by K. W. Jeter
I’d had a chance to study him now. Identrope had evidently been pulled into D’s Joadoid universe as well. His appearance had changed, getting with the period. The razor-cut silver hair, his televangelist ’do, had darkened and flattened, slicked back with brilliantine and parted high on one side. A stiff, tall shirt collar with a gold pin, and a stodgy three-piece suit, a gold chain draped over the vest front. He’d pushed his chair back from the desk, so I was able to see the whole effect.
“What can I say?” I scratched my chin. “These things happen. Around here, you can never be sure where people will wind up.”
“That’s not good enough.” Identrope, leaning back in his chair, thumbs hooked in the armholes of his vest, leveled a dark gaze at me. “I expected more loyalty from you, Trayne. Either that, or more intelligence.”
I shrugged. “Loyalty’s a difficult commodity to come by these days.”
Identrope shook his head. “Your brains, then. You could have at least used those. Did you really think I didn’t know what was going on? From the beginning? All your little scurrying around, and plotting and scheming—did you think you could do all that behind my back, and I wouldn’t know about it?”
“Yeah.” My mouth had dried to ashes. “That’s exactly what I thought.”
“Trayne . . .” Just that one word, the name, ached with an infinite sadness. “My son. That’s how I thought of you. There was so much I wanted . . . for you. But there was blindness here. Not mine, but yours. You thought I didn’t see. But my eye is never closed. My back is never turned. In this world, you can’t hide these things from me. You cleave the apple, and I’m there. In your mouth, in your breath, the hairs numbered upon your head. You should have known.”
I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for him to tell me something I didn’t know. A burning knife leapt out of my heart with each pulse, aimed at his throat. What had that my son line been all about? But I knew already, and the wordless knowing battered inside my skull, so loud I could barely hear the voice on the other side.
“And what was it for? What good did it do you, Trayne? Tell me that. Every step you took away from me, you lowered yourself. From the highest to the dust under my feet—you’ve gone to each in succession, and carved away your own soul in doing so. All of your little dealings on the side with that toad Geldt . . . that was how it started. You indulged in that, and it left you weak and open to that Harrison creature. You weren’t able to see what he was, that he invited you to treachery and deceit, and those things had already become your bread and drink.” Identrope’s face grew sterner, distaste consuming him “And where has it brought you, Trayne? Treading through streets of dust with some ignorant rustic, a fool, a thing of no consequence. That is your last companion, Trayne. Nothing at all.”
I raised my face and looked at Identrope. “You’ve seen him?”
“Why should I have?” Identrope shrugged. “These small things are of no importance to me. They’re only the things I use, pieces I fit together in the great design. But not you, Trayne. I didn’t use you. I loved you.” He looked down at the papers spread across the desktop. “But that was somewhere else, and another time.”
That was when I knew. That I knew more than he did. I knew who D was.
The door opened behind me, and the deputy came in. Identrope gestured toward me. “You can take him away now.”
The deputy grabbed me by one shoulder and pulled me out of the chair. “What do you want we should do with him?”
Identrope didn’t look up. “Whatever you’d like.”
An ugly smile turned toward me as the deputy shoved me toward the door.
I got pitched back into the cell, landing on my hands and knees. D sat on the edge of his cot, watching as the deputy slammed the bars shut.
“Don’t go away.” The smile paraded yellow teeth. “Me and my buddies got some stuff we’d like to talk to you about.” The deputy turned and headed down the jail corridor.
D grabbed my elbow and got me to my feet. “What’s going on?”
My bandaged hand had started leaking blood again. “I think our friends want to finish off what they started.”
I was right. In a few minutes, the deputy and the same crew of Klan uglies had showed up outside the bars. They all laughed and waved the ball bats around while the deputy unlocked the door.
