by Jack Dann
“S’cuse me.” Chet pushed back his chair and stood up. “Need to get something from my car.”
“What did you leave?” Tom asked.
“Just some medicine. Don’t let no one take my seat.” He pulled his denim jacket off the back of his chair and shrugged into it as he walked past the lunch counter and pushed aside the glass door next to the cash register.
Garrett mentioned an awful murder that had occurred a few days ago in the big city a couple of hundred miles away, the one that had made all the newspapers. Pretty soon everyone was talking about it: how it had been committed, who had been arrested, whether they really had done the deed, so forth and so on. Bill glanced over his shoulder; out the window, he saw that the trunk lid of Chet’s Cadillac had been raised. He watched Chet slam it shut; he turned and began walking back to the diner.
“Funny place to keep medicine,” he murmured.
“Huh?” Tom cupped an ear. “What’s that you say?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Chet came back into the diner, took his seat again. The rest of the guys were still discussing the murder, but he didn’t seem to have anything to add; he simply picked up a menu and opened it to the breakfast page. Bill noted that he didn’t take off his jacket.
A couple of minutes later, the kitchen door banged open again, and there was Joanne. The flycam prowled overhead, filming her every move, as she imperiously studied the dining room. Act II, Scene II: Joanne returns from break. Cue incidental music, audience applause.
“Hey, Joanne!” Garrett raised a hand. “Could we have a little service here, please?”
She heaved an expansive sigh (the audience chuckles expectantly), then pulled pen and order pad from her apron. “Can’t a girl get a break ’round here?” she said (the audience laughs a little louder) as she came over, the flycam obediently following her.
For the first time, Bill noticed how much makeup she was wearing: pancake on the cheeks, rouge around the eyes, red lipstick across the mouth. She was trying to erase her last ten years, at least for the benefit of the camera.
“Seems to me that’s all you’ve been taking lately,” Chet replied, not looking up from his menu. “We’ve been waiting over an hour now.”
Joanne dropped her mouth open in histrionic surprise (wooo, groans the audience) as she placed her hands on her hips. “We-l-l-l-l-l! I didn’t know you were in such a goshdarn hurry! What’s the matter, Chet, you waiting for a social security check?” (More laughter.)
Chet continued to study the menu. “Joanne,” he said quietly, “I’ve been coming here to eat before you were born. I bounced your little fanny on my knee when you were a child, and told Ray Senior that he should give you a job when you got out of school…”
“And if it wasn’t for you, I could have been working for NASA by now!” (Whistles, foot-stomping applause.).
Chet ignored her. “Every time I’ve come here, I’ve put a dollar in your tip glass, even when you’ve done no more than pour me a cup of coffee. So after all these years, I think I deserve a little common courtesy, don’t you think?”
Joanne’s face turned scarlet beneath the make-up. This wasn’t part of the script. “Well, I don’t… I don’t think I have to… I don’t have to…”
“Joanne,” Bill said softly, “just take our orders, please. We’re hungry, and we want to eat.”
“And turn off that silly thing,” Chet added. “I’d like a little privacy, if it’s not too much to ask.”
Reminded that the camera was on her (the audience coughs, moves restlessly) Joanne sought to recover her poise. “We-l-l-l-l-l, if it’s privacy you… I mean, if you don’t… I mean… if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon…”
“Sorry,” Chet said, then he reached up and grabbed the flycam.
The drone resisted as his fingers wrapped around its mike boom, its lenses snapping back and forth. Its motor whined as the rotors went to a higher speed, and for a moment it almost seemed alive as it fought against Chet’s grasp, then he yanked it down to the table.
Tom’s coffee went into his lap and Garrett nearly overturned his chair as they yelled and lurched out of the way. “No! Hey!” Joanne reached for the flycam as Chet turned it over. “Stop! What are you…?”
