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It took another twelve minutes to clear the taxis. Ralph stayed at Hub One while the interception operations were running, receiving datavises from the two Squad commanders.
The first taxi was laid up beside one of the rivers which meandered through Pasto. It had stopped interfacing with the route and flow processors as it drew up next to a boathouse. Road monitor cameras had been trained on the grey vehicle for eleven minutes, seeing no movement from it or the boathouse.
The AT Squad members closed in on it, using standard leapfrog advancement tactics. Its lights were off, doors frozen half-open, no one inside. A technical officer opened a systems access panel and plugged his processor block into it. The police AI probed the vehicle’s circuitry and memory cells.
“All clear,” Diana reported. “A short circuit turned the chassis live, blew most of the processors, and screwed the rest. No wonder it showed up like one of our hostiles.”
The second taxi had been abandoned in an underground garage below a residential mews. The AT Squad arrived just as the taxi company’s service crew turned up to take it away on their breakdown hauler. Everyone at Hub One witnessed the scenes of hysterics and anger as the AT Squad took no chances with the three service crew.
After running an on-the-spot diagnostic, the crew discovered the taxi’s electron matrix was faulty, sending huge power spikes through the on-board circuitry.
“Gallagher has to be on the bus,” Landon McCullock said as he cancelled his datavise to the AT Squad, the service crew’s inventive obscenities fading from his borrowed perception.
“I can confirm that,” Diana said. “The damn thing won’t respond to the halt orders we’re issuing via the motorway route and flow processors.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t alter programs with their electronic warfare technique,” Leonard DeVille said.
“It hasn’t altered its route, it just won’t respond,” she shot back. An almost uninterrupted three-hour stint spent interfacing with, and directing, the AIs, was beginning to fatigue her nerves.
Warren Aspinal gave his political colleague a warning frown.
“The AT Squad teams will be over the bus in ninety seconds,” Bernard Gibson said. “We’ll see exactly what’s going on then.”
Ralph datavised a tactical situation request into the hub’s processor array. His neural nanonics visualized a map of Xingu, a rough diamond with a downward curling cat’s tail. Forty-one of Moyce’s delivery lorries had been located and annihilated now, green and purple symbols displaying their movements, the locations when they were targeted. The bus was a virulent amber, proceeding down the M6 motorway which ran the length of Mortonridge, the long spit of mountainous land which poked southwards across the equator.
He switched to accessing the sensor suite on the lead hypersonic. The plane was just decelerating into subsonic flight. There was nothing any discrimination filter program could do about the vibration as it aerobraked. Ralph had to wait it out, impatience heating his blood feverishly. If Angeline Gallagher wasn’t on the bus, then they’d probably lost the continent.
The M6 was laid out below him in the clear tropical air. The hypersonic’s shaking damped out, and he could see hundreds of stationary cars, vans, buses, and lorries parked on the motorway’s service lanes. Headlights illuminated the lush verges, hundreds of people were milling around, some even settling down for midnight picnics by their vehicles.
The static pageant made the bus easy to spot, the one moving light source on the motorway, heading south at about two hundred kilometres an hour. It roared on past the riveted spectators lining the lane barrier, immune to the priority codes being fired into its circuitry from the motorway’s route and flow processors.
“What the hell is that thing?” Vicky Keogh voiced the unspoken question of everyone accessing the hypersonic’s sensor suite.
The Longhound Bus Company had a standardized fleet of sixty-seaters made on the Esparta continent, with a distinct green and purple livery. They were used all over Ombey, stitching together every continent’s cities and towns with an extensive, fast, and frequent service. The principality didn’t yet have the economy or population to justify vac train tubes linking its urban areas like Earth and Kulu. So the Longhound buses were a familiar sight on the motorways; more or less everyone on the planet had ridden on one at some time in their lives.
But the runaway vehicle speeding down the M6 looked nothing like a normal Longhound. Where the Longhound’s body was reasonably smooth and trim, this had the kind of sleek profile associated with the aerospace industry. A curved, wedge-shaped nose blending back into an oval cross-section body, with sharp triangular fin spoilers sprouting out of the rear quarter. It had a dull silver finish, with gloss-black windows. Greasy grey smoke belched out of a circular vent just behind the rear wheel set.
“Is it on fire?” a disconcerted Warren Aspinal asked.
“No, sir.” Diana sounded ridiculously happy. “What you’re seeing there is its diesel exhaust.”
“A what exhaust?”
“Diesel. This is a Ford Nissan omnirover; it burns diesel in a combustion engine.”
The Prime Minister had been running his own neural nanonics encyclopedia search. “An engine which burns hydrocarbon fuel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s ridiculous, not to mention illegal.”
“Not when this was built, sir. According to my files, the last one rolled off the Turin production line in 2043 AD. That’s the city of Turin on Earth.”
“Have you a record of any being imported by a museum or a private vehicle collector?” Landon McCullock asked patiently.
“The AIs can’t find one.”
“Jenny Harris reported a phenomenon similar to this back on Lalonde,” Ralph said. “She saw a fanciful riverboat when I sent her on that last mission. They’d altered its appearance so it seemed old-fashioned, something from Earth’s pre-technology times.”
“Christ,” Landon McCullock muttered.
“Makes sense,” Diana said. “We’re still getting a correct identification code from its processors. They must have thrown this illusion around the Longhound.”
The hypersonic closed on the bus, sliding in over the motorway, barely a hundred metres up. Below it, the omnirover was weaving from side to side with complete disregard for the lane markings. The ceaseless and random movement made it difficult for the pilot to stay matched directly overhead.
Ralph realized what had been bothering his subconscious, and requested a visual sensor to zoom in. “That’s more than just a holographic illusion,” he said after studying the image. “Look at the bus’s shadow under those lights, it matches the outline.”
“How do they do that?” Diana asked. Her voice was full of curiosity, with a hint of excitement bleeding in.
“Try asking Santiago Vargas,” Vicky Keogh told her sharply.
“I can’t even think of a theory that would allow us to manipulate solid surfaces like that,” Diana said defensively.
Ralph grunted churlishly. He’d had a similar conversation back on Lalonde when they were trying to figure out how the LDC’s observation satellite was being jammed. No known principle. The whole concept of an energy virus was a radical one.
“Possession,” Santiago Vargas called it.
Ralph shivered. His Christian belief had never been that strongly rooted, but like a good Kingdom subject, it was always there. “Our immediate concern is what do we do about the bus. You might manage to land AT Squad teams on the thing if they were equipped with airpack flight suits, but they can hardly jump down from the hypersonic.”
“Use the SD platforms to chop up the motorway ahead of it,” Admiral Farquar suggested. “Force it to stop that way.”
“Do we know how many people were on board?” Landon McCullock asked.
“Full complement when it left Pasto spaceport, I’m afraid,” Diana reported.
“Damn. Sixty people. We have to make at least an effort to halt it.”
“We’d have to reinforce the AT Squads first,” Ralph said. “Three hypersonics isn’t enough. And you’d have to stop the bus precisely in the centre of a cordon. With sixty possible hostiles riding on it, we’d have to be very certain no one broke through. That’s wild-looking countryside out there.”
“We can have reinforcements there in another seven minutes,” Bernard Gibson said.
“Shit—” It was a datavise from the pilot. A big javelin of white fire streaked up from the bus, punching the hypersonic’s belly. The plane quaked, then peeled away rapidly, almost rolling through ninety degrees. Bright sparkling droplets of molten ceramic sprayed out from the gaping hole in its fuselage to splash and burn on the motorway’s surface. Its aerodynamics wounded, it started juddering continuously, losing height. The pilot tried desperately to right it, but he was already too low. He came to the same conclusion as the flight computer and activated the crash protection system.
Foam under enormous pressure fired into the cabin, swamping the AT Squad members. Valency generators turned it solid within a second.
The plane hit the ground, ploughing a huge gash through the vegetation and soft black loam. Nose, wings, and tailplane crumpled and tore, barbed fragments spinning off into the night. The bulky cylinder which was the cabin carried on for another seventy metres, flinging off structural spars and smashed ancillary modules. It came to a jarring halt, thudding into a steep earthen bluff.
