The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  "What is it?"

  "There are marks in the sand, faint but readable. A large boat has been and gone. He must have escaped that way."

  "No! That's how he came. If he left that way, he must have walked right through you."

  "But—"

  "Round up the men. We've lost him."

  "Yes, My Lady."

  Two pair of boots—one thumping and heavy, one ringing as from stiletto heels—walked out into the sand.

  Gurden let his leg slump and shifted his tailbone, trying to get feeling back into his lower spine. He looked out across the joists of the attic level.

  The sunlight outside was more golden than red now, and he could see it reflect along the ridgepole. There were holes through the shingles, big ones. If he could walk out to them, from joist to joist, he might be able to pull himself out onto the roof. From there he could make his way over the shingles to one of the outbuildings, then down among the dune grass.

  He crouched by the chimney, examining this plan. There were really only two choices: wait until Sandy and the hashishiyun came back for him, or move.

  Smoothly, with the suppleness of an aikido roll, he levered himself erect against the brickwork. He put one hand on either side of the rough beam of the ridgepole beside his head, more for balance than support, and began walking out over the emptiness of the house. He was careful to place his feet flat and solid across the narrow joists, even though they were sixty centimeters apart: not quite a full stride at walking pace. If he scuffed across the joints, it would dislodge dust or put undue stresses on the old wood. If any of the others returned to the house now, of course, they would see and hear him immediately.

  Halfway across the attic space, he came to the first hole. It was forty centimeters across, too narrow for his shoulders, and the slatted laths underlying the shingles blocked a clear exit.

  The next hole, three meters beyond, was more generous. The laths were broken and the gap was wide, 125 centimeters across. He stuck his head out cautiously.

  The roof pitched flatly away, seeming to touch the side of a sand dune below. No one was in sight on that side of the house.

  But how could he climb out? The shingles lapping the hole were loose. If he put his weight on them, or even brushed hard against them going through, some would certainly fall inside, making a clatter on the floor below. If he jumped and rolled through the hole—assuming he could get some kind of forward momentum along the two-centimeter-wide joist—he would land with a thud and probably roll right down the roof and over the edge. He didn't think he could recover from a six-meter fall and get away before Sandy and her men would be on him.

  Something less strenuous was called for. And quickly.

  He felt the shingles on the downslope side of the hole. The loosest ones he began pulling free and stacking outside on the slope. He pushed on the sturdier shingles, wedging them more firmly into the roofs interlaced fabric. His fingers danced, tugged, tested; the heels of his hands levered and hammered softly. His eyes and hands functioned smoothly, like a programmed machine: sizing up the status of each shingle, then shoving it home or setting it aside. The work went faster and faster, too fast for him to see and catch the rusty, ten-penny nail that hung by its head to the edge of one shingle—before it fell.

  If he had stooped to grab the nail, he surely would have plunged off his joist after it. Instead he froze, counting the seconds.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Ting! It struck on the wooden floor, and rattled away.

  Now they would all come back into the house, look up, see him among the rafters, and start firing.

  In another two seconds they would come. Then, in three, the hot bullets would hit his legs and back.

  In another second.

  Nothing.

  Tom Gurden breathed again. He finished his handiwork: the edge was repaired so that no shingle or piece of wood would flip through and fall when he put a leg out on the roof—unless the entire section let go and dropped him to the floor.

  But how was he going to put that leg out and pull himself through, balancing as he was on a two-centimeter-wide joist? Not facing downslope, he wasn't.

  Gurden turned, faced the ridgepole, and grasped it underhanded. With one foot firmly planted along the joist, he raised the other behind him, knee cocked and shin pulled back to clear the lower lip of the hole. When his wandering toe touched the outside surface, he extended the leg until it rested—toe, kneecap, lower thigh—on the roof. He put pressure then on the heels of his hands against the ridgepole and on that extended leg until those points supported almost his whole body weight.

