Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (16 page)

I explained that I would not try to talk her out of doing the dishes. She gave me a kiss and said, “You cook good, even if you do use fungus.”

There came another knock at the door. This time Jamie got it, holding his sawed-off shotgun down at his side. I noticed that Christian’s shotgun was near to hand. No one else seemed concerned.

Jamie said, “It’s Carrie.”

I looked at Tom. He raised his eyebrows. “Well, should we let her in?”

“Might as well,” I said. Jamie opened the door and Carrie slipped inside. She was wearing a long coat of some white fur. She started to walk toward Tom, but stopped when she saw Christian. Her eyes widened.

“It’s all right,” said Christian. “I’ve switched sides.”

She stared, and her mouth worked.

Christian said, “Have
you
?”

“I—” She looked puzzled. “I don’t know.”

“Figures,” said Christian. He spat.

Tom said, “We need to know where your friend Souci is.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t. She doesn’t want anyone to know. She’d kill me.”

Tom turned away.

She said, “I came over to see you.”

“About what?”

She looked at us. The rest of us moved away to give Tom and Carrie room to talk privately. The two of them spoke softly together. Tom’s face was grim, and his fists clenched several times as they spoke. I got tired of watching very quickly, so I went back to the pantry and got out my banjo. I played “Cripple Creek,” and for a short time the world looked brighter than it had—brighter than it was, I guess.

Tom joined me. I stopped playing. Tom sat down. I said, “Well?”

“I’m a pinhead.”

“So what else is new? Has Carrie heard about the big fight?”

“Justin told her.” There was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice as he pronounced that name. “I guess Sugar Bear is really mad at us now, but they don’t know what to do.”

“Why haven’t they sent the police in after us?”

“She isn’t sure. Or at least she says she isn’t sure. I think there’s a lot of stuff she isn’t telling me.”

“Hmmm. What else did she say?”

“Personal things.”

“Ah.”

“Nothing new. Nothing good.”

“Oh. Any luck getting her to tell us where Souci is?”

“She won’t say, she’s too scared.”

“Damn. We’ll have to keep trying. Has she left?”

“No. She wants to know if she can stay here with us.”

“Why?”

“She’s frightened.”

“Of whom? Or what?”

“I’m not sure. She wouldn’t say.”

“That, as Christian would say, is some shit.” I walked out there. Libby and Christian were in a corner talking in whispers, I could hear Jamie and Rose in the kitchen cleaning. Carrie looked up, and her blue, blue eyes looked very wide and frightened. I sat down next to her and said, “Why is it you want to stay here?”

“Because… I do. Do you have to know why?”

“Yes.”

It looked like she was about to cry. She said, “I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t be with Justin anymore, and Souci is hiding—”

“You know where?”

“I can’t say.”

I said, “Why not?”

“You don’t know what she’s like.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No. She terrifies me. It’s like, when she’s around—”

“I know about it. Believe me. But that isn’t why you aren’t telling us, is it?”

“Yes, it is. I just can’t do something that would make her angry.”

“Great,” I said. “Then you sure as hell can’t stay here.”

“I—”

“Tell me why I should trust you. If you’re here, how do I know you won’t open the doors in the middle of the night? If you’re so weak you can’t risk making someone angry at you, how can I be sure that a little pressure, especially from
her
, won’t make you sell us out completely? Don’t you realize that they’re trying to
kill
us?”

She didn’t say anything, she just stared at the ground, and her shoulders shook. There are times when you just have to be a hard-ass, and this was one. Unfortunately I’ve never really been up to the job. I sighed. “Okay, here’s what I can do.” I dug around in my pocket for a while. “Here’s a key to our apartment. We aren’t using it, so you—what is it?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at her. There had been no mistaking that reaction. “What is it, Carrie?”

“Nothing, I just—”

“Don’t bullshit me. It’s something about the apartment, isn’t it?”

“No, there isn’t any—”

“Is it bugged, is that it?”

“No, I was just—”

“Are they waiting for us there?”

“No!”

“Are they going to burn it down?” She looked away. I said, “Is that it, Carrie? Are they going to blow the place up? Do they think we went back there instead of here?”

She buried her face in her hands. After a moment she nodded.

“When?” I asked her.

“It’s set to go off at noon.”

“Jamie,” I yelled. “What time is it?”

“About five after twelve,” he yelled back.

