by Paula Guran
Jack stepped over the barrier on Lafayette at 9:30. He smiled at the small tech crew hovering around the lights and camera. The equipment was real—NYTAS kept a supply of such things—but the people running it were phantoms. Digital golems, Carolien liked to call them. Jack’s smile broadened when he saw the name Carolien had given their supposed film-in-progress: The Frog Prince of Manhattan.
For the frogs were there, or at least fifty or so, lined up, some on benches, outside of a retro-eighties coffee shop, a “pointy-shoe boutique” (Carolien’s term), and a hipster pet store, with King Frog in the front. Jack nodded to him. Hard to tell, but he thought he saw a light flicker in the king’s eyes.
Standing in the middle of the street, Jack looked around. Everything seemed in place. By his request, Carolien had set up the frogs and left. El wanted to come but Jack told her it would work best if no one else was there. They weren’t far away, he knew, and that was all right. If it worked he’d be happy to see them. And if not—well, maybe they could try to contain the Rev. Or rather, Jack Shade, version 2.0.
He was just about to get started when two actual people, a man and a woman, stepped over the rope and came toward him, right past the phantom film crew. He had a moment of alarm until he recognized their stern grey and black suits. The man spoke first, in that flat Voice of Authority. “John Shade. Whatever you are doing had better not involve outsiders.”
“Of course not,” Jack said. “That’s the point of the barrier. The one you just ignored?”
The woman said “COLE knows what it’s doing.” Despite her flat tone and blank expression, Jack caught that hint of interest. Not his concern, he thought.
The man said, “You know that it doesn’t matter to us which version survives.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I get that.”
“So long as nothing leaks.”
Jack said, “Just seal the barrier after you leave and everything will be fine.”
When the pair of them had stepped over the ropes and back to the world, they paused for a second to glance up and down the street, and then they left. At the corner, the woman looked back at Jack, nodded slightly, then followed her partner.
Jack stood in the street, facing the World Trade Center, just as when the whole thing had started. He was dressed all in black, partly because this was work—the Rev was still his client—and partly because he knew that’s how Johnny would be dressed. The only unusual thing he had on was a small leather pouch hung from a long cord around his neck.
He took a deep breath. “Ray,” he said. His fox appeared, tail curled up, face tilted toward Jack. He said, “Tell Horne I’m ready.” Ray’s tail jerked, and then he vanished.
This was the tricky part. Horne’s second task was to bring the Rev. Papa Click was the one who’d created the damn thing, so Johnny would believe him when he said Jack was down and now was the time to strike. But could Jack trust him? He hadn’t told Horne what he was going to do, but Horne could still warn the Rev to watch out. Jack didn’t think he would. El was watching through her mother, and this was Horne’s only chance to get both of them off his back. Jack shook his head. A pussy-whipped god.
There was a kind of crack in the air, something you couldn’t really see or hear, and then he was there. Dressed all in black, head slightly cocked to the side, a grin at the corner of his mouth. Jesus, Jack thought, do I look like that? Maybe the Rev was thinking the same thing.
Somewhere behind Jack, a man said, “Holy shit! Did you see that? That guy—”
Another man said, “Dude, it’s nothing. Just special effects. You know, CGI.”
“CGI?” his friend said. “This is the fucking street, man. That guy came out of nowhere.”
“Forget it,” the other said. Jack knew that in a second or two they would do exactly that. The barrier didn’t stop people seeing things, it just stopped them remembering.
Jack moved a couple of steps closer. It felt like pushing against something—the dream interface, Jack realized. The Rev was still not entirely here. Jack stopped now. Let him make the next move.
The Rev began to circle him, slowly, in long loops. That shimmer continued, and a couple of times Jack realized it was he himself who was flickering. He thought for a moment of something Anatolie suggested once, that there was only ever one person and all the rest of us were Dupes. Not this time, he thought. One of us has to go and one of us has to stay. It was that simple.
