by J. S. Morin
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE SITE OF LION ESTATES
BREAKING GROUND - MARCH 2561
LOTS STILL AVAILABLE. CONTACT GRACIE REAL ESTATE.
Carl did some quick math in his head and concluded that March was months away. This terraformed world didn’t have its own calendar, so it must have been synced with Earth Standard. A few months was plenty of time. He swung the Squall around and lodged it in the shrubbery behind the billboard.
The night air was cool. Sobering. It felt good in a clean, unprocessed sort of way. After a half kilometer walking along the side of the road, feeling the soft squish of soil beneath his boots, Carl decided where he drew the line on being at one with nature, and continued his journey afoot from atop the asphalt. The direction he chose was at random. Or at least, it was the direction he’d been going in the Squall, so he continued along that general line on foot.
Time passed weirdly with no way to mark it. Carl hadn’t brought a datapad, or anything else that might have seemed out of place in the twentieth century. He didn’t own a watch appropriate to the time period. There were no overhead signs, no clock towers, not even passers-by to ask. Left. Right. Repeat. He couldn’t remember ever having been awake for a hangover to set in before. It was looking like this was going to be his first, as the sky ahead hinted at a coming dawn.
Behind him, the hum of an engine approached. A truck was headed Carl’s way, its headlights shining in his eyes. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he waved the other overhead, signaling the vehicle. At the last moment, he had the presence of mind to quickstep out of the middle of the road.
The truck slowed down and stopped with a squeak of brake pads. The motor continued to run, chugging at the front and belching a fog of exhaust out the back. The side of the truck was painted, declaring it to belong to the Harksville Gazette. “Hey there, friend. Need a lift?”
The driver was a middle-aged man, gray-haired with a youthful face. The sort of man who did a menial job because he loved it, cheerful even in the pre-dawn hours. It was a gold strike, a straight flush, an oil gusher in a pauper’s yard. “Thanks, pops. My dogs have had it,” Carl said, trying his best to keep to the lingo. He opened the passenger door and climbed aboard. As he sank into the seat, his back informed him that he should have given it a rest hours ago.
“I didn’t see a car,” the driver said. “How’d you get way out here?”
“My old lady kicked me out,” Carl said. It was the truth, from a certain point of view. “Now I’m just looking to hit the next town. I’m Dick Derringer.” He stuck out a hand, which the driver shook without hesitation.
“Pete Mulrooney. Nice to meet you. Hey, any chance that’s Derringer like the singer?”
Dumb. He hadn’t thought up an alias ahead of time, and now he was named after a guy that this world knew better than he did. It was one thing slipping Hendrix and Jagger past clueless officers on the border space patrols. He was going to need a new alias once he got rid of Pete. “That’s Rick Derringer,” Carl said. “My folks were big fans. Called me Richard, but I go by Dick instead.”
“Got a place to stay when you get where you’re headed?” Pete asked. “Don’t mean to pry, but you don’t look like you planned this out ahead of time.”
“Brother, you don’t know the half of it,” Carl said. “I was flying on fumes. Figured I’d stop in the first diner I came across and have a few cups of coffee.” The thought of buying coffee drew Carl’s thoughts to one key oversight. He patted at his pockets. Not only was he broke in local currency, but he didn’t even have hardcoin terras on him. And he was in no position to take funds out of any digital account, either. Dead men have lousy credit.
Pete looked over as Carl’s realization struck. Carl wasn’t used to being so transparent, but he was in no condition to play it cool—despite being dressed for the part. “You haven’t got a dime, have you, son?”
“My… uh, my old lady…”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Pete said. “Been ridin’ solo going on ten years now myself. Lemme make you a deal. You help me unload these papers once we get to Anaheim, and I’ll buy you a cup of joe and a plate of hash browns.”
“Make it bacon and eggs, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
# # #
Esper woke to the musty smell of a room too long closed up. If she had realized that they weren’t going to be spending the night in the village, she’d have focused her attention on airing out the guest rooms and laundering the bedclothes. Mort had proved that there were limits to his magic—he couldn’t clean if his life depended on it. The spells layered over the keep had kept it from rot and infestation, but little else.
