METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Small comfort either way to a corpse, but Mindy supposed that was part of the fine line between civilization and savagery—whether you talked to people before or after you killed them.

  Bashar had obviously used this route before. She helped him fold the microlight and heft it into a handy maple tree in a mesh bag. Once the aircraft had been secured, he moved swiftly down Powell Butte, not bothering to follow the younger growth along the old roadbeds, but simply moving through what had once been housing lots, their history attested by the odd surviving bit of cedar fence, or fragment of foundation. Along the way, they stepped past an almost intact swimming pool that now had a stream flowing into it, then draining from the other side.

  She thought she saw a very large fish sulking in the shadowed depths.

  “Why’d you change your mind?” she asked Bashar, addressing her question to the old man’s back. His homespun cotton shirt was soaked with sweat, too, plastered to his back under his leather pack.

  “Same mind I always had.” He leapt over a half-buried toilet, a feral rose growing out of its bowl.

  “I meant about meeting Crown.”

  “Because I’m old, and curious.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, gaze piercing even in the dark of the once-suburban woods. “Because you mean it when you come looking for a dead man. You’re not scoring points or bucking for promotion or taking a pay-off. More people like you in the world, things wouldn’t be as bad as they are.”

  “You’re Green,” she protested. “Bad is good for you.”

  That stopped his loping pace completely. He stepped so close she could smell the cloves on his breath. “No, Detective Fleischer.” He sounded quite irked. Was entering the city turning Bashar more political? “You’ve got it all wrong. Bad is bad. You know how many people have died too young or too soon in the past eighty years, from wars or hunger or oppression or sheer mismanagement? About two billion, we think. That’s a lot of case files.

  “Green is just a response. We think of ourselves as a cultural immune system, sometimes. It’s a lousy metaphor, but it helps. Like any immune system, there are lots of types of antigens. The daughter-cities. The J. Appleseed Foundation.” His right forefinger tapped her chest, just between and above her breasts. “Good cops like you, with transjurisdictional authority. You think there was anything like the LECs fifty or sixty years ago? Another response.

  “Bad is bad for everyone. We’re just trying.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “You’re listening to me, Detective. Do you know how rare that is?”

  “Yes,” she said. “In my line of work, I do have a sense of how rare that is.”

  “Well, maybe you would at that,” he replied, settling into a sort of grumble. “Read the book sometime. I explained it a lot better when I had time to write and think. Too busy staying ahead of time these days to do any more of that.”

  “Crown,” she reminded him, conscious that they were standing around in the dark on the wrong end of the city arguing politics.

  “Crown.”

  * * *

  They crossed the 205 perimeter by the simple expedient of walking up to the gate. Mindy was distinctly unsurprised to see that Bashar knew the challenges and countersigns for the EastPort Rangers who guarded the passage that used to be the Powell Boulevard underpass. They gave her a long stare that she probably could have met with a combination of badge flashing and bluffing, but she was happy to do this Bashar’s way.

  Then she realized that both of them were covered with forest wrack, blood spatters and machine oil. The two of them looked exactly like the popular image of Green terrorists.

  The EastPort Rangers didn’t seem overly bothered by them, once Bashar had said a few of the right things.

  On the far side, as they walked past a pair of burned-out McDonald’s—she’d always wondered why there were two of them—another thought occurred to Mindy. “You going to fly your plane back out of here?”

  “Oh, it’s not mine. The microlights are turked out at drop points all over Cascadia. If you know, you can go.”

  That piqued her curiosity. “When did you attend flight school?”

  Bashar laughed. “What’s flight school?”

  That explained a lot.

  “When do we call Crown?”

  “82nd Avenue,” he replied.

  Ten blocks. They could make it that far. She drew her riot pistol, released the safety, and ostentatiously checked the load. Just flashing her credentials for being on the Southeast streets a bit before midnight.

  Bashar followed suit with his little carbon fiber pistol. The screwy rifle remained broken down in his pack. They picked a path among burned-out cars and the scattered remains of barriers.

