And, of course, that was why he thought he might find Alethea here. Or what was left of her, fractured into parts—but perhaps recoverable. Entered into symbiosis with the local fauna.
And all I’ve managed to do is to get my friend killed, TB thought.
He couldn’t look at Jill anymore. He stood up and went to make himself some tea at the kitchen’s rattletrap synthesizer. As always, the tea came out of synth tepid. TB raked some coals from the fire and set the mug on them to warm up a bit, then sat back down, lit a cigarette, and counted his day’s take of rats.
Ten bagged and another twenty that he and Bob had killed between them with sticks. The live rats scrabbled about in the containing burlap, but they weren’t going to get out. Rats to feed to Jill. You shouldn’t raise a ferret on anything other than its natural prey. The ferret food you could buy was idiotic. And after Jill ate them, he would know. He would know what the rats were and where they came from. Jill could sniff it out like no other. She was amazing that way.
She isn’t going to eat these rats. She is going to die because you took a little scrap of programming that was all bite and you gave it a body and now look what you’ve done.
She didn’t have to die like this. She could have been erased painlessly. She could have faded away to broken code.
Once again, TB looked long and hard into the future. Was there anything, any way? Concentrating, he teased at the threads of possible futures with a will as fine as a steel-pointed probe. Looking for a silver thread in a bundle of dross. Looking for the world where Jill lived through her fight. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t find it.
It had to be there. Every future was always there, and when you could see them, you could reach back into the past and effect the changes to bring about the future that you wanted.
Or I can.
But I can’t. Can’t see it. Want to, but can’t, little Jill. I am sorry.
For Jill to live was a future so extreme, so microscopically fine in the bundle of threads, that it was, in principle, unfindable, incomprehensible. And if he couldn’t comprehend it, to make it happen was impossible.
And of course he saw where almost all of the threads led:
Jill would be a long time dying. He could see that clearly. He could also see that he did not have the heart to put her down quickly, put her out of her misery. But knowing this fact did not take any special insight.
How could I have come to care so much for a no-account bundle of fur and coding out here on the ass end of nowhere?
How could I not, after knowing Jill?
Two days it would take, as days were counted in the Carbuncle, before the little ferret passed away. Of course it never really got to be day. The only light was the fetid bioluminescence coming off the heaps of garbage. A lot of it was still alive. The Carbuncle was in a perpetual twilight that was getting on toward three hundred years old. With the slow decay of organic remnants, a swamp had formed. And then the Bendy River, which was little more than a strong current in the swamp, endlessly circulating in precession with the spin of the module. Where was the Carbuncle? Who cares? Out at the end of things, where the tendrils of the Met snaked into the asteroid belt. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t a centrifuge here to provide gravity for people. Nobody cared about whoever lived here. The Carbuncle was spun—to a bit higher than Earth-normal, actually—in order to compact the garbage down so that humanity’s shit didn’t cover the entire asteroid belt.
The big garbage sluice that emptied into the Carbuncle had been put into place a half century ago. It had one-way valves within it to guard against backflow. All the sludge from the inner system came to the Carbuncle, and the maintenance grist used some of it to enlarge the place so that it could dump the rest. To sit there. Nothing much ever left the Carbuncle, and the rest of the system was fine with that.
Somebody sloshed into the shallow water outside the hoy and cursed. It was the witch, Gladys, who lived in a culvert down the way. She found the gangplank, and TB heard her pull herself up out of the water. He didn’t move to the door. She banged on it with the stick she always carried that she said was a charmed snake. Maybe it was. Stranger things had happened in the Carbuncle. People and grist combined in strange ways here, not all of them comprehensible.
“TB, I need to talk to you about something,” the witch said. TB covered his ears, but she banged again, and that didn’t help. “Let me in, TB. I know you’re home. I saw a light in there.”
“No you didn’t,” TB said to the door.
“I need to talk to you.”
“All right.” He pulled himself up and opened the door. Gladys came in and looked around the hoy like a startled bird.
“What have you got cooking?”
“Nothing.”
“Make me something.”
“Gladys, my old stove hardly works anymore.”
“Put one them rats in there and I’ll eat what it makes.”
“I won’t do it, Gladys.” TB opened his freezer box and rummaged around inside. He pulled out a Popsicle and gave it to her. “Here,” he said. “It’s chocolate, I think.”
Gladys took the Popsicle and gnawed at it as if it were a meaty bone. She was soon done, and had brown mess around her lips. She wiped it off with a ragged sleeve. “Got another?”
“No I don’t have another,” TB said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“You’re mean.”
“Those things are hard to come by.”
“How’s your jill ferret?”
“She got hurt today. Did Bob tell you? She’s going to die.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He didn’t want to talk about Jill with Gladys. He changed the subject. “We got a mess of rats out of that mulmyard.”
“There’s more where they came from.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Gladys pulled up a stool and collapsed on it. She was maybe European stock; it was hard to tell. Her face was filthy, except for a white smear where wiping the chocolate had cleaned a spot under her nose and on her chin.
