But it’s Monday: the first day of classes for UW’s winter term. Sigh.
K and Miranda would never skip class, even if they were literally on fire. Shar skips on occasion, but she still has to go to campus. Her boyfriend, Richard, will fuss if she doesn’t meet him for coffee.
As for me … hell, I don’t need to go to class. I know everything already. But my grades sucked so badly last semester, I’ve been put under academic review. Translation: I have to improve or I’ll get expelled.
The actual challenge will be how to raise my marks convincingly, without pumping them so high the profs think I’m cheating. Step one will be going to class. Step two will be staying awake. Step three will be not drawing Cape Tech schematics while I’m sitting bored to death in the back row.
Anyway, all four of us grudgingly conclude that sleep is not going to happen in the near future. Instead, we decide to start the term self-indulgently with a full-calorie breakfast. Aria, Dakini, and Zircon become Miranda, Shar, and K, and we all hustle off to Mel’s Diner.
Mel’s is just a block from the university campus, the sort of place with pictures of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe on the wall, and ABBA’s greatest hits on the sound system. Most people who eat at Mel’s weren’t alive when ABBA was around, let alone during Dean’s or Monroe’s lifetimes. But the food is good, so nobody minds the crypto-meta-nostalgic iconography. It’s like having breakfast at Grandma’s.
When we get to the diner, it’s almost empty—no one except two guys dressed for a day in construction. (There’s always construction around the university.) The guys check out the four of us, and of course they home in on Miranda; but she doesn’t give them a glance, so eventually one smiles at me.
He’s not creepy about it. He’s kind of cute. I smile back.
I’m not horny, but I feel like I could be horny if it wasn’t 8 fucking A.M. Thank baby Jesus, Robin Hood didn’t break me. I’ll be swiping right again in no time.
We pick a table in the far back corner where we can talk without being overheard. We order food. We guzzle coffee. We converse. My roommates want to hear what I did in Sherwood Forest. I want to hear what’s happened in the outside world. Much catching up ensues … until suddenly everything stops.
My friends freeze midsentence. ABBA freezes mid-mamma. On the opposite side of the diner, the coffee being poured by a waitress becomes a motionless stream.
I sigh and turn toward the door. I’m not surprised to see Calon Arang.
“Show-off,” I say.
She ignores me. She’s looking at the fake memorabilia on the walls. She wants me to know she’s appalled by the decor.
“Come on, Calon,” I say. “You haven’t always been part of the zero-point-oh-one percent. If you’re the real Calon Arang, you lived in a grass hut with chickens in the yard.”
She gives me a look. “Chickens only came to Bali when Europeans did. I prefer ducks.”
“Greasy spoon diners don’t serve duck,” I say. “Not even duck eggs. But they make an awesome Western omelet.”
I reach out with my foot and hook the toe of my boot around a chair from a nearby table. I pull the chair across the floor, then set it nicely at the end of our table. “Want to join us?”
Calon doesn’t answer, but she makes her way toward me. She doesn’t sit. “You seem in good health,” she says.
“You mean, considering that you put me in a fucking exploding dress so you could make Robin Hood look like a murderer?”
“Yes, that.” Calon shrugs. “Would you believe me if I said I thought you might survive? I knew Maid Marian had a healing machine. There was a chance you might be saved if she moved quickly.”
I politely refrain from spitting in her face. “Doesn’t matter if I believe you or not. All I care is that you keep our deal.” I point to K. “This is my friend—the one with the vampire blood bond. Can you break it?”
Calon stares at K intently. Calon tilts her head … moves to look at K from another angle … leans in close and puts three fingers on K’s forehead. Finally, Calon chuckles softly. “The blood bond is already broken. A bond did exist, but now it’s gone.”
“How could that happen?” I ask.
“Either someone persuaded the vampire to sever the bond voluntarily, or else someone cast an extremely powerful spell to break the bond by force.”
“Those are the only two possibilities?”
“Those are the only two probabilities,” Calon says. “I would never pretend to know what’s possible. We live in a world where the Dark and Light mangle reality like two toddlers fighting over a toy. For all I know, your friend may have passed through a field of quaternion energy while hopping on one foot and reciting the Gettysburg Address, which somehow made the blood bond snap like a cheap rubber band. No one knows all the rules, Jools. And whatever the rules are at this moment, they’ll change when we aren’t looking.”