The valency generators cut off, and foam sluiced out of the wreckage, mingling with the mud. Figures stirred weakly inside.
Bernard Gibson let out a painful breath. “I think they’re all okay.”
One of the other two hypersonics was circling back towards the crash. The second took up position a respectful kilometre behind the bus.
“Oh, Christ,” Vicky Keogh groaned. “The bus is slowing. They’re going to get off.”
“Now what?” the Prime Minister demanded. He sounded frightened and angry.
“One AT Squad can’t possibly contain them,” Ralph said. It was like speaking treason. I betrayed those people. My failure.
“There are sixty people on that bus,” an aghast Warren Aspinal exclaimed. “We might be able to cure them.”
“Yes, sir, I know that.” Ralph hardened his expression, disguising how worthless he felt, and looked at Landon McCullock. The police chief obviously wanted to argue; he glanced at his deputy, who shrugged helplessly.
“Admiral Farquar?” Landon McCullock datavised.
“Yes.”
“Eliminate the bus.”
Ralph watched through the hypersonic’s sensor suite as the laser blast from low orbit struck the fantasm vehicle. Just for an instant he saw the silhouette of the real Longhound inside the illusory cloak, as if the purpose of the weapon was really to expose truths. Then the energy barrage incinerated the bus along with a thirty-metre-diameter circle of road.
When he looked around the faces of everyone sitting at Hub One, he saw his own dismay and horror bounced right back at him.
It was Diana Tiernan who held his gaze, her kindly old face crumpled up with tragic sympathy. “I’m sorry, Ralph,” she said. “We weren’t quick enough. The AIs have just told me the bus stopped at the first four towns on its scheduled route.”
Chapter 03
Al Capone dressed as Al Capone had always dressed: with style. He wore a double-breasted blue serge suit, a paisley pattern silk tie, black patent leather shoes, and a pearl-grey fedora, rakishly aslant. Gold rings set with a rainbow array of deep precious stones glinted on every finger, a duck-egg diamond on his pinkie.
It hadn’t taken him long to decide that the people in this future world didn’t have much in the way of fashion sense. The suits he could see all followed the same loose silk design, although their colourful slimline patterns made them appear more like flappy Japanese pyjamas. Those not in suits wore variants on vests and sports shirts. Tight-fitting, too, at least for people under thirty-five. Al had stared at the dolls to start with, convinced they were all hookers. What kind of decent gal would dress like that, with so much showing? Skirts which almost didn’t cover their ass, shorts that weren’t much better. But no. They were just ordinary, smiling, happy, everyday girls. The people living in this city weren’t so strung up on morality and decency. What would have given a Catholic priest apoplexy back home didn’t raise an eyebrow here.
“I think I’m gonna like this life,” Al declared.
Strange life that it was. He seemed to have been reincarnated as a magician: a real magician, not like the fancy tricksters he’d booked for his clubs back in Chicago. Here, whatever he wanted appeared out of nowhere.
That had taken a long while to get used to. Think and . . . pow. There it was, everything from a working Thompson to a silver dollar glinting in the hot sun. Goddamn useful for clothes, though. Brad Lovegrove had worn overalls of shiny dark red fabric like some kind of pissant garbage collector.
Al could hear Lovegrove whimpering away inside him, like having a leprechaun nesting at the centre of his brain. He was bawling like a complete bozo, and making about as much sense. But there was some gold among the dross, twenty-four-karat nuggets. Like—when he first got his marbles together Al had thought this world was maybe Mars or Venus. Not so. New California didn’t even orbit the same sun as Earth. And it wasn’t the twentieth century no more.
Je-zus, but a guy needed a drink to help keep that from blowing his head apart.
And where to get a drink? Al imagined the little leprechaun being squeezed, as if his brain were one giant muscle. Slowly contracting.
A macromall on the intersection between Longwalk and Sunrise, Lovegrove squealed silently. There’s a specialist store there with liquor from every Confederation planet, probably even got Earth bourbon.
Drinks from clear across the galaxy! How about that?
So Al started walking. It was a lovely day.
The sidewalk was so wide it was more like a boulevard in itself; there were no paving slabs, instead the whole strip had been made from a seamless sheet, a material which was a cross between marble and concrete. Luxuriant trees sprouted up through craters in the surface every forty yards or so, their two-foot sprays of floppy oval flowers an impossible shade of metallic purple.
He spotted a few trashcan-sized trucks trundling sedately among the walkers enjoying the late-morning sunshine, machinery smoother than Henry Ford had ever dreamed of. Utility mechanoids, Lovegrove told him, cleaning the sidewalk, picking up litter and fallen leaves.
The base of each skyscraper was given over to classy delis and bars and restaurants and coffee shops; tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, just like a European city. Arcades pierced deep into the buildings.
From what Al could see, it was the same kind of rich man’s playground setup on the other side of the street, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. Not that you could walk over to be sure, there was no way past the eight-foot-high glass and metal barrier which lined the road.
Al stood with his face pressed to the glass for some time, watching the silent cars zoom past. Big bullets on wheels. All of them shiny, like coloured chrome. You didn’t even have to steer them no more, Lovegrove told him, they did it themselves. Some kind of fancy electrical engine, no gas. And the speed, over two hundred kilometres an hour.
Al knew all about kilometres; they were what the French called miles.
But he wasn’t too sure about using a car that he couldn’t drive himself, not when it travelled that fast. And anyway, his presence seemed to mommick up electricity. So he stuck to walking.
The skyscrapers gave him vertigo they were so tall, and all you could see when you looked up at them was reflections of more skyscrapers. They seemed to bend over the street, imprisoning the world below. Lovegrove told him they were so high that their tops were designed to sway in the wind, rocking twenty—thirty metres backwards and forwards in slow motion.
“Shut up,” Al growled.
The leprechaun curled up tighter, like a knotted snake.
People looked at Al—his clothes. Al looked at people, fascinated and jubilant. It was a jolt seeing blacks and whites mixing free, other types too, light-skinned Mediterranean like his own, Chinese, Indian. Some seemed to have dyed their hair completely the wrong colour. Amazing.
And they all appeared so much at ease with themselves, owning a uniform inner smile. They had a nonchalance and surety which he’d never seen before. The devil which drove so many people back in the twenties was missing, as if the city elders had abolished worry altogether.
They also had astonishingly good health. After a block and a half Al still hadn’t seen anyone remotely overweight. No wonder they wore short clothes. A world where everyone was in permanent training for the big game, even the seventy-year-olds.
“You still got baseball, ain’t you?” Al muttered under his breath.
Yes, Lovegrove confirmed.
Yep, paradise all right.
After a while he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. He’d been walking for a quarter of an hour, and it didn’t look as if he’d got anywhere. The massive avenue of skyscrapers hadn’t changed at all.
“Hey, buddy,” he called.
The black guy—who looked like a prizefighter—turned and gave an amused grin as he took in Al’s clothes. His arm was around a girl: Indian skin, baby blonde hair. Her long legs were shown off by a pair of baggy culottes.
Cutie pie, Al thought, and grinned at her. A real sweater girl. It suddenly struck him that he hadn’t hit the sack with a woman for six centuries.
She smiled back.
“How do I call a cab around here?”
“Datavise the freeway processors, my man,” the black guy said expansively. “City runs a million cabs. Don’t make a profit. But then that’s what us dumb taxpayers are for, to make up the shortfall, right?”
“I can’t do the data thing, I ain’t from around here.”
The girl giggled. “You just get off a starship?”
Al tipped the rim of his fedora with two fingers. “Kind of, lady. Kind of.”
“Neat. Where you from?”
“Chicago. On Earth.”
“Hey, wow. I never met anyone from Earth before. What’s it like?”
Al’s grin lost its lustre. Je-zus, but the women here were forward. And the black guy’s thick arm was still draped over her shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind his girl making conversation with a total stranger. “One city’s just like another,” Al said; he gestured lamely at the silver skyscrapers, as if that was explanation enough.
“City? I thought you only had arcologies on Earth?”
“Look, you going to tell me how to get a fucking cab, or what?”
He’d blown it. The moment he saw the man’s expression harden, he knew.
“You want us to call one for you, buddy ?” The man was taking a longer, slower look at Al’s clothes.