Her borrowed bedroom was walled in stone, dark gray granite with a texture that felt rough but looked smooth. No mortar sealed the stone blocks together, but not a sliver of light passed through from the outside. The exception was the stained glass window that depicted a scene of a lone tower upon a hilltop, and two smaller windows of clear glass. The edges of the stonework were carved in bas-relief, with dragons chasing knights, knights hunting stags, stags following maidens, and maidens riding dragons, all in an endless loop. If the carvings held any significance, their meaning escaped her.
There was no bath, and she hadn’t brought a change of clothes. Donning her dusty, scuffed dress from the day before, Esper headed downstairs to find Mort.
She found the wizard in the grand parlor, asleep in an armchair. Slouched down, robe and hair both rumpled, he hardly looked like the lord of a village keep. Esper wasn’t quite sure she believed it herself. It was the twenty-sixth century, well past the age when hereditary nobles ruled anything more than the occasional late-hour talk vid. But Thunderglade and the rest of New Camelot didn’t want to be a part of the twenty-sixth century. They were some muddled up mix of the Dark and Middle Ages.
Mort shifted in his sleep, and Esper flinched. She’d awakened him once before, when the circumstances were dire. Without her life in the balance, it seemed more prudent to leave him be. She turned and tiptoed from the room, but only got as far as the door.
“Lady Richelieu?” Mort asked with a yawn. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just going to look for some breakfast.”
Mort waved a hand. “No, not that. Why are you still on the grounds? I sent you away.”
Esper took a step back. “Mort. This is Thunderglade. We arrived last night. The last thing you said to me was to watch out for gargoyles.”
Mort blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Oh. Yes. Sorry. Hope they didn’t bother you during the night. Ornery creatures.”
“And you didn’t send me away?” Esper said.
Mort stood and stretched with an audible crackling of stiff joints. “And clean this place up myself? Our guest will be here in hours—give or take a few hours.”
“Can you finally tell me who it is that we’re expecting?”
“And spoil the surprise?” Mort asked. He was beginning to sound like himself again, full of snark and vinegar.
“Yes!”
Mort shuffled over to the window, still stiff and slow. When he threw back the heavy drapes, the dim parlor was washed in morning sunlight. “Fine. Have it your way. We’re meeting Keesha Bell.”
Esper frowned. She’d heard that name before. But where? Then it came to her. “She’s the one who got us that egg-delivery job.”
“Not exactly,” Mort said. “She got us the contact who got us the job. She just thought of us when she had something on her plate that didn’t fit her business.”
“What business would that be?”
“She’s a collector of this and that,” Mort said. “Some she keeps, some she sells. She’s made herself quite a living at it. But in this case, she’s got enough of a network that she can make inquiries without raising too many questions.”
“How can you ask questions without making them?” Esper asked before she stopped to think. This was entirely the sort of flippant, irrelevant question that Mort could follow for hours, off on a
journey to the far end of a tangent.
But Mort just grinned. “Point taken. She can seek answers to her own questions without inspiring them within others. And never underestimate the value of precise language. Intentional misinterpretation is a key form of argument. It’s good to practice it. And it’s better practice for avoiding those traps yourself. People can’t take what you say the wrong way if you give it to them flawlessly formed.”
“So Keesha Bell is going to tell us where Kubu is being held?” Esper asked, steering them back onto the conversation’s original course.
“Already found that out,” Mort said. “That’s not the tricky part. This Inviu of Chapath, she’s a wizard. Being laaku, that doesn’t frighten me. I’m sure I could flatten her like a house of cards in a thunderstorm. But what else has she got going on? Laaku aren’t known for shunning tech, not even their wizards. They might not know a screw from a bolt—”
“They’re pretty much the same thing,” Esper interjected, thanks to Roddy’s crash course in ship maintenance.
“But they don’t mind employing people who do, and living with sciencey stuff all around them. She’s sure to have taken precautions to guarantee her own safety.”
