Closure

Signature's final chapter and epilogue.

Signature

Chapter Fourteen

Closure

“Okay,” called a voice in the back. “Everybody stand down. Those bodies are not to be touched by anyone.”

A man in casual wear walked to the line of executioners, looked Amantu directly in the eyes, and smiled warmly. Without looking away, he dropped his arms in a chopping motion and barked, “Lower those weapons immediately! You men move out and return to your stations!” Then, in a voice almost tender, “I’d like a moment alone with the professor.” When the room was clear he snapped on a transparent mask and worked his arms into a pair of elbow-length surgical gloves.

“Moses Matthew Amantu! How I’ve longed to meet you!” The mask fogged slightly at the cheeks. “You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands. Strictest orders. My name’s Thomas Ryder--but please feel free to call me Tommy. And there’s something so distant about the term ‘Mister,’ don’t you think? Anyways, sorry about all the mess. Damned cops. But what’re you gonna do?” He glanced at the mangled bodies with distaste. “Well. I’m what’s known in the Barrier’s M Section as a Closer. Occasionally citizens get caught up in police-style actions, entitling them to financial reparation, to legal assistance, to professional counseling and--generally their first concern--to an immediate explanation.” He lowered his head while raising his eyes. “Ah, sir! Such a time you’ve had! Do take a seat. And allow me to fix you a drink.”

Amantu didn’t budge. His diseased old heart was beating far too hard, yet he’d never been more aware of being alive. “Thank you, no. And I prefer to remain standing. You mentioned an explanation.”

“Of course.” The Closer crimped his nose. “But please, not here. Not with the dead.” He swept an arm. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

The professor, swooning, backpedaled until his shoulders met the bespattered skin.

Ryder nodded crisply. “So be it.” He pursed his lips and, his eyes twinkling behind the mask’s glass, stepped right past.

The skin breached, but remained open after he’d passed through.

Amantu looked everywhere but down, fighting to control his breathing while the Closer checked on Mack’s body.

A few minutes later Ryder sauntered back in, shaking his head and wiping down his gloves. “I had no idea carriers beat the crap out of their assimilators before they died.” He scrolled down his pocket scrambler. The men in protective suits, accompanied by forensics officers holding prongs and scanners, lumbered back in dragging sterilized body bags. The Closer jerked a thumb at Mack’s bedroom.

“Just what--” Amantu gasped, “just what do you mean by that?”

Ryder turned back. “I mean you’ve been taken for a ride, my friend, both figuratively and literally. These messy specimens, along with that beat-up and diapered individual in the bedroom--all the members of this so-called ‘Group’, in fact--were snatchers. They were Colony agents.”

Amantu pushed himself to his full height. Half a head taller than Ryder, he snarled down with all the righteousness he could muster, “And you, sir, are an outright liar! Good men have been murdered--friends of mine. Who are you people?” He was hyperventilating. “I thought this day had seen the last of lunatics and highwaymen.”

The Closer’s mask fogged again.

“Think back, Professor. Not too far--to just shortly after midnight. Do you remember entertaining a stranger between the hours of oh-one twenty-four and oh-one forty-seven? A telepresence utilizing a stolen police scrambler dropped in on you and the gang as you merrily crossed the Burghs to meet the new year. Well, that telepresence was in actuality a Colony agent, working in the guise of a gnarly street hustler. He was not a very good agent. He was only supposed to provide a certain psychotropic substance, not introduce a loaded military weapon. A Medium Range Assault arm was fired on that View, resulting in the speedy apprehension of said agent directly at the projection site. Our association proved most amenable. Over the course of half an hour he provided a wealth of insight into the Colony’s machinery; names, posts--things of which we hadn’t the foggiest idea. The man swore he’d spill the undreamable if only we’d let him live.” Ryder’s eyes warmed with secret amusement. He shrugged. “Odds are long he will.

“Now, everything I’m relating came straight from him, and it’s all been verified by creatively squeezing half a dozen federally-housed carriers prized for their compliance under questioning.

“Now try to remember, Professor. Did that telepresence import a controlled substance onto that View ride?”

Amantu sagged. “Only a mild stimulant. Of what possible legal consequence--I have--I have this heart condition.”

“And I’m sure it’s a good one. You were lucky your pals were there. They saved you from indulging…?”