“Sure,” Al bluffed.
“Okay. No problem. It’s done.” A phony smile.
Al wondered exactly what it was the man had actually done. He didn’t have no Dick Tracy wrist radio to call for a cab or anything. Just stood there, smiling, playing Al for a sucker.
Lovegrove was filling Al’s head with crap about miniature telephones in the brain. He had one fitted himself, he said, but it had packed up when Al possessed him.
“Going to tell me about Chicago now?” the girl asked.
Al could see how worried she was. Her voice, mannerisms, the way she had merged into her man’s encircling arm. They all telegraphed it, and he knew how to read the signs. Fear in other people was wholly familiar.
He thrust his face forwards toward the black guy, snarling at the wiseass bastard. Just for an instant three long scars pulsed hotly on his left cheek. “Gonna remember you, cocksucker. Gonna find you again. Gonna teach you respect , and, buddy, it’s gonna be the real hard way to learn.” The old rage was burning in his body now, limbs trembling, voice rising to a thunderous roar. “Nobody shits on Al Capone! You got that? Nobody treats me like some dog turd you stepped in. I fucking ruled Chicago. I owned that city. I am not some asswipe street punk you can take for a ride. I. Deserve. RESPECT.”
“Bastard Retro!” The man swung a punch.
Even if Lovegrove’s body hadn’t been enhanced with the energistic power which possessing souls exuded in the natural universe Al would probably have beaten him. His years in Brooklyn had pitched him into countless brawls, and people had quickly learned to steer clear of his awesome temper.
Al ducked instinctively, his right fist already coming up. The blow was focused, mentally and physically. He struck the man perfectly, catching him on the side of his jaw.
There was an ugly sound of bone shattering. Dead silence. The man flew backwards five yards through the air, hitting the sidewalk in a crumpled sprawl. He slid along the carbon concrete composite for another couple of yards before coming to rest, completely inert. Blood began to splatter from his mouth where serrated bone had punctured his cheek and lip.
Al stared, surprised. “Goddamn!” He started to laugh delightedly.
The girl screamed. She screamed and screamed.
Al glanced around, suddenly apprehensive. Everyone on the broad sidewalk was looking at him, at the injured black guy. “Shut up,” he hissed at the loopy broad. “Shut up!” But she wouldn’t. Just: scream, and scream, and scream. Like it was her profession.
Then there was another sound, cutting through her bawling, rising every time she took a breath. And Al Capone realized it wasn’t just handguns he could recognize after six hundred years. Police sirens hadn’t changed much either.
He started to run. People scattered ahead of him the way kittens ran from a pit bull. Cries and yells broke out all around.
“Stop him!”
“Move!”
“Stinking Retro.”
“He killed that dude. One punch.”
“No! Don’t try to—”
A man was going for him. Beefy and hard-set, crouched low for a pro football tackle. Al waved a hand, almost casually, and white fire squirted into the hero’s face. Black petals of flesh peeled back from the bone, sizzling. Thick chestnut hair flamed to ash. A dull agonized grunt, cutting off as pain overloaded his consciousness, and the man collapsed.
Then all hell really did hit the fan. Anxious people became a terrified mob. Stampeding away from him. Fringe onlookers got caught and bowled over by thudding feet.
Al glanced back over his shoulder to see a section of the road barrier fold down. The squad car glided over it towards him. An evil-looking black and blue javelin-head, airplane-smooth fuselage. Dazzlingly bright lights flashed on top of it.
“Hold it, Retro,” a voice boomed from the car.
Al’s pace slackened. There was an arcade ahead of him, but its arching entrance was wide enough to take the squad car. Goddamn! Alive again for forty minutes and already running from the cops.
What else is new?
He stopped, and turned full square to face them, silver-plated Thompson gripped in his hands. And—oh, shit—another two squad cars were coming off the road, lining up directly towards him. Big slablike flaps were opening like wings at their rear, and things came running out. They weren’t human, they weren’t animal. Machine animals? Whatever, they sure didn’t look healthy. Fat dull-metal bodies with stumpy gun barrels protruding. Far too many legs, and all of those rubber, no knees or ankles.
Assault mechanoids, Lovegrove said. And there was a tinge of excitement in the mental voice. Lovegrove expected the things to beat him.
“They electric?” Al demanded.
Yes.
“Good.” He glared at the one taking point, and cast his first sorcerer’s spell.
Police patrol Sergeant Alson Loemer was already anticipating his promotion when he arrived at the scene. Loemer had been delighted as his neural nanonics received the updates from the precinct house. With his outlandish clothes, the man certainly looked like a Retro. The gang of history-costumed terrorists had been running the police department ragged for three days, sabotaging city systems with some new style of plasma weapon and electronic warfare field. Other acts too. Most officers had picked up strong rumours of snatches going down, people being lifted at random from the streets at night. And not one Retro had been brought to book. The news companies were datavising hive loads of untamed speculation across the communications net: a religious group, a band of offplanet mercenaries, even wackier notions. The mayor was going apeshit, and leaning on the police commissioner. Smooth people from an unnamed government intelligence agency had been walking around the corridors at the precinct house. But they didn’t know anything more than the patrol officers.
Now he, Sergeant Loemer, was going to nail one of those suckers.
He guided the patrol car over the folded barrier and onto the sidewalk. The crim was dead ahead, running for the base of the Uorestone Tower. Two more precinct cars were riding with Loemer, closing on the crim, hemming him in. Loemer deployed both of his patrol car’s assault mechanoids, and datavised in their isolate and securement instructions.
That was when the patrol car started to glitch, picking up speed. The sensors showed him frightened citizens in front, racing to escape; one of the assault mechanoids wobbled past, shooting wildly. He fired shutdown orders into the drive processor. Not that it made much difference.
Then the Retro started shooting at the patrol cars. Whatever the gun was, it ripped straight through the armour shielding, smashing the axles and wheel hubs. Metal bearings screeched in that unique, and instantly recognizable, tone which heralded imminent destruction. Loemer thumped the manual safety cut out, killing power instantly.
The patrol car slewed around and bounced off the road barrier to smack straight into one of the Regree trees planted along the sidewalk. The internal crash alarm went off, half deafening an already dazed Loemer, and the emergency side hatch jettisoned. Loemer’s bubble seat slid out along its telescoping rails. The translucent bubble’s thick safety-restraint segments peeled back, allowing him to drop, wailing, to his knees as the air around him spewed out a terrible volley of sense overload impulses. His neural nanonics were unable to datavise a shutdown code into the crazed assault mechanoids. The last thing he saw as he fell onto the ground was the ruined Regree tree starting to keel over directly above him.
Even Al was bruised by the wild strafing of the sense-overload ordnance. The manic glee as he watched the patrol cars skid and smash was swiftly curtailed by the onslaught of light, sound, and smell. His energistic ability could ward off the worst of it, but he turned and began a stumbling run towards the arcade’s entrance. Behind him the assault mechanoids continued to deluge the street with their errant firepower, lumbering about like drunks. Two ran into each other, and rebounded, falling over. Legs thrashed about in chaos, beetles flipped on their backs.
The sidewalk was littered with prone bodies. Not dead, Al thought, just terribly battered. Je-zus but those mechanical soldier contraptions were nasty pieces of work. And unlike real police, you wouldn’t be able to buy them.
Maybe New California wasn’t quite paradise after all.
Al staggered his way along the arcade, caught up in the flow of people desperate to escape the havoc. His suit faded away, the sharp colour and cut reverting to Lovegrove’s original drab overall.
He picked up a little girl whose eyes were streaming tears and carried her. It felt good to help. Those goddamn brainless pigs should have made sure she was out of the way before they came at him with guns blazing. It would never have happened back in Chicago.
Two hundred yards from the arcade entrance he stopped among a group of anxious, exhausted people. They’d come far enough from the sense-overload ordnance to be free of its effects. Families clung together, others were calling out for friends and loved ones.
Al put the little girl down, still crying, which he thought was due to the Kaiser gas rather than any kind of injury. Then her mother came rushing up and hugged her frantically. Al was given profuse thanks. A nice dame. Cared about her children and family. That was good, proper. He was sorry he wasn’t wearing his fedora so he could tip it to her.