“Maybe not everyone’s as paranoid as you,” Esper replied.
“Most aren’t,” Mort said. “Many are dead. The rest are the ones to worry about. Now let’s get this place presentable. I didn’t know when I invited her here that it was in shambles.”
Esper didn’t say it. She wanted to, just to show Mort she’d picked up on it. He’d deny it, most likely, because he denied just about anything she puzzled out about him. But he was in a tizzy over making a good impression. This was the same wizard who wore a sweatshirt until the accumulated stains made it too stiff to pull over his head in the morning. The same wizard who only shaved when the scruff of his beard grew itchy. And now he was dusting furniture and trimming the garden paths? Mort was looking forward to seeing Keesha Bell for more than just information.
# # #
Sharky’s Pool Hall was lit by fluorescent bulbs in hooded awnings over each billiard table. Back lit smoke wafted from cigarettes and cigars. Every few seconds, a crack would sound from one table or another as phenolic resin balls collided. Players jawed at one another, boasted over victories, and called their shots. Ice clinked in glasses of various liquors. Paper currency rustled as it changed hands. Some of that currency was counted into Carl’s waiting hand.
“Double or nothing?” Carl offered. The gentleman in the shabby suit gave him a glare and walked away. Forty bucks wasn’t going to lose anyone his house, but it was sure to pay for a few nights in a hotel, a nice meal or three, and maybe a change of clothes. “Your loss, buddy.”
He had arrived mid-morning to a deserted room, barstools set upside down on tables and the bar. It was the middle of nowhere, halfway between Anaheim and San Jose, and the trucker traffic hadn’t picked up for the day. One of the bartenders had been cleaning the floors, and Carl offered him a hand in exchange for a couple practice games on the house. It had been years since he’d played, but there had been a few pool tables in the rec room aboard the ENV Justiciar. By the time the early crowd had arrived, two things had become clear. Carl had managed to get most of the rust scraped off his game, and most of the patrons of Sharky’s didn’t know the game worth a damn.
It was the faux-tourist thing popping up again. The stiffs who lived in New Cali just wanted the sniff, not the swallow. They came in and plunked money down on the table like it was the fare to a roller coaster or admission to a movie theater. For five or ten minutes at a pop, they got to feel like bad boys. Of course they weren’t all horrible, and Carl lost a game here and there; there were at least two other guys at Sharky’s hustling the rubes. But by tacit agreement, they stayed out of each other’s way and kept on winning. Carl was beginning to wonder why he bothered running a starship at all.
“Who’s got next?” he called out. A few heads turned, gave him a wary look, then turned back. Drinkers. Spectators. What he needed were players. “C’mon. Friendly game?”
Carl managed to get in a few rounds of nine-ball with no stakes, but that wasn’t helping his bankroll. Who knew how long he’d have to play Chet Diamond, his new alias. The more he could rack up to pad his pockets, the less chance he’d have to resort to honest work. Pete the newsman might have slipped him a couple bucks for bus fare in exchange for help with his morning route, but that wasn’t how Carl wanted to spend his time on the lam. If he was supposed to be dead, then this was sort of like an afterlife. He’d be damned if he was going to spend his afterlife breaking his back lugging stacks of newspapers.
Finally some lively marks walked in. It was after dark, and Carl was running on a belly full of cheap beer and greasy bar food. If the fellas in the patched denim jackets and bandannas were anything like what they were pretending to be—a gang of no-goodnik bikers—then they’d be game.
“Howdy, strangers,” Carl called out. He raised a hand and gave a twitch of a wave, leaning up against the table he’d claimed for most of the day. “You here to drink, play, or do a little of both?” He raised a brown bottle of beer to his lips to make the point that both was his style.
“How come I never seen you around here?” one of the bikers replied, his voice bellowing out for the whole pool hall to hear. He was the biggest of the lot, beer-bellied and bearded, with his jacket torn off at the sleeves to make a ragged vest. “And you callin’ me stranger?”
“I travel a lot,” Carl said, smiling. “Every place I go’s full of strangers. Got nothing against strangers though. You game?”