  The talk had gone out of her, but not the heart. Dead men notwithstanding, Mindy had the feeling today’s work would turn out to have been important. She just didn’t know how.

  They reached Bashar’s target unmolested, though Mindy had spotted at least three different people shadowing them. Out here, the bloodstains were probably helpful.

  She palmed her phone’s fob and dialed the number of Crown’s assistant again, hoping like hell that he had an air car on stand-by. She didn’t think her nerves could take the long drive across Southeast.

  On the other hand, her nerves probably couldn’t stand any more overenthusiastic night flying.

  * * *

  Graffito appearing throughout Cascadia, late summer of 2070:

  We are finished

  The city is finished

  The world is finished

  You are finished

  Follow the fire

  Follow the light

  Follow the burning city

  Follow the burning world

  From the ash we will recast ourselves

  Amid stones and bones

  We are finished

  But we will return

  * * *

  The days of agreement will never come

  Crown woke to silence. This time even the machines seemed to have fallen asleep. He’d been so accustomed to the whirring of fans, the clicking of pumps. “Kornbluth?”

  For a moment, he thought he was truly alone. Was this death? Now? A flash of rage surged through him. Too soon! Too soon!

  “Sir,” said Hubbard. “You are dreaming.”

  Crown woke again and found equipment machine carts pushed to one side. A sleepy-looking med tech was examining his arm.

  “Am I dying?” he asked.

  “No,” the med tech said shortly.

  “You asked to be prepared for visitors.” It was Hubbard again. “We have three security contractors waiting in the hall. Bashar and Detective Fleischer are being retrieved by other contractors, due here in about twenty minutes.”

  His dream-rage died away with that news. “They’re coming.”

  “As a point of interest, the Gold Man prototype will be delivered in two days, sir,” Hubbard added.

  Crown knew he should review the operator’s manual, or specs, or something. No, that could wait. “Any further word on our various queries?” His energy was back, however briefly. Crown reflected on how narrow his life had become, that getting an entire sentence out of his mouth in one flow could be a major accomplishment.

  “More data on Patriot, Inc. has come to light,” said Kornbluth. “Our forensic accountants have determined that the contract structure previously uncovered is a sham. Patriot is far more interpenetrated with the J. Appleseed Foundation than we realized.”

  “How much of that am I paying for?”

  “Unknown as of yet, sir.”

  “Sit up, please, Mr. Crown,” said the med tech. “I have a jacket to cover your lines.”

  Crown allowed himself to be ministered to in silence, while thinking hard on J. Appleseed, Patriot and the bull-slayers.

  * * *

  The three contractors were a mixed bag. One was a burly giant, a Hispanic man straight out of some online serial
about thugs and drugs. He more than looked the part. The other two were a man and woman, both ethnically ambiguous, whipcord thin and nearly vibrating with energy. Crown wondered if they were siblings, or spouses.

  Or possibly both.

  It didn’t matter to him.

  “We’ve been briefed, sir,” said the woman. Traces of some floral perfume lingered around her. “Your, ah, assistants, are very well supplied with information.” Her partner eyed the med tech suspiciously, while the beef slab swept the room with a small, handheld detector.

  “You know who’s … coming?” Damn damn damn. He needed his voice, his personality, to meet Bashar again.

  “The most dangerous man in Cascadia,” she replied. The big man glanced over at that, shrugged, and resumed his sweep. “We are not here to contest with him. Only to protect you.”

  “He is not a threat to me.” Crown struggled to keep his breath, keep talking. “But trouble follows him.”

  “He is trouble,” rumbled the big man, but he sounded amused.

  Crown trusted his expert systems implicitly, even in the light of the recent exercise with Protocol Beria, but he still wished he’d found time to read the files on these three.

  “Sir,” said Kornbluth. “The aircar has landed on the hospital roof. They will be here in three to five minutes.”