Just how did people express that kind of formal courtesy on this world anyhow? Lovegrove was puzzled by the question.
He carried on down the arcade. Cops would be swarming all over the joint in a few minutes. Another hundred and fifty yards, and he was out on the street again. He started walking. Direction didn’t matter, just away. This time he kept Lovegrove’s overalls on. No one paid him any attention.
Al wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. Everything was so strange. This world, his situation. Mind, strange wasn’t the word for it, more like overwhelming. Or just plain creepy. Bad to think that the priests had been right about the afterworld, heaven and hell. He never went to church much, much to his momma’s distress.
I wonder if I’ve been redeemed, paid my celestial dues. Is that why I’m back? But if you got reincarnated didn’t you start off as a baby?
They weren’t the kind of thoughts he was used to.
A hotel, he told Lovegrove, I need to rest up and think about what to do.
Most of the skyscrapers had some sort of rentable accommodation, apparently. But it would have to be paid for.
Al’s hand automatically went to a leg pocket. He drew out a Jovian Bank credit disk, a thick, oversize coin, sparkly silver on one side, magenta on the other. Lovegrove obediently explained how it worked, and Al put his thumb on the centre. A hash of green lines wobbled over the silver side.
“Goddamn!” He tried again, concentrating, wishing. Doing the magic.
The green lines began to form figures, crude at first, then sharp and regular. You could store an entire planet’s treasury in one of these disks, Lovegrove told him. Al’s ears pricked up at that. Then he was aware of something being not quite right. A presence, close by.
He hadn’t really thought about the others. Those who had been there when he came into Lovegrove’s body. The same ones who had deserted him in the disused shop. But if he closed his eyes, and shut out the sounds of the city, he could hear the distant babelesque clamour. It came from the nightmare domain, the pleas and promises to be brought forth, to live and breathe again.
That same perception gave him a most peculiar vision of the city. Walls of thick black shadow amid a universal greyness. People moved through it all, distorted whispers echoing all around, audible ghosts. Some different from others. Louder, clearer. Not many of them among the multitude.
Al opened his eyes and looked down the road. A section of the barrier was folding down neatly. One of the bullet cars drew to a halt beside it. The gull-wing door slid up, and inside was a proper car, a genuine American convertible wearing the streamlined image of the New California vehicle like a piece of clothing. It was low-slung, with a broad hood and lots of chrome trim. Al didn’t recognize the model, it was more modern than anything in the twenties, and his memory of the thirties and forties wasn’t so hot.
The man in the red leather driving seat nodded amicably. “You’d better get in,” he said. “The cops are going to catch you if you stay out on the street. They’re a mite worked up about us.”
Al glanced up and down the sidewalk, then shrugged and climbed in.
Inside, the image of the bullet car tinted the air like a stained soap bubble.
“The name’s Bernhard Allsop,” the man behind the steering column said. He swung the car out into the road. Behind them the barrier rose up smoothly. “I always wanted me an Oldsmobile like this beauty, never could afford it back when I was living in Tennessee.”
“And this is real now?”
“Who knows, boy? But it sure feels real. And I’m mighty grateful for the opportunity to ride one. You might say I thought it had passed me by.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“Caused a bit of commotion back there, boy. Them pigs is riled good and proper. We were monitoring what passes for their radio band these days.”
“I just wanted a cab, that’s all. Someone tried to get smart.”
“There’s a trick to riding around this town without the police knowing. Be happy to show you how sometime.”
“Appreciate it. Where are we going?”
Bernhard Allsop grinned and winked. “Gonna take you to meet the rest of the group. Always need volunteers, they’re kinda hard to come by.” He laughed, a high-pitched stuttering yodel reminding Al of a piglet.
“They left me behind, Bernhard. I don’t have anything to say to them.”
“Yeah, well. You know how it was. You weren’t altogether there, boy. I said we should have taken you along with us. Kin is kin, even though it ain’t exactly family here, know what I mean? Glad to see you came through in the end, though.”
“Thank you.”
“So what’s your name, boy?”
“Al Capone.”
The Oldsmobile swerved as Bernhard flinched. His knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the wheel; then he risked an anxious sideways glance at his passenger. Where before there had been a twenty-year-old man dressed in a set of dark red overalls, there was now a debonair Latin-ethnic character in a double-breasted blue suit and pigeon-grey fedora.
“You shitting me?”
Al Capone reached into his suit and produced a miniature baseball bat. A now highly apprehensive Bernhard Allsop watched it grow to full size. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the black stains around the end were.
“No,” Al said politely. “I’m not shitting you.”
“Holy Christ.” He tried to laugh. “Al Capone.”
“Yeah.”
“Holy Christ. Al Capone in my car! Ain’t that something?”
“That’s certainly something, yeah.”
“It’s a pleasure, Al. Christ, I mean that. A real pleasure. Hell, you were the best, Al, the top man. Everybody knew that. Run a bit of moonshine in my day. Nothing much, a few slugs, is all. But you, you ran it for a whole city. Christ! Al Capone.” He slapped the steering wheel with both hands, chortling. “Damn, but I can’t wait to see their faces when I bring you in.”
“Bring me in to what, Bernhard?”
“The group, Al, the group. Hey, you don’t mind if I call you Al, do you? I don’t want to give no offence, or nothing. Not to you.”
“That’s okay, Bernhard, all my friends call me Al.”
“Your friends. Yes siree!”
“What does this group of yours do, exactly, Bernhard?”
“Why, get larger, of course. That’s all we can do for now. Unity is strength.”
“You a Communist, Bernhard?”
“Hey! No way, Al. I’m an American. I hate the filthy Reds.”
“Sounds like you are to me.”
“No, you got it all wrong. The more of us there are, the better chance we stand, the stronger we are. Like an army; a whole load of people together, they got the strength to make themselves felt. That’s what I meant, Al. Honest.”
“So what does the group have in mind for when they get big and powerful?”
Bernhard gave Al another sideways glance, puzzled this time. “To get out of here, Al. What else?”
“To get out of the city?”
“No. To take the planet away.” He jabbed a thumb straight up. “From that. From the sky.”
Al cast a sceptical eye upwards. The skyscrapers were flashing past on either side. Their size didn’t bother him so much now. Starship drives still speckled the azure sky, streaked flashbulbs taking a long time to pop. He couldn’t see the odd little moon anymore. “Why?” he asked reasonably.
“Damn it, Al. Can’t you feel it? The emptiness. Man, it’s horrible. All that huge nothing trying to suck you up and swallow you whole.” He gulped, his voice lowering. “The sky is like there. It’s the beyond all over again. We gotta hide. Someplace where we ain’t never going to die again, somewhere that don’t go on for ever. Where there’s no empty night.”
“Now you’re sounding like a preacher man, Bernhard.”
“Well maybe I am a little bit. It’s a smart man who knows when he’s beat. I don’t mind saying it to you, Al. I’m frightened of the beyond. I ain’t never going back there. No siree.”
“So you’re going to move the world away?”
“Damn right.”
“That’s one fucking big ambition you’ve got there, Bernhard. I wish you a lot of luck. Now just drop me off at this intersection coming up here. I’ll find my own way about town now.”
“You mean you ain’t going to pitch in and help us?” an incredulous Bernhard asked.
“Nope.”
“But you gotta feel it, too, Al. Even you. We all can. They never stop begging you, all those other lost souls. Ain’t you afraid of going back there?”
“Can’t say as I am. It never really bothered me any while I was there first time around.”
“Never bothered . . . ! Holy Christ, you are one tough sonofabitch, Al.” He put his head back and gave a rebel yell. “Listen, you mothers, being dead don’t bother Al Capone none! Goddamn!”
“Where is this safe place you’re taking the planet to, anyhow?”
“Dunno, Al. Just follow Judy Garland over the rainbow, I guess. Anywhere where there ain’t no sky.”
“You ain’t got no plans, you ain’t got no idea where you’re going. And you wanted me to be a part of that?”
“But it’ll happen, Al. I swear. When there’s enough of us, we can do it. You know what you can do by yourself now, one man. Think what a million can do, two million. Ten million. Ain’t nothing going to be able to stop us then.”
