Mystery Box
A Circle Run
THE MAN IN THE LONG COAT WALKED down the streets of bone. The moon was shining on the sides of bone-white buildings and on the bone-white streets. The shadow the man cast as he walked was dark and lustrous—far more alluring than the man himself. He was nondescript, except for his eyes, which were sea-green and seemed to be illuminated from within. For a moment, the man felt observed and didn’t like it. He looked up at the moon. There were more people up there than there were in New York. More than there were on Earth. The light from the moon was like their twilight subconscious awareness, turned Earthward. Turned to him.
But that is only my imagination, C thought. Hardly anyone in space pays much attention to Earth, especially at night.
Tucked under C’s arm was a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. There was no address on the package, but that was all right because he wasn’t delivering it anywhere. This was only the semblance of delivery. He found the corner that he wanted, Church and Canal in old TriBeCa, and walked south down Church. Here the rogue strain of grist had transformed only the stone of the buildings to bone and not the metalwork. Something had gotten into the metal superstructure, though, because the iron ornamentation of the buildings had a blue tint to it, and was very brittle. There were places where the fire escapes had crumbled away in straight lines that mere rust would never have produced. More like broken ice.
But the air was not cold tonight. It was a mild October night, and he was glad he was wearing a coat with no quilted lining, even if it did flap a bit too much in the breeze. He wondered where he’d left the lining, but he couldn’t remember. Probably somewhere in space, or back on Mercury. The lining was like a lot of things that way.
C found the address he was looking for, PERCEPIED EXPORT. At the door there was a broken iron grating pushed to the side. The outside windows were covered with sheet-metal roller casings that did not look like they would be rolled up come daylight, or ever. He wondered what he might find in the spaces between the metal coverings and the windows behind them. Something lost from the last millennium, probably. For a moment, C pictured the three-hundred-year-old skeleton of a little girl stuck there, but shook the image from his head.
It wasn’t preposterous, knowing what he did of New York. For three centuries, New York had made a fetish out of children. Dead children. Live, trapped children. Over the beds of old women you would find the paintings of the Little Bone Boy, crying thick chalky tears from enormous eyes that were, somehow, still a living brown. The steps of most brownstones had their guardian children, taken from the sections of the city that had turned to bone, as perpetual wards against the bone-change coming once again for the young.
And there were darker, sexual perversities that had arisen. C knew all about them. He’d been there when it all began.
He opened the door on Church Street and went in. There was a single large room, twenty feet to the ceiling and maybe a hundred feet long and wide. The walls of the room were piled high with wrapped packages much like the one C held under his arm. In the center of the room was a cluster of desks. Three men and two women sat on battered chairs. Four of the five chairs had no backrests, but all of the people were hunched over their desks examining data pools, so the backrests didn’t seem to matter. The men and women moved their fingertips over the desktops, touching the surface here and there, here and there, as if they were using fortune-telling boards or shuffling invisible gambling chips.
C came and stood quietly near the desks. After a moment, a woman at the biggest desk looked up.
“I have something for Mr. Percepied,” said C.
The woman touched a spot on her desk, freezing the invisible swirl of data before her, C supposed. He could have attuned his grist outriders to examine what the woman was looking at, but it would be useless knowledge to him. Why soak up the entropy? Do only what needs doing.
“This is shipping,” the woman said. “You want receiving.”
“No,” C replied. “I don’t think so.”
“Mr. Percepied hardly ever comes into the warehouse,” the woman said. “I run things here.”
“I was told Mr. Percepied comes in on Tuesdays,” said C, “to buy for his personal collection.”
“Oh,” said the woman. She seemed startled, but quickly recovered herself. “I see. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Hecate Minim. You must be—”
“Mr. Cornell.”
She stood up and stretched. She was tall and had once been very beautiful. Now there was the red tinge of reparation grist to her skin, and her eyes were old—not the creases around her eyes, which were nonexistent, but the eyes themselves. They were the same startling green as his own.