Chet pushed her aside with one hand, then twisted the drone over on its back. The rotor blades cleaved through a plastic salt shaker and swept the pepper cellar halfway across the room before they snagged against the napkin dispenser.
Bill instinctively pulled his coffee mug out of the way. “Chet, what the hell…!”
Then Chet pulled out from beneath his jacket the tire iron he had fetched from his car trunk and brought it down on the flycam. The first blow shattered the camera lens and broke the mike boom, and the second shattered its plastic carapace and ruined a compact mass of microchips, solenoids, and actuators. The third and forth blows were unnecessary; the flycam was already an irreparable mess.
Then he dropped the tire iron on the table and sat down. There was a long silence as everyone in the diner stared at him. Then…
Long, spontaneous applause from the live studio audience.
As Joanne stared at the wreckage on the table, Chet picked up his menu and opened it again. “Okay,” he said, letting out his breath, “I’ll take two scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, wheat toast, and tomato juice. Please.”
Tears glimmered in the corners of Joanne’s eyes. “I don’t… I don’t believe you just… that was my…”
“Show’s canceled, Joanne.” Ray Junior, standing at the lunch counter behind them, spoke quietly. “Will you just take the man’s order?”
Joanne’s hands shook a little as she raised her pad and dutifully wrote down Chet’s order. Then she went around the table and copied down everyone else’s. Tom asked for blueberry pancakes, link sausage, rye toast; Garrett requested a western omelette, no fries or toast, and a large glass of milk.
Bill had lost his appetite; he only asked for a refill of his coffee.
Joanne snuffled a bit as she thanked no one in particular, then she turned away and marched on stiff legs back into the kitchen. No one said anything when Ray Junior came out a moment later with a brush and a plastic garbage sack. He avoided everyone’s gaze as he silently whisked away the debris, then he vanished through the swinging doors.
“Well…” Tom began.
“Well,” echoed Garrett.
Chet said nothing, slipped the tire iron beneath his chair, and picked up his coffee.
“Joanne’s a good kid,” Garrett added.
“That she is. That she is.”
“Leave her a good tip, guys. She deserves it.”
“Yeah, she certainly earns her money.”
“Hard-working lady.”
“Damn straight. That she is.”
More silence. Across the room, someone put a quarter in a jukebox. An old Johnny Cash song entered the diner. The door opened, allowing inside a cool autumn breeze; a heavyset driver sat down at the counter, took off his cap, and picked up the lunch menu. A sixteen-wheeler blew its air horn as it rumbled out of the lot, heading for parts unknown.
“So… Braves blew it again, didn’t they?”
“Yep. That they did.” Bill cleared his throat. “Now it’s football season.”
THE ICHNEUMON AND THE DORMEUSE by Terry Dowling
One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre, the winner of eleven Ditmar Awards and three Aurealis Awards, Terry Dowling made his first sale in 1982, and has since made an international reputation for himself as a writer of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Primarily a short-story writer, he is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and Wormwood, as well as other collections such as Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and Blackwater Days. He has also written the novels Beckoning Nightframe, His Own, the Star Alphecca, and The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse. As editor, he als
o produced The Essential Ellison, and, with Van Ikin, the anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF. Born in Sydney, he now lives in Hunter’s Hill, New South Wales, Australia.
In the tense story that follows, he shows us that there are some games you can never stop playing, whether you want to or not.
***
THIS time was different. This time on his way past the tombs, Beni turned left, ignored the guard Stones of the nearer mounds and headed down the path through the trees to the wide low tumulus where her tomb was.
He granted that the Stones had him, though nothing showed it. The tumulus was quiet under the hot afternoon sun; the trees, the grass barely stirred; the fields stretched away to meet the sky. The only movement was the heat shimmer on the other tomb mounds and the endless pull of the sentry Stones.
The Nothing Stones were neither stones nor quite filled with nothing, though that was the sense they gave, all sixteen of them, low basaltic pillars two metres high, as wide as his shoulders, as deep as his thigh, standing in the usual henge circle around the foot of the tumulus itself.
