Aces High

  “These gentlemen have told us about it.”

  “Really?” she observed. “That is so? That is what you told him?”

  Devil John nodded.

  “That’s what we told him,” Croyd said. “But—”

  “And the bag you dropped when you saw me approaching,” she said. “What might it contain? Open it, please, and show me.”

  “Of course,” said Croyd.

  “Anything you say,” Devil John agreed.

  Both men dropped to their knees before her and fumbled unsuccessfully for long seconds before they were able to begin unrolling the top of the bag.

  Croyd wanted to kiss her feet while he was in position to do so, but she had asked to see the inside of the bag and that should really come first. Perhaps she might feel inclined to reward him afterward, and—

  He opened the bag and a cloud of vapor swirled about them. Kim Toy drew back immediately, choking. As his stomach tightened, Croyd realized that the lady was no longer beautiful, and no more desirable than a hundred others he had passed this day. From the corner of his eye he saw Devil John shift his position and begin to rise—and at that moment Croyd realized the nature of his attitude adjustment.

  As the smell dissipated, something of the initial wave of glamour rose again from her person. Croyd clenched his teeth and lowered his head near to the mouth of the bag. He took a deep breath.

  Her beauty died in that instant, and he extended his power.

  Yes, as I was saying, the body is lost. It was destroyed by dogs. Devil John did his best for you, but he has nothing to deliver. We are going now. You will forget that I was with him.

  “Come on!” he said to Darlingfoot as he rose to his feet.

  Devil John shook his head.

  “I can’t leave this lady, Croyd,” he answered. “She asked me for—”

  Croyd waved the opened bag in front of his face. Darlingfoot’s eyes widened. He choked. He shook his head.

  “Come on!” Croyd repeated as he slung the bag over his shoulder and broke into a sprint.

  With one enormous leap Devil John landed ten feet ahead of him.

  “Weird, Croyd! Weird!” he announced as they crossed the street.

  “Now you know all about pheromones,” Croyd told him.

  The sky had become completely overcast again, and a few flurries of snow drifted past him. Croyd had parted with Darlingfoot outside another bar and had begun walking, down and across town. He scanned the streets regularly for a taxi but none came into view. He was loath to trust his burden to the crush and press of bus or subway.

  The snowfall increased in intensity as he walked the next several blocks, and gusts of wind came now to swirl the flakes and drive them among the buildings. Passing vehicles began switching on their headlights, and Croyd realized as the visibility diminished that he would be unable to distinguish a taxi even if one passed right beside him. Cursing, he trudged on, scrutinizing the nearest buildings, hoping for a diner or restaurant where he could drink a cup of coffee, and wait for the storm to blow over, or call for a cab. Everything he passed seemed to be an office, however.

  Several minutes later the flakes became smaller and harder. Croyd raised his free hand to shield his eyes. While the sudden drop in temperature did not bother him, the icy pellets did. He ducked into the next opening he came to—an alleyway—and he sighed and lowered his shoulders as the force of the wind was broken.

  Better. The snow descended here in a more leisurely fashion. He brushed it off his jacket, out of his hair; he stamped his feet. He looked about. There was a recess in the building to his left, several paces back, several steps above street level. It looked completely sheltered, dry. He headed for it.

  He had already set his foot upon the first step when he realized that one corner of the boxlike area before a closed metal door was already occupied. A pale, stringy-haired woman, dumpy-looking beneath unguessable layers of clothing, sat between a pair of shopping bags, staring past him.

  “… So Gladys tells Marty she knows he’s been seeing that waitress down at Jensen’s…” the woman muttered.

  “Excuse me,” Croyd said. “Mind if I share the doorway with you? It’s coming down kind of hard.”

  “… I told her she could still get pregnant when she was nursing, but she just laughed at me.…”

  Croyd shrugged and entered the alcove, moving to the opposite corner.

  “When she finds another one’s on the way she’s really upset,” the woman continued, “especially with Marty having moved in with his waitress now.…”

  Croyd remembered his mother’s breakdown following his father’s death, and a touch of sadness at this obvious case of senile dementia stirred within his breast. But— He wondered. Could his new power, his ability to influence the thought patterns of others, have some therapeutic effect on a person such as this? He had a little time to pass here. Perhaps …

  “Listen,” he said to the woman, thinking clearly and simply, focusing images. “You are here, now, in the present. You are sitting in a doorway, watching it snow—”

  “You bastard!” the woman screamed at him, her face no longer pale, her hands darting toward one of the bags. “Mind your own business! I don’t want now and snow! It hurts!”

  She opened the bag, and the darkness inside expanded even as Croyd watched—rushing toward him, filling his entire field of vision, tugging him suddenly in several directions, twisting him and—

  The woman, alone now in the doorway, closed her bag, stared at the snow for a moment, then said, “… So I say to her, ‘Men aren’t good about support payments. Sometimes you’ve got to get the law on them. That nice young man at Legal Aid will tell you what to do.’ And then Charlie, who was working at the pizza parlor…”

  Croyd’s head hurt and he was not used to the feeling. He never had hangovers, because he metabolized alcohol too quickly, but this felt like what he imagined a hangover to be. Then he became aware that his back, legs, and buttocks were wet; also, the backs of his arms. He was sprawled someplace cold and moist. He decided to open his eyes.

