by Tim Powers
She went out for a newspaper and ice cream the next afternoon, and never came back. I’d been wryly treasuring the memory, in a two-ships-that-pass-in-the-night way, until now.
Restraining my anger, I crossed to her table and sat down. The girl’s face looked up and smiled, obviously recognizing me.
“Hello, Saul.”
“Goddamn it,” I gritted. “All right, who are you?”
“Marcus. Are you upset? Why? Oh, I know! I still owe you for that newspaper.” Marcus started digging in his purse.
“Less of the simpering. You knew it was me?”
“Well, sure,” he said. “What’s wrong. I broke an unwritten law or something? Listen, you haven’t been around for a while. Customs change, ever notice? What’s wrong with members of the clan having relations with each other?”
“Christ. Lots of things,” I said hoarsely. Could the old man have sanctioned this? “It makes me sick.” I could remember going bar-hopping with Marcus in the 1860s when he was a bearded giant, both of us drunkenly prowling the streets of Paris, hooting at women and trading implausible and profane reminiscences.
“Don’t run off.” Marc caught me by the arm as I was getting up. “There are a few things I’ve got to tell you before the ceremony at six. Sit down. Laphroaig still your drink? I’ll get a bottle – ”
“Don’t bother. I want to go talk to the old man. Save whatever you’ve got to say until the meeting.”
“It’s old Hain I want to talk about. You’ve got to hear this sooner or later, so – ”
“So I’ll hear it later,” I said, and strode out of the bar to find Sam Hain, our patriarch. I’d been there only about five minutes, but I was already wishing I hadn’t come. If this was the current trend, I thought, I can’t blame Alice for disappearing.
Back in the high-ceilinged living room I caught the eye of a little boy who was pouring himself a glassful of Boodle’s. “Where’s our host?” I asked.
“Library. Amelia?”
“Saul. Robin?” Robin was always fond of good gin.
“Right. Talk to you later, yes?” He wandered off toward the group around the piano.
From the corner of my eye I saw Marcus – who’d put on a bit of weight since that night, I noted with vindictive satisfaction – hurry out of the bar. I braced myself, but he just crossed to the entry and thumped away up the stairs. Doubtless in a snit, I thought.
I pictured old Marc sniffling and dabbing at his mascara’d eyes with a perfumed hankie, and shook my head. It always upset me to consider how thoroughly even the keenest-edged minds are at the mercy of hormones and such biological baggage. We are all indeed windowless gonads, as Leibnitz nearly said.
Old Sam Hain was asleep in his usual leather chair when I pushed open the library door, so I sipped my beer and let my eyes rove over the shelves for a minute or two. As always, I envied him his library. The quarto Plays of Wharfinger, Ashbless’ Odes, Blaylock’s The Wild Man of Tango-Raza, all were treasures I’d admired for decades – though, at least in a cursory glance, I didn’t notice any new items.
I absently reached for the cigar humidor, but my fingers struck polished tabletop where it should have been. Suddenly I noticed an absence that had been subconsciously nagging at me ever since I’d arrived – the house, and the library particularly, was not steeped in the aroma of Caribbean cigars anymore.
Behind me the old man grunted and raised his head. “Saul?”
“Yes sir.” It never failed to please me, the way he could always recognize me after a long separation. I sat down across the table from him. “What’s become of the cigars?”
“Ahh,” he waved his hand, “they began to disagree with me.” He squinted speculatively at me. “You’ve been away twenty years, son. Have you, too, begun to disagree with me?”
Embarrassed and a little puzzled, I shifted in my chair. “Of course not, sir. You know I just wander off for a while sometimes – I missed four or five in a row at the end of the last century, remember? Means nothing. It’s just to indulge my solitary streak once in a while.”
Hain nodded and pressed his fingertips together. “Such impulses should be resisted – I think you know that. We are a clan, and our potentially great power is … vitiated if we persist in operating as individuals.”
I glanced at him sharply. This seemed to be an about-face from his usual opinions – more the kind of thing I’d have expected from Marcus or Rafe.
