Icicle spike
from the eye of a star.
I’ve come to kill you.
I almost spoke them, from sheer habit. But I did not. The war was over. Bex was here, and I knew it was over. I was going to feel something, once again, something besides guilt, hate, and rage. I didn’t yet, that was true, but I could feel the possibility.
“I don’t really breathe anymore, Bex; I pretend to so I won’t put people off,” I told her. “It’s been so long, I can’t even remember what it was like to have to.”
Bex kissed me then. At first, I didn’t remember how to do that either. And then I did. I added wood to the fire, then ran my hand along Bex’s neck and shoulders. Her skin had the health of youth still, but years in the sun and wind had made a supple leather of it, tanned and grained fine. We look the sheet from the couch and pulled it near to the warmth, and she drew me down to her on it, to her neck and breasts.
“Did they leave enough of you for me?” she whispered.
I had not known until now. “Yes,” I answered, “there’s enough.” I found my way inside her, and we made love slowly, in a way that might seem sad to any others but us, for there were memories and years of longing that flowed from us, around us, like amber just at the melting point, and we were inside and there was nothing but this present with all of what was, and what would be, already passed. No time. Finally, only Bex and no time between us.
We fell asleep on the old couch, and it was dim half-morning when we awoke, with Fitzgerald yet to rise in the west and the fire a bed of coals as red as the sky.
* * *
Two months later, I was in Thredmartin’s when Bex came in with an evil look on her face. We had taken getting back together slow and easy up till then, but the more time we spent around each other, the more we understood that nothing basic had changed. Bex kept coming to the ranch and I took to spending a couple of nights a week in a room her father made up for me at the hotel. Furly Bexter was an old-style McKinnonite. Men and women were to live separately and only meet for business and copulation. But he liked me well enough, and when I insisted on paying for my room, he found a loophole somewhere in the Tracts of McKinnon about cohabitation being all right in hotels and hostels.
“The glims are back,” Bex said, sitting down at my table. I was in a dark corner of the pub. I left the fire for those who could not adjust their own internals to keep them warm. “They’ve taken over the top floor of the hotel. What should we do?”
I took a draw of beer—Thredmartin’s own thick porter—and looked at her. She was visibly shivering, probably more from agitation than fright.
“How many of them arc there?” I asked.
“Six. And something else, some splice I’ve never seen, however many that makes.”
I took another sip of beer. “Let it be,” I said. “They’ll get tired, and they’ll move on.”
“What?” Bex’s voice was full of astonishment. “What are you saying?”
“You don’t want a war here, Bex,” I replied. “You have no idea how bad it can get.”
“They killed Rall. They took our money.”
“Money.” My voice sounded many years away, even to me.
“It’s muscle and worry and care. You know how hard people work on Ferro. And for those . . . things . . . to come in and take it! We cannot let them—”
“—Bex,” I said. “I am not going to do anything.”
She said nothing; she put a hand on her forehead as if she had a sickening fever, stared at me for a moment, then looked away.
One of the glims chose that moment to come into Thredmartin’s. It was a halandana, a splice—human and jan—from up-time and a couple of possible universes over. It was nearly seven feet tall, with a two-foot-long neck, and it stooped to enter Thredmartin’s. Without stopping, it went to the bar and demanded morphine.
Thredmartin was at the bar. He pulled out a dusty rubber, little used, and before he could get out an injector, the halandana reached over, took the entire rubber and put it in the pocket of the long gray coat it wore. Thredmartin started to speak, then shook his head, and found a spray shooter. He slapped it on the bar, and started to walk away. The halandana’s hand shot out and pushed the old man. Thredmartin stumbled to his knees.
I felt the fingers of my hands clawing, clenching. Let them loosen; let them go.
Thredmartin rose slowly to one knee. Bex was up, around the bar, and over to him, steadying his shoulder. The glim watched this for a moment, then took its drug and shooter to a table, where it got itself ready for an injection.