“They did not. It was their common effort to revitalize me. They may have saved my life.” It struck him. “They most certainly saved my life! They were professional men. I trusted them; in their zeal, their capableness.”

“A good call. Most Colony agents are every bit as qualified as their civil counterparts. Plus, they’re provided top-notch intelligence. Knowing your cardiac patterns, a member was assigned to provoke a case of angina, and another to convince you to indulge in a restorative tonic. At the appropriate moment, one of your new pals signaled the projecting agent by faking an emergency call. According to our little squealer, the assigned concoction contained a street drug known as Swirl, mixed with an Eastern synthetic capable of producing hallucinations ranging from paranoid to euphoric over a twelve-hour period. You’ve been slipped a dream, Professor.

“Now, one of Swirl’s more-popular effects is its ability to open up even the toughest nut: susceptibility to suggestion, libidinous fantasies, a glorious sense of brotherly love. Users become wide-open to new ideas.”

“Sober intellectuals are always open to new ideas.”

“Oh, come on, Amantu! We know all about you and your steel-trap brain. You’ve never heard a word you didn’t want to hear, and your fondest displays of acknowledgment are grunts and truncated scowls. Given that, it was the job of these snatchers to win you over: to win your focus, your trust, your affection--no mean feat. Yet here you are, still with ’em. Not such a standoffish guy after all.”

Amantu pondered the Group’s faces. Not those gory distorted outrages smeared across the gel’s Pisces, but the very personal, if at times galling, countenances still fresh in his memory. He heard again their jibes, their insights, their petty outbursts. These had been real people. They’d done right by him. Tommy Ryder was, by contrast, an arrogant bully with a very big bureaucratic bug up his butt.

“You’d been suitably prepped. The next step was to get you here for further inducement.”

“What ‘further inducement’?”

“You were to be treated to a feast for the eyes and imagination, something no historian”--and he spat the word--“could resist. According to our canary, this riveting spectacle involved a lost art utilizing what he referred to as ‘dancey lights’.” Ryder’s eyes took in every detail of the skin and floor. “Looks pretty tame to me. So what did our good doctor do, lecture ad infinitum? How quaint.” He rolled his neck. “Once you’d been induced, your new buddies were to bring you into the Colony for infection and assimilation. Does any of this sound famil--” Ryder cut himself short, raising a hand and backing off as Mack’s body was rolled out in a transparent cocoon. When the specialists were out of earshot he upped the ugliness in his tone.

“Here’s something you can teach your students, pal. Titus Mack was the Burghs’ Head Assimilator. Who knows how many decent citizens his boys snaught? Who knows how many he prepped, in this very toilet, for said infection and assimilation? Makes my stomach crawl. How’s ’bout yours?”

Ryder’s expression behind the glass was that of a man probing a clogged drainpipe. “Why do you think he lived all the way out here, anyway?”

“He was,” Amantu wheezed, “a man of research. Great men need great privacy.”

“Come again? Great actor is more like it. Mack kept up his healthful front like all gifted carriers--through sheer willpower. Only the riffraff run around raving and biting each other. But Titus Mack was a Y-Class with terminal liver disease. The Colony needed a new man for the site, and he was thoughtful enough to volunteer your name. Nudge, nudge, Amantu: how coincidental that your work in recall should fall right in line with the Colony’s overall strategy.”

“Not another word! You did not know these fine men. They were thinking individuals, not reactive ones. Seekers of truth, not fabrication.”

They parted for the forensics crew. The Closer oversaw the entire affair with crisp efficiency; an important man accustomed to having his orders followed precisely. Izzy’s and Abel’s bits and pieces were systematically tagged, bagged, and sealed. The professor clung to consciousness while one crew scanned the premises and another cleaned up. The skin and floor were scrubbed meticulously. By the time the workers had departed, every trace of the lives and deaths of three men had departed with them.

The skin hissed shut. The observatory was now a ghost house, but still ringing with the memories of miscellaneous commands. The whole process had taken perhaps twenty minutes, yet Ryder was able to pick up the conversation as though no interruption had occurred:

“Big on truth, were they? These guys were Method masters, pros from the word go. They had you eating right out of their hands. And, speaking of hands, you been holding any lately? Joining any ‘circles’ or ‘rings’? By the look of things, you were cozying right up when we busted in here. ‘Not snaught for naught’, eh, Professor? Well, Mr. Thinking Man, let me throw something else at you.