Johnny jerked his head toward the frogs. “Brought an audience, huh? Or maybe Carolien just wanted to have her friends watch me beat you. They were watching when I kissed her. You remember that, right? We’re going back to that pretty soon.” Jack didn’t move.
The Rev gestured toward the pouch around Jack’s neck. When he pointed his finger, it was like a stab of light that quickly vanished. “What the hell is that?” he said.
“Dragon seeds.”
The Rev looked shocked for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, man,” he said, “you that desperate? You’re gonna sow a race of warriors to try and beat me? Come on, that never works.”
Every Traveler knew the ancient Greek story of Kadmos of Thebes, who created an army by planting the teeth of a dragon. They knew what the story was actually about, and why it was a really, really bad idea.
“Not exactly,” Jack said. He lifted the pouch off his neck and emptied the contents into his left hand: six dark brown seeds, smooth and round. Jack was pretty sure the Rev would focus on what Jack was doing, and not on the fact that now they looked completely alike. Except, of course, for Jack’s scar.
Jack threw three of the seeds to Johnny’s left, the others to his right. Instantly, Duplicate Jack Shades sprang up. They were simple, more like sketches than a finished product, but they were there.
The Rev laughed, clapped his hands. “Wonderful,” he said. “Just like our old carny days. Not an army of warriors—a platoon of fake Jack Shades.” He looked at them all. “Come on,” he said to them. “I’m your brother.”
Jack had thought he might have to fake nervousness at this point, but the Rev wasn’t even looking at him. The six low-level Dupes ran at Johnny as if to attack him, until the Rev opened his arms wide then clapped his hands. There was a flash, and suddenly the Dupes were gone. For a few seconds, small lights, like fireflies, danced around the Rev’s body. “Best you got, Jack? You know what they say—what doesn’t kill me . . . ”
“Nietzsche?” Jack said. “You do a lot of reading in the dream world?”
The Rev laughed. “I was thinking G. Gordon Liddy.”
He’s drunk, Jack thought. Drunk on the energy Jack had just fed him. We’re almost there, and he’s not thinking. Because if he did think about it, the Rev would realize that Jack couldn’t attack him. Not with cheesy Dupes or anything else. Jack had no choice but to let the Rev win.
So he had to keep him off guard, rile him up. He said, “How can you take my place? You’re not me. You’re not even a real Duplicate. You’re just a badly made copy.”
“Bullshit!” the Rev said. “I’m you because you made me. Only I’m better than you. I’m you before you fucked yourself up. That’s why I’m taking over. To save you. To redeem you.”
“Face it, Johnny. You’re nothing but broken-up pieces. You were never meant to exist, except a down-on-his-luck sun god managed to dig through the garbage and find enough junk to slap you together.”
“Fuck you! He saved me. From your hatred. You tore me to pieces but he found me and brought me back. He filled me with holy light.”
“There,” Jack said. “You see? That’s him talking. I would never say shit like that.”
The Rev let out a cry of rage, then charged at Jack. He hit him in the face, the stomach. Jack made a show of fighting back, because the Rev would expect it, and it would feed the Rev’s desire to win, but it was just an act, for what could he do, he still had the Guest.
And it was all so strange. The blows were real, his face and body could feel every one of them, and at the same tim
e they seemed far away, something Jack was watching. Like a dream.
And then all his observations, all his analysis, ended, along with any pretense of fighting. He was on the ground now, broken, his lungs on fire, blood all over his face. The Rev reached down and yanked him to his feet. He held Jack’s face next to his, said, “See, Jack? You thought you could beat me. But you’re the one who’s done. Finished!”
“Bullshit,” Jack managed to whisper. “I’m still here. And you’re still a fake.”
“Not for long.” The Rev pulled Jack’s limp body against his, wrapped one leg around Jack to hold him in place, and then he opened Jack’s mouth and placed his own mouth tightly against it.