I looked at it closely now. It was female, but that did not mean much in halandana splices. I could see it phase around the edges with dead, gray flames. I clicked in wideband overspace, and I could see through the halandana to the chair it was sitting in and the unpainted wood of the wall behind it. And I saw more, in the spaces between spaces. The halandana was keyed in to a websquad: it wasn’t really an individual anymore. Its fate was tied to that of its unit commander. So the war-ghosts—the glims—were a renegade squad, most likely, with a single leader calling the shots. For a moment, the halandana glanced in my direction, maybe feeling my gaze somewhere outside of local time, and I banded down to human normal. It quickly went back to what it was doing. Bex made sure Thredmartin was all right, then came back over to my table.
“We’re not even in its timeline,” I said. “It doesn’t think of us as really being alive.”
“Oh God,” Bex said. “This is just like before.”
I got up and walked out. It was the only solution. I could not say anything to Bex. She would not understand. I understood—not acting was the rational, the only, way, but not my way. Not until now.
I enhanced my legs and loped along the road to my house. But when I got there, I kept running, running off into the red sands of Ferro’s outback. The night came down, and as the planet turned, I ran along the length of the Big Snake, bright and hard to the southwest, and then under the blue glow of Steiner, when she rose in the moonless, trackless night. I ran for miles and miles, as fast as a jaguar, but never tiring. How could I tire when parts of me stretched off into dimensions of utter stillness, utter rest? Could Bex see me for what I was, she would not see a man, but a kind of colonial creature, a mass of life pressed into the niches and fault lines of existence like so much grit and lichen. A human is anchored with only his heart and his mind; sever those, and he floats away. Floats away. What was I? A medusa fish in an ocean of time? A tight clump of nothing, disguised as a man? Something else?
Something damned hard to kill, that was certain. And so were the glims. When I returned to my house in the star-bright night, I half-expected to find Bex, but she was not there. And so I rattled about for a while, powered down for an hour at down and rested on a living-room chair, dreaming in one part of my mind, completely alert in another. The next day, Bex still did not come and I began to fear something had happened to her. I walked partway into Heidel, then cut off the road and stole around the outskirts, to a mound of shattered, volcanic rocks—the tailings of some early prospector’s pit—not far from the town’s edge. There I stepped up my vision and hearing, and made a long sweep of Main Street. Nothing. Far, far too quiet, even for Heidel.
I worked out the parabolic to the Bexter Hotel, and after a small adjustment, heard Bex’s voice, then her father’s. I was too far away to make out the words, but my quantitatives gave it a positive ID. So Bex was all right, at least for the moment. I made my way back home, and put in a good day’s work making whiskey.
The next morning—it was the quarteryear’s double dawn, with both suns rising in the east nearly together—Bex came to me. I brought her inside, and in the moted sunlight of my family’s living room, where I now took my rest, when I rested, Bex told me that the glims had taken her father.
“He held back some old Midnight Livet down in the cellar, and didn’t deliver it when they called for room service.” Bex rubbed her left fist with her right fingers, e
xpertly, almost mechanically, as she’d kneaded a thousand balls of bread dough. “How do they know these things? How do they know, Henry?”
“They can see around things,” I said. “Some of them can, anyway.”
“So they read our thoughts? What do we have left?”
“No, no. They can’t see in there, at least I’m sure they can’t see in your old man’s McKinnonite nut lump of a brain. But they probably saw the whiskey down in the cellar, all right. A door isn’t a very solid thing for a war-ghost out of its own time and place.”
Bex gave her hand a final squeeze, spread it out upon her lap. She stared down at the lines of her palm, then looked up at me. “If you won’t fight, then you have to tell me how to fight them,” she said. “I won’t let them kill my father.”
“Maybe they won’t.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
Her eyes were blazing green, as the suns came full through the window. Her face was bright-lit and shadowed, as if by the steady coals of a fire. You have loved this woman a long time, I thought. You have to tell her something that will be of use. But what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived—will survive—that great and final war—and so must survive now! You can’t kill the future. That’s how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the recruits. If you are meant to be there, they’d say then nothing can hurt you. And if you’re not then you’ll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting.