“I’ll just bet that this wonderful Titus Mack of yours told you some sad story about a bunch of religious nuts who were incinerated in a great big cave a long time ago, right? And maybe he added that it was the government’s fault, so they covered it up by calling it mass suicide, and wrote it into history that way.

“No! Wait a minute. I’m gonna go way out on a limb here. I’m gonna guess he told you that their supernatural creator showed up, and that the government didn’t want anybody to know about that either.

“I’ve heard umpteen variations on the story, from every carrier sick enough to jabber his way into custody.” Ryder screwed up his expression and clenched his fists melodramatically.

“Damn it all, Amantu, I’m gonna go way, way out--to the very tip of that limb! I’m gonna posit that Mack even ‘showed’ you this supernatural whatchamacallit; this ‘God’, this glowing guy on a stick--that he proved it to you. I wish I could have been here for that one, man. I’ll bet you’re downright positive you’ve seen this thing.”

He called up a draped-and-tagged gel couch, made a pretense of peeking behind it. “How’s about you show it to me? Then we can both pull out the whips and razors. And you won’t even have to take me all the way out to see your Madame Rat--you can prick me right here, prick. I’m one of the dumb ones.” He called the couch back down.

“How dare you! Just what are you implying?”

“I’m trying to say you’re a carrier, Amantu.”

“Liar! Liar! Liar! You have produced nothing but lies! From the moment your murderous circus violated this venerated place of research.”

The skin breached. A small phalanx of medical personnel made their way in. A couple of nurses at the fore zipped themselves into transparent body stockings, activated their masks, and stepped up wielding long plastic-tipped tongs.

“Aw, c’mon, Prof’! No need to get personal. But tell me; how you been feeling lately, huh? A little faint? A bit under the weather? Nausea, maybe, or flashes and sweats? How about hallucinations? I’ve heard it’s one hell of a ride at the onset of contraction. Think of it! Without an inkling, you were drugged, snaught, and infected--you’ve been all but crowned! Yet you claim to know what’s real and what’s not. How dare you!”

Amantu was hit with a tranquilizer. In seconds his arms and legs were made of wood, his head stuffed with cotton. A doctor scanned his optics and an assistant cut off his filthy gold robes with sterile scissors. Nurses picked up the rags with pneumatic pincers and dropped the mess into a large see-through pouch. They draped him in a cellophane hospital gown, stuffed his bloody feet in a pair of padded slippers, and stapled a radio ID bracelet to his wrist. The nurses stepped back. Amantu was hit with a stimulant. The medical personnel picked up their gear and filed back out the skin. Amantu forced out his words.

“Why then--why--why was I not also dispatched? After all you have related…you expect me to believe…you would leave a carrier here to--to carry on such despicable work? Why not put me out of my misery?”

The Closer wagged his head regretfully. “Sorry, not an option; I don’t make those decisions in the field. Everything’s been figured out. No ‘despicable work’ will be done here, for the simple reason that the jig is up on this place. Your masters will learn, soon enough, that their scheme has backfired. But don’t you worry about ’em taking it out on you, Mosey. They wouldn’t think of harming one of their own.”

Ryder backpedaled slowly, pausing every third step to mark his points:

“We don’t want you to suffer either, okay? As Mack’s old colleague, you should appear happily engrossed in your vital recall work; freed from the burden of students and faculty, able to transmit your findings directly to our offices for campus distribution. We want you to live long, healthily, and in complete security. You see, here you are much more valuable alive than dead. And so here you shall remain. You may, sir, consider yourself under permanent house arrest.”

The Closer blurred as he receded.

“Why--” Amantu gasped, fighting for cohesive breath, “--if what you say is truth, why should these poor people be sequestered generation after generation, locked away from the birthright of civilization?

“Why would a disease rage cureless for over four centuries?

“And why should plague data remain classified in the first place?”

His head fell. “What is it my government does not want me to know?”

Ryder stopped where he was. He carefully modulated his voice, speaking with the succinctness of a bully explaining the new ground rules.

“Now pay close attention, ‘Hammer’.

“Your government wants you to know that, as a vector, you’re quarantined here on a permanent basis.

