Strange Itineraries

by Tim Powers

  “Can this romance be saved?” said Marc, looking tremendously bored.

  “Anyway, he belted me. First time … only time … he ever did. God I was mad. I can’t now, as a man, imagine being that mad. So you know what I did? I went into the kitchen and got a big knife out of the drawer and, while he stood there muttering apologies, I shoved the blade up to the handle into my stomach. And I pulled it out and laughed at him some more and called him every filthy name I knew, for three whole goddamned hours, as I lay there on the floor and bled to death. He never moved. Well, he sat down.”

  Even Marc was looking a little horrified. “I don’t wonder the poor bastard’s in Fairview now,” he said. “And you visited him?”

  “Yeah. I forget why. I think I wanted to apologize, though I was a thirty-year-old woman when he last saw me … I told them I was a relative, and quoted enough family history to get in.” She took another big sip of the whiskey. “He was in a little bed, and his dried-up body didn’t raise the blankets any more than a couple of brooms would. I was looking respectable, freshly shaved, dressed like you see, smiling … and yet he knew me, he recognized me!” Amelia gulped her whole drink. “He started yelling and crying and, in his birdy old voice, begging me to forgive him.” She grinned, her man’s face wrinkling. “Can you beat that? Forgive him.”

  “Absolutely fascinating,” pronounced Marcus, slapping the table. “Now why don’t you go find somebody else to tell it to, hmm? Saul and I have to talk.”

  “I want to talk to the old man,” said Amelia weakly as she got to her feet and tottered away.

  “Oh, God,” Marc moaned, exasperated.

  “Hadn’t you better dash upstairs again?” I suggested. “With no one at the sim’s controls she’ll think it’s a corpse.”

  “No,” he said, staring after Amelia, “it’s equipped to run independently, too. Speaks vague platitudes and agrees with nearly everything that’s said to it. Oh, well, she’s too lushed to notice anything. Okay, now, listen, Saul, you started to ask why we dragged you in on this – I’ll tell you, and then you can call me a son of a bitch, and then do what I ask, and then, if you want, take the hostage when it shows up and disappear and never come back. As I say, you and the kid will be financially provided for.

  “Through the simulacrum, Rafe and I have been gradually changing clan policy, restoring things to the way they were before Hain took over in 1861. DIRE is going to resume the genetic and conditioning researches Hain made them stop in the 1950s, and, oh, we’ve bought and cultivated acres of farmland near Ankara for … certain lucrative enterprises he would never have permitted, and – anyway, you see? As a matter of fact, we hope soon to be able to maintain a farm of healthy perpetually pregnant ephemerals, so that we can have our deaths performed under controlled conditions and be sure the fetus we move on to is a healthy, well-cared-for one. Honestly, wouldn’t it be nice not to find yourself born in slums anymore? Not to have to pretend to be a child for a dreary decade until you can leave whatever poor family you elbowed your way into? And we can begin taking hormone injections quite young, to bring us more quickly to a mature – ”

  Suddenly I was sorry I’d had so much to drink. “That’s filthy,” I said. “All of it. More abominable than … than I can say.”

  He pursed his painted lips. “I’m sorry you can’t approve, Saul. We’d hoped your long absence was a sign of dissatisfaction with the way things were. But with our … hostage to fortune, as you put it, we don’t need your approval. Just your cooperation. Some siblings have commented on the changes in the old man, and we can’t afford to have them even suspect that what they see is a phony. If they knew he was gone it would be impossible to get them to work together, or even allow … Anyway, if they all see you, Sam’s traditional favorite, drinking with the old man and reminiscing and laughing and agreeing with everything that comes out of his mouth, why, it’ll be established in their minds, safely below the conscious level, that this is certainly the genuine Sam Hain they’ve unquestioningly obeyed for more than a century.”

  “You want me to kiss him?”

  Marc frowned, puzzled. “That won’t be necessary. Just friendly, like you’ve always been. And of course, if you don’t, then I’ll go hold Amelia’s hand in one of mine and,” he patted his purse, “blow her head off with the other. And then it’ll be her I give birth to in six months. Maybe she’d even be able to visit that poor son of a bitch at Fairview again, as a baby this time.”