“You can only irritate them,” I finally said to Bex. “There’s a way to do it with the Flash. Talk to that technician, what’s his name—”
“Jurven Dvorak.”
“Tell Dvorak to strobe the local interrupt, fifty, sixty tetracycles. It’ll cut off all traffic, but it will be like a wasp nest to them and they won’t want to get close enough to turn it off. Dvorak better stay near the node after that too.”
“All right,” Bex said. “Is that all?”
“Yes,” I said. I rubbed my temples, felt the vague pain of a headache, which quickly receded as my internals rushed more blood to my scalp. “Yes, that’s it.”
Later that day, I heard the crackle of random quantum-tunnel spray, as split, unsieved particles decided their spin, charm, and color without guidance from the world of gravity and cause. It was an angry buzz, like the hum of an insect caught between screen and windowpane, tremendously irritating to listen to for hours on end, if you were unlucky enough to be sensitive to the effect. I put up with it, hoping against hope that it would be enough to drive off the glims.
Bex arrived in the early evening, leading her father, who was ragged and half-crazed from two days without light or water. The glims had locked him in a cleaning closet, in the hotel, where he’d sat cramped and doubled over. After the buzz started, Bex opened the lock and dragged the old man out. It was as if the glims had forgotten the whole affair.
“Maybe,” I said. “We can hope.”
She wanted me to put the old man up at my house, in case the glims suddenly remembered. Old Furly Bexter didn’t like the idea. He rattled on about something in McKinnon’s “Letter to the Canadians,” but I said yes, he could stay. Bex left me with her father in the shrouds of my living room.
Some time that night, the quantum buzz stopped. And in the early morning, I saw them—five of them—stalking along the road, kicking before them the cowering, stumbling form of Jurven Dvorak. I waited for them on the porch. Furly Bexter was asleep in my parents’ bedroom. He was exhausted from his ordeal, and I expected him to stay that way for a while.
When they came into the yard, Dvorak ran to the pump and held to the handle, as if it were a branch suspending him over a bottomless chasm. And for him it was. They’d broken his mind and given him a dream of dying. Soon to be replaced by reality, I suspected, and no pump-handle hope of salvation.
Their leader—or the one who did the talking—was human-looking. I’d have to band out to make a full ID, and I didn’t want to give anything away for the moment. He saved me the trouble by telling me himself.
“My name’s Marek,” he said. “Come from a D-line, not far down-time from here.”
I nodded, squinting into the red brightness reflected off my hardpan yard.
“We’re just here for a good time,” the human continued. “What you want to spoil that for?”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. One of Marek’s gang spat into the dryness of my dirt.
“Go ahead and have it,” I said.
“All right,” Marek said. He turned to Dvorak, then pulled out a weapon—not really a weapon though, for it is the tool of behind-the-lines enforcers, prison interrogators, confession extractors. It’s called an algorithmic truncheon, a trunch, in the parlance. A trunch, used at full load, will strip the myelin sheath from axons and dendrites; it will burn up a man’s nerves as if they were fuses. It is a way to kill with horrible pain. Marek walked over and touched the trunch to the leg of Dvorak, as if he were lighting a bonfire.
The Flash technician began to shiver, and then to seethe, like a teapot coming to boil. The motion traveled up his legs, into his chest, out his arms. His neck began to writhe, as if the corded muscles were so many snakes. Then Dvorak’s brain burned, as a teapot will when all the water has run out and there is nothing but flame against hot metal. And then Dvorak screamed. He screamed for a long, long lime. And then he died, crumpled and spent, on the ground in front of my house.
“I don’t know you,” Marek said, standing over Dvorak’s body and looking up at me. “I know what you are, but I can’t get a read on who you are, and that worries me,” he said. He kicked at one of the Flash tech’s twisted arms. “But now you know me.”
