“Do you really want to kill yourself?” I aimed the inhaler at her face and screamed at her. “Do you, Kate? Do you?” The air in the alley was thick with despair and I was choking on it. “Come on, Kate. Let’s do it!”
“No.” Her head thrashed back and forth. “No, please. Stop.”
Her terror fed mine. “Then what the hell are you doing with this thing?” I was shaking so badly that when I tried to pitch the inhaler into the dumpster, it hit the pavement only six feet away. I had come so close to screwing up. I climbed off her and rolled on my back and soaked myself in the night sky. When I screwed up, people died. “Cyanide is awful bad for the baby,” I said.
“How do you know about my baby?” Her face was rigid with fear. “Who are you?”
I could breathe again, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Fay Hardaway.” I gasped. “I’m a PI; I left you a message this morning. Najma Jones hired me to find her daughter.”
“Rashmi is dead.”
“I know,” I said. “So is Gratiana.” I sat up and looked at her. “Father Elaine will be glad to see you.”
Kate’s eyes were wide, but I don’t think she was seeing the alley. “Gratiana said the devils would come after me.” She was still seeing the business end of the inhaler. “She said that if I didn’t hear from her by tomorrow then we had lost everything and I should . . . do it. You know, to protect the church. And just now my sidekick picked up three times in ten minutes only there was nobody there and so I knew it was time.”
“That was me, Kate. Sorry.” I retrieved the Donya Durand slingback I’d stripped off her foot and gave it back to her. “Tell me where you got this?”
“It was Rashmi’s. We bought them together at Grayles. Actually I picked them out. That was before . . . I loved her, you know, but she was crazy. I can see that now, although it’s kind of too late. I mean, she was okay when she was taking her meds, but she would stop every so often. She called it taking a vacation from herself. Only it was no vacation for anyone else, especially not for me. She decided to go off on the day we got married and didn’t tell me and all of a sudden after the ceremony we got into this huge fight about the baby and who loved who more and she stared throwing things at me – these shoes – and then ran out of the church barefoot. I don’t think she ever really understood about . . . you know, what we were trying to do. I mean, I’ve talked to the Bride of God herself . . . but Rashmi.” Kate rubbed her eye and her hand came away wet.
I sat her up and put my arm around her. “That’s all right. Not really your fault. I think poor Rashmi must have been hanging by a thread. We all are. The whole human race, or what’s left of it.”
We sat there for a moment.
“I saw her mom this morning,” I said. “She said to tell you she was sorry.”
Kate sniffed. “Sorry? What for?”
I shrugged.
“I know she didn’t have much use for me,” said Kate. “At least that’s what Rashmi always said. But as far as I’m concerned the woman was a saint to put up with Rashmi and her mood swings and all the acting out. She was always there for her. And the thing is, Rashmi hated her for it.”
I got to my knees, then to my feet. I helped Kate up. The alley was dark, but that wasn’t really the problem. Even in the light of day, I hadn’t seen anything.
8
I had no trouble finding space at the bike rack in front of Ronald Reagan Elementary. The building seemed to be drowsing in the heavy morning air, its brick wings enfolding the empty playground. A janitor bot was vacuuming the swimming pool, another was plucking spent blossoms from the clematis fence. The bots were headache yellow; the letters RRE in puffy orange slanted across their torsos. The gardening bot informed me that school wouldn’t start for an hour. That was fine with me. This was just a courtesy call, part of the total service commitment I made to all the clients whom I had failed. I asked if I could see Najma Jones and he said he doubted that any of the teachers were in quite this early but he walked me to the office. He paged her; I signed the visitors’ log. When her voice crackled over the intercom, I told the bot that I knew the way to her classroom.
I paused at the open door. Rashmi’s mom had her back to me. She was wearing a sleeveless navy dress with cream-colored dupatta scarf draped over her shoulders. She passed down a row of empty desks, perching origami animals at the center of each. There were three kinds of elephants, ducks and ducklings, a blue giraffe, a pink cat that might have been a lion.
“Please come in, Ms. Hardaway,” she said without turning around. She had teacher radar; she could see behind her back and around a corner.
“I stopped by your house.” I slouched into the room like a kid who had lost her civics homework. “I thought I might catch you before you left for school.” I leaned against a desk in the front row and picked up the purple crocodile on it. “You fold these yourself?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, “so finally I gave up and went for a walk. I ended up here. I like coming to school early, especially when no one else is around. There is so much time.” She had one origami swan left over that she set on her own desk. “Staying after is different. If you’re always the last one out at night, you’re admitting that you haven’t got anything to rush home to. It’s pathetic, actually.” She settled behind her desk and began opening windows on her desktop. “I’ve been teaching the girls to fold the ducks. They seem to like it. It’s a challenging grade, the fifth. They come to me as bright and happy children and I am supposed to teach them fractions and pack them off to middle school. I shudder to think what happens to them there.”
“How old are they?”