Their onyx-black, outward-facing sides were filled with stars, converging points of light, and while Beni would not look into those glossy midnight fields, he knew that if he remained, if they didn’t have him already, the darkling, star-ridden massebots would solve his mysteries, totes and sly conditionings and come to snatch him away, pulling, pulling, grabbing at sight and mind, close obsidian in the hot afternoon.
Always assume the Stones have you, Ramirez had said, told him now in memory, the greatest tomb-robber of them all, and Beni did so, leaving it to his autonomic tote systems to sort out. If they had him in a trance loop, he’d probably soon know. He continued through the perimeter henge, leaving the deadly megaliths at his back, and headed down the access ramp to the black gulf of the doorway.
Doorway not door. None of the old tumulus tombs had ever had doors. Beni stood before the quiet, porcelain-smooth, darkened throat in the side of its vast, low hill and called out.
“Dormeuse! Dormeuse! You have a visitor!”
The words echoed against the ceramic, died. There was only stillness, silence again, smooth cool midnight before him, daylight and blazing summer behind.
Beni, tech’d and toted, wearing a flamer he’d been told he probably wouldn’t use, carrying a metre-long touchpole over his back as nearly all tomb-robbers did, just in case, now brought up his wrist display, saw what the optics gave.
Classic plan clear and sure. Free of the Stones too, if he could trust the readings. It was the standard schema confirmed by all the survivors (most of all by Ramirez himself, one of the very few to make it back totally unharmed) as the basic Tastan design: stretch of corridor, peristyle hall, corridor, burial chamber.
Simple. Direct. Two hundred metres, fifteen, another hundred, then the ten-metre circular chamber: the classic Tastan biocromlech. Simple. Linear. Very deadly.
For there would be traps, illusions, sensory and neural tricks. Standing there, Beni ran the latest figures again, unchanged, of course, since the last postings, but you never knew when new data might be collated and added-the town’s comp systems were constantly at it. Outright death with bodies recovered still stayed at 12% of annual penalties, selective maiming and stigma-the ‘souvenirs,’ 14% (but at least you returned), failure to return at all was still 63% (up 2% on last year’s average-things did change), failure to enter the tomb but believing so, 11%.
Beni cleared that, studied the simplified plan again-spinal access corridor (axial, porcelain-smooth), vertebrate peristyle (handsomely corbelled, and otherwise featureless but for the fourteen columns, seven to a side, and the intaglio relief on each of the back walls), more corridor, finally the central tholos, the skull chamber: unavoidable analogy and another of Ramirez’s terms, just as he had been the one to revive the old names: tholoi, tumuli, henge megaliths, cromlechs, dolmens, going through the old databases, going on about Celts, Myceneans, Etruscans, whoever they were, much older peoples than the Tastans.
Beni flicked random selections, chance plan superimpositions, hoping to trick any tomb override. The defences were clever but they were old.
No change. The classic plan remained. No apparent change.
What would Ramirez do now? Beni wondered again, again, again, putting it off, avoiding. And, finding that he was doing so, made himself take the first step, found the others easier, was soon leaving the square of warm daylight far behind. His cap-light struck out ahead, illuminating the corridor, the smooth and off-white walls; his footsteps echoed off the cool ceramic, carrying him into night, into the underworld of the vast low funerary hill.
“Dormeuse?” he called. “You have company, Dormeuse!” Called it over and over, as Ramirez suggested he do.
“Not so loud,” a voice finally said, and a host flashed on beside him, a startling mummiform of light, gaining resolution, female distinction. “I’m trying to sleep.”
She was lovely, as perfectly formed, idealized, as Ramirez had said she would be, the tall glowing enantios intercept of an auburn-haired woman in middle-age or backtracked to about 45, with an open, pretty if not wholly beautiful face and eyes like blackest glass, but a gentle gaze all the same, with nothing like the cold arrogant manner of intercepts the grim-faced ‘souvenired’ veterans back in town had told him about.