  “I know, I know,” I told him impatiently. “I comprehended the threat the first time. Shut up and let me think.”

  I’ve had a number of children, over the centuries, and they’re all as dead-and-gone as Marc was threatening to make this one. It never bothered me much, even when, in a few cases, I’d actually seen them die – they’d had their little lives, and their irreversible deaths. And of course the … eviction of unborn babies from their bodies, though not a concept I was really at ease with, was anything but a new one to me. Still … I didn’t want a child of mine to get just alive enough to die and then be pushed away to sink into the dark. “They give birth astride a grave,” Beckett said, “the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” That’s how it is for the ephemerals, certainly. But let them have that instant’s gleam of light!

  “All right,” I said dully. “If Sam’s gone, I don’t care what becomes of you all anyway. I’ll take the kid and go incognito underground.”

  “The wisest choice,” approved Marcus with a grin that brought out smile lines in his cheeks. What, I wondered, would this girl have been like today, if Marc hadn’t taken over her embryonic body years ago? Perhaps we’d still have met at the street fair, and talked about Stevenson.

  It took me a few seconds to stand up, and I heard my chair clatter over behind me, but I felt coldly sober. “Trot upstairs and get in the driver’s seat,” I said. “I’d like to get home by midnight.”

  “Archimago will run the sim,” Marc said, giving a thumbs-up to Archie, who nodded and strode out of the bar without looking at me.

  “I’m going to take a walk out back,” I said. “Clear the fumes out of my head … and give your wind-up man time to join the others ahead of me. You don’t want this to look rehearsed.”

  “I suppose not. Okay, but don’t wander off or anything.”

  “You’re holding the stake,” I reminded him.

  Scattered between the house and the backdrop of trees silhouetted against the darkening sky, my siblings were beginning to deal with dinner. The fire-pit blazed fiercely, seeming to lack only a bound martyr for some real nostalgia, and the crowd, as if to supply it, was dragging up a whole side of beef wired to a revolving black iron frame. They’d got into the cellar, and I picked my way through a litter of half-empty Latour and Mouton bottles on my way to the unlighted, vine-roofed patio on the west side of the house.

  After dark we of the clan generally prefer noisy, bright-lit groups to solitude, and I wasn’t surprised to find the deep-shadowed patio empty. I fished a cigarette from my left jacket pocket and struck a match on the side of the bench I was sitting on, and drew a lungful and then let the smoke hiss out and flit away on the cool, eucalyptus-scented breeze.

  I stared at the dark bulk of the old house and wondered where its master was buried. Though it was like Sam to have let go, I blamed him for having killed himself. Surely he must have known we’d slide back into our old, ruthless ways once he was gone, like domesticated dogs thrown back out into the wilderness.

  A dim green glow defined a window in the third story, near where several heavy cables were moored to the shingles. Doubtless the room, I thought, where Archie is hunched over whatever sort of controls a simulacrum requires. I picked a loose chip from one of the flagstones and cocked my arm to pitch it at the window – then sadly decided the move would be a mistake, and let it fall back to the pavement instead.

  I was aware that it would be quite a while before I’d know whether Marc had kept his end of the bargain. I shook
my head and flicked away the cigarette. Marc and his crew were maneuvering me around – from the seduction three months ago to the curt orders of tonight – like a scarecrow, no more independent than their mechanical Sam Hain. Predictable is what you are, I told myself bitterly, and as helplessly useful as one of those keys for opening sardine cans.

  Before I knew what I was doing I found myself standing on the seat of the concrete bench and gripping one of the horizontal beams that the vine trellises were nailed to. By God, I thought, I’ll at least give Archie a scare, make him tangle the puppet strings a little. I chinned myself up and, driving my legs through the brittlely snapping trellis, jackknifed forward and wound up sitting on the beam, brushing dust, splinters and bits of ivy from my hair.

