Amnesia Moon (24 page)

Everett took the key. Fault stepped over the cracked mantel and went out into the rain. He looked back once, and Everett waved him on. Fault picked his way through the garden, then broke into a run and disappeared beyond the foggy treeline at the neighboring yard.

“I'm leaving now, Ilford,” said Everett.

Ilford held his right hand over the gash on his left. His face had become a site of violence, a battlefield. The older man he should have been was evident now, and at war with what he'd stolen from time and from Cale.

“You destroyed my house,” he said.

“I'm glad,” said Everett.

“We'll catch you,” said Ilford. “The first time you fall asleep you'll dream, and we'll find you and bring you back.”

“You should hope I never fall asleep again,” said Everett. “I've got a plan for you. I've got a dream in mind.”

“You can't control what you dream.”

“I've been practicing,” said Everett. “When I went away to Hatfork just now, weeks passed for me. I spent a long time refining my talent.”

It was a bluff, but Everett knew it was good enough. He knew he was in charge now.

“You know I can't let you go,” said Ilford. He moved to a spot between Everett and the door, picking his way over the shattered remains of his living room. “There are things to be accomplished here.” The words were a pathetic echo of his and Harriman Crash's rhetoric.

“It's over,” said Everett. “I know what you did.”

“What I did,” Ilford repeated stiffly.

“Fault told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Get out of my way,” Everett said.

“All you know how to do is run,” said Ilford. “We're the same, except I stay and try to build. You just run.”

“If I did what you did, I'd run too. Maybe running is a good thing when you're like this.”

“You can't run forever.”

“Well, I'd rather try. Than turn into you.” Everett suddenly saw his running as a talent, one more distinctive than the dreaming, even. It was what he'd had to offer Melinda back in Hatfork. It would be what he offered Edie now.

“You can't stop me from leaving,” said Everett. “I'm stronger than you. I stopped your clock.”

“You don't care about Cale,” said Ilford. “You're leaving him behind.”

“Cale is dead, Ilford. You killed him.”

Ilford looked over at the refrigerator. “I know about the drug, Everett. You think Billy could keep that from me? You think I don't know what's happening right below my feet?”

Everett didn't speak.

“I'll really kill him if you leave.”

Everett went to the refrigerator. The lock still hung loose where he'd pried it apart the day before. He opened it and took out the rack of vials.

He took one and put it in his pocket. Then lifted the rack and hurled it at Ilford's feet. It smashed into a mass of glass shards and ooze, drugs mixing with the soil from the bonsai trees and with the tangled clock innards.

Ilford looked down dispassionately at the mess.

“That's not what I meant,” he said. “That's
Billy's
Cale you just destroyed. Billy prefers the drug version because he can't face what really happened. It's easier to blame it all on me, to think I simply wiped Cale away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What really happened, Everett. Cale got sick. It wasn't my fault.”

“Sick?”

“Look.”

Everett turned. At the long window on the far side of the basement, seated facing the rain, was a figure in a wheelchair, a withered, defeated body, back curved around a wasted chest, wrists sagging against the arms of the chair. The figure's head was tilted slightly, away from the window, towards Everett, and though it was mostly in darkness, a hint of familiar features was visible in the soft light that glistened through the window.

It was Cale. Not the Cale from the tape or the Cale in the drug or the Cale that flickered in Ilford's face. A realer, sadder Cale.

Everett felt his certainty leaking away like the water trickling through the gaps in the cobblestone. Felt his departure and his fury plucked from him and replaced with weariness and doubt. He would have to stay.

He moved towards the figure, his foot catching on the broken pendulum.

“Don't,” said Ilford. “He's very vulnerable to infection, he can't be touched—”

As Everett plodded through the wreckage towards the dim figure, something happened, something changed.

“Not so close,” said Ilford, his voice rising with panic.

The wheelchair was heaped with meat in a rough approximation of a human form. The frozen roasts, lamb shanks, and slabs of beef from the gigantic freezer upstairs.

Not Cale.

Everett pushed the wheelchair, and the chunks of meat cascaded down, to roll in the dust and debris on the floor. The biggest piece, a glistening rack of ribs, settled into the seat of the chair, leaving a smear of grease and frost on its leather back.

It was just another trap, Everett thought. Another thing Ilford had set up while Everett was dreaming himself in Hatfork. A backup in case the clock didn't hold him.

Or possibly it was something more, something awful. Everett turned to Ilford.

“You should have stayed where I am,” said the old man bitterly. “He looked okay from a distance. When the light is right, you can see him coming back.”

“You only dream people into things,” said Everett. “You can't reverse it.”

Ilford was distinctly smaller and older now. His voice was almost lost in the sound of the rain.

“I'm trying,” he said. “I keep trying.”

“You said you'd kill him,” said Everett. “But he's not even here. There's no one to kill. And there's nothing keeping me here.”

“I'd never kill my own son,” said Ilford, his voice finally breaking, turning inward. “How could you think I'd do that?”

Everett went past him to the door, pausing only to check that the motorcycle keys were safe in his pocket.

 

He led the televangelist out of the rain, into the shelter of an abandoned storefront on a sidestreet off Submission. The onscreen face looked bewildered.

“I have something for you,” he said, and took out the vial from Fault's refrigerator.

The video face stared. “What is it?”

“What you've been looking for, I think. God.” He pressed it into the televangelist's ferroplastic palm. “Be careful with it. Store in a cool, dry place.”

“What kind of God is it?” asked the robot.

“The world-making kind,” Everett said. “The kind you're missing. It knows about wanting to be real instead of programmed, things you want to know. This is the first time it's been available in this form.”

The face frowned. “The first time?”

“Yes. There's a lot of bogus God going around. But this is the real thing.”

“How can I—access this God?”

