The thing is, you are being hunted, Chris.”

  “Hunted . . . How? Why?”

  “Let’s take the why first. The CC has been in contact again with the Charonese Mafia. The CC doesn’t really give a damn about you, but it’s willing to do the detective work the Charonese need to track down the individuals they are after.”

  “And I’m one of them?”

  “All of you ex-Invaders are.” She paused. “That’s what we call you in here, both cops and Charonese mercenaries. Invaders.”

  “I can’t protest. That’s what we did.”

  “I don’t know what you know about the Charonese Mafia.”

  “Very little, I guess. I know they are ruthless. You saw yourself when they went around killing all the survivors of the Invasion. By the way, I never got a chance to thank you properly for saving my life.”

  “You saved mine first.”

  I shrugged.

  “That was nothing to what you did. So thank you.”

  She gave me a twisted little smile.

  “You cursed me for putting you through all that pain.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were delirious. I didn’t take it seriously.”

  We looked at each other for a moment over the remains of our ice-cream sundaes. I heard Sherlock stir and get to his feet. He rested his head on my thigh. I knew he could sense that something was up. I knew it, too, but I didn’t know what it was.

  “The main thing you should know about the Charonese Mafia is that they never forget, they never forgive, and they never give up.”

  “That sounds like a lethal combination,” I observed.

  “You better believe it. And it concerns you. They’ve been hunting you for at least ten years that I know of. They intend to kill you.”

  * * *

  —

  “It’s not like the Charonese have a regiment of assassins in Luna looking for you. We think it’s only two, maybe three. And they find it difficult to move about because they are here illegally, and they probably have warrants out for them from the invasion.”

  “Ugly and Uglier,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “We think you are one of the last ones left. Maybe the last one. You pointed out that I saw them executing the survivors during the invasion. They intend to finish the job, no matter how long it takes.”

  “But why? Do they think I might testify against them?”

  “That may have been how this custom of theirs started. Leave no witnesses. It’s a gangster trademark going back centuries, back to criminal groups on Old Earth. It seems that now it’s just a tradition. But they are very, very big on traditions. It’s a major part of their culture, if you want to dignify their society as a culture.”

  And now they were after me.

  * * *

  —

  “The biggest thing that has kept you alive is your lack of cyber implants,” Gretel said. “The Charonese had no good way to identify you. The revived CC was no help, partly because we have been fighting it for years with cyber attacks. See, this new consciousness is even more frightening, in some ways, than the old one. It is capricious, paranoid, elusive. It hides from us and plots our deaths, but we have managed to keep it confused. But that’s getting less and less effective. It’s growing, and getting smarter and bolder. It’s been a shell game for years, with the Heinleiners working games on the CC, but he’s catching on. He’s getting better at guessing which of the several sextillion moving cups the little pea is hiding under. Which puts us all in danger.

  “You were a special case, though. At least to me. As you might have noticed, I’m sort of a leader around here. My father is the real leader, but he’s too busy with other things to take charge, and besides, he’s too wrapped up in his science. He’s not that great in social situations.”

  “Would that be V. M. Smith?” I asked.

  For the first time, she looked surprised.

  “How did you know that?” she asked, suspiciously.

  “I read Hildy Johnson’s book. She said she was going to the stars. On a ship called the Heinlein. I put two and two together. You’re Smith’s crazy daughter, right?”

  She smiled.

  “I’ll accept that title. So, yeah, that’s my dad. He’s still . . . tinkering with his ‘hyperdrive.’ That’s what he calls it, anyway. Supposed to get us to Alpha Centauri in a few days.” Without actually scoffing, she managed to imply to me that she was not holding her breath waiting for that to happen.

  Why anyone would want to go to Alpha was a good question. Our probes had reported back that none of the planets there were any more suitable for life than Luna was. So why put all that effort into going there, just to start making more burrows in the rock?

  But I supposed she meant that the hyperdrive would open up the stars to us. If it could go four light-years in a few days, just about anything in the galaxy was within reach.

  “We found out that one or both of the Charonese assassins here in Luna had gotten a line on your whereabouts. Probably from the CC. I decided that we had to pull you in.”

  “Yeah. Pull me in. Put me in a cell for several weeks.”

  “Again, I’m sorry about that. But like I said, I had to be on Mars, and I’m the only one who can interrogate you.”

  “That’s what this is? An interrogation.”

  “I’m trying to determine what we should do with you.”

  “Why not just send me home? I’ll take my chances with the Charonese. So why not let me go?”

  “Sorry, that’s the one thing I can’t do. At least, not yet. No matter how this turns out, you won’t be going back to your apartment for a while. You’ll be staying here.”