Except I am even older than my eyes.
Despite her eyes, and for no reason that he could name, he associated the woman with the color brown. Like a moth. As he thought of his old friend, Jack Cureoak, the wandering moth of the solar system’s night. This was Cureoak’s daughter, after all.
“Mr. Percepied said you could leave whatever it is with me,” Hecate Minim said.
C smiled sadly. “I’d rather give whatever it is to him,” he said.
“That may not be possible,” said Hecate Minim.
“It may not be,” C replied evenly.
“Do you have it with you?”
“Shouldn’t we go somewhere else?” C indicated the four other clerks sitting at their desks.
“They won’t hear us,” Hecate Minim said. “I’m on nightwatch this evening, and I locked them in virtual as soon as you came in.”
“You might be surprised what can seep into your dreams,” said C.
“All right, then. Let me use the bathroom and get my coat,” said the woman. She went to a closet in the back. C touched one of the men hunched over the desk. The man did not flinch or shudder. He moved his hands like insects across the wood grain of the desk surface. The woman returned wearing a coat of faded red wool. They went out into the night. She leaned against the broken iron door grate and got out a cigarette, shook it until it lit, then took two quick puffs. C noticed the brand of the cigarette, as he always did. Mandala 90s. She was breathing in a blend of marijuana and crazed Eastern logics from the kef farms out on the Gai radial, near Venus. But when she breathed out, the smoke smelled like hot sand. There must be new additives, C thought. Something all-consuming to make them smell that way.
“Is there some place we could get a cup of coffee?” he asked her.
“Coffee?” she said. “Don’t you mean whiskey?”
“I would rather drink coffee.” On Earth, the drinking of coffee sometimes had peculiar connotations. But C saw no reason to explain to her that he didn’t drink alcohol. He had watched what alcohol had done to Jack Cureoak. It had been enough to put him off drinking for three centuries.
“There’s a place on Walker,” she said. “But they have children.”
“I just like coffee,” said C. “That’s all.” They walked three blocks, saying nothing, and turned down a dark street. In the middle they came to a black door. There were black metal letters on the door that C would not have been able to read had it not been for the moonlight. The letters said NIGHT KINDERGARTEN.
The interior was lit with pinprick biolumins that twinkled like stars. Behind the coffee bar was a tank filled with preservative. A row of naked dead children was floating in it. Some were right side up; some were upside down, their hair trailing about them in the gooey liquid like rays of sun. The tank was long but narrow, and it held their bodies up against the glass. They were backlit with a blue-green lamp.
From the far rear, behind heavy black curtains, came the whimpers of the live children. Or, in truth, they would be adults who had been modified to look like children, thought C, if this place were on the up-and-up. But the grist could remake a body from the DNA up, so it was hard to tell what was really back there. The patrons could well imagine that they were groping an actual child. At twenty greenleaves for each copped feel, the kids did their best to keep up the illusion.
C remembered two hundred years before, when coffee had first started to be associated with pederasty. Now it was one of the famous forbidden attractions of old New York.
They ordered two smalls. Hecate Minim took hers dark and sweet. C, of course, took his coffee regular, like everything else. Leaving no trace was the way to stay alive.
They sat down at a table near the front where the childish whimpering wouldn’t drown them out.
“Have you considered the possibility that I am Mr. Percepied?” said Hecate Minim.
“Of course I have,” C replied. “But there are certain quantum fluctuations that I am sensitive to that tell me otherwise.” Of course there weren’t, or at least none that he was aware of, but Hecate Minim likely wouldn’t know that. In many ways, Earthers were the most provincial people in the solar system.
“I see,” she said. She sipped her coffee, and a bit of brown lipstick came off on the cup’s brim. The grist in the lipstick quickly sensed that it was no longer connected to its larger algorithm and began the migration back to the penumbra of Hecate Minim’s body. The lipstick smear faded away. C pictured all the lost bits of humanity forever following each human body around, perpetually trying to reconnect, but the body keeps moving ahead. Until it doesn’t. When we die, the rest of us finally catches up, thought C.