  The sky was clear and twilit between the buildings, with a few bright stars already in sight. It had been snowing. It had also been afternoon. He sat up. What had become of the past several hours, and—

  He saw a dumpster. He saw a lot of empty whiskey and wine bottles. He was in an alley, but …

  This was not the same alley. The buildings were lower, there had been no dumpster in the other one, and he could not locate the doorway he had occupied with the old woman.

  He massaged his temples, felt the throbbing begin to recede. The old woman … What the hell was that black thing she’d hit him with when he’d tried to help her? She had taken it out of one of her bags and—

  Bags! He cast about frantically for his own bag, with the carefully parceled remains of the diminutive John Doe. He saw then that he still held it in his right hand, and that it had been turned inside out and torn.

  He rose to his feet and looked about in the dim glow from a distant streetlight. He saw the doggie bags scattered about him, and he counted quickly. Nine. Yes. All nine of them were in sight, and he now saw the limbs, the head, and the thorax—though the thorax had now been broken into four pieces and the head looked much shinier than it had earlier. From the dampness, perhaps. The jar! Where was it? The liquid might be very important to whoever wanted the remains. If the jar had been broken …

  He uttered a brief cry when he saw it standing upright in the shadows near the wall to his left. The top was missing and so was an inch or so of glass from beneath it. He crossed to it, and from the odor he knew it to be the real thing and not just rainwater.

  He gathered up the doggie bags, which seemed surprisingly dry, and he placed them on the sheltered ledge of a barred basement window. Then he collected the pieces of chitin into a heap nearby. When he recovered the legs he noted that they were both broken, but he reflected that that could make for easier packing. Then he turned his attention to t
he jag-topped pickle jar, and he smiled. How simple. The answer lay all about him, provided by the derelicts who frequented the area.

  He gathered an armful of empty bottles and bore them over to the side, where he set them down and began uncorking and uncapping them. When he had finished he decanted the dark liquid.

  It took eight bottles of various sizes, and he set them on the ledge with the doggie bags above the small mound of shattered exoskel’ and cartilage. It seemed as if there were a little bit less of the guy each time he got unwrapped. Maybe it had something to do with the way he was divided now. Maybe it took algebra to understand it.

  Croyd moved then to the dumpster and opened its side hatch. He smiled almost immediately, for there were long strands of Christmas ribbon near at hand. He withdrew several of these and stuffed them into a side pocket. He leaned forward. If there were ribbon, then—

  The sound of rapid footfalls came and went. He spun raising his hands to defend himself, but there was no one near. Then he spotted him. A small man in a coat several times too large for him had halted briefly at the windowsill, where he snatched one of the larger bottles and two of the doggie bags. He ran off immediately then, toward the far end of the alley where two other shabby figures waited.

  “Hey!” Croyd yelled. “Stop!” and he reached with his power but the man was out of range.

  All that he heard was laughter, and a cry of, “Tonight we party, boys!”

  Sighing, Croyd withdrew a large wad of red and green Christmas paper from the dumpster and returned to the window to repackage the remainder of the remains.

  After he had walked several blocks, his bright parcel beneath his arm, he passed a bar called The Dugout and realized he was in the Village. His brow furrowed for a moment, but then he saw a taxi and waved, and the car pulled over. Everything was okay. Even the headache was gone.

  Jube looked up, saw Croyd smiling at him.

  “How— How did it go?” he asked.

  “Mission accomplished,” Croyd answered, passing him the key.

  “You got it? There was something on the news about Darlingfoot—”

  “I got it.”

  “And the possessions?”

  “There weren’t any.”

  “You sure of that, fella?”

  “Absolutely. Nothing there but him, and he’s in the bathtub.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay, because I closed the drain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My cab was involved in an accident on the way over and some of the bottles broke. So watch out for glass when you unwrap it.”

  “Bottles? Broken glass?”

  “He was kind of—reduced. But I got you everything that was left.”

  “Left?”

  “Available. He sort of came apart and melted a bit. But I saved most of him. He’s all wrapped up in shiny paper with a red ribbon around him. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Yeah … That’s fine, Croyd. Sounds like you did your best.”

  Jube passed him an envelope.

  “I’ll buy you dinner at Aces High,” Croyd said, “as soon as I shower and change.”

  “No, thanks. I—I’ve got things to do.”

  “Take along some disinfectant if you’re stopping by the apartment.”

  “Yeah … I gather there were some problems?”

  “Naw, it was a piece of cake.”

  Croyd walked off whistling, hands in his pockets. Jube stared at the key as a distant clock began to chime the hour.

  Unto the Sixth Generation

  by Walter Jon Williams

  Part One

  COLD RAIN TAPPED ON the skylights. The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner, and Maxim Travnicek was thankful—the jangling had been going on for days. He lit a Russian cigarette and reached for a bottle of schnapps.