“Your government wants you to know that, as its beneficiary, you’ll earn your keep by serving as its newest propaganda tool; video presentations, starring you, will be doctored to produce recall data amenable to right-thinking. Your government also wants you to know that, as your sponsor, it guarantees to provide for you throughout an extensive and highly productive tenure.

“And lastly, Amantu, your government wants you to know that Barrier members, as one of the hardest and fastest rules in nature, do not like carriers, do not like plague sympathizers, and most definitely do not like intellectual busybodies, especially of the ‘historian’ ilk.”

At the skin Ryder lifted his mask to flash a smile.

“Don’t bother,” he said, leaning back until the new breach met his contours. “I’ll let myself out.”

Behind him was dirty bright daylight. A perimeter had already been established, complete with police line, scads of official vehicles, and a mobile lab for the forensics specialists. The Closer stepped onto the porch and the skin’s lips kissed shut. The observatory’s interior steadily dimmed.

Amantu rested until he’d gathered the strength to push himself off. When he could get his mouth together he whispered, “Solo!”

The room dimmed further. A ghostly cocoon formed about the professor, glowing softly.

“Release all security blocks. Titus! M Section has control of your property! AJ and Izzy have been shot dead, implicated in some official insanity about a carrier conspiracy. I have been infected in the Colony, and without remedy will soon collapse. Instruct Solomon to scan my physical self so as to identify the pathogen.”

The slowly swirling nebula vanished. Amantu’s bleary eyes hung like pendants in the dark.

“Solo. Text Alone, Free-standing. Titus! I have in some manner been set up. I am a prisoner, at my wit’s end. Explain what is going on.”

The anticipated hovering text did not appear. It came to Amantu on a chill: the program wouldn’t accept an unkeyed ‘Titus’ link. It took an extra measure of courage to pursue the obvious.

“Solo. Am I mad?”

Cold white light brushed his eyes. A photographic image of nil value winked and was gone. In the ensuing fade-to-black Amantu spoke with exaggerated care.

“So-lo. Scan…my…physical…self. Describe anything awry--nervous, enzymatic, organic--anything that might result in a state of altered perception.”

Amantu’s insides were revealed in splendid detail. Pulmonary and respiratory organs, vividly active, blushed scarlet. Nerves, sinews, and cartilaginous bodies were etched in beautifully highlighted cobalt on pearl.

The room went dark.

Amantu’s white floating eyes fixed on the residual glow.

“Solo! Text Alone!” He beetled his brows. “Have I ingested, accidentally or through a second party, any substance capable of affecting my senses or cognitive processes?”

A snapshot and blackness.

“Solo! Produce a catalyst! Search your files for any agent that might induce hallucinations in an otherwise healthy individual!”

A heartbeat later, eight misty blocks were hovering at eye-level, two feet away. The word

HYPNOSIS

was a new one. Amantu tried it out phonetically. “Hype…no…sis. Solo. A brief description.”

HYPNOSIS

NOUN> SLEEP-LIKE STATE

INDUCED BY A SECOND PARTY

SECONDARY NOUN>HYPNOTISM

“Hype…no-tism,” Amantu tried. “Hype-notism…” He dropped his eyes. Barely able to stand, he mumbled, “Oh, Solo. What manner of man would do such a thing?”

The Text response was instantaneous:

HYPNOTIST

Amantu’s eyes flashed like a tiger’s.

“Hypenotist!”

He stomped through the room, calling up and smashing all things Mack.

“Hype-no-tist--Fool! Hype-no-tist--Rube! ‘Dancey lights’! Ah! I am a pawn! A patsy! A puppet played by a master!”

A blast of hot air almost knocked him over. Overwrought and vertiginous, he gripped the breached skin’s lips and snapped back his head.

In broad daylight, the Outskirts was the same wide-open dump he’d first seen by a drifting new year’s moon. The porch was vacant, the horizon blank, the ground devoid of fresh tracks and prints. He knuckled his eyes and loped across the porch, but the moment he violated the perimeter his ID bracelet came alive and his errant foot received a jangling thrill. It wasn’t all that bad, so he tried again, boldly extending an entire leg.