“You’re the little turd who had the gun.” The deputy led the crowd into the cell. Two of them picked me up and pinioned my arms behind my back. “That wasn’t a smart thing to do, at all.” The deputy brought his smiling face right up into mine. “If you’d been nice and cooperative, we might’ve just roughed you up a mite, and then let you go. But since you decided to be a fool about it, we’re just gonna have to teach you a real lesson.” He poked the end of a bat into my stomach.
From the cot at the other side of the cell, D called out. “Hey, leave him alone! We didn’t do shit to you guys—”
The deputy glared over his shoulder at D. “Shut your face. We’ll get around to you in a little while. But first . . .” He hoisted the bat.
I saw the bat’s thick end come swinging around in a level arc. Nicely timed: the two men let go of me right at the moment of impact. I went flying, and crashed onto the empty cot.
The deputy and his friends had obviously had a lot of practice at this kind of work. The blow had been enough to daze me, but not so much as to kill me outright with a skull crushed egg-like. This was going to be a long night before they were finished having their fun and I’d be put out of my misery.
I slid onto the floor, my fingers clawing across the cot’s thin mattress. A second passed before the pain caught up with the trauma; then it surged over me, fire radiating from my jawbone.
“Give him another, Jake! Har dee har har!” The ones in the back of the crowd started making animal noises.
Through their legs, I could see D on the other side of the cell. He sat trembling on the cot, white-knuckled hands gripping the edge, his face just as bloodless.
I caught a boot in my mouth. I tasted blood as the leather volley began on my ribs.
“D—” I managed to stretch a hand toward him. The bandage had torn loose, a red trickle running down to my elbow. “Help me—”
They let me crawl. It struck them funny, my reaching toward D. They howled when his trembling hand moved, drawn toward mine.
The tips of our fingers made contact. I saw the spark fall spinning inside his eyes. He knew, without words. Who I was, who he was.
D jerked his head from side to side, the tendons in his neck now knife edges around his windpipe. His eyes were naked creatures webbed in blood.
The men stopped beating me when they heard him scream.
A bat dropped and bounced on the cement floor. They turned as one and stared at D.
The scream’s rage filled the cell, making every atom of oxygen a razor with a single word on the blade. D clutched the sides of his head, fingers tearing at the sweat-darkened hair. His tongue curled backward, as though to taste that sound, swallow it back down into the battered crypt below his belly.
Silence for a moment, then words.
“I told you! I told everybody!” D’s hands swayed his head in a wobbling circuit, as if he could work it loose from the lock of his breastbone. “I told you to leave me alone—but you wouldn’t! You just keep pushing and pushing, and then it happens and I warned you—”
He rose from the cot, stepping past me as I collapsed across the floor. I rolled onto my back, and saw him through a red haze, as he reached for the deputy.
Another scream, a weak, empty thing. The deputy’s chest heaved with the draining of his lungs. D’s hand caught the deputy’s face, fingers digging into the jowls below the small eyes.
I felt the d-ranger power break against the walls of the cell, slapping the other men back. The deputy’s knees gave way as though the voiding bladder above had washed away joinings carved of sugar. D’s hand squeezed, then jerked back.
The deputy’s face wa
s a rag in D’s fist.
The intricate bone crumbled under D’s other hand. From the round box of skull, D pulled out a grey rat, its fur slick with blood, its hindquarters a knobbed rope running back into the dying man’s spinal column. The rat squirmed in D’s grasp, the red eyes fragments of the deputy’s, weeping with the same fear. D clenched his fist to a rock, and grey clotted bits leaked between his fingers.
The other men clawed their own faces, or dropped to their knees and scrabbled at the shivering metal bars of the cell.
I was going under, but not before I saw the stones of the walls become glass, then air, then stone again, darker than the hearts of mountains. They trembled and sparked, then exploded.
The floor opened up beneath me. I fell into a new universe, where the darkness kissed me hard.
THIRTY-FOUR
I AWOKE at ground zero.
I raised my head from a charred stone, my hands full of ashes and blood.
