Virgin was on her hands and knees, mucous hanging from her nose and lips. She was trying to draw the pistol. Ric kicked it away. It fell on muffled plastic.
Ric turned and pulled the spikes from the machine. Jesus had fallen out of his chair, was clawing at his face. “Dead man,” Jesus said, gasping the words.
“Don’t threaten me, asshole,” Ric said. “It could have been mustard gas.”
And then Marlene, on the ridge far above, watched the sweep hand touch five minutes, thirty seconds, and she pressed her radio button. All the buried charges went off, blasting bits of the other cabins into the sky and doubtless convincing the soldiers in the other buildings that they were under fire by rocket or mortar, that the kid from California had brought an army with him. Simultaneous with the explosive, other buried packages began to gush concealing white smoke into the air. The wind was strong but there was a lot of smoke.
Ric opened the back door and took off, the shotgun hanging in his hand. Random fire burst out but none of it came near. The smoke provided cover from both optical scanners and infra-red, and it concealed him all the way across the yard behind the cabin and down into the arroyo behind it. Sixty yards down the arroyo was a culvert that ran under the expressway. Ric dashed through it, wetting himself to the knees in cold spring snowmelt.
He was now on the other side of the expressway. He didn’t think anyone would be looking for him here. He threw the shotgun away and kept running. There was a cross-country motorbike waiting a little farther up the stream.
25
“There,” Ric said, pressing the return button. “Half of it’s yours.”
Marlene was still wearing her war paint. She sipped cognac from a crystal glass and took her spike out of the computer. She laughed. “A hundred K of Starbright,” she said, “and paper packets of happiness. What else do I need?”
“A fast armored car, maybe,” Ric said. He pocketed his spike. “I’m taking off,” he said. He turned to her. “There’s room on the bike for two.”
“To where?” She was looking at him sidelong.
“To Mexico, for starters,” he said. A lie. Ric planned on heading northeast and losing himself for a while in Navajoland.
“To some safe little country. A safe little apartment.”
“That’s the idea.”
Marlene took a hefty swig of cognac. “Not me,” she said. “I’m planning on staying in this life.”
Ric felt a coldness brush his spine. He reached out to take her hand. “Marlene,” he said carefully. “You’ve got to leave this town. Now.”
She pulled her hand away. “Not a chance, Ricardo. I plan on telling my boss just what I think of him. Tomorrow morning. I can’t wait.”
There was a pain in Ric’s throat. “Okay,” he said. He stood up. “See you in Mexico, maybe.” He began to move for the door. Marlene put her arms around him from behind. Her chin dug into his collarbone.
“Stick around,” she said. “For the party.”
He shook his head, uncoiled her arms, slid out of them.
“You treat me like I don’t know what I’m doing,” Marlene said.
He turned and looked at her. Bright eyes looked at him from a mask of bright paint. “You don’t,” he said.
“I’ve got lots of ideas. You showed me how to put things together.”
“Now I’m showing you how to run and save your life.”
“Hah. I’m not going to run. I’m going to stroll out with a briefcase full of happiness and a hundred K in my pocket.”
He looked at her and felt a pressure hard in his chest. He knew that none of this was real to her, that he’d never been able to penetrate that strange screen in her mind that stood between Marlene and the rest of the world. Ric had never pierced it, but soon the world would. He felt a coldness filling him, a coldness that had nothing to do with sorrow.
It was hard not to run when he turned and left the apartment.
His breathing came more freely with each step he took.
26
When Ric came off the Navajo Reservation he saw scansheet headlines about how the California gang wars had spilled over into Phoenix, how there were dead people turning up in alleys, others were missing, a club had been bombed. All those people working for him, covering his retreat.
In New Zealand he bought into a condecology in Christchurch, a big place with armored shutters and armored guards, a first-rate new artificial intelligence to handle investments, and a mostly-foreign clientele who profited by the fact that a list of the condeco’s inhabitants was never made public … this was before he found out that he could buy private property here, a big house on the South Island with a view of his own personal glacier, without a chance of anybody’s war accidentally rolling over him.