“Ho. It sounds as if you’re saying we should go back to the way we were in the days of the Medici – or as Balzac portrayed us in The Thirteen.” I spoke banteringly, certain he’d explain whatever he’d actually meant.
“I’ve been doing some deep thinking for a number of years, Saul,” he said slowly, “and it seems to me that we’ve been living in a fantasy daydream since I took over in 1861 and made such drastic changes in traditional clan policy. They were well-intentioned changes, certainly – and in a decent world they’d be practical. But we’re not living in a decent world, ever notice? No, I no longer think our isolation and meek, live-and-let-live ways are realistic. Ah, don’t frown, Saul. I know you’ve enjoyed this last hundred and twenty years more than any other period … but surely you can see you’ve – we’ve all – been ignoring certain facts? What do you think would happen if the ephemerals ever learned of our existence?”
“It wouldn’t matter,” I cried, unhappily aware that I was taking the side he’d always taken in this perennial question. “They’d kill some of us, I suppose, but we’ve all had violent deaths before. I prefer quick deaths to slow ones anyway. Why can’t we just leave them alone? We’re the parasites, after all.”
“You’re talking rot,” he snapped. “Do you really think killing us is the worst they could do? What about perpetual maintenance on an artificial life-support system, with no means of suicide? What about administering mind-destroying drugs, so you spend the rest of your incarnations drooling and cutting out paper dolls in one half-wit asylum after another? And even if you could get to your suicide kit or jump in the way of a car before they seized you … do you think it’s still absolutely impossible for them to track a soul to its next host?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered after a pause. In spite of my convictions his words had shaken me, touching as they did our very deepest fears. Maybe he’s right, I thought miserably. We are parasites – all the liquor and food and music and poetry we enjoy is produced by the toiling ephemerals – but surely even parasites have to defend themselves?
“Saul,” he said kindly, “I’m sorry to rub your nose in it this way, but you see we have to face it. Go have a drink and mix with the siblings; this will all be discussed after dinner. By the way, have you talked to Marcus?”
“Briefly.”
“Talk to him at more length, then. He’s got something important to tell you before the meeting.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Let him. Relax, it’s good news. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll finish my nap. It seems to be ripening to a real Alexandrian feast out there, and if it’s going to last on into tomorrow I’d best catch some shut-eye.”
“Right, sir.”
I closed the door as I left, and went back to the bar, slumping into the same chair I’d had before. Archie was tending bar now, and I called my order to him, and when it arrived I tossed back a stiff gulp of the nearly warm Scotch and chased it with a long draft of icy Coors.
Being a member of the clan, I was used to seeing cherished things come and go – “This too will pass” was one of our basic tenets – but the old man had, in only a hundred and twenty years, become a rock against the waves of change, an immortal father, a symbol of values that outlast individual lifetimes. But now he had changed.
One corner of my mind was just keening. Even this, it wailed, even this will pass?
I remembered the meeting at which he’d first appeared, on a chilly night in 1806 at Rafe’s Boston mansion. Sam was then a boy of about ten, and though he knew everyone and g
reeted the mature ones by name, he never did say who he’d been before. This upset a lot of us, but he was cordially firm on that point; and we couldn’t deduce it by a process of elimination, either – a number of siblings had suicided in the early 1790s, after the tantalizingly hopeful French Revolution had degenerated into the Terror, and several apparently let go, never to come back. There was, of course, a lot of speculation about which one he was … though a few whispered that he wasn’t any one of our lost siblings, but a new being who’d somehow infiltrated us.
The crowd in the bar slacked off. Most of the clan had carried their drinks out into the backyard, where the barbecue pit was already flinging clouds of aromatic smoke across the lawn, and the dedicated drinkers who remained were now working more slowly, so Archie came out from behind the bar and sat down at my table.
“Have a drink, Archimago,” I said.
“Got one.” He waved a tequila sour I hadn’t noticed.
I took a long sip of the Laphroaig. “Are we all present and accounted for?”