I licked my lips and stared at Carrie, who sat there and shook. “How precise was the bomb? Was it just the apartment or the whole building?”

“I don’t know. It was Justin. He’s good with bombs. He might have just gotten the apartment.”

“Might have? Great. Or he might not have. There were six apartments in that building, Carrie. How many were just blown up? Is there a fire going? How many people are going to die from
it
, Carrie? How many people just burned to death because you’re too scared to tell anyone what’s going on in time to stop it?”

She was crying now, very hard. This didn’t bother me at all. I was dimly aware of the others gathered around, but didn’t care about them, either. I said, “Here’s another question for you: How many more are going to die? How many that you could have saved, if you weren’t running around in terror of a bitch-goddess? Is she going to run you all your life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Decide, right goddamn now. Are you your own master, or are you living as the shadow of someone else? And if you
are
your own master, then how can you justify letting as many innocent people die as are going to die if you don’t help us?”

Christian came back into the room. He had apparently been out making some phone calls. “Yeah, it blew up,” he said. “It’ll be a while before they know how many were killed. They’ve already found three bodies, though.”

Carrie was sobbing loudly. My heart was not breaking for her. I said, “So, three people just died. At least three. How many more, Carrie?”

She stopped crying but didn’t look up. “Lots,” she said softly. “Everyone on the planet.”

I stood up. “
What?
”

“There’s nothing anyone can do about it,” she said. “The missiles have been launched already.”

Tom, Christian, and I looked at each other. The silence stretched from one end of the room to the other several times, until you could have hung your linen on it to dry. At last I swallowed and said, “From where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in space. They’ll be here sometime tomorrow. Late in the afternoon, I think.”

“We need to warn people.”

“Why? There isn’t any way off the planet, and there are enough missiles to make the whole planet uninhabitable.”

“I can’t believe there’s no way off the planet.”

“The reason the police have ignored you is that they’re investigating the sabotage of every space-going vessel in the city and on the planet, which occurred just about the same time you were attacked yesterday. Half the reason for the attack was to make sure you couldn’t do anything about it. I guess they thought you had better sources of information than you have. There’s only one carrier left, which is hidden somewhere for the rest of us to use. Most of us—”

“Us.”

She swallowed. “Sugar Bear.”

“Right.”

“Most of us on the planet left two weeks ago.”

I licked my lips. “Damn,” I said. I discovered then that knowing a nuclear attack was coming and being unable to prevent it was much, much worse than being hit by surprise.

“We’ve got to do something,” said Rose.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

“There are more than five thousand missiles headed for this planet,” said Carrie, almost tonelessly. “Each of them is more than powerful enough to destroy a city, and leave hundreds of square miles around it uninhabitable. The missiles are programmed by the Physician. Not even Monsieur Rudd can call them off or change their course.”

“That,” said Libby, “is very harsh.”

“You know a great deal about this,” I said. “More than Christian, for instance. Why is that?”

“Justin works directly for Monsieur Rudd, who is in charge of Sugar Bear of New Quebec, and in command here on Laurier. Justin talks a lot when he’s coked up.”

“I see. How does Souci fit in?”

Carrie bit her lip. “She used to go out with Justin. He told her even more than he told me.”

“Oh.”

“She was never involved in Sugar Bear activities, any more than I was, but she grew up with it, so she knows a lot.”

“So, she was seeing me to get information?”

Carrie looked at me, and slowly shook her head without ever breaking eye contact. “She didn’t know who you were when you met—didn’t figure it out until you mentioned Sugar Bear that day. She and I went along with Claude and Danielle. I guess they’d figured out something about the way the place first showed up. They didn’t tell us until much later. Then they told her to stop seeing you and she told them to fuck off. I guess they almost had her killed, but Justin talked them out of it. She loved you.”

This, as you can imagine, made me feel just glorious. I cleared my throat. I said, “I’m surprised they let Justin live, with how much he talks.”

“He knows people. And he’s actually pretty careful who he talks to.”

“I guess he must be, at that. So, where is the home world?”

“I don’t know. The Physician knows.”

“And Justin and Souci both know where the Physician is.”

“Yes.”

“And you know where Souci is.”

She nodded.

I said, “Well?”

A shudder went through her whole body. “She and Justin are staying with Monsieur Rudd.”

“Shit,” said Christian. “I should have guessed that.”

“So should I,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Jamie. “We know now.”

“Justin,” said Tom. “Justin is there.”