  I felt I had been calm and reasonable ever since being taken from my cell. But it was a cell, I was a prisoner, and I had finally had enough of playing nice with everybody. I stood up, angrily. Both Sherlock and the Dalmatian got to their feet, on alert.

  “Dammit, you said you were going to explain all this to me. You’ve been dancing around something. Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

  She was unfazed by my anger. She looked at me calmly.

  “What I’m trying to determine,” she said, “is whether you go back into your cell or become a free citizen of Irontown. There is no third choice.

  “Bottom line. Can we trust you?”

  twenty

  SHERLOCK

  I like vanilla ice cream. I also like tutti-frutti ice cream. I also like strawberry, peach, butter pecan, apricot, fig, and papaya ice cream. These are the flavors of the Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae that Hazel makes in her ice-cream parlor. There are eight flavors in the Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae. I once ate a Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae. It had eight scoops. I ate eight, get it? Ha-ha.

  But I was not eating a Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae on the da
y when we found αChris and αChris was taken to see Mary Smith, AKA Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes. AKA is a word we private detectives use. It means Also Known As.

  On that day I had eaten three scoops of vanilla ice cream. I think vanilla is my favorite flavor of ice cream. Though I also like butter pecan and strawberry. Spike was beside me, nodding off. I did not call him αSpike anymore because αChris was now my only alpha. This made me happy.

  (And I must cut you off there, feeling happy, Sherlock. You will get to speak again, I promise, but since I have been given the role of amanuensis, historian, and editor of this strange tale [or tail, if you will, ha-ha!] more or less by default, I must let Chris continue to have the floor, to preserve some sort of continuity. He still has more to tell of his reunion with Gretel.—PC)

  CHRIS

  “There’s a lot going on here that I don’t understand,” I said. “At least, it seems to me that all that incredibly complicated business of the para-leprosy—which didn’t exist—and the trail through the Chinese restaurant, all that bullshit, that was all just a scam, you were actually leading me to that empty apartment . . . but why? Why didn’t you just invite me? I would have come, you know that. Then you locked me up. Why didn’t you—”

  “I’m really pressed for time, Chris. Let me go on for a minute or two, okay?

  “Remember I told you about the shell game we’re playing? We shuffle and jive, we spoof and we fake, we hoax and we counterfeit. We cover up everything. If I had gone straight to you and asked you to join us here in Irontown, the CC would have seen it, and you would likely be dead by now. Me, too, probably. So we have to keep that little pea moving.

  “We have created blank spots in the cyber world. We move things in and out of them. I wanted you here, but I didn’t dare approach you. That apartment doesn’t exist in any database. In fact, that whole corridor is a ghost. Nobody lives there, but we maintain records showing that they do. We gassed you and took you down a stairway that doesn’t exist, and along a corridor linking Irontown to the outer world that also does not exist.

  “Before that, I left a trail for you to follow. The whole ruse with the leprosy. I thought that would get your attention. The business of me working at the Chinese restaurant. I was only there long enough to leave a scent trail for Sherlock. Pumpkin lied about knowing me. She’s one of us, one of the people who work what we call the Underground Railway. She’s a lot smarter than she acts, by the way. In fact, she’s one of our best cyber-wonks. She was the one who wrote that whole scenario

  “There is also another problem. There are those . . . well, let’s just say that not all Heinleiners wanted you here. There is still resentment over the invasion, and you were on the other side, don’t forget.”

  “. . . I don’t know how to say I’m sorry for something as awful as that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. As the boss, I can do a lot of stuff, but I’m not all-powerful. In the end, a compromise was reached. We decided that if you were good enough, smart enough, to follow me to the apartment, well, then you could have an invitation. If you couldn’t find me, you would never be the wiser, and you would be on your own.”

  “An invitation to what?”

  She drew herself up, looked into my eyes, took a deep breath, and finally got around to it.

  “We’re going to the stars, and you are invited.”

  “What . . . you mean Alpha Centauri in a few days?”

  She smiled.

  “No. That was an exaggeration. And it’s not really a ‘hyperdrive,’ in the sense of going into hyperspace, whatever that is, or through a wormhole, or a black hole, whatever those are. I don’t understand it, but it’s something new my father invented. It works, it doesn’t use rocket engines, and it is very, very fast. Alpha Centauri in . . . about ten years, ship’s time.”

  “But there’s nothing—”

  “No, we’re not going to Alpha, you’re right, there’s nothing there that’s worth the trip. That was just an example. The star we’re heading for is more like forty light-years away. There are two Earth-like planets in that system. We’re hoping at least one of them is habitable and doesn’t have people, or intelligent beings, anyway, already living there. If neither is suitable, we move on to the next star.”