“Why do you hate them so much? I know why Bob does. He’s crazy. But you’re not crazy like that.”
“I don’t hate them,” TB said. “It’s just how I make a living.”
“Is it now?”
“I don’t hate them,” TB repeated. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“I want to take a trip.”
“To where?”
“I’m going to see my aunt. I got to thinking about her lately. She used to have this kitten. I was thinking I wanted a cat. For a familiar, you know. To aid me in my occult work. She’s a famous space ship pilot, you know.”
“The kitten?”
“No, my aunt is.”
“You going to take your aunt’s kitten?”
Gladys seemed very offended. “No, I’m not!” She leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. “That kitten’s all growed up now, and I think it was a girl. It will have kittens, and I can get me one of those.”
“That’s a lot of supposes,” TB said mildly.
“I’m sure of it. My angel, Tom, told me to do it.”
Tom was one of the supernatural beings Gladys claimed to be in contact with. People journeyed long distances in the Carbuncle to have her make divinings for them. It was said she could tell you exactly where to dig for silver keys.
“Well if Tom told you, then you should do it,” TB said.
“Damn right,” said Gladys. “But I want you to look after the place while I’m gone.”
“Gladys, you live in an old ditch.”
“It is a dry culvert. And I do not want anybody moving in on me while I’m gone. A place that nice is hard to come by.”
“All I can do is go down there and check on it.”
“If anybody comes along, you h
ave to run them off.”
“I’m not going to run anybody off.”
“You have to. I’m depending on you.”
“I’ll tell them the place is already taken,” TB said. “That’s about all I can promise.”
“You tell them that it has a curse on it,” Gladys said. “And that I’ll put a curse on them if I catch them in my house.”
TB snorted back a laugh. “All right,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
“Water my hydrangea.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“It’s a plant. Just stick your finger in the dirt and don’t water it if it’s still moist.”
“Stick my finger in the dirt?”
“It’s clean fill!”
“I’ll water it, then.”
“Will you let me sleep here tonight?”
“No, Gladys.”
“I’m scared to go back there. Harold’s being mean.” Harold was the “devil” that sat on Gladys’s other shoulder. Tom spoke into one ear, and Harold into the other. People could ask Harold about money, and he would tell Gladys the answer if he felt like it.
“You can’t stay here.” TB rose from his own seat and pulled Gladys up from the stool. She had a ripe smell when he was this close to her. “In fact, you have to go on now because I have to do something.” He guided her toward the door.
“What do you have to do?” she said. She pulled loose of his hold and stood her ground. TB walked around her and opened the door. “Something,” he said. He pointed toward the twilight outside the doorway. “Go on home, Gladys. I’ll check in on your place tomorrow.”
“I’m not leaving for two days,” she replied. “Check in on it day after tomorrow.”
“Okay then,” TB said. He motioned to the door. “You’ve got to go, Gladys, so I can get to what I need to do.”
She walked to the door, turned around. “Day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be gone for a while. I’m trusting you, TB.”
“You can trust me to look in on your place.”
“And not steal anything.”
“I can promise you that, too.”
“All right, then. I’m trusting you.”
“Good night, Gladys.”
“Good night.” She finally left. After TB heard her make her way back to the swamp bank, he got up and closed the door behind her, which she’d neglected to do. Within minutes there was another knock. TB sighed and got up to answer it. He let Bob in.
Bob pulled out a jar of a jellied liquid. It was Carbuncle moonshine, as thick as week-old piss and as yellow. “Let’s drink,” he said, and set the bottle on TB’s table. “I come to get you drunk and get your mind off things.”
“I won’t drink that swill,” TB said. Bob put the jar to his mouth and swallowed two tremendous gulps. He handed the jar to TB, shaking it in his face. TB took it.
“Damn!” Bob said. “Hot damn!”
“Gladys was right about you being crazy.”
“She come around here tonight?”
“She just left. Said she wanted me to look after her place.”
“She ain’t going to see her aunt.”
“Maybe she will.”
“Like hell. Gladys never goes far from that ditch.”
TB looked down at the moonshine. He looked away from it and, trying not to taste it, took a swig. He tasted it. It was like rusty paint thinner. Some barely active grist, too. TB couldn’t help analyzing it; that was the way he was built. Cleaning agents for sewer pipes. Good God. He took another before he could think about it.
“You drink up.” Bob looked at him with a faintly jealous glare. TB handed the jar back.
“No, you.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Bob leaned back and poured the rest of the swill down his throat. When he was finished he let out a yell that startled TB, even though he was ready for it.
“I want some beer to chase it with,” Bob said.
“Beer would be good, but I don’t have any.”
“Let’s go down to Ru June’s and shoot some pool.”
“It’s too damn late.”
“It’s early.”
TB thought about it. The moonshine warmed his gut. He could feel it threatening to eat through his gut if he didn’t dilute it with something. There was nothing further to do about Jill. She would sleep, and at some time, she would die in her sleep. He ought to stay with her. He ought to face what he had done.
“Let me get my coat.”