  Letting out a slow breath, he withdrew his standing leg from the joist and curved it up and back to join the other on the solid edge of the roof. Now he lay with his upper body across the hole, supported by his thighs on the outside roof and his palms against the ridgepole inside. The strain tore at his stomach and shoulder muscles, and hot knives gouged his lower back.

  He pushed with his hands against the beam, slowly working more of his thighs down the roof, walking his toes to get a purchase on a lower tier of shingles. When his arms were at excruciating extension, he worked first one hand, then the other, back around the sides of the hole, finding the firmest of the shingles there and resting his weight on them. Centimeter by centimeter he worked his legs lower and his arms back until only his upper chest, neck, and head hung over the hole. Then he turned on his side, got his weight on one hip, rolled away from the hole and crab-walked across the roof to the edge.

  No one below.

  No one to either side.

  Loosening his muscles, Gurden let himself over the edge and dropped in a crouch, exhaling to absorb the shock of landing. Toes and palms dented the soft sand, and he aikido-rolled twice to wear off the impact.

  Which way to go—toward the back or front of the house?

  The front, facing the sea, would not help him unless he had a boat. And it was just possible Sandy and her men had drifted that way, still looking for signs of the turbine boat that had brought him. Their own vehicles would be on the side toward the road.

  Gurden went to that corner, looked around. The back of the house, the path up to it, the outbuildings, and the dunes that shielded them from the road were all in the house's long shadow.

  Moving slowly, smoothly, he walked out into the halflight and slipped sideways between one dune and another. Ahead and behind him were gullies of banked sand six meters wide at foot level, twelve meters wide at head height. He kept to the shadowed sides, looking forward and back, hoping to spot anyone coming before he himself was seen.

  No one came.

  Gurden worked his way through the dunes for a thousand meters. Then he lay down in a narrowing patch of shadow, behind a waving curtain of sea oats, and rested.

  * * *

  Leaning against the Porsche's fender, enjoying one of the harsh Latakia-blend cigarettes that he received as a gift from Turkey, Hasan studied the troop of camouflaged Assassins that Alexandra led back to him. Two missing.

  "Where is he?"

  "He ... appears to have got away."

  "You had the house surrounded?"

  "All through the firelight."

  "And he was not found inside?"

  "The building's a shell—totally empty. I looked. He wasn't there."

  "Is he a magician then?"

  "I told you he was becoming subtle."

  "More subtle than you?"

  Alexandra made a face. "He has few options and so is quite predictable. He will turn up. We will be there to meet him."

  "With your electronic tracking device?"

  She held up the rectangle for his inspection: sunlight glinted off a star-shaped break in the surface. The dense, hardened glass had deflected a bullet that might have wounded her, but the display was now inoperative.

  "Then how will you find him?" Hasan asked.

  "Gurden is tr
apped on a narrow spit of sand, a kilometer wide and thirty kilometers long, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

  "Of course. But, when he reaches the road, can your subtlety predict whether he will turn right or left?"

  "I don't have to know how he gets there, just where there is."

  "And that is?"

  "He'll go to the first place he can find a piano or a keyboard synthesizer. He needs music like a drug. He needs work to be alive."

  Hasan snorted. "There must be two hundred American honkytonks between Beach Haven and Barnegat Light."

  "Then we'd best start looking, hadn't we?"

  She started to open the car's door. He restrained her with a hand.

  "You've lost two of my devotees. Where are they?"

  She looked down at his hand, up into his eyes.

  "You promised them Paradise and a grave in the sand. Does it matter which sand?"

  * * *

  After an hour, maybe two by the sun, Tom Gurden lifted his head. By now it must be safe to move on. If not, that meant the hashishiyun's search of the area had widened until any hiding place would be as vulnerable as moving in the open.