“Get off my land,” I said. I looked at him without heat. Maybe I felt nothing inside, either. That uncertainty had been my companion for a long time, my grim companion. Marek studied me for a moment. If I kept his attention, he might not look around me, look inside the house, to find his other fun, Furly Bexter, half-dead from Marek’s amusements. Marek turned to the others.
“We’re going,” he said to them. “We’ve done what we came for.” They turned around and left by the road on which they’d come, the only road there was. After a while, I took Dvorak’s body to a low hill and dug him a grave there. I set up a sandstone marker, and since I knew Dvorak came from Catholic people. I scratched into the stone the sign of the cross. Jesus, from the Milky Way. Another glim. Hard to kill.
It took old-man Bexter only a week or so to fully recover; I should have known by knowing Bex that he was made of a tougher grit. He began to putter around the house, helping me out where he could, although I ran a tidy one-man operation, and he was more in the way than anything. Bex risked a trip out once that week. Her father again insisted he was going back into town, but Bex told him the glims were looking for him. So far, she’d managed to convince them that she had no idea where he’d gotten to.
I was running low on food and supplies, and had to go into town the following Firstday. I picked up a good backpack load at the mercantile and some chemicals for treating the peat at the druggist, then risked a quick look-in on Bex. A sign on the desk told all that they could find her at Thredmartin’s taking her lunch, should they want her. I walked across the street, set my load down just inside Thredmartin’s door, in the cloakroom, then passed through the entrance into the afternoon dank of the pub.
I immediately sensed glims all around, and hunched myself in, both mentally and physically. I saw Bex in her usual corner, and walked toward her across the room. As I stepped beside a table in the pub’s middle, a glim—it was the halandana—stuck out a long, hairy leg. Almost, I tripped—and in that instant, I almost did the natural thing and cast about for some hold that was not present in the three-dimensional world—but I did not. I caught myself, came to a dead stop, then carefully walked around the glim’s outstretched leg.
“Mind if I sit down?” I said as I reached Bex’s table. She nodded toward a free chair. She was finishing a beer, and an e
mpty glass stood beside it. Thredmartin usually had the tables clear as soon as the last drop left a mug. Bex was drinking fast. Why? Working up her courage, perhaps.
I lowered myself into the chair, and for a long time, neither of us said anything to the other. Bex finished her beer. Thredmartin appeared, looked curiously at the two empty mugs. Bex signaled for another, and I ordered my own whiskey.
“How’s the ranch,” she finally asked me. Her face was flush and her lips trembled slightly. She was angry, I decided. At me, at the situation. It was understandable. Completely understandable.
“Fine,” I said. “The ranch is fine.”
“Good.”
Again a long silence, Thredmartin returned with our drinks. Bex sighed, and for a moment, I thought she would speak, but she did not. Instead, she reached under the table and touched my hand. I opened my palm, and she put her hand into mine. I felt the tension in her, the bonework of her hand as she squeezed tightly. I felt her fear and worry. I felt her love.
And then Marek came into the pub looking for her. He stalked across the room and stood in front of our table. He looked hard at me, then at Bex, and then he swept an arm across the table and sent Bex’s beer and my whiskey flying toward the wall. The beer mug broke, but I quickly reached out and caught my tumbler of scotch in mid-air without spilling a drop. Of course, no ordinary human could have done it.
Bex noticed Marek looking at me strangely and spoke with a loud voice that got his attention. “What do you want? You were looking for me at the hotel?”
“Your sign says you’re open,” Marek said in a reasonable, ugly voice. “I rang for room service. Repeatedly.”
“Sorry,” Bex said. “Just let me settle up and I’ll be right there.”
“Be right there now,” Marek said, pushing the table from in front of her. Again, I caught my drink, held it on a knee while I remained sitting. Bex started up from her chair and stood facing Marek. She looked him in the eyes. “I’ll be there directly,” she said.
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