Libby didn’t say anything, but she picked up her pistol, and, for the first time since Fred had died, a smile crossed her lips.

Carrie woke up shivering, with dawn just barely hinting its arrival. The sheets were soaked with sweat; she pushed them off the bed. She opened the window, suddenly in desperate need of air. When the window wouldn’t open she almost smashed it, then she almost screamed. It opened at last, and the air tasted good, but was so cold that it sent chills through her. She shivered for a moment and looked for something to pull over the flimsy gown she was wearing. After a while she found a big, thick, blue terry-cloth robe. After that she felt a little better. She lit a cigarette and stared at the purples of the night sky. She couldn’t remember what her dream had been, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

The cigarette and the robe suddenly made her feel like an old woman, and she had a vivid image of herself that way, old, alone, wrinkled, alone, alone, alone. She stubbed the cigarette out and walked back and forth, driving the thought from her mind. Then sat in the fuzzy orange chair and rocked back and forth, singing softly to herself, until she felt better.

Once again, as she had so often, she wondered if she could be a singer. Everyone said she could. Even Mme Jeanne, her voice coach, who would rather die than give someone a compliment, had as much as said she could make a living doing popular music, if she was willing to give up bel canto (sniff, went Mme Jeanne).

And Carrie wanted to, she knew that.

To be in front of people, pouring every last, hidden secret from her soul out through her voice, and watching them light up, or cry, yes, that’s what she wanted. And she could do it, too, but—

But you can’t please everyone. Some people wouldn’t like her. They would say she was too breathy, or too free with her melody lines, or didn’t move well. And they would be wrong, but they would say those things, and would say them to
her
, and she couldn’t stand that. It would destroy her.

Well, it would.

Wouldn’t it?

As she lit another cigarette, she realized that if she had any more, Mme Jeanne would be able to tell she’d been smoking and would bawl her out.

The thought made her wince.

She put the cigarette out and went back to bed.

Jamie said, “You know what I don’t understand?”

“What?”

“If Feng came from the future, he must be sending us back, er, forward, to do something that will help him, right?”

“I suppose,” I said.

“Well, if Sugar Bear can really communicate with the future, like Christian says, then they can tell if they’ve won or not just by checking a little further. And for that matter, so can Feng and his people, right?”

Libby cleared her throat. “As I understand it,” she said, “no one can actually communicate with the future. All you can do is send messengers back to find your people and tell them things. It is a very difficult process, and very expensive, even for them. Sugar Bear must have learned that Feng had found us—Fred, Rich, Eve, and I—and that we were on their trail, and sent someone back to have us stopped. At the time, we didn’t know what we were looking for, but they couldn’t have known that.”

Jamie said, “I still don’t get it. If they’re from the future they must know how it turns out. So it’s like, whatever we do doesn’t matter.”

Libby shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I’m just a hired hand. They never told me any of the technical stuff.”

“They,” said Jamie. “You mean Feng?”

“Yeah, I mean Feng.”

“He recruited you himself.”

“I would have said ‘hired,’ but maybe recruit is more accurate.”

Jamie looked up at the picture that adorned the arch that connected restaurant to bar. I did, too. His smile no longer looked cheerful; now it was evil, manipulative. “Man, I’d like to meet him,” said Jamie.

“Why?” said Libby.

“He’s from the future. Who wouldn’t like to meet someone from the future? I mean, aren’t there things you’d like to ask him about?”

“I’d rather meet someone from the past,” said Libby. “Most of the things I’d like to know from Feng are things he won’t talk about.”

“But what’s he like?”

“He’s a pinhead,” said Libby. “Any more questions?”

“Shit. Yeah. I still don’t get it. What about Feng’s future? I mean, the future to him? Don’t they know how it came out?”

Libby said, “Think of this: Time travel is really hard to pull off, and risky to the people doing it. They wouldn’t send anyone back if they didn’t have to. I mean, the guys from the far future, where it’s already decided. So, one side can’t send anyone back because they lost, and the other side either doesn’t want to waste the energy, or sending someone back to say it worked out would prevent it from working out, so they can’t do it.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “As much as any of this does.”

“Okay,” said Jamie. “So what we have to do is get information back to the future that will give Feng’s people a chance against Sugar Bear.”

“Right,” said Libby. “And we’ve already got something, because they didn’t, I mean, don’t, or won’t, or something, know who the enemy is and what the whole thing’s about.”

Tom said, “Is it enough?”