Where D’s power had gone off—the d-ranger ability, the cataclysmic drain of reality-organizing function—the world had imploded, set fire to itself, chased a radiant tail down a small black hole. The landscape around me was flattened and singed.
The scorch marks on the earth radiated from where the jail cell had been, a few yards away from where I lay. A shallow hole looked like a bomb crater. Under a roiling yellow sky, I got shakily to my feet and stumbled over to the spot.
D was there, what was left of him. His face—my old face, the original one—had blind red sockets. His hands were smoke on the ground.
Bits of the deputy and his Klanner friends were scattered about, mixed in with the small rubble of the jail. Some of the pieces still looked human, others had been caught dead halfway through a transformation into strange, scrabbling forms.
The ruins of a familiar piece of machinery hunkered nearby. The pickup truck that the Klanners had run us down in squatted on melted tires, the paint on the fenders bubbled and blackened. I leaned against it, a residual heat seeping into my palms, and looked up. Ghosts floated in the immediate sky, the empty Klan robes, tattered around the edges, drifting lifeless to the earth.
I poked around some more, turning over both hard and soft scraps with the point of my shoe. I didn’t find any trace of Identrope. There was no doubt in my mind that when the place had gone up, he’d been far away. That was his style.
Before I left, I dragged D’s body—it was his now, for good—into the shallow hole, and kicked in enough stones and scraps of metal and brick to cover it. I turned and headed toward what looked like the low silhouettes of a small town on the horizon.
The town was similar to the hole-in-the-wall that D and I had started out from. Only brought up a couple of decades, to maybe the early fifties, Eisenhower and the Korean War. D’s Joadoid world was either evaporating or had been thrown into fast forward. The same as with that other small town, the people were all gone; I walked through abandoned streets. Maybe when D’s ability had overloaded and gone off, they’d all thought it was the Bomb, the great bowel-clenching fear of those days, come knocking at their doors, and they’d all scurried off to the nearest fallout shelter.
I found the window of a furniture store, with televisions, neat old Philco Futuras—brand-new here—with the picture tube sitting spacily on top of the box. The sets were all switched on, tuned to the same channel. A news program, in flickering black-and-white; a silver-haired announcer—I looked closely to make sure it wasn’t Identrope—sat at a desk and read from a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“Here’s a cutie for you.” The announcer winked and smiled. The screen cut from his face to a live-remote view of a big sheet-metal building, the front crumpled and blackened by fire. I recognized it: the New Moon Corporation’s work site out in the junkyard.
“Seems there’s been some rowdy action out in the countryside!” The news announcer’s voice boomed through the glass as I leaned my hands and face against it. The angle turned and I saw dead bodies splayed out on the ground, toppled-over motorcycles, and, in the distance, the uprooted barbed-wire fence. “A local motorcycle club—police sources tell us that many of the organization’s members have lengthy arrest records—called the—” He glanced at the top paper. “Unified Stoners . . .”
“No, no,” I murmured. “The Stone Units.”
“. . . attacked a corporate operation in a remote location. Probably to steal power tools, or drugs from the first-aid kits. But the motorcycle thugs got more than they bargained for! You can say that! Seems the company—the Nude Moon Corporation, headquartered right here in the Southland . . .”
“New Moon.”
“. . . seems the company, for reasons of its own, had a full complement of armed security personnel on the premises. That’s what those crazy motorcycle types ran right into! You have to admire their pluck—they sailed right in there regardless, even once the firing started.”
I gazed blankly at the television screens on the other side of the window. This was the first indication I’d had of what Geldt had been up to since I’d fobbed him on the Stone Units. Later, when the dust finished settling, I’d get the whole story pieced together, but for now my tired brain was dumbfounded.
The news camera panned over the corpses on the ground. There was Rasty Mike, his forehead caved in around a small black hole in the center. His lips snarled back to show his gnashed-together teeth. He was right at the New Moon building’s rolled-up freight door, probably because he’d led the charge through the downed fence.