It was an interesting feeling, sitting alone in his own house, knowing there wasn’t anyone within five thousand miles who wanted to kill him.
Ric made friends. He played the market and the horses. And he learned to ski.
At a ski party in late September, held in the house of one of his friends, he drifted from room to room amid a murmur of conversation punctuated with brittle laughter. He had his arm around someone named Reiko, the sheltered daughter of a policorporate bigwig. The girl, nineteen and a student, had long black hair that fell like a tsunami down her shoulders, and was fascinated with his talk of life in the real world. He walked into a back room that was bright with the white glare of video, wondering if the jai alai scores had been posted yet, and he stared into his own face as screams rose around him and his nerves turned to hot magnesium flares.
“Ugh. Mexican scum show,” said Reiko, and then she saw the actor’s face and her eyes widened.
Ric felt his knees trembling and he sank into an armchair in the back of the room. Ice tittered in his drink. The man on the vid was flaying alive a woman who hung by her wrists from a beam. Blood ran down his forearms. The camera cut quickly to his tiger’s eyes, his thin smile. Ric’s eyes. Ric’s smile.
“My god,” said Reiko. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”
“No,” Ric said. Shaking his head.
“I can’t believe they let this stuff even on private stations,” someone said from the hallway. Screams rose from the vid. Ric’s mind was flailing in the dark.
“I can’t watch this,” Reiko said, and rushed away. Ric didn’t see her go. Burning sweat was running down the back of his neck.
The victim’s screams rose. Blood traced artful patterns down her body. The camera cut to her face.
Marlene’s face.
Nausea swept Ric and he doubled in his chair. He remembered Two-Fisted Jesus and his talent for creating video images, altering faces, voices, action. They’d found Marlene, as Ric had thought they would, and her voice and body were memorized by Jesus’ computers. Maybe the torture was even real.
“It’s got to be him,” someone in the room said. “It’s even his voice. His accent.”
“He never did say,” said another voice, “what he used to do for a living.”
Frozen in his chair, Ric watched the show to the end. There was more torture, more bodies. The video-Ric enjoyed it all. At the end he went down before the blazing guns of the Federal Security Directorate. The credits rolled over the video-Ric’s dead face. The director was listed as Jesus Carranza. The film was produced by VideoTek S.A. in collaboration with Messiah Media.
The star’s name was given as Jean-Paul Marat.
“A new underground superstar,” said a high voice. The voice of someone who thought of himself as an underground connoisseur. “He’s been in a lot of pirate video lately. He’s the center of a big controversy about how far scum shows can go.”
And then the lights came on and Ric saw eyes turning to him in surprise. “It’s not me,” he said.
“Of course not.” The voice belonged to his host. “Incredible resemblance, though. Even your mannerisms. Your accent.”
“Not me.”
“Hey.” A quick, small man, with
metal-rimmed glasses that gazed at Ric like barrels of a shotgun. “It really is you!” The high-pitched voice of the connoisseur grated on Ric’s nerves like the sound of a bonesaw.
“No.” A fast, sweat-soaked denial.
“Look. I’ve taped all your vids I could find.”
“Not me.”
“I’m having a party next week. With entertainment, if you know what I mean. I wonder—”
“I’m not interested,” Ric said, standing carefully, “in any of your parties.”
He walked out into the night, to his new car, and headed north, to his private fortress above the glacier. He took the pistol out of the glove compartment and put it on the seat next to him. It didn’t make him feel any safer.
Get a new face, Ric thought. Get across the border into Uzbekistan and check into a hospital. Let them try to follow me there.
He got home at four in the morning and checked his situation with the artificial intelligence that managed his accounts. All his funds were in long-term investments and he’d take a whopping loss if he pulled out now.