Libby said, “I don’t know. Probably not. If we can tell them where Sugar Bear’s home world is—”

“What if it moves?” said Christian suddenly. “I mean, what if they change it?”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that you’re assuming that the place that’s their home world now is the same as what will be their home world in however many hundred years.”

“A point,” said Libby. “In fact, that’s just what they’ve been doing.”

I said, “It seems to me that anything we can find out is bound to help. If we only learn where they used to be, that may help them track down where they went. And what I’m hoping is that the Physician is from Feng’s time; which means he’ll know the answer we actually want.”

Christian nodded. Libby said, “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “I think we should get on with it.”

“I’d wait until nightfall,” said Christian. “They might have people keeping a watch on that house, although I doubt they suspect anything.”

“It’ll have to be tonight, though,” said Carrie. “They’ll all be gone by tomorrow.”

“You, too?” said Tom.

She nodded. “That’s the plan. I just needed a place to stay tonight.”

“How is it you were planning to get off-planet?”

“I was supposed to meet them at Monsieur Rudd’s tomorrow morning. But he wouldn’t let me stay there because they don’t trust me anymore.”

“I see. Well, you may as well stay here. We is gonna be busy.”

“Doing exactly what?” said Libby. “Or is it too much to ask for to come up with a plan?”

“Well,” said Jamie, “it wouldn’t hurt if we had a floor plan for the house.”

“That,” said Christian, “is not a bad idea.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I’ll do the best I can, but I was only in one room—”

“That’s all right,” said Christian. “We have an expert here.” He looked at Carrie.

Carrie said, “I—”

“Just do it, all right?” said Tom.

She licked her lips and nodded. Rose found her a place mat and a pen, and Libby began asking pointed questions about the layout of the place. We sat down and drank coffee while they worked.

Less than an hour later we were all looking at the more or less finished product. “Well,” said Jamie after a while. “This does us a world of good.”

I said, “We know where to find the back door, anyway. Carrie, are you sure you have no idea where Souci is?”

She shook her head. “One of the bedrooms on the second or third floor; that’s all I can guess.”

Rose said, “Couldn’t he have built a smaller house? He doesn’t need that many rooms.”

“Conspicuous consumption,” I agreed. “Shameful. Well, any ideas?”

“Two of us go in the back,” said Christian, “and three in the front. There’s a certain symmetry to the idea that I like.”

“How do we slip past the guards?”

“We don’t,” said Christian. “We just get up to the wall, at night, then move fast.”

“Won’t the doors be locked?” I said.

“Hmmm. Right. Anyone have any explosives?”

Libby got up and left. I said, “How about the windows? We could throw something at them—”

“Unbreakable,” said Carrie. “You’ll have more luck going through a wall.”

“Hmmm. All right. We’ll—” I stopped as Libby came back and set down a wooden box. She pulled the top off, and I saw six hand grenades, lying neatly in packing material, looking like a Christmas present.

“Fred had these,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Next problem?”

Tom said, “Do we have any idea at all what we’re going to do once we get inside?”

I said, “If something happens to Monsieur Rudd I won’t shed any tears, but the important thing is that we have to get Justin or Souci to tell us how to find the Physician, so we can get him to tell us where the home planet is—unless we’re real lucky and Justin or Souci knows.”

“I doubt it,” said Carrie.

Tom said, “Does that mean I can’t kill Justin?” Carrie made a small noise.

I said, “Not before we find out what we have to find out.”

Tom looked unhappy but didn’t argue.

“How do you figure to get them to talk?” said Christian. “Torture?” He looked skeptical.

“I don’t really know anything about torture,” I said. “I don’t know if I could go through with it if I did. Would you like to volunteer?”

“What, you don’t have the balls to do it yourself, but you can ask someone else to?”

“Yep,” I said. “You got it. Can you do it?”

We were momentarily interrupted by Carrie getting up and making a dash out of the room, either to cry or to throw up, I never bothered to ask.

“I have a better idea,” said Libby.

“Yeah?”

“We’ll just keep them in the house until they tell us how to find the Physician. I think they’ll tell us if it’s that or miss their ship.”

“Then what?” I said.

“Once we know, we come back here, and, wherever we jump to next, take it from there. Or, if the Physician
is
here on Laurier, we can find him and make him tell us the same way—by keeping him off the ship unless he does.”

“I don’t know if that will work,” I said, “but it’s the best idea I’ve heard so far.”