The Carbuncle glowed blue-green when they emerged from the hoy. High above them, like the distant shore of an enormous lake, was the other side of the cylinder. TB had been there, and most of it was a fetid slough. Every few minutes a flare of swamp-gas methane would erupt from the garbage on that side of the curve and flame into a white fireball. These fireballs were many feet across, but they looked like pinprick flashes from this distance. TB had been caught by one once. The escaping gas had capsized his little canoe, and being in the water had likely saved him from being burnt to a crisp. Yet there were people who lived on that side, too—people who knew how to avoid the gas. Most of the time.
Bob didn’t go the usual way to Ru June’s, but instead took a twisty series of passageways, some of them cut deep in the mountains of garbage, some of them actually tunnels under and through it. The Bob-ways, TB thought of them. At one point TB felt a drip from above and looked up to see gigantic stalactites formed of some damp and glowing gangrenous extrusion.
“We’re right under the old Bendy,” Bob told him. “That there’s the settle from the bottom muck.”
“What do you think it is?” TB said.
“Spent medical grist, mostly,” Bob replied. “It ain’t worth a damn, and some of it’s diseased.”
“I’ll bet.”
“This is a hell of a shortcut to Ru June’s, though.”
And it was. They emerged not a hundred feet from the tavern. The lights of the place glowed dimly behind skin windows. They mounted the porch and went in through a screen of plastic strips that was supposed to keep out the flies.
TB let his eyes adjust to the brightness inside. There was a good crowd tonight. Chen was at the bar playing dominoes with John Goodnite. The dominoes were grumbling incoherently, as dominoes did. Over by the pool table Tinny Him, Nolan, and Big Greg were watching Sister Mary the whore line up a shot. She sank a stripe. There were no numbers on the balls.
Tinny Him slapped TB on the back, and Bob went straight for the bottle of whiskey that was standing on the wall shelf beside Big Greg.
“Good old TB,” Tinny Him said. “Get you some whiskey.” He handed over a flask.
Chen looked up from his dominoes. “You drink my whiskey,” he said, then returned to the game. TB took a long swallow off Tinny Him’s flask. It was far better stuff than Bob’s moonshine, so he took another.
“That whore sure can pool a stick,” Nolan said, coming to stand beside them. “She’s beating up on Big Greg like he was a ugly hat.”
TB had no idea what Nolan meant. His grist patch was going bad, and he was slowly sinking into incomprehensibility for any but himself. That didn’t seem to bother him, though.
Bob was standing very close to Sister Mary and giving her advice on a shot until she reached over and without heat slapped him back into the wall. He remained there respectfully while she took her shot and sank another stripe. Big Greg whispered a curse, and the whore smiled. Her teeth were black from chewing betel nut.
TB thought about how much she charged and how much he had saved up. He wondered if she would swap a poke for a few rats, but decided against asking. Sister Mary didn’t like to barter. She wanted keys or something pretty.
Tinny Him offered TB the flask again, and he took it. “I got to talk to you,” Tinny Him said. “You got to help me with my mother.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s dead is what.”
“Dead.” TB drank more whiskey. “How long?”
“Three months.”
TB stood waiting. There had to be more.
“She won’t let me bury her.”
“What do you mean she won’t let you bury her? She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, mostly.” Tinny Him looked around, embarrassed, then went on in a low voice. “Her pellicle won’t die. It keeps creeping around the house. And it’s pulling her body around like a rag doll. I can’t get her away from it.”
“You mean her body died, but her pellicle didn’t.”
“Hell yes that’s what I mean.” Tinny Him took the flask back and finished it off. “Hell, TB, what am I going to do? She’s really stinking up the place, and every time I throw the old hag out, that grist drags her right back in. It knocks on the door all night long until I have to open it.”
“You’ve got a problem.”
“Damn right I’ve got a problem. She was good old mum, but I’m starting to hate her right now, let me tell you.”
TB sighed. “Maybe I can do something,” he said. “But not tonight.”
“You could come around tomorrow. My gal’ll fix you something to eat.”
“I might just.”
“You got to help me, TB. Everybody knows you got a sweet touch with the grist.”
“I’ll do what I can,” TB said. He drifted over to the bar, leaving Tinny Him watching the pool game. He told Chen he wanted a cold beer, and Chen got it for him from a freezer box. It was a good way to chill the burning that was starting up in his stomach. He sat down on a stool at the bar and drank the beer. Chen’s bar was tiled in beaten-out snap-metal ads, all dead now and their days of roaming the corridors, sacs, bolsas, glands, and cylinders of the Met long done. Most of the advertisements were for products that he had never heard of, but the one his beer was sitting on he recognized. It was a recruiting pitch for the civil service, and there was Amés back before he was Big Cheese of the System, when he was Governor of Mercury. The snap-metal had paused in the middle of Amés’s pitch for the Met’s finest to come to Mercury and become part of the New Hierarchy. The snap-metal Amés was caught with the big mouth on his big face wide-open. The bottom of TB’s beer glass fit almost perfectly in the round “O” of it.
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