  I stood up on the beam cautiously. It dipped here and there, but took my weight without coming unmoored, and in a moment I had flapped and tottered my way to the house wall, and steadied myself by grabbing a drainpipe that, overhead, snaked right past the window I wanted to get to. Not wanting to lose my drunken impetus, I immediately swarmed up it in my best rock-climbing style, leaving most of the skin of my palms on the rough seams of the pipe.

  I reached the level of the dim green window and braced a foot on one of the pipe’s brackets; then I leaned sideways, gripped the windowsill and made a fearsome wide-eyed, open-mouthed face while scrabbling at the glass with the nails of my free hand.

  There was no response – just an uninterrupted, muted hum of machinery. I banged the pane with my forehead and made barking sounds. Still nothing.

  I was beginning to get irritable. I dug in my right jacket pocket and pulled out the compact but heavy pistol I always kept there, and knocked in the glass. There were a few glass splinters in the frame when I was done, but I knew my leather jacket would protect me from them.

  I brought my other hand quickly to the sill, heaved, and dove into the room, landing on my fingertips and somersaulting across a linoleum floor.

  “I’ll take over the controls, Arch,” I gasped, springing to my feet. “How do you make the thing do a jig? Or – ”

  I stopped babbling. The room was empty except for a long plastic case on the floor, about three feet deep and connected by tubes to a bank of dimly illuminated dials on one wall.

  I sagged. My only concern at this point was to get out of there without having to answer any questions as to why I had thought it worth my while to break into what was doubtless the room housing the building’s air-conditioning unit. I hurried toward the metal door in the far wall, but jerked to a halt when I peripherally glimpsed a face under the curved plastic surface of that suddenly-recognizable-as-coffin-sized case.

  Sweat sprang out on my temples – I was afraid I’d recognized the face, and I didn’t want to look again and confirm it. You didn’t see anything, my mind assured me. Go rejoin the party.

  I think I’d have taken its advice if its tone hadn’t been so like Marc’s. I knelt in front of the case and stared into it. As I had thought, the sleeping face inside was Sam Hain’s, clearly recognizable in spite of the fact that the head had been shaved of its curly white hair and a couple of green plastic tubes had been poked into the nostrils and taped down beside the jaw.

  There didn’t seem to be any way to open the case, but I didn’t need to – I was certain this was the real Sam Hain, maintained, imprisoned, in dim, lobotomized half-life in this narrow room. So much for Marc’s story of a suicide and refusal to be reborn! Marc and his friends had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure Sam was out of the picture without being freed from his old body.

  I was still holding the little gun with which I’d broken the window, and I set it down on the plastic case long enough to whip off my jacket; then I picked it up and wrapped it and my hand tightly in the folds of leather. It was a little two-shot pistol I’d had made in 1900 for use on myself if I should ever want to leave a body quickly – its two bullets were .50 caliber hollow-points, pretty sure to do a thorough job at close range – and I didn’t grudge Sam one of them.

  I braced my wrist with my free hand and pressed the leather-padded muzzle against the section of plastic over Sam’s head. “The cage door’s open, Sam,” I whispered. “Take off.” I squeezed the trigger.

  There was a jarring thump, but the layers of leather absorbed most of the noise. I untangled the gun and put on the jacket, slapping it to dispel clinging smoke. One glance at the exploded ruin under the holed case was enough to tell me I’d freed Sam, so I tucked the gun back into my jacket pocket and turned to the window.

  Getting out wasn’t as easy as getting in had been, and I had a gashed finger, a wrenched ankle and a long tear in the left leg of my pants by the time I stood wheezing on the flagstones of the still-empty patio. I combed my hair, straightened my now-perforated jacket, and walked around the corner, through the fire-lit mob in the backyard, to the living room.

  It was a superficially warm and hearty scene that greeted me as I let the screen door bang shut at my back; yellow lamplight made the smoke-misty air glow around the knot of well-groomed people clustered around the piano, and the smiling, white-haired figure with his hand on the pianist’s shoulder fairly radiated benign fatherly wisdom. A stranger would have needed second sight to know that several of the company, particularly Amelia, were dangerously drunk, and that perhaps a third of them were currently a physical gender that was at odds with their instinctive one, and that their beaming patriarch was, under his plastic skin, a mass of laboring machinery.