Carrie came back and took her seat.

“Now, wait a minute,” said Jamie. “Let me see if I’ve got this. We break into Rudd’s house, take over the place, and keep everyone prisoner until Souci or Justin becomes so scared of missing the boat that one of them tells us how to find the Physician, but we make sure to keep everyone in the house prisoner, in case they can get help somewhere.”

“Right,” I said.

“If we’ve managed to do all this, we hope that we can somehow reach the Physician and somehow convince him to talk before the bombs fall. Is that really the plan?”

“Umm, well, put that way it doesn’t sound real workable, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Jamie.

Libby said, “Do you have any other ideas?”

“Not at the moment.”

I said, “We’d better cut the phone lines first, since—”

“Phone lines?” said Christian. “What are those?”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to try to keep them away from their phones. And, Christian, can you get us a car? Rudd’s place is a long way out into the country. I ran there once and walked back. It took a long time, and I don’t think we’ll all fit on Rich’s bike, though it would be appropriate.”

“Yeah, I know where I can borrow a car. I’ll get it this afternoon.”

“And remember, if we
do
get the information—”

“When,” said Jamie.

“—we have to make sure it gets to Feng’s before the bombs fall. Even if that means leaving people behind. Is everyone clear on that?”

Everyone was, except maybe Carrie, who just sat there and shook.

Jamie cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to bum everyone out,” he said. “But this might
—might—
be the last time we’re all together.”

“That’s true,” I said. “What about it?”

“We have some time to kill.”

It took me a minute to figure out what he was suggesting, but then I nodded, and Tom and Rose figured it out at the same time.

“Yeah,” said Tom.

“I’m up for it,” I said.

Rose just nodded as we stood up and went into the back room for our instruments. Tom tuned his mandolin, and I tuned up the banjo. We went into the bar and fired up the sound system. We certainly didn’t need it, but why not go all the way?

Christian, Carrie, and Libby were our audience. I played the opening two bars of “The Mermaid,” then Jamie and Tom came in, rhythmical drive and elegant taste, followed by Rose, late as usual, missing the beat as usual, but creating harmonies and countermelodies that made the song irrelevant, it was music, and it was her and it was us, we fell into sync and the verse began to sing us right on cue. We rose and fell with it, as if we were playing to assembled millions, for the music was our energy. Rose attacked the lead break like she’d keep the damn ship floating herself, Tom’s mandolin giggled around the edges, and I thought I was just trailing along with Jamie’s rhythm until I realized that some of those themes the fiddle was playing with were banjo licks.

Jamie launched us into “Peter’s Song,” before the last notes of “The Mermaid” had died, and that fell headlong into “Botany Bay.” Silly Irish tunes, they were, and a silly Irish band were we, but there was a place we could get to where the songs would play us, and it was there that evening.

Tom sang Sean Phillip’s “Ballad of Casey Dies,” and by the end I was choked up to where I could hardly sing. Christian joined us on Jamie’s twelve-string for “Old Joe Clark,” and caught the speed up, and for a while he was with us, too, which broke the mood, because his guitar laughed, and teased the fiddle, and egged me into bigger and bigger chances until it was far too fast to be doing the things we were all doing, and at last it ended and he sat down as if nothing had happened at all.

I was feeling the “end of set” kind of pleasant exhaustion when Jamie started the lopsided almost-rock rhythm of “Blackjack David.” Tom’s mandolin was barely audible, doing some sort of off-kilter scale that sent shivers down my spine, and the fiddle played the melody by playing everything else, then came back and dropped down as we stumbled into the first verse. Jamie started singing with his usual gusto, but there was a melancholy I couldn’t shake, because it seemed to me that this little band of Irish-playing fools actually maybe had something, and I doubted that we would ever have the chance to go—where?

Maybe the future. What could the future hold for four musicians like us? My one wish at that moment was that I would have the chance to find out. I didn’t think it likely.

The last verse of “Blackjack David” came, and we all threw in that extra burst of energy that tells us and the audience that we’re going to end the set with it. Tom and Jamie and I caught the harmony, and the fiddle screeched and clawed to a terrible high place from which it could never come down, and it didn’t, just stopped, and I turned and waved good-bye to verse, song, set, and, maybe, band.

We said nothing to each other as we stepped off the stage. I put my instrument away. Libby caught my eye and gave me a hug that I needed.

There was really nothing else to say.