It wasn’t a kiss, no matter what it looked like. It was more like an extraction. Jack could feel himself pulled inside out, everything that was Jack Shade sucked out of him. Strangely, the last thing he remembered was a man’s voice, an onlooker. “Christ,” the voice said, “I’m all for marriage equality and shit, but this is freaky.” In a second or two, what the man had seen, what he’d said, would all be gone. Forgotten, as if they never existed.
Like Jack Shade. Sucked away, pulled into his enemy, nothing left of him. Like a forgotten dream.
Jonathan Marcus Shade, the new Jack, former Duplicate, former Revenant, the Man Who Came Back, the Man Who Took Over, stood in the middle of Lafayette Street. “I did it,” he said. He turned around, looked at the golems pretending to film it all, looked at the ropes and the stragglers on the other side who would never have the faintest idea of the incredible thing that had just happened here. “I did it!” he said again, “I beat him. I won.”
“Horne!” he called out, and looked for his Dream Hunter benefactor. “Are you here? Did you see?” No response. He looked for Carolien too, but all he saw were rows of frogs lined up like spectators. Maybe that’s why she’d brought them, so they could watch and report back to her. He imagined how he’d show up at her place later, how she’d greet him with champagne. Or Dutch beer and cheese. He laughed. Maybe he should go see Irene Yao first. Have a cup of tea from that fifteen-hundred-year-old teapot. And then—then he would go to his room. His room. Jack Shade’s room. He laughed. “I won!” he shouted.
He looked down at the street. Just as he thought, there was nothing left of that other one, the so-called original. Not even a bloodstain. In the end, once he came out of the dream world, there could only be one of them. He was never just a Dupe. From the very beginning he was better, Jack Shade without all that suffering.
He was here. He’d made it all the way through. He began to touch himself just to feel that solidness. His sides, his arms, his legs. He reached up and touched his forehead, his eyes, his hair. And then he froze. For his right hand had come up against a gnarled, twisted line of hard skin. A scar.
“No,” he said again. “That’s wrong. I don’t—I’m Handsome Johnny. I can’t—” He jerked his hands away from his face, held them in front of him, palms out, fingers spread wide. It must be a mistake, he thought. A residual memory. In a moment he would check again and it would all be fine, the scar gone, banished like its owner.
Something—something was happening to his hands. They were shaking, tremors he couldn’t control, couldn’t even lower them. And light filled them. No, not the hands, the fingernails. New Jack stared at them, confused, and suddenly scared. And as he did so, the light lifted off his fingers and into the air, moving like a swirling cloud. No. It was paper! Hundreds of cut-up bits of rice paper glowed and danced around each other in the air. It was right then that Johnny Rev, the Man Who Thought He’d Come Back, realized exactly what Jack Shade had done to him.
He lunged for the papers, the Cloud of Knowing, but it was too late. The papers coalesced into a stream that flew through the air to travel in a great swirling arc—right into the mouth of King Frog. For a moment there was a low grinding noise, and then a multicolored flash of light shot back across the street at the Traveler who just a moment ago had been staring at his hands.
It hit him in the forehead, enough of a jolt to unbalance him, so that he fell backward. He managed to turn in the air and land on his hands and knees. Somewhere behind him, a man who would soon forget he’d even been there yelled, “Cool!” and a woman, his date apparently, whispered loudly, “Shh! You’ll ruin the shot.” She too would forget, though at the end of the evening, when her friend would try to kiss her, she would turn away, annoyed with him for no reason she could figure out.
Shade was still on his knees, catching his breath, when a woman who never forgets anything came and crouched alongside him. “Jack?” she said. “It is you, yes?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m back.”
“Ah, thank god,” Carolien said, and when they stood up she kissed him.
When they’d separated, Jack asked, “Was that a test?” Carolien nodded happily, and Jack laughed.
It was Alexander Horne who’d given Jack the clue, when he inadvertently reminded Jack of the Rev’s actual words. Not kill Jack, just beat him. If the Rev could somehow win, only for a moment, that would satisfy the Guest. The other clue was the fact that Johnny was not an actual Duplicate, he was a dream of a Duplicate. He could enter the hard world the tough way, step by step—or, take over Jack’s body. If Jack could vacate it for a while the temptation would be too much to resist. Johnny would leave the dream world by entering Jack’s body and believe it was his own.