“Nearly. The count’s at forty these days now that Alice is gone – and there are thirty-eight of us here. Not a bad turnout.”
“Who’s missing?”
“Amelia and Rafe. Amelia’s currently a man, about forty years old. Maybe she killed herself. And of course Rafe just died two months ago, so we can’t expect to see him for another decade.”
“How’d he go this time?” I didn’t care, really. Marcus and Rafe were fast friends, but though in some incarnations I liked Marcus, I could never stand Rafe.
“Shot himself through the roof of the mouth in his apartment on Lombard Street in San Francisco. Nobody was surprised, he was nearly fifty.” Archimago chuckled. “They say he managed to pull the trigger twice.”
I shrugged. “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing thoroughly,” I allowed.
Archie looked across the room and got to his feet. “Ah, I see Vogel is out of akvavit. Excuse me.”
Most of us choose to die at about fifty, to ride the best years out of a body and then divorce ourselves from it by means of pills or a bullet or whatever strikes our fancy, so that our unencumbered soul can – though we rarely talk about it – dart through the void to the as yet unfirmly rooted soul of some unborn child, which we hungrily thrust out into the darkness, taking its embryonic body for ourselves. It sounds horrible baldly stated, and there’s a mournful ballad called “The Legion of Lost Children,” which none of us ever even hums, though we all know it, but it’s hard to the point of impossibility to stare into the final, lightless abyss, and feel yourself falling, picking up speed … and not grab the nearest handhold.
Sam Hain, though, seemed to be an exception to this. He was born in mid-1796 and never died once after that, somehow maintaining his now one-hundred-and-eighty-five-year-old body on red wine, sashimi, tobacco and sheer will power. His physical age made him stand out among us even more than the obscurity of his origin did, and being patient, kindly and wise as well, he was elected Master at our 1861 meeting.
Up until then the Master post had meant little, and carried no duties except to provide a house and bountiful food and liquor for the five yearly meetings. I was Master myself for several decades in the early part of the sixteenth century, and some of the clan never did find out – or even ask – who the host of the meetings was. Sam Hain, though, made changes: for one thing, he arbitrarily changed the date of the meetings from the thirty-first of October to November first; he began to cut back on the several vast, clan-owned corporations that provide us all with allowances; and he encouraged us to get more out of a body, to carry it, as he certainly had, into old age before unseating some unborn child and taking its fresh one. I believe it was Sam, in fact, who first referred to us all as “hermit crabs with the power of eviction.”
I looked up from my drink and saw Marcus enter the bar and signal Archie. The alcohol had given me some detachment toward the whole business, and I admitted to myself that Marc had certainly drawn a good body this time – tall and slender, with cascades of lustrous coppery hair. I could no longer be attracted to it, but I could certainly see why I’d been so entranced at the street fair.
“Hello, Marc,” I said levelly. “Sam says you’ve got some good news for me.”
“That’s right, Saul.” He sat down just as Archie brought him his creamy, pale green drink, and he took a sip before going on. “You’re going to be a father.”
For several moments I stared at him blankly. I finally choked, “That night…?”
He nodded, grinning, and fished from his purse a slip of folded paper. “Tested out positive.”
“Goddamn you,” I said softly. “Was it for this that you picked me up in the first place?”
He shrugged. “Does it matter? I should think your main concern at this point is the welfare of the child.”
Though sick and cold inside, I nodded, for I saw the teeth of the trap at last – if one of us dies while in physical contract with a pregnant woman, it is her fetus that that one will take. And though we of the clan can generally have children, the hermit-crab reincarnation ability doesn’t breed true – our children are all ephemerals.
“A hostage to fortune,” I said. “You’re holding my unborn child for ransom, right? Why? What do I have that you want?”
“You catch on fast,” Marc said approvingly. “Okay, listen – if you cooperate with me and a couple of others, I’ll allow your child to be born, and you can take it away or put it up for adoption or whatever. We’ll even triple your allowance, and you don’t use more than half of it now.” He had another sip of his disgusting drink. “Of course, if you don’t cooperate, one of the clan is likely to die while holding my hand, and … well, the Legion would have one more squalling member.”