He looked at the figures and couldn’t understand them. There seemed to be a long, constant scream in Ric’s mind and nerves, a scream that echoed Marlene’s, the sound of someone who had just discovered what is real. His body was shaking and he couldn’t stop it.
Ric switched off his monitor and staggered to bed. Blood filled his dreams.
When he rose it was noon. There were people outside his gates, paparazzi with their cameras. The phone had recorded a series of requests for an interview with the new, controversial vid star. Someone at the party had talked. It took Ric a long time to get a phone line out in order to tell the AI to sell out.
The money in his pocket and a gun in his lap, he raced his car past the paparrazi, making them jump aside as he tried his best to run them down. He had to make the next suborbital shuttle out of Christchurch to Mysore, then head northwest to his hospital and to a new life. And somehow he’d have to try to cover his tracks. Possibly he’d buy some hair bleach, a false mustache. Pay only cash.
Getting away from Cartoon Messiah wouldn’t be hard. Shaking the paparazzi would take a lot of fast thinking.
Sweat made his grip on the wheel slippery.
As he approached Christchurch he saw a streak across the bright northeast sky, a shuttle burning its way across the Pacific from California.
He wondered if there were people on it that he knew.
In his mind, the screams went on.
NEAL BARRETT, JR.
Sallie C.
What do Billy the Kid, Erwin Rommel, and the Wright Brothers have in common? If you want to know, you’ll just have to read the sad, funny, poignant, and altogether delightful story that follows.…
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Neal Barrett, Jr., grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, spent several years in Austin, hobnobbing with the likes of Lewis Shiner and Howard Waldrop, and now makes his home in Dallas with his family, a dog, and a cat. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing, Omni, Fantastic, If, and elsewhere. He made his first sale in 1959, and has been a full-time freelancer for the past twelve years. His books include Stress Pattern, Karma Corps, and the four-volume Aldair series. Upcoming is a new novel, Through Darkest America, being published by the new Isaac Asimov Presents line from Congdon & Weed.
SALLIE C.
Neal Barrett, Jr.
Will woke every morning covered with dust. The unfinished chair, the dresser with peeling paint were white with powdery alkali. His quarters seemed the small back room of some museum, Will and the dresser and the chair an exhibit not ready for public view. Indian John had built the room, nailing it to the hotel wall with the style and grace of a man who’d never built a thing in all his life and never intended to do it again. When he was finished he tossed the wood he hadn’t used inside and nailed the room firmly shut and threw his hammer into the desert. The room stayed empty except for spiders until Will and his brother moved in.
In August, a man had ridden in from Portales heading vaguely for Santa Fe and having little notion where he was. His wife lay in the flat bed of their wagon, fever-eyed and brittle as desert wood, one leg swollen and stinking with infection. They had camped somewhere and a centipede nine and three-quarter inches long had found its way beneath her blanket. The leg was rotting and would kill her. The woman was too sick to know it. The man said his wife would be all right. They planned to open a chocolate works in Santa Fe and possibly deal in iced confections on the side. The railroad was freighting in their goods from St. Louis; everything would be waiting when they arrived. The man kept the centipede in a jar. His wife lay in the bed across the room. He kept the jar in the window against the light and watched the centipede curl around the inner walls of glass. Its legs moved like a hundred new fish hooks varnished black.
The man had a problem with connections. He couldn’t see the link between the woman on the bed and the thing that rattled amber-colored armor in the jar. His wife and the centipede were two separate events.
The woman grew worse, her body so frail that it scarcely raised the sheets. When she died, Indian John took the centipede out and killed it. What he did, really, and Will saw him do it, was stake the thing down with a stick Apache-style. Pat Garrett told the man to get his sorry ass out of the Sallie C. that afternoon and no later. The man couldn’t see why Garrett was mad. He wanted to know what the Indian had done with his jar. He said his wife would be fine after a while. He had a problem with connections. He couldn’t see the link between burial and death. Indian John stood in the heat and watched ants take the centipede apart. They sawed it up neatly and carried it off like African bearers.