“You’re going to possess a million people?”
“We surely are.”
The Oldsmobile dipped down a long ramp which took it into a tunnel. Bernhard let out a happy sigh as they passed into its harsh orange-tinged lighting.
“You won’t possess a million people,” Al said. “The cops will stop you. They’ll find a way. We’re strong, but we ain’t no bulletproof superheroes. That stuff the assault mechanoids shoot nearly got me back there. If I’d been any closer I’d be dead again.”
“Damn it, that’s what I been trying to tell you, Al,” Bernhard complained. “We gotta build up our numbers. Then they can’t never hurt us.”
Al fell silent. Part of what Bernhard said made sense. The more possessed there were, the harder it would be for the cops to stop them spreading. But they’d fight, those cops. Like wild bears once they realized how big the problem was, how dangerous the possessed were. Cops, whatever passed for the federal agents on this world, the army; all clubbing together. Government rats always did gang up. They’d have the starship weapons, too; Lovegrove burbled about how powerful they were, capable of turning whole countries to deserts of hot glass within seconds.
And what would Al Capone do on a world where such a war was being fought? Come to that, what would Al Capone do on any modern world?
“How are you snatching people?” he asked abruptly.
Bernhard must have sensed the change in tone, in purpose. He suddenly got antsy, shifting his ass around on the seat’s shiny red leather, but keeping his eyes firmly on the road ahead. “Well gee, Al, we just take them off the street. At night, when it’s nice and quiet. Nothing heavy.”
“But you’ve been seen, haven’t you? That cop called me a Retro. They even got a name for you. They know you’re doing it.”
“Well, yeah, sure. It’s kinda difficult with the numbers we’re working, you know. Like I say, we need a lot of people. Sometimes we get seen. Bound to happen. But they haven’t caught us.”
“Not yet.” Al grinned expansively. He put his arm around Bernhard’s shoulder. “You know, Bernhard, I think I will come and meet this group of yours after all. It sounds to me that you ain’t organized yourselves too good. No offence, I doubt you people have much experience in this field. But me now . . .” A fat Havana appeared in his hand. He took a long blissful drag, the first for six hundred years. “Me, I had a lifetime’s experience of going to the bad. And I’m gonna give you all the benefit of that.”
Gerald Skibbow shuffled into the warm, white-walled room, one arm holding on tightly to the male orderly. His loose powder-blue institute gown revealed several small medical nanonic packages as it shifted about. He moved as would a very old man in a high-gravity environment, with careful dignity. Needing help, needing guidance.
Unlike any normal person, he didn’t even flick his eyes from side to side to take in his newest surroundings. The thickly cushioned bed in the centre of the room, with its surrounding formation of bulky, vaguely medical apparatus didn’t seem to register on his consciousness.
“Okay, now then, Gerald,” the orderly said cordially. “Let’s get you comfortable on here, shall we?”
He gingerly positioned Gerald’s buttocks on the side of the bed, then lifted his legs up and around until his charge was lying prone on the cushioning. Always cautious. He’d prepared a dozen candidates for personality debrief here in Guyana’s grade-one restricted navy facility. None of them had exactly been volunteers. Skibbow might just realize what he was being prepped for. It could be the spark to bring him out of his trauma-trance.
But no. Gerald allowed the orderly to secure him with the webbing which moulded itself to his body contours. There was no sound from his throat, no blink as it tightened its grip.
The relieved orderly gave a thumbs-up to the two men sitting behind the long glass panel in the wall. Totally immobilized, Gerald stared beyond the outsized plastic helmet that lowered itself over his head. The inside was fuzzy, a lining of silk fur which had been stiffened somehow. Then his face was covered completely, and the light vanished.
Chemical infusions insured there was no pain, no discomfort as the nanonic filaments wormed their way around his dermal cells and penetrated the bone of the skull. Positioning their tips into the requisite synapses took nearly two hours, a delicate operation similar to the implanting of neural nanonics. However these infiltrations went deeper than ordinary augmentation circuitry, seeking out the memory centres to mate with neurofibrillae inside their clustered cells. And the incursion was massive, millions of filaments burrowing along capillaries, active superstring molecules with preprogrammed functions, knowing where to go, what to do. In many respects they resembled the dendritic formation of living tissue in which they were building a parallel information network. The cells obeyed their DNA pattern, the filaments’ structure was formatted by AIs. One process designed by studying the other, but never complementary.
Impulses began to flow back down the filaments as the hypersensitive tips registered synaptic discharges. A horribly jumbled montage of random thoughtsnaps, memories without order. The facility’s AI came on-line, running comparisons, defining characteristics, recognizing themes, and weaving them into coherent sensorium environs.
Gerald Skibbow’s thoughts were focused on his apartment in the Greater Brussels arcology: three respectably sized rooms on the sixty-fifth floor of the Delores pyramid. From the triple glazed windows you could see a landscape of austere geometries. Domes, pyramids, and towers, all squashed together and wrapped up within the intestinal tangle of the elevated bhan tubes. Every surface he could see was grey, even the dome glass, coated with decades of grime.
It hadn’t taken him long to decide that the people in this future world didn’t have much in the way of fashion sense. The suits he could see all followed the same loose silk design, although their colourful slimline patterns made them appear more like flappy Japanese pyjamas. Those not in suits wore variants on vests and sports shirts. Tight-fitting, too, at least for people under thirty-five. Al had stared at the dolls to start with, convinced they were all hookers. What kind of decent gal would dress like that, with so much showing? Skirts which almost didn’t cover their ass, shorts that weren’t much better. But no. They were just ordinary, smiling, happy, everyday girls. The people living in this city weren’t so strung up on morality and decency. What would have given a Catholic priest apoplexy back home didn’t raise an eyebrow here.
“I think I’m gonna like this life,” Al declared.
Strange life that it was. He seemed to have been reincarnated as a magician: a real magician, not like the fancy tricksters he’d booked for his clubs back in Chicago. Here, whatever he wanted appeared out of nowhere.
That had taken a long while to get used to. Think and . . . pow. There it was, everything from a working Thompson to a silver dollar glinting in the hot sun. Goddamn useful for clothes, though. Brad Lovegrove had worn overalls of shiny dark red fabric like some kind of pissant garbage collector.
Al could hear Lovegrove whimpering away inside him, like having a leprechaun nesting at the centre of his brain. He was bawling like a complete bozo, and making about as much sense. But there was some gold among the dross, twenty-four-karat nuggets. Like—when he first got his marbles together Al had thought this world was maybe Mars or Venus. Not so. New California didn’t even orbit the same sun as Earth. And it wasn’t the twentieth century no more.
Je-zus, but a guy needed a drink to help keep that from blowing his head apart.
And where to get a drink? Al imagined the little leprechaun being squeezed, as if his brain were one giant muscle. Slowly contracting.
A macromall on the intersection between Longwalk and Sunrise, Lovegrove squealed silently. There’s a specialist store there with liquor from every Confederation planet, probably even got Earth bourbon.
Drinks from clear across the galaxy! How about that?
So Al started walking. It was a lovely day.
The sidewalk was so wide it was more like a boulevard in itself; there were no paving slabs, instead the whole strip had been made from a seamless sheet, a material which was a cross between marble and concrete. Luxuriant trees sprouted up through craters in the surface every forty yards or so, their two-foot sprays of floppy oval flowers an impossible shade of metallic purple.
He spotted a few trashcan-sized trucks trundling sedately among the walkers enjoying the late-morning sunshine, machinery smoother than Henry Ford had ever dreamed of. Utility mechanoids, Lovegrove told him, cleaning the sidewalk, picking up litter and fallen leaves.
The base of each skyscraper was given over to classy delis and bars and restaurants and coffee shops; tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, just like a European city. Arcades pierced deep into the buildings.
From what Al could see, it was the same kind of rich man’s playground setup on the other side of the street, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. Not that you could walk over to be sure, there was no way past the eight-foot-high glass and metal barrier which lined the road.
Al stood with his face pressed to the glass for some time, watching the silent cars zoom past. Big bullets on wheels. All of them shiny, like coloured chrome. You didn’t even have to steer them no more, Lovegrove told him, they did it themselves. Some kind of fancy electrical engine, no gas. And the speed, over two hundred kilometres an hour.