She’s right. All bets are off when the Dark or Light get jiggy. Like, take a for-instance: K’s blood bond might have been cured by the medi-tank. The tank literally rewrote the DNA in all of K’s cells. It inserted lizard genes, then took them out again. Temporarily, K’s blood became qualitatively different. Could that have broken the bond?
Maybe. The medi-tank changed me, too, right? It stole my lovely ink, and I’m no longer tempted by booze. That had to be the tank’s fault, right?
Because the only other explanation is that I’ve replaced one addiction with another. My drinking problem has become a tinkering problem, Mad Genius–style. And now I’ll start going on benders during which I black out and start building death rays.
Naahhhh. It was the medi-tank’s doing. It cleaned me out and sobered me up. I’m fine.
And the tank also broke K’s blood bond. Because another possibility is that K broke the bond by making a deal with Lee. K’s too smart to do that. It would be too out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fires-of-hell.
Oh, K, you dumbass. What have you done?
“Are we finished here?” Calon asks.
I bring my thoughts back to the here and now. I could ask a lot more questions—such as how Calon found me here, and whether she’ll keep tempting me with proposals that will likely get me killed. But any answers Calon gives me will be half truths at best. She’ll try to use me, and I’ll try to use her.
Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship.
(Really, Jools? Yes. I’m stone cold sober and still making bad choices. At least I’m consistent.)
I nudge the empty chair with my foot. “Sure you don’t want breakfast? Everything comes with home fries.”
Calon doesn’t smile. But she doesn’t not smile. After a heartbeat, action throughout the diner suddenly resumes.
Calon sits in the empty chair and says, “Introduce me.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to my excellent agent, Lucienne Diver, and my equally excellent editor, Greg Cox. Also thanks to copy editor MaryAnn Johanson and Tor staffer Christopher Morgan. And thanks once again to Robert J. Sawyer for hosting “Rob’s Write-Off Retreat” where some of this book was written.
Thanks to everyone who has said nice things about this series, including Alyx Dellamonica, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Robson, and Charles Stross. Thanks to all those in the comic book industry who continue to develop superheroes and help them change with the times.
Gratitude as always to Wikipedia and the people behind it, as well as the many other web resources I consult on a daily basis for nuggets of knowledge and trivia.
Thanks to various people, places, and things around the city and region of Waterloo for being such good sports as I lay waste to prominent landmarks. Also a big shout-out to the Kitchener Public Library for providing so many services I need and love. Oh, and speaking of Kitchener, thanks to the entire city for mutely accepting that it doesn’t exist in the Dark/Spark world. There’s a tragic story there, and maybe some day I’ll get around to telling it.
ALSO BY JAMES ALAN GARDNER
All T
hose Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault
About the Author
James Alan Gardner (Jim) started reading comic books near the beginning of the Silver Age, and never really stopped. Eventually, he picked up a couple of math degrees from the University of Waterloo, after which he immediately started writing fiction instead. He has published numerous novels and shorter works, including pieces that made the finalist lists for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He has won the Aurora Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Readers’ Choice Award. In his spare time, he teaches kung fu to six-year-olds and indulges the vices of his pet rabbit. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. Deimatic Behavior
2. Interspecies Competition
3. Mutualism
4. Fixed Action Patterns
5. Punctuated Equilibrium
6. Social Grooming
7. Natural Habitat
8. Adaptive Coloration
9. Selective Pressures
10. Pupation
11. Courtship Display
12. Alternative Ecosystems
13. Migration
14. Feeding Strategies
15. Mechanisms of Fight or Flight
16. Epigenetic Inhibition
17. Junk DNA
18. Ecdysis
19. Territorial Aggression
20. Immune Responses
21. Potential Extinction Vectors
22. Population Renewal
Acknowledgments
Also by James Alan Gardner
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THEY PROMISED ME THE GUN WASN’T LOADED
Copyright © 2018 by James Alan Gardner
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Getty Images
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor ® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9878-9 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9877-2 (ebook)
eISBN 9780765398772
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: November 2018
* A sequence of behaviors that an animal performs “robotically” from start to finish, without being able to stop.
* The formula for kinetic energy.
* Alteration of a gene to prevent it from being used.
* Shedding of skin, e.g. in snakes.
They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded Page 36