  Travnicek took reading glasses out of his jacket and peered at the controls on the flux generators. He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome. To his former colleagues at MIT he was known as “Czechoslovakia’s answer to Victor Frankenstein,” a label coined by a fellow professor, Bushmill, who had later gotten a dean’s appointment and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity.

  “Fuck your mother, Bushmill,” Travnicek said, in Slovak. He swallowed schnapps from his bottle. “And fuck you, too, Victor Frankenstein. If you’d known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble.”

  The comparison with Frankenstein had stung. The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. His first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein’s alma mater, Ingolstadt. He’d hated every minute of his time in Bavaria. He’d never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years.

  Now, after Ingolstadt, after MIT, after Texas A&M, he was reduced to this loft. For weeks he had lived in a trance, existing on canned food, nicotine, and amphetamines, losing track first of hours, and then of days, his fervid brain existing in a perpetual explosion of ideas, concepts, techniques. On a conscious level Travnicek barely knew where it was all coming from; at such times it seemed as if something deep inside his cellular makeup were speaking to the world through his body and mind, bypassing his consciousness, his personality.…

  Always it had been thus. When he grew obsessed by a project everything else fell by the wayside. He barely needed to sleep; his body temperature fluctuated wildly; his thoughts were swift and purposeful, moving him solidly toward his goal. Tesla, he had read, was the same way—the same manner of spirit, angel, or demon now spoke through Travnicek.

  But now, in the late morning, the trance had faded. The work was done. He wasn’t certain how—later on he’d have to go through it all piece by piece and work out what he’d accomplished; he suspected he had about a half-dozen basic patents here that would make him rich for all time—but that would be later, because Travnicek knew that soon the euphoria would vanish and weariness would descend. He had to finish the project before then. He took another gulp of schnapps and grinned as he gazed down the long barnlike length of his loft.

  The loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents. Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop microcomputers. Papers, empty food tins, and ground-out cigarettes littered the crude pressboard floor. Blowups of Leonardo’s drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.

  Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man. He was hairless and the roof of his skull was transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo’s better wet dreams.

  The man on the table was connected to other equipment by stout electric cables. His eyes were closed.

  Travnicek adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit. He couldn’t afford to heat his entire loft, and instead wore an electric suit intended by its designers to keep portly outdoors-men warm while they crouched in duck blinds. He glanced at the skylights. The rain appeared to be lessening. Good. He didn’t need Victor Frankenstein’s cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.

  He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience—proper dress was important to him and he wore a tie and jacket under the jumpsuit—and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators. A low moan filled the loft, was felt as a deep vibration through the floorboards. The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered. Half went out. The moan became a shriek. Saint Elmo’s fire danced among the roofbeams. There was an electric smell.

  Dimly, Travnicek heard a regular thumping. The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.

  The scream reached its peak. Ultrasonics made Travnicek’s worktables dance, and shattered crockery throughout the building. In the apartment below, the television set imploded. Travnicek threw another switch. Sweat trickled down his nose.

  The android on the table twitched as the ener
gy from the flux generators was dumped into his body. The table glowed with Saint Elmo’s fire. Travnicek bit through the cardboard tube of his cigarette. The glowing end fell unnoticed to the floor.

  The sound from the generators began to die down. The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.

  “You’ll pay for that television, motherfucker!”

  “Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling,” said Travnicek. In German, an ideal language for the excremental.

  The stunned fluorescent lights began to flicker on again.

  Leonardo’s stern drawings gazed down at the android as it opened its dark eyes. The flickering fluorescents provided a strobe effect that made the eyewhites seem unreal. The head turned; the eyes saw Travnicek, then focused. Under the transparent dome that topped the skull, a silver dish spun. The sound of the broomstick ceased.

  Travnicek stepped up to the table. “How are you?” he asked.

  “All monitored systems are functioning.” The android’s voice was deep and spoke American English.

  Travnicek smiled and spat the stub of his cigarette to the floor. He’d broken into a computer in the AT&T research labs and stolen a program that modeled human speech. Maybe he’d pay Ma Bell a royalty one of these days. “Who are you?” he asked.

  The android’s eyes searched the loft deliberately. His voice was matter-of-fact. “I am Modular Man,” he said. “I am a multipurpose multifunctional sixth-generation machine intelligence, a flexible-response defensive attack system capable of independent action while equipped with the latest in weaponry.”

  Travnicek grinned. “The Pentagon will love it,” he said. Then, “What are your orders?”

  “To obey my creator, Dr. Maxim Travnicek. To guard his identity and well-being. To test myself and my equipment under combat conditions, by fighting enemies of society. To gain maximum publicity for the future Modular Men Enterprises in so doing. To preserve my existence and well-being.”

  Travnicek beamed down at his creation. “Your clothes and modules are in the cabinet. Take them, take your guns, and go out and find some enemies of society. Be back before sunset.”