Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  Castine yawned. “Doesn’t matter either way, now. She told the guy, and they’ve got it. On a boat, maybe.”

  She reached across for her glass and tipped it up to her mouth. The ice cubes rattled against her teeth as she finished it, and she caught one and began chewing it.

  Vickery shivered. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. Chew your ice cubes,” he added when she gave him a blank look.

  “I wasn’t,” she said. “Anyway, you do it yourself.”

  “I never—” he began, then remembered doing it right here, less than an hour ago, before they’d set out for the nest under the bridge. “Must be a nervous habit,” he finished lamely.

  “Whatever.” She put the glass back and wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. “It seems to me,” she said, “that taking somebody’s blood pressure must be slang for killing them. And you remember that disoriented girl on the bicycle at the park? She said, ‘We could have taken her blood pressure any time.’ I think she was channeling one of those people who were at Canter’s, and I think that person was pretty clearly talking about me.”

  Vickery pursed his lips and nodded.

  “I wonder,” said Castine, “if Omar Khayyam would still give us those funds he mentioned.”

  “Omar Sharif,” corrected Vickery with a tired smile. “We never did learn his actual name. But I know where the Egyptian Consulate is. I picked up a few fares there, when I was a driver for Galvan.”

  Castine sat up. “Let’s just go. Away. Get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Maryland, and there’ll be a huge curvature of the earth between us and all this dreadful stuff. We were lucky today—guys were waving guns around! A ghost possessed you!”

  “We’d still have the echo-visions. Or old-house visions, as they are these days.”

  “Those are bound to stop, eventually, and it’s long ago stuff anyway.” She looked straight at him and spoke clearly. “Your daughter, the daughter you didn’t even have, is oblivious to everything, you know that. Even if they, I don’t know, burn the book, it won’t change her situation one bit.”

  “That is true,” he conceded.

  She looked down into her empty glass. “I could even put you up, till you found an apartment.”

  No . . . girl? thought Vickery. “I might even be able to hold your hand without setting off hallucinations.”

  “Worth a try. Then.” Hurriedly she went on, “Omar did say he had the situation well in hand, didn’t he?”

  “Over in a few days, he said.” Vickery shrugged. “If we stay, we’d probably only get in his way, mess up his plans.”

  Castine waved around at the furniture and the peel-and-stick faux wood paneling. “I hate to ask you to give up all this.”

  “My space rent’s paid up through next month. I can come back after it’s all blown over, if I want to.” He yawned. “We can stop at Hesperia on the way to LAX, and pick up your clothes and billfold.”

  Castine got unsteadily to her feet. “I said I could sleep on the couch.”

  “You’re the guest, you get the bed. I’ll put fresh sheets on it.” He stood up and walked down the narrow hall to the shelf that served as a linen closet. Behind him he could hear Castine humming “What A Wonderful World.”

  The tall windows in the bottom three floors of Clifton’s Cafeteria were outlined in red and yellow neon, and the marquee projecting out over the Broadway sidewalk held back the Los Angeles night with a white glare that was reflected in the roofs of passing cars. Looking down on the pillars and cornices from a fire-escape balcony on the fifth level of the parking structure across the street, Elisha Ragotskie thought the place looked like one of the movie palaces of the 1920s.

  He stepped back through the broad window opening, into the humbler glow of widely-spaced lights in the cement ceiling. Not many cars were parked on this level yet, and he wheeled his bicycle into the shadows behind a van parked next to the north wall. It was a second-hand Schwinn ten-speed bicycle, with canvas pannier bags, that he had bought for cash four hours ago, feeling safer away from his too-recognizable Audi. His white shirt was still damp with sweat and he was shivering in the evening breeze that whispered through the big open windows in the street-side wall. He had thrown away the red suspenders.

  He was carrying two cell phones: his Samsung and a new prepaid TracFone. By touch he pried open the back of the Samsung and took its battery out of his shirt pocket; and when he clicked the battery into place in the phone, snapped the cover shut and thumbed the phone on, the screen soon glowed sky blue in the shadows behind the van. When he touched the Messages icon, the top text was from Agnes—she had finally replied to his several texts.