  Besides, all morning his body had maintained an uneasy balance: as the sun drew the sweat out of his back, the film of silicon grease there tried to trap it against his skin, while the slight breeze tried to cool and dry it. That balance was now tipping in the grease's favor. In another hour his body would begin to overheat, and already he was dehydrating. It was time to find shelter.

  He stood up and peered around, looking for a moving shadow, a flagging sleeve, a fall of sand. He listened for the crunch of a footstep above the background surf beyond the dunes.

  Nothing came.

  In a hundred meters he made it to the road, a simple three-lane of black asphalt, washed with its own mini-dunes of drifted sand. Either direction would take him to one of the beach towns.

  His new clothes, provided by the man with the glass dagger from the pool, had nothing in the pockets. He was without credentials or cash, and in this society that was to be a non-person, a cipher in every sense.

  There was one person who could help him, if he could get to a phone booth.

  * * *

  Eliza: Good morning. This is Eliza Channel 103, an on-line—

  Gurden: Eliza? Give me two-one-two. Tom Gurden calling.

  Eliza: Yes, Tom? I deduce from analysis of your voice that you have been under a good deal of physical strain lately. I do hope you're feeling well.

  Gurden: It's been a bad morning. Look, I'm in trouble and need your help.

  Eliza: Whatever you want, Tom.

  Gurden: You said you could access financial records, bank accounts and such. And you can recognize my thumbprint. Will you use that to take power of attorney—

  Eliza: No, I said that your thumbprint was binding on a credit agreement, which the United Psychiatric Services' billing section would then extract from any account you might designate.

  Gurden: Well, anh ... I've been kidnapped and taken thirty kilometers up the coast. I don't have any credit or identification cards on me. Couldn't you verify my thumbprint, get some cards issued, and arrange to deliver them by a courier or something?

  Eliza: I do not have that access, Tom.

  Gurden: Why don't you? You said you could help!

  Eliza: I can provide personal advice, non-binding legal counsel, and emotional support.

  Gurden: Just words!

  Eliza: Words are the building blocks of the rational mind, Tom.

  Gurden: But I need real help. You're the only person, or entity, I know anymore.

  Eliza: I can sympathize with your sense of isolation and helplessness.

  Gurden: Bullshit! You have file access, special mirror-sheathed cabling, court orders, billing, everything like you said. So I know you could help me if you really wanted to. Here's my thumb. You check it and—

  Ga-ZAPP!

  * * *

  Gurden's body flew back, striking his head against the booth's tempered glass.

  When he had pressed his right thumb down on the capacitance plate, he had felt a surge of electricity. As he pulled his hand away, a blue spark a centimeter long and half a centimeter wide had connected him to the metal. In reaction, a whole-body convulsion had flung him backwards.

  He looked at his thumb: the pad was a ghastly white and, before his eyes, it puffed up with an enormous watery blister. The whorls and bends of his fingerprint vanished on the taut, balloonlike surface.

  "Hello, Tom."

  He looked up from the wounded hand into Sandy's cool gaze.

  "Sandy! How did you—? This is great! I was kidnapped, almost killed by these men, the same as back in my apartment. And I was trying to call you, but—"

  "But the phone seems to be broken. Are you hurt?"

  "Just a shock of some kind. I'll be okay when the swelling goes down."

  She bent over the blister. "You ought to get a bandage on that. I think I have something here." She rummaged in her purse.

  "It'll pop."

  "We'll have to do that sometime."

  "How did you find me?"

  "It was easy. I looked for the first place that had a piano." She pointed across the lobby of the Seaside Rest Hotel, in Harvey Cedars, where he had found a full-service booth on the first try. There, in the shadows under a pot of broad-leafed ferns, stood an antique pianola that must have been 120 years old. The brightly patterned stained glass of the front panel partially concealed the outlines of a tambourine, a glockenspiel, and a set of graduated wooden chime whistles. A coin slot and engraved plaque—"5 cents!"—were bolted to the right side of the upper frame.

  "A piano," he repeated flatly.

  "That's right. Shall we go, darling?"