  That would be record time clearing security. Crown wondered how Bashar would manage that. The famously invisible man, walking into one of the most closely guarded buildings in Cascadia.

  Not his problem. And Bashar wouldn’t be Bashar if he couldn’t solve it for himself.

  Old men, fighting old fights. Crown was tired of everything, but mostly he was tired of being wrong. Sixty years of adult life as a Restorationist, trying to reverse the decline of free market capitalism, and now he had come to believe that he’d been betting on the wrong horse all that time. Hedged bets, given his indirect investments in J. Appleseed and elsewhere, but still bets facing the wrong way.

  Being pulled further off by the bull slayers. Who the hell were they?

  Beef slab and the small, silent man slipped into the outer room of Crown’s suite. The woman pulled the smallest gun he’d ever seen out of her minimal cleavage, checked it carefully, and tucked it back in.

  * * *

  Mindy and Bashar followed a pair of gray-uniformed guards through half a dozen checkpoints and two biocontainment barriers and one shoe bath. Her badge got her through without questions or a weapons check. Bashar flashed an ID card she didn’t recognize, and even some indiscreet neck craning on her part couldn’t tell her much except that the man’s picture was on it along with someone else’s name. It had the same effect as her badge, however.

  Whoever he was pretending to be remained a mystery to her. The logo, laser-scribed in a holographic matrix, couldn’t be read from her angle. Mindy would have paid good money for a solid look.

  Of course, she could just ask.

  The guards stopped outside an unmarked door. One, a diminutive black man whose nametag read Levine, D., frowned at her. “He has his own security inside. You’ll have to satisfy them.” His tone of voice very decidedly said, not my problem.

  The room within was a sitting room with two sofas, a writing desk and a kitchenette, along with an unfortunate hospital smell and no windows. It was currently dominated by a pair of men. One was large and dangerous; the other was small and dangerous. Mindy hated fighting small men. They tended to be quite vicious, having learned to be hard without the benefit of overpowering muscle or leverage.

  It was the big man who spoke, to her secret relief. “We’re to check IDs only. No pat downs. Mr. Crown hopes this expression of trust will be reciprocated.” He pronounced the last word oddly, as if it had just been taught to him.

  Mindy produced her badge again. Bashar simply stood, his arms loose at his side. Ready for violence.

  The small man examined her badge, passing it over an active reader to chirp the veri-chip that was the current effort at anti-counterfeiting. He glanced up at her. “I’ve heard of you.”

  “All wine and roses, I hope,” Mindy said.

  “Hmm. You popped the perp on the St. Cloud murders.”

  She had, at that. The case had been four years cold, but she’d found the man hiding out in a commune outside of Springfield, working as an expert on grains and seeds. Everything had hinged on a DNA sample from three husks of a strain of wheat not cultivated in the Western hemisphere. “That’s me.”

  “I work LEC sometimes,” he admitted. “You got a good rep.”

  All three of them looked at Bashar.

  Bashar shrugged. “I am who I am.”

  Yahweh or the highway? Mindy though irreverently, but kept her mouth shut.

  The two bodyguards exchanged a swift look. Mindy knew that telegraphing well enough. She’d bet money that the beef boy was a LEC contractor, too. He had to be smarter than he looked. No way Crown would have hired somebody who was nothing but muscle and a big jaw.

  “Yes, you are,” the big man finally said.

  And somehow, that was that. She’d expected much deeper security, but maybe this was a trust exercise. Or classic person-to-person security.

  The big man opened the connecting door and stood aside.

  * * *

  William Silas Crown appeared tiny. That couldn’t be right, she’d seen him on virteocasts over the years. He was one meter, eighty, at least.

  It was his advanced age, she realized. Not a lot of people lived to be old anymore. And the fact that he was sitting up in a hospital bed. Crown wore a red linen jacket with a Nehru collar closed at the throat. His waist and legs were under blankets. Three racks of equipment and infuser pumps were arrayed behind him, currently under dust covers she’d be willing to bet hadn’t been there half an hour ago. The room smelled of old age, rubbing alcohol, and perspiration.

