City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (16 page)

“Others? Is there more than one?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It might be the same one from different moments in time. And it's armed. It carries an ax. It can step forward or back in time through a five-minute range, until it finds the one split-second you are off-balance or not looking. It can take all the time in the world and try again as often as it likes. It takes trophies too. It chops off the heads and stores them inside its skull, which is hollow and made of glass like a fishbowl, so that everyone can see who it killed last.”

“Grisly. Sounds like something from your Man's island.”

“He's not my Man.”

“What?”

“Quickwig.” (That's not his name, but it's as close as us guys from the Bronx can say it.) “He's doing me a favor out of the benevolence of his big heart. It's not like I got anything to swap him for. Besides, he is a prince. Back in his day.”

Jack nodded. He knew the feeling.

“So Quickwig outranks me,” I said.

“He does not seem like the type who does your kind of work.”

“The first time I met Quickwig, we were rooming together. We had to share a bed, because of the crowding. He came at me with his harpoon and I was too slow with my pistol. I had to wrestle him. He broke my neck, and the Time Wardens brought me back to life. So I decided we had to be friends. I replayed the scene and gave him the bed this time, and bowed politely to his little fetish named Yojo, and once Yojo said I was jake, everything was copacetic.”

“Sounds like a good man to have in your corner.”

“He is. Even though he eats people.”

Jack shivered again. “You come from the Twentieth Century. You know modern life has a price. The noble savage is closer to unspoiled Eden than we are.”

“Don't be a jerk, sir, if you don't mind my saying so. Every sorry last one of us is just as far from Eden as everyone else.” I said. The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I turned my head and spat over the railing. The wad of spittle arced down into the mist, lost interest in gravity, and dissolved.

“In any case, the beheading habit allows the Tin Man to make kill-identifications easier back at the station. And if there is a Warden at the station, sometimes he will backdate the Tin Man, so it when you suddenly find it standing next to you with an axe, you can see your own bloody head, with a surprised and stupid look of shock, staring out from inside the hollow glass helmet of the machine. At least, I think the Tin Woodman is a machine.”

“You mean you don't know?”

“Quickwig says the Tin Woodman is a hobgoblin called Talamaur. They suck life from the dying. and eat the hearts of healthy men when they sleep. Who can say his guess is not closer to the horseshoe stake of truth than mine?”

“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more,” said Jack sourly. “So what happens if he has a Tin Man with him?”

“Then the third outcome is a sure thing.”

“What's that?”

“If he shows up with a Tin Woodman, I am already dead.”

At that moment, a beautiful, softly lilting song, half-breathless, half-panting and all-purring, came from the window. She was singing. It sounded so much like a love song, a song of erotic passion, that I did not actually catch the words.

When I did, I laughed. She really was pulling out all the stops, wasn't she?

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you-uu

Happy birthday-yy

Mister President…

And then the girl let out a scream like the shriek of a bird of prey. She had the trained voice of a singer and an actress who could hit the high notes loud enough to hear in the cheap seats, and she certainly was built like she had the excess lung capacity.

There were shadows in the semi-transparent window. For a moment, I thought it was two figures, the girl and her attacker come back for seconds. And then I laughed with the feeling that only cops who work for Time Wardens know, a feeling of relief, because you remember seeing the date on the headstone of the guy who just drew a knife and is coming for you.

It is like wearing the armor of the inevitable. It is like getting a big wet sloppy kiss from Lady Fate. Because you know, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that
he
is a dead man, not you.

Then I stopped laughing.

A bulky figure in a trenchcoat and a wide-brimmed slouch hat stepped out of the shower stall, of all places, and even with the window half dim, I could see the bathroom lights shining between the upturned collar and the downturned hat brim, right through the glass of his empty head. So I knew I was the dead man.

My head was not propped inside the machine-man's glass skull, which meant I would die by a method that destroyed the whole body, a method that left no corpse. You know what that means in this city.