That time it hurt. Amantu stepped back, tugging on the tightening bracelet. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Shrinking into his slippers and gown, Amantu wheezed and shuffled back inside. The old Mack place was palpably vacant, as quiet as a morgue. Dirty plates and utensils, unwashed robes, orthopedic furniture, dusted-over equipment and piled peripherals.

The Hammer pulled his hospital gown tighter and, standing in the utter darkness of ignorance, whispered,

“Solo?”

* * *

“And so,” the old man said, “for upwards of eleven decades I have labored here, patiently attempting to establish some sort of permanent contact with Titus Mack. I have been only marginally successful. You see, the Solomon program was self-written with Titus as runner. A two-way window will require Solomon’s adoption of my every idiosyncrasy…and I will confess to periods of wool-gathering.”

He auto-descended to near eye-level.

“Yet, by dint of a most resolute nature, I have succeeded in producing a free-floating, rude shadow of the original field. This minor feat was accomplished by following the great astronomer’s instructions through a kind of digitized Morse we wrote together, diaphragmatically assisted by Solomon himself. The resulting medium, a wave-sensitive field contained in a battery-powered vacuum jar, was named ‘Gist’ by Solomon. We felt he reserved that right of christening, for Ti and I could not have done it without him. After all, as Titus says, the Gist is ‘Solomon’s baby’.

“Now, it is urgently essential that you get this Gist into the hands of a man of science; a man able to complete the job. I have not been allowed a guest, nor been permitted to leave these premises, for some hundred-plus years--even though all rumors of plague are eradicated, even though civilization swept over this poor workhorse long ago, even though the Outskirts are little more than a dirty memory.

“You there: child! Your forefinger should be raised in a display of rhapsodic comprehension, not nastily thrust up a distended nostril. It behooves all mankind that my words are well-marked, so pay scrupulous attention. Follow me: the Gist is analogous to a man with spinal column damage. The will is there, but the nervous bridge is down. Contact must not be long-curtailed or the field will dissipate! Ti must be prodded!”

The children stared back and forth, their expressions ranging from mooning innocence to barely suppressed hilarity. A few mimicked old Amantu’s puffy cheeks and bulbous eyes, others pantomimed a supine walrus in free fall.

These physical impersonations, for all their overblown outlandishness, were fairly accurate--Moses Matthew Amantu’s condition was wide open to the rudest form of mockery.

At one hundred and seventy-four years of age he’d more than doubled his natural lifespan, and was now paying dearly for the dubious gift of artificially-induced longevity. He weighed four hundred and seventeen pounds, eleven ounces and eight grams; his body fat was stabilized at an even eighty-seven percent. The children were aware of this, as it was very clearly delineated on the frame’s liquid crystal display. What they didn’t know was that every gram of that lolling bulk had to be buoyed by a gyro-operated mattress consisting of thousands of tiny stress-responsive padded pistons, or his body would simply roll off its hovering “Crib” and plop onto the porch like a tubful of gelatin.

Amantu’s blood-engorged eyes had the same problem: without the spongy cupped wings that made up the rims of his lens-less goggle-like glasses, the aqueous old orbs would slide right out of their sockets at the least concussion. That sculpted pillow supporting his soft wide skull was really a padded compartment for an oxygen cylinder. A pair of slender tubes, one emerging from each side of this pillow, bent round his massive old head and clipped onto a nose-shaped plate attached to the goggles. Out of sight, the tubes were sutured into nasal passages. The litter’s chassis contained computer-driven micro-devices for supporting every vital function of the Fifteenth Century’s seniors, all ergonomically designed, all artfully secreted.

Now the pumps worked overtime, compensating for a brief surge of passion as Amantu aimed the Crib at his audience and spewed, “You must--you must very carefully preserve this Gist, or…” he gasped, “or…”

“Or what?” said that young smart-aleck Boone, much to the delight of his little buddies. “You’ll pee all over us?” Half a dozen scattered like chickens, shrieking with hilarity.

Sensors in the Crib’s armrests immediately picked up on the Hammer’s spiking blood pressure, stimulating a near-instantaneous firing of Axxons® in precise response to every nerve impulse in his left forearm. The hovering Crib swung, with digitally-controlled outrage: toes down, left-bearing. Warning lights went running round the litter and dimmed: old Amantu’s moment of anger had cross-kicked his adrenals. Just framing a suitable retort left him silent and spent.