Will thought about this and carefully shook his trousers and his shoes. He splashed his face with water and found his shirt and walked out into the morning. He liked the moment suspended, purple-gray and still between the night and the start of day. There was a freshness in the air, a time before the earth changed hands and the sun began to beat the desert flat.
Behind the hotel was a small corral, the pen attached to the weathered wooden structure that served as workshed, stable, and barn. The ghost shapes of horses stirred about. The morning was thick and blue, hanging heavy in the air. Saltbush grew around the corral, and leathery beavertail cactus. Will remembered he was supposed to chop the cactus out and burn it.
Indian John walked out on the back steps and tossed dishwater and peelings into the yard. He took no notice of Will. The chickens darted about, bobbing like prehistoric lizards. Will opened the screen and went in. The hotel was built of wood but the kitchen was adobe, the rough walls black with smoke and grease. The room was hot and smelled of bacon and strong coffee. Will poured himself a cup and put bread on the stove to make toast.
“John, you seen my brother this morning?” Will asked. He didn’t look up from his plate. “He get anything to eat?”
“Mr. Pat say your brother make a racket before noon he goin’ to kill him straight out. Like that.” John drew a finger across his throat to show Will how.
“He hasn’t been doing that, John.”
“Good. He gah’dam better not.”
“If he isn’t, John, then why talk about it?”
“Gah’dam racket better stop,” John said, the menace clear in his voice. “Better stop or you brother he in helluva big trouble.”
Will kept his fury to himself. There was no use arguing with John, and a certain amount of risk. He stood and took his coffee and his toast out of the kitchen to the large open room next door. He imagined John’s eyes at his back. Setting his breakfast on the bar, he drew the shades and found his broom. There were four poker tables and a bar. The bar was a massive structure carved with leaves and tangled vines and clusters of grapes, a good-sized vineyard intact in the dark mahogany wood. Garrett had bought the bar up in Denver and had it hauled by rail as far as he could. Ox teams brought it the rest of the way acr
oss the desert, where Garrett removed the front of the hotel to get it in.
There was a mirror behind the bar, bottles and glasses that Will dusted daily. Above the bottles there was a picture of a woman. The heavy gilt frame was too large for the picture. The woman had delicate features, deep-set eyes and a strong, willful mouth. Will imagined she had a clear and pleasant voice.
By the time he finished sweeping there were pale fingers of light across the floor. Will heard steps on the back stairs and then the boy’s voice talking to John, and then John speaking himself. John didn’t sound like John when he spoke to the boy.
Will looked at the windows and saw they needed washing. It was a next-to-useless job. The sand ate the glass and there was no way to make them look right. The sight suddenly plunged him into despair. A man thirty-six with good schooling. A man who sweeps out and cleans windows. He wondered where he’d let his life go. He had scarcely even noticed. It had simply unraveled, coming apart faster than he could fix it.
The boy ran down the steps into the yard. He walked as if he owned the world and knew it. Will couldn’t remember if he’d felt like that himself.
The front stairs creaked and Will saw Garrett coming down. This morning he wore an English worsted suit and checkered vest. Boots shined and a fresh linen collar, cheeks shaved pink as baby skin. The full head of thick white hair was slicked back and his mustache was waxed in jaunty curls. Will looked away, certain Garrett could read his every thought. It made him furious, seeing this ridiculous old fart spruced up like an Eastern dandy. Before the woman arrived he had staggered around in moth-eaten dirty longhandles, seldom bothering to close the flap. At night he rode horses blind drunk. Everyone but John stayed out of his way. Now, Will was supposed to think he had two or three railroads and a bank.
Garrett walked behind the bar and poured a healthy morning drink. “Looks real nice,” he told Will. “I do like to see the place shine.”
Will had rearranged the dust and nothing more. “That Indian’s threatening my brother,” he announced. “Said he’d cut his throat sure.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 68