I looked down at my gun, which was now in my hand. It was a Police Special. What I held in my fist was just the aiming unit, the emission aperture and the firing controls. The real weapon was the size of a warehouse sitting in a null-time vacuole in the fourth-and-a-half dimension, halfway past next Tuesday or somewhere beyond the second star to the right, with atomic piles and dynamos and batteries of big guns and futuristic zap-rays and a whole arsenal of various brands of death and maiming and unhappiness. It could blow a hole in the Moon or pick the left wing off a housefly landing on the Washington Monument from the Empire State Building, and never mind the curvature of the Earth or the prevailing winds. It was that good.

Now, it was useless. The Tin Woodman was programmed to identify it as a weapon. No matter what I did with it, the action would be counteracted before I fired.

There were tremors of cold shivering through my fingers, and I saw little blurry patches of mist clinging to my fingers. A time paradox. A decision point.

This was a moment where I either turned and ran, like Oedipus trying to run away from his cursed life, or I could go in and die like a Kamikaze pilot, a sacrifice to destiny.

“Banzai!”

I ran up the nearer ramp toward the girl and sprinted toward my death.

I'd had a pretty good life, I guess. I had no complaints.

Strike that. My life stank like an incontinent skunk pie sandwich with no mustard, if one of the slices was the crusty heel no one likes to eat, and I had loads of complaints.

As I ran, I let go of my Special, and the gun used its tractor field to jump like a fish and slide back into my armpit holster. With the same motion, I brought the baseball bat I was carrying to my shoulder. Joe DiMaggio had given it to me. The Yankee Clipper. Signed it, too, with a hot engraver's pen. It was my prize possession.

Jack was ahead of me. Unlike me, he had not hesitated. My face felt hot for the first time that night as I ran after him, trying to catch up to him. I was blushing for shame. Damn me if I would let a client go into harm's way first!

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Queequeg's shadow move between me and the doorway to the far ramp, the other entrance. In his bare feet, he was surprisingly quiet and surprisingly swift. His deadly harpoon, which can kill a mammal much bigger than a man, was held lightly at his shoulder. His top hat was resting carefully behind him on the balcony deck, upon the spot where he had been posted, so it would not get mussed.

I followed Jack. Queequeg could handle himself. My ears popped as I passed through whatever unseen forcefield or abracadabra magic, or whatever it was that stretched across the threshold to the tower and allowed the Wardens to keep the weather outside without the need for a physical door.

And, no, we did not bounce off the force field or end up five seconds in the past. Not that there was any way to find out what was off-limits until the moment after you find yourself in the moment before, looking stupid. There are no leases in the City, since the Masters of Time own everything, but there are rosters and quartermasters and people with prestige among the Swell Set. And then there were people with pull and those with favors to call in among the Not So Swell. And there were tough guys with tougher reputations to maintain among the Really Not Swell At All. Whatever the quartermaster or the ward boss assigned, you didn't take, but you swapped to someone who had something you liked better, or you gave him your marker. So everyone knew who really owned what, and who owed who, but nothing was written down.

This was Jack's apartment. He did not live there, and his name was not on the ward roster, but he had prestige, and his lieutenants had pull, and his boys had reputations, so it was for all intents and purposes his.

Jack was pelting up the ramp. He reached the upper corridor. It was brighter in here, all glowing gold walls and display cases like a museum. I could see the pistol in his hand, a footlong length of polished and gilded wood and lustrous pewter. It was a flintlock, or it looked like one. I had not inspected it very closely when I obtained it from Aaron Burr late yesterday, in return for forgetting his past. It had been just before the evening horserace and evening riot at the hippodrome (Bucephalus had bested Marengo in the last race, and was running against Traveller, and odds were running twelve to seven for Lee's horse.) I barely had time before evening curfew to get from the riot to Jack, and no time to instruct him.

Had Jack even loaded the pistol? Did he know how? I did not remember whether I had told him how to load and hold it, not to assume pistols of that type would stay loaded. Inwardly, I cursed myself. It is that kind of small mistake, not double-checking the details, that gets men killed. But it was too late.