Al knew all about kilometres; they were what the French called miles.
But he wasn’t too sure about using a car that he couldn’t drive himself, not when it travelled that fast. And anyway, his presence seemed to mommick up electricity. So he stuck to walking.
The skyscrapers gave him vertigo they were so tall, and all you could see when you looked up at them was reflections of more skyscrapers. They seemed to bend over the street, imprisoning the world below. Lovegrove told him they were so high that their tops were designed to sway in the wind, rocking twenty—thirty metres backwards and forwards in slow motion.
“Shut up,” Al growled.
The leprechaun curled up tighter, like a knotted snake.
People looked at Al—his clothes. Al looked at people, fascinated and jubilant. It was a jolt seeing blacks and whites mixing free, other types too, light-skinned Mediterranean like his own, Chinese, Indian. Some seemed to have dyed their hair completely the wrong colour. Amazing.
And they all appeared so much at ease with themselves, owning a uniform inner smile. They had a nonchalance and surety which he’d never seen before. The devil which drove so many people back in the twenties was missing, as if the city elders had abolished worry altogether.
They also had astonishingly good health. After a block and a half Al still hadn’t seen anyone remotely overweight. No wonder they wore short clothes. A world where everyone was in permanent training for the big game, even the seventy-year-olds.
“You still got baseball, ain’t you?” Al muttered under his breath.
Yes, Lovegrove confirmed.
Yep, paradise all right.
After a while he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. He’d been walking for a quarter of an hour, and it didn’t look as if he’d got anywhere. The massive avenue of skyscrapers hadn’t changed at all.
“Hey, buddy,” he called.
The black guy—who looked like a prizefighter—turned and gave an amused grin as he took in Al’s clothes. His arm was around a girl: Indian skin, baby blonde hair. Her long legs were shown off by a pair of baggy culottes.
Cutie pie, Al thought, and grinned at her. A real sweater girl. It suddenly struck him that he hadn’t hit the sack with a woman for six centuries.
She smiled back.
“How do I call a cab around here?”
“Datavise the freeway processors, my man,” the black guy said expansively. “City runs a million cabs. Don’t make a profit. But then that’s what us dumb taxpayers are for, to make up the shortfall, right?”
“I can’t do the data thing, I ain’t from around here.”
The girl giggled. “You just get off a starship?”
Al tipped the rim of his fedora with two fingers. “Kind of, lady. Kind of.”
“Neat. Where you from?”
“Chicago. On Earth.”
“Hey, wow. I never met anyone from Earth before. What’s it like?”
Al’s grin lost its lustre. Je-zus, but the women here were forward. And the black guy’s thick arm was still draped over her shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind his girl making conversation with a total stranger. “One city’s just like another,” Al said; he gestured lamely at the silver skyscrapers, as if that was explanation enough.
“City? I thought you only had arcologies on Earth?”
“Look, you going to tell me how to get a fucking cab, or what?”
He’d blown it. The moment he saw the man’s expression harden, he knew.
“You want us to call one for you, buddy ?” The man was taking a longer, slower look at Al’s clothes.
“Sure,” Al bluffed.
“Okay. No problem. It’s done.” A phony smile.
Al wondered exactly what it was the man had actually done. He didn’t have no Dick Tracy wrist radio to call for a cab or anything. Just stood there, smiling, playing Al for a sucker.
Lovegrove was filling Al’s head with crap about miniature telephones in the brain. He had one fitted himself, he said, but it had packed up when Al possessed him.
“Going to tell me about Chicago now?” the girl asked.
Al could see how worried she was. Her voice, mannerisms, the way she had merged into her man’s encircling arm. They all telegraphed it, and he knew how to read the signs. Fear in other people was wholly familiar.
He thrust his face forwards toward the black guy, snarling at the wiseass bastard. Just for an instant three long scars pulsed hotly on his left cheek. “Gonna remember you, cocksucker. Gonna find you again. Gonna teach you respect , and, buddy, it’s gonna be the real hard way to learn.” The old rage was burning in his body now, limbs trembling, voice rising to a thunderous roar. “Nobody shits on Al Capone! You got that? Nobody treats me like some dog turd you stepped in. I fucking ruled Chicago. I owned that city. I am not some asswipe street punk you can take for a ride. I. Deserve. RESPECT.”
“Bastard Retro!” The man swung a punch.
Even if Lovegrove’s body hadn’t been enhanced with the energistic power which possessing souls exuded in the natural universe Al would probably have beaten him. His years in Brooklyn had pitched him into countless brawls, and people had quickly learned to steer clear of his awesome temper.
Al ducked instinctively, his right fist already coming up. The blow was focused, mentally and physically. He struck the man perfectly, catching him on the side of his jaw.
There was an ugly sound of bone shattering. Dead silence. The man flew backwards five yards through the air, hitting the sidewalk in a crumpled sprawl. He slid along the carbon concrete composite for another couple of yards before coming to rest, completely inert. Blood began to splatter from his mouth where serrated bone had punctured his cheek and lip.
Al stared, surprised. “Goddamn!” He started to laugh delightedly.
The girl screamed. She screamed and screamed.
Al glanced around, suddenly apprehensive. Everyone on the broad sidewalk was looking at him, at the injured black guy. “Shut up,” he hissed at the loopy broad. “Shut up!” But she wouldn’t. Just: scream, and scream, and scream. Like it was her profession.
Then there was another sound, cutting through her bawling, rising every time she took a breath. And Al Capone realized it wasn’t just handguns he could recognize after six hundred years. Police sirens hadn’t changed much either.
He started to run. People scattered ahead of him the way kittens ran from a pit bull. Cries and yells broke out all around.
“Stop him!”
“Move!”
“Stinking Retro.”
“He killed that dude. One punch.”
“No! Don’t try to—”
A man was going for him. Beefy and hard-set, crouched low for a pro football tackle. Al waved a hand, almost casually, and white fire squirted into the hero’s face. Black petals of flesh peeled back from the bone, sizzling. Thick chestnut hair flamed to ash. A dull agonized grunt, cutting off as pain overloaded his consciousness, and the man collapsed.
Then all hell really did hit the fan. Anxious people became a terrified mob. Stampeding away from him. Fringe onlookers got caught and bowled over by thudding feet.
Al glanced back over his shoulder to see a section of the road barrier fold down. The squad car glided over it towards him. An evil-looking black and blue javelin-head, airplane-smooth fuselage. Dazzlingly bright lights flashed on top of it.
“Hold it, Retro,” a voice boomed from the car.
Al’s pace slackened. There was an arcade ahead of him, but its arching entrance was wide enough to take the squad car. Goddamn! Alive again for forty minutes and already running from the cops.
What else is new?
He stopped, and turned full square to face them, silver-plated Thompson gripped in his hands. And—oh, shit—another two squad cars were coming off the road, lining up directly towards him. Big slablike flaps were opening like wings at their rear, and things came running out. They weren’t human, they weren’t animal. Machine animals? Whatever, they sure didn’t look healthy. Fat dull-metal bodies with stumpy gun barrels protruding. Far too many legs, and all of those rubber, no knees or ankles.
Assault mechanoids, Lovegrove said. And there was a tinge of excitement in the mental voice. Lovegrove expected the things to beat him.
“They electric?” Al demanded.
Yes.
“Good.” He glared at the one taking point, and cast his first sorcerer’s spell.
Police patrol Sergeant Alson Loemer was already anticipating his promotion when he arrived at the scene. Loemer had been delighted as his neural nanonics received the updates from the precinct house. With his outlandish clothes, the man certainly looked like a Retro. The gang of history-costumed terrorists had been running the police department ragged for three days, sabotaging city systems with some new style of plasma weapon and electronic warfare field. Other acts too. Most officers had picked up strong rumours of snatches going down, people being lifted at random from the streets at night. And not one Retro had been brought to book. The news companies were datavising hive loads of untamed speculation across the communications net: a religious group, a band of offplanet mercenaries, even wackier notions. The mayor was going apeshit, and leaning on the police commissioner. Smooth people from an unnamed government intelligence agency had been walking around the corridors at the precinct house. But they didn’t know anything more than the patrol officers.