  Marcus, perched on the arm of the couch, raised his thin eyebrows at my rumpled, dusty appearance, then gave me a little nod and glanced toward the simulacrum. I obediently crossed the room and stood beside the thing.

  “Well, Saul!” the machinery said. “It’s good to see you, lad. Say, have you thought about what we were discussing earlier in the library?”

  “Yes, Sam,” I said with as warm a smile as I could muster, “and I can see it all makes perfect sense. We really do need to establish a position of power, so we can defend ourselves against the ephemerals … if that should ever become necessary.”

  I wanted to gag or laugh. I hope, I mentally told the embryo in Marcus, you may some day appreciate what I’m doing right now to buy you a life.

  “I’m glad,” nodded the simulacrum. “Some truths are hard to face … but you never were one to flinch, Saul.” It smiled at the company. “Well, siblings, another song or two and then well get down to the meeting, hmm? Saul and Marcus and I have a few proposals to air.”

  Mirabile resumed banging away at the piano, and we went through a couple of refrains each of “Nichevo” and “Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fus” as a bottle of Hennessy made the circuit and helped the music to lend the evening an air of pleasantly wistful melancholy. I took a glass of cognac, and winced to see Marc working on still another grasshopper.

  “Here, Mirabile,” muttered Amelia, edging the pianist off the bench. “I learned to play, last life.” After finding a comfortable position, she poised her unsteady hands over the keys, and then set to.

  And despite all her hard drinking she played beautifully, wringing real heartbreak out of “St. James Infirmary,” which we all sang so enthusiastically that we set the glasses to rattling in the cupboard.

  We were all singing the last lines when it became clear that Amelia was playing and singing a different song, and our voices faltered away as the new chords moaned out of the piano and Amelia’s lyrics countered ours.

  She was handling her man’s voice as well as she handled the piano, and some of us didn’t immediately realize what song it was that she was rendering.

  “…Throw on another log,” she sang,” – but draw the curtains shut!

  For across the icy fields our yellow light

  Spills, and has raised a sobbing in the night.

  “Sing louder, friends! Drown out that windy, wavering song

  Of childish voices, and step up the beat,

  For a rainy pattering, like tiny feet,

  Draws ne
arer every moment. For so very long

  They’ve wandered, wailing in a mournful chorus,

  Searching through all of hell and heaven for us.”

  I don’t know whether it was the vapors of the cognac that caused it, or the mood of gentle despair that hung about us like the tobacco smoke, but a couple of voices actually joined her in the nearly whispered refrain:

  “And at the close of some unhappy Autumn day,

  From their cold, unlighted region,

  Treading soft, will come the Legion

  Of Lost Children and they’ll suck our souls away.”

  Then a number of things happened simultaneously. Marc’s little fist, as he lunged from the couch arm, cracked into Amelia’s jaw and sent her and the heavy bench crashing over on the hardwood floor; Mirabile slammed the cover down over the keys, producing one final rumbling chord; the simulacrum just stood and gaped stupidly, and the rest of the company, pale and unmoving, registered varying mixtures of anger, embarrassment and fear.

  Marc straightened, shot a look toward the sim, and then glanced furtively at me – and snatched his eyes away immediately when mine met them.

  “Get her out of here,” he rasped to Mirabile. “Don’t be gentle.”

  “To hell with the songs,” said the Sam Hain replica expressionlessly. “It’s time for the meeting.” I reached into my right jacket pocket. “Just a minute,” I said. They all looked up, and I could see a dew of sweat on Marc’s forehead – he was wary, even a little scared, and I believed I knew why. “I’ll be back in a moment,” I finished lamely, and walked into the kitchen.

  Just outside the window over the sink was a thermometer, and I cut the screen with a butter knife to reach it. It unsnapped easily from the clamp that held it to the wall, and I pulled the glass tube off and slipped it into my pants pocket. To explain my exit I took a can of beer from the refrigerator and tore the tab off as I strolled back into the living room.