He drank his coffee. It was tepid with too much milk and these mugs were not self-heating. He set down the cup.
“I have some memories for Mr. Percepied,” he said. He had put the package on the floor beside his chair. Hecate Minim gazed down at it.
“There?” she said. “You’re just carrying them around?”
“That’s all you can do with memories, isn’t it?” He said. “But they’re not in the box. The box is something else.”
She sat back, regained her composure. Her hair was black, but her eyebrows were light brown. Her skin was Caucasian, tanned—but that was only the grist. C doubted that Hecate Minim got out in the sun very much.
“He’ll want to know what you’ve got,” she said.
“Something unique,” C replied. “Something from the twenty-eighth century. A manuscript. The only copy of an unpublished poem. With memory latencies.”
“What is it?”
“A page from a poet’s notebook. It’s really quite amazing. The guy must have had a hell of a mind for observation, down to the quantum level. These may be the oldest set of memory imprints that have ever been recovered.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Only a thumbnail.”
“Who is it?”
“You should ask me what is it,” C said.
“Well,” said Hecate Minim. “What?”
“It’s a murder,” C replied. “The memory of killing a woman with a knife.”
“A knifing. That’s not so unusual. You can buy knifings by the dozen over on Canal Street.”
“No,” said C. “This is different.”
“How different? Who is the writer?”
“Jack Cureoak.”
Hecate sat back, unconsciously licked her lips. She was very good not to give anything else away. She moved up a notch in C’s admiration. “My,” she said. “Really? Cureoak? The guy who wrote the poems about the outer system?”
“Desolate Traveler is the most famous book. And the others.”
“We are definitely interested, but—”
“There’s something else.”
“What you’ve got is already pretty good.”
“There’s no record.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it’s well established that Cureoak never killed anybody. He was a pacificist. They drafted him into the navy, but he got drummed out during the unrest in the asteroid belt. He could barely bring himself to defend himself in a fight. But there is a record for a man named Clare Runic. Clare Runic knifed a woman named Mamery St. Cloud to death in 2744.”
“I don’t see—”
“Clare Runic was Cureoak’s best friend at the time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Cureoak did it. Clare Runic took the rap.”
“That was three hundred years ago. Who cares?”
“Mr. Percepied will care.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I know who Mr. Percepied is.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That hardly matters,” C replied. He drained the rest of his coffee, lukewarm or not. “Tell him I have the manuscript and the only copy of the latencies. Tell him that there is only one payment that I’ll take for them.”
“How much do you want?” asked Hecate Minim. “Percepied Export makes a small profit selling Earth memorabilia, but I promise you that Mr. Percepied himself is not a wealthy man in any sense of the word.”
“Don’t worry. Even if he were rich, he wouldn’t have enough money. He never could,” C said. “There is only one thing I want from Mr. Percepied. Tell him I want Cassady-13.”
“You’re talking gibberish.”
For the first time in weeks, C laughed aloud. “Yes,” he replied. “I am. Exactly.”
“I have to get back to work,” Hecate Minim said, attempting to appear indignant, but seeming flustered instead. “Where can we contact you?”
“I have a signifier at the Hotel Egypte on Fifty-Ninth Street.”
“That’s up in bone country.”
“Indeed,” said C. “I’m registered under the name of Cornell. Joseph Cornell.”
“You say your name like it’s not your name at all.”
C laughed again. “It may very well be my name, my dear,” he said. “And, in any case, it will do.”
“All right,” said Hecate Minim. “I’ll tell Mr. Percepied. But it may be me that you have to deal with.”
“It is a matter of complete indifference,” C replied. “All I want is Cassady-13.”
Hecate Minim gathered her coat and left. After a moment, C reached over and touched the cup brim that she had just drunk from. He closed his eyes and felt the remains of her grist there, frantically seeking its mistress. But she was gone. C put the grist to his lips.