I didn’t flinch at the reference to the strictly tabooed song, for I knew he’d hoped to shock me with it. “Cooperate? In what?”
He spread his hands. “Something I don’t think you’d object to anyway. The, uh,” he patted abdomen, “hostage is just insurance. Would you like a fresh drink? I thought so. Arch! Another boilermaker here. Well, Saul, you’ve heard the good news – take it easy! – and now I’m afraid I’ve got some bad.” He just sat and watched me until I’d had a sip of the new drink.
“Sam Hain is dead,” he said, very quietly. “He blew his head off, in this very house, late in 1963. Please don’t interrupt! Rafe and I found his body only a few hours afterward, and came to a decision you might disapprove of – the next meeting wasn’t for three years, so we had one of the secret, advanced branches of our DIRE Corporation construct a simulacrum.”
I opened my mouth to call him a liar, but closed it again. I realized I was certain it was true. “What does smoke do, clog the thing’s circuits or something?”
He nodded. “It’s rough on the delicate machinery, so we had him give up the cigars, as you noticed. It was me speaking to you through the simulacrum, from the controls upstairs.”
“I saw you run out of the bar.” Marc started to speak, but I interrupted him. “Wait a minute! You said ‘63? That can’t be – he’d be … eighteen now, and he’d be here today. If this is – ”
Marc took my hand. “He would be eighteen, Saul. If he came back … but he didn’t. He let go. We were pretty sure he would, or we wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of having the sim built.”
I jerked my hand away. I didn’t doubt him – Sam Hain was just the sort who’d choose to drop away into the last oblivion rather than cheat an unborn child of life – but I wanted no intimacy with Marc.
“All right, so you’ve got this robot to take his place. Why involve me in – ”
I broke off my sentence when a dark-haired man with a deeply lined face lurched into the bar; his tie was loose, his jacket looked slept in, and he’d clearly been doing some preliminary drinking elsewhere. “Who’s doling out the spirits here?’ he called.
Archimago waved to him. “Right here, Amelia. We didn’t think you were going to
show. What’ll you have?”
“Ethanol.” Amelia wove with drunkard dignity across the room and ceremoniously collapsed into the third chair at our table. “Okay if I join you? Who are you anyway?”
I overrode Marc’s brushing-off excuses, wanting some time to consider what he’d been saying. “Sure, keep your seat, Amelia. I’m Saul, and this is Marcus.”
“Yeah,” Amelia said, “I know. I visited Marc last year at his apartment in Frisco. Still living there, Marc? Nice little place, on that twisty street and all. ‘Member that night we drove to – ”
“You’re late,” Marcus said coldly, “and drunk. Why is that?”
Amelia’s eyes dulled, and though her expression grew, if anything, more blank, I thought she was going to cry. “I had a stop to make this morning, a visit, before coming here.”
Marc rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “This morning? Where, in New York?”
Archie brought a glass of some kind of whiskey, and Amelia seized it eagerly. “In Costa Mesa,” she breathed, after taking a liberal sip. “Fairview State Mental Hospital.”
“I hope they didn’t say they were too full to take you,” Marc said sweetly.
“Shut up, Marc,” I said. “Who were you visiting?”
“My … fiancé, from my last life,” Amelia said, “when I was a woman.”
The incongruity of a woman talking out of a man’s body rarely bothered me, but it did now.
“He’s seventy-two years old,” she went on. “White hair, no teeth … a face like a desert tortoise.”
“What’s he doing in the hatch?” Marc inquired.
His sarcasm was lost on the inward-peering Amelia. “We were engaged,” he said, “but we got into a fight one evening. This was in 1939. I’d gone out to dinner with a guy I’d met at a party, and Len said I shouldn’t have. I was drunk, of course, and I laughed and told him … the truth, that I’d slept around long before I met him, and would be doing it long after he was dead.”