She screamed again. Jack had seen too many movies, because he raised his foot and kicked at the door panel leading into the bedroom of the suite. He ended up on his backside staring at the glowing gold ceiling.

I turned off the silence field and said: “Allow me.”

My gun leaped into my hand from the holster, projected an aiming beam, then launched a missile made of white-hot plasma instead of old-fashioned metal. The gun emitted a magnetic force field shaped like a tube to guide the missile to the target, then designed and built an invisible set of braces and baffles out of nucleonic energy-tension to suppress the explosion within a five-foot radius. Then the gun focused a time distortion hole on the spot to sweep the wreckage of the door panels and part of the wall sideways out of the continuum, into the non-being between timestreams, as the missile plasma ruptured and made a miniature version of a sun.

So, not only was Jack and half the planet not killed, all he saw was a perfect circle-shaped hole appear in the wooden wall. Also, a perfect vacuum-globe appeared in the air in front of him, then imploded with a bang. I guess nature abhorred it, since it immediately vanished and was replaced by a shockwave that pulled Jack forward and hurled him into the bedroom.

I holstered my gun, gripped the bat in both hands and followed him at a less hectic pace.

It was like stepping into a Museum diorama tuned to the Mid-Twentieth Century, coastal North America. The original suite had been one large chamber made of invulnerable gold walls. Now, the inside had been portioned off into human-sized rooms by walls of wood and plaster, and apportioned with furniture and appliances like you might see in a rich man's home. Since I did not often get invited into wealthy drawing rooms, the place looked like something I had only seen in motion pictures. Only everything was in color.

There were cut crystal sets, ornaments on marble stands, a coffee table, a couch, a big silk-covered bed to one side, a door to the bathroom to the other, a bar or miniature kitchen stocked with electronic wonder gizmos, and lots of carpet underfoot. Only the far wall, the one with the man-high window in it, was gold. Drapes were hung across it to block the golden glow from outside. And there was a chandelier overhead, to give light because the glow was blocked. This is the kind of useless extravagance that only the people the Wardens really, really like get to enjoy. Jack was not one of the middle ranks of the mortals of Metachronopolis. He was from the tip-top, the flaky upper crust. He was one of the guys the Wardens let play with their toys.

By fate or chance or cosmic design, Jack landed on top of the guy in the long black cloak—I kid you not, the target was dressed like a comic opera villain from the Silent pictures of last decade—just as the guy tore the towel off the girl.

No sooner had Jack landed than he was kneeling on the guy's arms, punching him in the face with one fist, and strangling him with the other hand. Blood was streaming from the guy's nose, into his gray beard and his thin gray hair.

The bearded face was wrinkled. The girl's attacker was an old man.

My guess was late sixties, so he was perhaps twenty or thirty years older than Jack. And it was not an opera cape that he was wearing. It was a self-heating thermocloak from the Twenty-First Century, the thing they use in hospitals to medicate patients and keep their hearts working. So, he was not only old, he was decrepit. You had to wonder where he found the juice to get his Walla Walla Washington to stand up and salute.

A walking stick had fallen from his thin, veiny hand. It did not look like the sort of stick that rich men carry to show that they don't need to muss their hands with work. It looked like the type old men lean on because their legs are weak. At the top of the stick was a gold knob. My gun beeped at me and told me the knob was producing a time distortion effect, but it only had a nine-inch range. He had to be holding it for it to work, so it was no source of danger at the moment.

Horrid gargling noises were coming from the old man as Jack squeezed his throat.

The Tin Woodman turned toward me. Not
turn
, exactly. It blinked from facing away from me to facing toward me, its shoulders hunched and its gauntlets raised. It was holding a long-handled executioner's axe; a half-moon of sharpened metal shining like brass formed the business end with a spike sticking out the other way.

The monster looked like a freakish cross between the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow, the guy who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men from that radio program, and beneath that, a knight from Avalon in plate armor of purest gold. There was nothing but a fishbowl glint between its hat and its trenchcoat collar.