Hecate in her building. All the citizens of New York had an entire building to themselves these days, if they wanted. Some had complete blocks.
Somewhere in Chelsea. From her window, Hecate could see the Jersey shore across the Hudson. Jersey gone back to swamp and mosquitoes. Somewhere out there in the mud they had buried the Chrysler Building after it went on its rampage and had to be taken down with a missile.
Hecate setting down groceries. A rustle in the back of her musty living room.
Faint light on a wan face. Cigarette smoke rising in moted sunlight.
“Did you get the eggs?”
“No, Papa, I forgot to—”
The vision faded and there was something else in the grist remnant, something familiar, a memory of a memory . . .
But then the feeling faded, and that was all C could recover from the grist. It was enough. He went to the coffee bar and got a refill. From the back, a child cried out.
“There, there,” said a man’s simpering voice. “There, there.”
C used the coffee to wash down the last traces of Hecate Minim.
Uracil Cern
C wandered the city in a purely random manner for the next day and a half. He couldn’t sleep. In fact, C had not been able to sleep for centuries. The ability to sleep was something he’d lost as he went through more and more duplications of himself. Eventually, the heightened knife-edge sensitivity of insomnia became his natural state. Now he could hardly remember what it was like to be relaxed to the point of unconsciousness.
The real ossification of the city started in the upper thirties of Manhattan, and north of there the city was completely white. The epicenter was at Broadway and 116th, at the old site of Columbia University, but the bone-change had radiated far out into Queens, taken all of the Bronx. And Brooklyn? Brooklyn was a dangerous place. He’d only been there a few times and had no wish to return. Rogue grist still roamed the avenues, and only the grist knew Brooklyn.
The sun was hot in the bone canyons of midtown. The street-cleaning grist was functioning still in most parts of the city. It took the form of little rain clouds that moved along in ragged lines an inch above the streets. Seen from above, the sweeper clouds looked exactly like the miniature version of a storm front moving over a continent of Earth. When it reached an obstruction, it analyzed to determine whether the obstruction was alive. If the blockage was inorganic or dead—and small—the grist broke it down. If it was big and dead, the grist sweepers cleaned it and left it there. Something had gone corrupt in the algorithm, however, and the sweepers did not recognize about a third of the streets. On these streets, the bone dust, weathered over the years from the buildings, piled up in drifts or mingled brownly with the other residue of the city. Some of these drifts were hardened to a chalk by decades of rain, but mostly the worn bone remained in loose grain form. When a wind picked up, particles swirled in choking clouds from hidden alleys and side streets. On most autumn days, you could not walk the streets of New York north of Forty-Second Street without getting your clothing thoroughly plastered with bone dust.
At one point on a purely random street that the sweepers had missed, C leaned over and with his finger took a sample of the bone from a drift. Surrounding C (surrounding almost every human being these days) was his own pellicle of grist, a kind of invisible armor of information and calculation embodied in micromachines. It was him as much as the meat and blood of his body were him. Maybe it was more him, since he had often had other bodies—growing them and shucking them like ears of corn—but his pellicle retained more or less the same programming. Perhaps that was his secret identity after all these years, hidden in the grist. Maybe all he really was, was a disembodied thought.
No. I’m a man.
He turned his pellicle to analyzing the bone sample.
The bone was as he’d left it three hundred years before, and still holding what it held within its calcium interstices, its hard-sponge caverns.
What it held—what it was designed to contain—was the Harmony code. And attached and interwoven with the code was a youthful copy of the man who was now the ruler of the inner solar system.
Let me out!
C gasped, stopped in the street, and leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath. After all these years, the ghost of Amés was still so potent! The man within the trapped code wanted to be free. No, more than that. He wanted to rule. To dominate.
Everything.
Let me out and things will go easy on you!
“Don’t worry,” C said, though the trapped code could not hear him. “You’ve given me no choice in the matter.”
Let me out. Let me stop the chaos! You need me. Everyone needs me to tell them what to do. Let me out before it’s too late!
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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