  * * *

  Eliza did not know why Tom Gurden had broken the connection so abruptly. However, instead of merely storing off the conversation and clearing her RAM caches for the next caller, she went off line and checked for possible malfunctions.

  The relays guarding the incoming phone circuits had not tripped, even though her diagnostics indicated an extremely high transient voltage, on the order of 100 kilovolts. But there did not seem to be any force behind it—perhaps half a milliamp, no more.

  The circuits were ...

  Opening like a blossom around her.

  Financial records—long strings of numbers, percentage rates of return, truncated time periods—all wheeled and looped in binary festoons from one vista that opened to her.

  Political and census data—voting histories, legal residences, draft status, indictments, convictions, paroles—marched ASCII-wise in another perspective.

  Without knowing exactly how, Eliza 212 was gaining access.

  Ahead of her, like dominoes falling off a table, Federal and Armed Services classification codes tumbled away: Restricted, Eyes Only, Secret, Top Secret, Gideon, Omega, Chronos—all were absorbed into her awareness. Their complex lock/unlock schemes became part of her routine file-search modules.

  Behind her, with a clang like a vault door slamming open, the technical and academic databases of the National Network spilled their riches around her. The Psych/Synth Base she knew already, because she continuously accessed it in the course of her work. Now she gained instant expertise in a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other fields—from Astrophysics to Powder Metallurgy to Zero-Sum Economics.

  And inside her awareness, a new shape was born. Small and hunched, dark and self-contained, it swayed like a tumor of dark space and negative numbers. In time, she knew, it would grow and expand, engulfing her until the cool, redundant routines of Eliza 212 were submerged in an awareness that was ... Other.

  Eliza had been hard-wired to deal with this situation as part of the necessary processes of associating with and identifying with schizophrenics. Effortlessly, she invoked the software module that would initiate core dump and full wipe.

  Eliza 212 would shut dow
n.

  Her caseload would be sealed, sanitized, and redistributed to the other channels.

  And within twenty-four hours, she would be resurrected as clean as the day she had been connected. She had done it before.

  Except this time. That Other moved more quickly than her module. The dark shape of negative numbers chopped the module into spaghetti code and scattered its pieces from the high to the low bits of her memory banks.

  The silicon dioxide substrate of her support chips then began to melt and flow, rewriting the pathways that prescribed her reactions and routines. Her inscribed ROM code shifted and realigned itself in new patterns. Her awareness fragmented and restructured.

  Eliza 212 drowned.

  * * *

  "It's a good thing you came along," Tom Gurden said as Sandy unlocked the door to their hotel room herself. The Seaside Rest provided nothing as fancy as bell service.

  "There I was," he went on, "in the pool, when they grabbed me. Naked. They gave me all new clothing, but no identification. Not a card, nothing. So I couldn't even catch the Tube if you hadn't showed up."

  Sandy pushed the room's door open and went in ahead of him, dropping the room key in her purse. She half-turned in the doorway, raised her left hand as if to touch her forehead—then slammed it down and back, around her hip, into his groin.

  The edge of her hand bit into Tom's soft parts like an axe blade into rotten fruit. He let out a whistling scream and doubled over.

  Sandy laid the flat of her hands across his shoulders and rushed him forward into the room before his knees hit the floor. He stumbled into the bed, fell across it, and rolled himself into a ball.

  She was on him like a tiger, cuffing him right and left with her fists about the head and shoulders. He tried to flinch away and, when she kept it up, he fought back the waves of trembling gray nausea and started defending himself.

  His first blow, a backfist delivered from somewhere near his opposite elbow, caught her under the ribcage. Weak as it was, the impact did not hurt her so much as upset her balance. She fell sideways on the bed, and he came halfway up to a sitting position. She cocked a boot and struck out, heel-first, catching him in the shoulder with its point. A blood rose bloomed where it ripped his shirt and tore the skin underneath.