Geldt was there, too, about midway in the pack of dead bikers. Maybe he’d been caught surprised by the security forces New Moon had hired, and been popped before he’d had a chance to pull his usual sneak-away number. Or maybe he’d been caught up in his role as the bad-ass Trayne, the number he’d improvised for the Stone Units’ benefit. That high-stakes criminal, looking for a good crowd of accomplices to hook up with. I never found out which it had been, Geldt or “Trayne,” who had gone down with the bikers.
The news announcer rattled on, a fast counterpoint to my own crippled thought processes. “Whatever these boys were looking for, they’d probably agree now, it wasn’t worth the trip! And here’s the strangest part. Seems there was some kind of rocket setup on the premises; the company’s representatives have so far declined to make any comment about what this was to be used for. But it was apparently fueled and ready to go when the motorcycle club made their ill-fated break-in attempt. Imagine their surprise when the thing took off!”
Mine was about equal. The window glass sweated under my hands as I pressed closer.
“Apparently the motorcyclists inadvertently triggered a preprogrammed launch sequence. Indications are that a low-level satellite has already been released; its exact trajectory and function have not yet been determined. Turning to sports, it’s a big day for—”
I stepped back from the store window. So the New Moon satellite had gone up—I couldn’t calculate yet what effect that would have on what I had to do. I had a deep suspicion that the timetable had been stepped up another notch by this event. If I was going to carry through on killing Identrope, I’d better get my ass in gear.
That whole project—Identrope’s death—was obviously complicated by the fact that he was aware of my intentions, and had been all along. I had two factors on my side: one, if omniscience was one of Identrope’s goals in constructing his web and achieving “white reality,” he hadn’t gotten there yet; he hadn’t known who and what D had been. Identrope apparently hadn’t even known that he’d been pulled into another whole pseudo-real universe, D’s Joadoid world. So Identrope still had his blind sides; that gave me room to operate. And further on that, factor two: by now, Identrope would be sure that I was well and truly off the scene, killed by those fun-loving Klanners. The element of surprise was mine once again.
At the town’s edge, I spotted a fire burning just above the horizon. I couldn’t make out the tapered shape of the dirigible, but I knew it was there. I started walking again.
First I heard the music, the carnival pipes. It took me a moment, but then I remembered. What one of the tramps, back when D and I had gotten off the freight train, had been talking about. Identrope’s new operation down here. A whole amusement park underneath the burning dirigible.
Night had fallen by the time I came within viewing distance of the place, bringing the colored lights up sharper. Now I saw where all the people had gone; they were here, crowded in around the carousels and giant Ferris wheel. The wooden framework of a roller coaster creaked under the hissing of the cars’ wheels against the curved rails.
I worked my way through the parking lot and toward the entrance. The milling crowd’s faces were flushed and overexcited, as though they were here for some candy-filled apocalypse. Small children screamed as though gripped by sudden fever. A sailor in uniform bent a woman nearly double in his embrace, his kiss all-devouring.
The crowd’s tidal pull caught me and dragged me into its midst. The current drew me under a sign of a million blinking light bulbs—I couldn’t see what the letters spelled—and spat me out stumbling in the park’s center.
“You don’t need a ticket, mister! Not tonight!” A teenage kid dressed like an elf with a hormone problem grabbed me and shoved me into a cart on tracks. Another elf slammed a lever over, and I rattled into a papier-mâché and chicken-wire cavern.
“Trayne!” a woman’s voice shouted at me in the darkness. “Over here!”
My eyes hadn’t adjusted. I looked around blindly. “What?”
“Just get out of the cart. Don’t worry about it—”
The cart swivelled around a curve in the track as I jumped off. I landed on my hands and knees in a rubble of discarded paper cups and food wrappers.
The woman helped me to my feet. A blue-tinged light behind a Styrofoam rock allowed me to see. I found myself looking into Snow White’s face.
“Hello, Eastern.” I slapped dust from my trousers. “I like the outfit.”