  Crown himself looked like a corpse that hadn’t quite caught up to current events. His eyes were like raisins, set back in a network of wrinkles and pain lines. Such hair as he had was pallid wisps across a spotted scalp. His hands were like claws, fingers closed about halfway to a fist, the tendons of the back of the hand prominent and strangely wasted beneath the parchment skin.

  “Detective Fleischer, Bashar. Forgive me for not rising to greet you.”

  The pain behind his every word and action was acutely obvious to Mindy, who’d been observing her father’s mindless decay for some years now. Beside her, Bashar nodded, somehow imparting all the dignity and respect of a formal bow in the simple dip of his chin.

  “There is nothing to forgive, sir,” she said. Where had that ‘sir’ come from?

  Bashar glanced at her, at the female guard hovering behind the head of Crown’s bulky medical bed, then back at Crown. “We have met, Mr. Crown.”

  “Under unfortunate circumstances,” Crown said, then stifled a cough.

  Bashar nodded again. “We are both old men. Fortunate circumstances are no longer our lot. My remaining time is not much deeper than yours.”

  The question, What do you want? hung in the air between them. An entire unspoken conversation seemed to be taking place before Mindy’s eyes. The shared experience of a vanishing generation, people who remembered the world as it used to be. Or the shared experience of Cascadiopolis.

  “I sent Tygre Tygre to you,” Crown said. He closed his eyes, took several slow, shallow breaths. “But he was never mine.”

  “He belonged to no one but himself,” Bashar replied.

  “And the bull-slayers.”

  That was a test shot if Mindy had ever heard one.

  Bashar favored Crown with a long, impassive stare. It was the heaviest silence Mindy had ever experienced. She watched the guard tense up, then made eye contact with the woman, silently willing her to stay out of this exchange.

  “Lightbull,” Bashar said, almost casually.

  “Tauroctony,” replied Crown.

  Tauroctony. What the hell was that? Counting bulls, maybe, but her e
ducation wasn’t up to sorting out the Classical roots.

  “The bombings …” Bashar’s voice trailed off, the first time Mindy had seen any evidence of uncertainty in the man.

  They stopped talking in code then, and began trading information about Lightbull, Patriot, Inc., and the decline and fall of American culture.

  She listened, fascinated, as two full lifetimes of experience crossed over before her eyes. And ears, perhaps.

  The two old men spoke for almost fifteen minutes, an interchange of ellipses and allusions and compressed bursts of facts, punctuated by coughing and occasional interjections from a set of unseen voices that turned out to be Crown’s expert systems.

  Some of it she already knew from her own investigations, and spending the strange, violent day with Bashar. But the picture came together, at least partially, before her eyes. These two were better cold case crackers than she’d ever be.

  Lightbull, whoever they were, had bombed Three Fingered Jack, and then Cascadiopolis. They had also hacked into Crown’s extremely well secured systems and directed money to something called Patriot, Inc. which might or might not be a division of Edgewater. Ownership was murky. A common thread from both the bombings and the hacking was Mexico City. That connected Tauroctony and Lightbull.

  “Bull dancers,” Crown had said at one point. “Minoan women and Roman mystery cults and the corrida and the American stock market. Every last bastard of them, bull dancers.”

  Mindy liked the image, could even follow all the references. Which was gratifying. These two old men made her feel stupid. The sheer density of their conversation was staggering.

  “Tygre told me once in passing that he came from a secret school,” said Bashar finally. “Now we know something of them.”

  Crown took a slow, rattling breath. “I will not be alive long enough to pursue them.”

  “Neither will I,” Bashar replied. “But our heirs will be.”

  “You don’t simply work for … J. Appleseed, do you?”

  “I am J. Appleseed. Very, very few people know that.”

  “Why Patriot?” Crown took another long, rattling breath. “What’s the connection?”