Now he, Sergeant Loemer, was going to nail one of those suckers.
He guided the patrol car over the folded barrier and onto the sidewalk. The crim was dead ahead, running for the base of the Uorestone Tower. Two more precinct cars were riding with Loemer, closing on the crim, hemming him in. Loemer deployed both of his patrol car’s assault mechanoids, and datavised in their isolate and securement instructions.
That was when the patrol car started to glitch, picking up speed. The sensors showed him frightened citizens in front, racing to escape; one of the assault mechanoids wobbled past, shooting wildly. He fired shutdown orders into the drive processor. Not that it made much difference.
Then the Retro started shooting at the patrol cars. Whatever the gun was, it ripped straight through the armour shielding, smashing the axles and wheel hubs. Metal bearings screeched in that unique, and instantly recognizable, tone which heralded imminent destruction. Loemer thumped the manual safety cut out, killing power instantly.
The patrol car slewed around and bounced off the road barrier to smack straight into one of the Regree trees planted along the sidewalk. The internal crash alarm went off, half deafening an already dazed Loemer, and the emergency side hatch jettisoned. Loemer’s bubble seat slid out along its telescoping rails. The translucent bubble’s thick safety-restraint segments peeled back, allowing him to drop, wailing, to his knees as the air around him spewed out a terrible volley of sense overload impulses. His neural nanonics were unable to datavise a shutdown code into the crazed assault mechanoids. The last thing he saw as he fell onto the ground was the ruined Regree tree starting to keel over directly above him.
Even Al was bruised by the wild strafing of the sense-overload ordnance. The manic glee as he watched the patrol cars skid and smash was swiftly curtailed by the onslaught of light, sound, and smell. His energistic ability could ward off the worst of it, but he turned and began a stumbling run towards the arcade’s entrance. Behind him the assault mechanoids continued to deluge the street with their errant firepower, lumbering about like drunks. Two ran into each other, and rebounded, falling over. Legs thrashed about in chaos, beetles flipped on their backs.
The sidewalk was littered with prone bodies. Not dead, Al thought, just terribly battered. Je-zus but those mechanical soldier contraptions were nasty pieces of work. And unlike real police, you wouldn’t be able to buy them.
Maybe New California wasn’t quite paradise after all.
Al staggered his way along the arcade, caught up in the flow of people desperate to escape the havoc. His suit faded away, the sharp colour and cut reverting to Lovegrove’s original drab overall.
He picked up a little girl whose eyes were streaming tears and carried her. It felt good to help. Those goddamn brainless pigs should have made sure she was out of the way before they came at him with guns blazing. It would never have happened back in Chicago.
Two hundred yards from the arcade entrance he stopped among a group of anxious, exhausted people. They’d come far enough from the sense-overload ordnance to be free of its effects. Families clung together, others were calling out for friends and loved ones.
Al put the little girl down, still crying, which he thought was due to the Kaiser gas rather than any kind of injury. Then her mother came rushing up and hugged her frantically. Al was given profuse thanks. A nice dame. Cared about her children and family. That was good, proper. He was sorry he wasn’t wearing his fedora so he could tip it to her.
Just how did people express that kind of formal courtesy on this world anyhow? Lovegrove was puzzled by the question.
He carried on down the arcade. Cops would be swarming all over the joint in a few minutes. Another hundred and fifty yards, and he was out on the street again. He started walking. Direction didn’t matter, just away. This time he kept Lovegrove’s overalls on. No one paid him any attention.
Al wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. Everything was so strange. This world, his situation. Mind, strange wasn’t the word for it, more like overwhelming. Or just plain creepy. Bad to think that the priests had been right about the afterworld, heaven and hell. He never went to church much, much to his momma’s distress.
I wonder if I’ve been redeemed, paid my celestial dues. Is that why I’m back? But if you got reincarnated didn’t you start off as a baby?
They weren’t the kind of thoughts he was used to.
A hotel, he told Lovegrove, I need to rest up and think about what to do.
Most of the skyscrapers had some sort of rentable accommodation, apparently. But it would have to be paid for.
Al’s hand automatically went to a leg pocket. He drew out a Jovian Bank credit disk, a thick, oversize coin, sparkly silver on one side, magenta on the other. Lovegrove obediently explained how it worked, and Al put his thumb on the centre. A hash of green lines wobbled over the silver side.
“Goddamn!” He tried again, concentrating, wishing. Doing the magic.
The green lines began to form figures, crude at first, then sharp and regular. You could store an entire planet’s treasury in one of these disks, Lovegrove told him. Al’s ears pricked up at that. Then he was aware of something being not quite right. A presence, close by.
He hadn’t really thought about the others. Those who had been there when he came into Lovegrove’s body. The same ones who had deserted him in the disused shop. But if he closed his eyes, and shut out the sounds of the city, he could hear the distant babelesque clamour. It came from the nightmare domain, the pleas and promises to be brought forth, to live and breathe again.
That same perception gave him a most peculiar vision of the city. Walls of thick black shadow amid a universal greyness. People moved through it all, distorted whispers echoing all around, audible ghosts. Some different from others. Louder, clearer. Not many of them among the multitude.
Al opened his eyes and looked down the road. A section of the barrier was folding down neatly. One of the bullet cars drew to a halt beside it. The gull-wing door slid up, and inside was a proper car, a genuine American convertible wearing the streamlined image of the New California vehicle like a piece of clothing. It was low-slung, with a broad hood and lots of chrome trim. Al didn’t recognize the model, it was more modern than anything in the twenties, and his memory of the thirties and forties wasn’t so hot.
The man in the red leather driving seat nodded amicably. “You’d better get in,” he said. “The cops are going to catch you if you stay out on the street. They’re a mite worked up about us.”
Al glanced up and down the sidewalk, then shrugged and climbed in.
Inside, the image of the bullet car tinted the air like a stained soap bubble.
“The name’s Bernhard Allsop,” the man behind the steering column said. He swung the car out into the road. Behind them the barrier rose up smoothly. “I always wanted me an Oldsmobile like this beauty, never could afford it back when I was living in Tennessee.”
“And this is real now?”
“Who knows, boy? But it sure feels real. And I’m mighty grateful for the opportunity to ride one. You might say I thought it had passed me by.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“Caused a bit of commotion back there, boy. Them pigs is riled good and proper. We were monitoring what passes for their radio band these days.”
“I just wanted a cab, that’s all. Someone tried to get smart.”
“There’s a trick to riding around this town without the police knowing. Be happy to show you how sometime.”
“Appreciate it. Where are we going?”
Bernhard Allsop grinned and winked. “Gonna take you to meet the rest of the group. Always need volunteers, they’re kinda hard to come by.” He laughed, a high-pitched stuttering yodel reminding Al of a piglet.
“They left me behind, Bernhard. I don’t have anything to say to them.”
“Yeah, well. You know how it was. You weren’t altogether there, boy. I said we should have taken you along with us. Kin is kin, even though it ain’t exactly family here, know what I mean? Glad to see you came through in the end, though.”
“Thank you.”
“So what’s your name, boy?”
“Al Capone.”
The Oldsmobile swerved as Bernhard flinched. His knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the wheel; then he risked an anxious sideways glance at his passenger. Where before there had been a twenty-year-old man dressed in a set of dark red overalls, there was now a debonair Latin-ethnic character in a double-breasted blue suit and pigeon-grey fedora.
“You shitting me?”
Al Capone reached into his suit and produced a miniature baseball bat. A now highly apprehensive Bernhard Allsop watched it grow to full size. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the black stains around the end were.
“No,” Al said politely. “I’m not shitting you.”
“Holy Christ.” He tried to laugh. “Al Capone.”
“Yeah.”
“Holy Christ. Al Capone in my car! Ain’t that something?”
“That’s certainly something, yeah.”
“It’s a pleasure, Al. Christ, I mean that. A real pleasure. Hell, you were the best, Al, the top man. Everybody knew that. Run a bit of moonshine in my day. Nothing much, a few slugs, is all. But you, you ran it for a whole city. Christ! Al Capone.” He slapped the steering wheel with both hands, chortling. “Damn, but I can’t wait to see their faces when I bring you in.”