“Ten when they start. Most of them have turned eleven already. They graduate next week.” She peered at the files she had opened. “Some of them.”
“I take it on faith that I was eleven once,” I said, “but I just don’t remember.”
“Your generation grew up in unhappy times.” Her face glowed in the phosphors. “You haven’t had a daughter yet, have you, Ms. Hardaway?”
“No.”
We contemplated my childlessness for a moment.
“Did Rashmi like origami?” I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t want to listen to the silence anymore.
“Rashmi?” She frowned, as if her daughter were a not-very-interesting kid she had taught years ago. “No. Rashmi was a difficult child.”
“I found Kate Vermeil last night,” I said. “I told her what you said, that you were sorry. She wanted to know what for.”
“What for?”
“She said that Rashmi was crazy. And that she hated you for having her.”
“She never hated me,” said Najma quickly. “Yes, Rashmi was a sad girl. Anxious. What is this about, Ms. Hardaway?”
“I think you were at the Comfort Inn that night. If you want to talk about that, I would like to hear what you have to say. If not, I’ll leave now.”
She stared at me for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You know, I actually wanted to have many children.” She got up from the desk, crossed the room and shut the door as if it were made of hand-blown glass. “When the seeding first began, I went down to City Hall and volunteered. That just wasn’t done. Most women were horrified to find themselves pregnant. I talked to a bot, who took my name and address and then told me to go home and wait. If I wanted more children after my first, I was certainly encouraged to make a request. It felt like I was joining one of those mail order music clubs.” She smiled and tugged at her dupatta. “But when Rashmi was born, everything changed. Sometimes she was such a needy baby, fussing to be picked up, but then she would lie in her crib for hours, listless and withdrawn. She started anti-depressants when she was five and they helped. And the Department of Youth Services issued me a full-time bot helper when I started teaching. But Rashmi was always a handful. And since I was all by myself, I didn’t feel like I had enough to give to another child.”
“You never married?” I asked. “Found a part
ner?”
“Married who?” Her voice rose sharply. “Another woman?” Her cheeks colored. “No. I wasn’t interested in that.”
Najma returned to her desk but did not sit down. “The girls will be coming soon.” She leaned toward me, fists on the desktop. “What is it that you want to hear, Ms. Hardaway?”
“You found Rashmi before I did. How?”
“She called me. She said that she had had a fight with her girlfriend who was involved in some secret experiment that she couldn’t tell me about and they were splitting up and everything was shit, the world was shit. She was off her meds, crying, not making a whole lot of sense. But that was nothing new. She always called me when she broke up with someone. I’m her mother.”
“And when you got there?”
“She was sitting on the bed.” Najma’s eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. “She put the inhaler to her mouth when I opened the door.” Najma was looking into Room 103 of the Comfort Inn. “And I thought to myself, what does this poor girl want? Does she want me to witness her death or stop it? I tried to talk to her, you know. She seemed to listen. But when I asked her to put the inhaler down, she wouldn’t. I moved toward her, slowly. Slowly. I told her that she didn’t have to do anything. That we could just go home. And then I was this close.” She reached a hand across the desk. “And I couldn’t help myself. I tried to swat it out of her mouth. Either she pressed the button or I set it off.” She sat down abruptly and put her head in her hands. “She didn’t get the full dose. It took forever before it was over. She was in agony.”
“I think she’d made up her mind, Ms. Jones.” I was only trying to comfort her. “She wrote the note.”
“I wrote the note.” She glared at me. “I did.”
There was nothing I could say. All the words in all the languages that had ever been spoken wouldn’t come close to expressing this mother’s grief. I thought the weight of it must surely crush her.
Through the open windows, I heard the snort of the first bus pulling into the turnaround in front of the school. Najma Jones glanced out at it, gathered herself and smiled. “Do you know what Rashmi means in Sanskrit?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ray of sunlight,” she said. “The girls are here, Ms. Hardaway.” She picked up the origami on her desk. “We have to be ready for them.” She held it out to me. “Would you like a swan?”
By the time I came through the door of the school, the turnaround was filled with busses. Girls poured off them and swirled onto the playground: giggling girls, whispering girls, skipping girls, girls holding hands. And in the warm June sun, I could almost believe they were happy girls.
They paid no attention to me.
I tried Sharifa’s call. “Hello?” Her voice was husky with sleep.
“Sorry I didn’t make it home last night, sweetheart,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know that I’m on my way.”
MOTHER AEGYPT
Kage Baker
One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late nineties, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-travelling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, SCI FICTION, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. Her second novel, Sky Coyote, was published in 1999, followed by a third and a fourth, Mendoza in Hollywood and The Graveyard Game, both published in 2001. In 2002, she published her first collection, Black Projects, White Knights. Her most recent books are a novel set in her unique fantasy milieu, The Anvil of the World, a chapbook novella, The Empress of Mars, and a new collection, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories. Coming up are a new Company novel, The Life of the World to Come. Her stories have appeared in our Seventeenth and Twentieth Annual Collections. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.