“A problem,” he admitted. “You and your friends will have to figure that out. You have to take it in somehow. Let it alter your program.”

He looked at the televised face and imagined Cale there instead. Like the face from the videotape he'd watched in Vacaville. Full circle. Only now Edie would be right. Cale would exist only on television.

He wondered if the robots would go up the hill and kill Ilford, when Cale got inside them.

“Thank you,” said the televangelist.

“You're welcome.”

The robot strode purposefully into the rain. Everett watched it walk away, then he went back to the motorcycle.

Ten minutes later he crossed the hump of the bridge over the bay, and the tall buildings dropped out of sight behind him. In the Oakland hills he rode out of the rain. The highway was empty, and he didn't have to stop until the bike ran out of gas a few miles short of Vacaville.

He junked it and, for the second time, walked in.

 

 

 

 

Things were different. He noticed that from the first. Nobody he passed on the street seemed right. As in the mirror room of a funhouse, everyone was taller or shorter or wider than they should be, or else they were missing a limb or two. He saw an albino and a dwarf and a man with a footlong nose, but he didn't see anyone he recognized. Nobody was proportioned right. It gave him a headache. And they all slinked along the sidewalks like they barely had a right to be there, avoiding one another's eyes, and his.

It was nearly sundown. He found his way downtown, where he made an immensely fat woman on a park bench look up from the comic book she was reading—it featured svelte, well-proportioned government stars—and give him directions to the luck-testing offices. She blinked out at him through her mask of flesh and pointed the way.

He found Cooley's office, but Cooley wasn't there. His secretary was a woman with a set of complicated braces supporting spindly, withered legs. She looked at him suspiciously, but when he gave the name Chaos, her eyes widened.

“I need to know where Edie Bitter moved,” he said. “Where she's living now.”

“Mr. Cooley needs to talk to you,” she said. “He'll want to know you're here.”

“I'll talk to Ian later. He'll be able to find me.”

“Excuse me,” she said. “Please wait outside.”

He went out into the hallway, to be stared at by a shrunken man who sat waiting perched on the edge of a bench. Everett nodded, and the man nodded back, smiling.

“You're pretty, but I'm not in love with you,” said the man.

“What?” said Everett.

“You're pretty, but I'm not in love with you. I don't even know you. Why's that?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You must be here because they're going to make you famous now. Is that right?”

“No.”

“Don't be modest. I probably ought to get your autograph. You'll be on TV. The girls will love you. We'll all love you.”

“No, really.”

“Then you must be in trouble. It's got to be against the law to be so good-looking if you're not one of them.”

The conversation was interrupted by the clatter of the secretary appearing on her ungainly, stiltlike braces. She glared at Everett and the dwarf angrily.

“Here.” She handed Everett a slip of paper. “I called Mr. Cooley. You can go now. That's the address. He says he'll see you tomorrow. After you get adjusted.”

“Adjusted?”

She frowned. “Look, I don't know who you think you are, Mr. Chaos. But you're showing very little respect for—the way we do things around here.”

“I've been away.”

“I can see that.”

“I've got questions—”

“Save them for Ian. Please go.” She turned and hobbled back into the office.

He walked to the eastern edge of town, the windows ahead reflecting flashes of the low orange sun behind him. The streets he passed were increasingly residential and quiet. He found the address on the note, a two-story apartment building, the upper floor cantilevered out over a parking space. Edie's station wagon was in the lot.

The woman who came to the door presented a problem. She was Edie, but she also wasn't. She was about four feet tall, taller than the man at Cooley's office but not by much. Her body wasn't disproportionate, though. A midget, he thought, not a dwarf, remembering the distinction.

She had Edie's features drawn in precise miniature on her face.

“Chaos?” she said, her voice high but recognizable.

“Yes,” he said, and then didn't know what else to say.

“Do you want to come in?” she said.

He nodded and followed her inside.

The scene there was a bizarre analogue of the one he'd left: two boys watching television. But Ray was enormously fat. As wide as he was tall, he took up half the couch. Dave sat on one of the arms. At first Everett assumed he was just making room for his brother. Then he spotted Dave's tail, protruding through a gap in the back of his pants and hanging down the side of the couch.

Melinda came out of the bedroom. She hadn't changed. She looked from Everett to Edie to Everett, then ran up and threw her arms around him.

“I didn't know where you were,” she said, her face pressed against his side.

“It took longer than I thought.” He met Edie's eyes as he said this.

Melinda backed away. “I saw you in Hatfork. You'remember that?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised.

“Thought I was going crazy.”

Edie left, walking on her tiny legs into the kitchen. Ray and Dave just sat and stared at Everett, the television blaring behind them.

“Melinda,” said Everett. “Would you take Ray and Dave outside? The sun's nice.”

She made a wry face, but turned and said with exaggerated weariness, “C'mon, guys.” She waved her hand, and Ray and Dave hurried after her, Ray wobbling like jello.

He went into the kitchen. Edie, characteristically, had busied herself washing dishes. But now she had to stand on a chair to do it.

He wanted to rush to her, embrace her unhesitatingly, the way Melinda had embraced him, but it seemed clumsy.
impossible. Would he lift her like a child? He wanted her to be as she was before, and at the same time he wanted, desperately, to make her know this didn't matter. The two impulses fought in him, one shaming the other.

She finally turned, her eyes full of fear and confusion.

“What happened, Edie?”

“You went away,” she said with sudden bitterness.

“I'm sorry about that,” he said, very softly. “I wish I hadn't. But what happened here?”

“Nothing,” she said defensively. She pulled off the rubber gloves and sat down on the chair. “We moved a few times, of course. I'm working in a cardboard recycling factory this week. Melinda had her luck tested—did she tell you? No, of course not. Well, it was very good, Ian was very impressed . . .”