The knobby little bigmouth tossed his head at the gaping Callum twins.

“C’mon! Let’s go. Let the old frogman croak in private.” He grabbed Darla Maker’s hand as though she were a leashed dog, picked up his skimmer, and whirled it across the yard. Before the Callums could respond, Boone was running like a quarterback, still holding Darla. He swung her as he leapt, catching her waist in the same move so that the two landed photogenically on the whipping skimmer’s static hub. Boone leaned her forward. Amantu watched resentfully as the cheering twins jumped off the porch and went bounding through the flagging overgrowth.

A stirring to his left triggered sensors in the goggles. Amantu rolled his eyes. The Crib turned, dipping slightly in response to pressure from his left elbow.

It was that damned Archer boy--the blond pauper’s son with the rebuilt hip and femur. That execrable prosthesis whirred and ratcheted for the zillionth time as the child, having enviously watched his friends once again dash off without him, nervously gimped back around.

Amantu had never liked the boy; he was slow and hollow-eyed. His silent unbroken stares were ruder, somehow, than the daily derision of that whole receding pack of snotnoses. The boy’s primitive, poor man’s prosthesis didn’t endear him either. The noise grated: Hwee, thump. Hwee, thump. Again and again. Over and over. And over and over and over and over and Amantu harrumphed tinnily.

Before he could draw another blank, he addressed his favorite imaginary audience, in the process forgetting all about little Archer.

“It is intellectually difficult to accept, on the one hand, that Titus Mack is indeed God-becoming--not in an omnipotent sense, of course, but in the wise of omniscience. On the other hand, he is the mind of the universe in potential; existing as a part of all things that have occurred on our little sphere, and as a part of all things that are occurring in real time. He is, to all indications, alive, alert, and vigorous. But without mantle. As a non-corporeal entity, Mack cannot feel, cannot suffer, cannot perish--and this gives him freedoms foreign to structured being. He speaks excitedly, in that rough but ever-developing code of ours, of eventually attenuating by attaching to starlight, and so forever disencumbering himself of our planet’s gravitational pull.”

Amantu sighed wispily. The effort almost stalled him.

His eye caught a hovering speck on the horizon.

Amantu paled, the machinery accelerating fractionally.

“Demolition!” he managed. A second later the Crib’s sensors were all over the place. The nose-plate fogged.

“Get underneath!” he gasped. “Place your hands on the rails.” Once the boy had complied, Amantu banked the Crib hard to lee. The skin breached and they wobbled inside. House lights waxed serenely as the skin kissed closed behind them.

Amantu laboriously steered the Crib until it was hovering a few feet above the squashed couch by the dilapidated southern skin.

“On that stand,” he hissed. “Underneath the black cloth a…a bell jar. Fetch it here, and be exceedingly mindful as you do so.”

Archer very carefully limped over to the stand, lifted the jar as if it were a Ming vase, and very carefully limped back to Amantu’s Crib.

“Set it, with the utmost delicacy, upon this little table.”

Archer did so. Amantu tightened his grip on the armrest, activating a chrome pincers on a telescoping arm. As the old man gently rocked his palm on the rest, the pincers responded by just as gently oscillating above the cloth. He closed his fingers and elevated his wrist. The pincers plucked the cloth off the jar, dragged it down one side, dropped it on the table.

Inside was two liters of empty space

The jar was airtight and rounded at the top, with a two-inch armored base containing a short stack of disk-shaped atomic batteries. Positioned on one side, just where the wall sloped into the cap, was a black vulcanized diaphragm about the size of a man’s palm.

“Upon that diaphragm,” Amantu wheezed, “one places one’s lips when addressing the Gist. The Gist can only be activated by the spoken command ‘Solo’.”

At the name the jar’s interior appeared to sparkle slightly.

Archer dropped to his good knee, his expression rapt.

“Fairy dust!” he cried.

When he looked back up, Amantu’s face and hands were the color of tallow. The Crib dropped against the couch, auto-corrected, and resumed hovering at an awkward angle. Archer rose hesitantly, trying to keep his fake leg from squealing. He watched the purple lips writhe:

“Boy…boy…that nickname--the unique vibrations produced by those two precisely articulated syllables--is a password. Those wavelengths act as a key to open the Solomon program through his Gist. You must find an adult…repeat to him what I have told you. Explain what is at stake for mankind--no, no--tell him to bring the Gist to men of science. At the university they will pick up where I have left off. But you must remember the password! Tell the science men to use it.”