Here, in a hugely entertaining tale that seems at first like a fantasy but that experienced Baker fans will recognize as a stealth Company story, she takes us back to an impoverished pre-modern Europe for the saga of an opportunistic rogue and con man, someone who always has his eye out for the main chance, who ends up blundering into a sweet new confidence game that might turn out to be just a little more than he can handle . . .
Speak sweetly to the Devil, until you’re both over the bridge.
– Transylvanian proverb
IN A COUNTRY OF MAD forests and night, there was an open plain, and pitiless sunlight.
A man dressed as a clown was running for his life across the plain.
A baked-clay track, the only road for miles, reflected the sun’s heat and made the man sweat as he ran along it. He was staggering a little as he ran, for he had been running a long while and he was fat, and the silken drawers of his clown costume had begun to work their way down his thighs. It was a particularly humiliating costume, too. It made him look like a gigantic dairymaid.
His tears, of terror and despair, ran down with his sweat and streaked the clown-white, graying his big moustache; the lurid crimson circles on his cheeks had already run, trickling pink down his neck. His straw-stuffed bosom had begun to slip, too, working its way down his dirndl, and now it dropped from beneath his petticoat like a stillbirth. Gasping, he halted to snatch it up, and peered fearfully over his shoulder.
No sign of his pursuers yet; but they were mounted and must catch up with him soon, on this long straight empty plain. There was no cover anywhere, not so much as a single tree. He ran on, stuffing his bosom back in place, whimpering. Gnats whined in his ears.
Then, coming over a gentle swell of earth, he beheld a crossroads. There was his salvation!
A team of slow horses drew two wagons, like the vardas of the Romanies but higher, and narrower, nor were they gaily painted in any way. They were black as the robe of scythe-bearing Death. Only: low, small and ominous, in white paint in curious antiquated letters, they bore the words: MOTHER AEGYPT.
The man wouldn’t have cared if Death himself held the reins. He aimed himself at the hindmost wagon, drawing on all his remaining strength, and pelted on until he caught up with it.
For a moment he ran desperate alongside, until he was able to gain the front and haul himself up, over the hitch that joined the two wagons. A moment he poised there, ponderous, watching drops of his sweat fall on hot iron. Then he crawled up to the door of the rear wagon, unbolted it, and fell inside.
The driver of the wagons, hooded under that glaring sky, was absorbed in a waking dream of a place lost for millennia. Therefore she did not notice that she had taken on a passenger.
The man lay flat on his back, puffing and blowing, too exhausted to take much note of his surroundings. At last he levered himself up on his elbows, looking about. After a moment he scooted into a sitting position and pulled off the ridiculous lace milkmaid’s cap, with its braids of yellow yarn. Wiping his face with it, he muttered a curse.
In a perfect world, he reflected, there would have been a chest of clothing in this wagon, through which he might rummage to steal some less conspicuous apparel. There would, at least, have been a pantry with food and drink. But the fates had denied him yet again; this was nobody’s cozy living quarters on wheels. This wagon was clearly used for storage, holding nothing but boxes and bulky objects wrapped in sacking.
Disgusted, the man dug in the front of his dress and pulled out his bosom. He shook it by his ear and smiled as he heard the clink-clink. The gold rings were still there, some of the loot with which he’d been able to escape.
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The heat within the closed black box was stifling, so he took off all his costume but for the silken drawers. Methodically he began to search through the wagon, opening the boxes and unwrapping the parcels. He began to chuckle.
He knew stolen goods when he saw them.
Some of it had clearly been lifted from Turkish merchants and bureaucrats: rolled and tied carpets, tea services edged in gold. But there were painted ikons here too, and family portraits of Russians on wooden panels. Austrian crystal bowls. Chased silver ewers and platters. Painted urns. A whole umbrella stand of cavalry sabers, some with ornate decoration, some plain and ancient, evident heirlooms. Nothing was small enough to slip into a pocket, even if he had had one, and nothing convenient to convert into ready cash.
Muttering, he lifted out a saber and drew it from its scabbard.
As he did so, he heard the sound of galloping hooves. The saber dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He flattened himself against the door, pointlessly, as the hoofbeats drew near and passed. He heard the shouted questions. He almost – not quite – heard the reply, in a woman’s voice pitched very low. His eyes rolled, searching the room for any possible hiding place. None at all; unless he were to wrap his bulk in a carpet, like Cleopatra.
Yet the riders passed on, galloped ahead and away. When he realized that he was, for the moment, safe, he collapsed into a sitting position on the floor.
After a moment of listening to his heart thunder, he picked up the saber again.
It was night before the wagon halted at last, rumbling over rough ground as it left the road. He was still crouched within, cold and cramped now. Evidently the horses were unhitched, and led down to drink at a stream; he could hear splashing. Dry sticks were broken, a fire was lit. He thought of warmth and food. A light footfall approached, followed by the sound of someone climbing up on the hitch. The man tensed.
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