The question was, of course, how Jack could return. His final vision in the Court of Owls had shown him how you could transfer your memories, your physical knowledge, your loves and everything that mattered onto scraps of paper hidden under your fingernails. King Frog was the final trigger that would bring him back to his body.
Carolien put her arm around his shoulder to steady him. “Come home with me,” she said. “The golems will take care of everything.”
He moved away from her and stood up straighter to look around. There, just at the edge of the ropes, stood Elaynora Horne. Jack went over to her. “Are we good?” he said.
“I’m the one who should ask you that. It was my father that did this.”
“Screw your father. You and me—are we good?”
She took a deep breath, let it out. “Yes.”
Jack nodded, then kissed her lightly on the lips. “Thank you,” he said. Then he limped over to where Carolien already had a taxi waiting just beyond the ropes.
Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow he’d finally go get her that frog.
Epilogue
Jack Shade, Original Jack, stood a long time before the scuffed brown door on Bayard Street. There was something invisible about the doors to the upstairs apartment on this busy street of stores and restaurants. Invisible and all the same, each one a copy of all the others.
Did she know he was there? Probably. If she cared to monitor the street. If she cared to monitor him. Or maybe it wasn’t caring, just keeping track. Pay attention, she used to tell him. Don’t get distracted.
He turned away from the narrow apartment door and stepped through the open doorway of the Lucky Star Restaurant. It all looked the same—the worn linoleum floor, the old wooden chairs, the white bowls of sambal next to the aluminum napkin dispensers. And at the far end, standing behind the wooden order counter with its stack of paper menus, stood Mrs. Shen, her hair a little greyer, her fingers a little more gnarled, but otherwise unchanged.
There were only two occupied tables in this middle of the afternoon, one where two young neighborhood guys were silently eating a large plate of guy laan in oyster sauce, the other with a middle-aged white woman who’d pushed aside the remains of some noodle dish and was writing in a large green notebook.
Mrs. Shen looked up, about to recite some innocuous formula, then her mouth fell open and a second later she clapped her hands. “Jack!” she said. “What a nice surprise.”
“Hi, Mrs. Shen,” Jack said. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Are you back?” she asked. “More study?”
; He smiled. “Just a visit, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, a shame. We’ve missed you, Jack.”
“Me too.” He paused, then said, “She like anything special these days?”
“Seaweed and jellyfish salad in sesame garlic dressing.”
“Sounds good. Give me a double order, okay?”
“Of course.”
When Jack stepped outside again, the door to the upstairs apartments stood open. He smiled and began to walk up the five flights of stairs. At the top, her apartment door was open as well. Jack suspected it was the only door in Manhattan without multiple locks. Without any locks, actually.
“Hello, Jack,” she said as he walked in. She looked exactly the same as when he’d last seen her, stretched out on her reinforced bed, hands resting on the rope of dreads that crossed her belly.
“Hello,” he said. “I brought you some seaweed and jellyfish.”
“Thank you. Please put it on the chair, if you don’t mind.” Jack nodded, and set the brown bag on the plain wooden chair next to her bed.
Silence a moment, then Jack said, “I was talking to Alexander Horne recently.” A smile flickered across her face, so quickly no one but Jack would have noticed it. He said, “He mentioned you. Called you Anatolie the Younger.” No reaction. Jack took a breath. He said, “Are you a Duplicate?”
“Yes.”
Jack’s eyes closed a moment, then he said, “Were you always my teacher?”
“Yes.”
“Did I ever meet the origi—Anatolie the Elder?”
“No.”
“Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Not here.”
Jack was pretty sure he knew what “here” meant. He said, “Is she ever coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a long pause, then Jack nodded and said, “Thank you.” When Anatolie didn’t answer, he went back down the stairs.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Her novel The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award) is set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war. Its sequel, The House of Binding Thorns, will be published in April 2017.