  OK, read her text from an hour ago, where? And what did you do?

  He entered the words, You pick—one of our places—familiar—food, drinks—whatever you’ve heard, I can explain. Trust.

  Her reply was immediate: OK—n/naka on Overland.

  Sweating in spite of the cold, he tapped in, Feeling more occidental—the Rose? The Rose was in Venice, and he knew she had been to the beach with the twins today, and wouldn’t relish driving back out there.

  Occidental, you mean, came her reply. Too far. Tesse, Clifton’s, Pizzana?

  He exhaled in relief, and tapped in, Pizzana sounds good and sent it; then immediately typed in, No, Clifton’s is better. Drinks at the 2nd floor bar—alone, off the record!

  He had first kissed her in that mellowly lit cathedral of a bar, just a few steps from the huge redwood tree that extended up through all the floors, at a table beside a stuffed deer in a glassed-in diorama.

  Agreed, came her reply. When?

  I can be there in half an hour.

  See you then.

  He turned off the phone and leaned back against the wall, breathing hard. She might come alone, he told himself, as she agreed to. Maybe I still mean a bit more to her than oblivion does.

  Agnes Loria had been a philosophy major at UCLA when Ragotskie met her, and she had already been inclined toward the pragmatic sorts of mysticism—she had progressed from the psychic training methods described in Alexandra David-Neel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet to Guillaume Cendre-Benir’s Technomancy and the post-modern techniques of chaos magic, and claimed to have seen the future through the Burroughs method of reading random reassemblies of cut-up texts. She said the future was blurry.

  They had met at the Conscious Life Expo at the LAX Hilton in February of last year. She had been standing outside by the valet parking line, smoking a cigarette—“I’ve moved past any concern for my individual body,” she had told him when he asked her about the cigarette. He had found her individual body compellingly attractive, though—she was tall, her figure willowy and athletic, and her green eyes under chestnut bangs seemed deeper and more expressive than those of anyone else he’d ever met.

  He had lately moved down to Los Angeles from San Jose, along with the rest of Harlowe’s ChakraSys team, and he dropped a few hints about their work and their goal—and Agnes had seized on it. She had described their meeting as synchronicity, and within a week the two of them had moved into an Echo Park apartment together.

  And at first Agnes had found him fascinating. Many of his interests were in fields new to her, and she was a voracious pupil. Poetry and painting left her baffled, but semiconductor electronics and the formal logic of computer coding excited her enormously. The only classical music she had ever heard had been snippets in movie soundtracks and advertisements, and she gratefully followed Ragotskie’s guidance into the works of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Wagner . . . though she hadn’t cared for the austerity of Bach or Vivaldi. She told him one time that the great symphonies were superior to any literature, since they were emotional but not discernibly about people, and didn’t involve the language and vocabulary of the listener.

  But she had progressed in the Singularity disciplines faster than Ragotskie himself. Ego-death, the dark night of the soul, was something she seemed to crave; unlike Ragotskie, who, despite hi
s best efforts, still clung to a lot of affective aspects of his particular existence—especially his growing affection for the particular person who was Agnes Loria.

  She had soon come to find his feelings for her, and her own feelings for him, “regressively indiv,” and a week ago she had moved out of the apartment, and wouldn’t tell him where she was staying now. She yearned to subsume herself in the Singularity, the big egregore that was taking form from the minds of the group—“gestating and gestalting,” as Harlowe put it.

  Ragotskie had been resolutely willing to let his own personality be dissolved in the transcendently greater entity which would be the egregore, but he had found that he could not bear the prospect of Agnes Loria ceasing to be specifically and fascinatingly herself.