“Bring me in to what, Bernhard?”
“The group, Al, the group. Hey, you don’t mind if I call you Al, do you? I don’t want to give no offence, or nothing. Not to you.”
“That’s okay, Bernhard, all my friends call me Al.”
“Your friends. Yes siree!”
“What does this group of yours do, exactly, Bernhard?”
“Why, get larger, of course. That’s all we can do for now. Unity is strength.”
“You a Communist, Bernhard?”
“Hey! No way, Al. I’m an American. I hate the filthy Reds.”
“Sounds like you are to me.”
“No, you got it all wrong. The more of us there are, the better chance we stand, the stronger we are. Like an army; a whole load of people together, they got the strength to make themselves felt. That’s what I meant, Al. Honest.”
“So what does the group have in mind for when they get big and powerful?”
Bernhard gave Al another sideways glance, puzzled this time. “To get out of here, Al. What else?”
“To get out of the city?”
“No. To take the planet away.” He jabbed a thumb straight up. “From that. From the sky.”
Al cast a sceptical eye upwards. The skyscrapers were flashing past on either side. Their size didn’t bother him so much now. Starship drives still speckled the azure sky, streaked flashbulbs taking a long time to pop. He couldn’t see the odd little moon anymore. “Why?” he asked reasonably.
“Damn it, Al. Can’t you feel it? The emptiness. Man, it’s horrible. All that huge nothing trying to suck you up and swallow you whole.” He gulped, his voice lowering. “The sky is like there. It’s the beyond all over again. We gotta hide. Someplace where we ain’t never going to die again, somewhere that don’t go on for ever. Where there’s no empty night.”
“Now you’re sounding like a preacher man, Bernhard.”
“Well maybe I am a little bit. It’s a smart man who knows when he’s beat. I don’t mind saying it to you, Al. I’m frightened of the beyond. I ain’t never going back there. No siree.”
“So you’re going to move the world away?”
“Damn right.”
“That’s one fucking big ambition you’ve got there, Bernhard. I wish you a lot of luck. Now just drop me off at this intersection coming up here. I’ll find my own way about town now.”
“You mean you ain’t going to pitch in and help us?” an incredulous Bernhard asked.
“Nope.”
“But you gotta feel it, too, Al. Even you. We all can. They never stop begging you, all those other lost souls. Ain’t you afraid of going back there?”
“Can’t say as I am. It never really bothered me any while I was there first time around.”
“Never bothered . . . ! Holy Christ, you are one tough sonofabitch, Al.” He put his head back and gave a rebel yell. “Listen, you mothers, being dead don’t bother Al Capone none! Goddamn!”
“Where is this safe place you’re taking the planet to, anyhow?”
“Dunno, Al. Just follow Judy Garland over the rainbow, I guess. Anywhere where there ain’t no sky.”
“You ain’t got no plans, you ain’t got no idea where you’re going. And you wanted me to be a part of that?”
“But it’ll happen, Al. I swear. When there’s enough of us, we can do it. You know what you can do by yourself now, one man. Think what a million can do, two million. Ten million. Ain’t nothing going to be able to stop us then.”
“You’re going to possess a million people?”
“We surely are.”
The Oldsmobile dipped down a long ramp which took it into a tunnel. Bernhard let out a happy sigh as they passed into its harsh orange-tinged lighting.
“You won’t possess a million people,” Al said. “The cops will stop you. They’ll find a way. We’re strong, but we ain’t no bulletproof superheroes. That stuff the assault mechanoids shoot nearly got me back there. If I’d been any closer I’d be dead again.”
“Damn it, that’s what I been trying to tell you, Al,” Bernhard complained. “We gotta build up our numbers. Then they can’t never hurt us.”
Al fell silent. Part of what Bernhard said made sense. The more possessed there were, the harder it would be for the cops to stop them spreading. But they’d fight, those cops. Like wild bears once they realized how big the problem was, how dangerous the possessed were. Cops, whatever passed for the federal agents on this world, the army; all clubbing together. Government rats always did gang up. They’d have the starship weapons, too; Lovegrove burbled about how powerful they were, capable of turning whole countries to deserts of hot glass within seconds.
And what would Al Capone do on a world where such a war was being fought? Come to that, what would Al Capone do on any modern world?
“How are you snatching people?” he asked abruptly.
Bernhard must have sensed the change in tone, in purpose. He suddenly got antsy, shifting his ass around on the seat’s shiny red leather, but keeping his eyes firmly on the road ahead. “Well gee, Al, we just take them off the street. At night, when it’s nice and quiet. Nothing heavy.”
“But you’ve been seen, haven’t you? That cop called me a Retro. They even got a name for you. They know you’re doing it.”
“Well, yeah, sure. It’s kinda difficult with the numbers we’re working, you know. Like I say, we need a lot of people. Sometimes we get seen. Bound to happen. But they haven’t caught us.”
“Not yet.” Al grinned expansively. He put his arm around Bernhard’s shoulder. “You know, Bernhard, I think I will come and meet this group of yours after all. It sounds to me that you ain’t organized yourselves too good. No offence, I doubt you people have much experience in this field. But me now . . .” A fat Havana appeared in his hand. He took a long blissful drag, the first for six hundred years. “Me, I had a lifetime’s experience of going to the bad. And I’m gonna give you all the benefit of that.”
Gerald Skibbow shuffled into the warm, white-walled room, one arm holding on tightly to the male orderly. His loose powder-blue institute gown revealed several small medical nanonic packages as it shifted about. He moved as would a very old man in a high-gravity environment, with careful dignity. Needing help, needing guidance.
Unlike any normal person, he didn’t even flick his eyes from side to side to take in his newest surroundings. The thickly cushioned bed in the centre of the room, with its surrounding formation of bulky, vaguely medical apparatus didn’t seem to register on his consciousness.
“Okay, now then, Gerald,” the orderly said cordially. “Let’s get you comfortable on here, shall we?”
He gingerly positioned Gerald’s buttocks on the side of the bed, then lifted his legs up and around until his charge was lying prone on the cushioning. Always cautious. He’d prepared a dozen candidates for personality debrief here in Guyana’s grade-one restricted navy facility. None of them had exactly been volunteers. Skibbow might just realize what he was being prepped for. It could be the spark to bring him out of his trauma-trance.
But no. Gerald allowed the orderly to secure him with the webbing which moulded itself to his body contours. There was no sound from his throat, no blink as it tightened its grip.
The relieved orderly gave a thumbs-up to the two men sitting behind the long glass panel in the wall. Totally immobilized, Gerald stared beyond the outsized plastic helmet that lowered itself over his head. The inside was fuzzy, a lining of silk fur which had been stiffened somehow. Then his face was covered completely, and the light vanished.
Chemical infusions insured there was no pain, no discomfort as the nanonic filaments wormed their way around his dermal cells and penetrated the bone of the skull. Positioning their tips into the requisite synapses took nearly two hours, a delicate operation similar to the implanting of neural nanonics. However these infiltrations went deeper than ordinary augmentation circuitry, seeking out the memory centres to mate with neurofibrillae inside their clustered cells. And the incursion was massive, millions of filaments burrowing along capillaries, active superstring molecules with preprogrammed functions, knowing where to go, what to do. In many respects they resembled the dendritic formation of living tissue in which they were building a parallel information network. The cells obeyed their DNA pattern, the filaments’ structure was formatted by AIs. One process designed by studying the other, but never complementary.
Impulses began to flow back down the filaments as the hypersensitive tips registered synaptic discharges. A horribly jumbled montage of random thoughtsnaps, memories without order. The facility’s AI came on-line, running comparisons, defining characteristics, recognizing themes, and weaving them into coherent sensorium environs.
Gerald Skibbow’s thoughts were focused on his apartment in the Greater Brussels arcology: three respectably sized rooms on the sixty-fifth floor of the Delores pyramid. From the triple glazed windows you could see a landscape of austere geometries. Domes, pyramids, and towers, all squashed together and wrapped up within the intestinal tangle of the elevated bhan tubes. Every surface he could see was grey, even the dome glass, coated with decades of grime.