An ice-blue moan rolled out of Amantu’s depths. His head would have fallen to the side had not the equipment auto-adjusted. With the last of his strength, he willed the Crib to face Archer directly.

“Cover it,” he coughed. “Put it under your coat. Keep it out of the light. Under no circumstances must a seal be broken--the Gist must not be exposed to air!”

Archer obediently pulled the cloth back over the jar and tucked it under his raggedy overcoat.

“Now go.”

The boy hesitated. “But what about you, sir? I--I can’t leave you here.”

“Be gone, boy! And do not look back. Your work is ahead of you.”

Archer sniffled to the skin. As it splayed to meet him he looked back, momentarily blinded by daylight. “But I don’t want to go, sir. I want to stay here with you.”

A faint snarl. “I said get out! Do as you are told!”

Archer looked down at his plastic foot. “But I want to stay,” he sniffed. “I--I want to be here with you, sir.”

A series of ugly wet grunts.

Archer kept his eyes glued to the tiles.

In a minute that faltering old voice whispered back, “But I do not want to be with you, you filthy little cripple. I have always despised you. Always! Do as you are told! Get out of my house, get out of my life. Get out of my sight!”

Archer unsuccessfully fought his tears. “Sir--”

“Cripple!”

A couple of splats preceded a high steady whine. The Crib hissed to the floor.

Archer hobbled down the observatory’s overgrown dirt path, holding the Gist tightly under his coat. Unable to think past his tears, he came upon the road unawares. A whisking sound cut right in front of him and a blow to the ear almost knocked him down. He carefully balanced the jar against his chest and looked up.

Boone kept a hard eye on him as he helped Darla off his skimmer; a gentleman leading a lady from her coach. When she was on solid ground he strutted up, his expression fierce.

“Gimme your bottle, Archie. C’mon! I know the old frog give it to you. Gimme that damn bubble-boogie!”

Archer bent deep at the waist while Boone whaled on him.

There came a smacking sound followed by a very unmanly squeal.

Still shielding the Gist, Archer peeked between his crossed wrists. Darla was standing in front of the assailant with one hand raised. By the stunned look on the boy’s face it was obvious he’d just been slapped, and slapped hard. When he could face her again, he did so with only one welling eye.

The girl was on fire.

“You leave him be; he’s not hurting anybody! Let him keep his silly bottle.” She stormed back to the skimmer. Boone whirled, the eye now streaming.

“Listen. You didn’t see nothing. Okay? Nothing! You blab and I’ll break off that phony leg of yours and stuff it down your throat foot-first. You got me?”

Archer lowered his head and waited for the next barrage.

After a few seconds Boone turned and hurled the skimmer rowdily. It was a good spin, nearly horizontal and right on the money. He and Darla jumped on in tandem, and as they pressed their bodies forward the skimmer fairly leaped along the road. The girl had just time to peer back, throwing Archer a look that would bother him well into his teens. He was crouching there, watching them recede, when a large shadow made him scrunch even deeper.

A Demolition Crab was hovering over the observatory, one trembling winch at each corner.

Archer banged his fake leg up the road to a cliff overlooking the new quarry. In the distance the Burghs loomed like Oz, stretching all across the horizon until the buildings were lost in smog. Archer looked back. The skin was wide open; a crew was dragging out an oversized body bag that left a slimy serpentine trail.

The boy flopped down and had a good long cry. When he was all wept-out he pushed himself back up and stood looking over the quarry.

There wasn’t a soul around.

Archer pulled the jar from under his coat and carefully peeled up its soft cloth cover. Shading it with his body, he peeked left and right, then tentatively placed his lips on the rubbery black diaphragm. It had a funny chemical taste, so he pursed his lips and whispered quickly,

“Solo!”

Immediately the jar filled with a swirling haze.

Archer shrieked and tossed it just as far as he could.

The glass broke on the rocky grade; the bottom half going one way, the top half the other, and a widening blurry pinwheel racing down between them.

Archer whirled on his prosthetic leg and, screaming like a woman, ran hwee hwee hwee all the way home.