  And so today he had broken ranks—and how. He had thrown away his chance at a kind of immortality, not to mention his career with ChakraSys, and possibly his life—and made himself the enemy of Simon Harlowe and probably of Agnes Loria too. And for nothing—he had used up his cyanide and lost his gun, and when he had tried to use the bloody sock pendulum to find the Castine woman again, he’d discovered that the job really called for a second person, to navigate; the necessity of pulling into a parking lot every few blocks to consult the thing had made it hopeless.

  Now he shook off those uncomfortable memories and pocketed his phones and stepped out from behind the van. He crossed the cement floor and stepped over the window sill and stood again in the chilly breeze on the fire-escape balcony, looking down at the traffic on Seventh Street and the glowing façade of Clifton’s. He would recognize Agnes’ station wagon when it turned in to the parking structure entrance on the street directly below; he would recognize Harlowe’s gray Chevy Tahoe SUV, too, if it were to show up, but Harlowe would surely still be pursuing Castine and Vickery, even without the bloody sock as a pointer.

  But with any luck Castine and Vickery would elude Harlowe—Harlowe had certainly lost what he liked to call the elephant of surprise, and those two seemed adept at running and hiding—and then Ragotskie’s clumsy attempts at assassination would have accomplished his purpose after all, without his having to kill anybody. The egregore would fail without the IMPs, and Agnes would surely be able to free herself from it then, and remain the precious individual that she had always been—even though she’d have preferred it otherwise.

  In order to emerge as a rational, self-consistent entity, the egregore would need to incorporate a reciprocating pair of special people—what Harlowe fancifully referred to as a couple of IMPs. IMP was an acronym for Interface Message Processor, which, in the early days of computers, was a kind of mini-computer that allowed many different sorts of computers to function together as a single network, and maximized internet communications. Routers served the purpose now.

  The various minds that would constitute the emerging egregore would need to be able to function together as facets of a single entity, pulses that could be applied anywhere in the system at any time. The structure, the entity, would need IMPs.

  Castine and Vickery would have been ideal. Their psychic foundations had been shifted by whatever it was that happened to them last year—Harlowe’s man Foster said they died and came back from the afterlife—and it had left them insecurely moored in now. Unlike normal people, Castine and Vickery were at least potentially in several moments at once, like figures in a time-lapse photograph. Integrated together into the egregore, they might very well have been able to operate across several seconds simultaneously, anticipate thought-signals that hadn’t even been sent yet, and make the egregore’s mentation instantaneous.

  Ragotskie wished them well in their continued evasion of Simon Harlowe.

  A car that looked like Agnes’ station wagon swung into view on the street below, and the breath caught in Ragotskie’s throat—but the car drove on past the parking entrance, and before it disappeared around the Seventh Street corner he saw that it was white, not yellow.

  She might not appear at all, he thought. She might simply have called Harlowe and told him to find me at Clifton’s and deal with me.

  But five minutes later a yellow station wagon slowed directly below, and it disappeared into the parking structure entrance. Ragotskie waited until he could hear the car’s tires squealing on the polished cement as it rounded the turns from one level up to the next, and then he hurried back to crouch beside the bicycle, between the van and the wall.

  Soon he heard the rumbling of a car engine echoing on this level, and after a few seconds it switched off and he heard a door clank open. He raised his head enough to see through the van’s side windows, and it was Agnes, alone, closing the door of her car.

  Ragotskie had to force himself not to stand up and speak to her.

  She looked toward the fire escape, then turned and scanned the several parked cars; Ragotskie ducked down before her gaze swept the van. He heard her walk to the elevator in the far corner, and after a few seconds he heard the elevator doors open and then close.

  She was about twenty minutes early.

  Ragotskie stood up. He was actually considering wheeling his bicycle back into the elevator and going down to meet her at the restaurant after all—he had bought a cable and lock, and could secure the bicycle to a lamp post—when he heard another car coming up the ramps.

  He hesitated, then crouched behind the van again.

  The engine noise expanded out of the ramp tunnel, and then a car idled to a halt on this level, and this time he heard two doors open and close, and the unmistakable knock of Harlowe’s cowboy boot heels.