Beni glanced down at his scanner, glad to see the basic plan confirmed, even if not to be trusted, never to be trusted, and kept on walking. The intercept ‘walked’ with him, fully formed now, smiling like a curious servant, which is exactly what she was. It was. She.
“Someone has been talking to you,” she said. “You’re too confident.”
“But new to this all the same. I need as much help as I can get.”
“I have much more experience. Listen. Turn round now. I’ll let you go. Promise.”
Beni smiled. Even without the advice he’d been given, he would have found the offer unacceptable, though it actually did happen now and then. Sometimes did. Justified the old saying that even the tombs had a bad day occasionally.
“Don’t believe you. Won’t do it. Thanks.”
The display flickered but held, his reader sorting, sorting, seeking any other valid plan, if only as a split-second glimpse.
“Last chance,” she said. “Keep going and I’ll have you.”
“You probably already do,” Beni said, heart pounding, afraid and exhilarated, entranced by the image, forcing himself to talk down at his scanner display, avoiding the eyes. “The Stones’ll have me if they don’t already.”
“Do you know what souvenir I have planned for you?”
“Please, Dormeuse. Do what you must, but enough of these threats.”
And sure enough, the intercept changed tack.
“You see no ethical problem with this, do you?”
Beni smiled at the shift, gave the rote answer. “There has never been a time where one age and culture hasn’t plundered the remains of another.”
“But why? There’s no wealth here. Nothing you can use. No gold, jewels or funerary possessions. Forget the rumours. Not enough precious materials in the circuitry and hardware. Certainly nothing accessible to you. No meaningful tech knowledge.”
“I know.”
“So why? Why do you use the term ‘tomb-robbers’ if-?”
“I prefer the ‘reasonable’ to the ‘threat’ mode, but could you bring on the next phase? I do need to concentrate.”
The phantom hovered, seemed to walk. “Such an arrogant young man. Someone has been talking to you. But I’d really like to know.”
Arrogant? Beni stared down at the display and considered it. Overconfident perhaps. Optimistic. Determined to be among the best. But hardly arrogant. “What have others said? Ramirez managed it. What did he say?”
“He was courteous but wouldn’t talk to me as freely as you seem prepared to. He probably suspected a voice trap, some trance dislocation induced by word pattern, tone and timbre. You don’t seem to fear
that.”
“There were others though, Dormeuse.” The maimed ones, he didn’t add. Barlow, Deckley, Kylow, Soont, the others, all skilled men and women, all souvenired. “What did they say?”
“Again, not too much,” the phantom answered. “Concentration does that, I suppose. And fear. I gather it is some emblematic thing, using the term ‘tomb-robber’ and all. You’re stealing the chance to do it, aren’t you? Stealing the privilege. The mystery of another age. Some said it’s rites of passage. The tombs are here, they said. Intact. Penetrable yet at the same time impenetrable ultimately. One age scorning another.”
“Scorning? They said that?” Beni found it hard to imagine any of those bluff or dour survivors back in town saying that. He was impressed anew. “But, Dormeuse, you’re the one who must feel something like that surely. Scorn.”
“A sentry profile can’t. I’m just a print of my original; my job is to represent my occupant’s self. Keep her safe. Or me, depending on how you view architectural psychonics.”
“But no body, I’m told. Just the stored personality index.”
“Ah, little hunter. I recognize a question when I hear it. One age does plunder another. You, too, would have my secrets. Perhaps that is what you come for, the chance to steal knowledge of my day, get the old sentry intercepts talking. Yet such a risk. Death and injury on the chance of just a little something more about the Tastan past.”
A stab of youthful defiance surged up, made Beni want to stay silent then, but, like countless others before him, he did want to know. He had to ask. “Your body is here?”