Every bar and pool hall had regulars. They had a way of acting more at home than the owners did. Up until now, Carl hadn’t been able to pick out any true regulars at Sharky’s. But these bikers owned the place. It was time to dig a little deeper into his pockets, up his game, and squeeze these road-pilots for all they were worth.
“Sully, hand over Emma Lou,” the biker said to the bartender. In nine hours of loitering, Carl hadn’t picked up on the bartender’s name. But Sully ducked behind the bar and came up with a long, narrow case and handed it over to one of the lead biker’s companions. Inside was a pool cue, disassembled, and the assistant biker turned it into its weaponized form for his boss. “Whadda they call you?” he asked Carl.
“Chet Diamond,” Carl replied, touching a finger to his temple in a piss-poor salute. “How ‘bout yourself? You seem like top dog around here. You got a name?”
“Call me Panhead,” he replied. He sauntered over to Carl with Emma-Lou in hand and a glass mug of draft beer that someone pressed into his hand as he passed by. He took down the entire mug in one long pull, gasping at the end. “And you’re in a heap of trouble, pardner.”
Carl racked up a game of nine-ball. “Go ahead and break. Ten bucks a game.” He slapped a ten-dollar bill onto the side of the table.
“We don’t play for sissy money around here,” Panhead said. Hoots and encouragement from his gang echoed the sentiment. “Twenty’s the least I’ll take out Emma Lou for. And since she’s already out, you better be willing to play.”
“I was just being neighborly, offering a warm-up game,” Carl replied, fishing in his pocket and adding a pair of fives to his ten.
Panhead grinned, showing off a missing front tooth. He pulled out a roll of bills from the inside pocket of his vest. Sliding out a single bill, he mashed it down onto the edge of the table with a greasy hand. Carl fixated on the roll of bills as it disappeared back to the sweat-stained interior of that vest. There had to have been thousands there. He wouldn’t risk trying to bankrupt Panhead, but the guy could afford to lose a few hundred without getting bent out of shape over it.
The biker walked around to the head of the table and broke with a thunderous crash. Balls scattered, but none went in. Carl took his turn and dropped the 1 and 2 balls before missing a shot. Panhead sank the 3, but then left Carl the 4, 5, and 6 balls, before Carl made a combination shot to sink t
he 9.
“Nice game,” Carl said, scooping up Panhead’s money from the table but pointedly leaving his own bet in place.
“Lemme have another shot,” Panhead insisted. Carl wasn’t going to dissuade him. “Forty this time.”
With a shrug, Carl added Panhead’s losses from the previous game to his own bet. “Sure thing, pal. Just gimme a minute.”
Grabbing his winnings, Carl headed for the men’s room. This was a setup. Nobody played like Panhead did, not if he owned his own cue with a name and everything. The increase in the bet size was his cue to leave. Panhead was going to hustle him. No one got to be a con man without learning the other guys’ tricks. Carl wasn’t good enough to hustle pool, but he sure knew what a hustle looked like. He could always play the line a little longer and call it a night just before Panhead pulled the rope and let the guillotine drop on him. It was a retrovert colony, for God’s sake; it wasn’t like they were going to have real criminals. Panhead and his boys weren’t going to dust him over a game of pool. Hell, the whole point of “dusting” someone required energy weapons or magic, neither of which fit the vibe in this colony.
The men’s room was everything Carl had hoped for. A single urinal and toilet, a sink, and a window that opened to the outside. There was something undignified about climbing through a window and skulking off into the night. It didn’t fit with the slick-back hair and jeans-and-leather look. But Carl was a realist—that look was as phony as the rest of the colony. He was a twenty-sixth-century guy. Maybe he liked the music and a few of the old flatvids from the era, but he didn’t owe twentieth century “cool” a damn thing.
Carl flipped the little metal hook on the door into the loop on the doorjamb. It would stop anyone entering inadvertently and stop exactly no one over the age of five from breaking in. The window opened easily. With the toilet for a stepladder, he’d be able to make it out with little difficultly or dignity. His jacket would get in the way, so—