  “He won’t be here for a while yet,” came Harlowe’s well remembered voice. “Taitz, wait here, you know his car—watch this level and the ones immediately below and above, and taser him if he shows up. Foster, you come with me.”

  Ragotskie heard footsteps knock across the cement floor in the direction of the elevator, and soon he heard its doors open and close again. He managed, an inch at a time, to shift his feet and sit down without making a sound. After a while he was wrinkling his nose at the scent of cigarette smoke on the breeze that found its way to the space behind the van.

  Ragotskie imagined Taitz standing out there in the middle of the floor, or leaning against the balcony rail with his back to the street, the olive-green windbreaker tight across his shoulders, his narrow eyes watching the ramps and the stairs and the elevator doors. His right hand might be in his pocket, holding the pistol-grip of the taser.

  Ragotskie shivered as he recalled breaking the window of Harlowe’s SUV and stealing the wooden box with the bloody sock in it. Taitz must certainly be angry.

  By his estimation ten minutes passed before Taitz moved to the stairs; and the scuff of his footsteps was diminishing downward.

  When Ragotskie judged that Taitz had reached the bottom of the stairs and was looking around at the cars and the ramp on that level, he quickly pulled out both of his phones, and he tapped the number of the TracFone burner phone into his Samsung; sweat made rainbow sparkles on the screen. When the burner phone jingled, he hastily swiped the screen to open the connection, then stepped out from behind the van and hurried across the floor to Agnes’ car.

  It was locked, but he scuttled around and crouched by the front bumper, and he held both phones in one hand while he groped under the bumper—whispering curses—until he found the magnetic box that contained a spare key.

  His breath was rushing in and out through his open mouth as he scrambled to his feet, and he had to stab the key at the door lock twice before it rattled in; and as he turned it, the sound of the lock post snapping up was immediately followed by the tap of footsteps on the stairs.

  Ragotskie levered open the car door and dropped the TracFone burner into the map pocket, then eased the door shut and darted back to his refuge in the shadows behind the van. Sweat ran into his eyes, and the effort of keeping his breath slow and shallow made his throat ache. Planting the phone had been a risky move, but, with a call in progress, it was a good microphone—Agn
es always used the Waze app on an iPad to know what route to take when she was going anywhere, and he hoped to overhear the Waze voice’s directions as it guided her to wherever she was living now.

  The soft tap of shoes had reached this level, and moved out across the floor.

  A sudden thought made Ragotskie’s ears ring—in his haste a few moments ago, he had left the empty magnetic box on the cement floor by the right from tire of Agnes’ car.

  But the cool breeze again carried the smell of cigarette smoke. Ragotskie let his muscles relax, very slowly.

  And he jumped when he heard Taitz’s voice say, loudly, “What?” For several seconds Ragotskie just held his breath, and even closed his eyes; then Taitz said, “He probably saw you guys.” Evidently Taitz’ phone had been set to vibrate, so there had been no ringtone for Ragotskie to hear. “He would have called her if he was just delayed . . . yeah, ten more minutes.”

  With his teeth clenched and his eyes still closed, Ragotskie began mentally counting seconds; and he had counted off fifteen minutes’ worth before the elevator doors audibly slid open and the footsteps of several people advanced across the cement floor. The rap of Harlowe’s boot heels raised echoes.

  Ragotskie winced to hear Agnes’ voice, but he couldn’t make out the words, and he hoped fervently that she would walk straight to the driver’s side door of her car and not notice the empty magnetic box on the cement floor on the other side.

  But he heard her car door slam, loudly in the air and more muffled from the speaker of his Samsung phone. He hastily covered the speaker slot with his thumb. Both cars started up, and tires squeaked as the drivers backed and filled to turn toward the descending ramp.

  When the sounds of the car engines had diminished away below, Ragotskie slid the phone into his shirt pocket and stood up. There was no one to be seen on this level now. He thought about crossing to the balcony and peeking over the rail to see the cars exit onto Broadway, but the idea of Harlowe glancing up and seeing him made him shudder and discard the idea.