  The idea of getting on a ship and heading out to Betelgeuse or some damn place like that was alarming, but there was something else that somehow took precedence in my mind. I found it hard to express. But it had to be said.

  “So everything I did to find you, all the tracking I did . . . well, actually, Sherlock did, mostly . . . that was all you leading me around by the nose. All that time, you were playing me for a sap.”

  “I don’t know what a sap is.”

  “Old pulp-fiction slang for a clueless idiot.”

  “Okay, you could say that—”

  “I don’t know how else you could put it.”

  She looked a little angry at that.

  “How about I was working very hard to save your ass?”

  “I didn’t ask for it. I don’t think I want it. Why would I want to get on your crazy starship, which will probably blow up halfway to Neptune? I’ve got a life here.”

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to say anything. I felt my face getting hot. Sure, Chris, you’ve got a life, pretending to be a film-noir shamus from the twentieth century. Sitting on my ass in my retro office and waiting for clients to come in the door. And how many clients have you had in the last few years, Chris? Well, it wouldn’t take long to count the custom-made manila folders in my big metal file cabinet.

  Sure, you’ve got a life. A pretend life. A make-believe life.

  But it was my life, and I intended to go on living it.

  “One more question,” I said. “Why me? Of all the millions of people who don’t live in this crazy Irontown, why me? You think you will desperately need a private detective in interstellar space?”

  “Actually, we are trying to take at least one of every skill, every profession, because if we need one, it won’t be possible to go back.

  “But that’s not the main reason, Chris. You could say that I have an investment in you. I spent a lot of time keeping you alive, and I can’t bear to think a Charonese assassin is going to come along and murder you. So it’s personal.”

  “Gretel, I have about as much faith in these Charonese assassins and this coming Big Glitch Part Two as I have in your dad’s hyperdrive.”

  “Well, you don’t have to believe me. You have the option of staying behind. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we will blow up on takeoff, and maybe the killers will never find you. But the Second Big Glitch? That’s real. I have spent the last five years of my life battling to keep it from happening. And I’m losing. We are all losing.”

  “I think I’ll stay behind, then, and thank you very much for the invitation and the unexpected stay in your little hotel. So, can I go?”

  She grimaced.

  “I’m afraid not. See, you know too much now. You can’t go back home until just before the ship takes off.”

  “And how long is that? You have a timetable?”

  “No. No set date. But it will have to be soon.”

  “Terrific. So I guess the gorilla will take me back to my cell now.”

  “Soon.” She leaned forward. “Chris, I wish you would think about it some more. Everything I’ve told you is very real. The ship is being readied and provisioned and stocked with everything we think we could possibly need at our destination. And if you think getting you here was insanely complicated, just think how hard it has been keeping all that work, all those preparations, secret from the CC.”

  “I guess so. It hardly matters to me, though. I’m going back into the can. Stir. The slammer, the hoosegow, the calaboose.”

  “I’m sorry, Chris. I really am. I had so hoped that you would go with us.” She looked down, then int
o my eyes. “See, there is one more reason I wanted to rescue you. Like I said, it’s personal. During that awful time, I . . . well, I developed quite a crush on you.”

  Her face was actually red. I had no idea how to respond to that. I was still getting used to the idea of Gretel, little heroic Gretel, as a grown woman. Now I looked at her, and saw her as an adult for the first time. I could see the ten-year-old I had known and the woman she had become.

  And I didn’t want to think about it. I’d think about it in my cell tomorrow. Because tomorrow is another day.

  “I do want to know one more thing, though. Where is this ship?”

  She laughed out loud.

  “You’ve been living in it.”

  “But . . .” That didn’t seem possible. Not that I had been in a ship, I knew that. But I hadn’t realized it was the ship.

  The Heinlein was a derelict on a grand scale. Pretty much everyone who had been paying attention at all to the history of the last hundred years knew it was out there, a giant beached steel whale, rumored to be five miles long. In reality, who knew? Because you could hardly see it. For a hundred years the crater where it lay had been used as a dumping ground for all the junk of three cities. In fact, the Heinleiners had used this junk when they built their separate city.

  For many decades, no one thought it would ever rise again. Hell, right then, I didn’t believe it would ever fly. It was not as if they had just heaped the rubbish against the sides of the ship, to be shaken off when it rose on . . . what? The hyperdrive? The ship had been built right into Irontown. From where I was sitting, I could see a small piece of its massive hull, and the attachments were far more than just a clothesline strung from an apartment to an anchor point on the ship.

  No, stuff was welded to the ship. Apartments clung like barnacles to the metal. There was trash surrounding it, attached to it. There was no way in the world that the Heinlein would ever shake free of all that.